The Best American Essays 2014

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

For Donald and AK

  AROUND MY WAY we really tripped over two things: the beef with them Woodlawn whores in ’85; then four years later, when stick-up boys shot Sonny.

  In high school, me, Charm Sawyer, and Piccolo Breaks got up a social club called the Oxfords. More or less just the little guys with round glasses from our block, plus an off-brand or two from the Avenue—North or Wabash—or from the Heights—Liberty or Park.

  I pimped in the fine honey from church to the jam. Tanya, Carla, Kim, Lisa, Stacy, all of them dying to get out of the house. I was about fifteen when I booked out, and it took every bit of two years to get snug. But it had started in middle school with me and Rodney Glide freaking the white girl in the basement and him working her skirt up.

  I wasn’t really built like that. Check it out. Back in the day I loaded dirt and wood chips at a garden supply store on Wabash. One time a church girl gave me a ride home after work and I told her wait while I caught a quick shower. Since the old-school play was to answer the Jehovah Witness knock at the door in a towel, any girl at your house was supposed to get open-fly treatment. Church girl called her mother telling her why she was hold up. Her old mother, an ex-opera contralto, started fussing. “Kim, use common sense. Even little Lair’s trying to get some!” I took it as a compliment. Her mother didn’t think I was gay the way her unafraid daughter did when I stepped from the shower, still in a towel. That’s when I started liking older women, because they always act like, given the chance, you might knock them down. And I got it backwards, since all what she said really did was start me on eating out.

  The Oxford clique came together for an obvious reason. When we still footed it to parties and up Rhythm Skate, we needed a whole crew or a connect to get by in the world of yo boys and slickheads. As time went on, the Oxfords put it together for real. Even though all us from out the row house—a snatch of grass in front and the #51 bus chugging by, floods and bugs in the basement, alleyways of blackness out back—all us little men had turned out the next Timex Social Club.

  Woodlawn niggers called us the Pajama Crew for spite, because we draped our fathers’ old trench coats, that winter of ’85. Them County slickheads wore tight their Adidas nylon sweatsuits, silk BVDs, and herringbone gold chains, flexing power. But the real Oxford contribution to the B-More scene was the DC Go-Go haircut—the flattop—or sometimes just faded, Jerseyed, Phillied. Bear in mind that your average yo boy from off the corner cut his naps down to the scalp. That’s why we called them unremarkable niggers slickheads.

  To me, slickheads lacked imagination, and their haircut was only the beginning of that emptiness. When I was first learning about it, slickhead behavior seemed inhibited, closed down, and reactionary. Like when I was prancing at the Harbor with my merry-go-round honey Sade, me ragging in a cycling cap, moccasins, bleached jeans, and an Ocean Pacific T of a man surfing on a beach I had never seen, and some slickhead called to her, “A yo, drop that prep and get with this slick.” They had no class, and if I hadn’t thought he would have shot me I might have banged him in his mouth. Then again, he wasn’t talking to me, and I was into women’s lib, eating out and everything.

  The Oxfords went for exhibition and fullness, the whole way, and took it straight to those break-dancing older slickhead clowns from Woodlawn. Yeah, they was popping and breaking, helicopter and all that, but that shit is for tourists. Our thing was the leg dances, speeded-up jigs. I copped our step from this old head who rocked coach’s shorts and a touring cap, and who gave up the flow downtown every summer. At the Inner Harbor, near the water-taxi line, seven or eight of us would break into the Oxford Bop, a crisscross reel, while we shouted the lyrics to Status IV’s “You Ain’t Really Down.”

  “Said you were my lady . . . And your love was true . . . !”

  More attention than pulling your thing out.

  The Oxfords liked a Roman holiday. Pretty Ricky brother crashed through the top of the telephone booth at the Harbor. Charm jumped from the second-floor balcony onto the reception desk in the Comfort Inn lobby. James Brown leapt through a car windshield, hind parts first. But mainly we threw cranking jams and released our boredom into the laps of the Oxford Pearls. All them was getting down, especially the girls from Catholic school. Even though we modeled ourselves on the old-time Negro fraternities, chanting “O-X!” through dim basement corridors pulsating with Chip E. Inc. stutter-singing “Like This,” the Oxfords could also function like that—like a gang. Coming up in 21215—Bodymore, Murderland—attending public schools, we only did what we had to do. Anyway, a homeboy of a homeboy kicked some slickhead in the chest over a girl at a high school party at a fraternity house on Liberty Heights, and the war against Woodlawn jumped off.

  The jam was a cranker, Darrin Ebron spinning “Al-Naafiysh,” “Set It Off,” and “Din Da Da” over and over; naturally it was honey heaven. I was wedging my knees between so many willing thighs that I never saw Pretty Ricky cousin Jerome and Ron J guff. First thing I knew the music cut off and Pretty Ricky and Mighty Joe Young were shuttling back and forth from the Kappa House to the phone booth in the 7-Eleven parking lot and Charm Sawyer was popping cash shit. I looked out into the mild May night, and it was enough shell-toes and silk BVDs to stop four lanes of traffic. Me and my homeboys were wearing moccasins and corduroy shorts. I had a pound of Dax in my hair, dripping like Shabba Doo’s but faded like a prep’s.

  I loaded all of my men into the car and left the scrum thinking I was just helping out, like Jesus would do. I had a Monte Carlo, an orange EXP, an IROC-Z, and a Cressida on my ass—a slickhead caravan in hot pursuit. Then I thought I got lucky.

  Northwest Baltimore’s finest had been called about the scrap and I braked when the blue lights spun behind me. I pulled over and I told the police everything I knew, which was that some grown men were following me and I was scared. But you know how Five-O handled his bit.

  “I want you out my ju-risdiction! Get your ass out of my sight!”

  You know how Five-O cuss you when he through with you. Then he drove off.

  It was six of us in the AMC Sportabout, a car about as good for driving as open-toed shoes for running ball. Besides the fact that the starter on my people’s car was iffy, the windows didn’t operate, and the door handle on the driver’s side was broke. That night I put that old yellow wagon to the test. I headed down Liberty Heights back to Garrison Boulevard, and I learned what Pretty Ricky had been doing on the telephone. He had reached out to his wild cousins, some hoppers who ain’t mind popping tool. I took Garrison and that baby right turn by the firehouse to Chelsea Terrace, to fetch some gun-slinging boy from out his house. After Five-O shammed on me, I was needing Ricky’s cousin to appear with that .357 Magnum that Hawk carried on Spenser: For Hire. Instead a jive compact cat hopped into the old station wagon with barely a .25 in his dip.

  Now, I had seen some young boys around my way with tool. I think one of them even got into Time for showing up strapped at Garrison or Pimlico, the local junior high schools. In fact it had been the cats from my year at middle school, the twins from Whitelock Street now going up Walbrook with Charm, who had brought tool to #66, setting the trend right at the beginning of the 1980s. They had got put out for a couple of days for that stunt. The next year, at Harlem Park Middle, them boys had burned up a cat for his Sixers jacket. I had seen a couple niggers pulled off of a public bus and beaten before. I held my ground standing next to a boy from Cherry Hill who had got his head opened up with a Gatorade bottle at a track meet, and I had gone with Charm to square off at some boys’ houses who had been running their mouths too much. And of course I had fought with everybody in my crew except Ricky, who was getting too much ass to fight, because if he won he could double destroy your ego. The best one to fight was Sawyer’s brother Chester, who was always threatening you with a nut session or worse. I hoped that the beef would get squashed, but I thought that it would take a big-time older head to do it, and I thought he would have needed a .12-gauge or something with some heat.
Because on that night, Woodlawn was coming thick.

  We were just idling in the middle of the street, nigger shit, everybody talking at once, planning to fail, when the IROC-Z came up from behind and the Monte Carlo and the EXP drove up from the other direction. The motherfuckers had some kind of CB or headphone communications. A crabapple-head big boy marched out of the Monte Carlo shouting, got up to my face, and started yanking on the door handle. I know it: I had that pleading, begging look on my face. He swung on me anyway and then tried to rip me out from the AMC Sportabout, but the broken door handle saved me. My people, my people. Mighty Joe Young was riding shotgun, and he shouted at me, “Drive!” I hit the gas and thread a needle through the IROC-Z–Cressida–EXP posse, racing my way down Chelsea Terrace. It was ride-or-die down the hill to Gwynns Falls Trail, Walbrook Junction, the briar patch for Charm, Pretty Ricky, and Knuckles.

  Knowing the Junction better than our foes, we got back to our block unscathed. I let out Ricky and his cousins, and then we cooled out in an alley. First the slickheads got Ricky’s address from some girl and tried to raid his people’s house, but they were in the middle of the block and Woodlawn couldn’t get to a window or through the front door. I thought I had made a safe passage until the next morning my father woke me up and asked did anything happen. I told him no, and he walked me outside to the ride. Late that night, them damn County yos had chucked a wedge of concrete through the windshield of the wagon.

  A couple of days later a homeboy who worked at the McDonald’s on Liberty Heights, just over the line in the County, got banked. Charm and Knuckles stopped going up the ’Brook because Simon, the concrete thrower, had promised them a bullet. A week after that Pretty Ricky fought the cruelest of the host, Carlos Gallilee and Dante Rogers, in the middle of Reisterstown Road. For a cat known throughout the city as a gigolo, a guy with slanted eyes and a Puerto Rican look, Rick had a whole lot of heart. He knocked the knees out of his jeans beating those dogs off and he stayed with his cousins in Philadelphia for a couple of weeks after that.

  The war went on at high schools, parties, football games, festivals, and public events. About two weeks after the chase, in the parking lot of the all-girls public senior high school where Muhammad, Dern, and I chilled out every day after track practice, this boy Meechee was sitting in the back of a green Thunderbird steady loading a .38 while his homeboys, a lanky bastard about six-foot-nine and some other culprit, leaned on us. They cornered Muhammad on the hood of his Sentra.

  “Where Ricky at? Where your boy at?”

  I was wanting to run away with my whole body, but my feet got so heavy in the quicksand of his pistol that I could only look longingly in the direction of the administration building. My heart was pumping Cherry Coke the whole way, but I was proud of Muhammad for how he kept the fear out of his voice. The next day Muhammad and Dern got their family arms and we went all tooled up to high school. They took it as far as slinging iron in their sport coats. The day after that, we cut school altogether for marksmanship class in Leakin Park, an abandoned grassland just west of the Junction that had become a desolate zone. The Pearls were jive giddy. I just blasted into the creek, but I had to stop Sawyer, who never had a whole lot of sense, from shooting the pistol right behind my ear. To my mind, nothing is as loud as the roar of that .38.

  The war changed the landmarks of our scene. Up to that time I had been keen to play in the County, and I could have cared less about my grimy, down-on-its-heels hometown. Now that we had to go everywhere in groups for safety, Reisterstown Road Plaza Mall and Security Mall in the County, the places where we used to flock to scoop out the honey, were less inviting. Our neighborhood mall, Mondawmin, became safe—if we toned our flamboyance down a little—and we started falling through Mondawmin, the Harbor, even Old Town Mall on the East Side. We kept linking up with city cats we’d gone to school with or had been in summer programs with, guys I had known from church at Lafayette Square, or the Druid Hill Avenue YMCA, where my father had been the director. Plus the girls I knew from those parts of town were slinging enough iron to take care of a boy. We went to our cousins and neighbors from around our way to get our back, to hustlers I had worked with at minimum-wage jobs all over the city, who came from tiny-ass streets crammed with thousands of brick row houses. The kind of music a cat listened to, or how he cut his fade, became unimportant compared to if he was from the city, how good he was with his hands, and, especially, if he had heart. That was how Sonny got down with the clique, because even though he was a young boy, he had all of the above.

  Heads from around my way cut their teeth on the Woodlawn beef. The hoppers, the young boys we never had room for in the car, they headed straight up to Bell and Garrison to build themselves up. The hustle on Garrison, or, even more big-time, Park Heights and Woodland, was strictly Fila and Russell. Man, them cats bumped. From then to now it must be something like three thousand cats shot on Garrison between the Junction and Pimlico—that’s one boulevard in one section of one chocolate American city. Plus ain’t nobody ever see a bustling swaggering yipping corner like Park Heights and Woodland in its prime. Serving ’em well, boy and girl, serving ’em well. Knuckles and Mighty Joe Young knew how to get by around there. I never caught on and only went up to The Lot, the neighborhood McDonald’s on Reisterstown Road, a couple of times. I wouldn’t throw quarters away on Pac-Man or Space Invaders. I was spending my money on rugged-sole Timberlands and twelve-inch records so I could become a club dancer. Same as slick, the corner was insular and monotonous, unless you had a taste for street fighting and raw booty. Anyway, the hoppers wound up getting tight with cats who the corner was all they had. Like Ringfrail’s brother Clyde, who wore brass jewelry, or Taiwan, an adolescent beggar who graduated to being a teenage beggar. Or Little Toby, who had started smoking too early and would always be short and skinny. I think (and was glad) Wookie was already gone by then. I know, and was sad, that Monty was. Every time I go home and walk to the Korean store to get some Utz or Tastykake, I run into them all.

  The young boys of course had to take it serious. I only had a year left of high school, but they were going to be in this thing for a long time. Pretty Ricky’s younger brother Maceo started going to war on his own, against anybody at all. At the corner store on Wabash and Sequoia he stabbed Richard Franklin, who then followed Maceo back to his house and sent him three-quarters of the way to their family’s funeral home with the same knife. Some vet’s old bayonet. Kind of intimate, being punctured with the same steel that still has your victim’s blood on it. When Five-O locked up Chucky Blue that same night, Chucky, on something like love boat, almost turned the paddy wagon over. That was pure dee Chuck Blue, living out the Myth. I’d never seen a motor vehicle rock from side to side on two wheels like that before.

  It was curious. I found out a lot more about my neighborhood, and was surprised to know that I had a place in it. Slickheads from around the way, cats known for hanging on the corner, mad ill dynamite-style cats like Darius, who rode his Honda Elite scooter in Fila slippers—they respected preps from the city, as long as us cats carried that thing original, which was to say never perpetrated no fraud. It meant taking pride in where you’re from. And we did. The Oxfords off Wabash were gaudy preps: pink shirts, green pants, bright-colored track shoes, and Gumby haircuts. Plus there was no bourgeoisie contingent at the schools we mainly attended. Loyola, Walbrook, City College, Carver, Cardinal Gibbons, and Forest Park. To go to school there, you couldn’t stand out more than to be an African American prep from the city. I might have eaten humble pie on a bus ride or two, but plenty of times I strutted the city like the word Hero was stitched on my chest. And the best-known cat in the clique for that air of confidence was Sonny.

  But then our style became a casualty in the war that went off and on for years. On account of the Woodlawn beef, everybody began to ease on down the road to slick, Russell sweats and Filas, bald head and sullen, gold in your mouth, pass the reefer. All of a sudden it seemed like slick had someth
ing serene you needed to get through life, a good way to not mind being an outlaw. I didn’t like it on a number of levels. And I was always the historian—the identity yo was too much connected to the yo-ski thing from the 1970s, when the kids ran “What’s up yo-ski?” into the fucking ground. And as I got more black and proud, the ski part of it sounded too close to the Polack-Johnny level, the citywide hot dog stand. Corny for us to follow the hick klan from Dundalk and Highlandtown.

  I never even knew all of exactly how we survived. I had a play cousin from Edmondson Village, slick as a wax floor and known throughout the city as The Ninja. He had jumped with the airborne in Grenada. One story went that he jogged up at a park on Woodlawn with an Uzi and told them to lay off. Another tale had it that the big-time boys from up the top of our street, who owned Yummy’s at North and Gold, took an arsenal up to the courts at Bedford, where everybody from the County ran ball, and said they was holding so-and-so personally responsible for whatever went down. I admit, a couple of years later, one night we did have Carlos Gallilee all by himself up at Club 4604 on Liberty Heights. Darius, who had the distinction of having popped tool at the LL Cool J concert, wild Chuck Blue, and the ill James brothers were there, really wanting to hurt somebody. I just talked to Carlos, not feeling it was sporting to bring all of that wrath down on him on a night he was acting humble. But then again, he was an actor and today he’s set himself up in Hollywood.

  Funny how the slickheads didn’t fare well in the end. Rocky, the mastermind—who had said up the Kappa House, not to me, just in my general direction, “You and your homeboys is just fucked!”—shot in the head. Muscleman Dante, whose girl I stole, ended up strung out after sitting down for ten at Jessup. Simon, the lunatic concrete-block man, gunned down at a police roadblock. I think pistol-loading Meechee fell into the dirt too—and if he did, then that’s too much like right.