Buck

by M. K. Asante

“What does that even mean … being bankrupt?”

  She’s sitting in the La-Z-Boy she never gets up from. Her sadness bolts her to the chair like the Death Row Records logo. She’s paralyzed like how my grandfather was. She’s faded too, high as a kite, eyes glazed like shiny marbles. White paste in the creases of her mouth like she’s been talking way too long. She doesn’t say much, though. Pill bottles, Diet Coke, empty Häagen-Dazs containers, and bills form rings around her like Saturn. TV on—Cops as usual. Every night, Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you. That shit creeps me out. Makes me think about Uzi. Maybe it makes her think about Uzi too? Maybe that’s why she watches? I see Uzi in her shattered face.

  Her purse is like CVS, a blur of brown plastic bottles with X’s and Z’s. She’s got a fistful of pills, all fruity colors like Wild Berry Skittles.

  Yo, this ngh named D-rugs, my moms dates him

  Swear to God I hate him, if I could I would break him*

  “It means we’re broke, Daudi.” She pops the orange pill.

  “I’m not Daahoud, Mom.” She doesn’t respond, just looks me over all floaty-eyed.

  “What about Dad?”

  “He’s bankrupt too … and in trouble with the IRS.” Red.

  How can people who’ve been working their whole lives be broke? How can people who’ve been struggling their whole lives still be struggling? Is this what my dad means when he says the struggle continues? But when does it end? Something’s off about this picture. Fuck this broke-ass picture.

  “I know, Daudi,” she says, like I’m my brother. She keeps calling me that lately. “When it rains it pours.” Purple. She’s crying without tears. “When you grow up hungry,” she says, “you promise yourself you’ll never be hungry again.”

  “I promise to get us out of this,” I say.

  “I know, Daudi.”

  “It’s me, Ma, Malo,” I try to correct her. But she’s fading out now like the dope fiends who wash cars on Broad and Godfrey. “I’ma get us out of this, Mom.”

  “I know, Daudi.”

  Dear Carole,

  I’ve never seen Malo so angry. He’s slamming things. His cheeks are puffy. I ask his coach if something happened. He says that “they lost” but that “Malo played well.”

  I ask Malo, “What happened?” He doesn’t say anything but I can feel him respond.

  “I know that you lost the game but I heard you played well.” I feel his body hiccup, as if to say, How could I play well if my team lost? I continued, “Sometimes we lose, but if we try our best, that is all we can do.” That got a rise out of him. He turned over and looked at me and said in a stern voice, “We lost!”

  I know what he means: I lost, Mom, and I don’t ever want to lose again! I wasn’t going to get much further with “as long as you give it your best.”

  Losing isn’t an option for Malo and it hurt. I understand that for Malo, losing was akin to something that I have never experienced. He was upset at himself because he felt that he could have saved the game and he didn’t. He was upset that an event that involved him had not gone well. Never mind his teammates; he had lost and right now that was all that mattered.

  Losing isn’t the flip side of winning for Malo. It is all or it simply isn’t. From the very beginning of his life, it was win by any means necessary. If I tapped him lightly, he responded more forcibly just to make sure if it were combat, I would know that he was ready. Where does he get that? If he fought with Daudi and he was losing, he would change the rules so that Daudi was punished. I’m the unwitting foil in the Malo book of rules. Win at any cost. He will go for the jugular and not think anything about it. When I finally wise up to his tricks, he is not repentant and is already on to bigger and better things. Malo has always been fearless. I pray that this quality doesn’t get him into trouble later on in his life.

  God, give me strength.

  Amina

  * * *

  * “D Rugs,” Cam’ron, 1998.

  16

  A Hunnit Knuckles

  Ted hollers, “These are the Thug Life codes all UPK members shall live and die by.” We’re huddled in the parking lot behind Cardinal Dougherty High School, under a big gray sky smoky with overcast.

  The whole crew—like a hunnit knuckles—rushes me and Amir like a sandstorm.

  “One: You got three options: (a) get rich, (b) get sent to jail, or (c) get killed.”

  I catch a punch to the back of my head. “UPK!” they keep shouting. I squint up at the silver overcast sky, then trip into Amir—we swing on everything moving.

  “Two: Your word is your bond.”

  A dozen flying fists landing everywhere like hail.

  “Three: One crew’s rat is every crew’s rat. Snitches get stitches. We don’t talk to police. No fish ever got caught with its mouth shut.”

  I bust a lip—then get mine bust … head shots like tambourines on Sundays.

  Gotta put you on your ass to see what it does to you

  When you stand up and see that I’m just showin love to you*

  “Four: Money over bitches. Chasing bitches, you’ll run out of money. But chasing money, you’ll never run out of bitches.”

  Stumbling backward … me and Amir, back to back, sucking air before we go buck …

  “Five: No slinging in schools … Slinging to little children or having little children slinging is against the Code.”

  Hooks and haymakers.

  “Six: In unity, there is strength!”

  Uppercuts, crosses, and chaos.

  “Seven: The boys in blue don’t run nothing—we do! We control the hood and make it safe for squares.”

  Blood flies from my nose.

  “Eight: No slinging to pregnant sisters. That’s baby killing and therefore genocide!”

  I’m falling into different-colored rooms—orange/​red/​purple/​black.

  “Nine: Know your target, who’s the real enemy … Civilians are not a target and should be spared in hood warfare.”

  A body shot takes me to my knees. “UPK!” Amir’s blood in my eye.

  “Ten: Harm to babies and old people will not be forgiven.”

  Timb boots stomping me like a welcome mat.

  “Eleven: No rape.”

  I ball up, knees to forehead … and then I don’t feel any pain anymore.

  “Twelve: Respect brothers and sisters if they respect themselves.”

  I tackle a body, land on my feet, and swing for the hills.

  “Thirteen: No shooting at parties.”

  Nothing but air … everyone moves away … I cough up gravel and blood. A great big bear hug.

  “Fourteen: Know the Code. Be a real ngh. Be down with the Code of Thug Life.”

  I fight out of the hug … keep swinging … punching, kicking, grabbing, tackling … they’re trying to get me to stop but I won’t, fuck that, I’m out for blood … I swing … swing … keep fighting and fuckin fighting until they’re all piled on top of me and I can’t move.

  “It’s all love,” they say. “It’s over, young buck! You did it.”

  I keep going … keep swinging like my life depends on it.

  Later, Scoop tells me my heart is bigger than my chest.

  “One more Code. Fifteen: Protect yourself at all times.”

  Scoop puts a .22-caliber Beretta in my palm.

  It’s heavy in my hands. I marvel at it. I feel like Pac in Juice or maybe Pacino in Scarface. Nino in New Jack. Everybody else but me. I wonder if I can use this in my nightmares, use it to blow back evil. I think about the cops, the robber, the repo man. Fear melts in the palm of my hand.

  I’m a lyrical destructor, don’t make me buck ya

  Because I’m a wild muhfucka†

  “Is it loaded?”

  “No use otherwise.”

  * * *

  * “Bring It On,” DMX, 1998.

  † “Give Up the Goods,” Big Noyd (Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd), 1995.

  17

>   Some Type of Way

  My stomach feels like a dishrag. Tongue like a balloon in my mouth. Eyes unbuttoned. Jaw weeping. Even the sky bleeds as the sun sets over Nia’s crib. She lives on Stenton Ave. across the street from MLK High School.

  “But why?” she asks me, patting my face with an ice pack. I’m in her room. It’s baby blue and has stuffed animals all over her bed like Jumanji.

  “ ’Cause,” I say slow.

  “ ’Cause what?” She wipes my face.

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know why. Maybe I did it because Uzi’s gone and UPK are like my big brothers now. Or because Amir wanted to do it too. Or for protection. Or to piss Pops off. Or because I just don’t give a fuck anymore. Or maybe there is no why.

  “ ’cause, whatever.”

  She just shakes her head. “They beat you up. What type of—”

  “Nah, we got jumped in, plus we fucked them up too.”

  “I guess,” she says, rolling her eyes, “I don’t see the point if they’re supposed to be your friends.”

  Nia is like fresh water. She has me feeling some type of way.

  “You love that bitch?” Ryan asked me the other day.

  I almost ripped his head off. “She ain’t no bitch. Chill with that … and yeah, I’m feelin her, so fall back.”

  I just stare at her, stare at her like she’s the most precious piece of artwork in the Philly Museum of Art. Her skin is silky and shiny like the outside of a bubble. Each one of her eyelashes shows and curls into forever.

  “Look at your little peach fuzz,” she says, laughing, touching my bruised chin. She has a smile that stops at nothing.

  Her mom’s at work—she’s all mine.

  She kisses me, her lips softer than a whisper. I can feel my heart beating in my dick, stone stiff. My hands take over like they’re possessed. I play her collarbone like a harmonica.

  We fuck like our lives depend on it, like we’re all we have, and I think it’s true.

  We’re lying on her bed, watching the ceiling fan make circles in the dark. Her neck, smooth and warm, resting on my bicep in perfect tilt.

  “What’s the craziest thing you ever did?” I ask her.

  Her eyes roll back in thought.

  “I know.”

  “What?”

  “Fall in love with you.”

  “But you don’t even know me like that to be falling in love.”

  “I know,” she says, getting back on top of me. “That’s why it’s so crazy … Did you know that love causes the same chemical reaction in the brain as insanity?”

  I think about that for a minute—love and insanity, beauty and the beast.

  “Crazy.”

  18

  MALO

  Scoop hands me a frosty forty of OE. I hit it, then put it on my swollen face like an ice pack. It’s all big and awkward, like a traffic cone.

  I look down 5th Street: little girls with braids and colorful Venus Williams barrettes jumping rope fast. Little boys juking in the middle of the street, playing roughhouse, shooting at a bottomless black crate tied to a phone pole. Sirens whine in the distance.

  “Yo! What you call a pretty girl on Ryan’s arm?” Amir asks.

  “I don’t fuckin know.”

  “A tattoo! Haha.”

  “Ya mom!” Ryan says. He’s sitting between this girl Tasha’s legs, getting his hair braided.

  I kiss my mama goodbye and wipe the tears from her lonely eyes

  Said I’ll return but I gotta fight the fate’s arrived*

  This Cambodian kid, Dah, is tatting my arm up. Dah’s my age and can make a tattoo gun out of an electric toothbrush, Bic pen, and guitar string. He’s doing it right now—sharpening the guitar string against the mouth of the curb like floss. Dah is like Uptown’s MacGyver. Give homie some duct tape, a couple of paper clips, batteries, a tube sock, and like two and a half hours, and he’ll make a better version of anything they sell at Radio Shack. Once he even made a bulletproof vest out of Kevlar strips he ganked from some old Goodyears.

  Everyone comes to Dah to get tatted, twenty bucks a lick. He put a crucifix on Ted’s veiny-ass forearm, “Only God Can Judge Me” on Aubrey’s back, “MOB” on D-Rock’s hand, a teardrop under Scoop’s eye, and two cherries on Amber’s left titty, and he did way too many RIP tats.

  “I use the E string ’cause it’s mad thin,” he says, his dark anime eyes bugged with focus. “Can also straighten staples for the needle, but I like the E. It plays music on nghz’ skin.”

  “Dah, you ain’t a ngh, stop saying ngh, ngh,” D-Rock says.

  “Eat a dick,” Dah says, “ngh.”

  D-Rock’s just fucking with Dah. Nobody cares that Dah says ngh because—forreal-forreal—Dah and all the other Cambodians in Olney are nghz. They look like nghz—dark, thick features; dress like nghz—baggy and colorful; talk like nghz—fast and raw; and are even broker than nghz, with like forty people in a two-bedroom apartment. They don’t own shit—no nail salons, no beauty stores, no laundromats, no check-cashing spots, no corner stores, no banks, no take-out spots with cloudy bulletproof glass—just like nghz. I think the other Asians look down on them too … just like nghz.

  “It hurts like a bitch,” Amir says, biting open a grape freeze pop.

  “It’s the real ngh way. No shop, no license,” Ted says. “Just needle to bone.”

  I don’t care, though. I hope it hurts. That jump-in plus everything else with my fam got me numb to pain. I can take it, bring it. I don’t feel shit, cold as steel.

  “Aight!” Dah says as he tapes it all together and inspects it.

  “Damn, that shit is ugly,” D-Rock, says staring at Dah’s invention. It has a medieval body and a jailhouse spirit.

  “Looks ain’t everything—like a bad bitch could have that house in Virginia, you never know,” says Scoop.

  “Essaywhuman?” I say like Black Thought from the Roots.

  “HIV, ngh!”

  D-Rock, Scoop, and Aubrey are chilling. Blunt smoke slow-dances around their faces. The door to Scoop’s tinted-out gold Benz is ajar. Biggie pours out of the Pioneers. D-Rock is draining a Keystone Light.

  “Man, all y’all nghz shut the fuck up and throw something up,” Ted says, taking his shirt off fast like he’s about to rumble.

  “Go ’head with all that lifting shit, man.”

  “You ain’t lifting, you ain’t living!” he barks. “I’ma show y’all simple nghz how I’m living.” He starts doing reps on the bench. He woofs like a dog every time he throws the weight up. And that’s exactly what Ted reminds me of: a little hyper pug dog, always drooling at the corners of the mouth, always wild, ready to scrap, loud as fuck. Uzi says he has a Napoleon complex.

  Dah bangs the gun against the curb.

  “That jawn still works, right?” I ask, laughing. Dah just looks at me, mouth twisted, head tilted.

  “What? Name one thing I made that didn’t work,” he challenges.

  I thought about the bulletproof vest he made since—

  “And don’t say the vest!”

  Last year, this kid Edris, one of Uzi’s best boys, bought Dah’s bulletproof vest. He was rocking it, and on his way home from some girl’s house, right there in front of the laundromat on Broad Street—Wishy Washy—they ambushed him. The vest stopped a few slugs from wreaking havoc on his chest, but it was useless above his linebacker shoulders. Shells shatter skull. They went point-blank and shot his nose off like the Sphinx. It’s crazy how many people are getting killed throughout the city. Every night someone’s son or daughter is murdered and it seems like nobody cares. Death feels like it’s around every corner, waiting under the stop signs, looking down from the street lights, creeping out of the sewers.

  “They took the elevator on him—top floor. It was a bulletproof vest, not mask,” Dah says. “The vest worked,” he adds, hitting a switch on the tattoo gun, which suddenly buzzes to life, “and so does this … ready?”

  Dah’s passionate about what
he does. I think it’s dope to see people who are passionate do their thing, like MJ—either one. Plus out here all you got is your name. That’s exactly why I’m getting my name tatted on me.

  “Hell yeah,” I say, and take off my shirt. “I want Malo right here,” pointing to my whole left arm. “Big as shit. Loud. All the way turned up.”

  “Got you.” He writes it out—MALO—on a piece of paper in Old English letters. The letters are sharp curves like ninja stars. As I’m staring at my name it hits me that there are two types of people: camels and lions. Camels—the ones that follow and always do as they’re told, listen quietly and never question, never challenge. Those that bend every which way to please the world, the authorities, parents, school, government, and follow blindly. Lions—the ones that make their own rules, chart their own path. The lions are the G’s and the camels are the bustas. It’s like Scoop always says: “G’s do what they want, bustas do what they can.”

  I shoot up like a rocket.

  “What?” Dah says.

  “You know how Tupac said THUG LIFE stands for ‘The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucks Everybody’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “MALO—‘Me Against Law and Order.’ ”

  * * *

  * “I Ain’t Mad At Cha,” 2Pac featuring Danny Boy, 1996.

  19

  Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

  Roach is chasing me down the hallway, limping after me like a hungry pirate. He’s the shape of a sack of laundry—a stuttering hamper coming right at me. I don’t even know why he’s chasing me or what I did this time. I just decide to run, so now I’m running, fast like how my dad says my great-great-grandfather ran when he escaped slavery in Valdosta. It’s not even lunch yet and the Limp is after me. Feets, don’t fail me now.

  The BS starts in chemistry.

  I get there and teacher Helga is in my ass like a bike with no seat.

  “Where were you?” she asks like the police. Her face drags and drips like an old melted candle.