Buck

by M. K. Asante

  “Yo, it’s your grandma,” I say outside the bathroom door.

  “Serve her!” he says, toilet flushing. I don’t. He does.

  Cuz being a ngh means you love nghz

  So how could you love nghz if you tryna drug nghz?†

  I bounce the next day, tripping on how the streets turn you cold, how money has us out here like zombies, killing each other for crumbs.

  —W—

  I wake up on Frazier Street in West Philly.

  Staying here with Amir’s cousin June. The house is across the street from a church with a lawn sign that says God Saves. I think, Bullshit. Saves who? Not Amir. Saves what? When? Whatever.

  The block is quiet during the day. These old heads play chess on the hood of an old Chevy Monte Carlo. They call me over one day, try to read me, see what I’m about. One of them, he’s got his cane resting on his knee, tells me I’m not a man yet.

  “You ain’t a man until you learn that your dick is either a commodity, a tool, or a weapon.”

  “My dick is just big,” I laugh, and go back in the house.

  One day they tell me some guys came around looking for me.

  “Asked if we knew where you were.”

  “You sure?”

  “They said your name. Malo. About three or four of ’em. Ugly fellas too. I hope you ain’t in no trouble.”

  I rack my brain. No one knows I’m here except June. It’s got to be Bone and Damien trying to collect. I leave that night, keep it moving.

  I learn to always keep it moving, never stay anywhere too long. They say if you drop a frog in boiling water, it’ll jump out. But if you drop it in room-temp water and slowly heat it up, the frog sits there and dies. I’m trying to be the frog that gets the jump on the boil. So I’m learning to see as far as possible and, same time, avoid being seen, lay in the cut like peroxide. I’m growing eyes that hear and ears that see. The only ones who make it out here are the nghz that move fast. So I keep my train moving so I don’t get moved on. Harder to hit a moving target.

  I drive around the city looking at the shapes the shadows make on the ground, against the buildings, on people. Philly is a city of shapes. Out here everybody has an angle, like geometry. Squares trying to box me in. Octagons trying to stop me. Circles trying to throw me for a loop. Everything on the line. The sooner I catch the angle, the better off I am.

  —N—

  I wake up on Allegheny Ave., staying with Scoop. Kianna told me to stay away from him but this is a last resort. I don’t even know who lives in this house. It’s just a spot full of random people coming and going—turnstile. It’s above a Korean corner store, so we chill in front of there a lot. I wonder why—wonder when, wonder how—Koreans who don’t speak much English just come up in the hood, set up shop, and make mad bank off nghz. Fuck it—it is what it is—I ain’t mad at ’em. Everybody gotta eat.

  Normal corner store shit: quarter hug juice, chips, blunts, beer, cigs, and straight-shooter crack pipes right next to the candy. Scoop’s always arguing with them.

  “A pack of Pall Malls.”

  “Pall Malls?” I say. Every black person I’ve ever met smokes Newports.

  “I like designer clothes, Versace, Moschino, Polo, but I’m not paying for no designer name-brand cancer. Give me the cheap shit.”

  When Scoop was with Kianna, everybody knew he had screws loose, but now that they’re apart, it’s clear that his screws are actually gone for good. Kianna’s the only one who can calm him down. Every day he’s beefing with nghz, robbing people, fighting, and creating enemies. One night the house gets lit up. A drive-by. I’m sleeping on the floor when it happens. Glass exploding. People screaming. Tires screeching. I leave the same night.

  —E—

  I wake up in my car under a bridge in Logan. Alone with my heartbeat. Get out to pee.

  “Run that shit!” I’m got. This hairy-face ngh, gat in palm, eyes like tinted windows with air bubbles. The other boy, corn bread husky, grim-reaper hoodie on, looks out.

  “Hurry up.” He pats my pockets. “Run all that shit!” He helps me take it off. Snatches my beeper. Spots the chain, the one Amir gave me, under my rugby. “Chain too,” he orders like it’s already his. And that’s the last straw. It hits me—I don’t even care if I die, fuck it, I ain’t got shit to live for. I’m ready to die for this chain Amir loved so much, his prized possession and the only thing his pops left him.

  “Shoot!”

  “Bang ’im.”

  He rips the chain from me.

  “You Muslim?” He stops struggling with me, studying the chain. Seems like everybody in Philly is Muslim. I nod fast. He looks at his friend—they talk to each other without speaking. He pushes the chain into my fist, then gives me all my shit back.

  “My bad … Salamu alaikum,” he says, and fades into the night.

  Amir’s chain is broken but I’m just relieved that I still have it.

  I find out later the charm says Allah, which means “God” in Arabic.

  I remember the sign on Frazier Street: God Saves.

  * * *

  * “Banned from TV,” Big Pun (Capone-N-Noreaga featuring Nature, Big Pun, Cam’ron, Styles P, and Jadakiss), 1998.

  † “N.I.G.G.A. (Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished),” 2Pac, 1998.

  31

  On the Road

  Ryan shows up in the middle of the night, sweating, heaving, eyes breathing like glowing coals, the way Amir’s looked the last time I saw him. We just leave—before he even tells me the whole story about how he’s on the run, what went down—we just hit the highway and don’t look back.

  “They coming for me, Malo,” he says as I chug down I-95, windows down, music blasting. I feel like they’re coming for me too: the cops, Bone, Damien, Scoop’s enemies.

  “Slow down, Malo, they got a APB out.”

  “APB?”

  “All points bulletin.”

  We pull over at a rest stop, fill the tank, and spend our last few bucks on snacks and a map of America. We spread the country out on the dash of my Explorer. We’re in Delaware.

  “Where you wanna go?”

  “Anywhere. Just away from here.”

  Embrace the wheel and hit a buck without crashin fuck

  My drug passion got a nigga stashin fast what*

  I call my older cousin Chris, who lives in Ft. Worth, Texas.

  “Y’all fools need to come down here to the Funky … tell ’em he can stay down here and lay low.” Chris came to stay with us in Philly a few years ago and remembers Ryan. He’s cool as shit, from L.A., straight outta Compton like N.W.A. “Bompton” is how he reps it. He claims Ft. Worth too. He stays with us for like a year, goes to community college, and puts me on to Texas hip-hop: Geto Boys, UGK, Rap-a-Lot Records, DJ Screw.

  “Say no more,” he tells me on the phone. “Come on, kin-folk! What y’all waitin on?”

  We drive through Richmond and Raleigh, through Memphis and Little Rock. We watch the sun rise, set, and then rise again, like watching reruns of a miracle. I bask in the miracle, in the warmth of its rays, in its rise, fall, and redemption.

  Nighttime comes and swallows everything. Eighteen-wheelers roaring past like trains, then disappearing into the black.

  In front of us, the horizon trembles in haze. Ryan drives. I pull out Noreaga’s CD and, bored, peep the liner notes: To my real thugs on da run eating—avoid court, da C.O.’s, da P.O.’s, county and state police. When in and out of state remember your name or attribute change with da town, so as u travel remain eatin’. All authorities are crazy for trying to take on our destiny in their hands.

  I think about Uzi, think about all the Uzis, all the Amirs, the Ryan, the Malos, running … from what? I don’t know why I’m running but I feel like I can’t stop. I’m tired but don’t want to stop. Not the car, not the music, nothing. There’s something scary about stopping, like in that movie Speed, where the bus has to go faster than fifty-five mph or else it blows up.

  To stop:
to die.

  The only thing I know about Ft. Worth is that it’s always the featured location on my mom’s favorite show, Cops … and that my favorite cousin, Chris, is waiting for us to show up in Funkytown.

  The air is hot and sticky like we’re inside a plastic bag. Chris lives in an apartment complex and pushes a black Mustang.

  “Y’all lil’ nghz grab a beer and come on back,” Chris says. He’s got broad shoulders and dark curly hair. Hazel eyes that match his complexion. He’s in his classic black hat—no logo, no team, just black with a bent brim.

  We’re at Chris’ boys’ crib. They play dominoes and yell shit like “Study long, study wrong … Fish wata stank … Follow that cab—it got dope in it … Getcha kids out the street … Domino motherfucker!”

  These twins, Lil’ Brain Dead and Half Gone, show up with this girl.

  “Give the lil’ nghz some head,” one of them tells her.

  “Okay, daddy,” she says. “But one at a time … baby face first,” pointing at me, strutting into the back room.

  “Handle that.” Chris hands me a Trojan. “Strap up.” I go in first. She’s laying on the bed playing with herself. I can’t. I walk out of the room and it’s a revolving door for the next couple of hours. Tag team. Choo-choo.

  Let it sit inside your head like a million women in Philly, Penn.

  It’s silly when girls sell their soul because it’s in†

  All I can think about is Nia, my heart. She has the energy that holds this whole damn world together, that makes the sun rise. Her voice whispers to me thousands of miles away.

  I call but it just keeps ringing …

  My uncle Howard picks me up from Chris’ in the morning. Gives me a giant bear hug. Tightest embrace ever. He has a slow, proud walk. Chest out.

  “I’m eighty-one,” he tells me. He can pass for fifty.

  His house is an oasis. Like calm in the middle of a storm. We sit on the couch with my aunt Georgia and watch this movie Powder, about an albino boy with special powers. I check out the box cover, it reads, “An Extraordinary Encounter with Another Human Being.”

  We’re all really feeling this movie. It feels like Powder is talking directly to me. He’s like: When a thunderstorm comes up, I can feel it inside. When lightning comes down, I can feel

  it wanting to come to me. Grandma said it was God. She said the white fire was God … Energy, always relaying, always transforming, and never-ending … Have you ever listened to people from the inside? Listened so close you can hear their thoughts—and all their memories. Hear them think from places they don’t even know they think from.

  Me and my uncle talk about death, life, belief. He’s a mystical man, a thinking man, with the widest, most inviting smile I’ve ever seen, ever felt.

  “Walk with me.” He leads the way in slow, proud strides. Big freckles like stars.

  “I know about your friend,” he says. Know what? I think. That he’s on the run? About the gun? The stash? “I can tell by your eyes, you got something you want to say … but can’t. Not yet.” Crazy how he knows all this. I feel like he knows everything. About me, about Ryan, all the shit we’re into. But he’s not judging. Those eyes, deep like canyons, seeing right into my soul, doing something to me.

  “I know.”

  We walk along a creek behind his house.

  “ ‘Like black pearls trapped in the white cerebellum, we glisten out of reach of drum gun and talking bird … I want you to leap high in the sky with me until we see yellow trees and blue gulf.’ ”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. It’s like he’s speaking a foreign language, a foreign language I want to learn.

  “Henry Dumas,” he says. “Heard of him?”

  I shake my head.

  “Heads up,” he says, pulling a thin book from his back pocket and tossing it to me. I look at the cover: Poetry for My People.

  “Check it out,” he says. “Dumas was from my hometown. Sweet Home, Arkansas.”

  I stand at the edge of the water, on the edge of being, reflecting—on my mom and how I want to tell her, to show her, that I’m sorry; on Bone and how I’m going to stop running and face him like a man when I get back to Philly; about Uzi and how I don’t want to end up in jail like him; about my dad and how I miss him; about what Amir said about fathers.

  “ ‘Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.’ ” He pats me on the shoulder. “That’s Rumi.”

  Later on, at dinner, Uncle Howard tells me about the war inside.

  “There’s a war between two wolves inside everybody. One is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, and ego. The other’s good. It’s love, peace, beauty, happiness, truth, hope, joy, humility, kindness, and empathy.”

  I’m thrust back to reality when my cousin Kianna hits me up. She’s frantic. Out of breath. Tells me my mom OD’d … that they don’t know if she’s going to make it.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  Me and Ryan at the doorway with our bags.

  “I’ll take my chances back up there … can’t see myself living down here,” Ryan tells me. He’s coming back to Philly with me, facing the risk. “Is what it is.”

  I give long, deep hugs to Uncle Howard and Aunt Georgia, then hop in the car with Ryan. I start the engine, then jump out, forgetting something.

  I walk up to my uncle. “In the story,” I ask, “who wins … between the two wolves?”

  “The one you feed.”

  * * *

  * “Channel 10,” Capone-N-Noreaga, 1997.

  † “Doo Wop (That Thing),” Lauryn Hill, 1998.

  32

  The White Fire

  “Slow down, Malo.” I hear Ryan, but my foot is heavy. Heart heavier. Speeding through Little Rock with the windows halfway down, feeling halfway between everywhere, right and wrong, past and present, life and death, me and me.

  Between the no longer and the not yet.

  Thunder, lightning, dark clouds swirling above us like vultures. We’re driving straight through a storm from the Bible.

  I think about the wolves inside me, growling, fighting.

  Lightning in front of us, treetops flashing. We head right for it like an electric finish line in the sky.

  No music, just storm.

  White fire in the sky.

  “Slow down, Malo.” But I’m in go mode. I feel like scum for what I said to my mom. If she dies, I don’t deserve to live.

  I drive so fast, so hard, I don’t even notice the cops on our ass. Ryan’s jaw tightens in thought.

  Speak when spoken to, say less than necessary, I tell myself as the trooper crushes gravel on his march toward us.

  “What state we in?” Ryan asks me.

  “I don’t know, maybe Virginia.”

  “I tailed you for two miles at ninety mph.” Pale stone face.

  “My mom’s in the hospital … I’m rushing to see her … Sorry, officer, I didn’t realize how fast I was going.”

  “You said your mom’s in the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that gives you the right to speed through my county?”

  “But she—”

  “I could care less, boy,” he says, scoping my system in the back: speakers, amp, neon bars. “Now look here: the only person with blue lights around here is going to be the law.”

  Cops like him are the reason for these songs: “Black and Blue” by Brand Nubian, “Coffee, Donuts and Death” by Paris, “Crooked Cops” by E-40, “Crooked Officer” by Geto Boys, “Dirty Cop Named Harry” by Hard Knocks, “Duck da Boyz” by Strickly Roots, “Fuck tha Police” by N.W.A., “Get the Fuck Out of Dodge” by Public Enemy, “Good Cop/Bad Cop” by Blahzay Blahzay, “Illegal Search” by LL Cool J, “In the Line of Duty” by Eightball and MJG, “One Time Gaffed ’em Up” by Compton’s Most Wanted, “Looking Through the Eye of a Pig” and “Pigs” by Cypress Hill, “Protect and Serve” by UGK, “Punk Police” by Mac Dre, “Say Hi to the Bad Guy” by Ice Cube, “Sound of Da
Police” by KRS-One, “Time for Us to Defend Ourselves” by MC Shan.

  I want to get to my mom and I don’t want to bring any attention to Ryan.

  “Yes, officer.” I bite my tongue. “I understand.”

  More cops show up, some in regular clothes. They make us sit on the side of the road, cuffed, while the K9 tears my car up.

  Mr. Police, please try to see

  That there’s a million muthafuckas stressin just like me*

  “Sorry, man. My bad.” I feel like I let Ryan down, like I’m letting everyone down.

  “It ain’t your fault.”

  “If I would’ve just done the speed limit …”

  “I can’t run forever,” he whispers.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the officer says after they run everything. “You aware there is a warrant for your arrest?”

  They take Ryan and vanish into the foggy night.

  * * *

  * “Only God Can Judge Me,” 2Pac, 1996.

  33

  Brooklyn Girl

  A bleak hospital is all hospitals. On the elevator up, I think about how I hate hospitals. The odor of the helpless, hopeless. The doctor is this pretty Indian lady. She tells me how my mom almost died.

  I lean over Mom. She grabs my hand.

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” I keep saying. A million lights and indicators around her like NASA. I think about my brother, about me, and about her. About the last time she was healthy.

  “Where were you?” she asks.

  “A little bit of everywhere.” She rubs my hand.

  I stay with her, by her side, all day, all night. I dab her lips with the sponge-tipped water tube when her mouth gets dry. I want to make her happy.