by Mike Epps
There was an evil teacher at my school, a rough little woman who could not wait for me to get in her grade.
“When you’re in my class, I’m going to get you!” she’d say when she saw me around the school.
When I did get in her class, I found out what it meant to be “got.” Whenever I did anything wrong, she made me kneel on the floor for what felt like hours, facing the wall, my knees on bottle caps. That was some Guantánamo shit right there, you know what I mean?
But these days I almost feel bad for that evil teacher. Because if she thought it was going to straighten me out, it sure didn’t work. If anything, it made me hate school more. I just got worse and worse, just to spite her, and also because it felt like: Why not? We didn’t really have any idea of what we wanted to be when we grew up, what we would want to be good for. It’s not like college felt like a real possibility for most of us. Hell, most of us would drop out before the end of high school. It’s not like we were on the fast track to med school.
You know, when people say, “What did you want to be when you grew up?” I’m, like, “Get the fuck out of here. That is a white-people question.” We didn’t have goals where I came from. There weren’t any kids saying, “I want to be president!” “I want to be a pilot!” “I want to be . . .”
Oh naw. We wanted to get some money, and we wanted some new Jordan sneakers, and we wanted to not die. That was as far as we were thinking ahead.
No one really seemed to expect anything from us, you feel me? I feel like the whole world—and for sure all the white parts of Indianapolis—just hoped we’d stay in our neighborhood and not come bother them. People blame poor people for not pulling themselves out of poverty, but how you going to pull yourself out of it when you can’t even imagine what it would look like? It’s not as if we had an uncle who was an astronaut or a neighbor who was a professor or a cousin who was a banker. We knew people who worked in factories and people who worked at fast-food restaurants, and plenty of people who didn’t work at all.
But there was at least one day a year when the white part of the city pretended to care about us: Career Day.
It was a joke, of course. For a couple hours once a year, some poor sap came to talk to us in a loud assembly no one paid much attention to. In theory, they’d get firemen or cops or doctors to show up and talk to us about life and their jobs and we’d get inspired and choose to not become drug dealers.
Right-o.
One year, the guy who came to talk was introduced to us as “Officer Friendly.”
There wasn’t nothing friendly about that motherfucker. He should have been called Officer Drew the Short End of the Stick and Had to Go Talk to Hood Kids, or Officer Irritable, or Officer Let’s Get This Over With. He came down to the school, sat in a chair in front of us, and talked to us kids about his job and about how the law is good and a lot of other things that sounded pretty far-fetched. Some brownnoser kids raised their hands and said they wanted to be cops.
Oh, come the fuck on, you do not, I thought.
Then came the Q & A part.
“What’s the scariest thing you ever had happen?”
“What’s it like chasing bad guys in your car? Do you get to drive fast?”
“Do you have a police dog?”
“Do you really eat donuts?”
Ha-ha.
Then it’s my turn to ask something. You can guess my favorite question: “You done killed somebody?”
“Oh no,” Officer Friendly said with a little chuckle. “We’re not going to talk about that today.”
I raised my hand again. I had some more questions, mostly about guys from my neighborhood.
“You know Dominic Amy?” I asked.
I saw the cop flinch.
Dominic Amy was a bad muhfucka. I knew he knew Dominic Amy, aka Big Sweets.
“Why, yes,” the cop said, looking uncomfortable. “I do know him. How do you know him?”
“Dominic don’t know me,” I said, “but I know him ’cause he’s from the hood, too. I know some other people, too, who you might know.” I listed a few more names. All, I bet, on his most-wanted list.
“Well, that’s a real Indianapolis Who’s Who!” Officer Friendly said. Then he joked to my teacher, “He’s pretty interesting, this kid here.” He was probably mentally measuring me for an orange jumpsuit.
“That’s enough questions from you, Michael,” the teacher said.
The cop said I didn’t need to know Dominic Amy and those other guys, that I should stay away from them, that I should think about becoming something good, like a police officer, that I should work hard in school and play it straight and I’d get to be like him when I grew up, not in prison like those other guys would be one day if they weren’t already.
But Dominic Amy was doing more than all right, from what I could tell. He commanded more respect on my block than this cop in bad shoes. And you wouldn’t catch Dominic Amy having to show up at some crappy school first thing in the morning to talk to a bunch of annoying fucking kids.
What I wanted to say to Officer Friendly, too, was that I couldn’t choose not to know Dominic Amy or anyone out there like him. If you lived where I lived, no matter how hard you tried not to, you’d know everything about Dominic Amy, just as sure as if you lived where Officer Friendly lived you’d know all about the president of the United States or Madonna or Tom Cruise.
Plus, when shit went down and I was in some sort of trouble, a hell of a lot more help was available from the likes of Dominic Amy than from any Officer Friendly. And the reality of where I grew up is that if a parent isn’t there every day, hands-on with their kids, those kids are going to venture off and find stuff. And not good stuff. It’s not like we’d wander down a dark alleyway and find ourselves accidentally taking an SAT. We wouldn’t pass out at a party and wake up wearing a suit and tie on a trading floor.
As the years went by, school got harder and I went less and less. With my dad not being around so much, there was no way my mom could keep an eye on us all the time. She was raising the five of us—me, Chaney, Julie, Robbie, and John—on her own, and just on her salary at Block’s department store. There weren’t a lot of enrichment activities available. In fact, sometimes there was barely enough food in the house.
Our living situation wasn’t always stable, either. We moved around a lot, trying to find a place that we could afford that could hold us all. Sometimes that meant all six of us in a studio apartment. In between those apartments, whenever we got kicked out for not paying rent, we’d put our stuff in storage and go stay at my grandmother’s, on Twenty-First and Carrollton, until we were back on our feet.
While we were staying with my grandmother, I switched from School 48 to School 101, closer to her house. Man, School 101 was the hood hood. There were some hard fucking kids at School 101. I had to learn fast how to survive there. My secret was to act cooler and harder than everyone else, even though inside I was scared.
The key to my tough persona was smoking. My mom caught me once when I was about nine teaching myself to smoke in the basement. She said, “I’ll tell you what. You stay in the basement and smoke the whole pack until you finish it.”
It was nasty, but I sat down there and smoked my fool head off. I was coughing, crying—it was terrible. But it was kind of like smoking boot camp, and I learned to do it without gagging after that. And that’s how I became a smoker.
So at 101 I was able to impress the fuck out of other kids. Some bad muhfuckas would come up on me and I’d just lean back like I wasn’t intimidated at all. Then I’d pull out a cigarette and start smoking. I wasn’t even ten yet, but I was a guy who’d lean against a wall and smoke. They were fucking impressed. At that age, kids say, “Damn, he’s a real bad boy!” and then they listen to you. People didn’t fuck with me. They looked at me like a leader.
Once, a neighborhood kid stole a couple of younger kids’ bikes, including my brother’s. These little boys were tough, but they didn’t know how to get their b
ikes back. As the older and wiser “man,” I gathered them around me in the backyard, lit my usual cigarette. I was a military commander. I had to give them a plan to get those bikes back, and also make them feel like they had the power to execute it. I thought long and hard while they stared at me.
“Go get your bikes!” I said finally.
They stood there for a second and then ran out of the yard.
An hour later, they came back with their bikes. They were a little worse for wear, but they looked proud of themselves, and I was proud of them, too.
That said, I mean it wasn’t like some of my friends weren’t bike thieves, too. One kid I knew thought of nothing but bikes—which were the best ones, how to steal them, what he could sell them for. In fact, he never made eye contact with anyone, ever, because he was too busy looking at bikes.
Big Black Stacy. Little Poker. Julio. Fatso. Mike Jones. Flea. Little T. Big Ellis. Shaky. Big Man. J-Dawg. Red. Junie. Fat C. LaDon. Rico. My mom didn’t like the looks of some of them—she thought Fatso, especially, was bad news. My mother told me many a time, “Leave that little boy alone. He gonna get you in trouble.”
I should have listened to her, but there was a problem: They were the most fun to hang out with.
Even when I did get in dangerous situations, I almost always seemed to find ways to wiggle out of them. There was one day when a couple of older boys were picking on me at 101.
“You better stop picking on me,” I said, “or I’ll sic our dogs on you! We have seven Doberman pinschers!”
When they didn’t believe me, I went and got my brother John.
“These are the guys picking on me, John,” I said. “They don’t believe me that we have dogs. Tell them we have dogs!”
“We have dogs,” John said, like the good brother he was. (We had no dogs.)
“Dobermans?” a kid asked.
“Sure,” John said. (Across the street from our house were a couple of biker guys who had two Dobermans. In the early ’80s, those dogs were very popular. It was a good lie.)
“But do you have seven Dobermans?” one of these kids said to John.
John raised his eyebrows and looked over at me. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say yes, but he shrugged. He let it ride, letting them believe it if they wanted to.
“Whoa!” the kid said. “I guess we’re not following you home after all!”
On our way home from school that day, once we were out of those kids’ sight, John started laughing.
“What?” I said.
“Seven?” he said.
Hey, if you’re going to lie, make it good, right? I think I was a good storyteller because I didn’t ever go halfway. I went all out.
“You don’t just tell a lie,” my brother John said to me. “You always tell it and then you paint it.”
Looking back now, I wonder if I was so bad because I was sensitive and all the bad shit around me was piling up in my kid brain. And I wonder, if I’d had more stimulation and more education and more attention, whether I’d have been so restless. I felt like I needed to be popular or I’d get beat up, not be safe. I was too shy to really show people my true self, so I just said, “Fuck it, I’m going to be bad.” My only way to get attention was to be bad, talk about people, say shit.
Deep down, I spent a lot of time hoping things would get better somehow. I wanted so much for myself and for my family. I wanted new toys, and nicer clothes, and better food. I wanted our mom not to be so tired and to get a nice, permanent house like she wanted.
See, my mom had a dream. She wanted a house of her very own, big enough for all of us, full of light. She wanted the house to be clean and comfortable. She wanted to fill it with nice furniture and pretty curtains. And she even wanted to put a white picket fence around our yard. That fence would show the neighbors that we were living right, and in her mind I think she thought it would keep the bad parts of the world out and her kids safe.
Little did we know, she was about to get her picket fence—and it would ruin our lives.
3
The House at Carrollton and Dirty-Third
So there was my dad, Tommie, who I shared with Chaney, and then there was Robert, who was Robbie, John, and Julie’s dad, and sometimes they would visit at the same time, and sometimes when they did, they were a little bit wasted and feeling emotional.
Awkward—two drunk men in the driveway, both yelling for their kids. It looked like a cabstand at the end of the night. Sometimes they would throw punches at each other because they were both still in love with my mother.
We didn’t care if they were drunk, though. We all loved our dads, and one another’s dads, too. Both our dads treated us all equal, as if we were theirs. (My dad always said Julie was the daughter that he never had.) Still, all us kids thought, when it came down to it, that our dad was the toughest, the smartest, and the strongest. We could argue all day about it.
Chaney and I would say Tommie was the best. Julie, John, and Robbie would say Robert was the best.
After fighting about it for hours, we’d ask my mom to break the tie.
“Ain’t neither one of them shit!” she’d say, like Judge Judy.
Then one day a new guy came along, Reggie. A nice guy, younger, lots of energy. My mom always liked younger men, and they liked being with a confident, pretty older lady.
Usually I didn’t like the guys my mom brought around besides Tommie and Robert. All I knew about them was they always ate our cereal. But this Reggie seemed like a good guy. And he fell in love with my mom. He was a good-hearted dude, and he wasn’t only nice: He also had a good job working at a publishing company. He even liked us five kids and seemed okay with being a stepdad. He was the answer to my mom’s prayers. And it just kept getting better.
“Quit your job!” Reggie told my mom. “I’ll take care of you and your kids.”
That was a bold move right there. Five kids, and there Reggie was, saying he’d take responsibility for all of us.
Eventually, Reggie and my mother got married and had two boys of their own, our little brothers Aaron and Nathan, whom we all loved.
Man, those were some flush years. My mother would take us to Reggie’s job on Friday to pick his check up and then we’d go grocery shopping. We had food in the house, and Reggie seemed to make my mom so happy.
I say we were flush . . . Actually, we had enough, but never extra. I was bad at math, but even I knew that seven was a lot of children to feed on one paycheck. The second food hits the table, everyone’s racing to eat as much as possible as quickly as possible. When you have that many kids in the house, it’s like the real Hunger Games.
If we ever came into possession of any kind of treat, we would have to eat it right then, even if we weren’t hungry. You can’t hide candy when you’re surrounded by that many kids, because even if you come up with the most brilliant hiding spot in the entire world, someone is going to sniff it out.
My brother John once got a honey bun and wanted to save it until after dinner so he could really savor it. Well, we all loved honey buns, so he knew he’d have to squirrel it away if he wanted it to survive in that house for a few hours. He came up with a pretty good spot: at the very back of the fridge, behind the baking soda.
Well, my brother Chaney and I still found that honey bun way in the back. We had to move about five hundred bottles of expired mustard and ketchup out of the way to do it, but we got it, and it was delicious.
John learned a valuable lesson that day about eating honey buns the second you get them.
By the time I was in second grade or so, Reggie was supporting all of us at a house on Carrollton and Thirty-Third Street. He was a stable father figure, and our actual dads still dropped by sometimes to see us (and to fight over our mom, like always). It was a nice house in a neighborhood full of kids. That was the happiest time I can remember.
Not like it made too much difference to my behavior. I still acted bad. In fact, once I was so bad my family still talks about it all the t
ime. Seriously, if you meet them, they’ll say, “Nice to meet you. Did Mike tell you about the bowling alley?”
Yeah, so here’s the bowling alley story:
Sometimes my mom or Reggie or the aunts and uncles would take us kids to the Indianapolis airport, because you could watch the planes take off. We’d never been on a plane, so we couldn’t get enough of it. Also, they had arcade games and a bowling alley at the airport, so if we did get tired of watching planes, there was plenty of other stuff to do.
One Halloween soon after my mom and Reggie got together, we got taken to the airport bowling alley. Aunt Angela was the fun aunt. She’s the one who took us to the bowling alley. There were a lot of us, so no one noticed right away when I wandered off. There was some kind of tournament going on, money on the line, high pressure. It was fun to watch them getting all stressed-out. I wandered over to the concession stand and watched the guy making hot dogs and pouring Cokes.
Then I found the utility room. The door was unlocked, so I stepped inside. There were a lot of switches and buttons in there. I wondered if this was what it felt like to fly a plane, to man switches. I wondered what would happen if I pulled one . . .
I flipped a breaker. The room went dark . . . and so did the whole bowling alley.
The soda machine went off. The scoreboards. The ball-return system. People started screaming. Someone ran to the room and found the breaker and turned it back on, then found me there, looking guilty as hell. I got perp-walked back to my family, past a lot of people going ape nuts. They’d lost their scores! They’d dropped a ball on their foot! They’d bumped into things! I thought they should be glad that I hadn’t hit the airport light switch instead and made the planes all land on top of each other.
My aunt Angela grabbed my arm and said, “You’re going home. That’s it!” And the manager of the bowling alley made a big deal of escorting us out.
“I wanna stay!” I begged Aunt Angela.