Buck (11 page)

“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.

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.’ ”

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.

I just shrug. She doesn’t know what’s going on with my family. Doesn’t want to know either. Plus I’m not telling my whole life story in front of the class.

She keeps pushing. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Detention,” she says.

“Do what you gotta do,” I say.

She notices my rolled-up sleeve. I’m wearing my fresh tat like a Purple Heart. It’s big and raised like it’s in 3-D.

“See, class?” she announces to everyone. “You’ll go nowhere in life with that thing on your arm. Nowhere!”

She gets back to the class, lecturing us about substances that can’t be broken down into any other substance.

“Helmets, helmets,” she keeps saying in her thick German accent. Her voice is always harsh and angry. I laugh. She means “elements.”

What’s the point? My hands are in my pocket rubbing lint. I’m broke. Mom’s broke. Dad’s broke. Uzi’s broken.

“Can you teach us how to make money?” I ask with my hand up.

“No. This is chemistry.”

“You said that chemistry came from alchemy … and alchemy is turning base metals like copper and lead into precious metals like silver and gold … turning something into nothing … how do you turn rabbit ears into fat pockets?”

“Stop talking right now.” She points at me.

Nothing they teach here is useful—just a bunch of stuff to memorize and spit back, like this is karaoke night. I don’t see
the point. Maybe it’s like the whole camels-and-lions thing. Maybe this is where they train the camels to follow blindly. Tests, tests, and more tests, that’s the only language they speak. Fuck their test. Life is my test.

I’m tagging in my notebook when I hear his voice in the hallway.

“Where’s Milu?” I hear him ask. He can never say my name right. Why? It’s not that hard—
Malo
(ma-low)—plus I hear this muhfucka say way harder names perfectly. He never fucks up
Tsyplakov
(sip-lih-kov) or
Rydzewski
(rid-zes-key) or
Ruotsalainen
(roo-aht-suh-li-nen). Fuck is so hard about
Malo
?

I don’t even know why he’s looking for me. I never know.

I slide out of the back door and into the hallway. He buzzes across my sight. Beelines toward me.

“Milu! Come!” he yells at my back like I’m Lassie. I might turn into Cujo on his bitch ass. I act like I don’t hear him—he didn’t call my name anyway.

I run down the hallway, book bags scattered along the sides like sandbags. All eyes on me. I slap all the open lockers shut. This school has mad hiding spots and I know them all. I’ve used them all before.

Random classroom—

Posters of dead white dudes—Washington, Adams, Jefferson—stare down at me as I hide. They grit on me like the judge gritted on Uzi in Arizona.

Storage closet—

Crystal finds me in here. Kianna calls Crystal a “fast-ass lil’ skeezer.” She’s my age but she’s always messing with older guys. She flashes me and I feel her up until Bobby, the janitor, old black dude with a pimp stroll, barges in. “Give me five on the black hand side,” he says to me, then tells us “to get the hell outta here.”

Bathroom—

I find my boy Jessie in here. He’s mixed, lives with his white mom and grandma, who are both cool as shit. He writes graffiti and has a name all over West Philly. I wish he was in my grade but he’s in high school. He pulls out a silver Sharpie and we bomb the stalls. He tells me about all the rappers who write graf.

“Fat Joe writes
Crack
. Masta Ace writes
Ase
. Havoc from Mobb Deep writes
Nal
. Bushwick Bill writes
Spade
. Fab 5 Freddy writes
Spin
.”

Jessie writes
JesOne
. Me:
MALO
. They’ll never forget my name.

On the roof—

Bird’s-eye of Philly. Dirty gray sky pushes down on me from above. Down below the city waits to swallow me up, its big mouth open wide like it’s yawning.

I keep running. In the hallway, I bump into Fred. He’s standing there with Flynn, this rich white kid who’s always wearing bow ties and boat shoes and who likes to laugh and make fun of the starving African kids in the Feed the Children commercials—punk ass. Fred is mixed, black and white, and we go way back. Back in elementary we used to kill the talent shows. We were Kris Kross, had the whole school like “Jump, Jump” in our backward Phillies and Sixers jerseys, hair twisted up with little black rubber bands. We did the Kid ’n Play too, dancing, rocking the crowd like
House Party
. But now he hangs with these corny-ass kids. He fronts like he doesn’t know me, doesn’t know my mom, my dad, my bro, like we didn’t spend weekends together playing in North Philly or Mt. Airy, like we never had love. Fred laughs when his new friends talk shit about black people like he’s not half black. Fuck it, no time to think about that right now.

“Shhhhhh … don’t say anything,” is the only thing I say as I run past him. As soon as Fred sees me, then Roach, I hear him blurt out: “He went that way, Principal!”