Authors: M.K. Asante
Buck (12 page)
At the end of the hallway, the end of the road, a dead end. My back against the big brown doors that sound like trucks when they open. Roach’s a few feet away. I push the doors open with my butt.
“If you leave, don’t come back,” he says.
The brown trucks give one last honk as I burst out into daylight and keep running.
Dear Carole,
The crowd of “friends” around me disappears after Chaka leaves. Every now and then Malo says, “So-and-so said to say hello.” I ask him, “Why didn’t you tell me that you saw so-and-so?” His response is, “They know your number.” It sounds cold to me but it’s true. If they want to talk to me, they can pick up the phone or drop me a note. Some of them try. But truth be told, I don’t want to hear from anyone. Why would I?
Who are these people and what are they to me? How do they see me and in whose image? The platitudes and praises are gone but I knew this. “Don’t take it seriously,” I remember telling myself. “There is an agenda behind those flowery words.” Malo has always taken everyone with a grain of salt. At his young age, he knows bullshit. He wants no part of it. He knows how to hide his disdain, but doesn’t.
They expect me to keel over and wither. They expect me to howl at the moon. They expect me to beseech and plead, to cower and beg, to grovel and bend. I’m dying a little inside but they don’t know who I am: the little girl from Brooklyn that can throw down with the best of them. I’m in survival mode and it’s taking all of the energy I have.
I’m in survival mode and everyone and everything that crosses my path has to bow to that energy. Even my dreams are in survival mode. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!” I wonder who said that. It might be true but all of this was killing ground. It was a matter of when and where. The killing ground was the given and I know it all too well. Survive and the ground won’t swallow you!
Survive and the fear won’t envelop you! Survive and the next day the horizon appears just as you thought you were breathing your last breath. I know something about life and death. I can’t embrace life the way that many people do but I know how to survive.
So it’s no surprise when the company disappears and the phone calls stop. On chance meetings at a store or on the street, they examine me intensely, looking for “damage.” I smile inside. The “damage” you are looking for has always been there. What you are seeing now is “survival.”
God, give me strength.
Amina
C.R.E.A.M
.
The root of evil isn’t money, it’s not having money. Brokeness blows dark thoughts into my mind like thick black smoke. The worst part is seeing my mom suffer. It weighs on me, clings to me like wet clothes.
Criminal minded you’ve been blinded
…
The other night, riding ’round the city with Scoop and Amir, I peep what this whole world is about. It’s as clear as a Ziploc that cash—bucks, endz, dough, bread, scratch, cheese, loot, green, gwop, bank—rules everything around me, near me, in the distance, and on the hazy horizon. I think about all the songs about money: “Get Money,” “For the Love of $,” “C.R.E.A.M.,” “All for the Money,” “Dead Presidents,” “Paid in Full,” “It All Comes Down to the Money,” “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” “Money, Power, Respect,” “Money Money
Money.” About how all the artists that made those songs probably felt like I feel right now.
Visualizin the realism of life and actuality
Fuck who’s the baddest a person’s status depends on salary
*
I see how the jawns react to bread. Like this one girl, Jade, gorgeous thick dime jawn from Nicetown. She’s older, like eighteen. One day I try to rap to her on the C bus, approach her all respectful, and she just igs me like I’m not even there. Then this other day I’m riding through her hood in Scoop’s bug-eyed Benz and she spots me, flags me down like I’m a taxi. I barely have to speak, she just hops in and starts giving me head in the whip like I’m Joe Pesci in
Casino
. Later on she tells me, “Nghz are like bank accounts. Without money, they don’t generate interest.”
Far as I can see, money buys everything: hoes, cars, clothes, land, even freedom. Uzi’s only in jail because we don’t have the money to keep him out. At Uzi’s sentencing, cracka-ass judge spent more time talking about fines and money and restitutions and penalties and paybacks and fees than anything else. Shit is a racket. Everybody’s getting paid: the lawyers, the judges, the guards, the cops, the old chick with the glasses typing, all the companies making the uniforms, the handcuffs, the shackles. Everybody’s banking—everybody except us.
I’m about to change that, though. I’m fifteen now, man of the house, and it’s time to make my own way. America is about the golden rule: those with the gold make the rules. I’m getting my own gold. It’s like that Billie Holiday song my mom used to play around the house:
God bless the child that’s got his own, that’s got his own
. It’s on me. My mom is already stressed out enough, I’m not going to make it worse by asking her for money. I want to give her one less thing to worry about. I don’t want to ask my pops. He’s cheap and probably doesn’t have it anyway. Plus—fuck asking. Asking means strings attached, means owing, and I don’t owe nobody. I feel like I’m alone anyway.
Where did my family go? What happened to us?
The day has come. Time to get my hustle on. Fashion trends are always changing, but getting money is a style that never plays out. The hustle runs through my blood like diabetes.
Bone presses a code to unlock a door to a secret storage room in his basement. Everything is dark, smoky, shadowy. Duffle bags, scales, baggies. Barking, howling, pacing pits and Rots with wet fangs guard the gates to the Garden of Weeden. The basement is dark with low ceilings. Bone is short with hair all over his face like the Lebanese dudes that own all the sneaker stores on Market Street. He’s got a blue Phillies fitted over his eyes.
“I get everything,” he says. “Blueberry Kush, Super Skunk, Sour Diesel, White Widow, Maui Wowie, Blue Sky, Afghan Kush, Acapulco Gold, Holland’s Hope, G-13, Jedi Kush, Northern Lights, Panama Red, Purple Haze, Quebec Gold, Three Kings, everything.” Bone moves more trees than Timberland. “All my shit is KB, kine bud.
Kine
basically means ‘the shit’ in Hawaiian.”
People around my way are used to dirt weed, that brown brick catnip shit from Mexico that smells like feet and doesn’t really get you high, just gives you a sleepy headache, and has more seeds and stems than Fairmount Park. Some grimy dealers spray their dirt with Raid ant killer and try to call it exotic.
My plan is to bring Bone’s shit back around my way and make a killing.
I got advice from my father, all he told me was this
Ngh, get off your ass if you plan to be rich
†
I know Bone through Amir, and Amir knows him through Damien. Damien is this fat black boy from South Philly who lives with Bone, they’re like brothers. He’s also the hatchet man, the bodyguard, down to do dirt. Amir tells me that Damien killed somebody who owed Bone a hundred bucks, just off principle.
We walk into the main room and Damien starts talking shit, first on Amir, then on me, then Bone:
“Amir so black he bleeds smoke.
“Malo, your head looks like Mt. Rushmore … Your hats and haircuts should cost extra.
“Doesn’t Bone look like a retarded albino Chihuahua?”
The whole time Amir is just shaking his head, trying not to laugh. Then Amir slowly rises to his feet for his stand-up:
“Damien, you so ugly, when you smile your face hurts.
“You so fat you livin large.
“Look at your hairline, Damien, it’s pushed so far back I can read your damn mind.
“Damien’s so fat he got arrested for having twenty pounds of
crack
!”
Everybody laughs except Bone, who takes me back into the stash room. He weighs out three ounces on a digital scale.
“You got three things,” he says. “Good, fast, and cheap … but you can only have two at any given time. So if it’s fast and cheap, it ain’t good. If it’s good and cheap, it ain’t fast.” He hands me the work. “This right here: fast and good … not cheap.”
Dear Carole,
Philadelphia public schools are notorious in many ways and I need to protect Malo as much as I can. Malo has been stoic throughout all of this but I wonder what is going on with him inside.
My mind is on the future and determining what school Malo will attend. Education for me was always the key and I assumed that my sons would feel the same way. After all, African Americans have made great strides but we still have so far to go. That is my dream for my children but reality is seeping in as they let me know in many different ways that they don’t want to follow. Like Daudi, Malo was expelled from the seventh grade. And like Daudi, he has picked up on the thug life. My sons love the hood
and its most material aspects. He is wilding out. He smokes weed and drinks. He seems most concerned with hanging out and doesn’t want to spend any energy on his future right now. He is angry with me and I understand that.
I understand Malo’s need to explore and test the boundaries. I rebelled in a different way but I definitely rebelled. But as someone who grew up in the hood, I am all too aware of its dangers and peril, especially for young black men. It will sort itself out but I know that this precipice that they are on could drop from underneath them and then the journey is over.
I want to protect Malo most at a time when he least wants to be protected. I want to be close to him when he wants to be as far away from me as possible. I sense the perils that hover over him and smell the excitement and the adventures that await him. My sons are dear to me. Daudi with his maddening, manic behavior and Malo with his sly, confident moves are a part of me.
I hug Malo but my mind is on the future. How is it that the future has become so tenuous for both of my sons and, truth be told, me?
God, give me strength.
Amina
G-TOWN
Me and my mom move to the twelfth floor of this building in Germantown that my mom calls a “concrete monstrosity.” My old neighborhood, in Olney, wasn’t the ghetto. It had its ghetto parts with drugs and shootings like everywhere in Philly, but my block was nice and our crib was a big brown and white Tudor house. But this new spot in G-Town is the ghetto for real. Our building looks like Tracy Towers, the building where my cousins stay at in the Bronx, and Tracy Towers looks like the building from
Good Times. Ain’t we lucky we got ’em
.
And like Tracy Towers, our building has an incinerator for trash. My mom tells me where it is and hands me a plastic CVS bag full of trash. I walk across the hall to the little incinerator room. It’s warm and smells like the steam from manholes. I grab the metal handle and pull open the shaft. I can
feel the heat from below. I put the bag in the chute, close it, and listen to our trash fall, crash, and burn.
I didn’t want to move here, but fuck it, I’m never home, so it doesn’t really matter where I live, I guess. It’s like Uzi said: “I’m a Nomadic Addict Merchant.” Anyway, it’s probably a good thing. I think my mom needs to get away from our old crib, too many memories. Too much pain living in those old walls.
Our new walls are paper thin, absorbing the voices, noises, and lives of the people living above, below, on both sides, and across from us—box life.
Germantown is still Uptown Philly, it’s like a ten-minute ride from Olney. It’s blacker than Olney, though. In Olney, you got everybody—Cambodians, Indians, Russians, Puerto Rocks, Caribbeans, blacks, whites—on some United Nations shit. G-Town is basically all black except for the people that own the blur of sneaker, beauty, and liquor stores and the bail bond, check-cashing, and tax return spots and the Chinese food, Chicago, Louisiana, Kentucky, New York, and Hollywood Fried Chicken joints. Other than that it’s all black.
We live on the twelfth floor. From the terrace, everyone below looks like little commas. Rooftops bright with hanging laundry and satellite dishes. At night, police choppers, ghetto birds—vultures—fly around with their thirsty searchlights crawling up the walls, flooding the night.
It’s cold. The heat in our apartment isn’t working, so I pull the oven open.
The walls in my room are naked white and I ain’t putting no clothes on this cave bitch. No posters, no pictures, no shit to remember or to live by, no nothing. Who knows how long I’ll be here?
I’m older now, see what having a father’s about
One day they can be in your life, next day they be out
*
My mom tells me I got a letter from my dad. I’m still too mad at him to open it. I just add it to the pile. When Amir comes over to see our new spot, he peeps the stack.
