Buck (16 page)

She snatches her journal from me. “How could you?” she asks, thumbing through the pages as if to make sure they’re all there. “How could you violate me like that? How could you?”

When it rains, it pours. Her eyes fall on my table—on my gun, my pound of weed, and all my money. Her face tightens. She sees the piles of new clothes on my bed. She grabs as much gear as she can hold, then power walks out of my room. I follow her out to the terrace. She hurls my clothes over the railing.

I bolt downstairs.

“… the fuck,” seeing more shit flying down: It’s a bird, it’s a plane—no, it’s fly gear falling from the sky like parachutes. It all settles on the concrete like autumn leaves over puddles.

I grab what I can grab and come upstairs dragging my clothes through the hallway. She’s thrown some of my clothes in the hallway too. I try to open the door but the top lock stops me. I bang on the door like five-o.

“Ma?”
Bang-bang-bang
. I feel her on the other side of the door.

“What?” she says, cold.

“Open the door, Ma.”

She’s at the door like a bouncer. “No … I want you out of my house.”

“Where I’m s’pose to go?”

“I don’t care. You’re old enough to sell drugs, carry a gun, steal my journal behind my back? Then you’re old enough to be on your own.”

“I was trying to help you.”

“Help me? You’re never here! You don’t care about me.” Her words feel like punches to the throat.

“I’m not the one that left you. Where your friends at? Huh? Where’s Dad? Where’s Uzi? I’m the only one still here!”

“Out!”

I can’t believe this shit. “You kicking me out, Ma?”

“Yes, I want you out!”
Maybe the pills got her spazzing?
Someone gets off the elevator, sees the chaos, keeps it moving.

Me and my mom just stand there for a minute, different sides of the tracks, listening to each other’s breath. Hers is heavy and distant like a freight train.

“Alright, Ma, I’ll leave … but open the door first, I gotta
get my stuff.” I’m not scared. I have enough money and bud to get my own spot, to make moves on my own. I don’t need nobody. Fuck it.

I get on my linebacker shit and hit the door with my shoulder like it’s a running back coming through the middle. Pops open. I slide past her and go to my room.

All of my shit—the weed, money, gun—is gone, everything gone.

“Where is it?” The table is a blank page.

“Out!” she screams after me.

“Where’s my shit, Ma?” I’m looking around the room, searching, panicking.

“I threw it away.” I run to the trash. Dig through. Nothing.

“Where’s it at, Ma? I ain’t playin.”

“The incinerator.”

“You’re toxic,” I say, looking right at her. She smacks the dog shit out of me. My face on fire.

My last words: “Now I see why Dad left.”

A nation of questions:
Where to stay? Who to stay with? Who to call? Where the fuck am I going? Where to get money? What am I going to do about Bone’s money? What’s the point … of life? Who killed Amir? Who am I? Am I who I say I am? Why am I here, in Philly, in America, on Earth, right now? What’s my purpose?

I hit 10 Gs, thinking,
I’ll crash at Ted’s crib, lay low, and plot my next move
. I spot the crew, standing where they always stand, between the liquor store and the corner store, next to the Fern Rock Apartments fence, under the train tracks, and across the street from Rock Steady, this bugged ngh who sits on a crate all day with a broken radio, rocking his head back and forth to a beat no one else can hear.

Everything looks the same, except them. They’re all rocking baby Afros and wearing all black everything, like Darth Vader. I feel like I missed a memo.

“Peace, brother Malo.” I laugh, thinking,
Brother Malo
?
How long have I been gone
? Since I moved to G-Town, I haven’t been around here much. Plus I don’t understand why none of them came to Amir’s funeral.

“What’s up with the ’fros?”

Ted pulls out a long pick with a black fist on the handle, fluffs his ’fro. “Crowns,” he says.

“What?”

“These are our crowns,” cuffing it. “In the Bible, Samson got his power from his hair.” He looks at my fresh cut. “Malo, you keep going to the barbershop, losing your power, losing your crown.”

“ ‘Thou shalt not mar the corner of thy beard.’ Leviticus 19:27,” D-Rock reads from a book with a glowing black man drawn on the cover.

“Let me hit that,” I say, reaching for the strange little blunt Ted is blazing. He doesn’t pass it.

“It’s a beedi … not weed.”

“It get you high?” I ask. “I’m stressed.”

“No high, just sacred Indian herbs.”

I ask them for a forty and they say it’s liquid crack.

“Take a chicken bone, the wishbone, and drop it in a bottle of malt liquor—OE, Steel Reserve, St. Ides, Crazy Horse, Hurricane, Midnight Dragon, Colt 45—that shit will dissolve in under a minute. It’s poison, brother.”

Huh? But these are the nghz that slid me my first forty, made me take my first shot of Henny, passed me my first
blunt, handed me my first gun. I step away from 10 Gs for a couple of months and they turn square?

“Da fuck is going on with y’all? The ’fros, the gear, poison?” I say.

They call it Right Knowledge.

D-Rock’s like, “There’s nothing left, so we gotta be right. Right Knowledge leads to right thinking, and right thinking leads to right action. We are a part of the Holy Tabernacle Ministries … the Egyptian Church of Karast … the Holy Seed Baptist Synagogue … the Ancient Order of Melchizedek … the Ancient Order … the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors … Yamasse Native American Tribe … the Washitaw Tribe.”

“Real eyes realize real lies,” Ted says, gazing into my eyes. It’s like he’s in a trance, like he’s under a spell. I hear the
Twilight Zone
theme.

“Yo, y’all in a cult?” I can’t believe this. Uzi’s not going to believe this shit.

“The Holy Tabernacle Ministries is no cult. Check yourself, man.”

They call the leader Dr. York. They talk about him like God and say something about how they’re going down to Georgia to live in some pyramid he built.

“He has seventy trillion years of knowledge.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dr. Malachai Z. York … Imperial Grand Potentate
Noble: Rev. Dr. York 33 Degrees/720 Degrees … Malachi Zodok … Amunubi Rah Ka Ptah … Abba Issa … the One … Isa Abd’Allah Ibn Abu Bakr Muhammad … Akhtah Isa Jabbarlah … the Angel Michael … Murdoq … El Qubt … the Green One … Yanuwn … Rabboni Y’shua Bar El Haady … Sabathil … Maku … Baba Bassa Afrika … the Master Teacher … the Grand Hierophant … Chief Black Thunderbird Eagle … the Reformer.”

They pop in a CD:

“… Where are you going? Where we came from. Where have we come from? Every place and no place, so come, let’s go … I am a being from the nineteenth galaxy called Illyuwn. We have been coming to this planet before it had your lifeform on it. I manifest into this body to speak through this body. I am a entity, an etheric being …”

“Y’all serious?”

“Dead serious.”

“… My incarnation as an Ilah Mutajassid or avatar was originally in the year 1945
A.D
. In order to get here I traveled by one of the smaller passenger crafts called SHAM out of a mother plane called Nibiru. I am an Anunnaqi or what you would call an Extraterrestrial; I am what you call an Angelic being, an Eloheem from the eighth planet Rizq … I have incarnated here in this form for the sole purpose of saving the children of the Eloheem, the Nubians, the chosen 144,000 …”

They ask me what I think about all this.

I think of this Richard Pryor flick Uzi used to watch all the
time. Richard Pryor is sitting down, making crazy faces, smoking. Goes: “In my neighborhood, you know, there used to be some beautiful black men that would come through the neighborhood, dressed in African shit, you know. Really, now, you know, ‘Peace and love, remember the essence of life, we are people of the universe, life is beautiful.’ My parents would go, ‘That ngh is crazy.’ I used to love to go to the meetings, though, when you get down. I got ultra black for a while. Brothers would be rappin, I never knew what they were saying, though. But the brothers would be having them motions. ‘You see the first thing you got to know is about eating pork. Now you eat a piece of pork, you don’t realize the suffocations of this individuality’s prospect. What the man is trying to lay on you through porkitis, you would not understand, because the trichinosis of your mind would not relinquish the thought of individuality. You know what I mean?’ Now that ngh is crazy.”

I’m standing here, listening to spaceships and stars, and all I can think is:
These nghz are crazy … even crazier than the Hebrew Israelites with the bullhorns and Afrika Bambaata outfits at Broad and Olney
.

I also think it’s kind of cool, though. Cool that they’re into something, something besides the block. They’re teaching themselves, questioning stuff, and trying to figure this crazy world out—and that’s dope.

They give me a copy of a book called
Behold a Pale Horse
. The cover has white horses, black horses, fires, angels, chariots, the devil, and heaven and hell on it. Shit looks like a nightmare. They tell me that politics is politicks because ticks are bloodsuckers. Human is hue man. American is Ameri-con. Nubian is new being. They call me an A-alike.

“A-alike ’cause we B-alike and C-alike.”

They say they are part of the chosen—the 144,000 Eloheems that are going to board the mother ship.

“When?” I ask.

“Y2K. The year 2000. That’s when we board Nibiru and leave this galaxy.”

“Let me see your hand, Malo.” I put it out like I’m trying on a ring. He studies my hand.

“Look,” he says to D-Rock. D-Rock looks at my hand.

“Fuck y’all doin?”

“Making sure you ain’t no reptilian. Reptilians are disagreeable beings, opposed to the existence of humanity. You can tell by their fingers, if they got webs or not. And they got grayish skin ’cause they evolved from dinosaurs. Their hair grows in sixes, like white people’s, hence six-six-six. Our hair, the Eloheems’, the black man’s hair, grows in nines.”

A cult, though? A cult? Uzi won’t believe me if I tell him. I’m learning to expect the unexpected.

I don’t even ask Ted if I can crash at his spot. He’s acting too weird. I just pull off while they go on ramming about crowns and spaceships. I chuck the deuces and keep it moving.

Alone in the streets.

No place to be somebody. I can go everywhere but can stay nowhere. I feel like the blunt I’m smoking, burning way too fast. Sixteen going on what? I dip from spot to spot, going through chambers like a Shaolin warrior lost on an impossible quest.

I go to Bone’s house to work something out. I owe him three Gs because the pound my mom burned up was given to me on consignment. I didn’t pay for it yet.

In his dark, dirty basement, with his pit bulls barking nonstop and his goons palming pistols on the couch, he tells me cold: “I’ll give you until the end of the week. That’s it.”

I think about what Amir told me about Damien—how he killed someone over a hundred bucks, off principle—and how I only really know Bone and Damien through Amir, and how Amir wasn’t even that cool with them. I feel dead already.

I drive around the city thinking of my next move.

I miss everybody: Amir, Mom, Dad, Uzi. I think about them all as I cruise through South Phil, blunted, eyes low, plotting my next move. I wonder if Amir can see me now, can picture me rollin. I wonder if Uzi can see me. He doesn’t call, write, nothing.

I keep falling asleep behind the wheel. I just wake up … driving … and I’m like,
Damn, how long was I asleep for?
It’s usually for a few seconds, but still. I dream quick dreams like flashes of broken light. A flash of Zimbabwe, of Uzi, Mom, Dad, happier days.

I think it’s because most nights I don’t sleep. I stay up all night, up with the night workers and nightwalkers, dope fiends and crooked cops, the stars and the nghz under them searching for stripes, pimps and stick-up kids, truck drivers and dope boys, take-out spots and road crews, hoodies and heels, dungeons and dragons. I love the night. Everything, everyone, everywhere changes when the sun dips.

I never
go
to sleep. I might crash, pass out, fall out, dip, but I never
go
. I’m like a ngh on the run and sleep is the cops, trying
to take me off the streets, slow me down. I might get locked up, but I ain’t turning myself in. I don’t
go
to sleep.

I wake up everywhere, different parts of the city, usually still high and drunk from the night before, usually on the floor. You can’t fall out of bed when you sleep on the floor … or in the car.