Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (5 page)

It felt incredible. I didn’t care if I grabbed somebody’s chain and dragged them down the stairs with their head bouncing, boom, boom, boom. Do I care? No, I need that chain. I didn’t know anything about compassion. Why should I? No one ever showed me any compassion. The only compassion I had was when somebody shot or stabbed one of my friends during a robbery. Then I was sad.

But you still fucking do it. You think they’re not going to kill you; that it can’t happen to you. I just couldn’t stop. I knew there was a chance I would get killed but I didn’t care. I didn’t think I would live to see sixteen anyway so why not go hard? My brother Rodney told someone recently that he thought I was the most courageous guy he knew. But I didn’t consider myself courageous. I had brave friends, friends who would get shot over their jewelry or watches or motorcycles. They weren’t giving it up when people robbed them. Those guys had the most respect in the neighborhood. I don’t know if I had courage, but I witnessed courage. I always thought that I was much more crazy than courageous. I was shooting at people out in the open while my mother looked out the window. I was brainless. Rodney was thinking it was courage but it was a lack of brainpower. I was an extremist.

Everyone I knew was in the life. Even the guys who had jobs were hustling on the side. They sold dope or were robbing. It was like a cyborg world where the cops were the bad guys and the robbers and the hustlers were the good guys. If you didn’t hurt nobody, nobody would have talked to you. You would be labeled as square. If you did bad, you were all right. Somebody bothered you, they’d come fight for you. They’d know you were one of the guys. I was so awesome, all these sleazy, smiley scumbags knew my name.

Then things started to escalate. I began to come into intimate contact with the police. Getting shot at in Brownsville was no big deal. You’d be in the alley gambling, and some guys would come running in shooting at the other guys. You never knew when the shit was going to go down. Other gangs would drive through on their motorcycles and, boom, boom, they’d take a shot at you. We knew where each crew would hang out, so we knew not to go certain places.

But it’s something else when the cops start shooting at you. One day a few of us were walking past the jewelry store on Amboy Street and we saw the jeweler carrying a box. I snatched the box and we started running. We got close to our block and we heard car tires screech, and some undercover cops ran out of the car and, boom, boom, they started shooting at us. I ran into an abandoned building that we hung out in and I knew I was free. I knew that building like the back of my hand. I knew how to go into the walls or go to the roof and go through a hole and be in the rafters above the ceiling. So I did that. I got on top of the ceiling and looked through the hole and I could see anyone walking on the floor below.

I saw the cops enter the building. They started walking across the floor, guns drawn, and one of them went right through a hole in the floor.

“Holy shit, these fucking kids are busting my balls bringing me into this building,” he said. “I’m going to kill these fucking bastards.”

I’d be listening to these white cops talking and laughing to myself. The building was too fucked up for the cops to go up to another floor because the steps were falling apart. But there was a chance that they might look up and see me hiding in the rafters and shoot my ass. I thought about jumping to the next roof because that was my building, but it was a ten-foot jump.

So I made my way to the roof and my friend who lived in my building was on his roof. I was on my knees because I didn’t want to stand up and let the cops outside see me, but my friend was giving me the blow-by-blow.

“Just chill out, Mike. They came out of the building. But they’re still looking for you. There’s a bunch of cop cars down there,” he reported.

I was waiting up on that roof for what seemed like an eternity.

“They’re down, Mike. They’re down,” my friend finally said.

So I went down but waited inside a little longer. My friends were looking around the block, making sure the cops weren’t hiding there.

“Just wait some more, Mike,” my friend said. Finally he told me I could go out. I was blessed to make it out of that situation. The jewelry box we stole had all these expensive watches, medallions, bracelets, diamonds, rubies. It took us two weeks to get rid of all that shit. We had to go sell some there, then go to a different part of town to sell some other pieces.

With all the jostling I did, it’s somewhat ironic that my first arrest was over a stolen credit card. I was ten years old. I obviously was too young-looking to have a card, so I’d get some older guy to go into the store and I’d tell him to buy this and this and that and buy something for himself. Then we’d sell the card to another older guy.

But one time we were in a store on Belmont Avenue, a local store, and we tried to use the card. We were dressed clean but we just didn’t look old enough to have a credit card. We picked out all these clothes and sneakers and brought them to the counter and gave the cashier the card. She excused herself for a second and made a call. Next thing we knew, she had cut the card in half and in seconds the cops came in and arrested us.

They took me to the local precinct. My mother didn’t have a phone, so they picked her up and brought her to the station. She came in yelling at me and proceeded to beat the shit out of me right there. By the time I was twelve, this started to be a common occurrence. I’d have to go to court for these arrests, but I wasn’t going to jail because I was a minor.

I used to hate when my mother would get to the precinct and beat my ass. Afterwards, her and her friends would get drunk and she’d talk about how she beat the shit out of me. I’d be curled up in the corner trying to shield myself, and she’d attack me. That was some traumatizing shit. To this day I glance at the corners of any room I’m in and I have to look away because it reminds me of all the beatings my mother gave me. I’d be curled up in the corner, trying to shield myself, and she’d attack me. She didn’t think nothing of beating me in a grocery store, in the street, in front of my schoolmates, or in the courtroom. The police certainly didn’t care. One time they were supposed to write up a report on me and my mother stormed in and beat my ass so bad they didn’t even write me up.

She even beat me up when I was in the right sometimes. Once, when I was eleven, I was shooting dice on the corner. I was up against a guy who was about eighteen. I had a hot hand that day and my friends were betting on the side that I’d hit my numbers. I got down $200, but I hit my number six straight times. I had won $600 of his money.

“Shoot one more time. Shoot for my watch,” he said.

Boom, I hit my 4-5-6.

“That’s the name of the game,” I said. “Gimme the watch.”

“As a matter of fact, I ain’t giving you nothing,” he said and he tried to snatch the money I won from him. I started biting him. I hit him with a rock and we started brawling. Some of my mother’s friends saw the commotion and ran to our apartment.

“Your son is fighting with a grown man,” one of them said.

My mother came storming over. All the other grown men there were letting us fight because they wanted their money. If this guy didn’t pay, nobody else was going to. So I was in the middle of fighting this guy when my mother jumped on me, grabbed my hands, smacked me, and threw me down.

“What are you fighting this man for?” she yelled. “What did you do to this man? I’m sorry, sir,” she said to him.

“He tried to take back his money,” I protested.

My mother took my money and gave it to the man and smacked my face.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said.

“I’m going to kill you, motherfucker,” I yelled as she pulled me away.

I deserved every beating I got. I just wanted to be one of the cool kids, the kid in the street who had jewelry on and money in their pockets, the older kids, the fifteen-year-olds who had girlfriends. I wasn’t really into girls that much then but I liked having the clothes and getting all the attention.

By then, my mother was giving up on me. She was well known in the neighborhood and knew how to speak eloquently when she needed to. Her other children had the capacity to learn to get along with others, but then there was me. I was the only one who couldn’t read and write. I couldn’t grasp that stuff.

“Why can’t you do this?” she’d say to me. “What’s wrong with you?”

She must have thought I was retarded. She had taken me to all these places on Lee Avenue when I was a baby and I’d undergo psychological evaluations. When I was young, I’d talk out loud to myself. I guess that wasn’t normal in the ’70s.

Once I got into the court system, I had to go to court-mandated special ed crazy schools. Special ed was like jail. They kept you locked up until it was time to go home. They’d bus in all the antisocial kids and the fucking nuts. You were supposed to do whatever they told you to do but I’d get up and fight with people, spit in people’s faces. They gave us tokens to go back and forth to school, and I’d rob the kids for their tokens and gamble with them. I’d even rob the teachers and come to school the next day wearing the new shit I bought with their money. I did a lot of bad shit.

They said I was hyperactive so they started giving me Thorazine. They skipped the Ritalin and went straight to the big T; that’s what they gave little bad black motherfuckers in the ’70s. Thorazine was a trip. I’d be sitting there looking at something but I couldn’t move, couldn’t do nothing. Everything was cool; I could hear everything, but I was just zonked out, I was a zombie. I didn’t ask for food, they just brought out the food at the right time. They would ask, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” And I would say, “Oh, yes I do.” I didn’t even know when I got to go to the bathroom.

When I took that shit, they sent me home from school. I’d stay in the house chilling, watching
Rocky and His Friends
. My mother thought something was wrong with her baby, but I was just a bad-assed fucking kid. They misdiagnosed me, probably fucked me up a little, but I never took it personally when people misdiagnosed me. I always thought that bad stuff happened to me because something was wrong with me.

Besides the zombies and the crazy kids, they sent the criminals to the special ed schools. Now all the criminals from different neighborhoods got to know each other. We’d go to Times Square to jostle and we’d see all the guys from our school, all dressed up in sheepskins and fancy clothes, money in our pocket, doing the same thing. I was in Times Square in 1977 just hanging out when I saw some guys from the old neighborhood in Bed-Stuy. We were talking and the next thing I knew one of them snatched the purse of this prostitute. She was furious and threw a cup of hot coffee at my face. The cops started coming towards us and my friend Bub and I took off. We ran into an XXX-rated theater to hide but the hooker came in shortly after with the cops.

“That’s them,” she pointed to Bub and I.

“Me? I didn’t do shit,” I protested, but the cops paraded us out and put us in the backseat of their car.

But this crazy lady wasn’t finished. She reached in through the back window and scratched my face with her long hooker nails.

They drove us to the midtown precinct. As we pulled away from Times Square, I saw my friends from Bed-Stuy, the ones who did all this shit, watching from the street. I had been arrested many times so I was used to the formation. But they looked at my rap sheet and I just had too many arrests, so I was going straight to Spofford.

Spofford was a juvenile detention center located in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. I had heard horror stories about Spofford – people being beaten up by other inmates or by the staff – so I wasn’t too thrilled to be going there. They issued me some clothes and gave me a cell by myself and I went to sleep. In the morning, I was terrified. I had no idea what was going to go down in that place. But when I went to the cafeteria for breakfast, it was like a class reunion. I immediately saw my friend Curtis, the guy that I had robbed the house with who got clobbered by the owner. Then I start seeing all my old partners.

“Chill,” I said to myself. “All your boys are here.”

After that first time, I was going in and out of Spofford like it was nothing. Spofford became like a time-share for me. During one of my visits there we were all brought to the assembly room where we watched a movie called
The Greatest
, about Muhammad Ali. When it was over, we all applauded and were shocked when Ali himself walked out onto the stage. He looked larger than life. He didn’t have to even open his mouth – as soon as I saw him walk out, I thought,
I want to be that guy
. He talked to us and it was inspirational. I had no idea what I was doing with my life, but I knew that I wanted to be like him. It’s funny, people don’t use that terminology anymore. If they see a great fight, they may say, “I want to be a boxer.” But nobody says, “I want to be like him.” There are not many Alis. Right then I decided I wanted to be great. I didn’t know what it was I’d do but I decided that I wanted people to look at me like I was on show, the same way they did to Ali.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t get out of Spofford and do a three-sixty. I was still a little sewer rat. My situation at home was deteriorating. After all those arrests and special schools and medications, my mother had no hope for me at all. But she had never had any hope for me, going back to my infancy. I just know that one of those medical people, some racist asshole, some guy who said that I was fucked up and developmentally retarded, stole my mother’s hope for me right then and there. And they stole any love or security I might have had.

I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally that would have no effect on me, but emotional and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends and I’d see their mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was fifteen, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.

Since I was now in the correctional system, the authorities decided to send me to group homes to get straightened out. They would take a bunch of kids who were down, abused, bad, psycho kids and throw them together in some home where the government paid people to take us in. The whole thing was a hustle. I would never last more than two days. I’d just run away. One time, I was in a group home in Brentwood, Long Island. I called home and bitched and moaned to my mother that I didn’t have any weed there, so she made Rodney buy me some and deliver it to me. She was always a facilitator.