The Best American Essays 2014 (15 page)

Heads from around my way cut their teeth on the Woodlawn beef. The hoppers, the young boys we never had room for in the car, they headed straight up to Bell and Garrison to build themselves up. The hustle on Garrison, or, even more big-time, Park Heights and Woodland, was strictly Fila and Russell. Man, them cats bumped. From then to now it must be something like three thousand cats shot on Garrison between the Junction and Pimlico—that's one boulevard in one section of one chocolate American city. Plus ain't nobody ever see a bustling swaggering yipping corner like Park Heights and Woodland in its prime. Serving 'em well, boy and girl, serving 'em well. Knuckles and Mighty Joe Young knew how to get by around there. I never caught on and only went up to The Lot, the neighborhood McDonald's on Reisterstown Road, a couple of times. I wouldn't throw quarters away on Pac-Man or Space Invaders. I was spending my money on rugged-sole Timberlands and twelve-inch records so I could become a club dancer. Same as slick, the corner was insular and monotonous, unless you had a taste for street fighting and raw booty. Anyway, the hoppers wound up getting tight with cats who the corner was all they had. Like Ringfrail's brother Clyde, who wore brass jewelry, or Taiwan, an adolescent beggar who graduated to being a teenage beggar. Or Little Toby, who had started smoking too early and would always be short and skinny. I think (and was glad) Wookie was already gone by then. I know, and was sad, that Monty was. Every time I go home and walk to the Korean store to get some Utz or Tastykake, I run into them all.

The young boys of course had to take it serious. I only had a year left of high school, but they were going to be in this thing for a long time. Pretty Ricky's younger brother Maceo started going to war on his own, against anybody at all. At the corner store on Wabash and Sequoia he stabbed Richard Franklin, who then followed Maceo back to his house and sent him three-quarters of the way to their family's funeral home with the same knife. Some vet's old bayonet. Kind of intimate, being punctured with the same steel that still has your victim's blood on it. When Five-O locked up Chucky Blue that same night, Chucky, on something like love boat, almost turned the paddy wagon over. That was pure dee Chuck Blue, living out the Myth. I'd never seen a motor vehicle rock from side to side on two wheels like that before.

It was curious. I found out a lot more about my neighborhood, and was surprised to know that I had a place in it. Slickheads from around the way, cats known for hanging on the corner, mad ill dynamite-style cats like Darius, who rode his Honda Elite scooter in Fila slippers—they respected preps from the city, as long as us cats carried that thing original, which was to say never perpetrated no fraud. It meant taking pride in where you're from. And we did. The Oxfords off Wabash were gaudy preps: pink shirts, green pants, bright-colored track shoes, and Gumby haircuts. Plus there was no bourgeoisie contingent at the schools we mainly attended. Loyola, Walbrook, City College, Carver, Cardinal Gibbons, and Forest Park. To go to school there, you couldn't stand out more than to be an African American prep from the city. I might have eaten humble pie on a bus ride or two, but plenty of times I strutted the city like the word
Hero
was stitched on my chest. And the best-known cat in the clique for that air of confidence was Sonny.

 

But then our style became a casualty in the war that went off and on for years. On account of the Woodlawn beef, everybody began to ease on down the road to slick, Russell sweats and Filas, bald head and sullen, gold in your mouth, pass the reefer. All of a sudden it seemed like slick had something serene you needed to get through life, a good way to not mind being an outlaw. I didn't like it on a number of levels. And I was always the historian—the identity
yo
was too much connected to the
yo-ski
thing from the 1970s, when the kids ran “What's up yo-ski?” into the fucking ground. And as I got more black and proud, the
ski
part of it sounded too close to the Polack-Johnny level, the citywide hot dog stand. Corny for us to follow the hick klan from Dundalk and Highlandtown.

I never even knew all of exactly how we survived. I had a play cousin from Edmondson Village, slick as a wax floor and known throughout the city as The Ninja. He had jumped with the airborne in Grenada. One story went that he jogged up at a park on Woodlawn with an Uzi and told them to lay off. Another tale had it that the big-time boys from up the top of our street, who owned Yummy's at North and Gold, took an arsenal up to the courts at Bedford, where everybody from the County ran ball, and said they was holding so-and-so personally responsible for whatever went down. I admit, a couple of years later, one night we did have Carlos Gallilee all by himself up at Club 4604 on Liberty Heights. Darius, who had the distinction of having popped tool at the LL Cool J concert, wild Chuck Blue, and the ill James brothers were there, really wanting to hurt somebody. I just talked to Carlos, not feeling it was sporting to bring all of that wrath down on him on a night he was acting humble. But then again, he was an actor and today he's set himself up in Hollywood.

Funny how the slickheads didn't fare well in the end. Rocky, the mastermind—who had said up the Kappa House, not to me, just in my general direction, “You and your homeboys is just fucked!”—shot in the head. Muscleman Dante, whose girl I stole, ended up strung out after sitting down for ten at Jessup. Simon, the lunatic concrete-block man, gunned down at a police roadblock. I think pistol-loading Meechee fell into the dirt too—and if he did, then that's too much like right.

Then again, now that I think of it, these were mainly city guys, who had hung strong with Woodlawn, eighteen and nineteen and, like me, trying anything to get out to the suburbs. Slickheads and their expensive tennis did win the style war; but really, it was just that the city guys lost.

 

That summer, about ten weeks after the beef got under way, I learned that the police was the slave patrol and the Confederate Army extended. I had been surprised when they refused to protect me from the Woodlawn slickheads, but I hadn't known that my category was on their assassination list.

My father replaced the yellow wagon with a Japanese compact car, used, but with a tape deck and a sunroof, a real surprise. Somehow I had the car in the early afternoon, and me, Charm, and Mighty Joe Young were skylarking around the neighborhood, telling lies about the fine honey, bumping “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.” I noticed two white guys and a brother in a Chevrolet Cavalier near the library on Garrison, but I wasn't on the corner so it only seemed odd, not a personal threat. We stared them down and, three deep, drove off to the Plaza, doubling back and through, around Garrison Boulevard and Wabash Avenue.

At Reisterstown Road and Fords Lane I reached the traffic light. All of the sudden it seemed like a car was smashing into the side of me. A Highlandtown cracker pushed a heavy revolver through the sunroof and up to my head, his other hand reaching for the steering wheel. I could count the bullets in the chambers and see the tiny indentations in the cones of the soft lead. I wet my lap. For real. I was preparing to die. The angry man was shouting, “Move over!” and “Git out the car! Git the fuck out the car!” Then, with some time, I thought to myself that he must be a damn bold car thief. It was broad daylight. And even though we had just bought the sporty little Toyota, I couldn't see why he'd be so amped up for a $7,890 car. In a minor key, I thought that a cool hustler would probably find some way to drive off.

I tried to throw the car in park and slide away from the gun at the same time, but I couldn't get past Charm Sawyer's legs in the passenger seat. Charm had been yoked halfway out of the window by the black gloved hand of . . . Five-O? I heard commotion in the back, and next thing I knew Mighty Joe Young had his teeth on the asphalt. Then I noticed a silvery patch swinging from the chest of the man from Highlandtown with the dirty beard, and he demanded my license and registration.

After about fifteen minutes the dirty white man came back to the car.

“You ran a red light back there but my buddy doesn't have enough time to write you a ticket. Beat it.”

I looked around fumbling with my mouth open and managed to get the Toyota away from the intersection. We got to the next block and pulled over, me and Charm shaking and crying from relief and shame and Mighty Joe Young mouthing Who-Struck-John. Never will get that dirty white man and that giant .38 from my mind.

When I told my father about it, I could see in his face and his demeanor that there was no authority to appeal to. When I was just a kid, I had been robbed by some bullies and had reluctantly confessed that humiliation to my dad. In his house shoes he stalked out into the middle of the avenue, attempting to find the boys who had wronged his child. But this new violation was just a new burden to shoulder. I knew enough to sense him crying on the inside. We were father and son inside of our house, but outside we were black males in America, with the same honor and respect as No. 1 crabs in season.

I guess prep or slick wasn't all that.

The Pell grants and the Maryland scholarships got cut off around this time, and all of a sudden nobody was going to college out of state. The money went out as fast as the dope came in. That ride to Edwin Waters or Cheney or Widener, that had been wish fulfillment in the past. By the second half of the '80s, if you went to school, it was either down the street to the community college or up to Morgan, the old state college for Negroes where my parents and Charm's parents had been sent, at the end of the #33 bus line. Most of my homeboys, their parents would let them try it out for a semester. Our people believed in control. In our neighborhood fathers would brag to each other, “I'm never letting that nigger drive my car,” meaning their own sons. Young boys like Dan Redd and Darryl and Mark were smart, but they couldn't get to school out of state and get that big jump on life from out the neighborhood. I got into college three hundred miles away—and those last weeks when the beef was running fast and furious, I tried not to be so simple-minded as to jeopardize a chance.

About two weeks before I was supposed to go off to Connecticut, a year now after the chase, the fellas wanted me to drive the brigade down to the Inner Harbor to square off against Woodlawn one last time. Remembering how my father's car had got kissed by the concrete block, I chilled. I heard that when it went down, it wasn't like a Murphy Homes versus Lexington Terrace scrap. Woodlawn had sent mainly the little boys. The police got into the fight before anybody got stomped or thrown into the water. Still, everybody began their adult criminal record that night in '86, and later it helped me that I wasn't there. But I saved the car one night and burned it up the next. When I got back after my freshman year in college, still dropping off into sleep after six weeks on line for Kappa, I passed out at the wheel and hit a neighbor head-on. I never drove again until I was on my own.

 

They were dog years between the end of high school and the end of college. Time folded every summer: scrapping in '86, macking in '87, bent in '88, and banging a gun in '89. I wouldn't want to live through '89 again, bringing all of that time together. We weren't Oxfords so much anymore—just homeboys now—and only rocking the prep style as a kind of occasional comment on the absurdity of our condition. The world had turned Slick with a capital
S.
To me the hi-top fade had its funeral rites when the cornball Toms at Duke started wearing it. I even stopped collecting house music and let the Blastmaster speak for me with that record “Ghetto Music.”

We knew what time it was, but used the powerful narcotics to keep ourselves from the numbers. Heroin was flowing like water that summer, and Saddlehead and Jidda, Paris and Los, all of them good ole North and Poplar Grove boys could get it. Poplar Grove. Longwood. Bloomingdale. The Junction. Then we started falling further down. In the wee hours we used to slumber outside some spot at Lombard and Arlington, not far from ole H. L. Mencken's, blunted, waiting for Troy and Stanley to finish sniffing that dope. The world of joogy. Around my way they call it
boy
or
joogy.
Girl
is
Shirl
caine—after Shirley Avenue where you go get nice. If you live in a town with a lot of joogy, everything else, like girl, seems real regular, jive legal. Joogy got me down from the psychedelics that they pumped up at college. Put it like this: in a world of disarray, joogy helps you to carry that thing.

That summer, back from college, every time I left out the house I saw somebody with tool, and one time I'm making eye contact with this lean slickhead, shooting a .45 into the air to keep street fighters tearing up a park festival from scratching his Benz. When I caught his eye I thought he was going to finish me. No question, joogy helps keep that begging, crying look off of your face. It got to the point where the police would be detaining me for walking down the street, and I'm getting ill to handle the stress, which everybody say is imaginary. That summer of '89 people was cross and fussing and we used to wear our Africa medallions at these pro-black rallies organized by Public Enemy. The next summer all the music was about killing each other over colored rags.

The summer Sonny got shot my right hand Charm Sawyer had to hit a boy who was holding a pistol on him, and even though I was making speed toward a degree, I doubted it was fast enough. Hanging out with Sawyer was scrapping every night, which wasn't really my style, especially after he busted my head on Muhammad's basement floor. Plus it's tough on your gear, my main way to get notice from the ladies. “A yo, Lair, hold my glasses,” he'd say as he sized up someone for a scrap. “Imma piece that nigger.” I would take them. Then he'd smirk and start throwing the dogs. He started out with skinny light-skin boys, but he was working his way up to short, wiry, dark-skin men. When we went out, he would always say that he would either get some pussy, beat a nigger, or get blind ill by the time the sun came up. I didn't understand his rage at the ceiling of possibility until a little later.