Yaccub's Curse (18 page)

He looked to his small crew for friendship. The color of his skin, the flat colorless dialect he spoke in, the plain preppie-looking clothes he wore, the way he walked, swaggering like a gunslinger, all branded him as an outsider. Even the way he thought, his disinterest in girls or sports, fighting or dancing or graffiti, his inability to tell a good dirty joke, the type of music he listened to. He liked his father’s old Doors and Beatles albums instead of Run DMC, Public Enemy or Slick Rick. He didn’t even like Prince or Micheal Jackson. Dispite his ridiculous generosity these differences created a wall between him and the other runners. As long as he was paying the way, everyone would show up but when he just wanted to hang out and play video games he often found himself alone. He grew increasingly resentful as parties were planned without him ever receiving an invite or jokes were told that he wasn’t in on. He was mired in the same filth and sin as them but still he was not one of them. He was alone in the very crowd he had brought together. Often, he thought about that long ago kid who had picked on him for sounding like “Richard Pryor doing and impersonantion of a White boy” and tried to alter his voice, his mannerisms and his inflections to imitate their slang. This too was unsuccessful. He was not very good at it and it sounded as if he was making fun of them. Soon, he stopped giving a fuck. He didn’t care if he was loved as long as they feared him, and they did. They all did.

Killing a runner who had claimed to have been robbed of over six thousand dollars was how Stevie first discovered who he was.

“Ay fool! You! Come here!”

“Yo Stevie. W-what’s up?”

The kid was three inches shorter than Stevie and two years younger. He had three gold teeth in his mouth that hadn’t been there the week before and a thick gold rope around his neck. Stevie looked down at the kids feet, he was wearing a brand new pair of Jordons. Rage turned Stevie’s complexion crimson. He could feel something dark and terrible building within him. It was not an unwelcome sensation.

“Where’d you get that rope?’

“My mom bought it for me.”

“What?”

“My-my mom bought it for me.”

“Is you tryin’a play me? You think I’m a fuckin’ joke?”

“Naw, naw I swear. She did!”

Stevie pulled out the revolver his father had bought him. A .45 caliber Smith and Wesson. He held it at his side as he stepped closer to the kid and stared him in his eyes.

“Your mom’s a fuckin’ crackwhore! She ain’t buyin’ shit but rocks. You stole that money, didn’t you?”

He cocked the hammer.

“Naw, man. I-I ain’t steal nuthin’. You know I wouldn’t do that.”

He put the gun to the kid’s head.

“You about the dumbest mutherfucker I ever met. If you hadn’t tried to flash the cash in my mutherfuckin’ face, buyin’ gold chains and teeth and shit, I might have believed your stupid ass!”

“I swear! I didn’t!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Stevie pulled the trigger.

Scratch has described this to me many times and like I said, I don’t know how much of this shit is true or not, but I don’t think he was lyin’ about this part.

The kid’s head came apart. The bullet entered right above his temple, taking off the top of his skull. The kid fell at his feet and little Stevie just stood there with the gun still in his hands, watching blood and brains flop out of the top of the kid’s ruptured skull. According to Scratch, something about the way the kid’s brains just came sliding out of that big crack in his dome triggered something in him. He knelt down in the kid’s blood, completely transfixed, mesmerized, and he started scooping up handfuls of the kid’s brains and shoving them in his mouth. That’s when he finally knew who he was. That’s how Scratch put it to me. He said, “That’s when I finally knew who I was, how I fit in, what my true destiny was.” I thought he was just full of shit or crazy as fuck. I didn’t get it. I get that shit now though.

— | — | —

Chapter 10

“Show them a little prospect of gain to lure them, then attack and overcome them.”

—Sun Tzu,
The Art Of War

“…There’ll be times… when my crimes… will seem almost unforgiveable… I give in… to sin… because I have to make this life livable…”

—Depeche Mode

««—»»

“Hey, fool! Back up off me wit’ that gat! You think that’s some kinda toy? Point the barrel at the floor ’til you ready to shoot that shit!”

“I know what the fuck I’m doin’, dog. Ain’t like this the first time we done rode on a nigga.”

Tank and I had been working for Scratch for almost four years. Dirty work. Wet work. Our job was to get bloody so he didn’t have to. We’d been doing it ever since the summer of our fourteenth birthday when we’d murdered that kid Demetrious for him. Now we were almost adults and we were the most accomplished shooters he had. Because we didn’t give a fuck. Not about ourselves or anyone else.

Four years is a long time for a shooter in the hood. Most didn’t make it six months before someone hollowed out their chest as payback for some loved one sacrificed in the name of business. Huey hadn’t joined Tank and I in our criminal venture. He should have. For a guy who wasn’t getting paid for it, it seemed like he was always poppin’ shots at someone. Usually it was for disrespecting his girl. He’d hooked up with Iesha a few years back and they were about to have a kid together. Still, Huey was always down to back us up if we needed help and we often did. We knew how he felt about us working for a white drug dealer, but he usually kept all that Black militant shit to himself. He’d given up on preaching to us years ago. Now he settled for just saving our asses instead of our souls. I couldn’t count how many times he’d pulled Tank and I out of some shit we’d gotten into while trying to pop some fool Scratch had taken a dislike to for some reason or another.

As Tank and I crept up the stairs of the main tower in the pentagon of dilapidated twelve story tenements that made up the Raymond Rosen projects, all I could think about was how I wished that Huey was there to get my back rather than his idiot brother.

“Just watch that shit.”

“I know what I’m doin’, dog. You just watch yo’ own shit. I ain’t shot yo’ ass yet have I? Give a brotha some credit!”

“This ain’t no joke, Tank. This ain’t no driveby. We up in they buildin’. In their house. On the sixth fuckin’ floor no less! It’s a long way to run if we fuck up and miss and they’ve got home court advantage. They know this place a hell of a lot better than we do.”

“If we fuck up and miss then we ain’t runnin’ nowhere. Them niggas’ll smoke our asses ’fore we hit the stairs. This shit is like cap or be capped you know I’m sayin’?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you sayin’.”

I closed my mouth and turned my attention back to creeping up the graffiti and urine stained stairwell. Tank and I both had our guns out and perspiration was making the grip slippery.

My problem was that I wasn’t like Tank. Tank could get his hat blown off by a bullet that passed half an inch from his skull and then sit back and talk about some trick with a fat ass he’d seen on a rap video as if nothing had happened. I would be shaken for weeks after an event like that. Tank just accepted his fate. He didn’t expect to get out of this shit alive. He knew he’d probably be dead before he was old enough to vote, but as long as he had money, clothes, and hoes while he was alive then he didn’t give a fuck about tomorrow. His life meant nothing to him and no one else’s life meant more to him than his own. Tank was a truly dangerous individual.

“Don’t get all serious now, dog. I was just fuckin’ with you about us not getting’ out of here alive. I mean,
you
might get capped if you miss, but I’ll be getting my fat ass out of dodge. I may not be built like a sprinter, but I’ll turn into fuckin’ Maurice Green if a motherfucker starts tryin’ to spray my ass with some hot shit.”

Tank laughed, but I found it impossible to share in his humor. My nerves were jangling as if I’d been doused in ice water and plugged into a light socket. As grateful as I was to find that the stairway had no lights in it allowing us to creep up to the sixth floor almost completely unseen in the darkness, the night was starting to feel like another obstacle. I kept wondering what else could be creeping around in the blackness.

I started to speed up, no longer concerned with stealth just anxious to get out of the darkness. Tank trundled along behind me trying to keep up and making even more noise in the attempt. I had to slow down or risk alerting the entire building to our presence. I was sure that these dealers had lookouts and informants on every floor. At least they would if they knew what the fuck they were doing.

“Damn, dog! Slow down. I was just kidding about that Maurice Green shit.”

“Sorry, playa. I just want to get this shit over with.”

“I hear you, bro. I can barely even see you it’s so dark in here.”

Finally we reached the sixth floor and stepped out of the stairwell into the hallway. It was only slightly better lit. Light from the apartments spilled out from beneath the doors, illuminating the floor as we made our way toward our target.

We were almost there.

“How many of these mutherfuckas are up in here anyway?” Tank whispered.

“There should be about five of them up in there.”

“Nigga, you said there was three!”

“Aw, don’t bitch out now.”

“I ain’t bitchin’. You know I don’t give a fuck if there was ten mutherfuckas up in there! They ain’t nothin’ but a paycheck to me.”

Yeah, I knew that, and it was damn frightening. Looking at him then it was hard to believe that I’d kicked his ass when I first met him. Now he was 6’3” 240lbs of blue black muscle and fat. His nappy cornrolls spiraled down from beneath a baseball cap with “Made In The Ghetto” emblazoned across the front of it. Red checkered boxer shorts poked out the top of his black FUBU jeans. Even though I was two inches taller than him Tank was twice as thick. He looked to me at that moment the same as he did when I’d first met him… monstrous and unstoppable.

We were halfway down the hall, just yards away from the apartment we were supposed to hit, when I looked down at Tank’s jeans and spotted a little green light flashing on and off. It took me a second to figure out what it was.

“Jesus Christ, dog! Are you trying to get us fucking killed?”

I snatched the cell phone off his hip and ripped the battery off of it. Then I shoved it back in his pocket. My heart was banging on my chest as if trying to escape.

“What?”

“What? Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you doing with a cell phone when we tryin’ to creep on some mutherfuckas? Fuck would have happened if that shit had gone off and them niggas came out to see who was in the hall? There goes our element of surprise.”

“My fault, dog. But you ain’t gotta get all loud. What if they had heard
you
?”

“I’m still whisperin’.”

“Just barely.”

“Fool, stop tryin’ to take the blame off your ass.”

“The blame for what? Ain’t nothin’ happen. You just paranoid.”

“Just keep quiet for you get us both killed, will you? Alright, I kick the door in and start bustin’ with the Berretta. You follow with the AK and spray the whole room. Don’t leave shit breathin’ in there. Not even a fuckin’ goldfish. I don’t want nobody walkin’ out that room but us.”

Tank raised the AK then hesitated. He turned and looked at me with an expression on his face that was completely indecipherable. If I didn’t know Tank better I would have thought it was fear.

“What’s up, man?”

“I can’t believe we still doin’ this shit. Four years, dog! Four years of this shit. If there’s drugs and money up in there we should just break with it and get our own thing goin’”

“Of course there’s drugs and money in there, and don’t you think Scratch knows that? You think you hard, nigga? Scratch could pay a ten-year-old to body your dumb ass. Now stop playin’ and let’s do this. These mutherfuckers probably heard us by now. All the fuckin’ noise you’ve been makin’. If I get shot I’ma fuck your fat ass up!”

I kicked the door in and the smell of stale beer, sour urine, fried chicken, and cooked cocaine, tore up through my nostrils, straight down my throat, drying up my taste buds and gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The first thing I saw when I looked around were two ghost-like females sitting naked in the corner of a near empty room, hollow-eyed, souls long fled their wasted flesh, passing the glass dick back and forth sucking it dry. Both of them combined wouldn’t have made 30 years or a hundred pounds. Then I saw the four overdressed hoods who were stumbling over each other trying to get to the table where their guns lay piled up; thrown there haphazardly like one would toss a set of car keys.

I knew why Tank never took this shit seriously. I get myself all worked up like we’re about to bust in on Scarface or Nino Brown and what we find every time are a bunch of kids, in over their heads, playing gangster. The speed at which profits multiply peddling a product that pushes itself had catapulted many losers into the big-time. But staying there was never as easy as getting there.

These four punks had openly challenged Scratch’s authority by setting up their little rock house in the same projects that Scratch dealt out of and without a purchase agreement from him, which meant they were buying from someone else, which meant they were competition, which meant they were corpses too dumb to know they were dead, just waiting to be bagged and tagged.

As I looked around I suspected that they had done it not because they thought they were hard, but because they were stupid. And here they were slippin’ hard in a room filled with product, guns, and enough money to buy textbooks, school lunches, and new blackboards for an entire high school, getting their nuts off in two stank-ass teenaged pipers. I think I fired the first shot just to fight off the revulsion I felt.