This time Huey charged. He grabbed the big kid by his hair and brought his knee down into the boy’s face repeatedly, his body a frenzied blur of savage motion until the kid slumped unconscious to the blacktop. Still, even after the white kid was unconscious, Huey continued to smash knees and elbows into the guy’s face in a blind rage. The kid’s skull began to lose shape as bone was pulverized.
“Huey! No! Stop! Stop! You’re going to kill him!”
Blood had started running from the White boy’s ears, nose and mouth, and he had started convulsing.
“We got to get out of here, bro!”
I snatched Huey off of him. The kid’s face was destroyed. It had lost all integrity and was little more than a bleeding pulp of hair and skin. It was the most gruesome sight I had ever witnessed. I barely pulled it together in time to run. I had frozen in anticipation, waiting to see if the kid’s brains would run out of his ears.
We took off back the way we had come and left the kid bleeding in the Burger King parking lot surrounded by his horrified friends who were too scared to even scream. They stared in mute shock and didn’t even see us leave. I was in shock too as we ran. I felt like I was in a dream.
He did it with his bare hands. He killed that kid with his bare hands!
There was no doubt in my mind that I had just witnessed a murder, a barbaric and senseless murder of incomprehensible savagery. No way could that kid have survived a beat down like that. If he did he would never be the same again.
My feet barely touched the ground as we ran. I was high on adrenaline and the smell of blood and fear— the spectacle of violence.
My God, what did we just do?
It wasn’t that I felt sorry for him or felt any guilt or remorse whatsoever. Fuck a white boy! What really had me trippin’ was the degree of hatred a person would have to have in their hearts to do that to someone with their bare hands. I could never imagine hating anyone like that unless I had loved them first or they had hurt someone I loved. To do that to a complete and absolute stranger who’d done nothing to me I’d have to be insane. I’d capped fools plenty of times, but this was hands on, it was intimate, passionate. Not the cold detachment of pulling a trigger. Shootin’ a fool you could almost imagine that it was the gun and not you that had killed him. But…this? The blood was literally on his hands. That type of hate completely defied my reason.
It occurred to me that Huey had problems that ran far deeper than anything anyone could see. There was something monstrous and cruel in him. Maybe we all had problems like that, deep down. Because, as monstrous and inhuman as Huey seemed to me right then, I had still killed three times as many people as he had in the last year alone. If Huey was a psychopath then what the fuck was my excuse?
We ran all the way back down to Frankford Ave. I trembled and paced back and forth looking over my shoulder for the police. If the bus didn’t come soon I was sure I would have lost my mind.
“Settle down, man! You look guilty as fuck.” Huey was laughing.
“I think you killed that White boy, playa.”
“If only the whole race had one neck, huh?”
“Nah, bro, I’m serious. That dude is deader than disco. That was some ill shit back there.”
Huey looked me up and down, sneering with contempt.
“Fool, I know damn well you ain’t cryin’ like some little bitch over no dead peckerwood? How you gonna be out there killin’ brotha’s all over the street for that devil you and Tank work for then start trippin’ when we finally do a devil who deserved to get done?”
I stared sheepishly at my feet, unable to face his accusatory eyes. I certainly didn’t feel any grief over that White boy’s death. I was just worried because of how the law looks at it. Cops didn’t trip when niggas capped niggas, least of all when it was drug related, but when two Black roughnecks beat a middleclass suburban kid to death in front of his friends in a good safe neighborhood like the Northeast, shit definitely hit the fan. Killing a White boy wasn’t no casual thing and I didn’t really appreciate being made an accessory to it without even being asked first. Still, true homies backed each other up right or wrong and I wasn’t about to desert my boy now. We’d been through too much shit together. Besides, I couldn’t really explain to Huey that my biggest reservations came from a fear that he was insane and the knowledge that to society any ten of the niggas I murdered in the streets didn’t compare to killing one White kid.
“I don’t know, man. That shit was just a little deep.”
“Naw, brotha. That shit you do is deep. You out there killin’ your own fuckin’ people at the whim of some power crazy white devil. That shit is deep. What I just threw down was revolutionary! That was taken out reparations on a devil’s ass!”
Huey was standing up and glaring at me with his face contorted into some bizarre combination of a snarl and a grin. Spittle flew from his lips as he barked out his words. The bus had pulled up now and people were exiting and staring at us as Huey raged and roared. I pulled Huey close and whispered to him trying to calm him down.
“Yo, nigga, chill! You tryin’ to get us arrested? Let’s get on this bus and get the fuck out of here before the cops roll up.”
“I ain’t your goddamned nigga!” Huey shouted backing away from me and shrugging my arm off his shoulder, “If that’s what you wanna be then you can call yourself that, but I got better things to do than be a nigga all my life.”
Huey’s eyes beamed hate and shined with an almost religious fervor as he spoke. I was still glancing over my shoulder looking nervous and scared. Huey hissed and rolled his eyes in disgust. He turned his back on me and walked onto the bus.
I walked behind him and sat down next to him staring out the window. I felt foolish. I knew I had just lost much of Huey’s valued respect. He didn’t look at me for the rest of the ride. Instead he stared at every white face on the bus challenging them with his eyes, daring them to return his contemptuous glare as if everyone of them had done him some personal wrong.
If only the whole race had one neck.
He had meant it. There was no doubt that he would murder every Caucasian in existence were it possible, including the half that was inside of him. That much hate just couldn’t be healthy.
Huey’s message would have affected me a little deeper if it wasn’t for the fact that he was such a cold-hearted killer himself. Even though he cried and poured out a little liquor for every brotha he killed it still seemed to me like the pot calling the kettle black. If he’d never killed another Black man and had only killed White people I might have bought his revolutionary stance, but I knew that the kid he’d pummeled back there was the first White person he’d ever done, but it wasn’t his first homicide. Still, my conscience was ringing and I couldn’t wait to numb it into silence with a couple of Colt 45s, a fat ass blunt and some of Yolanda’s talented head. I couldn’t wait to get away from Huey. It would be a long time before he and I kicked it again.
««—»»
The flames crawled down the Marijuana filled cigar, eating it slowly away as I sucked its senses-dampening vapors down into my lungs and tried to forget about my life. Yolanda wasn’t home so I had hooked up with Tank. I passed the forty to him and he tilted it up like it was Gatorade and he’d just finished a marathon.
Tank and I sat down in the playground of Lingelbach Elementary School where he and I had first met years ago. We didn’t speak, instead we indulged in that timeless male ritual sucking our emotions down into a dense fog of inebriation, down into the dark emotional chasm where every pain we’d ever endured festered. It was a reservoir that was far from infinite and would need to be emptied soon before it erupted violently outward. The cold bitter taste of the beer washed over my tongue and scrubbed away the faces of the vengeful dead. When the blunt was passed back to me I sucked it down to a roach. I was as high as I could get, but it wasn’t enough. I still couldn’t shake the depression I was in. Even Tank was looking uncharacteristically melancholy. Without any warning at all tears sprang to my eyes and spilled down my cheeks.