“Man you a punk! Messin’ with an eight year-old kid as big as you is!”
He wasn’t going for it though and he punched me right in my mouth. I fell over and he dove on top of me preparing for the ground and pound, but some teenagers who were hangin’ out on the corner caught the whole exchange and luckily intervened on my behalf.
“Yo, Sid! Man, don’t be messin’ with that little kid. Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”
They gathered around us and pulled him off of me, but not before he delivered two more blows to my head. While they held him I jumped up and punched him right in the stomach, doubling him over. The teenagers all laughed.
“This a tough little thug right here! He took that ass whuppin’ and he ain’t even cryin’. I remember how Sid used to cry like a little bitch every time somebody got in his ass.”
Sid wanted to jump on me again, but the other kids held him back.
“Don’t even fuck with him Sid ’cause you shouldn’t have started with him in the first place. Now ya’ll are even.”
“Naw fuck that!” Sid shrieked in a high-pitched falsetto whine that raked my nerves. “I ain’t lettin’ this little bitch get away with that! I’ll let my little brother kick his ass. They both the same size. Yo, Jay!”
Sid pulled free from the other boys and called to some kids up the street who were racing Hot Wheels cars down a large pile of dirt that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk for some inecsplicable reason in front of a burnt out house. The biggest one of them lifted his head and looked our way. Jay was a carbon copy of his brother, big lips, bucked teeth and all. He was slightly smaller than his older sibling though still larger than me. He was perhaps only a year younger than his older brother. He trotted over wearing brand new shell-top Adidas and a red and white Sixers jersey.
“Jay, take care of my light work!”
He pointed towards me and I looked at the older boys for help, but apparently this was all fair and honorable to them because they backed off to give us room to fight, forming a loose circle around us. I looked back over at my grandmother’s house and was amused to see her and my mother still unloading the U-haul truck. We hadn’t even moved in good yet and here I was already about to get into a fight. My mom probably thought I was playing innocently and was no doubt happy to see how quickly I was making friends.
I knew I could have gotten myself out of all that drama just by calling for her, but then these kids would have thought I was a punk and a mama’s boy. In retrospect, that may not have been such a bad thing. Instead I took the first step on the road to building one of the most fearsome reputations the G had ever known. I stepped up to that kid like I was the baddest little muthafucka on the planet.
“If I win, I’m takin’ those sneaks.” I said pointing down at his shiny new Adidas.
“You ain’t gonna win, punk!” he replied and as far as I was concerned that was as good as a handshake.
“Bet!” I said and began swinging hooks at his head as hard and fast as I could surprising myself by landing more than I missed. He tried to swing back, but his punches were smothered by the deluge of blows I was raining down on him. I started kicking at him too and pretty soon he was turning to run. I tackled him and threw him in a headlock.
“Now give up those sneaks or I’m gonna tear your head off!” I was jerking on his neck and dragging him around the street. He was crying and calling for his brother, but the older boys were once again holding Sid back.
“Your brother ain’t helping you, fool! Now take them sneaks off! I ain’t playin!”
He took them off and I took them home. When my mom asked me where I had gotten them from I told her some of the kids down the street had found them and since I was the only one small enough to fit them they let me have them for a dollar. Lying came as easily to me as fighting.
“And where did you get a dollar from?”
“Grandma gave it to me yesterday.”
“Well, I think you spent it well,” Grandma interrupted, peeking over her glasses at my little feet then back at the shoes I held in my hands. “Them old things you wearin’ now are ’bouts ta fall off your feet.”
My mom went back outside to finish emptying the truck before Grandma could start in on her about how dirty I always looked and how she had never let any of her children look that way.
I wore those Adidas, the first brand name sneakers I had ever owned, until my toes busted out the front and beat Sid with a stick when he tried to get them back from me.
— | — | —
Chapter 2
“Don’t you know… That it’s true… That for me… And for you… The World Is A Ghetto?”
—War, “The World Is A Ghetto”
««—»»
There was a war going on in our neighborhood. Every morning you could smell the burnt carbon and sulfur lingering in the air after a gun battle. It filled your nostrils as you rose to greet the day. No bacon and eggs. No morning paper. Instead you counted the bullet holes in the walls from stray shots to see how close you’d come to not waking up at all and checked your family members to make sure there wasn’t suddenly one less.
In school you could see that wide-eyed shock and nervous fidgeting of post traumatic stress disorder on kids as young as eight and nine who had already lost brothers, cousins, or even parents and grandparents to the war. Some of them were already soldiers themselves. I was insulated from most of it by over-protective parents and living the proper distance from the Avenue. My street was mostly quiet. I was one of only four kids on the block. The rest were all old people. There just wasn’t much gang activity among the geriatric set. But ours was just a small oasis in a desert of violence and crime. Even on the next block there were bodies dropping almost nightly as the hierarchy of criminal power resolved itself through gunfire.
Increased pressure from the government forced the Mafia out of the street-level drug business leaving other organized gangs to fight over the lucrative market which was suddenly wide open. The Jamaican drug posses came blasting through the neighborhood eager to take over the cocaine business, that the Italians had abandoned, from the local thugs, the so-called Junior Black Gangsta Lords. The results were drive-by shootings that left more innocents dead than the intended targets. Including children. Then there was Scratch, a white drug dealer from North Philadelphia who was starting to prop his dealers up in some of the open air drug markets up and down Germantown Avenue. He kept a low profile, but it was pretty well known that he was waiting to mop up after the war between the Jamaicans and the JBGL. He had used the same opportunistic approach in North Philadelphia and now he was the biggest dealer in that part of the city with a crew of nearly a thousand soldiers and dealers. He was the last thing G-town needed.
When the Jamaicans took over the JBGL Scratch started making his presence known more and more and the results were lots of dead Jamaicans. Scratch’s reputation was one of unbelievable violence. The reality of his activities on the street was worse than anything you’d ever heard in even the most brutal gangsta-rap song or over-the-top slasher movie. Scarface didn’t have shit on him. In G-town, he fit right in. Soon, his dealers were shoulder to shoulder with dealers from the JBGL competing for customers on the Ave.
Germantown Avenue separated a dungeonous slum of filth, poverty, and despair on the Eastside from the only slightly more tolerable ghetto on the West. Between the two lay a stretch of concrete wilderness that contained more bars and liquor stores per square inch than any zoning commissioner would allow anywhere but in a slum that was carefully planned to remain that way. Churches, fast food joints, bars, and liquor stores, and in front of each one prowled a drug dealer eager to capitalize off the hopelessness that each venue attracted.