Buck Read online

  “Yea, c’mon,” I add.

  “Thirty minutes!” He storms out. Uzi kicks the door shut.

  “Can’t stand him,” Uzi says, scrunching up his face. “Wish I lived with my real dad. That ngh right there, my real pops”—shakes his head into his fist in awe—“is cool as shit. Lets me do whatever the fuck I want.”

  Whenever Uzi gets into it with my dad, he starts talking about Bob, his dad.

  “Bob is the truth,” he says.

  No he ain’t, I think.

  I’ve heard all this before, but I listen like it’s new music. In my mind, though, this song is played out. He sings about how Bob runs shit in Harlem, from One-two-fifth to the Heights; how everybody calls him “the mayor of the ghetto”; how he’s always rocking the fly shit before everyone else—fitteds, jerseys, fedoras; how he curses up a storm, all types of fucks and shits and bitches—hurricane slang.

  But the other night, while Uzi was locked up, I heard the unofficial lyrics to the song. The ones hidden in Uzi’s stomach, I guess. They said that Bob is a junky, all strung out on heroin; that he beat the everything out of my mom every day they were together, like Ike Turner did Tina; and that my mom’s neighbor, a priest, put a gun in Bob’s mouth and told him if he ever touched my mom again he’d be “summoned to appear before his maker.” My mom told me this secret music from her chair, Egyptian pillow resting on her stomach. I was kneeling next to her, holding her soft hands, soaking up these blues.

  “He would beat me and beat me until my eyes were purple and swollen shut.” She cried as she told me. I hugged her with all I had: arms, heart, body, and soul. I want to protect her from everything, from all the evil in this cold world. I think about the man who beat her and bite my bottom lip so hard it bleeds. I think about using my dad’s double-barreled shotgun on Bob—about taking it from his closet, loading it with buckshots just like Pops taught me last summer after our crib got robbed, and squeezing. Uzi doesn’t know that I know this.

  “Bob is that ngh,” Uzi says.

  Fuck Bob! is what I really want to say, but this is Uzi’s last day in Philly and I don’t want him to bounce on a bad note—so I press mute.

  My parents are in the kitchen waiting to take Uzi to the airport. They’re mad because Uzi keeps getting in trouble. They get him out, but he gets right back in. They keep saying he’s playing with fire.

  He gets expelled from all the schools: Ivy Leaf for telling some girl “Suck my dick, bitch” in the middle of math class; Piney Woods, this black military school in Mississippi, for breaking some kid’s nose; and a bunch of other places. He even gets booted from the last-chance schools—the ones with names like Second Chance and Fresh Start—so now my parents don’t know what the fuck to do.

  The day after Uzi got locked up they called a family meeting. They sat us down and talked about the struggle, about the sacrifices our ancestors made, and about how they came up. They asked us all these questions about their upbringing, then answered before we could respond.

  Do you know where we came from?

  DAD: A one-room shack in Valdosta, Georgia. I was the oldest boy of sixteen children. Sixteen of us in a shack the size of a pigeon coop, on the banks of the Okefenokee Swamp and Withlacoochee River.

  MOM: The projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I was the oldest girl of three. We all slept in the same bed. Single mom.

  Do you know what it was like back then for us?

  DAD: I started working on the plantation when I was six. Picking cotton for white folks. I picked more than I weighed, working under the hot Georgia sun from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. The thorns around the bolls would leave my hands cracked and bloody. We were sharecroppers who never got a share. Separate restaurants, separate water fountains, separate toilets, separate schools, churches, neighborhoods. The only thing that blacks and whites shared in Valdosta were mosquitoes.

  MOM: I started working when I was eight: scrubbing floors and toilets for white families in Long Island. It showed me just how poor we were. Dirt.

  Do you know how hard it was?

  DAD: I was eleven when I got my first job as a shoeshine boy at a white barbershop. I just took my wooden shoe box and went inside the shop and asked the owner if I could set up and shine shoes. He said, “Yeah, boy, just give me fifteen cents on every quarter you make.” Shining white people’s shoes was a guaranteed position; after all, it was nonthreatening and subservient. So I was not surprised that I got the job; other than working in the fields, it was probably the only job that I could have gotten at the time. My first customer, a young white man in his twenties with black shoes, sat in the chair near the window, and I took out my polish, my rag, and toothbrush. When I finished, instead of paying me, he spat in my face.

  MOM: I saw my mother raped. We lived on the third floor of a rooming house on Vanderbilt Avenue. “Yell for help, yell for help,” my mother told me as the man broke down the door to our room. I ran to the window and looked down on the dark street where nothing seemed like it was moving. I opened my mouth wide but nothing came out. No voice, no cry, no nothing.

  The refrain: If we made it from all that—from projects and plantations—what’s your problem? It’s not just Uzi either. My cousin Kadir from the Bronx got knocked a week after Uzi did for robbing the subway platform.

  “The subway platform?” I asked my aunt on the phone.

  “Yes, he robbed everyone who was waiting for the A train at ten-thirty in the morning. I’m convinced he’s lost his goddamn mind.”

  They’re sending Uzi to Arizona to live with my uncle Jabbar. Bar’s cool. He’s a former Golden Gloves champ who sparred with Muhammad Ali back in the day. He always rocks a gold chain, pinky nugget ring, and a hustla’s grin. Cadillac slick, he looks just like Tubbs from Miami Vice.

  Last time I saw him, on Thanksgiving, he pulled me to the side.

  “You getting any ass yet?” he asked, submarine voice. I just laughed. His thick hands pulled me close.

  “Huh?” He studied me, tightening his grip. I nodded a lil’ nod. “My boy!” He scrubbed the top of my head like a lotto scratch-off. “Life is all about ass … You’re either covering it, laughing it off, kicking it, kissing it, busting it for some white man at the job, or getting some!” I cracked up.

  “Just remember,” he said. “Sex is like riding a bike: you gotta keep pumping if you want to go anywhere … Lemme ask you something else?”

  “What’s up, Unc?”

  “You eating pussy yet?” He grabbed me.

  “Come on, Unc,” squiggling out of his grip.

  “Let me smell your breath.” He chased as I jetted out of the room.

  He found me in my room.

  “Put your shit up,” he said, putting his hands, like boulders, in front of his grill. He threw a jab at me. “Fuck you gon’ do, nephew?” Sizing me up like a fitted hat. I jumped out of my seat.

  “Gotta be ready for anything.” Touched my chin with another jab. “C’mon now, put your shit up.” I threw my hands up. He caught me again—bang. “Keep ’em up, young buck. Up! Protect them pussy-eating lips.”

  I moved them up. His fist on my ribs. My hands fell like they were asleep. His fist on my chin. He picked me apart, then showed me how to hold my hands.

  “Stand strong, feet shoulder width apart, like this.” Planted his feet, fixed my stance. “And if you ever want to kiss a ngh good night,” staring into his right fist, “swing it like this. Land it right there,” landing it slo-mo on my face.

  I pulled back and tried to throw the same punch. “Like that?”

  “Yup, just like that,” catching my punch. “That punch right there will make a ngh swallow and spit at the same damn time.”

  Unc can fight anybody, whoop anybody’s ass … except for dynamite. Dynamite is crack and heroin mixed up—it’s undefeated.

  “You clean?” my mom asked him on the phone the other day. I was eavesdropping on the other phone.

  “Seven months. Think about using ev
ery day, but I’m clean. Intend on staying that way too.” Before they hung up, he said, “Send the boy. I’ll get him in line.”

  Uzi’s going through his dresser. It’s got so much graffiti on it I can’t tell the original color. It’s bombed out like one of the subway cars in the train yard near my grandma’s house on Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

  Top drawer—

  “Want these?” he asks, tossing nunchucks at me.

  “Yeah!” I catch, swing. They’re really just two wooden paper towel holders chained together.

  “Take these too.” He throws brass knuckles at me. I slide my fingers into the four holes that look like the Audi rings. Make a fist.

  “And yo—don’t get caught with none of this shit either,” Uzi tells me. I nod like a bobblehead and throw a brass jab at the air. “I’m not tryna hear Mom’s mouth.”

  Middle drawer—

  Black and silver Krylon spray paint and a couple of fat cap nozzles.

  Bottom drawer—

  A Phillies Blunt box full of sticky photos. He hands me this pic of a naked jawn. “What you know about that, Malo?”

  “Damn,” I say. “Her titties look like two bald heads.” Uzi laughs and hands me another photo.

  “ ’Member this?” It’s a hazy pic of me and Uzi.

  “Nah,” I say. “When was this?”

  “That’s from when we moved here. Our first day in Philly. Mom took this,” he says. I keep staring at the photo.

  “I look shook.”

  “You were! You don’t remember that day? You don’t remember what you asked me when we were watching the fire?”

  I shake my head nah. “What fire?”

  “That was the day they bombed MOVE.”

  “Who bombed who?”

  “Mayor Goode had the police drop a bomb on this group called MOVE, right there on Osage Avenue. We could see the blaze from our building.”

  “Oh yeah,” I say slow, remembering, seeing the smoke curl behind my eyes. “That was a bomb?”

  “Yeah, they dropped C-4 with Tovex on the whole block. That’s the shit NASA uses to blow up asteroids and whatnot. Mad people died—women, kids. Shit was crazy. Mom is friends with one of the survivors—Ramona Africa.”

  “So what did I ask?”

  “We were watching it go down—the smoke, the helicopters, sirens—you asked me if it was the end of the world.” We both laugh. “It was, though, in a way. It was the end of the world we knew. We moved into a burning city.”

  He pulls one last thing out of his dresser: a deck of cards. He shuffles them, then they disappear, and reappear in my pocket. I’m like, “What the …?” and he’s just flashing this crazy grin.

  “See, Malo, every ngh knows magic—look how we disappear when five-o rolls up.” I laugh, thinking, And reappear in jail? “For real, though, magic is all about misdirection. Large movements to cover small movements. And every magician needs a signature trick.”

  I wish I knew magic. My signature trick would be to make the cops—the ones that stormed through our door that day, then into my dreams most nights like a horrible movie playing over and over in my head—disappear. Poof. Be gone.

  I hug Uzi tight and try not to let go. I feel like if I let him go, he’ll be gone forever. I can’t fight back the tears. If he comes back tomorrow, it’ll be too long.

  * * *

  * “All Night Long,” Common, 1996.

  † “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” Nas, 1996.

  3

  10 Gs

  I wake up in Uzi’s room. Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, the Fat Boys, Rob Base, Eric B and Rakim, Cool C, NWA, the Ultra-magnetic MCs, Crown Rulers, PE, Wu-Tang, and like three years’ worth of Jet magazine Beauties of the Week watching over me. Dimes in bikinis and baby oil. Lashonda Harrington is from Abilene, TX. She enjoys scuba diving, reading, and cooking. Shanika Frazier is from Dayton, OH. The 5′5″ model enjoys exercising, shopping, and dancing. Kia Dawson is from Trenton, NJ. She plans to study business administration and communications. Kimberly Jackson is an aspiring songwriter who resides in Texas. She enjoys playing dominoes and watching football. Malo enjoys them all.

  Uzi’s gone, but I can still hear him singing, “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” over my bed in his Bone Thugs-N-Harmony voice. When he was here, we’d walk to Broad and Olney together to go to school, cracking jokes and laughing the whole way. He’d hop on the C or the 55, whichever came first, and I’d get on the sub, the Orange Line. Now it’s just me, solo-dolo. I feel naked without him.

  I walk up to the corner of 10th and Godfrey—we call it 10 Gs—where all of Uzi’s boys chill. They stand where they always stand, between the liquor store and the corner store, next to the Fern Rock Apartments fence, under the train tracks, and across the street from Rock Steady, this bugged ngh who sits on a crate all day with a broken radio, rocking his head back and forth to a beat no one else can hear. My mom calls them the “corner boys” because they’re always out there, posted like guards at a checkpoint. They hug the block, huddled in hustle, eyeing everything and everyone everywhere every day.

  She says: “They’re bringing down the neighborhood … They’re looking for trouble … They’re an eyesore.”

  I just say: “Waddup?”

  All the usual suspects are here: Ted, Scoop, D-Rock, and AB—the squad.

  “ ’Sup, young buck?” Scoop rumbles, shaking my hand like he’s trying to prove a point, squeezing the red out. My hand feels like a Juicy Juice carton.

  “Damn, man,” I say, shaking the sting out.

  “Yeah! You feel that shit, ngh?” He laughs his wicked laugh like he’s possessed or something. “I break, not shake. I crush, not brush. Bruise, not cruise.”

  “Y’all up early?” I say, since I know none of them are in school. I think they’d be seniors like Uzi. They all dropped out around the same time. Ted always says he graduated valedictorian from the school of hard knocks.

  9 6 the deal, we real about this cheddar, forever

  Corner standing, in any weather*

  “Up early? Nah, you up early. We ain’t been to sleep yet. We up late.”

  “Sleep is the cousin of death,” D-Rock says.

  “Speaking of cousins,” Scoop says, his sharp face behind a Newport, “you talk to Kiki?” Scoop is skinny with a face the color of unfinished wood. Cartoon eyes sunk low in sleepy sockets. Long dangly arms. A meaty W. C. Fields nose that’s always red at the tip like Rudolph’s. He’s got the kind of hair that can go to the Puerto Rican, black, or white-boy barbershops, the shape-up curly top with gel. He’s wearing all Polo—his outfit looks like a horse stable.

  “Nah.”

  Takes a drag. “She still mad?”

  “She’s always mad at ya black ass,” Ted says.

  “Fuck you, Theodore.” Scoop and Ted are always talking shit to each other, it’s how they show love.

  Kianna—Kiki—is my older cousin and Scoop’s girl. This time she’s mad at him because he beat up these two guys her first day at college. She goes to Albright in Reading, up there with all the name-brand outlets and the Puerto Rican gangs.

  We helped her move into her dorm, me and Scoop, carrying all her stuff up three flights of stairs. After that we found the gym on campus. It’s nice, state-of-the-art everything. We were playing basketball against these two dudes—“college nghz,” Scoop kept calling them, like it’s a diss. I don’t even know what homie said, but he said something, and Scoop just went off. Dropped dude with a right hook to the jaw. Then he rushed my guy like a gust of wind—strangled him. I was just standing there shell-shocked at the three-point line, like, What the fuck, Scoop?

  We left right before the cops came. The school put Kianna on some kind of probation.

  “I can’t take him anywhere,” she whines to me on the phone. “He’s too niggerish. I’m getting too old for this shit.” I remember when all that thug shit turned her on. “It’s not cute anymore,” she says. “I’m in college now.”

  I’ll never forg
et the first day I met Scoop: “Why they call you Scoop?” I asked.

  “Cuz I be scooping nghz’ chins with uppercuts!” he said in his Badlands rasp. He’s from the Badlands, 3rd and Cambria. His voice is ill because no one sounds like him. It’s like he has a rattly muffler in his throat. His tone can flip from vicious to hilarious to straight cryptic in a blink.

  I fucked with those beyond my age bracket

  cuz they analyze and mack to get the papers and stack it†

  A hooptie skids in the middle of the street. Some lady I see around sometimes, older, always in scrubs, rolls down the window. Shakes her head.

  “Damn, y’all still out here?” she jokes.

  Ted jumps up, strikes a pose, and sings “Always and Forever” like Heatwave.

  “Yo, Malo, why your peoples ship your big brother away like that?” Ted asks.

  “I can’t even call it.” I step to school.

  * * *

  * “Illegal Life,” Capone-N-Noreaga, 1996.

  † “Gimme Yours,” AZ, 1995.

  4

  Friends or Foes?

  My school colors are piss yellow and shit brown. The building is the color of shit too, like someone took a monster dump and smeared it all over.

  This kid Fritz, my boy Ryan’s cousin, actually did that last year on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween. Me and the squad went out mobbing around Olney, throwing eggs at cars, buses, people, whatever, it’s a Philly tradition. We doused this abandoned U-Haul truck, Florida plates, with kerosene Ryan found in his uncle’s basement. Nobody wanted to light it … fuck it, I’ll do it. I swiped the match, stared long and hard into its glow until the flame crept down, pinching my fingertips, then threw it in. The fire jumped up like hibachi, scorching my leg. We ran up 7th Street as the truck blew up. After that, Fritz, who I’ve never liked and is known for taking shit a hundred miles too far, decided to literally take shit too far. We all told him not to do it but he was hell-bent. He took a shit in the bushes, scooped it up with the Philadelphia Daily News, and smeared it on somebody’s front door—the wrong somebody. Nasty. That somebody, a stocky old head who was in the Gulf War, caught Fritz and it was lights out. Fritz gets what he deserves, what’s coming to him. Dude beat his ass with a Louisville Slugger. Then he made Fritz eat it … his own shit.