Yaccub's Curse Read online

  —Al Capone

  “…Here is something you can’t understand. How I can just kill a man!”

  —Cypress Hill, “How I Can Just Kill A Man”

  ««—»»

  There was a fierce heatwave scorching the life out of Philadelphia on the day I first met Scratch. The summer seemed like it would never end. The sun perched on our backs and rode us hard from six A.M. until damn near nine o’clock every night. The heat and humidity had coated the city like a sheet of hot oil. I think the temperature was ninety-eight degrees, but the humidity made it feel like a hundred and ten. The scorching temperatures were igniting fuses. The whole neighborhood was going ballistic. Folks were dying from knife and bullet wounds as much as from heat stroke. School was out. Violent crime was up. And everyone around my way was either trying to stay cool or trying to get paid. Both of which were nearly impossible in that boiling cauldron of madness and poverty that we called G-town.

  Wasn’t much of anything going down in the G that day. Water gun fights, crack pipes flickering in the dark alleys that provided the only shade on our treeless little street. Those who had someone to fuck were sweating in their lover’s embrace propagating the next generation of the poor, hopeless, and pissed-da-fuck-off. Hip-hop music boomed from every radio, the bass thundering like the ghetto’s heartbeat, a testosterone thunder-drum pounding out the rhythm and song of Black rage and rebellion.

  “…Fuck da police coming straight from the underground… a young brother got it bad ’cause I’m brown…”

  The basketball courts were filled with future Julius Ervings, Magic Johnsons, and Micheal Jordans, sweating half the fluids in their bodies out on the hard concrete courts as they leapt toward the hoops. Every fire hydrant was pouring out hundreds of gallons of water onto the scarred and filthy streets as equally scarred and filthy kids laughed and played in its cool spray. Me and my boys, Tank and Huey, were sitting around pitying ourselves and trying to think of someone to make suffer for what we wanted, didn’t have, and could see no way of ever possibly affording, when a deer walked right into the middle of our pack and bared its throat to the wolves.

  This kid’s name was Demetrious, “Meech” for his friends. He had just moved into the neighborhood from the Richard Allen Projects in North Philadelphia and he was always trying to prove himself by talking big about how tough his old neighborhood was, how we were all soft, how much money he had, and how many bitches he could pull; always bragging and showing off. As usual he started spitting some crazy tale to impress us, but this time he claimed to have evidence.

  He said he was going to show us where he had hidden this gat he’d stolen from a dealer he used to mule for. He described in detail how he’d lifted this nickel plated .45 automatic and about two gees from the fool he worked for the day before him and his Mom had moved out of the housing projects and up into G-town. Immediately me and my boys began trying to figure out how to get the gun away from him and force him to get up off that cash.

  “Show us that shit then. Unless you just bullshittin’?”

  “I ain’t bullshittin’! I’ll show you.”

  We walked with him across McCallum Street and onto Pomona on our way to the big empty lot between Cherokee Street and G-town Avenue. My skin was vibrating with excitement as if it was going to dance right off my body. It was the way I imagined crack fiends felt all the time. Somehow I knew that everything was about to change for us. I wish I could say now that I’d felt the warning signs, that I’d had some type of premonition, some foreboding of the evil we were about to step into. But all I felt was the greed. All I was thinking about was the cash and the gun and what I would do with it when I got it. Now I know that it had to happen this way. Evil draws evil.

  The lot was overgrown with weeds and filled with big rats that crawled out of the sewers to eat the garter snakes, salamanders, and trash. We walked carefully, looking out for the larger rats that were known to bite kids. Demetrious bent down and turned over a huge slab of asphalt that had probably been thrown there years before during some type of road repair project.

  “Yo, man here it is!” He held up a big shiny silver automatic that looked strangely familiar, “See, nigga? I told you I wasn’t just frontin’!” His features brightened into a proud smug expression as he brandished the impressive looking handgun. That’s when I stepped back and really took stock of the kid I was about to victimize.

  He was as tall as me though slightly more filled out. A year older than me though obviously not as bright. His clothes were brand new. A typical hoodrat whose parents spent all their money on clothes and jewelry while their homes fell further and further into disrepair. He wore a Sixers jacket and a pair of Air Jordans, ridiculously oversized FUBU jeans that hung halfway off his diminutive ass, and a long T-shirt that came down to his knees that read “North Philly”. He wore a silver necklace with a huge crucifix attached to it. The biggest sinners were always the most religious.

  His hair was cut short except for four or five inch long dreadlocks at the very front of his head. He wore what looked like a half-carat diamond stud in his left ear. I was sickened and insulted by Demetrious’ flashy affluence amid our conspicuous poverty and I decided right then and there that I had to have that Sixers jacket, those sneakers, and that jewelry even if this kid had to die.

  “Yo, lemme see that shit.” I said casually; reaching out for the big heavy gun as if the last thing on my mind was rollin’ him for those two gees. He wasn’t a total fool, though, and my reputation for doin’ crazy shit proceeded me.

  “Naw, dog. You ain’t never handled no gat. You might kill somebody with your crazy ass.”

  “I’ve fired ’em before. Let me see tha mutherfucka.” Huey said in his cold raspy monotone sounding like wind whispering through a morgue. Huey looked like Lenny Kravitz or Maxwell, like he should have been on stage singing a love ballad rather than in the hood with us, but he was perhaps the most vicious of all of us and damned sure the spookiest. He knew what I was up to and so he stepped forward and pinned Meech down with his hard adult eyes, hollow and dangerous as shotgun shells. There was nothing in that glassy amphibian stare that could be appealed to, still Meech tried anyway.

  “Hey, Yo, I don’t know, man. I mean you cool and all but…”

  Demetrious squirmed and stammered as if he could feel Huey’s lifeless eyes crawling over his flesh probing for weaknesses.

  “But nuthin’ then. I ain’t even gonna shoot tha muthafucka. I just wanna hold it. You know, check it out and shit.”

  Huey inched closer to him and his voice dropped to a smooth seductive whisper. Demetrious was hypnotized as Huey’s lithe cappuchino colored fingers slid across his and slowly lifted the gun from his hands . I pushed back the memory of those same agile hands slipping a weapon out of my hands just a year ago and turning it on my father.

  “A-a-awight man. You can hold it. But just you, okay?” Demetrious said, adjusting the silver cross dangling over his chest and cutting a quick glance at me. People were always more scared of me than of Huey for some reason; until they got to know him better. I wore my craziness on the outside like a uniform. Huey’s madness festered and boiled inside of him just beyond his eyes. It took a while to notice it.

  Huey gripped the huge pistol by the handle with two hands. He checked the clip then jacked a round into the chamber, clicked off the safety and handed it to me. Sunlight glinted off the metal and my eyes took up the gleam.

  “Yo, man! Don’t chamber no rounds! That shit could go off! And I don’t want this crazy-ass-nigga touchin’ it! Gimme that shit!”

  “Just chill, Bro. Don’t trip.” Huey said as he stepped around to block Meech from snatching the gun, which would’ve been a fatal mistake.

  “Naw, fuck that! I don’t want this psycho muthafucka fuckin’ around with my gat! Gimme that shit!” He reached for it and I pushed him back. Tank stepped up next to Huey and his tremendous girth literally blocked the sun. He stared down at Demetrious who seemed to be near
panic, and grinned like a Downs Syndrome child with a mouthful of feces.

  Tank was fourteen years old now and he was already as big as a heavyweight boxer, about 6’ 3” and 230lbs.

  “You ain’t gonna let this punk bitch talk to you like that and get away with it is you, Snap?”

  Snap was my nickname, earned because of my anger management issues and impulse control problems.

  “Grab that nigga, Tank.”

  Tank scooped Meech up like a sack of groceries, wrapping one of his thick meaty arms around Demetrious’ throat; not choking him, but preventing him from escaping. The other arm caught Meech’s right arm in an underhook. Meech fought and kicked to get free of Tank’s stranglehold, but there was no way he could free himself from the much larger boy. I stepped up and pressed the barrel of the gun against his right eye.

  “I bet this muthafucka could blow the whole side of your head apart.” My eyes started getting that wild look as I remembered the way that Rasta’s head had flown to pieces and imagined this kid’s brains splattering across the grass. My breath came quicker and quicker in short ragged bursts. My blood raced through my veins carrying healthy loads of adrenaline. I wanted to do him. For no particular reason I wanted to smoke that fool. Just to see what it would look like.

  “Come on, dog. Quit playin’! Don’t point that at me, dude! It could go off! Come on! Let me go! Quit playin’! Let go!”

  “Nigga, do I look like I’m playin’ with your bitch ass?!”

  Growing up in the projects of North Philadelphia, Demetrious had seen enough violence to know that this certainly wasn’t no joke. He started struggling harder and Tank was beginning to have a difficult time holding him.

  “Bro, you better calm down right now or I’ll drop you right here. Word to God. If you say one more fuckin’ word I’ll split your wig wide open.” I had looked in the mirror often enough to know exactly what Meech saw on the other end of that gun; one big, black, crazy muthafucka who didn’t give a fuck about nothing.

  Demetrious tried to change his approach and began begging and whining.

  “Come on, Snap. I thought we was boys, man?”

  Even though Snap was my nickname, at that time I was still ambiguous about it. It was okay for my friends to call me Snap, but some nigga I hardly knew?

  “Bitch, I ain’t your fuckin’ boy! These is my boys right here.” I said, gesturing towards Tank and Huey. “I could give a fuck about your punk ass! Now what’s up with that cheddar, fool?”

  “Bro, I swear I ain’t got no cash. I was just frontin’ about that shit.”

  “Like you was frontin’ about this gat? I’m about to fly your head in two seconds so you better think fast.” I pressed the gun deeper into his eye and gritted my teeth, imagining the loud report of the huge weapon.

  “It would be a damned shame if you was lyin’.” My eyes had gone vacant and glassy with the bloodlust. I was trying to muster up the courage to eat this kid’s brains the way I had seen that white gangster do when I first moved into this neighborhood. If a white boy could do it then I damned sure could too. Fuck if I was going to chew his balls off though. That was just takin’ it too far.

  “Meech!!!”

  An alien voice rang out behind us and I almost turned and shot at it, but I knew that Demetrious would have taken that opportunity to run and if I had to shoot him I didn’t want it to be in the back. That would have ruined his jacket and I still wanted it.

  I turned my head and was surprised to see a white boy walking across the field with two hyper-muscular thugs on either side of him like massive black bookends. The white dude was wearing a FUBU shirt with pictures of Fat Albert and the gang on it. Two big platinum chains draped down over his emaciated chest one ending in a crucifix and the other with a diamond encrusted medallion shaped like the continent of Africa. On him both symbols were a mockery. He wore big clunky Timberland work boots despite the heat and lack of snow and a black “North Philly” baseball cap spun backwards on his blonde head. A pair of jet back “Loce” style sunglasses with the Gucci label on the arm completely hid his eyes, but I had seen them before, first furious and then enraptured as he had consumed that Rasta’s gray matter years ago. I hadn’t thought about that shit in a long time. After a while I had managed to convince myself that it had all been in my head. But seeing that white boy walking toward me across the field brought it all back to me. There standing across from me was the devil himself.

  He had a platinum three-finger ring with the name “Scratch” spelled out in a cluster of diamonds. His mouth sparkled with platinum capped teeth with rubies embedded in the canines that gleamed in the failing twilight. The white boy’s sunglasses slipped down the bridge of his nose as he peered down at us and his cold blue eyes narrowed into slits. The whites of his eyes had sallowed from excessive marijuana use.

  Back then I didn’t really know any white people. None of the kids I hung out with knew any either. We went to school with them, but we never spoke to them and they never spoke to us either and never ever came into our neighborhood. They were like mysterious specters existing just on the periphery of our experience. Influencing our lives in frightning and dramatic ways that we could scarcely imagine, but never seeming to come into direct contact with us. The man who shut off your heat and your telephone when you couldn’t afford to pay the bill that month was white. The man who tacked the eviction notice up on your door when the rent was late was white. The man who came to arrest your father and take him away to prison forever was white. In our minds, white people were right up there with God and the devil. They were spoken of in whispers and curses and appeared in gross proportions in every aspect of mass media from the pictures on our candy wrappers to the televisions, movies, magazines, and billboards we saw every day. They passed us in department stores and gave us strange looks that made us feel guilty and unclean, somehow less than a person

  There was no doubting who he was. Even if I hadn’t seen him blast and then cannibalize that rasta on my doorstep a few years back, everyone had heard of Scratch by that time. Seeing a white boy living down in the ghetto slangin’ cane and shooting up the ’hood made news. By the time Huey, Tank, and I had gotten tight, Scratch had tightened his grip on the whole neighborhood and bizarrely had become both enemy and idol. He had “Gangsta” emblazoned across his soul right next to the neon sign that flashed “Murderer” in searing crimson. Since the day I’d seen him off one of Jah Warrior’s boys outside my window he’d grown into one of the biggest crack dealers in North Philadelphia. Still, I decided to front like I didn’t know him just to play hard. I was hoping he wouldn’t notice my legs shaking in my baggy jeans. I was scared shitless.

  “Who the fuck is you?” I asked, still jamming the barrel of the gun into Meech’s eyesocket.

  Scratch’s two bodyguard’s, dressed similarly in FUBU running suits and big clunky Timberland boots were already drawing their guns. Every dealer who was clockin’ major chips back then had bodyguards. His were megalomorphic giants both over six feet tall and close to 300lbs. They were teenagers as well, highschool athletes. The largest of them I recognized as a lineman on G-town High’s football team.

  “That little mutherfucker owes me some chedda…” Scratch slurred, still glaring hard over the top of his Gucci sunglasses. Then he turned those cold slivers of ice toward Meech, “…and some pain.”

  Demetrious shuddered visibly.

  “I don’t give a fuck! We got business with him ourselves and since we got to him first you gonna have to wait your turn whoever your Vanilla Ice lookin’ ass is supposed to be.” I looked him up and down sneering contemptuously.

  “You ever here of Scratch, little bro?” He asked calmly pointing to the name on his ring. “Well that’s who the fuck I am, my nizzle! So if you know what time it is you’ll act like you know and turn this fool over to me. You know I’m sayin’?”

  His slang was thicker than the most ignorant thugs I knew, but it was obviously exaggerated. The dialect of someone reare
d on gangsta rap.

  As if subtlety could exist in such titanic forms, his two bodyguards crept closer inch by inch trying to quietly position themselves for an ambush, plotting to jump me for the gun and smoke us all. But I wasn’t about to go out like that. I had lived with death all my life. I could sense its every movement and very nearly read its thoughts. It swirled around Scratch transposed over his image like a double exposure. The taint of it had already marked his bodyguards. I wondered then if it had perhaps marked us as well.

  I nodded to Huey and he slipped around to the side of the bodyguard nearest him ready to intercept should they try some dumb shit. With Huey and his brother at my side I was feeling damned brave even though the two linebackers were both even larger than Tank, and Huey was smaller than all of us. However, what Huey lacked in size he more than made up for in skill. He was lethal with that martial arts shit.

  “Alright, if you Scratch then what tha fuck do a big time hustler want with some little pussy-ass nigga like this? And what the fuck is you doin’ up here in the G? I thought ya’ll kicked it down in North Town?”

  “This little bitch vic’ed some of my stash and my money. That’s why I’m here.”

  Scratch smiled wide so that the sun sparkled on his bejeweled orthodontic work at which point his two bodyguards lunged clumsily for me. I had been anticipating the attack and squeezed off a shot, catching one of them high on the thigh and missing his family jewels by mere inches. Huey took the other one’s kneecap off with a roundhouse kick. His shin impacted the huge teenager’s patella with a sickening “Crunch!” that bent his leg backwards against the grain and sent him tumbling earthward with an ear-piercing shriek. Huey scowled viciously and then kicked the knee again eliciting a fresh howl of agony then he drew his foot back as far as he could and aimed a kick at the boy’s jaw. The jaw made a hollow popping sound as it came unhinged and hung stupidly from the fractured tendons. The big boy’s eyes rolled up in his head. He was unconscious before his head finished its decent to the steaming dirt floor.