Queens, New York 1994

“Who’s that kid drinking with Nar?” I ask as I enter the pit.  The pit is the corner of the pedestrian walkway you see as you zoom across the expressway.  It is bordered on both sides by metal gates and it leads to a small forest encroaching on a small side street in Queens.

“That’s Deal,” Riis (pronounced rise) tells me. “He came down to apologize for writing over one of Nar’s pieces in the city and Nar just started beating him, fucking him up.  You know how Frank gets. He’ll beat a kid ‘til his arms are tired of swinging.”

“Nah, yeah I know, I know, haaaaah,” I laugh as I put a cigarette butt out on my tongue.

“So yeah, Nar destroyed the kid, but he kept getting back up.  So finally Nar got tired of beating him and asked him if he wanted to go get a forty.”

“So, what, nobody jumped in?”

“Nah, I mean yeah, we tried. Nar wanted him all to himself, greedy bastard, ‘cause it was his piece that got written over and all.”

“Where’s he from?”

“He’s from somewhere in Uptown. He said he grew up in Jersey.  Haven’t you ever seen a Deal piece up over there before.  He’s up a lot son.”

“Nah, never seen one up…”  The truth was that they were all into their graffiti shit, but I could care less.  Their so called art “pieces” were just their sick nicknames written in big cartoony bubble letters and accented with a star, or a year, or something that was like a signature.  I could care less if a city full of lowlifes remembered my name or not. As a matter of fact, I don’t even want them to know my name; anonymous villains never get caught, because if they got caught some badge would find out their name and they wouldn’t be anonymous.

  I mean, isn’t a reputation just evidence waiting to be used against me?  I’d rather do my thing on the low and stay anonymous like a ghost writing ninja with a smokescreen pen.  But there is something to be said about the lust for pure punishment.  “… you think Nar’ll mind if I go knock out a couple of his teeth?” I ask Riis with a serious half-grin.

“Naah, K.  You know you’re like his little brother, do what you feel.”  Riis chuckles through the gold tooth framing the Ecuadorian flag.

It’s true, Nar is like my big fat Irish brother. He has always looked out for me ever since I’ve known him. He gets me forties if I don’t have any money. One time he even let me borrow one of his sweaters when I came over in the middle of a snowstorm. I really just wanted someone to drink with, but he chilled with me the whole day.

Riis, El Capitan, was the guy who would take charge when no one else would, or even knew how.  That is his instinct. My instincts range from self-preservation to tripping over tempting sins and waiting to fall down.

I walk over to the figure I know as Deal who’s back has been turned to me the entire time.  Deal is wearing a hoodie, but that’s not special because we all are.  He’s also wearing baggy jeans and a blue Columbia jacket.  An orange filter is spraying smoke from his fingertips as he talks to Nar about some prices and quantities. I guess he doesn’t call himself Deal for nothing. I bet he’s packing. I bet he’s been packing all along but he just came to squash the beef and probably even felt that Nar was justified in beating him, and since it was a fair and square affair he doesn’t care. It takes some discipline to hold onto a shooting star when your luck has just eclipsed. Maybe I shouldn’t punch his teeth loose from his gums. I’ll decide as I talk to him.

As I approach Nar sees me and lets out his clandestine cackle. 

“What up Nar!”  I yell as I outstretch my closed fist to meet his in a simple salutation.  Now my plan is to ignore Deal for a second and then as I’m turning to introduce myself  throw a good pushy punch from the shoulder and knock out a couple of his teeth. 

“Whas up, K!  Where’s ya forty?”  Nar couldn’t stand to see anyone in the pit without a forty.  I answer by unzipping my jacket to expose the clear glass encasing the gold colored brew of beauty.  His already wide smile widens more emitting flames. 

He says, “Oh, ya came prepared.”

I turn to see the face I walked over here to smash.  Pause.  Deal’s eye is closed and bloody from a gash in his eyebrow.  His nose is encrusted with a dry plaster of mucus mixed with red cement and I don’t know how he can hold the burning filter to his purple, swollen lips much less take hits off of it.  He throws it letting out a fiberglass puff and simultaneously reaches out his hand and says, “Deal,” as an introduction.

“Hey,” I start with a momentary lapse into shocked compassion, “I’m Super, man, what’s up?”  I say as I flip an imaginary coin in my head.  Heads I exercise my great power by annihilating Deal, and tails I exercise my great power by allowing Deal his dignity in the face of noble humility. 

“Superman?” he asks inquisitively, looking up at me from his 5’3” eye level.

“Nah, man. It’s just Super. Man it’s actually just Kabel, but they gotta put me up as something, nah mean.  So was born the holy Supa K,” I say as I pump a fist in the air then hold it out as if I’m getting ready to take off into the stratosphere.  My audience of twisted scarfaces don’t laugh, but I do as I make an ass of myself for the one thousandth time in the pit. 

It turns out that this kid Deal isn’t such a bad guy.  He was wasted when he sprayed over Nar’s piece and found out we were looking for him from a kid in KNO.    He decided to take it upon himself to see Nar in person and apologize. I guess he figured what’s the worst that could happen, but Nar is the worst that could happen. 

Being so small, I’m sure Deal is used to getting his ass kicked.  I guess he feels that no matter what the excuse he deserves whatever punishment Nar decided to hand down to him. I mean, he did write over his piece and all.  I respect him for being so bold and righteous. I’d make him an honorary member of TSD if I wasn’t an honorary member myself. 

There are no ideologies left in the world, everyone is a realist and if people don’t believe in what’s real then what they didn’t believe in can be the death of them anyway. And death is as real as it gets. Death is the only eventuality for every culture and every living thing on earth.

Some people are scared of it and they obey laws and go to church and make sure they have benefits so that they can keep it away as long as they can.  We hate it and we spit in its face every chance we get; we taste it and touch it. We smoke it and drink it and punch it in its ugly skinless face. Our hate for death is the zipper on a leather mask stitched with barbwire that knits us all together down here in the pit.

After we chat for about forty minutes, and I finish my first forty, the other guys and I start liking Deal.  He’s a funny little fucker even though he doesn’t talk much. I noticed he doesn’t curse. I wonder if anyone else noticed.

“You’re a funny little bastard Deal, you know, I was gonna knock your teeth through your cheek when I walked over here, but damn son, your grill is fuuuuuucked!  Haaaah! Oh shit my bad, my bad, yo.  I didn’t mean no disrespect calling you little and all.”  I’m faded and rambling.  As I tap the mouth of my forty on my teeth and let the piss drip over my tongue and down my esophagus, Kenny shows up with Anser. 

Anser is a psycho Asian fat fuck who does lines of coke like my mom drinks diet coke.  Kenny and I were the only spics there tonight besides Riis. Perro didn’t show his face tonight, he’s probably with some chick. God bless him, I haven’t gotten any since I moved here. 

I’m not sure if Hunger’s Latin.  He hardly talks unless Perro is around and when he does it’s always in English. But I always talk in English too and I talk a hell of a lot more than Hunger so maybe he doesn’t know if I’m Hispanic either. I guess there is a whole generation of Hispanics who don’t speak Spanish. I never realized that before. He could be like Italian or something or even Albanian, but none of that mattered.  It only mattered if you were down for yourself and ready to drink.

It looks like Kenny and Anser met up at the train station, which happens sometimes by coincidence. “Ya’ll feel like robbing somebody tonight?” Kenny asks behind a pair of all black sunglasses, which partially hide the three lines shaved into his right eyebrow.   

I’m not a violent man, but anything’s better than listening to the crew talk shit all night.  Kenny is cold-blooded and logical.  He wouldn’t even introduce the concept to the crew unless he knew we could do it.  Deal’s face doesn’t change as the proposition is proposed, which makes me suspect one of two things. Either Deal really isn’t a violent man, or maybe he just doesn’t trust us that much yet. Good for Deal, the crew could turn on him at any moment; barbed wire stitching tends to lacerate the very fabric that it holds together. It unravels.

Nar gets a little twinkle in his eye whenever the idea of random acts of violence enter into his wicked mind, and Riis and Kenny automatically begin whispering to each other as Anser produces a forty from inside his right pant leg and begins guzzling like a victorious Korean village warrior on a celebratory walk home, thirsty from fighting off small bands of Japanese horsemen combing the countryside.

            I make my way over to my Latin brothers Kenny and Riis to form a twisted triangle of terror as I get informed on the plans. 

            “Who, what, and why?”  I say leaving the foreground of this jolly scene.

            Kenny replies, “Three Brooklyn kids selling herb on the boulevard, they’ve got cash, a car, and weed on deck.”

            Queens boulevard.  We all come from different parts of Queens, but we all meet at the pit a few times a week.  We’re a block from the E train’s Union Turnpike stop that happens to be on Queens Blvd.  This is also right next to the courthouse, but at night there are no bailiffs or judges, just winos and young punks.

            “Yeah, I was coming up out of the train station and they were like, Yo son want some herb, and I was like lemme smell it yo, so I did.  Shit, smelled pretty fucking good too.”

If Kenny says it’s good weed, then it must be cause since I’ve been here all he ever does when we smoke is complain about the shitty weed here and how you have to go out of town to some colleges to get some really good shit, so I’m excited. 

            “What’s the plan, Riis?”  His Ecuadorian brain blends scenarios into fact until he watches us escape in the movie playing in his mind.

            “We need two more guys besides us, then just follow my lead and be yourselves,” he says with his famous twenty karat smile.  Then he goes and mingles among men with little left to live for in search of two more accomplices for the sins we are about to commit.

I know this kid Hunger is going to be down.  He’s mental or something. He snatched this one bitch’s earrings off and kicked her ass down the stairs.  His face didn’t even change as he grabbed her gold hoops and thrust his foot through her chest. Her ears began gushing blood before she fell far enough to break this other kid’s arm that was walking up the stairs behind her.  His mind is gone.  But who am I to judge, he’s been fair to me since the first time we met.  He can crush spirits with the best of them.  Whether he’s nuts or not I’m glad to have him on the team.  We are going to expose splintered bone whites to the darkness of the night.   

            I look at Kenny and say, “Crush ‘em?”

            He looks back and replies, “Crush ‘em!” while he rocks side to side with his hidden fists balled up in his pockets.

            Riis hears this and interrupts our quiet moment before the storm, “We don’t need to crush anyone, too much attention on the boulevard.  We can just take a couple of bags and walk away.  We’re five deep and they’re only three, they won’t want to start anything they can’t finish.”

            “I don’t know Riis, these fuckers look pretty mean, no telling what they keep under the seat,” Kenny retorts with a condescending nuance.

            “K, watch the fag by the car, stay behind us and don’t make it obvious that you’ve got your eyes on him.  The rest of you be on your best behavior.”

            Hunger and Nar walk over to us as we leave.  Hunger turns and hurls his empty forty bottle across the desert of broken glass covering the pedestrian walkway.  In the air it captures the colors of order in our society and sparkles with red brake lights and white headlights before it turns to sand on our elevated beach of despair. 

            “Anser’s not coming?” I ask Ken with much surprise.

            “I guess not,” he says slightly annoyed by my asking a question I had already known the answer to.  Since Anser’s not coming I can guess that he’s been up all night doing yay and speed and he probably feels like relaxing with a beer and smoking some weed.  Since Nar is coming I can deduce that he’s been up all night snorting yay and speed while drinking and smoking weed and he feels like relaxing by beating the living piss out of a couple of hard rocks. 

            The Captain looks at us all in the eyes one by one before we start walking up from the pit to the robbery.  He puts his long hair up in a vertical ponytail on the top of his head and places a pair of metallic blue bug-eye sunglasses on his face gently.  Then he says, “Anything can happen out there guys.  Don’t underestimate your victim’s strength.  In the face of fear a rabbit can strike like a wolverine.  Now let’s go take what’s not ours and if worse comes to worse watch each other out there. War is hell.”

            I’m pretty taken by the Captain’s speech.  The last time we did a piece of violence it was real sudden.  This bum we were drinking beers with just turned on us.  He broke a bottle and started waving it at us.  I just kicked, without thinking, and knocked the bottle from his hand with the bottom of my boot.  Riis already had his knife out and stabbed him in his filthy neck.  Then we just kicked him until we got tired and left him there.

            I got the idea to take his rings off of his fingers. We tried for a few minutes, but they just wouldn’t come off. I got the idea to smear some of the blood on his hands to lubricate them and then we finally slipped them off. We each got a ring. I took mine to the pawn shop and got twenty bucks for it. That money couldn’t even replace the pants and boots I burned because they just had too much blood on them. I guess crime doesn’t pay.

            Right now I’m the center of an eighteenth century oil painting depicting five figures walking from the pit up a grassy knoll to the sidewalk with two guys on each side about to rob some drug dealers for less than fifty dollars worth of weed. The dark blues and waist length cloaks make us look like futuristic devils of the Renaissance.

I have to watch the guy who’s going to be next to the car.  I don’t want to get shot, but it happens all the time. I left Boston because people I knew started going to jail for gunplay. I only used a gun once back in L.A. and it misfired. I hate guns.

 The only people who ever pointed guns at me were the police. Around here there have been headlines in the paper about a guy sneaking up on cops and shooting them in the back. No one is safe anymore. Cops can’t protect us, shit, they’re just soldiers too. I’ve been through a lot, but I’ve never been shot or stabbed. Death is a shadow in the darkness, he is camouflaged and prancing around me every minute.  I wonder if anyone else is scared of getting shot.  Man, The Captain’s speech really fucked with my head, rabbits and wolverines fence with metal masks under the streetlight of my intoxicated imagination. 

            Up the hill we walk in ultra slow motion, as the cold night steams off of our hot veins and the horns grow under our hats and hoods, as devil-planted seeds sprout and ice cubes form instead of green foliage in the dirt-filled ditch of our pitiless stomachs.  Why should I risk my life?  Why not?  What life?  All I have is daily beer money and the hope to one day work forever.  Women are bitches, water is thicker than blood, and what can I ever become but what I am?  I’m a Spic.  I’m a half-Rican, half-Colombian mixed up mutt who lives the life of a degenerate, coming up from his cave in the basement to poison himself with other sociopathic miscreants on a ritual basis. 

            Why should a peasant fear death, when continuing is so much worse than any ending? Maybe there is hope, maybe. We turn onto the boulevard and see the vics.  One guy is by the car hanging over the roof with both arms as the door sits opened on his back.  When he sees Kenny he nods his head.  Ken nods back.  He’s bigger than I am, but not by much.  He seems relaxed, bobbing his head as the music plays with a slow wrath.  The other two are by the train entrance talking. We approach them. 

            Kenny speaks.  “What up, yo?” He says as he reaches out his fist to get dap from the cat with his hat to the side.  The other guy is silent all of a sudden, sulking like a small paper bag around a twelve ounce and leaning as he puffs away on a slim tipped cigar.   

            “What’s up, yo?  Are these your boyz?” Then he reaches out his hand and says, “I’m Trazer.”

            Riis gives him dap and says, “I’m The Captain.”

            “What you need Captain?”

            “Depends on how good the greenery is.”

            “Oh, my greenery is green if your scenery isn’t too lean.  I got dro and regs.”

            “Let me see the dro.”

            Silent goes to the car to get the weed.  I haven’t seen any bulges or awkward moves that would indicate a gun.  It could be in the small of his back, or in the car, in his sock. I’m not a cop. I don’t have any proper training. There is just no way of telling. I could fool myself into thinking I can tell, but honesty is the best policy with yourself. I don’t know if any of them have a gun. 

I love it.  My veins are pumping hot orange onion sauce from the frankfurter cart and this is all becoming too much like watching the pause of darkness on the T.V. screen as I change channels just as it disappears I realize that nothingness is what I want to see, so I blink again.  He comes back with the tiny glass bottle with a crystallic bud inside and he hands it to Trazer. Trazer hands it to Riis. The guy by the car is still bobbing his head and hasn’t said a word.

            Riis says, “What’s this? A dime?”

            “Nah, that’s a twenty, man,” Trazer says trying to put some bass in his voice.  But he’s already shown his cards.  We’re tough and he’s bluff.  When someone gets quiet it’s either because they’re afraid or they’re fearless.  These cats ain’t fearless.  They’re baby demon tails haven’t even begun to swing just yet, but I can hang from mine and use its tip to open beer bottles.     

            “Let me see another one.”

            “Why you want to see another for, yo?”

“Why you think Trazer, we all five gonna smoke one tiny bud like this? Nah man, we need at least two viles of smiles.”

            Traze smirks.  Traze. Trazer.  Trazey.  Oh, shit I bet his name is Stacey.  What a bitch!  Silent goes and comes back.  The Music Man is watching now, but he’s not watching me.  He’s watching El Capitan.  There must be something about a guy who wears sunglasses at night that is outright untrustworthy. 

            He hands another tiny bottle over to Riis.  Stacer looks at Silent as if to say, why’d you hand him another bottle without getting the money first, but quickly fixes his eyes back on Riis who is digging in his pocket for the money.  He doesn’t take his hand out though, he just says, “Thanks,” as he lowers his sunglasses to wink at Silent.

            “Thanks?  What the fuck you mean thanks.  That’s forty beans, son!”

            “Consider it a gift, for the crew.”

            Stacey reaches toward his back, I turn to see what the Music Man is doing, fuck, reaching under the seat.  I pounce and glide with leather wings and grab the head bobber by the leather belt holding up his baggy jeans.  Swinging him away from the open door and towards the back of the car he loses his balance and tumbles on his back. My foot follows him down with a good hard stomp to his head. 

He has a two foot long lead pipe in his hand, thank God it wasn’t a gun.  I reach to take it from him.  We struggle.  I knee his groin, but he keeps fighting.  I land an amazing falling head butt. I always wanted to head butt someone!  Forehead to his nose and half a cup of dark red, almost black blood squirts down over his mouth and chin.  He lets go of the pipe to hold his nose.  I spit a translucent mixture of snot and saliva down onto my victims face and shirt.  His guard is blocking his face so I give him a good stomp in his gut being sure to lift my knee up with a jump so that I can come down with all of my weight.  He groans and lets go of his face as he covers his stomach with his arms and assumes fetal positioning.  I give a quick look over the car to see how my boys are doing.  I don’t see sissy Silent, but Hunger is smoking his tipped cigar as he beats on Trazer with Kenny.  That means Nar and Riis are doing Devil knows what at the bottom of the stairs with Silent, who Hunger probably threw down the stairs anyway.  That kid is fucked up.

Crazy fucks like Hun live forever.  I turn back to the breathless bloody mass at my feet and begin swinging the pipe at his folded frame.  I don’t see the impact of his blunt sword on his own pulpish flesh, each strike is blacked out, like the darkness of moments between a channel change.  I flip again, and again, and again, but it’s the same guy getting beat on every channel and then the picture gets frozen.  I can hear the crowd chanting for blood, chanting my name, “Su-per!  Su-per!”

            “Super! If he ain’t movin’ check his pockets and get in the car you sick fuck,” The Captain yells from the driver’s side of our new car.  I see Hunger and Kenny doing a standard roll and search.  I quickly put my knee on the Music Man’s head and begin searching his pockets.  Cars drive by and look. No one stops. Cops will take forever to come if they do get a call. I love New York. He has no cash on him, only a few more viles of dro and some bags of regs.  I take a bag of regs for myself, for tomorrow, and I stand and give my latest victim a few more kicks and stomps to his-

“C’mon!”  Nar says from the front passenger seat. I can see Riis’s reflection looking at me in the side view mirror turning his head in mock disapproval from the driver’s seat.  Kenny and Hunger are in the back laughing, well Ken’s laughing, Hunger is barely cracking a smile, as usual.  I jump in the back with them and close the door in one motion as Riis takes off almost spinning out of control and turning up the radio as he blows a red light.

I have an uncle who lost the use of his left arm in a car accident. This was back in the 70's. He was in the backseat and the girl he was sitting next to got decapitated. Who's the lucky one?

“WOOOOOOO!”  Nar let’s out a riotous war cry and we all start screaming feeling that surge of predatory adrenaline when a violence is all over and some other bastard is lying face down on the concrete.  Winning. 

I never played sports or entered the school talent show.  I never got an A.  These bloody boots are my certificate of completion and the bag of regs I have in my sock is my only trophy.  We must have committed six felonies in two minutes.  Six and counting as Kenny hands a screwdriver to Nar who pops the radio out of the dash like it was a kernel in a hot frying pan. 

“Yo, Riis, we should have run over that kid’s arm when we took off, yo,” I say with great enthusiasm.

“Fuck him, yo! We took his shit, beat his homeys, and I’m speeding in his whip. What!”

We all laugh and it feels great to be knit together, even if it is with barbwire.  Finally, after moving from school to school, from relative to relative, after always feeling out of place, I finally found true friendship, here where I was born, in Queens.  Being around this type of love brings out the best in me.

            We take the car to a dark side street and park it. We all get out.  We search the trunk for trinkets and then start walking towards the train station. 

“What about Anser and them?” I ask everyone.

“If they hear sirens they’ll know it was us and they’ll disperse.  Over the walkway, through the trees, to grandmother’s house they’ll go,” Riis answers as he undoes his samurai pony tail and takes off his shiny blue shades.

“What did we get?”

In total we took, one car radio and one amp, one air freshener, a baby seat (Riis has a two year old), some tools from the trunk (for Abuelito), two hundred dollars in weed which we all split evenly except for the bag I stashed in my sock, one fifty in cash, two pairs of sneakers, one sweater, one hat, miscellaneous CDs, and Hunger tosses the last of Silent’s tipped cigar as he disappears down a train station stairwell with Riis and Nar.