Awareness Project (Round 2)
Let's workshop this short story about a bigoted D.A.R.E. officer teaching some DC middle-schoolers a few lessons about how drug use and improper language distorts one's perception of reality
Awareness Project
An imitation McGruff-the-crime-dog beelined toward center circle of the cafegymitorium, bullhorn in paw and shepherd at heel. McBluff addressed the hive of D.C. middle-schoolers, declaring with disconcerting amplification that he hid a bag of weed somewhere in the bleachers. “It might be under one of you!” he screamed, overloading the horn. He glanced down to his left. “Reichen.” The German shepherd, wet nostrils flaring, sniffed the air. “Don’t even think about smuggling any drugs in here, not with Troy around.—Zook!”
Troy’s military posture melted at the command, yet he moved with a mechanical meticulousness on the verge of defying canine nature. Wearing a black t-shirt with the crimson initialism “DAP” emblazoned on the back in the spray-paint font of a too-cool-for-school 1980s (street-inauthentic even then, but a decade still too near for it to be nostalgically retro even so), he zigzagged his snout through the crowd. The cacophony of shrieks, despite the cover of laughter as thick as the pubescent musk, bore a palpable undertone of unease. Neither their decibel nor even their jerky movements fazed the methodical sweep. He huffed and snorted, sneaking a few teen-spirit crotch sniffs along the way (for even lethal commandos tear up when they think of their mother)—zeroing in, finally, on the basketball sneaker of a black boy in the second row.
“That’s not the stash spot, son. You’ll need to hang back after the video.” A flourish of laughter fell upon the dead hardwood, a surface offering rebounds sufficient for dribbling in only a few places. Troy remained snarling, teeth bared almost with the Hollywood theatrics of a 1950s soundstage. McBluff called the shepherd back to his side with an order that cut through the mirth. “Hier!”
McBluff yanked off his bloodhound headpiece and, in a scene reminiscent of Nick Nolte in Blue Chips, punted it into the telescopic bleachers to his right. “This isn’t Disneyland, boys and girls. If that’s what you were expecting today, you’re in for a rude awakening.” He tore away from the remaining costume (a brown fur suit cloaked in the beige trench coat of a noir detective) and kicked it aside with his cop boot.
“In a few months you start high school. You know how many arrests I make from high schools each year? Any idea? Ninth graders, high on crack and cough syrup. Know how many leave in body bags? Guess. Guess for me.” He scanned the faces, rotating with slow drama to capture every eye. “I didn’t think so.”
His finger jabbed out to a giggling white boy in a field of black girls. “Think getting high is fun?” Both faces flushed crimson. “Think it’ll make you cool?” McBluff curled his hand of accusation into a white-knuckle fist and retracted it toward his mouth with a quivering show of struggle. “Well—.” McBluff bit down on the index knuckle of that quivering fist, closing his eyes as if to summon his better angel. “That’s all about to change today, folks.—Hit the lights.”
The face of a woman appeared on the dropdown projector screen, paused but quivering like the whole room.
“Meet Linda.” McBluff gestured behind him toward a raised stage still warm from step-team practice. “College dropout turned heroin addicted. Pathetic waste of space.—Lovely complexion, huh? Hmm. Scabs to die for, babe.” His voice dripped with disdain. “We taped this scum so all you boys and girls could learn what she couldn’t.”
He paused, a grimace crossing his features. Had he been speaking in a more intimate space he might have leaned in closer, lowering his voice for emphasis. “Unfortunately, one thing you won’t experience is the smell. You’d never even consider doing drugs if you smelled this wretch. Believe me. Images aren’t enough. I know. I get it. They’d show us all these pictures before weekend leave, back in the Army—pictures of the sores and pus and blood of gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis: the works. Now if we had that smell, maybe some of us wouldn’t have slipped off those rubbers in the heat of action. No, images won’t cut it. But take my word. I wish I could just bottle that smell and pass it around: show-and-tell. That would scare you straight! I’m not talking bad-hygiene stench, boys and girls. I’m talking abscess stench—the stench of the Civil War. Ever learn about that? Or they getting rid of that too?”
McBluff bit his knuckle again, squeezing his eyes shut as if to gather or restrain himself.
“I met dear Linda here a few months before we filmed what you’re about to see. She was hauled into the station for guess what? Trading dignity for a fix. You understand what I’m laying down? Let me spell it out: giving men sex—anal, vagina, mouth sex—to feed her filthy habit. You ever see a carny? She made carnies look like the picture of heath. Pus, pus oozing from this cavity in her arm—a crater to the bone! Aack!”
McBluff spit, Troy blinking as if this gesture of disgust were impromptu. “She was lucky not to lose her arm, let alone her life, that night. She was lucky, boys and girls, we had gotten her to the hospital by the time her intestines ruptured. Ever see a hippo explode on PBS? Two months, no bowel movement. Believe that? Well, believe it. You don’t shit when you’re on smack, folks.”
He paused, letting the visions form in their energized minds as he patted Troy in a gesture that seemed heavy with the burden of shared witness to humanity’s darkest corners. “You’d think all this would make her stop. Scared straight, right? No way. That’s the grip of addiction. She thought she could just ‘experiment’: a little dibble here, a little dabble there. What’s wrong with that, right? Well, now—now she’s got a death wish.”
Troy and McBluff looked at one another, a show of meaningful exchange in sync enough to seem rehearsed. “We caught up with her again for the video. And guess what? She was still shooting up as much as she could get her little piggy hands on. Ridiculous.”
He patted Troy’s head again, almost as if in silent apology for exposing such an empathetic animal to so much human embarrassment. “Let’s see Little Miss Sunshine in action. Let’s see what happens when you choose drugs.—Hit play.”
The stilled face on screen began to bob and sing, the burnt orange of its caked-on foundation stark against the pallor of an acned neck. “♫ Gotta get this hit. Gotta suck this dick. Gotta get this hit. ♫” One arm bandaged and everywhere else scarred like an embattled shark, there Linda sat: hunched in grim routine, spoon-cooking her black-tar concoction on an Al-Bundy couch of monochromatic grime—a couch easy to imagine would continue its greedy suck of light even if under noon sun in its proper place curbside next to a rusty trash barrel whose night flames warm homeless fingers. Red words screaming of budgetary constraints faded in across the bottom of the screen: “Drug Awareness Project: Linda.”
Linda appeared unfazed by the soot bellowing thick enough from the water heater that one of the crewmembers declared, outside of the camera’s shot, he had to go outside. The camera turned his way, only to capture—locked in its zoom—his boot crunching one of several RC Cola cans on the rug. The camera then turned back to the subject, her sing-song of concentration continuing but even thicker in its instigating tone of “I dare you to try to help someone who gives as little fuck as me!”
“Where are your parents?” said a voice, just shy of full dissociation, behind the camera. “Linda,” the voice said, louder and with more urgency to break through the trance of song, “talk to me. Are you still in contact with your mom or your dad?”
Linda stabbed her thigh, stabbed her breast. The drawn-out futility of finding a vessel among the webwork of sclerotic collapse was palpable. Few viewers, at least among those humane and prosocial, would be able to resist—however slimy it made them feel—rooting for her, as if her all-too-junky idea of success—placing the payload on an unblocked path to the heart—were their very own.
“Do me in the neck, John.” She held her breath and bore down, a quivering and impotent attempt to Valsalva a neck vessel for him.
“No Linda.”
Linda turned to John with venom eyes. “Useless piece of shit.” Linda turned to the camera, undoing her forearm bandage. “You don’t want to miss a vein,” she said with a twisted smile, the canopy of black undulating just above her head. “Missin’s like poppin’ an aspirin, kiddies.”
“Linda. Linda, don’t,” John said.
Linda remained smiling sadistically into the camera as she uncovered the five-by-three inch crater of rot, recessed almost to her bones.
“How’d that happen?” said the voice behind the camera.
“This shit. Cut with God-knows-what!” John said, pointing to the syringe that seemed to glisten even through its dinginess with deadly allure. “It has her see bugs, and she goes to war.”
Linda’s determined prying and bending of the caramel scabs finally exposed a purple course-way. She slurped back the slaver that threatened to spill forth from the mouth of single-point concentration. “But now they’re my friends.”
The camera zoomed in. She drove the needle in and pulled the plunger back a bit with her one top tooth, filling the chamber with some blood. Her voice took the low tone of a man about to shoot his load: “There’s the red flag.” She pushed the plunger down with her thumb, a sinister satisfaction spreading across her face. “Ease it in. Easy. Give me the warm, baby.”
“How long have you been using?” said the voice behind the camera, zooming up for a second at the dried Pollock of blood on the ceiling tiles.
Linda milked her arm up toward her heart while John covered the crusted hollow with the yellowed bandage, the wrist and hand of that arm dangling dead as it had been the whole time.
“This is a fucking dud!”
John tried to put a sweatshirt over her head (Georgetown University), but she resisted. “Touch me, bitch! Touch me!”
She looked at the camera, a purple lesion on her nose and her eyelid. “I throw up if it’s good,” she said.
The camera focused down on the nonstick puke pot next to her. There was the sound of glass shattering in the background. The stagnant vomit riled. The camera zoomed out.
“I suck the streets dry for this motherfucker and he fucks me. Fuck!”
Linda started clawing her face and tearing her hair, the needle still clenched in the one and only hand that could clench.
“Linda, please,” John said.
“Do I look like I have veins to waste, John? You pussy!”
“What exactly are you supposed to feel?” said the voice behind the camera.
“Like its fuckin’ pickup time from daycare.—Aaahhh!” She threw a beer bottle at the wall.
“She always does this,” John said. His shoulders relaxed with his audible exhale of surrender to the unfolding.
“Out you mealy-mouthed motherfucker. Ooouuut! Get him out! Niggas will fuck your shit.”
“You don’t even know what you’re saying. God dammit, Linda. Give it a few seconds.”
“You ruin this for me motherfucker. Ruin iiiittt!”
Syringe still in her hand, twice she clocked her face with a beer bottle. A knot was already rising at her eyebrow as she stared dead into the camera as if to demonstrate her power to resist blinking.
“Linda, please don’t do that,” said the voice behind the camera.
“Nice, bust your head up,” John said. “Kill more brain cells.”
Linda mushed the bottle into his face. “Get tested, you pussy. See who’s got the last laugh.”
“You want me out? I’m gone.” John got up. “She’ll be on the nod in one second. Watch,” he said, out of the camera’s sight.
Linda put her face up close to the camera and sang. “He mad cause I like that nigga dick. He mad cause I like that nigga dick.”
Her eyes started to droop and her bopping tapered off into a subtle rock.
“That nigga dick. Nigga dick. That nig dick. Ni di.”
The first wave of nupping took her. She remained rigid at the edge of the couch cushion, refusing to let the drug drop her black eyelids all the way or sink her back into the couch. Fueling this fight, tricking herself into believing that she was doing well in this fight, she picked up with her complaints in mumbles that decreased in volume and sense until they were nothing but lip quivers of generalized anger before they vanished entirely.
At the point where there was no more appearance of complaint, she began the fight to keep hold of the syringe and to keep her head from crashing down on the coffee table. As soon as she would nod off she would catch herself, squeezing her hand shut around the syringe and jerking her head back up against the apparent pull of the coffee table. The table was slowly winning the fight. Each time the hand squeezed shut, more syringe tended to be sticking out than on the previous squeeze. Likewise, each head jerk never restored the original position of her head. At best each rewound half of what was played, and at worst merely paused the downward flow. The syringe of course could not follow this law once it escaped the hand, clinking the table. But the head, although at times jarred back all the way to its last relatively fixed point, kept on according to the law. Soon enough the head was on the scattered coins of the table, just having moon-landed to the left of a bowl of ramen, all the liquid absorbed in the fuzzy noodles.
Reaching the table was not the end of the struggle. Her head started moving along the table—away from the stagnant soup and the flurry of ants; away from the bottles jammed with cigarette butts; away from the Pennysaver opened to an ad circled in the same red in which was written: “Try this / Please / xoxo.” It was as if left were down and right were up.
Once at the edge, the head started flowing downward again. It was the moldy shag tractor-beaming it in the whole time, it seemed. And still, through all this, the fight was not over. There were those jerks signaling some sort of struggle.
Soon enough she was at peace. Against her stillness the room itself, quiet now but for he sound of distant sirens, seemed to pulsate with a sickly energy, as if it were a living organism feeding off the desperation and degradation and debauchery written literally on its walls.
The screen went black.
The screen opened outside on John, his weary frame propped against house’s cracked and filthy shingles of asbestos—cigarette in one hand, Styrofoam coffee cup in the other.
“I just can’t take this anymore,” John said, his voice laden with exhaustion and frustration. “She refuses help. She’s at the hospital every other day. Her pimp has her screwing every fucking body in town. She’s been—I don’t know. Her speech, her vocabulary—it’s all changed. She never talked like that. And she’s been the most reckless I’ve seen her. She doesn’t care who she scores from. She drives right into her fucking femoral! She shoots right into her goddamn sore! I give her money for the skin grafts and she just picks them away. I’m fed up.—I found her sucking dust spray the other day.”
“Why are you still with her?” said the voice behind the camera.
“I can’t bring myself to let her go. Without me she wouldn’t live. How can you just let someone go, into death?
John squatted down against the concrete foundation, his breath visible in the air, his nose starting to flow.
“I love her.”
“How’d she get into it?”
“We did a little coke in college. Amphetamines. That whole deal. For the edge, you know? She took to it real quick. Dependent personality. She was wired all the time and couldn’t get sleep. Alcohol wasn’t doing shit. But when she got her hands on that Horse—. Shit, man. She was done. Done the first taste. All day, every day. Flunked out of school. I spent all my time worrying about her fucking ass and I flunked out. It’s a fucking wreck. Two three years ago she was nothing like this. Believe me. Innocent. Beautiful.”
John looked down. Tears dropped from his eyes.
“Fucking bitch,” he whispered.
“How’d you guys meet?”
“Ha.” John looked up at the sky and sniffed back his snot. “I wish I could go back. I really do. Start over.”
A gold-rimmed Crown Victoria passed by. The voice behind the camera was silent. John stood up. Looking at the ground now, he wiped his face with the sleeve of his flannel button-down and sniffed back more snot.
“Linda would cook all the time for her friends.” John gave a deep sigh. “There was this eating area, a little kitchen, in the basement of her dorm. I was doing a film project with one of Linda’s friends. She brought me to one of these get-togethers. Linda was stunning. You wouldn’t believe. Complexion clear. Smile on her face. Innocent.”
The voice behind the camera was silent.
“It’s actually a pretty funny story,” John said, a faint smile playing on his lips. “And you know, I just had—just right now—this urge to go get her so we could laugh about it. Sometimes I forget like that. Like when people say they forget for a split-second that someone close to them died.”
The camera zoomed in on the etchings of John’s face.
“‘So Linda,’ I said, ‘whatchya makin’ tonight?’
“She goes: ‘I’m cooking mom’s famous Chai-knee-fry rice.’
“When I laughed she gave me this stink face and turned back to the stove. I didn’t know what I’d done to offend her. I could feel my face go red. Was she self-loathing or something? No. Why would she be doing these meals? Was she just poking fun at her people? These were the kind of things running through my head, you know? Is she implying that I’m a racist? I just didn’t know.
“She was as nice as ever the whole dinner, but still—I wanted to make up for offending her. I didn’t want her thinking I was prejudiced. I asked her all these questions—too many—about the dishes and showed too much interest in her answers. Trying too hard, you know? I thought I blew it. But the following week I got invited back.” John shifted in his squat.
“A few weeks and the whole ‘Chai-knee-fry rice’ thing faded away. My main concern was building up the spirit to ask Linda out. There was something between us, you know? But it was hard to decipher, uncertain.” A cop car zoomed by.
“Then it happened again. She goes: ‘You guys want me to cook Chai-knee-fry rice?’ Everyone was like: ‘We’re happy to eat whatever you cook.’ I looked around at the faces. I couldn’t tell if they were perplexed by what she said and trying to hide it, or if the joke was on me.” John shook his head, the smile more prominent now.
“The next get-together was several months later: start of the Fall semester. Linda’s friend had told me Linda liked me. Turns out everyone was in on hooking us up. They left the dinner early and I kissed her. Her first kiss ever. College girl and her first kiss! She invited me upstairs. She said she’d been in love with me.—Geez.” John’s mood shifted. “A very different Linda.”
John stood up, as if the change in position would shoo away whatever darkness had his voice trail off just then.
“We were lying there naked. I had to bring it up. I go: ‘The night we first met you said something so strange. I asked what you were making and you said, ‘Chai-knee-fry rice.’ You said it another time too.’
“Linda goes: ‘I probably said it many times. It’s my mom’s dish.’
“‘Chai-knee-fry?!’
“She goes: ‘Chai-knee-fry.’
“‘Are you pulling my leg?’ I said. ‘You’ve been fucking with me the whole time, haven’t you?’ So I was like ‘Yo. Say “Chinese.”’
“‘Chinese,’ she said. Perfect pronunciation.
“‘If you can say ‘Chinese,’ why the fuck you say ‘Chai-knee’ when you’re talking about Chinese fried rice?’
“‘Chai-knee-fry rice is different,’ she said. ‘You can’t tell?’
“I’m like: ‘Are you fucking serious?! You’re mom’s fried rice is an example of Chinese fried rice!’
“She went on stubborn for a second there before it clicked.—That’s how sheltered. That’s how innocent.”
John took a sip from his Styrofoam cup. “From then on, I could always say ‘Chai-knee-fry rice’ and get a smile out of her. Not now. At no point in the day can I break through to her with this. This used to be our safe word—our truce phrase, you know? The fighting ever got too serious we could say this. We could say it and instantly gain that perspective that the fighting was silly. Now—. Shit. She won’t even care if I say this as soon as we wake up. The crack of fucking dawn she’s dead to it. Dead.—Well, not completely, I guess: she’ll damn sure use it to get money out of me.”
A car stereo started booming. Men outside of the camera’s purview called out “Barry Farms motherfuckers! Ain’t no white mahfuckin’ pigs welcome!—Artie Eliott! Artie Eliott! Ain’t saying shit, right? What about Artie? Coward pigs!” The car screeched off. The music dropped in pitch and volume.
“She’s gone,” John said. “That person in the hole down there’s not Linda. She doesn’t want to change. She doesn’t want to change and she’s cracking. We walked up the Exorcist steps a few months back. Since then she’s been saying she’s possessed by Pazuzu, and that she loves it inside her. I’ll go out and come back—two three hours later—and she’ll be kneeling on the floor, flailing her tongue in my direction. If she’s got that much willpower to wait there just to fuck with me, I don’t see how she can’t kick this thing.—The answer is simple, I guess: she doesn’t want to kick it. She loves it. More than me. More than herself.”
A horizontal line wavered down the screen—a tracking blip during playback of the VHS.
“I don’t know what I’ll do. All I can think of is taking a gun to my face. I tell her this and what does she do? She dares me. She calls me ‘pussy.’ That’s what gets her attention.”
The screen went black.
The screen opened on a lady toking a pipe in an alley recess. Words came across the bottom of the screen, the image and audio warbling momentarily: “Drug Awareness Project: Debra.” Debra was singing (in the chorus melody of Domino’s “Sweet Potato Pie”). “I’m all fucked up and I don’t know why. Feelin’ kinda freaky and that’s no lie.” Pigeon shit dropped on her head. “Niggabitch!”
The screen went blue.
“Lights,” the cop said, bullhorn on the ground and Troy panting at his left side. He waited for the laughter to die down. “Unfortunately you won’t get to see anymore singing lowlifes this afternoon. On the walk home you’ll see a few, I’m sure. Or, sadly enough, maybe inside your own homes.
“Please, make the right choice about drug use. You don’t have to come from a broken family. You could’ve gone on vacations, camping trips. It doesn’t matter.—Try it and die.”
The students made their way off the bleachers. A crater-faced custodian, red hair combed back with grease and whose mere presence made one itchy, set the panic-bar doors in open position for fluid exit.
The cop picked up the McBluff body suit and went up to the black boy, still there in the second row. The boy dug the nickel bag out of his shoe and placed it, translucent green, in the hand opened at his face.
“Come with me,” the cop said, pocketing the weed.
The boy trailed the cop into the bleachers to retrieve the bloodhound head.
“Hold this,” he said.
Under the suspicious eye of Troy, the custodian began turning the handrails in preparation for bleacher retraction.
“Troy!” the cop yelled, and the dog and the boy followed him out to the squad car.
The dog in the back and the boy in the passenger seat, the cop looked over and said, “You like getting high, Jamal?”
“I don’t smoke, sir.”
“Why the dime bag in your shoe, then? You’re telling me you’re a dealer? A dealer on school grounds? Serious crime. Is that your story, Leroy?”
“No, sir.”
“Let me ask you again. You like getting high?”
“I just do it, sir. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?! You must be getting bad shit, boy.—He doesn’t know.” The cop pulled the bag out from his pocket, opened and smelled. “This is pretty bad shit. You roll this in a Phillies blunt?”
“Yes, sir. Dutch, whatever.”
“Smoking this shit, sprayed with God knows what. And out of ci-gar paper! That spells cancer, son. You want that?”
“No, sir. I peel the cancer paper, though.”
“Where do you buy?”
“I got it from a friend.”
“You know just what to say, don’t you?”
“It’s the truth.”
“You in the system?”
“No, sir.”
“What’s your name?”
“Todd.”
“Todd what?”
“Johnson.”
“Now how am I going to check on that? What’s with all the goddam Johnsons?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“Don’t lie to me, boy. You’re not in this system, right?”
“No, sir.”
“You are?”
“No, sir.”
“I could get you suspended from school and get your parents involved. Grandma, whatever.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’m not going to do that. But you need to promise me—. Ready? Promise me not to mess with drugs. Can you do that?”
“Fo sho.”
“What was that?”
“Fo sho.—I will, sir.”
“Were you asleep during the video, Jamal?”
“No, sir.”
“What was the point of the video?”
“Keep kids off drugs.”
“Why is that?”
“Drugs mess with the mind.”
“Drugs mess with more than the mind, Leroy. I show this video because there’s a natural way to go about perceiving things. It’s the way of perceiving things when we’re not taking drugs. See the dog? See the dashboard? Does it quiver? Does it look blurry to you? Does it look groovy? Does it look phat? Assuming you’re not high right now, this is what I’m talking about. It’s called ‘so-ber.’ Say that word for me.”
“Sober.”
“The more and more people take drugs, the more and more people change what ‘sober’ means. If everyone’s high, then high’s the new sober. We can’t have that.”
“Fo sho.”
“Ah, Jamal. Here you go again. That’s exactly my point. The same thing is true with language. The video was about language too, if you remember. You remember?”
“Well, they was speakin.’”
The cop chuckled, shaking his head at the dog through the rearview mirror.
“Jamal, it would be best to keep your mouth shut, ’cause you’re putting your foot in it. You want me to change my decision?”
“No, sir.”
“You say, ‘they were speaking.’
“They were speaking.”
“Are you my ape, Jamal?—No. Don’t answer that. Listen—. You’ve gotten me all off track.”
“Sorry, s—.”
“Op. Just listen now. Language is the main point of the damn video. Remember the whole Chinese-fried-rice thing? The point is that this is America. We say ‘Chinese fried rice’ not ‘Chai-knee-fry rice.’ Shape up or ship out. You get it? Drugs corrupt the right way to perceive and think, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, slang and all the foreign pronunciations corrupt the right way to speak and think. When you go around fo sho this and krunk that, you’re corrupting the language. You’re trying to take over American English and make it your own, just like drug users are trying to take over sober, redefine it. Sizzurp this. Crackalakin that. How are people going to understand you? Your people have to shape up if they want jobs, Jamal. How do they expect jobs talking like that? My theory is they don’t want jobs. They want that welfare. The slang shifts so goddamn much I doubt you even know what each other are talking about half the time. You have trouble understanding your own people, Jamal?—Now’s a good time to answer.”
“Sometimes.”
“So you agree! The same goes with pronunciation and accent. It’s unpleasant to talk to someone with a bad accent and it causes miscommunication. We don’t want that, do we? Chinese fried rice. Speak American! In the army I heard about this one black guy who used to double everything. He’d say, for example, ‘my cars are my cars’ or ‘my life is my life.’ No one understood what he was talking about. There was confusion all around. You know where he learned this from? His own mother. He was just copying her. The funny thing is, she didn’t really double up like this. She’d say, ‘Oh Lord, my children are maturing,’ all the time. Except it would sound something like, ‘Oh Lawd, machilrin are maturin’.’ Her corruption of the language led to her son’s corruption of the language. He thought she was saying, ‘My children are my children.’ Get it? Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“See how it spreads? Bad language, drug abuse, demons and ghosts—all that. These come from ignorance and spread ignorance.
“That’s how my grandma says it too.”
“Ah! Good. First step is identifying the source of the problem. In biblical times Granny would’ve been killed. You ever read Judges, a book of the bible? 40,000 people were killed for mispronouncing something.”
“That’s the devil, sir.”
“Jamal, please. Say no more. Just listen. I need you to do two things for me. First, stop taking and selling drugs. Second, start speaking right and start telling other people to speak right. Your people like Chinese food, right Bruce Leroy? When Chang asks if you want Chai-knee-fry rice, you tell him ‘No. I want Chinese fried rice.’ If your grandma says, ‘Machilrin are maturin’,’ you say, ‘No, Grandma: My children are maturing.’ If your brother says, ‘I was sleep.’ You say, ‘No, brother: You were a-sleep.’ If your momma says, ‘Murray,’ when she refers to Maury Povich, you say, ‘No, momma: Mau-ry’ (and then you tell her to get her welfare ass up and get a job and stop watching daytime TV). Just like I don’t want my boy coming home knowing how to role blunts, I don’t want him coming home talking black. Got me?—Now you go.
“Okay, sir.”
“Matter of fact—. Is that your friend over there waiting for you?
“Who, sir?”
“Don’t play dumb boy. The gansta over there.”
“Yeah. That’s my friend.”
“You boys rap?”
“Sometimes, sir.”
“Go get him. Let’s hear a little ditty.—Seriously. Go get him.”
Todd walked up to the thug at the corner. The thug laughed, tilting his head back and showing super white teeth. The thug led the way back to the car.
“That you, NYC? You eating steaks or something?”
“Most definitely eatin’.”
“How you eating? Selling drugs?”
“You want to hear some lyrics, right? Well you gotta pay.”
“Five bucks. What’s that get me?”
“One song.”
“Get in.—You,” he looked at Todd and gestured with his thumb, “back there.”
“With the dog?”
“Yeah, Leroy. With the dog.”
Todd and NYC got in. McLarren nudged NYC. “Dogs and water really left its mark on your people.” McLarren looked back at Todd through the rearview. “Good. The only way to learn is to jump right in. Troy won’t bother you. Don’t make any sudden moves, though.”
“Troy’s one of my favorite songs, yo,” said NYC. “They reminisce over you, for real.”
“You gonna sing that one?” McLarren said.
“Nah, that’s Mecca and the Soul Brotha. I got my own shit.—Hit that beat, son.” Todd, in turn, hummed a melody over bare bones puffs of air. The beat was gritty in the style of early 90’s productions for Mobb Deep, the sharp snare done with a suck of air through the molars. Troy was panting and everyone else was bopping their heads in sync.
“Con Ed already cut that grid.
No heat and its got me all pissed.
Now the bank wanna roll up in my crib
’cause my moms ain’t payin’ no mortgage.
At the door they trynna bust in.
Got the shank well hidden at my hip.
Got the shank well hidden at my hip—uh.
Got the fucking shank hidden at my hip.
White bitch, try and touch my shit.
Do he know that he dealin’ with a kid
whose at the age of straight lunatic?
Barely ten I ain’t ’bout to do no bid.
Mom’s crying ’bout she’s got to live.
Yo it hurts me to see her like this.
He say ‘Go live with your next of kin.’
On her knees she tugs at his zip.
He say ‘Oh now you wanna try workin.
Think your kid wants see you suck a dick?
I hope to God you also lose him.’
All this stress has me set to flip.
I start crying as a way to trick.
As he’s peepin’ wall holes from my kicks,
the ice pick to the temple follows quick.
Another stab to the face follows spit.
Then I grab this mahfucker’s wallet,
making sure before he dies from my hits
(and best believe he’s gonna die from my hits),
making sure before he dies from my hits,
to let him know I’m going after his kids.
‘Boy you sure picked the wrong business—sucka.’”
“Well that sure did reaffirm why I need to be out here,” McLarren said. “You need to talk to someone, son.”
“You crazy.”
“No you crazy.”
“It’s how I cope. ‘It’s kinda hard tryina survive in this here state,’” NYC sang, as if part of a song.
“Just don’t ruin the boy back there.”
“Never that. That’s my seed.”
McLarren shook his head and sighed, eyebrows arched. “Here’s ten. You have change?”
“You crazy, McLarren.”
“What’s crazy is I write rhymes now too,” McLarren said, still holding the ten.
“This dude stay rhyming,” NYC said to Todd. Directing his attention to McLarren now: “What you got?”
“Something for my son. My boy is trying to be a gansta rapper. I found a notebook with his rhymes. So I wrote this little ditty in there.”
“Give em a beat,” NYC directed Todd.
McLarren started bopping. “I got to remember it. Hold up.”
“Ugh. Ugh. Ugh,” NYC chanted with a smile as McLarren whispered to himself.
“Here we go,” McLarren said. “Greg is a gay. He can’t—wait. Hold up. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go,” McLarren chanted to adjust to the rhythm.
“Yo Greg is gay. He can’t get a lay.
He asks a girl ‘please’ but she pushes him away.
He tries to act black. Maybe this will work.
But we all know he’s just a homo jerk.
I try to teach this kid how to be a man.
But he’s too deep in love with his right hand.”
“With his right hand,” NYC added in for emphasis. “Ahahaha. That shit was tight. Anyways—thank you,” he said, pulling on the ten just when he placed emphasized on “you.”
“If that will keep you from robbing, so be it,” McLarren said, not letting it go.
“You know I only stick up the stick-up kids.”
“Okay, Robbin’-in-the-Hood,” McLarren said, letting it go.
NYC got out of the car. Todd followed. “Ima use that,” NYC said before shutting the door.
McLarren lowered the passenger seat window and creeped forward to keep even with the boys. “Hey, hey. Don’t forget who gave you that. You make it big, don’t burn me.”
McLarren sped off.
