Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

There was no attendant at the counter, and despite my imaginings no red-aproned drone rushed to shoo us away. Randy showed off his knowledge with the arrangements behind the glass. Those are the speed loaders, those are the scopes. And there, my boys, there are the guns themselves. You had to be eighteen or older to buy one, so we handed our ragged, balled-up dollar bills over to Randy and summoned a teenage lackey. She pulled out her key chain to unlock the case.

“Do you want the black or the silver?”

Black, baby. (Internal voice “baby,” not external people-voice “baby”)

Reggie and I didn't have toy guns growing up, so we had to catch up. Even when the house was empty, I got nervous walking around with it. Green or orange water pistols had been okay, but anything else sent our father speechifying. “That's some white-man shit,” he'd say, confiscating the cap gun from a birthday party goody bag. “Whitey loves his guns. Shoot somebody he loves that shit. So let him. No kid of mine is going to get that mind-set.” I practiced solo, deep in the recesses of the Creek, out of sight of beachgoers and homeowners. Why startle the happy vacationers with the sight of a skinny, slouching teenager, the sun glinting off his braces and handgun? All they wanted was to get out of the city for a few days and put their feet up. I rounded up some mussel shells from the dark sand at the edge of the Creek and stuck them in a thin black row. My great aim the first day was just dumb luck, a little taste to get me hooked. I nicked the shells, tinking off bits. The day of the fight, I'd have the bigger targets of my friends.

We armed one by one. Reggie told me he was “going off to practice with Bobby,” and disappeared for one of their secret confabs, probably a razzle-dazzle rapping/shooting extravaganza of great theater. It's like that y'all. Anticipating the hip-hop stars a few years off. Not that the rest of us were immune. NP tucked his piece into his belt like a swaggering cop on the take or the cracker sheriff of a Jim Crow Podunk, Clive was observed busting a Dirty Harry move when he thought we weren't looking, and Randy was often found cradling his rifle to his chest, a gruesome sneer on his face as if he were about to take an East Hampton bistro hostage. I myself favored a two-handed promising-rookie pose, favored by Starsky and Hutch extras who got clipped before the first commercial and were avenged for the rest of the hour. “He woulda made a good cop, just like his old man.”

When we all got together in the days leading up to the event, it was only a matter of time before we started posing for album covers. (The photographer always gets a kick out of taking pictures of these rap guys, they preen and strut more than supermodels.) We stood in a line, in character. The movie and TV comparison is the natural analogy, because back then we were informed by cop movies and cop shows, but given the future of rap music, the album cover is the better fit. Not one from innocent '85, but a few years in the future, when the music changed. We were a posse: the Azurest Boys.

We'd learned to change the character of our fighting and would continue to do so for the rest of our lives, readjusting for different provocations, different stakes. The music grew up, too, testicles dropping, voice changing, going from this:

Rhymes so def rhymes rhymes galore

Rhymes that you've never even heard before

Now if you say you heard my rhyme, we gonna have to fight

'Cause I just made the motherfuckers up last night

To this, in so short a time:

“Hey yo, Cube, there go that motherfucker right there.”

“No shit. Watch this… Hey, what's up, man?”

“Not too much.”

“You know you won, G.”

“Won what?”

“The Wet T-Shirt Contest, motherfucker!”

[sounds of gunfire]

Lyrics from the aforementioned “Here We Go” and then “Now I Gotta Wet'cha,” copyright 1992 by Ice Cube, born the same year as me, who grew up on Run-D.M.C like we all did. “Wet'cha,” as in “wet your shirt with blood.” All of us, the singers and the audience, were of the same generation. Something happened. Something happened that changed the terms and we went from fighting (I'll knock that grin off your face) to annihilation (I will wipe you from this Earth). How we got from here to there are the key passages in the history of young black men that no one cares to write. We live it instead.

You were hard or else you were soft, in the slang drawn from the territory of manhood, the state of your erected self. Word on the Street was that we were soft, with our private-school uniforms, in our cozy beach communities, so we learned to walk like hard rocks, like B-boys, the unimpeachably down. Even if we knew better. We heard the voices of the constant damning chorus that told us we lived false, and we decided to be otherwise. We talked one way in school, one way in our homes, and another way to each other. We got guns. We got guns for a few days one summer and then got rid of them. Later some of us got real guns.

ON WEDNESDAY WE WENT OVER THE RULESat Clive's house. Me, Marcus, Randy, and Clive. Clive's parents worked for the Board of Ed and only came out on weekends, and he had a nice deck on which to discuss matters of importance. The deck furniture was brand-new, fuming up a cloud of plastic musk. We weren't allowed to sit on it. The week before, according to Nick, he'd come over for a visit, and joined Clive at the table. Clive's mother summoned Clive into the house, and when he came out, he went around to the back of the house and fetched an old mildewy chair for Nick to sit on. The forbidden aspect made the meeting seem more official.

No face/No shooting at the eyes, that was a no-brainer. No cheating — if you're hit, you're hit, don't be a bitch about it. Sag Harbor Hills was the boundary of the battlefield, no cutting through to other developments and sneaking back to emerge ambush-style. I said we should all wear goggles just in case, and to my surprise they seemed to agree. There was talk of synchronizing watches, but no one wore a watch in the summer except me, because summer is its own time and I was the only one who didn't know this. When the scheduling question came up, I said, “Tomorrow night?” during Reggie's shift, and everyone at the table was free then so there were no objections. The weekend was out — too many people around — and no one wanted to put it off 'til next week. Reggie was benched and I was glad.

Not that it could have gone down any other way. Although we hatched the plan for the BB-gun war on a Monday, there was no doubt that in the end it would go down on a Thursday.

There was one matter left to discuss. Clive brought out some lemonade. Classy. I took notes. Me and Reggie's house was a hangout pad for the guys during the week, but Clive made better use of his Kid with an Empty House situation, bringing home girls from Bayside and even having girls from his high school out for a few days. He bused them in from the city, and didn't even pay for the Jitney. The boy had style, our Hefner in Kangol.

Sipping his lemonade, Clive raised the issue of Randy's rifle and the FPS. A metal BB out of one of the pistols, at the range we were going to be shooting at one another, hurt a little bit but not that much, according to hearsay. Pump the rifle enough times, however, and a copperhead BB was going to break the skin.

“But if I can't pump, I'll be at a disadvantage,” Randy moaned.

“We have to figure out how many rifle pumps is equal to the standard pistol shot,” I offered.

“How do we figure that out?” Clive asked.

“We can test it out on Marcus,” Randy said.