Wrath White - Yaccub's Curse

I looked at Nikky and he looked at me. We both looked like shit. Black eyes and busted lips. We started to laugh. At that moment we knew that we were truly the best of friends. I had gotten his back when he had needed it and he had gotten my back in return and even though we had both gotten our asses kicked it had been worth it to learn the depths of our friendship.

We never went back to Tommy Hill after that. I couldn’t afford a new sled and even though Warlock would have given Nikky anything he wanted, he wouldn’t have gone to the hill without me. It was all for the best anyway. A week later they found some Muslim lady buried in the snow up there. She had been pregnant and someone had torn her baby out of her womb. They said it looked like the killer had used his bare hands and teeth to rip out her unborn child. I thought that had to be bullshit. No one was that sick.

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Chapter 4

“Hell is other people.”

—Jean Paul Sartre

««—»»

In school I was always getting into trouble. Even though I made good grades, got perfect scores on all my tests, and did most of my homework, I was constantly getting into fights.

Anyone who dissed me would wind up with missing teeth and because of my raggedy clothes I got dissed a lot until they saw how fearsomely I fought. They started calling me Snap because of my bad temper. Even my teachers called me Snap. My viciousness even caused Nikky to distance himself from me. We hung out around the way, but at school he treated me like a wet food stamp. I understood where he was coming from though. I would have preferred to be anonymous and invisible like him, but he wasn’t getting teased like I was. Warlock saw to it that Nikky was never out of fashion. He never wore the same jeans two days in a row. His clothes didn’t fit too tight because he’d grown out of them before the income tax return check came. His shoes didn’t have holes in them and his jacket didn’t have the name of the kid who’d owned it before your mother purchased it from the goodwill written on the inside collar. But for me, with my exhausted retrograde wardrobe, life would have been unbearable if I didn’t hold the entire school in fear. Even still their whispered insults shadowed me through the halls as they hurled them silently at my back.

When Tank and Huey transferred to our school, everyone began trying to instigate a war of the hoodrats. They couldn’t wait to see us get that shit on.

“Did you see that big muthafucka from North Philly? You know him and Snap ‘gonna wind up thumpin’. I hope he kicks that crazy nigga’s ass! Snap think can’t nobody beat his ass. I can’t wait to see Tank get a hold of ’im.” Every hallway in school echoed with some variation of this same refrain. I wanted to squeeze each and every one of their voiceboxes shut to keep that noise out of my head.

After hearing so much about these new kids from North Philadelphia’s notorious Richard Allen projects, I wanted to see what they were all about. I had already subjugated the entire 5 thgrade with ease and I wanted to know if their really were two kids that were my match. At that time I considered myself unbeatable. I was eager to fight these two fools and get it over with. They had already tangled with several guys whom I had fought in the past and beaten them just as easily as I had and to be truthful it was making me kind of anxious. When the day finally came it was like high noon in a spaghetti western.

I was on my way to lunch when the biggest blackest kid I could ever remember seeing lumbered towards me. He was at least 5’5” tall and about 160lbs (which was gigantic for a ten-year-old) and as black as death and sin. He was too solid to be called fat. He seemed to be stuffed full of sand or rocks like my dad’s old handmade punching bag and even though his gut stuck out about five inches in front of him nothing on him jiggled. His hair was all nappy and uncombed though he had one of those big wooden brushes sticking out of his back pocket.

His clothes were outdated, ill-fitting, and dirty just like mine, but you could tell he didn’t give a fuck just as easily as you could tell that I did. His eyes were big and round with heavy eyelids that covered half his eyes making him look constantly tired or bored. As he lumbered toward me down the hall I could hear his loud ponderous breathing reminding me of the way the shark Darryl had caught once on a deep sea fishing trip had sounded before he clubbed it to death and threw it back overboard. I remember feeling sorry for the shark that day, but right then I kind of wished I had a club myself.

In “The G,” and I suspect in every ghetto in Philly if not the entire East Coast, when two males pass each other on the street or in a hallway a contest of wills begins. It’s called who will yield and move out of the other one’s way. First we look into each other’s eyes to assess the degree of threat. If the guy looks away or smiles at you then you hog the entire sidewalk and make him walk on the grass or in the street. But if he mad-dogs you like this big angry thug was doing to me and doesn’t give up any ground then it’s on and you have to choose whether to be a bitch and back down or be a man and fight. Sometimes you both look at each other and mutually decide that you’re too evenly matched and silently consent to both yield a little ground each so that you may pass without bumping shoulders. The entire “contest” takes seconds and happens dozens of times a day, but only rarely results in a fight. There are only so many alpha males and most of the betas know their place. But when Tank came swaggering down the hallway we both knew that neither of us would back down. For no good reason than that it had become my instinct to fight, I put myself even more directly in his path and gave him my hardest look. We slammed into each other chest to chest.

“Nigga is you crazy bumpin’ into me! I should kick your fuckin’ ass!” Tank bellowed in a voice that sounded way too deep to have come from a kid. He put both his hands on my chest and shoved hard. At first I was amazed and didn’t quite know what to do. It had been a long time since anyone had treated me that way. There seemed to be no fear in his heart at all. I stared at him as if I had discovered a new species, then he played himself by pushing me again instead of just flat out punching me. This muthafucka wasn’t taking me seriously and was gonna try and embarrass me like some bitch before kicking my ass. It fucked me up cause back then I was the baddest brotha on the block and definitely the baddest thing at that little school. Even the junior high school kids knew that if you fucked with me you’d better protect your neck ’cause I would more than likely be back to stick a blade in it. The only people who didn’t know what a terror I was, was Mom, my grandmother and Tank and his brother Huey.

Tank thought he was hard coming from North Philly and all. The brothas down there think everybody else is soft ’cause they ain’t on welfare and their moms ain’t on crack. But even though we had marginally nicer homes and better schools in G-town, we were still just as poor, just as desperate, and just as mean, and many of us were on welfare and had parents who were hitting the pipe as hard as them fools in the projects. We were every bit as angry, as bitter and hopeless, as jaded and hardened and lost. In my mind I was going to prove all of that with one punch.

Tank shoved me a second time and I dipped and threw an uppercut to his solar-plexus with all the strength I could muster, a Tyson punch, thrusting upwards with my legs so that I nearly rose off the floor myself. I knew that at 5’3” and less than 100lbs there was no way I was going to knock the much bigger kid out going toe to toe with him but I knew just where to hit to cause the most damage. I figured I could knock the wind out of him and then fuck his shit up while he struggled to catch his breath. He bent over with the punch and I kicked him right in the face trying to shove my worn-out Nike right into his mouth and succeeding in splitting his lip open and cracking a tooth. The huge kid staggered backwards holding his face and I kicked him in his gut like the SWAT team kicking down the door to a drug warehouse, putting all my weight behind it like I was trying to drive right through him. An explosion of air came out of his lungs and he went down on one knee gasping and wheezing as he fought to replenish the oxygen I’d just deprived him of. I leapt on him and began pummeling him with my tiny fists.