Wrath White - Yaccub's Curse

—Mark Twain, “The White Man’s Notion”

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Scratch had been around so long that he was as much a part of the Black community as the soul food restaurants, rib joints, swap-meets, and storefront churches. He was as familiar a fixture as the Black Muslims selling bean-pies and Final Call newspapers on Chelten Ave and the junkies, crackheads, and winos chasing the next high up and down Germantown Ave. Like all of us, he was brought here by hard-luck and misfortune and had found a way to overcome it. And, like many of us, he had overcome it at the expense of the rest of the community. He was as much of a curse to black people as poverty, drugs, and AIDS.

I was still in diapers when he and his dad moved to Philly. His father, Stephen Hechtman, was a riches to rags case. Word is that he was a financial advisor on Wall Street when his wife caught him fucking around with this Black call-girl named Nikky who looked like a young Pam Grier, long legs, afro, big tits, coffee complexion and all. Seems he had a thing for the sistas.

Now, I don’t know the whole story, just rumors and shit and what Scratch told me himself whenever he was drunk and in a confessional mood. I’m not sure which version is more reliable. Scratch always had a talent for bullshit. But this is how I think it all happened, how Scratch became Scratch.

His mom caught his dad in their house, in their bed, with his face buried in this black bitch’s ass. She forgave him and they started going to counseling but then she caught his ass again. He’d been calling out sick from work to spend the day smoking crack and fucking that whore in her ass in a loft he’d rented for her in the village. The little trick had fallen in love. He was burning through their savings like it was a fucking holiday, buying his little whore all the drugs, clothes, and jewelry she could want. His wife divorced him while there was still something left for her to get half of. He lost his job soon after that and then he moved to Philly with his whore and his young son. He was now hopelessly addicted to rock cocaine.

He moved them into an apartment in Society Hill and him and his Nubian princess would spend all day and all night partying like rock stars, smoking rocks and fucking like fiends. That only lasted a couple of months before he’d smoked up the last of his savings and they all wound up in the projects. That’s where Stephen Jr. died and Scratch was born,

For Stephen Jr. being the only White kid in the projects meant frequent ass-kickings and long hours of loneliness. He was deathly afraid of the teeming swarms of hostile dark-skinned kids that he suddenly found himself surrounded by. For them, he represented the establishment that had long victimized them. He was their chance to get back at the White man and they took that chance at every opportunity, sending young Stephen home with missing teeth, bloody noses, and fat lips, almost every day. Stephen would sit in his room crying while Stephen Sr. and his Black whore got high in the next room. He would remember the Manhatten apartment he’d grown up in, the exclusive private school, and his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since the divorce. She hadn’t wanted him and had given him away in exchange for the apartment. She had never really been much of a mother. He’d been raised mostly by boarding schools and daycare centers. Still, she’d been nicer to him then Nikky. To her, he was nothing but a nuisance and a drain on money she could have used to buy more crack.

Stephen thought of himself as an angel who had fallen from grace into a hell where savage Black devils waited to rend his flesh to ribbons and abscond with his soul. Each day was a misery and every sight, sound, and smell, was a profanity that mauled his senses and defiled his innocence.

His room was his only oasis. He had put a lock on the door and filled the room with books and comics. He kept a Walkman cassette player hidden under his bed so he could listen to music while he read horror novels. The books, along with most of the tapes, he’d stolen from Woolworths down on Germantown Avenue. No one really paid much attention to the book section. It wasn’t normally a major target of thieves. He would read Stephen King novels, and books by Harlan Ellison, Graham Masterson and then Clive Barker and Jack Ketchum, reading long into the night as dope fiends and crackheads, friends of Nikky and his dad, partied on the other side of the door.

They brought home an old Black and White TV one day that they’d stolen from somewhere and had been unable to sell. It only worked intermittently, but it was better than nothing. Stephen brought it into his room and it, along with the horror novels, and Heavy Metal tapes, became his escape from the hell of the ghetto.

During the night, he clutched his dad’s old .22 rifle to his chest; afraid that one of the dope fiends would break into his room and try to touch him. In the mornings, he crept through the piles of beer cans and liquor bottles, empty fast-food containers and junk-food wrappers, tip-toeing between the listless unconscious forms of his dad’s new friends. He would risk the inevitable beating and steal whatever money was left over from their late night binge then catch the subway to McDonalds at Broad Street and Columbia Ave before making his way to school. They were barely managing to survive off of welfare and so his dad had begun selling small quantities of cocaine to support his habit and keep them all from starving to death and being kicked out on the street. Even though the rent in their little project apartment was only $180 a month, it still had to be paid. Nikky still turned an occasional trick to help out as well.

Stephen was miserable and had stopped speaking to either his dad or Nikky. He just locked himself in his room and watched TV and read and dreamed of making enough money somehow to get back to New York, back his real mother whom he was sure must miss him terribly. In reality, the former Mrs. Liza Hechtman, who was now the current Mrs. Liza Newborn, had never really been cut out for motherhood and being rid of the moody young boy with the long curly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes that she had given birth to, had freed her to pursue her life with her new husband. He too, an artist who was ten years her junior and unemployed, was unsuited and uninterested in parenthood. Once a month she would send a child support check that Nikky and his dad promptly smoked up.

At school, little Stephen was the teacher’s pet. Smart, always eager to answer questions and help other kids, he couldn’t understand why the other children resented him so much.Although he was the only White kid in his neighborhood, at school there were a few other White kids who seemed to fit in just fine. But for him, school would be a hard test for many years until he started slangin’ caine.

Stephen was not a small boy by any means, but he had never been in a fight before attending school in North Philly and he had no idea how to defend himself. He was beaten up frequently but he never backed down, never gave up his lunch money, never let anyone steal his clothes or sneakers. Instead, he would take the ass-whipping. Each blow he received, to him, justified his hatred of Blacks and secretly, he took pleasure in it.

“You talk like a White boy.”

It was lunch time and Stephen was sitting in the cafeteria trying to choke down a peanut butter sandwich when a short, raggedy-looking, black kid with a chipped front tooth, and a patch of shiny crinkled skin on his forehead from where he had suffered a third degree burn, came walking up behind him. The kid had a short Jheri curl that had dried out and turned frizzy. He looked like a pre-adolescent junkie.

“I am White.”

“Yeah, but you sound like Richard Pryor doing an impersonation of a White boy. I didn’t even know people really talked like that. You sound like a little pussy talkin’ like that!”