Grace After Midnight Read online

  But church went on for too long and got me restless. I was an outside kid. Inside bored me. Outside stimulated me. I loved the streets. Loved to sit on the stairs in front of Mama’s house and just watch the world go by. Early on, Mama let me wander. She really had no choice ’cause I’d be wandering anyway. Wander down to the corner store where they sold meats and candies. Wander over to the beauty parlor where the women were deep in their dish. Wander to the liquor store where the old winos spun their stories about back in the day. Wander to Gibson’s, the sub shop where they got a little arcade with Pac-Man. No one could beat me at Pac-Man.

  Wander across the street to play with Curtis. Like me, Curtis followed Knight Rider on TV. I didn’t know about Sesame Street or Electric Company, but I sure knew about Knight Rider, the show where the star was KITT, a black customized Pontiac Trans-Am. I wanted KITT because KITT could ride through fire. Nothing could stop KITT and nothing could destroy KITT. I had dreams about being in the world of the Knight Rider like I had dreams about being with the Smurfs. In my Knight Rider dreams, when I was commanding that car, nothing could stop me.

  You can imagine how happy I was when I got me a toy version of the Knight Rider car.

  “How come you don’t play with dolls?” asked Curtis.

  “How come you don’t play with dolls?” I asked him.

  “I’m a boy. My people say you a butch.”

  “What’s a butch?” I wanted to know.

  “That means you ain’t right.”

  “But I got the right Knight Rider, don’t I?” I said, holding the car up to the sun and watching the light bounce off it.

  “Let me see that thing.”

  He grabbed the little car from me and let it fly down the street until it knocked into a light pole so hard that black paint chipped off the right door. That got me seeing red. I lost it. I took a swing at Curtis that caught him upside his head. I nearly took his head off. He came back at me, but I was too strong for me. I kept slamming him.

  “You a butch,” he kept screaming at me.

  I slammed him so hard that people passing by had to break it up.

  Curtis never fucked with me again.

  Back in the crib, Mama used to scold me when she learned I was fighting. After my eye operation I wore glasses for two years. I broke many a pair due to squabbles. I knew Mama wanted me in dresses and ribbons, but Mama was also wise enough to know that wasn’t me. Mama knew to accept people the way they are.

  Pop got a kick out of having a tomboy. He was a handyman who ran his own little business. He could fix anything mechanical and he liked teaching me. I’d go up on the roof where he taught me to lay tar. Taught me to fix the pipes. When I got a bike—a red-and-black boy’s style with the bar under the seat—Pop taught me to take that sucker apart and put it together again. I’d put an empty juice carton on the spokes of the back tire to make that rat-rat-rat-rat noise. Me and the boys would call ’em our dirt bikes. At age eight, that’s how we rolled.

  Pop would watch me roll down Oliver on my Huffy and smile.

  “Girl,” he said, “you got an extra dose of get-up-and-go.”

  Pop had a good dose himself. He’d get up and go visit girlfriends behind Mama’s back. Found this out the hard way:

  One day we were in the pawnshop where he picked out a gold necklace. He wrote a little card and put it in a box. Because I was looking at all the pistols behind the counter, Pop didn’t think I was noticing him. But I noticed everything.

  Get home and get ready for dinner. Dinner’s always an event at Mama’s ’cause you never know who’ll show up at the table. Fact is, you never know at any given moment who’s living in the house. Mama’s grandchildren are always around, not to mention cousins of all ages.

  Tonight’s macaroni and cheese. Mama puts a hurting on mac and cheese.

  “Hey, Mama,” I say. “Pop bought you a beautiful necklace.”

  Pop looks at me like he wants to kick me in the head.

  “That’s lovely,” she says. “Let me see it, Levi.”

  Pop starts stuttering. “Not sure—not sure where I put it.”

  “You put it right in your pocket,” I say, running over and digging it out for Mama to see.

  “There’s a card and everything,” Mama says.

  When she reads the card, though, her eyes turn red as fire. Just like that, she puts Pop’s ass out the house. Poor Pop’s in the doghouse for weeks. He finally pleads his way back in, but the beautiful thing about the man is that he’s not mad at me.

  “Give her a whupping for what she done to you,” says a cousin of Pop’s, a teenaged boy who likes to get high down in our basement where he lives for free. “Whup her bad.”

  But Pop ain’t giving me no whupping.

  Pop is saying, “That’s my girl. She just told the truth, that’s all she did. You can’t go off on no one for telling the truth.” And with that he’d pat me on the head and have me go with him down the street to fix someone’s washing machine.

  KEN AND BARBIE

  Sheila was Barbie.

  I was Ken. I was five, maybe six years old.

  We were playing house.

  Sheila had golden brown hair. Her body was developing faster than the other girls’. She already had a little booty.

  “You the mommy,” I said. “I’m the daddy. I just got home from work. How ’bout a kiss?”

  Sheila kissed me on the cheek.

  “You make dinner,” I said. “I gotta go back to work.”

  “Where you work?” she asked.

  “On the streets,” I answered.

  “What you do?”

  “Woman,” I said, acting like Pop, “I do what I need to do. I take care of you, that’s what I do.”

  “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Ken loves Barbie and Barbie loves Ken. That’s how it go.”

  “We gonna have babies?”

  “You want babies?”

  “Three,” she said. “Two girls and one boy.”

  “Okay, we’ll have babies.”

  “You know how to make babies?” Sheila wanted to know.

  “Well,” I hesitated. I really didn’t know, but I said, “We just kinda rub together.”

  We kept our clothes on and just kinda rubbed together.

  “Okay,” I said, “you wait awhile and then the babies come.”

  That was our game, and we played it for months.

  Sheila was my first girlfriend. Our song was LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.”

  That song had me falling in love with slow jams. Funny to think of me as a little girl dreaming of being the man of the family.

  But that’s who I was.

  Another girl, this one a little older, would sometimes have me sleep over at her house. She’d call it a pajama party. She also liked to play LL’s “I Need Love.” She also liked to play house.

  When we got into bed, she played like she was asleep, and she let me do sneaky shit to her. But I knew she was awake and loving it. She just didn’t want to admit it. That was my first experience being with a girl who liked to pretend she wasn’t liking it. As time went on, I learned that she wasn’t the only one.

  I learned that lots of girls have different sexual feelings. The honest ones will admit to it. They’ll even talk about it. Sometimes they like a boy. Sometimes they like a girl. Sometimes they like a girl who acts like a boy. I never had problems talking about those different feelings. I did what felt good and natural. Never had no guilt. Never felt like I was doing nothing wrong.

  But I’d soon learn that not everyone has an easy attitude about sex. Sex gets people confused, guilty, and crazy. If you’re open about your feelings, and those feelings are different from everyone else’s, you might be laughed at or even beaten down. You might be secure about your sex life, but the more secure you are, the more insecure you’ll make others—especially folks who hate the different sex feelings running through their heads and heating up their hearts.

  Th
ey say your life is secure long as you got a roof over your head.

  When I was eight, the roof blew off our house—just like that—and water started flooding in. We ran down to the basement. I thought we’d drown, but we made it through. In 1988, some kind of crazy storm hit Baltimore real hard and nearly did us in.

  Next day, though, Pop was up there banging on a new roof.

  “Anyone wanna help?” he asked everyone. Mama had some relatives living there that I didn’t even know.

  No one wanted to help—except me.

  “She’ll fall off,” said a woman I called my aunt.

  I paid her no mind, climbed up there and started hammering.

  From the streets, a guy looked up and saw me.

  “Hey, Levi,” he yelled at Pop, “ain’t that child labor?”

  “This child,” Pop yelled back down, “ain’t no child. She’s smart as a whip and twice as strong as any two boys on this block.”

  “Well, you keep her close to you, Levi, ’cause this block’s getting worse every day. This here is the Wild West.”

  Pop knew the neighborhood well as anyone. He saw the dangers. He saw how the shit was turning worse before his very eyes. He’d tell me that back in the day it was a nice place to live and raise kids. He’d complain about the hoodlums.

  Once I even saw Pop come face to face with a knucklehead trying to jack him up.

  It was the end of the workday. I happened to look out a window and saw Pop walking down the street. That’s when a gangsta jumped up outta nowhere and stuck a gun in Pop’s back. Pop wheeled around and gave this boy such a heavy look—I mean fire was coming out Pop’s eyes—the thug backed down. The gangsta melted into a punk. Never saw nothing like that before. But that was Pops.

  He was strong. He worked hard, earned his money, provided for his family. Him and Mama both did things right. They were the right models for a young girl growing up.

  So why didn’t I grow up the way they wanted me to?

  Why couldn’t I follow their lead?

  Why did I wind up doing the things I did?

  The streets were screaming at me—that’s for sure. But the streets were screaming at everyone. Some kids ignored those screams. I didn’t. I had to see what the screaming was all about.

  EVERYTHING MOVES

  OFF MONEY

  If you studied the streets like me, the truth was up in your face: Money made it happen. Money made people jump, duck, hustle, and hide. Big money made you big. The lack of money made you little. Your money could be dirty or clean. Didn’t matter. Your money could be soaked in fresh blood. That didn’t matter either. What mattered was having it. What mattered was getting it. What mattered was keeping it.

  To an eight- or nine-year-old child looking at life from the steps of East Oliver Street, it was crystal clear that everything moves off money.

  Then when the boys from New York started opening up shop, it became even clearer. New money was taking over.

  A shop is where a dealer sets up operation, gets him a couple of corner boys to organize the merchandise and look out for cops, plus a couple of runners who deal with the customers in the cars or the customers walking by.

  If you’re a kid with half a brain, you scope out the scene in no time.

  To me it was interesting.

  Being outside Mama’s house was always more interesting than being inside.

  Action was better than no action.

  “You’re restless like a little boy,” one of Mama’s friends told me.

  I was already thinking of myself as a boy—so I took it as a compliment.

  The girls were inside with their sewing kits and baby dolls.

  The boys were outside looking for trouble.

  Trouble didn’t scare me none. I didn’t think twice about it. I figured I could take care of myself.

  Rico thought so, too.

  Rico was the first dealer who brought me into the game—even though he didn’t bring me very far.

  Rico was an ultracool cat from New York, half black, half Puerto Rican. Short, handsome, super-smooth.

  Loved me some Rico. Rico spotted me right off.

  “You just sitting there playing like you don’t know what’s happening,” Rico told me.

  I didn’t say a word.

  “You talk?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “What do you got to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  A car rolled by with 2 Live Crew screaming from the speakers, “We Want Some Pussy.”

  “You know what that song’s about?” Rico asked.

  I nodded.

  “I bet you do.”

  He came closer to me and said, “I got something for you to hold. You cool with that?”

  I nodded again.

  He handed me a packet. I knew what was inside.

  “You put this in your pocket for a minute or two. I’ll be back later.”

  He was testing me.

  When he got back in an hour, I was sitting in the same place.

  “Got that packet?” he asked.

  I handed it to him without saying a word. He handed me three ten-dollar bills.

  That was the start.

  That was also when the cops wouldn’t think that a kid might be holding dope for a dealer. Back then you could get away with it.

  Back then, before the New Yorkers like Rico came through, the dope scene was calmer. You’d see people get high, but Rico and his boys raised the stakes: The highs got higher ’cause the dope got stronger. Things got crazier.

  The crackheads were really crazy. It was like watching cartoon characters on TV. They had different names—Superman, King Kong, Wacky. If Wacky found a hole—a shop where the dope was really good—the other fiends would see him tripping and start screaming, “Where the hole at, Wacky?” Wacky would point to the hole and the crackheads would run over there to cop. The hole was the spot, the shop where the shit was sold.

  After they got high, they acted all funny, shaking and dancing and carrying on.

  To get the fiends from coke to heroin, which earned the dealers more money, Rico and his boys would pass out what they called Ts. Ts were teasers, free samples to get you started.

  “I see you understand the game,” Rico said to me.

  I didn’t even bother to nod. I didn’t have to.

  The game on the street was so different—more complicated, more dangerous and deadly—than the games we played in the schoolyard. The schoolyard games, volleyball and baskeball, were great for me because I excelled at them.

  I wasn’t intimidated by the taller boys who were older and stronger. I was quicker and more aggressive. I couldn’t be backed down. That attitude earned me a good reputation in the schoolyard. And my high grades earned me respect in the classroom. School was cool. School was guarded by security niggas with real guns. School was no joke.

  But school was boring. School didn’t excite my eyes or my mind. School was routine. You could predict what would happen from one day to the next.

  On the streets, though, you couldn’t predict shit. Might be quiet now, but a minute later, BANG! Something big comes down that changes up the game. The battles over territory, the fight for the best locations to set up shops, the new playas coming in and the old playas going out—the action never stops.

  You have to be quick. And smart. If you react wrong, that might be it. If you react right, you can keep playing.

  I kept playing.

  UNCLE

  I was eight years old when I fell in love with Pam Grier.

  Mama’s grandson was living in the basement where he played the tapes of her movies from the seventies. I was glued to the screen.

  Pam Grier was Coffy, a chick with a giant Afro and a body from heaven. She works as a nurse during the day. At night she takes on the bad guys and blows them away, one by one. She’s got her own private arsenal and her own style of killing. The poster hanging on the basement walls says, “She’s the godmother of them all . . . the baddest on
e-chick hit squad that ever hit town.”

  In another movie, Pam is Foxy Brown. This time her hair is curly and her dresses even skimpier. Foxy Brown is so down she don’t hesitate cutting off some guy’s dick. You don’t fuck with Foxy.

  But Foxy is make-believe and the streets are real. I can’t deal with make-believe for too long. I’m back on streets, just looking around, holding a packet or two, seeing what the day brings.

  One day I was sitting on the steps when a man came by. He was in his twenties, good-looking, two golds in his mouth, happy attitude. I knew he was dealing.

  “Hey, Snoop,” he said, “what you doing?”

  “Who’s Snoop?” I asked.

  “You.”

  “I ain’t Snoop, I’m Fefe.”

  “No, you Snoop.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.”

  He sat down on the steps next to me.

  “You too young to be doing what you doing,” he said.

  “How you know what I’m doing?” I asked.

  “I seen you, Snoop,” he said. “I seen you watching this mess out here. You watch like a hawk. You don’t miss nothing.”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “You a girl who thinks you’re a boy,” he said. “But I think you’re Snoop.”

  “Why Snoop?” I asked.

  “Snoop out of Charlie Brown. Snoop’s that puppy who’s always saying cute things. He’s sweet but he’s sad.”

  “All right.”

  “Yeah, you Snoop all right. And I’m telling you you should be in school.”

  “I am in school. Today’s a holiday.”

  “You do good in school?”

  “Real good.”

  “What subject you like best?”

  “Math.”

  “Figures,” he said. “You gotta be good with numbers.”

  “I am.”

  “And you’re real sure of yourself, ain’t you?”

  I just shrugged. Where this guy coming from? What did he want? Why was he so interested in me?

  His two gold teeth sparkled off the sunshine. He had this big smile across his face. I didn’t know what to think.