From north to south
And when the judge turn the pages
We go into rages ’cause his statutes and laws
Don’t do nothing but put justice on pause
We got a whole nation behind bars
And a few who loose and think they stars
’Cause some other brother holding their number
While they out here in the world of slumber
Talking about some law and order
While the Man slipping dope across the border
But the game is over
’Cause Cellblock Four is taking over
And just like these words are being spoken
We know the rules are made to be broken
Yeah, yeah, the game is over!
“What you think?” I asked Kelly.
“It’s okay,” Kelly said. “I like rap. How come you didn’t go on with it?”
“Why don’t you run my group on your television?” I said. “Check it out for yourself?”
Kelly was keeping the remote in his hand. He lifted it and pointed it toward the television. I was getting better at recognizing where I was and peeped the school media center.
“Yo, man, you know Miss Oglivie won’t go for that,” Omar said, leaning back in the lounge chair, and shook his head. “She said we could have a rap group, but everything had to be positive. That’s the whole purpose of the group.”
“Yeah, how are we going to have a positive rap group called Cellblock Four?” Victor asked. He was Omar’s cut buddy, so I knew he was going to back him up.
“What’s positive for one person don’t have to be positive for everybody,” I said. “You trying to be positive or you trying to suck up?”
“Here’s what the story is,” said Deon Crooms, who was sitting across from us at a little card table. He spoke in a low voice. “Miss Oglivie came to us with the idea of putting together a rap group, and she told us what she wanted. It was supposed to be about taking care of business in school, getting your life together, that kind of thing. If that’s what she wants, she’s not going to be going for something about being thugs.”
“He’s right and you know it,” Omar said.
“Who wants to hear that stuff except Miss I-Wish-the-Hell-I-Was-White Oglivie and some junior Uncle Tom wannabes?” I said. “People want to hear about some dudes getting hard and standing up to the power. What you think all them OG’s is about?”
“I’m not some Uncle Tom and I’m as black as you’ll ever be,” Deon said. “But I’m sick of hearing about black men having to be gangsters and getting shot forty-five times so they can say they keeping it real.”
Deon was looking around the room like he had said something deep and was grooving on it.
“So what you saying?” I asked Deon. “You saying that we’re supposed to be rappers, but somebody else is going to dictate the rhymes and all we’re going to do is follow the program?”
“Why can’t you think positive?” Omar asked. “How are you different? What you saying ain’t nobody heard?”
“Getting your head together isn’t positive?” I asked.
“I don’t think you can think of nothing positive,” Deon came back. “What you talking about sounds weak to me.”
Deon played a little ball and was believing he was all that and then some. He had been making some bad noise in my direction for a while. He had his head to one side, eyeballing me like I was short or maybe didn’t have the heart to step to him.
“Check this out, Deon.” I went over to where he was sitting and pulled up a chair right in front of him. “I think you’re weak. What’s more, I think you need for somebody to do a serious readjustment of your thinking patterns by slamming you upside your head. What I’m thinking is maybe if I knock one of your ears clean through your head, it’ll filter out all them turds you got in your brain that you calling ideas.”
I could look into his eyes and see he didn’t know what to say. He had built up his front like a true mind warrior, but when the deal was on the table his heart was skipping beats.
“I think you’re going to throw away the whole deal,” he said. “Instead of a rap group we gonna end up with nothing.”
“We’re going to be blowing a free period and everything,” I heard Omar saying from behind me.
“Let’s have a vote on it,” Victor said.
“You vote on it,” I said, standing up. “I got things to do.”
I was hot when I left the lounge.
We were in an assembly when Miss Oglivie first suggested that we start a rap group. I was down with the program, but as soon as she started talking about “positive values” and all that crap I knew she didn’t mean nothing good. She picked Omar and Victor, and Deon volunteered. A girl we called Silly threw in my name, but I knew that it was Lauryn, who I was getting real serious with, who had told her to do it. A lot of kids gave me a cheer because I had made a smoking rhyme about a brother who got killed on 125th and Park under that little railroad bridge that goes into Grand Central Station. Maurice, my ace, had dug it and asked me to do it on tape over a reggae beat. I did it and he burned a bunch of copies on CDs and we passed them around, so they knew I was strong.
Miss Oglivie didn’t like it, but she had to take me. Omar, Victor, and Deon stuck together like the lames they were, and I knew a vote was going to go against me.
After school I saw Lauryn on Lenox Avenue. For a change she wasn’t with Silly. I had just got some fresh minutes on my cell and called her. We were walking downtown, me on one side of the street and her on the other side.
“I heard you and Deon almost got into it,” she said.
“No, he don’t want me,” I said. “All he wants is to run his mouth.”
“It’s still about naming the group?” she asked.
They had wanted to call the group The Righteous Brothers, which was definitely up there and I would have gone along with it if the raps they were running were good. But they were just catching words from Miss Oglivie and snatching slogans off the wall and laying them out like they were something somebody wanted to be hearing.
“It’s not just about the name,” I said. “It’s about the whole set, same as it was before.”
“Where you going?” Lauryn asked.
“Thought I’d check out Milbank,” I said. “See if anybody’s over there.” I was really going to the brownstone man, but I didn’t want to tell Lauryn that because she didn’t want me using anything.
“Why don’t you come over to my place and check me out?” she said.
“I thought you and Silly were supposed to be doing something,” I said.
“So you saying that you don’t want to see me?” she asked.
“I’m just saying that—” I looked over to where she was and saw that she had stopped walking. “I’m just saying that after all the grief I had today, I need to relax a little. Thought maybe I would hoop a little.”
“Lil J, you going to cop?” Right up front.
“No,” I lied. “I’m just tense, that’s all.”
“So why don’t you cop and then come over to my house?” she said. “Do it in front of me. Why you slipping and sliding?”
“I told you I wasn’t going to cop,” I said.
“Why you shouting into the phone?” she came back.
“So what you want?” I asked. It even sounded weak to me.
“Stay there,” she said. “I’ll go with you to get the stuff.”
Lauryn was treating me like I was a stone head, but I knew I wasn’t. I could let the shit go in a heartbeat, but I just wasn’t ready to go, not just yet, and she couldn’t get next to that. But I knew where she was coming from, because I had seen a lot of dudes who thought they just had chippies and they was drowning and looking for the big fish to come save their butts but the big fish wasn’t coming. My roll was different. I was correct and knew where I was going, and that was the truth—only it didn’t sound so good when I wasn’t shouting it. When I was just saying it to
myself, it didn’t sound too good at all.
I appreciated where Lauryn was coming from. She was steady in my corner and I knew it.
I saw her coming across the street. She was looking good, as usual. What she didn’t know was that I was as tense as I told her I was. She thought I was just out to party a little. But all that crap with the rap group was getting me down, and I didn’t feel like going home and dealing with my moms. Lauryn came up to me and I could see she was wearing her attitude.
“I did think you were going to be hanging out with Silly,” I said.
“It’s nice of you to be concerned about her,” Lauryn said.
Silly was the best-looking woman in the whole world. Her real name was Alicia, but all the guys started calling her Silly because that’s the way she made you feel when she came around and you didn’t know where to put your eyes. Alicia and Lauryn were probably the smartest students in the school, too. Silly was thinking about being either a historian or a dancer, and Lauryn wanted to be a lawyer. They were both serious about their lives.
“So what you want to do?” I asked.
“You were going to cop, so let’s go do it,” Lauryn said.
We had some more back-and-forth, and at first I figured she thought I’d be too shamed to use in front of her. Then she was insisting and my head was tilting to maybe she wanted to party.
The brownstone man was on 105th and Park. He ran a little bodega on the corner and sold stuff from Mexico right over the counter. I knew the cops had to be on to him, but he was always open for business. Lauryn waited outside for me while I went in, bought two hits and a bag of chips, and came out.
We didn’t talk on the train uptown on the way to her house.
Lauryn’s parents were separated. Her mother had a good gig and did all the right things. She went with Lauryn to museums and plays and saw to it that Lauryn always had some cash and dressed good. Lauryn was a day and a half past fine and knew how to present herself.
The apartment was clean and everything was in its place. It wasn’t like my pad, with a sink full of dirty dishes and little armies of empty plastic medicine bottles all over the place.
“So you tense, go on and get untense,” Lauryn said.
“So what you saying?” I asked.
“What am I saying?” Lauryn put her palms up. “I’m not saying anything. I’m just sitting here at my kitchen table waiting for you to get yourself untense. You’re the one that’s running the show.”
“Hey, Lauryn, let me get to the bottom line,” I said.
“You going to snort the line or shoot it up?”
That shut me up, and I didn’t know what to say to her. I just sat there for a long time with my head down. Then I was hearing her on the screen and at the same time I wasn’t hearing her, because I was trying to shut it out. I asked Kelly to shut the television off.
“You dope up in front of her?” Kelly asked.
I nodded. “Just turn it off.”
“Why, don’t you think it’s time to see what you been doing?” Kelly asked. “How you going to put some reason to it if you keep running away from the set?”
“I wasn’t running away from nothing. Sometimes it was like the heroin calling to me. When I didn’t have nothing, I could think about giving it up, about turning away and doing something else. Sometimes, when I really wanted to party and didn’t have the money, I’d go play some ball or just watch television and the feeling would go away. But when I had money, or when I had already scored a hit, I got nervous. I didn’t have to have the dope, but when I had it, I had to use it. You know what I mean?”
“No,” Kelly said. “Let me watch the screen.”
Lauryn’s mom kept aluminum foil in a cupboard, and I saw myself getting it. I folded it up into a little upside-down tent and put the hit in the middle of it. I didn’t look at Lauryn as I heated it up over the front burner on the stove and watched it melt. I watched myself changing hands as the foil got hot, then watched the hit steam up.
I didn’t dig the smell as I breathed it in deep, and my throat was feeling bad in a heartbeat.
I was saying something to Lauryn, but she didn’t answer. Sitting with Kelly, I didn’t remember what I had said.
I told myself I was going to be cool as the dragon found a comfortable place in my body. I could feel it shifting and moving and finding places that needed chilling out. I put the foil down in a cigarette tray when it was done.
Kelly turned the sound back up and I told him to shut it off. He said no.
“So tell me about this great love you feeling for me,” Lauryn said. “Now that you’re not tense anymore.”
“It’s true,” I said. “You’re like a bridge in my life.”
“That is so tired, Lil J,” Lauryn said. “Men have been talking about women being bridges in their lives for umpteen years. Far as I’m concerned, a bridge is just something you walk on to get someplace else. Is that what I am to you? Something you can walk on as you move to your next high?”
“No, I mean, like—there’s two worlds. There’s the world you see in the newspaper. You know, important stuff going on. People in their business suits rushing around to meetings or talking about how this thing or that thing is going to affect the world,” I said. “They’re like the real people, because that’s all you be reading about in the papers or seeing on television. When they kick out the news every night, that’s who they’re talking about. And then there’s…”
The hit was rising fast and I was holding on, trying to pay attention.
“Then there’s the world I live in,” I said. “People ain’t doing nothing. Walk down the street and brothers just standing and leaning against whatever. Passing time. Or maybe time passing them. I don’t know.”
“I think I’m pregnant,” she said.
“What?”
“That wasn’t the right answer,” she said.
My mouth was fuzzy dry and my brain was running around trying to find a landing place.
“Yo, I love you, and I’m going to be there for you….” The words didn’t have any weight. They were just coming out my mouth and floating away.
Lauryn was crying.
Me and Kelly sitting in the dark, the room getting cold, and on the screen was this picture of Lauryn looking all alone. And then there was the sound of her crying. The crying filled the screen, and filled the corners of the room with me and Kelly, and filled all the dark places in the world.
The camera was on my face. My lips were moving.
“I love you, Lauryn,” I said.
“You left the burner on,” she said.
8
“SO YOU CUT LAURYN LOOSE?” Kelly asked.
“In a way, because I was still using,” I said. “But she didn’t cut me loose. She’s good that way. I wanted to get straight, but I needed some time. You know, when you getting ready to have a kid, you want to get your act together. I guess I just needed more time.”
“Seem to me all you got is time,” Kelly said. “What you need more time for?”
“I can’t explain it, man,” I said. “You got to live it to give it. You ain’t been in my shoes, you don’t know where I’m coming from.”
“No, I know where you coming from.” Kelly sniffed, then cleared his throat. “You just got some stink on yourself and don’t want to deal with it. You got a woman. You got a baby. You breathing twenty-four/seven, but you needing something different to deal with.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Then why don’t you run it by me so I can understand it,” Kelly said.
“Maybe I don’t feel like it,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe you don’t. But you know what? You seen yourself upstairs on the roof with the piece in your hand,” Kelly said. “You going to unknow that? Like you unknowing what’s going down with Lauryn? Like you unknowing what’s going down with Brian?”
“Run what by you?”
“Run down what dope doing for you,” Kelly said.
“Maybe y
ou said it right the first time,” I said. “Maybe what it’s about is, I don’t want to know what I’m about. I don’t see nothing ahead for me. I don’t see nothing coming down the road—no car saying, Get on in, I’ll give you a lift. Maybe I don’t want to deal with that. You know, I ain’t the first guy like me I’ve seen. You see guys like me all the time in the ’hood. Nodding out and feeling the same way I feel. Going from day to day until it’s over and somebody making chalk marks around their bodies or they’re sitting in a cell someplace. What about that I need to know more than I know now?”
“How about the rap group?” Kelly asked. “You weren’t that bad.”
“Omar, Victor, and Deon went on with it and I laid low,” I said. “There was going to be an assembly and they were supposed to do a presentation. It was like jive from the get-go and everybody knew it was going to be. Maurice hooked me up with a portable amplifier and a speaker and I had an idea I was going to let them do their thing on the stage and then I was going to come from the back and make a challenge. I figured I would blow the place up with my rhymes because they were tough and they weren’t pulling any punches.
“I know this white boy named Ryan who hung out with the brothers, and he had his own amp and stuff. He was kind of lame, but he knew all the jams and he could lay down a beat with his mouth. You know, he would make sounds like he was scratching and then throw in some scat with it. If you just heard him and didn’t see him, you would think he was from Jamaica or someplace. Anyway, he was going to come down the side while I came down the middle aisle. We figured everybody would turn and check us out and then the guys onstage would have to deal with it.
“Omar and them went on first, and they put out some garbage that was even worse than I thought it was going to be. They couldn’t even keep a beat. When they went through their first set, Miss Oglivie stood up and started talking about giving them a big hand. That’s when me and Ryan started up. Just like I thought, everybody got into what we were doing right away. They were showing us instant love, but Miss Oglivie stopped the whole show. ‘Everybody sit down! Everybody sit down!’ Then she told me and Ryan to leave the auditorium. That was it. A lot of people came over to me later and said we were on the money, but it didn’t make no never-mind. Miss Oglivie threw away our thing.