Most of your stories have me
but some like Juco Slut and Against His Religion are introspective. Reading them made me realize some things about myself.
to your wordsmanship and for sharing these with us
By Popular Demand: True Coliwood Stories - College Athletics
- Thread starter Walt
- Start date
Most of your stories have me
but some like Juco Slut and Against His Religion are introspective. Reading them made me realize some things about myself. to your wordsmanship and for sharing these with us
HalfwayHandsome
A WALKING LICK #502C0MEUP
Drop them next 2 breh
I'm about to drop an epic one on y'all right now. It should keep you occupied for a while, because it's long as shyt. I sat down to remember all the details, and shyt just poured out. I can't front, I might take a week off from these episodes, because this one last one really drained a nikka. Hope y'all enjoy reading it... it's definitely the most personal episode, and even though these joints are all factual this one might be the most honest, if that makes sense.
I'm posting it now...
Preacher Man
This is Preacher Man's story which is really Mitch-Daddy's story; Mitch-Daddy's story wouldn't make sense without Rome's story; and Rome's story is too closely tied to my own story, which is Lonnie's story too. So I have to touch on each part for the whole to make sense. At least I hope it will make sense by the time I finish. Guess we'll see.
Some of my best and most vivid memories of childhood are locked into backseats of packed, broken down cars riding to my aunt Anne's house in Queens. Her husband Alton was a garbageman, made a relatively good salary, they had a house, which was so rare in my family it might as well have been an oil well. Alton turned the basement in to a bar, mad playboy centerfolds and paintings of naked black women up on the walls. Me and my cousins would sneak down to that shyt when the grownups were too drunk to notice or care, just snoop around. Alton's perverted basement bar seemed as unique, mysterious, and ill as the Bat Cave back then; now it strikes me as a sort of blues song turned into a physical structure, a symbol of alcoholism and escapism and general dissatisfaction for a working class nikka married to a fellow drunk with a big ass family that came over for parties too damn much.
We had a big ass, black ass, close-knit family. Few people had cars, so we'd all pile into a small collection of whips that had to make different stops to pick up different family members throughout the city. Me and my mom often ended up in a beat up, third-hand Cadillac my aunt Lena's husband owned, which everyone called Bessie.
I wish I could get those moments back: playing "my car" out the window with my cousins who were stuffed in the back with me, the odor of the car freshener co-mingling with the scents of potato salad and oxtails and rice-and-peas and macaroni-and-cheese that were seeping out from tinfoil-wrapped plates and bowls in our parents' laps, Fonda Rae or the Isley Brothers or Maze drifting back to us like a supernatural fog from the one good speaker in the front of the car...
Back then Lena's husband Ellis had already been driving a cab in New York City for 10 years; I do believe that nikka could've gotten us from Far Rockaway to the South Street Seaport blindfolded. He was an asset at all family gatherings because he was the one person you could rely on to drive drunk without risk.
I distinctly remember one ride in particular, when Stevie Wonder came on the radio singing:
Like a long lonely stream
I keep runnin' towards a dream
Movin' on, movin' on
Like a branch on a tree
I keep reachin' to be free
Movin' on, movin' on
Lena and my mom were singing along with it, hands in the air, heads swaying side-to-side... Looking back, they probably smoked joints before getting into the car - they always took a little longer to come downstairs after the kids had already climbed into the back.
My mom: You know how young that boy was when he made this?
Lena: 'member his blind ass at the Apollo?
My mom: You know I do. How he knew to make a song like this at his age, Lena? How a young boy know all that pain?
Lena: And feel that weary already?
My aunt's husband was like "he prolly read books as a kid."
shyt cracks me up to this day. They were having a real fukking moment... then homie came through like "Stevie had a library card." 
The first two books I ever read were The History of the New York Yankees and The Children's Bible. It was easy, at that age, to get the two confused at times, and for a while during my youth the 1978 Yankees in particular were religion to me. I would read the chapter on that team over and over and over until Ron Guidry, Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Willie Randolph, Graig Nettles, and Mickey Rivers became Biblically heroic in my mind. I can recite ERAs, RBIs, AVGs, etc. from that team like Rakim lyrics. My uncle Lonnie knew how much I loved the game, so he would come by my mother's apartment and take me out sometimes to throw a baseball around. He copped me my first glove; he taught me how to cut open a yellow wiffle bat and stuff it so I could play schoolyard pickup with a tennis ball (that’s not just a New York thing, is it?); he gave me an autographed Don Mattingly baseball for my 13th birthday. I loved my motherfukking uncle more than I can put into words.
Lonnie played baseball when he was younger, but gave it up to focus on boxing - he was a serious fighter until drugs sidetracked his ass. I've seen him knock out a handful of nikkas on some street shyt, because he was lightskinned and handsome and cats would mistake him for a prettyboy on some lazy stereotyping and decide they could disrespect him. Yeah... don't ever get into a fight with a dude who knows how to box. You will end up on your back.
Between my 7th and 10th birthday, the hierarchical structure of my world went like this: I was convinced the man on this album cover
was Jesus (no joke - for years I thought Jesus' face was the one from that cover); the '78 Yankees were Biblical figures; I thought my aunt Viola was Victoria Lord from One Life to Live. But my Uncle Lonnie stood out as my personal Superman. On top of being nice with his hands, good with ladies, and generally cool and good-hearted, he had this outfit from Dapper Dan's to match his blue pair of Ballys... 
Back then, where I was from... nikka, what? That was the equivalent of Obama getting elected, doing a backspin at his inauguration, and then declaring war on a random country like Mauritius for the fukk of it... all while sippin' some Henny during a game of Tonk with his cabinet.
He took me out to a schoolyard and taught me how to hit a curveball when I was 7 years old. I remember standing on a concrete playground where homeplate doubled as the tip of a hopscotch board, trying to memorize Lonnie's instructions: head in, even swing, don't bail. He was about 40 feet away telling me in that hot-knife-through-butter voice of his: hips before hands, hips before hands. He'd throw a slow curve at me and I'd generate serious wind when it went past. Stay back on the ball. I was missing all them shyts. Finally Lonnie shook his head, moved his hands both down and toward me like he was pushing a bad spirit away, and said if you wanna hit it, you gotta figure out how to believe what you don't see. I can hear him saying that shyt even now, all these years and miles away, even as I'm typing this. After that, I was hitting ropes.
When I was 12 years old, in a local youth league, against the top pitcher in our league (a Hispanic cat who threw hard as fukk, and was one of the only dudes with a legit assortment of pitches) I could hear my uncle in my ear during each at bat, and I hit two home runs off homie. I cranked a fastball to center field my first time up, and my third trip he threw a curveball - I saw that motherfukker coming like a prophecy - and I pulled it clean over the fence in left. Alongside a step-back 3 I hit in a star player's face near the end of a huge upset in high school and a dunk I had on a football player during intramurals in college that brought the gym down, it was one of the greatest sports moments of my life. nikkas all talk that glory shyt like they've hit buzzerbeaters and done windmills in the clutch and shyt, but those moments come few and far between even for talented players of any sport.
Lonnie showed up to my 5th birthday party and gave me $10. He was days away from heading to jail for something or other – nikkas in my family stayed on their way in or back from prison – and that $10 was literally the last money he had to his name. That was the type of dude he always was, and at a young age I got my ethics for friendship from him. If I’m with you, I’m with you. In the words of Cormega the QB Don, you my nikka when you hot or when the temperature change.
This is Preacher Man's story which is really Mitch-Daddy's story; Mitch-Daddy's story wouldn't make sense without Rome's story; and Rome's story is too closely tied to my own story, which is Lonnie's story too. So I have to touch on each part for the whole to make sense. At least I hope it will make sense by the time I finish. Guess we'll see.
Some of my best and most vivid memories of childhood are locked into backseats of packed, broken down cars riding to my aunt Anne's house in Queens. Her husband Alton was a garbageman, made a relatively good salary, they had a house, which was so rare in my family it might as well have been an oil well. Alton turned the basement in to a bar, mad playboy centerfolds and paintings of naked black women up on the walls. Me and my cousins would sneak down to that shyt when the grownups were too drunk to notice or care, just snoop around. Alton's perverted basement bar seemed as unique, mysterious, and ill as the Bat Cave back then; now it strikes me as a sort of blues song turned into a physical structure, a symbol of alcoholism and escapism and general dissatisfaction for a working class nikka married to a fellow drunk with a big ass family that came over for parties too damn much.
We had a big ass, black ass, close-knit family. Few people had cars, so we'd all pile into a small collection of whips that had to make different stops to pick up different family members throughout the city. Me and my mom often ended up in a beat up, third-hand Cadillac my aunt Lena's husband owned, which everyone called Bessie.
I wish I could get those moments back: playing "my car" out the window with my cousins who were stuffed in the back with me, the odor of the car freshener co-mingling with the scents of potato salad and oxtails and rice-and-peas and macaroni-and-cheese that were seeping out from tinfoil-wrapped plates and bowls in our parents' laps, Fonda Rae or the Isley Brothers or Maze drifting back to us like a supernatural fog from the one good speaker in the front of the car...
Back then Lena's husband Ellis had already been driving a cab in New York City for 10 years; I do believe that nikka could've gotten us from Far Rockaway to the South Street Seaport blindfolded. He was an asset at all family gatherings because he was the one person you could rely on to drive drunk without risk.
I distinctly remember one ride in particular, when Stevie Wonder came on the radio singing:
Like a long lonely stream
I keep runnin' towards a dream
Movin' on, movin' on
Like a branch on a tree
I keep reachin' to be free
Movin' on, movin' on
Lena and my mom were singing along with it, hands in the air, heads swaying side-to-side... Looking back, they probably smoked joints before getting into the car - they always took a little longer to come downstairs after the kids had already climbed into the back.
My mom: You know how young that boy was when he made this?
Lena: 'member his blind ass at the Apollo?
My mom: You know I do. How he knew to make a song like this at his age, Lena? How a young boy know all that pain?
Lena: And feel that weary already?
My aunt's husband was like "he prolly read books as a kid."
shyt cracks me up to this day. They were having a real fukking moment... then homie came through like "Stevie had a library card." The first two books I ever read were The History of the New York Yankees and The Children's Bible. It was easy, at that age, to get the two confused at times, and for a while during my youth the 1978 Yankees in particular were religion to me. I would read the chapter on that team over and over and over until Ron Guidry, Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Willie Randolph, Graig Nettles, and Mickey Rivers became Biblically heroic in my mind. I can recite ERAs, RBIs, AVGs, etc. from that team like Rakim lyrics. My uncle Lonnie knew how much I loved the game, so he would come by my mother's apartment and take me out sometimes to throw a baseball around. He copped me my first glove; he taught me how to cut open a yellow wiffle bat and stuff it so I could play schoolyard pickup with a tennis ball (that’s not just a New York thing, is it?); he gave me an autographed Don Mattingly baseball for my 13th birthday. I loved my motherfukking uncle more than I can put into words.
Lonnie played baseball when he was younger, but gave it up to focus on boxing - he was a serious fighter until drugs sidetracked his ass. I've seen him knock out a handful of nikkas on some street shyt, because he was lightskinned and handsome and cats would mistake him for a prettyboy on some lazy stereotyping and decide they could disrespect him. Yeah... don't ever get into a fight with a dude who knows how to box. You will end up on your back.
Between my 7th and 10th birthday, the hierarchical structure of my world went like this: I was convinced the man on this album cover
Back then, where I was from... nikka, what? That was the equivalent of Obama getting elected, doing a backspin at his inauguration, and then declaring war on a random country like Mauritius for the fukk of it... all while sippin' some Henny during a game of Tonk with his cabinet.He took me out to a schoolyard and taught me how to hit a curveball when I was 7 years old. I remember standing on a concrete playground where homeplate doubled as the tip of a hopscotch board, trying to memorize Lonnie's instructions: head in, even swing, don't bail. He was about 40 feet away telling me in that hot-knife-through-butter voice of his: hips before hands, hips before hands. He'd throw a slow curve at me and I'd generate serious wind when it went past. Stay back on the ball. I was missing all them shyts. Finally Lonnie shook his head, moved his hands both down and toward me like he was pushing a bad spirit away, and said if you wanna hit it, you gotta figure out how to believe what you don't see. I can hear him saying that shyt even now, all these years and miles away, even as I'm typing this. After that, I was hitting ropes.
When I was 12 years old, in a local youth league, against the top pitcher in our league (a Hispanic cat who threw hard as fukk, and was one of the only dudes with a legit assortment of pitches) I could hear my uncle in my ear during each at bat, and I hit two home runs off homie. I cranked a fastball to center field my first time up, and my third trip he threw a curveball - I saw that motherfukker coming like a prophecy - and I pulled it clean over the fence in left. Alongside a step-back 3 I hit in a star player's face near the end of a huge upset in high school and a dunk I had on a football player during intramurals in college that brought the gym down, it was one of the greatest sports moments of my life. nikkas all talk that glory shyt like they've hit buzzerbeaters and done windmills in the clutch and shyt, but those moments come few and far between even for talented players of any sport.
Lonnie showed up to my 5th birthday party and gave me $10. He was days away from heading to jail for something or other – nikkas in my family stayed on their way in or back from prison – and that $10 was literally the last money he had to his name. That was the type of dude he always was, and at a young age I got my ethics for friendship from him. If I’m with you, I’m with you. In the words of Cormega the QB Don, you my nikka when you hot or when the temperature change.
Preacher Man (continued)
From day one of college, Rome was my main nikka no matter the weather. I spent anywhere between 10 and 20 hours a day with that dude. Dragging in his truck, cracking jokes in the dining hall, hoopin', randomly roaming campus, kickin’ it with females, trading music, whatever. The only thing we didn't do - together or apart - was go to class.
We both had real fukked up family situations, and looking back we were probably suffering from depression at the time. Black people keep the concepts of and remedies for mental ailments at arm’s length. Partially because we are, in general, undereducated about such issues and partially because we are traditionally underserved by the societal structures that would diagnose that sort of thing. So while wealthy white kids walk around with prescriptions and special educational allowances based on a litany of diagnoses, nikkas deal with everything from minor depression to bi-polar disorder without ever receiving half a pill of anything or an hour of the most basic counseling. When we deal with basic mental/emotional problems it’s chalked up to cultural pathology, laziness, general bad behavior. Whatever the case, me and Rome bonded fast, and we collectively gave school the middle finger.
There were two things of primary importance in Rome’s life. The first was his truck, a red lowrider with tinted windows and rims on it. He kept that shyt clean as hell – the red paint always looked sun-kissed, the rims gleamed and shimmered like a discoball, the stereo system made every piece of a song sound crisp and distinct… Rome consumed my music collection like a wild animal; he had never heard any of the shyt I brought to college with me. At first he was like “we don’t fukk with that out here.” But within a week of knowing me, he was a fiend. He got deep into east coast shyt. nikka was losing his mind over Primo. He was memorizing mixtape lyrics, all that shyt. For some reason the album he couldn’t get enough of was Diamond D’s first joint – he would drive around blasting “Best Kept Secret,” “I Went for Mine,” and “fukk What You Heard” so much I started to get sick of them shyts.
I was going the opposite direction musically. ATLiens blew my mind – to this day it ranks up there for me with any album, any genre, ever. “Growing Old” had me like 
Like every New York nikka back then, I made snide remarks about the two corny looking nikkas in the source ads, standing in front of the car. We used to call them cats “Fat & Skinny.” But when I got down South and actually listened to 8-Ball & MJG… yo, they were nice as fukk. I started fukking with Scarface and Pac real heavy – they were the first rappers I heard where I felt their spirit on the tracks. I was used to hearing swagger come through in lyrics, but not spirit.
The other incredibly important thing in Rome’s life was… a smurf. His grandmother had given him this smurf for his birthday way back, and he carried it around with him everywhere. I really do mean everywhere, at all times. If he hooped it was in his pocket, on the court; if we were driving around it was on his dashboard; if he went to meet a broad to fukk, it was in his pants at the foot of the bed; when we ate in the dining hall, it wasn’t unusual for the smurf to be posted up next to the napkin holder, salt, and pepper. It was a football player smurf, kind of giving a stiff-arm, kind of striking the Heisman pose.
One time we were making a trip to an HBCU to kick it with two chicks we met at a party, shyt was all the way across the state, and in the middle of the drive Rome realized he had left his smurf at the Black Student Center earlier that day. Son turned around immediately, drove an hour-and-a-half back, and harassed some poor dude in maintenance (he pretty much threatened violence) until someone came over after business hours and opened the center up so Rome could look for his smurf. Homie didn’t fukk around when it came to that smurf, man.
Rome roomed with this DB on the football team, Willie Mitchell. nikkas called him Mitch-Daddy. As I said in a previous episode, I wasn't about to demean myself calling no motherfukker "daddy," so I called the homie Mitch. Some football nikkas are surprisingly small - if you saw some of those DBs back then in street clothes, they could've easily been any old dude you crossed paths with. Mitch was like 5'9, looked mad slim... but dude was strong as shyt. I found that out the hard way, a night when he was drunk as shyt, and randomly said “fukk Harlem.” I looked at that nikka like
and told him “fukk all of South Carolina, you country ass nikka.” Next thing I knew, we were brawling. Son was hitting me with body shots, I was clubbing him in the head… then all of a sudden he started laughing hysterically and gave me a hug. You know you my nikka. That’s the way Mitch was, unstable as shyt. You never knew what zone he was going to be in from minute to minute.
Mitch had hos on deck. His hos on deck had hos on deck. And those hos had hos in the dugout eager to pinch hit. I didn't get it. For some reason that nikka face always made me think of him as a negro version of Tony The Tiger. He had 2 polo shirts, a loud ass Eddie Bauer joint with stripes that looked like it was made by someone stomping on a box of crayons, and 1 generic Hilfiger joint. He ran them shyts like crazy. Rocked a black leather jacket with at least 3 rips in it. Never had anything interesting to say. Son’s response to everything was Dere it is, daddeh. That's all that nikka would say, like a malfunctioning country nikka Teddy Ruxpin doll. Yo Mitch, the Deltas are throwing a party next weekend. Dere it is daddeh. We about to go to dinner. Dere it is daddeh. Rome told me to let you know he lost his key, so leave the door unlocked. Dere it is daddeh. I’d be looking at that cat thinking damn, learna new line, my nikka.
He stayed with bytches upon bytches though. Especially track hos – football nikkas ran through track hos like weak arm tackles. Getting bytches in college is rarely about game, it’s almost always about some imagined status or mutual recklessness. Mitch was one of the most reckless and shameless nikkas ever when it came to hos – he had a baby with this chick back in South Carolina; his baby moms’ best friend ran track at school, and he started fukking her and one of her teammates. The greater the chance bytches would find out about each other and cause drama, the more appealing the situation seemed to him. He started fukking this one shorty I had my eye on, she actually seemed to be about something, so once when we were chillin’ I straight up asked him damn, how you bagged Anisa? Here’s the line Mitch kicked to homegirl: you know what the cool thing about college is? You can be friends... but still fukk. When he told me, I was sitting there looking at dude like
If I tried that line on shorty she would’ve hit me with the gas-face. Yes, I was mad and I was fukkin’ hating.
Another thing I was hating… spending time in Rome’s room, because Mitch was a filthy dude. He had these dark blue sheets he never washed or changed, and there were mad visible sex stains on them. When he was getting ready to go outside, son would pull this tiny ironing board out, lay it across the cumstained sheets, and crispify one of his dirty ass shirts. The heat from the iron would amplify the funky odor of the shirts. Son was not about that laundry room. Rome hated being in there because this one track ho Mitch was bustin’ down named Toni was always up in the spot. She had deluded herself into believing she was his girl, and she would walk into the room without even showing Rome the least bit of courtesy, lie down on Mitch’s funk factory of a bed, and wait there, wordlessly, for him to show up. That bytch had issues for real. Shorty was mad stuck up, wouldn’t acknowledge anyone but Mitch, would stare straight through me if I was around… I was like hold up, reality check ho: you sitting on cumstained sheets and fukking the biggest dog on campus. You serious right now? I’ll slap you with a damp washcloth, you stank bytch. I wish Cam had been poppin’ back then. I would’ve hit shorty with tell you and your groupie friends: go get your coochies cleansed.
From day one of college, Rome was my main nikka no matter the weather. I spent anywhere between 10 and 20 hours a day with that dude. Dragging in his truck, cracking jokes in the dining hall, hoopin', randomly roaming campus, kickin’ it with females, trading music, whatever. The only thing we didn't do - together or apart - was go to class.
We both had real fukked up family situations, and looking back we were probably suffering from depression at the time. Black people keep the concepts of and remedies for mental ailments at arm’s length. Partially because we are, in general, undereducated about such issues and partially because we are traditionally underserved by the societal structures that would diagnose that sort of thing. So while wealthy white kids walk around with prescriptions and special educational allowances based on a litany of diagnoses, nikkas deal with everything from minor depression to bi-polar disorder without ever receiving half a pill of anything or an hour of the most basic counseling. When we deal with basic mental/emotional problems it’s chalked up to cultural pathology, laziness, general bad behavior. Whatever the case, me and Rome bonded fast, and we collectively gave school the middle finger.There were two things of primary importance in Rome’s life. The first was his truck, a red lowrider with tinted windows and rims on it. He kept that shyt clean as hell – the red paint always looked sun-kissed, the rims gleamed and shimmered like a discoball, the stereo system made every piece of a song sound crisp and distinct… Rome consumed my music collection like a wild animal; he had never heard any of the shyt I brought to college with me. At first he was like “we don’t fukk with that out here.” But within a week of knowing me, he was a fiend. He got deep into east coast shyt. nikka was losing his mind over Primo. He was memorizing mixtape lyrics, all that shyt. For some reason the album he couldn’t get enough of was Diamond D’s first joint – he would drive around blasting “Best Kept Secret,” “I Went for Mine,” and “fukk What You Heard” so much I started to get sick of them shyts.
I was going the opposite direction musically. ATLiens blew my mind – to this day it ranks up there for me with any album, any genre, ever. “Growing Old” had me like
Like every New York nikka back then, I made snide remarks about the two corny looking nikkas in the source ads, standing in front of the car. We used to call them cats “Fat & Skinny.” But when I got down South and actually listened to 8-Ball & MJG… yo, they were nice as fukk. I started fukking with Scarface and Pac real heavy – they were the first rappers I heard where I felt their spirit on the tracks. I was used to hearing swagger come through in lyrics, but not spirit.The other incredibly important thing in Rome’s life was… a smurf. His grandmother had given him this smurf for his birthday way back, and he carried it around with him everywhere. I really do mean everywhere, at all times. If he hooped it was in his pocket, on the court; if we were driving around it was on his dashboard; if he went to meet a broad to fukk, it was in his pants at the foot of the bed; when we ate in the dining hall, it wasn’t unusual for the smurf to be posted up next to the napkin holder, salt, and pepper. It was a football player smurf, kind of giving a stiff-arm, kind of striking the Heisman pose.
One time we were making a trip to an HBCU to kick it with two chicks we met at a party, shyt was all the way across the state, and in the middle of the drive Rome realized he had left his smurf at the Black Student Center earlier that day. Son turned around immediately, drove an hour-and-a-half back, and harassed some poor dude in maintenance (he pretty much threatened violence) until someone came over after business hours and opened the center up so Rome could look for his smurf. Homie didn’t fukk around when it came to that smurf, man.
Rome roomed with this DB on the football team, Willie Mitchell. nikkas called him Mitch-Daddy. As I said in a previous episode, I wasn't about to demean myself calling no motherfukker "daddy," so I called the homie Mitch. Some football nikkas are surprisingly small - if you saw some of those DBs back then in street clothes, they could've easily been any old dude you crossed paths with. Mitch was like 5'9, looked mad slim... but dude was strong as shyt. I found that out the hard way, a night when he was drunk as shyt, and randomly said “fukk Harlem.” I looked at that nikka like
and told him “fukk all of South Carolina, you country ass nikka.” Next thing I knew, we were brawling. Son was hitting me with body shots, I was clubbing him in the head… then all of a sudden he started laughing hysterically and gave me a hug. You know you my nikka. That’s the way Mitch was, unstable as shyt. You never knew what zone he was going to be in from minute to minute. Mitch had hos on deck. His hos on deck had hos on deck. And those hos had hos in the dugout eager to pinch hit. I didn't get it. For some reason that nikka face always made me think of him as a negro version of Tony The Tiger. He had 2 polo shirts, a loud ass Eddie Bauer joint with stripes that looked like it was made by someone stomping on a box of crayons, and 1 generic Hilfiger joint. He ran them shyts like crazy. Rocked a black leather jacket with at least 3 rips in it. Never had anything interesting to say. Son’s response to everything was Dere it is, daddeh. That's all that nikka would say, like a malfunctioning country nikka Teddy Ruxpin doll. Yo Mitch, the Deltas are throwing a party next weekend. Dere it is daddeh. We about to go to dinner. Dere it is daddeh. Rome told me to let you know he lost his key, so leave the door unlocked. Dere it is daddeh. I’d be looking at that cat thinking damn, learna new line, my nikka.
He stayed with bytches upon bytches though. Especially track hos – football nikkas ran through track hos like weak arm tackles. Getting bytches in college is rarely about game, it’s almost always about some imagined status or mutual recklessness. Mitch was one of the most reckless and shameless nikkas ever when it came to hos – he had a baby with this chick back in South Carolina; his baby moms’ best friend ran track at school, and he started fukking her and one of her teammates. The greater the chance bytches would find out about each other and cause drama, the more appealing the situation seemed to him. He started fukking this one shorty I had my eye on, she actually seemed to be about something, so once when we were chillin’ I straight up asked him damn, how you bagged Anisa? Here’s the line Mitch kicked to homegirl: you know what the cool thing about college is? You can be friends... but still fukk. When he told me, I was sitting there looking at dude like
If I tried that line on shorty she would’ve hit me with the gas-face. Yes, I was mad and I was fukkin’ hating.Another thing I was hating… spending time in Rome’s room, because Mitch was a filthy dude. He had these dark blue sheets he never washed or changed, and there were mad visible sex stains on them. When he was getting ready to go outside, son would pull this tiny ironing board out, lay it across the cumstained sheets, and crispify one of his dirty ass shirts. The heat from the iron would amplify the funky odor of the shirts. Son was not about that laundry room. Rome hated being in there because this one track ho Mitch was bustin’ down named Toni was always up in the spot. She had deluded herself into believing she was his girl, and she would walk into the room without even showing Rome the least bit of courtesy, lie down on Mitch’s funk factory of a bed, and wait there, wordlessly, for him to show up. That bytch had issues for real. Shorty was mad stuck up, wouldn’t acknowledge anyone but Mitch, would stare straight through me if I was around… I was like hold up, reality check ho: you sitting on cumstained sheets and fukking the biggest dog on campus. You serious right now? I’ll slap you with a damp washcloth, you stank bytch. I wish Cam had been poppin’ back then. I would’ve hit shorty with tell you and your groupie friends: go get your coochies cleansed.
Preacher Man (continued)
It felt like every single time I hung out with Mitch we would get in some serious shyt. The bonus footage episodes Banned From the Mall and The Driveby are about shyt that happened because of him. I literally ran from cops and bullets because of this motherfukker on different occasions. I remember going to a basketball game with him, Rome, and this other football player, Russ-Daddy. Mitch had been smoking weed that was clearly laced with some shyt, and after the game we were walking back to our dorm when homie just froze in the middle of the street. Cars were swerving to miss dude, honking at him, people shouting… Homie was statue-still, his brain had locked up on him. A campus police officer was in the area, and he was about to call the real police but we convinced him that Mitch was Russ’s mentally-challenged little brother. Thankfully Russ was a defensive end, because he had to carry Mitch the rest of the way home.
Mitch had a homie named Kenyatta, who was a DB on the team too. ‘Yatta was one of the most disrespectful nikkas I have ever met in my life, and he provided me with what was simultaneously one of the foulest and funniest moments I ever witnessed. Son showed up at Rome’s and Mitch’s room while we were all in there kickin’ it. That stank track ho Toni was on the bed as usual. ‘Yatta stood in the doorway and started telling Mitch about this party that was gonna pop off later that night. It’s gonna be some fine hos there. Toni sucked her teeth, rolled her eyes, and said Hello, I’m sitting right here. ‘Yatta got a quizzical look on his face, looked at Toni, then Mitch, then looked at me and Rome, then back at Toni, and said:
But you ain’t nothin but a bytch.
SON! SON! You have to understand how he delivered that line though! It was so sincere, like he was really puzzled that Toni didn’t grasp her place in the pecking order. He was basically like “I am allowed to discuss other hos around you, because you are also of ho status. Didn’t you know that, my dear?” No joke, me and Rome looked at each other and sprinted out of the room. We ran all the way to the common room near the elevators and collapsed on the couches, laughed for like 10 straight minutes, tears in our eyes and everything. I have never seen a broad get so simply and yet so viciously dismissed.
Those were the good times. They ended quickly.
The first semester we were spending grant money like that shyt was drug money, and as the saying goes fast cash slows up. By second semester we were both broke as a joke; Rome was on academic probation and I had mad incompletes to make up. The university cut off my meal plan toward the end of the fall semester because I owed a bill or some shyt. I went to the Dean of Minority Students to plead my case. It’s counterintuitive to allow a student to enroll in classes but cut off his meal plan. How can I starve and study at the same time? I’ll never forget, dude gave me the head nod like he was deep in thought, then wrote something down on a notepad, tore it out, handed it to me. It was the address for a local soup kitchen.
Be black and poor at a big state school, brehs.
Rome had his own tragic circumstances to deal with: when he got put on academic probation, his mother took his lowrider truck and made him drive her little Ford EXP. I don't know if they still make those joints, but damn that car was a sad ass matchbox whip. The engine on that bytch clattered and wheezed like a flabby and sick beatbox crew. This is the most similar model I could find:
Swapping out his truck for that shyt was tantamount to turning on a vacuum cleaner inside his soul and sucking his swag out of him. Dude was dejected every single day.
A nikka had to eat, so I was working every angle possible – flirting with the broads who worked the registers at the food court and jackin’ frozen meals from the ROTC office, which was left unlocked at night. Me and Rome devised the ill scheme to steal textbooks. We figured out the rooms with airconditioners didn't have locks on the windows – you could climb in those bytches from the balcony. So I came back early from break and stayed at his crib; we drove all the way from his place to the university, which was in a different state. Walked the balconies on every floor of two different dorms, climbed in every window with an airconditioner in it, jacked whatever textbooks we found. I’m not proud of this; those were low ass moments for a nikka. We made two wild discoveries in the process: I. one room we went in belonged to the granddaughter of a Yankee legend – she had a birthday card from him on her desk, which is how we found out. Not from the ’78 team, thankfully. The other thing we saw on her desk was a medical report about an abortion she’d had.
II.We climbed into 'Niqua's room (chick I used to fukk, from Episode I) and found photos in her top drawer of her man sitting on a bed, holding his meat with a big ass smile on his face. 
That fukking photo haunted me for months, b. Some things, as they say, you cannot unsee. On the bright side, we ended up with $500 each off all the textbooks we grabbed and flipped at the used bookstores around campus.
By the 3rd week of first semester of the next year, Rome dropped out. He was fukking with a shorty he knew from high school named Cassandra. She got pregnant, he was broke, so he went back home to find some work. I was fukked up when my nikka jumped ship. The only other person I was in close touch with was my cuzzo Skoob I grew up with - for a time I shared a bed with him on some poverty shyt in the projects - who was doing a bid on cocaine possession. He wrote me from jail every week (I still have all the letters in storage) and twice a month he'd hit me with a collect call to chop it up. nikka would write me about how he was gonna come out brand new, change his name to some 5% shyt like Wisdom Abdullah or something, help his moms and his sister move out the hood, all that standard bullshyt young nikkas kick when they first get locked. I stopped hanging out with the athletes as much because I was working 3 part time jobs to make sure I didn’t get my meal plan cut again. I had gotten injured real bad my first semester in college, so there were no more hoop dreams for me neither. I basically worked, came home, wrote my cousin, then called this one chick I was messin’ with to come over and fukk. A nikka was low as shyt at that time.
Around that same time Mitch got himself into some next level stupid shyt. We didn’t kick it anymore now that Rome wasn’t rooming with him – college at a big school was wild like that, you could be potnas with a nikka one week, ignore each other for the next 3 years – but he made such a mess I found out about it as it was happening. Dude was banging out this lightskinned shorty named Monique, and he had her in his room when his baby moms popped up for a surprise visit. That Tony-The-Tiger-in-the-face, dere it is daddeh ass nikka wasn’t exactly a dude who could think on his feet, so his reaction to the dire circumstances was to lock the redbone in his closet – against her will – while arguing with his baby moms at his front door. I honestly believe it all could’ve been sorted out if ‘Yatta was there to make one of his ignorant yet sage declarations… Anyway, shyt ended up with a police standoff, because Mitch hit his baby moms in the face and refused to let Monique out of the closet. Entire dorm was watching that shyt unfold. And yes, we were still in the same dorm, because the school – although they swore up and down it wasn’t the case – clearly rigged the housing lottery so the black people by and large remained on the same side of campus (i.e. separate from the white students) unless they moved off campus altogether. The fukking South, man.
So yeah, the homie Mitch got locked, and suspended from the team. It was October. I remember that much because it was around the time of Fall Break, and I went to see Rome. He wasn’t living at home anymore, he was bouncing around from spot to spot, couch surfing, doing petty, leftover drug-dealing on some flunky shyt. We kicked it for a few days, and while I was happy to see my nikka, I was disenchanted with his whole scene and the company he was keeping. I didn’t leave the projects in NYC to rediscover them 750 miles away or whatever, you know?
A couple weeks after break I was on my way to the main dining hall for lunch. To get there you had to pass this area called The Square, which was a little space between the dining hall and the bookstore. Usually student groups would post up there, or people trying to get you too sign petitions, or vendors hawking posters or whatever else college students were prone to purchase. That day though, I saw some shyt that stopped me dead in my tracks: the homie Mitch was in The Square, wearing a cheap ass suit, with a bible in his hands, preaching. nikka was going hard, in his own incoherent way. I’m trying mad hard right now to formulate an apt comparison… It was like seeing J.R. Smith counseling a group of cats on the merits of shot clock management; ‘Melo breaking down the art of the extra pass; Dwight Howard leading a seminar on mean-mugging; Rhyme King advocating for monosyllabic lyrical patterns; @Soundwave’s mother pretending she knew who @Soundwave’s father was. shyt WAS PREPOSTEROUS. I stood there for a full hour, skipped lunch, watched Mitch kick his sermon and quote scripture, felt lost as fukk about the world. From then on, his teammates stopped calling him Mitch-Daddy; dude’s new nickname was Preacher Man.
It felt like every single time I hung out with Mitch we would get in some serious shyt. The bonus footage episodes Banned From the Mall and The Driveby are about shyt that happened because of him. I literally ran from cops and bullets because of this motherfukker on different occasions. I remember going to a basketball game with him, Rome, and this other football player, Russ-Daddy. Mitch had been smoking weed that was clearly laced with some shyt, and after the game we were walking back to our dorm when homie just froze in the middle of the street. Cars were swerving to miss dude, honking at him, people shouting… Homie was statue-still, his brain had locked up on him. A campus police officer was in the area, and he was about to call the real police but we convinced him that Mitch was Russ’s mentally-challenged little brother. Thankfully Russ was a defensive end, because he had to carry Mitch the rest of the way home.
Mitch had a homie named Kenyatta, who was a DB on the team too. ‘Yatta was one of the most disrespectful nikkas I have ever met in my life, and he provided me with what was simultaneously one of the foulest and funniest moments I ever witnessed. Son showed up at Rome’s and Mitch’s room while we were all in there kickin’ it. That stank track ho Toni was on the bed as usual. ‘Yatta stood in the doorway and started telling Mitch about this party that was gonna pop off later that night. It’s gonna be some fine hos there. Toni sucked her teeth, rolled her eyes, and said Hello, I’m sitting right here. ‘Yatta got a quizzical look on his face, looked at Toni, then Mitch, then looked at me and Rome, then back at Toni, and said:
But you ain’t nothin but a bytch.
SON! SON! You have to understand how he delivered that line though! It was so sincere, like he was really puzzled that Toni didn’t grasp her place in the pecking order. He was basically like “I am allowed to discuss other hos around you, because you are also of ho status. Didn’t you know that, my dear?” No joke, me and Rome looked at each other and sprinted out of the room. We ran all the way to the common room near the elevators and collapsed on the couches, laughed for like 10 straight minutes, tears in our eyes and everything. I have never seen a broad get so simply and yet so viciously dismissed.
Those were the good times. They ended quickly.
The first semester we were spending grant money like that shyt was drug money, and as the saying goes fast cash slows up. By second semester we were both broke as a joke; Rome was on academic probation and I had mad incompletes to make up. The university cut off my meal plan toward the end of the fall semester because I owed a bill or some shyt. I went to the Dean of Minority Students to plead my case. It’s counterintuitive to allow a student to enroll in classes but cut off his meal plan. How can I starve and study at the same time? I’ll never forget, dude gave me the head nod like he was deep in thought, then wrote something down on a notepad, tore it out, handed it to me. It was the address for a local soup kitchen.
Be black and poor at a big state school, brehs.Rome had his own tragic circumstances to deal with: when he got put on academic probation, his mother took his lowrider truck and made him drive her little Ford EXP. I don't know if they still make those joints, but damn that car was a sad ass matchbox whip. The engine on that bytch clattered and wheezed like a flabby and sick beatbox crew. This is the most similar model I could find:
Swapping out his truck for that shyt was tantamount to turning on a vacuum cleaner inside his soul and sucking his swag out of him. Dude was dejected every single day.
A nikka had to eat, so I was working every angle possible – flirting with the broads who worked the registers at the food court and jackin’ frozen meals from the ROTC office, which was left unlocked at night. Me and Rome devised the ill scheme to steal textbooks. We figured out the rooms with airconditioners didn't have locks on the windows – you could climb in those bytches from the balcony. So I came back early from break and stayed at his crib; we drove all the way from his place to the university, which was in a different state. Walked the balconies on every floor of two different dorms, climbed in every window with an airconditioner in it, jacked whatever textbooks we found. I’m not proud of this; those were low ass moments for a nikka. We made two wild discoveries in the process: I. one room we went in belonged to the granddaughter of a Yankee legend – she had a birthday card from him on her desk, which is how we found out. Not from the ’78 team, thankfully. The other thing we saw on her desk was a medical report about an abortion she’d had.
II.We climbed into 'Niqua's room (chick I used to fukk, from Episode I) and found photos in her top drawer of her man sitting on a bed, holding his meat with a big ass smile on his face. That fukking photo haunted me for months, b. Some things, as they say, you cannot unsee. On the bright side, we ended up with $500 each off all the textbooks we grabbed and flipped at the used bookstores around campus.By the 3rd week of first semester of the next year, Rome dropped out. He was fukking with a shorty he knew from high school named Cassandra. She got pregnant, he was broke, so he went back home to find some work. I was fukked up when my nikka jumped ship. The only other person I was in close touch with was my cuzzo Skoob I grew up with - for a time I shared a bed with him on some poverty shyt in the projects - who was doing a bid on cocaine possession. He wrote me from jail every week (I still have all the letters in storage) and twice a month he'd hit me with a collect call to chop it up. nikka would write me about how he was gonna come out brand new, change his name to some 5% shyt like Wisdom Abdullah or something, help his moms and his sister move out the hood, all that standard bullshyt young nikkas kick when they first get locked. I stopped hanging out with the athletes as much because I was working 3 part time jobs to make sure I didn’t get my meal plan cut again. I had gotten injured real bad my first semester in college, so there were no more hoop dreams for me neither. I basically worked, came home, wrote my cousin, then called this one chick I was messin’ with to come over and fukk. A nikka was low as shyt at that time.
Around that same time Mitch got himself into some next level stupid shyt. We didn’t kick it anymore now that Rome wasn’t rooming with him – college at a big school was wild like that, you could be potnas with a nikka one week, ignore each other for the next 3 years – but he made such a mess I found out about it as it was happening. Dude was banging out this lightskinned shorty named Monique, and he had her in his room when his baby moms popped up for a surprise visit. That Tony-The-Tiger-in-the-face, dere it is daddeh ass nikka wasn’t exactly a dude who could think on his feet, so his reaction to the dire circumstances was to lock the redbone in his closet – against her will – while arguing with his baby moms at his front door. I honestly believe it all could’ve been sorted out if ‘Yatta was there to make one of his ignorant yet sage declarations… Anyway, shyt ended up with a police standoff, because Mitch hit his baby moms in the face and refused to let Monique out of the closet. Entire dorm was watching that shyt unfold. And yes, we were still in the same dorm, because the school – although they swore up and down it wasn’t the case – clearly rigged the housing lottery so the black people by and large remained on the same side of campus (i.e. separate from the white students) unless they moved off campus altogether. The fukking South, man.
So yeah, the homie Mitch got locked, and suspended from the team. It was October. I remember that much because it was around the time of Fall Break, and I went to see Rome. He wasn’t living at home anymore, he was bouncing around from spot to spot, couch surfing, doing petty, leftover drug-dealing on some flunky shyt. We kicked it for a few days, and while I was happy to see my nikka, I was disenchanted with his whole scene and the company he was keeping. I didn’t leave the projects in NYC to rediscover them 750 miles away or whatever, you know?
A couple weeks after break I was on my way to the main dining hall for lunch. To get there you had to pass this area called The Square, which was a little space between the dining hall and the bookstore. Usually student groups would post up there, or people trying to get you too sign petitions, or vendors hawking posters or whatever else college students were prone to purchase. That day though, I saw some shyt that stopped me dead in my tracks: the homie Mitch was in The Square, wearing a cheap ass suit, with a bible in his hands, preaching. nikka was going hard, in his own incoherent way. I’m trying mad hard right now to formulate an apt comparison… It was like seeing J.R. Smith counseling a group of cats on the merits of shot clock management; ‘Melo breaking down the art of the extra pass; Dwight Howard leading a seminar on mean-mugging; Rhyme King advocating for monosyllabic lyrical patterns; @Soundwave’s mother pretending she knew who @Soundwave’s father was. shyt WAS PREPOSTEROUS. I stood there for a full hour, skipped lunch, watched Mitch kick his sermon and quote scripture, felt lost as fukk about the world. From then on, his teammates stopped calling him Mitch-Daddy; dude’s new nickname was Preacher Man.
Preacher Man (continued)
It was a real ill Fall, heading into a cold Winter for your boy. A couple weeks after that I was in bed when the phone rang; I was ducking this broad I’d stopped banging out, so I let the shyt go to my answering machine. A voice I recognized started talking. Dude had that voice when your heart isn't quite willing or able to process the news your mouth has to deliver. "Yo... it's Cory man... Rome... ayo… that nikka Rome… he dead man." Suddenly I knew how Mitch must’ve felt when he froze up in the middle of the street. I went numb as fukk. Damn. We had been shamefully out of touch except for those 3 days over break. That shyt hit me so hard, it didn’t actually hit me, if that makes sense. But trust, it kept hitting me for years after, on some time release vitamin shyt. That shyt still hits me. That shyt is hitting me right now.
Cory spelled out the horrific details on my machine, and as I listened I felt a hole open inside me that hasn’t ever closed. Rome had been at his homie’s house, sick as hell with a fever, passed out in the bedroom upstairs. Unbeknownst to Rome, his homie was perilously overdue on money he owed the biggest dealer in the city… that night he and his squad came to collect. They showed up at the house, tied up the 3 dudes in the living room, shot each one execution style. Rome heard the shyt, woke up out of his fever haze, fumbled around in the upstairs bedroom for the landline, and they heard him. According to Cory, you could hear Rome catch one to the head on the 911 tape; they bucked him as soon as the operator picked up. Sometimes I still try to imagine those harrowing final moments of my nikka’s life… alone in a dark bedroom, a long way from home, the sound of gunshot after gunshot downstairs and then footsteps like a drumline climbing the steps when they realize there’s someone else in the house… In the words of Andre on “Growing Old.” My stomach can't digest it even when I bless it...
I wish I could really go into detail about Rome's funeral, but it's too hard. His absentee father who made a big show about weeping and missing the son he never bothered to raise… His little brothers who were too young to understand the magnitude of things… His shorty who was pregnant with a son who would never see Rome in anything but inadequate photographs… How Rome had been my main nikka, yet I only found out his full name for the first time in the funeral program… My anger with God, with myself, with everyone because I couldn’t cry. Everything seemed too absurd to me instead of sad.
What I remember most clearly is Rome’s mother giving me a hug that seemed to stretch forever, then handing me the two things from Rome’s truck she said she knew he would want me to have: the Diamond D tape he borrowed from me, and his smurf. I’m not ashamed to say I’m tearing up right now typing this shyt. I remember that after we embraced, when she turned and walked back to be with her family, the fact of her dignity stayed with me, and it hung like a phantom around me long after we hugged. I can feel it now, even.
I copped an Amtrak ticket back home for Thanksgiving, which left me with $75 to my name. I knew I had to be careful with that money, because the train station was half an hour from campus, and if I wanted to get back I’d need about $25 for the cab. It used to be that Rome would pick me up whenever I took the train, so I didn’t have to worry. Those days were over.
Late on Thanksgiving a random cat rang my mom’s phone and was like if you want to see your brother Lonnie alive again, you need to come get him. Then the voice gave an address in Harlem, over by the Wagner projects, and hung up. My moms started crying like shyt. She gave me the address and I went out looking for my favorite uncle.
East Harlem wasn’t a fun place to walk through late at night. I had to go past where Dapper Dan’s used to be, then under the bridge on Park where mad hookers and fiends were… At the time I couldn’t see the Harlem I knew was disappearing even more rapidly than I could've imagined: that in another 7 years 125th wouldn’t even have a hint of its old life to it; that vendors and bootleggers would get harassed out of existence; that the iconic eateries and record shops of my youth would be forced to close; that the people who used to show up on tour buses to eat at Sylvia's and gawk at how the other half lived would soon show up in moving vans and turn Harlem out with gentrification. That across from the Jackie Robinson projects, in front of the big ass wall that had EACH ONE TEACH ONE graffittied across it for years, where we would play taps until like 2 or 3 in the morning because there were no lights on the basketball court, I’d attend a block memorial for Skoob after he’d been shot and killed too. You really never see what’s coming; sometimes when people ask me what I think life is, I say a perpetual ambush.
I found my uncle in a rundown, abandoned brownstone that had been turned into a crackhouse. I bet that place costs at least 4 grand a month to live in these days. fukking New York City. He was in a small room that was cold as fukk; the one light source in the entire building was a lamp in the room, and it was so bright I had to squint to see anything. I had to step over a styrofoam Chinese takeout box, some chicken bones, shards of glass from a Ballantine Ale bottle that it turned out had been cracked over my uncle’s head. Lonnie was in the corner by a broken radiator looking like a sheet of looseleaf paper someone crumpled into a ball and tossed there. I saw blood running down his head and soaking through the side of his t-shirt. I knelt over him and shook him to make sure he was still alive. Dude rolled over, looked in my face, recognized me, and asked in a raspy ass voice Who had the best curveball of all time? Say what? I’m turning around to make sure whoever left my uncle like this isn’t coming back, worried he’s going to bleed out, and this nikka is asking me about baseball? I tried to get him to his feet, but he waved me off. You heard me nikka; answer the question. I'm looking at him like he's out his damned mind. Finally, I said: Dwight. Dwight, huh? Yeah motherfukker, Doc Gooden. He pushed himself against the wall so he had some support, and I could see he’d been stabbed real bad in his side. He was talking between shallow breaths, and his words came slow and spaced out. Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown was the best curveball pitcher of all time. I helped him to his feet finally, and when he leaned against me I felt all his weight. The nikka lost one of his fingers working on the farm. Then, when he was coming back from that shyt, the nikka broke another finger and it ended up being permanently bent. I started leading him to the door, then out into the hall. fukked up, right? We had to keep stopping because walking was causing him mad pain. He would gasp for air and clutch his side. It wasn’t fukked up though. Because of that he had a crazy grip on the ball and his curve had a special spin on it. Made it unhittable. I saw a gypsy cab down the block and waved one of my arms to flag it down. Sometimes it's our flaws that make us shine. He grabbed me under my chin and made me look in his eyes. You know it’s people who can’t walk but can dance, and it’s people who stutter but can sing clear? The cab pulled up in front of us and Lonnie kept rambling. Tells you something about the human brain. Or maybe the heart.
I took Lonnie to the hospital and then caught the train back to his apartment because he had left his 5-year-old daughter Shantel alone there. They were supposed to be spending Thanksgiving together. Dude hardly got to see her, and I knew that once her mother found out about this shyt, he was going to see her even less. When I walked into the apartment Shantel was on the floor in front of the tv with markers spread out around her, drawing and coloring in shapes on a piece of construction paper. I picked her up, hugged her, and told her she had to come with me to my mom’s place. I asked her what she was drawing. Flowers. She pointed at the coffee table, which had a vase of plastic roses on it. You see them? You see them? They always stay beautiful. I thought maybe I should let her know that’s how you could tell when something wasn’t real.
It was a real ill Fall, heading into a cold Winter for your boy. A couple weeks after that I was in bed when the phone rang; I was ducking this broad I’d stopped banging out, so I let the shyt go to my answering machine. A voice I recognized started talking. Dude had that voice when your heart isn't quite willing or able to process the news your mouth has to deliver. "Yo... it's Cory man... Rome... ayo… that nikka Rome… he dead man." Suddenly I knew how Mitch must’ve felt when he froze up in the middle of the street. I went numb as fukk. Damn. We had been shamefully out of touch except for those 3 days over break. That shyt hit me so hard, it didn’t actually hit me, if that makes sense. But trust, it kept hitting me for years after, on some time release vitamin shyt. That shyt still hits me. That shyt is hitting me right now.
Cory spelled out the horrific details on my machine, and as I listened I felt a hole open inside me that hasn’t ever closed. Rome had been at his homie’s house, sick as hell with a fever, passed out in the bedroom upstairs. Unbeknownst to Rome, his homie was perilously overdue on money he owed the biggest dealer in the city… that night he and his squad came to collect. They showed up at the house, tied up the 3 dudes in the living room, shot each one execution style. Rome heard the shyt, woke up out of his fever haze, fumbled around in the upstairs bedroom for the landline, and they heard him. According to Cory, you could hear Rome catch one to the head on the 911 tape; they bucked him as soon as the operator picked up. Sometimes I still try to imagine those harrowing final moments of my nikka’s life… alone in a dark bedroom, a long way from home, the sound of gunshot after gunshot downstairs and then footsteps like a drumline climbing the steps when they realize there’s someone else in the house… In the words of Andre on “Growing Old.” My stomach can't digest it even when I bless it...
I wish I could really go into detail about Rome's funeral, but it's too hard. His absentee father who made a big show about weeping and missing the son he never bothered to raise… His little brothers who were too young to understand the magnitude of things… His shorty who was pregnant with a son who would never see Rome in anything but inadequate photographs… How Rome had been my main nikka, yet I only found out his full name for the first time in the funeral program… My anger with God, with myself, with everyone because I couldn’t cry. Everything seemed too absurd to me instead of sad.
What I remember most clearly is Rome’s mother giving me a hug that seemed to stretch forever, then handing me the two things from Rome’s truck she said she knew he would want me to have: the Diamond D tape he borrowed from me, and his smurf. I’m not ashamed to say I’m tearing up right now typing this shyt. I remember that after we embraced, when she turned and walked back to be with her family, the fact of her dignity stayed with me, and it hung like a phantom around me long after we hugged. I can feel it now, even.
I copped an Amtrak ticket back home for Thanksgiving, which left me with $75 to my name. I knew I had to be careful with that money, because the train station was half an hour from campus, and if I wanted to get back I’d need about $25 for the cab. It used to be that Rome would pick me up whenever I took the train, so I didn’t have to worry. Those days were over.
Late on Thanksgiving a random cat rang my mom’s phone and was like if you want to see your brother Lonnie alive again, you need to come get him. Then the voice gave an address in Harlem, over by the Wagner projects, and hung up. My moms started crying like shyt. She gave me the address and I went out looking for my favorite uncle.
East Harlem wasn’t a fun place to walk through late at night. I had to go past where Dapper Dan’s used to be, then under the bridge on Park where mad hookers and fiends were… At the time I couldn’t see the Harlem I knew was disappearing even more rapidly than I could've imagined: that in another 7 years 125th wouldn’t even have a hint of its old life to it; that vendors and bootleggers would get harassed out of existence; that the iconic eateries and record shops of my youth would be forced to close; that the people who used to show up on tour buses to eat at Sylvia's and gawk at how the other half lived would soon show up in moving vans and turn Harlem out with gentrification. That across from the Jackie Robinson projects, in front of the big ass wall that had EACH ONE TEACH ONE graffittied across it for years, where we would play taps until like 2 or 3 in the morning because there were no lights on the basketball court, I’d attend a block memorial for Skoob after he’d been shot and killed too. You really never see what’s coming; sometimes when people ask me what I think life is, I say a perpetual ambush.
I found my uncle in a rundown, abandoned brownstone that had been turned into a crackhouse. I bet that place costs at least 4 grand a month to live in these days. fukking New York City. He was in a small room that was cold as fukk; the one light source in the entire building was a lamp in the room, and it was so bright I had to squint to see anything. I had to step over a styrofoam Chinese takeout box, some chicken bones, shards of glass from a Ballantine Ale bottle that it turned out had been cracked over my uncle’s head. Lonnie was in the corner by a broken radiator looking like a sheet of looseleaf paper someone crumpled into a ball and tossed there. I saw blood running down his head and soaking through the side of his t-shirt. I knelt over him and shook him to make sure he was still alive. Dude rolled over, looked in my face, recognized me, and asked in a raspy ass voice Who had the best curveball of all time? Say what? I’m turning around to make sure whoever left my uncle like this isn’t coming back, worried he’s going to bleed out, and this nikka is asking me about baseball? I tried to get him to his feet, but he waved me off. You heard me nikka; answer the question. I'm looking at him like he's out his damned mind. Finally, I said: Dwight. Dwight, huh? Yeah motherfukker, Doc Gooden. He pushed himself against the wall so he had some support, and I could see he’d been stabbed real bad in his side. He was talking between shallow breaths, and his words came slow and spaced out. Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown was the best curveball pitcher of all time. I helped him to his feet finally, and when he leaned against me I felt all his weight. The nikka lost one of his fingers working on the farm. Then, when he was coming back from that shyt, the nikka broke another finger and it ended up being permanently bent. I started leading him to the door, then out into the hall. fukked up, right? We had to keep stopping because walking was causing him mad pain. He would gasp for air and clutch his side. It wasn’t fukked up though. Because of that he had a crazy grip on the ball and his curve had a special spin on it. Made it unhittable. I saw a gypsy cab down the block and waved one of my arms to flag it down. Sometimes it's our flaws that make us shine. He grabbed me under my chin and made me look in his eyes. You know it’s people who can’t walk but can dance, and it’s people who stutter but can sing clear? The cab pulled up in front of us and Lonnie kept rambling. Tells you something about the human brain. Or maybe the heart.
I took Lonnie to the hospital and then caught the train back to his apartment because he had left his 5-year-old daughter Shantel alone there. They were supposed to be spending Thanksgiving together. Dude hardly got to see her, and I knew that once her mother found out about this shyt, he was going to see her even less. When I walked into the apartment Shantel was on the floor in front of the tv with markers spread out around her, drawing and coloring in shapes on a piece of construction paper. I picked her up, hugged her, and told her she had to come with me to my mom’s place. I asked her what she was drawing. Flowers. She pointed at the coffee table, which had a vase of plastic roses on it. You see them? You see them? They always stay beautiful. I thought maybe I should let her know that’s how you could tell when something wasn’t real.
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Preacher Man (continued)
I went with my mom to see Lonnie in the hospital the day before I had to go back to school, and I gave him my last $40, because I knew he was broke and was going to need money for a meal when he got out. When I got on the Amtrak the next morning, I figured someone else would be getting off at my stop to go back to campus, and I could catch a ride with him/her. It was a stupid ass plan, but it was all my broke ass had. 14 hours later, I was alone on a side street late at night, with no idea of my next move. I stood for a long time thinking, coming up with nothing, asking God to send me some kind of minor miracle. fukk that shyt God, you owe me that much. After a while I started walking with my two bags, and in 15 minutes I was near the on-ramp for the highway. A Volvo slowed as it was approaching the ramp and the driver rolled down his window. He was an old white guy. You okay? I’m a student. I lost my wallet. I’m trying to get to the university. He looked me over and I could tell he was weighing the risks. Finally he said I’m heading that way… I’ll give you a ride.
When I plopped down in his backseat I felt exhausted. The dimensions of the world felt loose as a dreamscape. I had never hitchhiked in my life, but I was too worn out to give a fukk about whether it was a bad idea to get in a car with a stranger. He had the radio on one of those AM talk stations, and I drifted off into my thoughts while a monotone voice delivered the news of the day. I was thinking about Rome, Mitch, my uncle Lonnie; life, death, God. Around 20 minutes later we pulled off the highway and onto a road, and a car going in the opposite direction passed us with its brights on; when the sudden burst of light poured into the Volvo I could see myself in the rearview mirror, and I had tears streaming down my face. The dude driving the car saw it too, and he turned the radio off – it was an oddly respectful gesture, like he was giving me some peace or something. The car was suddenly so silent that it seemed overtaken by a mournful hush, and I started bawling.
I hadn’t cried when I heard Cory on my answering machine, or at Rome’s funeral, but I guess I finally cracked. I cried in that backseat because I'd chased an abstract basketball dream to a strange land that had ended up being a spiritual and social wilderness; I cried because the world had tracked me down to show me its worst, and I knew that somehow I was going to have to find a way to keep trudging along; I cried because I knew I was going to drop out of college and go back to New York City as another sad statistic; I cried because Rome's mother, a weary, round-faced woman who had to bury her oldest son and then go back to raising 3 others, had such tenderness in her eyes when she handed me Rome’s smurf; I cried because I saw my childhood Superman crumpled up like a paper ball in a low rent crackhouse, with blood leaking out of him; I cried because for the first time since Lonnie taught me to hit a curve, I had lost the ability to believe in what I couldn't see.
Most of all I cried because so many black men in America died young or saw their hearts and souls age prematurely, and I finally understood how Stevie Wonder knew all that weariness when he sang that one song; I cried because historically it seemed just about all black music - shyt... black life, period - was about finding a way to distill a tiny bit of happiness from unspeakable misery.
That’s Mitch’s story, Rome’s story, Lonnie’s story, my story. That’s the story of the beginning of the end of my time at that university. There’s no neat bow to tie on it, because that’s not how life works. Right now, after typing all this out, I have the feeling of being 3 places at once: in my bed, feeling the chill of early morning through the window; in the back of Bessie the thirdhand Cadillac, laughing with my little cousins while we ride to Queens; in the backseat of that kind stranger's Volvo, bawling my eyes out.
One of the thoughts I’m left with is whether emptiness is more about what we lost or what we never had? Whether the tragedy is that there never will be a “place in the sun" like Stevie sang about, or that maybe there used to be and we didn’t realize we were there until it was gone – until, as Outkast put it, fat titties turned to teardrops and fat ass turned to flab.
I’m wondering whether I should even post this shyt, because it’s all factual, and it’s so deeply personal. fukk it, I’ll post it in a minute. Right now I’m looking out the window and imagining what my place in the sun would look like. There would be potato salad and oxtails wrapped in tinfoil, smelling good as hell; Blue Ballys with the outfit to match for all my nikkas; a big ass smurf in the middle of town square hitting the Heisman pose; Rome in his sun-kissed lowrider truck with the rims shimmering, the sounds of Diamond D’s first album spreading out in all directions from his crisp ass stereo system; Lonnie looking strong and healthy and handsome, teaching everyone how to see the curveballs life throws at us so we never strike out; people who couldn’t walk would be dancing, and people who stuttered would be singing, and our flaws really would make us shine; there would even be Mitch flashing that dumb ass Tony The Tiger smile of his, saying dere it is, daddeh... and Shantel would be pointing at everyone and everything like You see them? You see them? They always stay beautiful.
I went with my mom to see Lonnie in the hospital the day before I had to go back to school, and I gave him my last $40, because I knew he was broke and was going to need money for a meal when he got out. When I got on the Amtrak the next morning, I figured someone else would be getting off at my stop to go back to campus, and I could catch a ride with him/her. It was a stupid ass plan, but it was all my broke ass had. 14 hours later, I was alone on a side street late at night, with no idea of my next move. I stood for a long time thinking, coming up with nothing, asking God to send me some kind of minor miracle. fukk that shyt God, you owe me that much. After a while I started walking with my two bags, and in 15 minutes I was near the on-ramp for the highway. A Volvo slowed as it was approaching the ramp and the driver rolled down his window. He was an old white guy. You okay? I’m a student. I lost my wallet. I’m trying to get to the university. He looked me over and I could tell he was weighing the risks. Finally he said I’m heading that way… I’ll give you a ride.
When I plopped down in his backseat I felt exhausted. The dimensions of the world felt loose as a dreamscape. I had never hitchhiked in my life, but I was too worn out to give a fukk about whether it was a bad idea to get in a car with a stranger. He had the radio on one of those AM talk stations, and I drifted off into my thoughts while a monotone voice delivered the news of the day. I was thinking about Rome, Mitch, my uncle Lonnie; life, death, God. Around 20 minutes later we pulled off the highway and onto a road, and a car going in the opposite direction passed us with its brights on; when the sudden burst of light poured into the Volvo I could see myself in the rearview mirror, and I had tears streaming down my face. The dude driving the car saw it too, and he turned the radio off – it was an oddly respectful gesture, like he was giving me some peace or something. The car was suddenly so silent that it seemed overtaken by a mournful hush, and I started bawling.
I hadn’t cried when I heard Cory on my answering machine, or at Rome’s funeral, but I guess I finally cracked. I cried in that backseat because I'd chased an abstract basketball dream to a strange land that had ended up being a spiritual and social wilderness; I cried because the world had tracked me down to show me its worst, and I knew that somehow I was going to have to find a way to keep trudging along; I cried because I knew I was going to drop out of college and go back to New York City as another sad statistic; I cried because Rome's mother, a weary, round-faced woman who had to bury her oldest son and then go back to raising 3 others, had such tenderness in her eyes when she handed me Rome’s smurf; I cried because I saw my childhood Superman crumpled up like a paper ball in a low rent crackhouse, with blood leaking out of him; I cried because for the first time since Lonnie taught me to hit a curve, I had lost the ability to believe in what I couldn't see.
Most of all I cried because so many black men in America died young or saw their hearts and souls age prematurely, and I finally understood how Stevie Wonder knew all that weariness when he sang that one song; I cried because historically it seemed just about all black music - shyt... black life, period - was about finding a way to distill a tiny bit of happiness from unspeakable misery.
That’s Mitch’s story, Rome’s story, Lonnie’s story, my story. That’s the story of the beginning of the end of my time at that university. There’s no neat bow to tie on it, because that’s not how life works. Right now, after typing all this out, I have the feeling of being 3 places at once: in my bed, feeling the chill of early morning through the window; in the back of Bessie the thirdhand Cadillac, laughing with my little cousins while we ride to Queens; in the backseat of that kind stranger's Volvo, bawling my eyes out.
One of the thoughts I’m left with is whether emptiness is more about what we lost or what we never had? Whether the tragedy is that there never will be a “place in the sun" like Stevie sang about, or that maybe there used to be and we didn’t realize we were there until it was gone – until, as Outkast put it, fat titties turned to teardrops and fat ass turned to flab.
I’m wondering whether I should even post this shyt, because it’s all factual, and it’s so deeply personal. fukk it, I’ll post it in a minute. Right now I’m looking out the window and imagining what my place in the sun would look like. There would be potato salad and oxtails wrapped in tinfoil, smelling good as hell; Blue Ballys with the outfit to match for all my nikkas; a big ass smurf in the middle of town square hitting the Heisman pose; Rome in his sun-kissed lowrider truck with the rims shimmering, the sounds of Diamond D’s first album spreading out in all directions from his crisp ass stereo system; Lonnie looking strong and healthy and handsome, teaching everyone how to see the curveballs life throws at us so we never strike out; people who couldn’t walk would be dancing, and people who stuttered would be singing, and our flaws really would make us shine; there would even be Mitch flashing that dumb ass Tony The Tiger smile of his, saying dere it is, daddeh... and Shantel would be pointing at everyone and everything like You see them? You see them? They always stay beautiful.
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dennis roadman
nuclear war in my bag
incrediblejust gonna drop this here to go along with the oxtail. actually knew this before i knew it was a stevie song
reminds me of parts of my life where nothing went right and everything on the horizon seemed desolate
Lewis Black
Superstar
R.i.p Rome 
Youhadasparkwhenustarted
Superstar
Jesus, reading that made me reflect on my own life, my own loss, and the demons I've battled;some I'm still battling this day. Thinking about my favorite uncle getting locked up when I was kid for possessing and distributing drugs, and not understanding why he was taken; Seeing him released years later, only to see him defeated by the seemingly impossible task of finding a job as a convicted felon with a GED, falling to the allures of easy money, just to get locked up again for possession. All the while simultaneously destroying the mystique that I had built up of him, leaving me to cope with the depression and the wave of cynicism that overcame me afterwards. And my mother who I lost a few years ago, who lost her battles with here own vices years ago, vices she turned to because she was unable to deal with the mental ramifications of being abused and tossed from foster home to foster home (your lines about mental illness in the black community hit me HARD, and was such an astute observation about how it's treated, especially the bit about the the lack of empathy that coincides with it) because she lost her parents-my grandparents- in a car accident that my mother bore witness too in the backseat of the car; and seeing how it all haunted her and made her turn to alcohol. And having one of my best friends, one of the wittiest,most naturally intelligent, underachieving ass nikkas I've ever met, get killed because of some street shyt, at an age before any of us had a chance to find out who we really were, and how that shyt still doesn't seem fair. I feel like I can relate to your story a bit, hence why I'm opening up more than I ever thought I would on a message board, and I know how these pains literally fester inside of you, never to go away, popping up whenever you're vulnerable or just at random sometimes. They only fukking thing you can do is cope and learn to live with the pain, because it never goes away no matter how much you try to trick yourself into believing it doesn't hurt.
I didn't mean to carry on, I don't want to make anything about this thread about me, and I can't tell it like you tell it, but fam, when I started relating to your story I got touched b, I had to get some of this shyt out. when you first started this thread, I didn't expect at any point I would come out of this thread feeling like this...
I didn't mean to carry on, I don't want to make anything about this thread about me, and I can't tell it like you tell it, but fam, when I started relating to your story I got touched b, I had to get some of this shyt out. when you first started this thread, I didn't expect at any point I would come out of this thread feeling like this...
