I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (27 page)

When I was about eight years old, I was playing in the street with a couple of friends of mine. This dude who was in his early twenties came out of a nearby house. He went up to me, and I don’t know whether he was drunk or high. All I knew was that he was messed up. “I want you to touch my dick,” he told me.

I didn’t even know what that meant. “
What
? Boys don’t do that!”

“C’mon, touch my dick.”

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but I knew that it was
weird
. I ran away until I bumped into my pal Jerome, who was the same age as the drunk guy. I’d always do errands for him, going to get candy or passing his messages on to other people. “Hey, it’s my little homeboy!” Jerome said. “Slow down, man. Why you running?”

Only then did I feel safe. “Some guy just told me to touch his dick.”

“He said
what
?”

I told him the whole story of what just had happened. “I didn’t know what to do so I ran away.”

“Come with me.” Jerome brought me to a couple of his friends. “Tell them what you just told me.”

Now a whole posse made me lead them to where the dude was. Then they made me repeat what he had said to me. “That motherfucker’s lying,” the dude said.

“Listen, motherfucker,” Jerome told him. “He don’t even know what that means.
How the fuck would he even know how to lie about that shit
?”

Right in front of me, they started whupping his ass. The idea that somehow I shouldn’t watch what was going on never even entered
their heads. It was like a public trial, and I was the audience. They kept beating him and beating him and beating him.
They’re not stopping
, I realized.
I think they’re going to kill him
. By the time all those dudes were done, he was more dead than he was alive.

This kind of thing happened all the time. My sister got pregnant by a guy, and he wouldn’t acknowledge it—so a couple of dudes from my neighborhood beat the fuck out of her boyfriend. Now imagine if your whole community, what you consider your whole
world
, thinks like that. How many places can there be where we
all
see eye to eye?

When you witness violence as the norm, you grow to see it as the solution to your problems. When someone does something wrong, you don’t tell. You kick his ass. But maybe the guy whose ass you kicked thought
he
was right. Then he gets his friend and they kick
your
ass. Well, you’re not going to let these motherfuckers kick
your
ass. You get your friends and go after them. Now they’re outnumbered. To even the odds, someone grabs a knife. Where does this escalation lead to? Logically and inevitably, motherfuckers grab their guns—and they never let them go.

I
have been around guns my entire life. I will be around guns for the rest of my life. Any attempt to get guns off of the street is an impossibility—and a policy based on the impossible is a failure at best and counterproductive at worst. Guns have been a part of American culture since Washington’s troops brought their own pieces to the fray. Black Americans have been here since the very
beginning. We’ve been around guns long before we’ve been living in the ghetto.

When I was fourteen years old, I came home from school to find my cousins sawing a bunch of wood. “What are you guys doing?” I asked them.

They kept sawing and didn’t look up.
Hsss, hsss
. “Just building a room,” one eventually said.

“A
room
?”

Hsss, hsss
. “Yeah.”
Hsss, hsss
. “A room.”

“Who’s it for?”

Hsss, hsss
. “It’s for you, motherfucker.”

Sure enough, they built this little room for me outside of the main house, and that’s where I had to sleep from then on. Maybe my parents felt I was getting into trouble too much, maybe they were sick of my bullshit, maybe they wanted to ostracize me. I was never told what the plan was. I just knew what the
result
was, and that was
spectacular
: I was fourteen and basically had my own studio apartment. They made the space up and it was actually pretty damn cool. It had a carpet, a bed, and electricity. I had a fan for when it was hot, and a heater for when it was cold.

The setup was terrific except for one crucial thing: It didn’t have a bathroom. My parents locked the door at nine o’clock at night, and locked me out of the house in the process. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter if I had to pee. I just went to the peach tree that we had and pissed on that out of necessity. After a while, I started pissing on those peaches just out of spite. I knew exactly which fruit to aim for, too, since the low-hanging peaches at the bottom were the sweetest. Every Sunday my mother would make peach cobbler, and every Sunday I would never eat it because I knew I had pissed on the fruit. I won’t eat peach cobbler to this day.

That sort of solved the bathroom problem. There was a whole other problem that I had to deal with. Sleeping in that room by myself was
horrifying
. I was out there all alone. It doesn’t matter how tough you are: When you’re fourteen and you’re sleeping in complete isolation every night, it gets pretty creepy pretty quickly. They brought in another bed, and my brother Kevin started sleeping in that room with me. I was glad to have his company.

Unlike the main house, my room didn’t have a lock on it. It did have a sliding glass door, so every night I would put a stick between the door and the frame so no one could slide it open. The door was at the foot of Kevin’s bed. He couldn’t see through it when he was asleep, but from my bed I always had a perfect view of the outdoors.

One night there was a full moon, an especially bright one. I could see everything outside, and that’s how I watched a big, strange man come up to the glass door. To be fair, I don’t know if my imagination made him bigger or if he was just a big man. Whatever the case was, it wasn’t a good thing. The man looked to his right, then he looked to his left, and then he tried to open the door. Nobody could hear Kevin or me if there was any trouble, and this most certainly was trouble. There was no way the man could have seen me or anything else inside my room. I knew how dark it was from the outside. My heart was beating very fast. I didn’t want anything to happen to me or to my brother. Fortunately, I knew exactly what to do.

I grabbed my gun.

In the silent darkness, I chambered a round. Click
click
. The man heard the sound and he knew exactly what it meant.
Everyone
knows what that sound means. He turned around and walked off just like nothing had ever happened. After a minute, I took out the stick that was holding the sliding door closed and went outside in my boxers to look for the dude. With my little .25 in hand, I felt
safe—and I
was
safe. I never found the man, and it’s probably a good thing for both of us that I didn’t.

Even though I’m not a hunter, I grew up with guns and I always carry them. There is a tendency to put people in categories, and as a progressive I’m expected to be opposed to guns. But all we are is the sum total of our life experiences. Guns, to me, aren’t a political issue so much as they are a cultural issue. We live in a gun culture, and I grew up in a gun culture.

The first time I ever saw a gun was in fourth grade. This classmate of mine named Vincent had a cute .25 in a little box. He just showed it to us and nothing really came of it. It was a couple of years after that that I became aware of what that small metal weapon could do. A bunch of us were hanging out at the elementary school that was down the street from my house. It was dark one night, and all the kids were there drinking beer and talking shit.

This cat named Derek—who’s a preacher now—picked up this .357 Magnum and shot it three times in the air.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
It was the first time I’d ever heard a gun. The force of that sound was also the first time I’d ever
felt
a gun, because the power of that thing reverberated through the air. The shock waves alone were enough to scare me. I couldn’t get my head around what it would feel like if one of those bullets hit you. I went home right after that, jarred.

But I wouldn’t have to use my imagination about the power of guns for much longer. Up the block from me lived two brothers who used to get drunk all the time. Then they used to get drunk and
argue
all the time. Eventually, they would get drunk, argue, and shoot guns into the air all the time.

Everyone knows where this story is going.

They were brothers and they loved each other. One day, though, they got too drunk and too argumentative and too trigger-happy.
We didn’t see one brother accidentally kill the other brother. We simply saw the effects of him getting shot, and we saw the police and the ambulance come.

Now I had seen guns, I had felt their power, and I had seen their effects when used irresponsibly. It was in seventh grade that I first saw guns being used at their worst. There was a kid named Bradley who was a couple of years older than me. Bradley was this light-skinned dude with a lot of hair, and all the broads loved him. His ambition was to be an Eagle Scout. Bradley would go to scout meetings, and he wore a scout uniform. At the time he was a Life Scout or whatever the level is before you get your Eagle patch. I was obviously never meant to be any kind of scout, so I never really found out. But a ninth grader who is trying to be a scout is obviously on his way to becoming a pretty upstanding citizen.

I was playing ping-pong in my buddy Tommy’s garage when this other kid rolled up on a bike. “They shot Bradley,” he told us.

I couldn’t even believe it. “Bradley is
never
getting in trouble,” I blurted. “He’s a good dude.”

The kid shrugged. “That don’t matter. They got him.”

We followed the kid to where Bradley was still lying on the street. We got there way before the cops or the ambulance came, of course. We
never
had to worry about them coming to save nobody. I’ve never seen
that
happen. I saw Bradley there on the ground, struggling to breathe. The blood was everywhere. I would say that it looked “like a crime scene” but for the fact that it actually
was
a crime scene.

I quickly learned what had happened. These cats in my neighborhood always, always,
always
started shit. The previous Saturday had been no exception, and they’d been at a party with some Crips where they once again started shit. Cut to the present. They were
standing on a corner and some dudes pulled up—those same Crips. Everybody knew what time it was, so everybody ran. Everyone, that is, except Bradley. He was sitting on his bicycle, thinking he ain’t in it, so he didn’t flee. Those Crips pulled out a .30 and emptied a clip into him.

I watched Bradley lying there, and then he took this deep, long breath that I had never heard a person take before. It’s almost impossible to describe what that breath sounds like to someone who has never seen a person die. Decades later, I read a Stephen King novel and he mentioned that a character “expelled the last of his tidal breath.” That was what it like, a pulling in and a last push out just like the tide.

All the various ways that I’d seen cats with guns informed the way that I saw the world. I knew that it was better to have one than to not have one. The cats with them didn’t have to worry; the cats without them did. We used to always say that it was “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” We said that so often it was practically our version of “Have a nice day.”

It was when I was fifteen years old that I finally got a gun of my own. Even though it was only a little .25, I just wasn’t scared anymore. Not only wasn’t I scared, I wasn’t even
cautious
. I felt like I could do what I wanted, and that I could go where I wanted. I felt
powerful
. There was a different feeling with it in my pocket. When confronted with danger, everyone’s usual reaction is either fight or flight. Only for me, now there wasn’t no flight.

That same year, I was walking home when a car started to pull up alongside me. The driver cut his lights off and slowed down. I knew exactly what that was. The guy in the car was from a different
neighborhood and he started talking shit. Before I’d gotten my heater, I would have been running long before he rolled to a stop. Now I was still scared—but I was excited at the same time. I wanted to see what would happen. He got louder, and then I got louder. Quickly I said, “Nigga, I’ve got a piece.
Fuck
this.” I flashed my little .25, and he drove away. After that, I never was the same.