Читать книгу Gun Baby Gun - Iain Overton - Страница 14

6. THE CRIMINALS

A surprising video and gangland killings – El Salvador – meeting ‘the Shooter’ and drinking to the Beast – tea with a spook – secret graves and grave secrets – Holland and Ecuador – personal trauma of guns recalled – memories of Papua New Guinea – a gunpoint mugging and hard justice seen

The video was of a New York that no longer exists. Mean streets against a dripping industrial grime. So far removed from today’s Manhattan’s chic and West Village bearded hipster irony, it wasn’t even New York. They called the song ‘Gotham Fucking City’. The three-minute, twenty-second video was the story of Paris Lane’s death – a suicide captured in song. A eulogy in gritty rap by the singers Smoke DZA and Joey Bada$$, with lyrics as hard as the story it was telling.

Life’s a gamble need my own pair of dice this time,

All I ask is for friends without parasitic minds,

But that’s as seldom as Paris city crimes.

The video told how Paris Lane had not killed himself in that New York lift lobby because of depression or demons or other silent assassins, but because of a drugs deal gone wrong. Having read the comments under Paris’s suicide video, I had searched some more and found this rap video. It was not a story I had visualised. Only the ending was familiar. The last frames in the music video showed the image of a young man stood before a closing lift, a gun in his mouth, but this scene was intercut with others: young thugs with guns seeking vengeance, lurking at the tower block’s doorway.

The hooded men were shown in the film being robbed twice. The first time Paris had seized their drugs. The second time he had denied them their chance at dispensing a brutal form of street justice. Perhaps Paris knew, schooled as he was on the city’s sidewalks, that he couldn’t get away with what he had done, so he chose a different road.

The comments below the online video were illuminating. ‘R.I.P. paradise he killed his self before everybody he robbed killed him first,’ someone had written. Underneath it another said: ‘Supposedly he wanted out of a gang and they were going to kill him so the last thing he did was say goodbye to his girl before leaving on his own terms.’

Perhaps it wasn’t a suicide at all. Not in the strictest sense, at least. Rather just the bloody ending of a gangland disagreement. Something that had gone so far south that the only way for Paris to find a way out was to put gunmetal in his mouth.

Truth is sometimes hard to see. It’s even harder when there’s a gun in the way.