Читать книгу Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography - Mike Tyson - Страница 6

We were beefing with these guys called the Puma Boys. It was 1976 and I lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and these guys were from my neighborhood. At that time I was running with a Rutland Road crew called The Cats, a bunch of Caribbean guys from nearby Crown Heights. We were a burglary team and some of our gangster friends had an altercation with the Puma Boys, so we were going to the park to back them up. We normally didn’t deal with guns, but these were our friends so we stole a bunch of shit: some pistols, a .357 Magnum, and a long M1 rifle with a bayonet attached from World War I. You never knew what you’d find when you broke into people’s houses.

So we’re walking through the streets holding our guns and nobody runs up on us, no cops are around to stop us. We didn’t even have a bag to put the big rifle in, so we just took turns carrying it every few blocks.

“Yo, there he goes!” my friend Haitian Ron said. “The guy with the red Pumas and the red mock neck.” Ron had spotted the guy we were after. When we started running, the huge crowd in the park opened up like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was a good thing they did, because, boom, one of my friends opened fire. Everybody scrambled when they heard the gun.

We kept walking, and I realized that some of the Puma Boys had taken cover between the parked cars in the street. I had the M1 rifle and I turned around quickly to see this big guy with his pistol pointed towards me.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said to me. It was my older brother, Rodney. “Get the fuck out of here.”

I just kept walking and left the park and went home. I was ten years old.

I often say that I was the bad seed in the family, but when I think about it, I was really a meek kid for most of my childhood. I was born in Cumberland Hospital in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York, on June 30, 1966. My earliest memories were of being in the hospital – I was always sick with lung problems. One time, to get some attention, I put my thumb in some Drano and then put it in my mouth. They rushed me to the hospital. I remember my godmother gave me a toy gun while I was there, but I think I broke it right away.

I don’t know much about my family background. My mother, Lorna Mae, was a New Yorker but she was born down south in Virginia. My brother once went down to visit the area where my mother grew up and he said there was nothing but trailer parks there. So I’m really a trailer park nigga. My grandmother Bertha and my great-aunt used to work for this white lady back in the thirties at a time when most whites wouldn’t have blacks working for them, and Bertha and her sister were so appreciative that they both named their daughters Lorna after the white lady. Then Bertha used the money from her job to send her kids to college.

I may have gotten the family knockout gene from my grandma. My mother’s cousin Lorna told me that the husband of the family Bertha worked for kept beating on his wife, and Bertha didn’t like it. And she was a big woman.

“Don’t you put your hands on her,” she told him.

He took it as a joke, and she threw a punch and knocked him on his ass. The next day he saw Bertha and said, “Well, how are you doing, Miss Price?” He stopped hitting on his wife and became a different man.

Everybody liked my mom. When I was born, she was working as a prison matron at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, but she was studying to be a teacher. She had completed three years of college when she met my dad. He got sick so she had to drop out of school to care for him. For a person that well educated, she didn’t have very good taste in men.

I don’t know much about my father’s family. In fact, I didn’t really know my father much at all. Or the man I was told was my father. On my birth certificate it said my father was Percel Tyson. The only problem was that my brother, my sister, and I never met this guy.

We were all told that our biological father was Jimmy “Curlee” Kirkpatrick Jr. But he was barely in the picture. As time went on I heard rumors that Curlee was a pimp and that he used to extort ladies. Then, all of a sudden, he started calling himself a deacon in the church. That’s why every time I hear someone referring to themselves as ­reverend, I say “Reverend-slash-Pimp.” When you really think about it, these religious guys have the charisma of a pimp. They can get anybody in the church to do whatever they want. So to me it’s always “Yeah, Bishop-slash-Pimp,” “Reverend Ike-slash-Pimp.”

Curlee would drive over to where we stayed, periodically. He and my mother never spoke to each other, he’d just beep the horn and we’d just go down and meet him. The kids would pile into his Cadillac and we thought we were going on an excursion to Coney Island or Brighton Beach, but he’d just drive around for a few minutes, pull back up to our apartment building, give us some money, give my sister a kiss, and shake me and my brother’s hands and that was it. Maybe I’d see him in another year.

My first neighborhood was Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. It was a decent working-class neighborhood then. Everybody knew one another. Things were pretty normal, but they weren’t calm. Every Friday and Saturday, it was like Vegas in the house. My mom would have a card party and invite all her girlfriends, many of whom were in the vice business. She would send her boyfriend Eddie to buy a case of liquor and they’d water it down and sell shots. Every fourth hand of cards the winner had to throw into the pot so the house made money. My mom would cook some wings. My brother remembers that, besides the hookers, there’d be gangsters, detectives. The whole gamut was there.

When my mother had some money, she’d splurge. She was a great facilitator and she’d always have her girlfriends over and a bunch of men too. Everybody would be drinking, drinking, drinking. She didn’t smoke marijuana but all her friends did, so she’d supply them with the drugs. She just smoked cigarettes, Kool 100’s. My mother’s friends were prostitutes, or at least women who would sleep with men for money. No high-level or even street-level stuff. They would drop off their kids at our house before they went to meet their men. When they’d come to pick up their kids, they might have blood on their clothes, so my mom would help them clean up. I came home one day and there was a white baby in the house. What the fuck is this shit? I thought. But that’s just what my life was like.

My brother Rodney was five years older than I was so we didn’t have much in common. He’s a weird dude. We’re black guys from the ghetto and he was like a scientist – he had all these test tubes, was always experimenting. He even had coin collections. I was, like, “White people do this stuff.”

He once went to the chemistry lab at Pratt Institute, a nearby college, and got some chemicals to do an experiment. A few days later when he went out, I snuck into his room, started adding water to his test tubes, and I blew out the whole back window and started a fire in his room. He had to put a lock on his door after that.

I fought with him a lot, but it was just typical brother stuff. Except for the day that I cut him with a razor. He had beaten me up for some reason and then he had gone to sleep. My sister, Denise, and I were watching one of those doctor-type soap operas and they were doing an operation. “We could do that and Rodney could be the patient. I can be the doctor and you can be the nurse,” I told my sister. So we rolled up his sleeve and got to work on his left arm. “Scalpel,” I said, and my sister handed me a razor. I cut him a bit and he started bleeding. “We need the alcohol, nurse,” I said, and she passed it to me and I poured it onto his cuts. He woke up screaming and yelling and chased us around the house. I hid behind my mom. He still has those slices to this day.

We had some good times together too. Once, my brother and I were walking down Atlantic Avenue and he said, “Let’s go to the doughnut factory.” He had stolen some doughnuts from that place before and I guess he wanted to show me he could do it again. So we walked by and the gate was open. He went in and got a few boxes of doughnuts, but something happened and the gate closed and he was stuck in there and the security guards started coming. So he handed me the doughnuts and I ran home with them. My sister and I were sitting on our stoop and cramming down those doughnuts and our faces were white with the powder. Our mom was standing next to us, talking to her neighbor.

“My son aced the test to get into Brooklyn Tech,” she boasted to her friend. “He is such a remarkable student, he’s the best pupil in his class.”

Just then a cop car drove up and Rodney was in it. They were going to drop him off at home, but he heard our mother bragging about what a good son he was and he told the cops to keep going. They took him straight to Spofford, a juvenile detention center. My sister and I happily finished off those doughnuts.

I spent most of my time with my sister Denise. She was two years older than me and she was beloved by everybody in the neighborhood. If she was your friend, she was your best friend. But if she was your enemy, go across the street. We made mud pies; we watched wrestling and karate movies and went to the store with our mother. It was a nice existence, but then when I was just seven years old, our world got turned upside down.

There was a recession and my mom lost her job and we got evicted out of our nice apartment in Bed-Stuy. They came and took all our furniture and put it outside on the sidewalk. The three of us kids had to sit down on it and protect it so that nobody took it while my mother went to find a spot for us to stay. I was sitting there, and some kids from the neighborhood came up and said, “Mike, why is your furniture out here, Mike?” We just told them we were moving. Then some neighbors saw us out there and brought some plates of food down for us.

We wound up in Brownsville. You could totally feel the difference. The people were louder, more aggressive. It was a very horrific, tough, and gruesome kind of place. My mother wasn’t used to hanging around those particular types of aggressive black people and she appeared to be intimidated, and so were my brother and sister and me. Everything was hostile, there was never a subtle moment there. Cops were always driving by with their sirens on; ambulances always coming to pick up somebody; guns always going off, people getting stabbed, windows being broken. One day my brother and I even got robbed right in front of our apartment building. We used to watch these guys shooting it out with one another. It was like something out of an old ­Edward G. Robinson movie. We would watch and say, “Wow, this is happening in real life.”

The whole neighborhood was also a hotbed of lust. A lot of people there seemed to be uninhibited. It wasn’t uncommon to hear people talking on the street: “Suck my dick,” “Eat my pussy.” It was a different kind of environment from my old neighborhood. One day a guy pulled me off the street, took me into an abandoned building, and tried to molest me. I never really felt safe on those streets. After a while, we weren’t even safe in our apartment. My mom’s parties ended when we got to Brownsville. My mother made some friends, but she wasn’t in the mix like she was in Bed-Stuy. So she started drinking heavily. She never got another job, and I remember waiting in these long lines with my mother down at the welfare center. We’d wait and wait for hours and then we’d be right up front, and it was five o’clock and they’d close the fucking shit on you, just like in the movies.

We kept getting evicted in Brownsville too. That happened quite a few times. Every now and then we’d get a decent spot, crashing for a short time with some friends or a boyfriend of my mother’s. But for the most part, each time we moved, the conditions got worse – from being poor to being serious poor to being fucked-up poor. Eventually we lived in condemned buildings, with no heat, no water, maybe some electricity. In the wintertime all four of us slept in the same bed to keep warm. We’d stay there until a guy would come and kick us out. My mother would do whatever she had to do to keep a roof over our heads. That often meant sleeping with someone that she really didn’t care for. That was just the way it was.

She’d never take us to a homeless shelter, so we’d just move into another abandoned building. It was so traumatic, but what could you do? This is what I hate about myself, what I learned from my mother – there was nothing you wouldn’t do to survive.

One of my earliest memories is of welfare workers coming into the apartment to look for men under the bed. In the summertime, we’d go get the free lunches and free breakfasts. I’d tell them, “I got nine brothers and sisters,” so they’d pack more. I’d feel like I just went to war and got a bounty. I was so proud that I got food for the house. Can you imagine that bullshit? I’d open the refrigerator and see the baloney sandwich and the orange and the little carton of milk. Twenty of them. I’d invite people over. “Do you need something to eat, brother? Are you hungry? We have food.” We were acting like we paid for this with hard-earned money. It was a free lunch.

I was a momma’s boy when I was young. I always slept with my mother. My sister and brother had their own rooms, but I slept with my mother until I was fifteen. One time, my mother slept with a man while I was in the bed with her. She probably thought I was asleep. I’m sure it had an impact on me, but that’s just how it was. I got booted to the couch when her boyfriend Eddie Gillison came into the picture. They had a really dysfunctional love affair. I guess that’s why my own relationships were so strange. They’d drink, fight, and fuck, break up, then drink, fight, and fuck some more. They were truly in love, even if it was a really sick love.

Eddie was a short, compact guy from South Carolina who was a worker at an industrial Laundromat factory. He didn’t get too far in school, and by the time my brother and sister got to fourth grade, he really couldn’t help them with their homework. Eddie was a controlling guy, but my mother was a very controlling woman, so all hell would break loose on a routine basis. There was always some kind of fight, and the cops would come, and they’d go, “Hey, buddy, walk around the block.” Sometimes we’d all get in on the fighting. One day my mother and Eddie were having a bad argument and they got physical. I jumped in between them trying to defend my mom and I was trying to restrain him and, whop, he slugged me in my stomach and I went down. I was, like, Oh, man, I can’t believe this shit. I was just a little kid! That’s why I’ve never put my hands on any of my kids. I don’t want them thinking I’m a monster when they get old. But back then, beating on a kid was just the way it was. Nobody cared. Now it’s murder, you go to jail.

Eddie and my mother fought over anything – other men or women, money, control. Eddie was no angel. When my mother had female friends over and they’d all get drunk and she’d pass out, he’d fuck her friends. And then they’d fight. There was really some barbaric stuff, going at each other with weapons and cursing, “You motherfucker, fuck you” and “You nigga, suck my …” We’d be screaming, “Mommy, stop, no!” Once, when I was seven years old, they were fighting and Eddie punched her and knocked her gold tooth out. My mother started boiling up a large pot of water. She told my brother and sister to get under the quilt, but I was so mesmerized watching my wrestling program on the TV that I didn’t hear her. My mother was so slick, she walked by and nothing happened, then she came back into the room and by then my sister and brother were prepared, they were hiding under the quilt. Eddie was sitting right next to me, and the next thing I heard was this boom and the pot with the boiling water hit Eddie in the head. A little bit of the water splashed on me. It felt like it weighed a ton.

“Aaggghhh!” Eddie ran screaming out the door into the hallway. I ran right after him. He turned around and grabbed me. “Oh, baby, baby, that bitch got you too?” he said. “Yeah, the bitch got me, ah, ah, the bitch got me!” We brought him back in the room and took his shirt off, and his neck and his back and the side of his face were covered in blistery bubbles. He looked like a reptile. So we put him on the floor in front of the little window air conditioner, and my sister sat down next to him. She took a lighter and sterilized the end of a needle and then burst the blisters, one by one. My sister and I were both crying, and I gave him a quarter to cheer him up.

When I think about it, I always thought of my mother as the victim in most situations, and Eddie did beat on her. I’m sure the lady lib would think that her reaction was great, but I thought, How could you do that to somebody who is supposed to be your boyfriend? It made me realize that my mother was no Mother Teresa. She did some serious stuff and he still stayed with her. In fact, he went to the store to buy her some liquor after she burned him. So you see, he rewarded her for it. That’s why I was so sexually dysfunctional.

That is the kind of life I grew up in. People in love cracking their heads and bleeding like dogs. They love each other but they’re stabbing each other. Holy shit, I was scared to death of my family in the house. I’m growing up around tough women, women who fight men. So I didn’t think fighting a woman was taboo because the women I knew would kill you. You had to fight them, because if you didn’t, they’d slice you or shoot you. Or else they’d bring some men to take advantage of you and beat you up, because they thought you were a punk.

If I was scared to be in the house, I was also scared to go outside. By then, I was going to public school and that was a nightmare. I was a pudgy kid, very shy, almost effeminate shy, and I spoke with a lisp. The kids used to call me “Little Fairy Boy” because I was always hanging out with my sister, but my mother had told me that I had to stay around Denise because she was older than me and had to watch me. They also called me “Dirty Ike” or “Dirty Motherfucker” because I didn’t know about hygiene back then. We didn’t have hot water to shower in, and if the gas wasn’t on, we couldn’t even boil water. My mother tried to teach me about it, but I still didn’t do a very good job. She used to take soap and fill a bucket up with hot water and wash me. But when you’re a young kid, you don’t care about hygiene. Eventually I’d learn it in the streets from the older kids. They told me about Brut and Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin.

My school was right around the corner from our apartment, but sometimes my mother would be passed out from drinking the night before and wouldn’t walk me to school. It was then that the kids would always hit me and kick me. They were, like, “Get the fuck out of here, nigga, you, like, nasty motherfucker.” I would constantly get abused. They’d punch me in the face and I would run. We would go to school and these people would pick on us, then we would go home and they’d pull out guns and rob us for whatever little change we had. That was hard-core, young kids robbing us right in our own apartment ­building.

Having to wear glasses in the first grade was a real turning point in my life. My mother had me tested and it turned out I was nearsighted, so she made me get glasses. They were so bad. One day I was leaving school at lunchtime to go home, and I had some meatballs from the cafeteria wrapped up in the aluminum to keep them hot. This guy came up to me and said, “Hey, you got any money?” I said, “No.” He started picking my pockets and searching me, and he tried to take my fucking meatballs. I was resisting, going, “No, no, no!” I would let the bullies take my money, but I never let them take my food. I was hunched over like a human shield, protecting my meatballs. So he started hitting me in the head and then took my glasses and put them down the gas tank of a truck. I ran home, but he didn’t get my meatballs. I should have clobbered those guys, but I was so scared because those guys were so brazen and bold that I just figured they must know something I didn’t. “Don’t beat me up, leave me alone, stop!” I’d say. I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying. That’s a wild feeling, being that helpless. You never ever forget that feeling. The day that guy took my glasses and put them in that gas tank was the last day I went to school. That was the end of my ­formal education. I was seven years old and I just never went back to class.

After that, I would go to school to eat breakfast and then leave. I’d walk around the block for a couple of hours. Then I’d go back for lunch and leave. When school was out, I’d go home. One day during the spring of 1974, three guys came towards me on the street and started patting my pockets. “Got any money?” they asked. I told them no. They said, “All the money we find, we keep.” So they started turning my pockets out but I didn’t have anything. Then they said, “Where are you going? Do you want to fly with us?”

“What’s that?” I said.

So we walked over to the school, and they had me climb the fence and throw some plastic milk crates over to them. We started walking a few blocks and then they told me to go into an abandoned building.

“Whoa, I don’t know,” I hesitated. I was one wimpy little guy against three. But we walked in and then they said, “Go to the roof, Shorty.” I didn’t know if they were going to kill me. We climbed up to the roof and I saw a little box with some pigeons in it. These guys were building a pigeon coop. So I became their little gofer, their smuck-slave. Soon I found out that when the birds flew, they often landed on some other roof, because they were lazy and in bad condition. I’d have to go downstairs, see which roof they landed on, figure out a way into that building and then go up on that roof and scare the birds off. All day I chased the birds, but I thought that was pretty fun. I liked being around the birds. I even liked going to the pet store to buy their seed. And these guys were tough guys and they kind of liked me for being their gofer. My whole life I had felt like a misfit, but here on the roof I felt like I was home. This was what I was supposed to do.

The next morning I went back to the building. They were on the roof and saw me coming and started throwing bricks at me. “Motherfucker, what are you doing over here? You trying to steal our fucking birds?” one of the guys said. Whoa, I thought this was my new home.

“No, no, no,” I said. “I just wanted to know if you guys need me to go to the store for you or chase your birds.”

“Are you serious?” he said. “Get up here, Shorty.” And they sent me to the store to buy them cigarettes. They were a bunch of ruthless street guys, but I didn’t mind helping them because the birds enthralled me. It was really cool to see a couple of hundred pigeons flying around in circles in the sky and then coming back down to a roof.

Flying pigeons was a big sport in Brooklyn. Everyone from Mafia dons to little ghetto kids did it. It’s unexplainable; it just gets in your blood. I learned how to handle them, learned the characteristics of them. Then it became something that I became somewhat of a master of, and I took pride in being so good at it. Everybody would let their pigeons fly at the same time, and the name of the game was to try and catch the other guys’ pigeons. It was like racing horses. Once it’s in your blood, you never stop. Wherever I lived from that day on, I always built me a coop and had pigeons.

One day we were on the roof dealing with the pigeons and an older guy came up. His name was Barkim and he was a friend of one of these guys’ brothers. When he realized his friend wasn’t there, he told us to tell him to meet him at a jam at the rec center in our neighborhood that night. The jams were like teenage dances, except this was no Archie and Veronica shit. At night they even changed the name of the place from the rec center to The Sagittarius. All the players and hustlers would go there, the neighborhood guys who robbed houses, pickpocketed, snatched chains, and perpetrated credit card fraud. It was a den of iniquity.

So that night I went to the center. I was seven years old, and I didn’t know anything about dressing up. I didn’t know you were supposed to go home and take a shower and change your clothes and dress to impress and then go to the club. That’s what the other guys who were handling pigeons did. But I went straight to the center from the pigeon coops, wearing the same stinky clothes with all this bird shit on me. I thought the guys would be there and they’d accept me as one of their own, because I was chasing these fucking birds off of these ­buildings for them. But I walked in and those guys went, “What’s that smell? Look at this dirty, stinking motherfucker.” The whole place started laughing and teasing me. I didn’t know what to do; it was such a traumatizing experience, everybody picking on me. I was crying, but I was laughing too because I wanted to fit in. I guess Barkim saw the way I was dressed and took pity on me. He came up to me and said, “Yo, Shorty. Get the fuck out of here. Meet me back at the roof eight in the morning tomorrow.”

The next morning I was there right on time. Barkim came up and started lecturing me. “You can’t be going out looking like a motherfucking bum in the street. What the fuck are you doing, man? We’re moneymakers.” He was talking fast and I was trying to comprehend each word. “We’re gonna get money out here, Shorty. Are you ready?”

I went with him and we started breaking into people’s houses. He told me to go through the windows that were too small for him to fit through, and I went in and opened the door for him. Once we were inside, he went through people’s drawers, he broke open the safe, he was just really wiping them out. We got stereos, eight-tracks, jewelry, guns, cash money. After the robberies, he took me to Delancey Street in the city and bought me some nice clothes and sneakers and a sheepskin coat. That night he took me to a jam and a lot of the same people who laughed at me at the other jam were there. I had on my new coat and leather pants. Nobody even recognized me; it was like I was a different person. It was incredible.

Barkim was the guy who introduced me into the life of crime. Before that, I never stole anything. Not a loaf of bread, not a piece of candy, nothing. I had no antisocial tendencies. I didn’t have the nerve. But Barkim explained to me that if you always looked good, people would treat you with respect. If you had the newest fashion, the finest stuff, you were a cool dude. You’d have status.

Barkim took me to a roller-skating rink on Utica Avenue where I met these guys who were called the Rutland Road Crew. They were young, maybe twelve years old, but they dressed like grown men. Trench coats, alligator shoes, rabbit furs, Stetsons with the big brims. They had on designer clothes from Sergio Valente, Jordache, Pierre Cardin. I was impressed. Barkim told me how they did it – these guys were pickpockets, chain snatchers, and robbers. They were just babies. They’re in public school and they’ve got watches and rings and necklaces. They’re driving mopeds. People called them thugs but we called them money niggas. That shit was crazy.

Barkim started introducing me to people on the street as his “son.” He was only a few years older than me but it was street terminology that warned people not to disrespect me. It meant: “This is my son in the streets, we’re family, we rob and steal. This is my little moneymaker. Don’t fuck with this nigga.” People that respected him had to respect me now. He taught me which people to look out for, which people I couldn’t trust because they would take my shit right from me. My life reminded me of Oliver Twist, with the older guy Fagin teaching all this stuff. He bought me a lot of clothes, but he never gave me a lot of money. He’d make a couple of thousand from robbing and he’d give me two hundred. But at eight years old, two hundred was a lot of money. Sometimes he’d take out a piece of jewelry that we stole and let me borrow it for a few days.

I took my criminality to another level with the Rutland Road Crew. They were mostly Caribbean guys from Crown Heights. Barkim knew the older set, The Cats. I started hanging out with the RRC, their junior division. I got involved in their little house-robbing heists. We’d go to school, eat breakfast, and then we’d get on the bus and train and start robbing during school hours. That was the beginning of me feeling like I belonged. We were all equal as long as we put in our share of the robbing proceeds.

Some people might read some of the things I’m talking about and judge me as an adult, call me a criminal, but I did these things over thirty-five years ago. I was a little kid looking for love and acceptance and the streets were where I found it. It was the only education I had, and these guys were my teachers. Even the older gangsters said, “You shouldn’t do this. Go to school,” but I didn’t want to listen to them, even though they had respect in the street. They were telling us to stay in school at the same time they were out there robbing. All the guys respected me because I was a little moneymaker. I’d break off some for my friends who needed a little cash. I’d buy us all liquor and food. I started buying pigeons. If you had good birds, people respected you. Plus, it was a rush to steal things and then go out and buy clothes. I saw how everybody treated me when I came around and I was dressed up nice with my shearling coat and my Pumas. I had a ski suit, with the yellow goggles, and I’d never been to a ski slope in my life. I couldn’t even spell fucking Adidas but I knew how they made me feel.

One of the Rutland guys taught me how to pick locks. If you get a key that fits the hole, you just keep playing the key and it wears down the cylinder and you can open the door. I was, like, “Fuck!” Man, when we opened some of those doors, you’d see silverware, jewelry, guns, stacks of money. We were so happy we were crying and laughing at the same time. We couldn’t get it all. You couldn’t walk down the street with that shit, so we just filled up our schoolbags with as much stolen goods we could stuff in them.

One day my friend Curtis and I were robbing a house. The people who lived there were from the Caribbean and so was Curtis. I was in this pitch-black house and I heard “Who’s that? Is that you, honey?” I thought it was Curtis playing around, trying to scare me. So I said, “I’m trying to find a gun and the money. Look for the safe, all right?” “What, baby?” I realized then that it wasn’t Curtis talking. It was the guy who lived there who was lying on the couch. I rushed to the door. “Curtis, this shit don’t look right. Let’s get out of here, somebody is in here,” I said. But Curtis was a perfectionist. Curtis wanted to lock the door instead of just running away. I ran the fuck out. The owner opened the door and smashed Curtis in the head and knocked him out cold. I thought he was dead. It wasn’t until a year later that I saw him again. He was alive, but his face was all shattered, he got hit that hard. Yup, it was the hard-knock life for us.

When we stole silverware or jewelry, we’d go to Sal’s, a store on Utica and Sterling.

I was a baby, but they knew me from coming in with older guys. The guys at the store knew I was coming in with stolen stuff, but I knew they couldn’t beat me because I knew what shit cost back then. I knew what I wanted.

Sometimes we’d be in the streets and if it was noon and we saw a school, we’d just go into the school, go to the cafeteria, grab a tray, get in line, and start eating. We might see someone we’d want to rob, someone who had their school ring around their neck. So we’d finish the food, put the tray back, get by the door, grab the ring, and run out.

We always wanted to look nice on the streets because normally if you’re a little black kid out in the city looking bummy and dirty, people harass you. So we looked nice and nonthreatening. We had the school backpacks and little happy glasses and the Catholic school look with nice pants and white shirts, the whole school outfit.

After about a year, I started doing burglaries by myself. It was pretty lucrative, but hanging in the street and jostling was more exciting than robbing houses. You’d grab some ladies’ jewelry and cops would chase you, or what we called heroes would try to come in and rescue the day. It was more risk-taking for less money but we loved the thrill. You normally had to have a partner to be a successful jostler. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be planned, but you’d see someone you knew, so you teamed up.

Sometimes you’d find that you had competition for jostling. You’d get on a bus and there might be someone already on the bus waiting to pickpocket some people. But you might be more obvious. That was called “waking the bus.” The bus was quiet before you got on, but now that you’ve come aboard, the bus driver makes an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, there are some young men who just got on the bus. Watch your pockets. They will attempt to steal from you.” So you get off at the next stop, but the quiet jostler gets off and comes after you.

“Motherfucker, you woke the bus up!” he’ll scream. And if he’s an older guy, he might start beating on your ass and taking your money or the jewelry that you stole.

People didn’t like to go pickpocketing with me because I wasn’t as patient or as good as they were. I was never smooth, like, “I’m going to play this nigga, I’m going to do this, right up and close in person.” I was much better at blindsiding people.

Any strong guy could blindside someone. But the trick was to be cunning and outsmart them. Most people would think, They’re onto me, I’m going to walk away. But not me. A lady might have her hand on her wallet all day, and we’d be watching, watching, and she never takes her hand out of her pocket. And we’d follow her and then move away but we’d have one little kid still watching her. And she’d let down her defenses for a few seconds and go do something and he’d get it. Then he’d be gone. And before we got out, we’d hear a gut-wrenching scream, “Aaaaahh, my money, my money!” It was crazy. We didn’t give a fuck.

The most primitive move was to snatch somebody’s gold chain. I used to do that on the subway. I’d sit by the window. That was when you could open the windows on subway cars. I’d pull a few windows down, and then the car would stop and new people would come on and sit by the window. I would get out and as soon as the train slowly started moving, I’d reach in and snatch their chains. They’d scream and look at me, but they couldn’t get off the train. I’d fix the clasp, hold the chain for a couple of days, look good and sport it, and then I’d sell it before the older guys took it from me.

Even though I was starting to look the role, I never could get on with the girls back then. I liked girls, but I didn’t know how to tell them I liked them at that age. One time, I was watching these girls jump rope, and I liked them and I wanted to jump rope with them, so I started teasing them and, out of nowhere, these girls in the fifth grade started beating the shit out of me. I was playing with them, but they were serious and I was just taken by surprise. I got serious about fighting back too late. By then, somebody came and broke it up and they’d gotten the best of me. I didn’t want to fight them.

It was no surprise to my mother and my sister that I was robbing and doing antisocial things to bring money in. They saw my nice clothes, and I’d bring them food – pizza and Burger King and McDonald’s. My mother knew I was up to no good, but by that time she knew it was too late. The streets had me. She thought that I was a criminal and I would die or never turn out to be shit. She’d probably seen it before, kids like me being like that. I would steal anything from anybody. I didn’t have any boundaries.

My mother would prefer to beg. She embarrassed me a bit, because she was too honest. She was always asking for money; that’s just the way she was. I gave my sister a lot of money for the house to help my mom out. Sometimes I’d give my mother a hundred bucks and she wouldn’t pay me back. She didn’t respect me like that. I’d say, “You owe me some money, Ma.” And she’d just say, “You owe me your life, boy. I’m not paying you back.”

The big kids in the neighborhood knew I was stealing, so they would take my money and my jewelry and my shoes, and I would be afraid to tell my mother. I didn’t know what to do. They’d beat me up and steal my birds, and they knew that they could get away with ­bullying me. Barkim didn’t teach me how to fight. He just taught me how to dress in nice clothes and wash my ass. Normally when someone was screaming at me in the street or chasing me, I would just drop my stuff and run. So now I was getting bullied again but I was more of a mark.

Growing up, I always wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted to be the guy talking shit: “I’m the baddest motherfucker out here,” “I got the best birds.” I wanted to be that street guy, the fly slick-talking guy, but I was just too shy and awkward. When I tried to talk that way, somebody would hit me in the head and say, “Shut the fuck up, nigga.” But I got a taste of what it was like to bask in the adulation of an audience when I got into my first street fight.

One day I went into this neighborhood in Crown Heights and I robbed a house with this older guy. We found $2,200 in cash and he cut me in for $600. So I went to a pet store and bought a hundred bucks’ worth of birds. They put them in a crate for me, and the owner helped me get them on the subway. When I got off, I had somebody from my neighborhood help me drag the crate to the condemned building where I was hiding my pigeons. But this guy went and told some kids in the neighborhood that I had all these birds. So a guy named Gary Flowers and some friends of his came and started to rob me. My mother saw them messing with the birds and told me, and I ran out into the street and confronted them. They saw me coming and stopped grabbing the birds, but this guy Gary still had one of them under his coat. By then, a large crowd gathered around us.

“Give me my bird back,” I protested.

Gary pulled the bird out from under his coat.

“You want the bird? You want the fucking bird?” he said. Then he just twisted the bird’s head off and threw it at me, smearing the blood all over my face and shirt.

“Fight him, Mike,” one of my friends urged. “Don’t be afraid, just fight him.”

I had always been too scared to fight anyone before. But there used to be an older guy in the neighborhood named Wise, who had been a Police Athletic League boxer. He used to smoke weed with us, and when he’d get high, he would start shadowboxing. I would watch him and he would say, “Come on, let’s go,” but I would never even slapbox with him. But I remembered his style.

So I decided. “Fuck it.” My friends were shocked. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I threw some wild punches and one connected and Gary went down. Wise would skip while he was shadowboxing, so after I dropped Gary, my stupid ass started skipping. It just seemed like the fly thing to do. I had practically the whole block watching my gloryful moment. Everybody started whooping and applauding me. It was an incredible feeling even though my heart was beating out of my chest.

“This nigga is skipping, man,” one guy laughed. I was trying to do the Ali shuffle, to no avail. But I felt good about standing up for myself and I liked the rush of everybody applauding me and slapping fives. I guess underneath that shyness, I was always an explosive, entertaining guy.

I started getting a whole new level of respect on the streets. Instead of “Can Mike play with us?” people would ask my mother, “Can Mike Tyson play with us?” Other guys would bring their guys around to fight me and they’d bet money on the outcome. Now I had another source of income. They’d come from other neighborhoods. I would win a lot too. Even if I lost, the guys who beat me would say, “Fuck! You’re only eleven?” That’s how everybody started knowing me in Brooklyn. I had a reputation that I would fight anyone – grown men, anybody. But we didn’t follow the Marquis of Queensberry rules in the street. If you kicked someone’s ass it didn’t necessarily mean it was over. If he couldn’t beat you in the fight, he’d take another route, and sometimes he’d come back with some of his friends and they’d beat me up with bats.

I began to exact some revenge for the beatings I had taken from bullies. I’d be walking with some friends and I might see one of the guys who beat me up and bullied me years earlier. He might have gone into a store shopping and I would drag his ass out of the store and start pummeling him. I didn’t even tell my friends why, I’d just say, “I hate that motherfucker over there,” and they’d jump in too and rip his fucking clothes and beat his fucking ass. That guy who took my glasses and threw them away? I beat him in the streets like a fucking dog for humiliating me. He may have forgotten about it but I never did.

With this newfound confidence in my ability to stand up for myself, my criminality escalated. I became more and more brazen. I even began to steal in my own neighborhood. I thought that was what ­people did. I didn’t understand the rules of the streets. I thought ­everybody was fair game because I sure seemed to be fair game to ­everybody else. I didn’t know that there were certain people you just don’t fuck with.

I lived in a tenement building and I would rob everybody who lived in my building. They never realized that I was the thief. Some of these people were my mother’s friends. They’d cash their welfare checks and maybe buy some liquor, and they would visit my mom, drink some ­liquor, and have some fun. I’d go into my room and go up the fire ­escape and break into their apartment and rob everything from their place. Then when the lady would go upstairs, she’d discover it and run back screaming, “Lorna, Lorna, they got everything. They got the ­babies’ food, they got everything!”

After they left, my mother would come into my room.

“I know you did something, didn’t you, boy? What did you do?”

I’d say, “Mom, it’s not me. Look around,” because I would take the food and stuff and leave it on the roof and my friends and I would get it later.

“How could I have done anything? I was in the room right here, I didn’t go anywhere.”

“Well, if you didn’t do it, I’ll bet you know who did it, you thief,” my mother would scream. “You’re nothing but a thief. I’ve never stole nothing in my life. I don’t know where you come from, you thief.”

Oh, God. Can you imagine hearing that shit from your own mother? My family had no hope for me, no hope. They thought my life would be a life of crime. Nobody else in my family ever did stuff like that. My sister would constantly be telling me, “What kind of bird don’t fly? Jailbird! Jailbird!”

I was with my mother one time visiting her friend Via. Via’s husband was one of those big-money showing-off guys. He went to sleep and I took his wallet out of his pocket and took his money. When he woke up, he beat Via up real bad because he thought she had stole the cash. Everybody in the neighborhood started hating my guts. And if they didn’t hate me, they were jealous of me. Even the players. I had nerve.

It felt incredible. I didn’t care if I grabbed somebody’s chain and dragged them down the stairs with their head bouncing, boom, boom, boom. Do I care? No, I need that chain. I didn’t know anything about compassion. Why should I? No one ever showed me any compassion. The only compassion I had was when somebody shot or stabbed one of my friends during a robbery. Then I was sad.

But you still fucking do it. You think they’re not going to kill you; that it can’t happen to you. I just couldn’t stop. I knew there was a chance I would get killed but I didn’t care. I didn’t think I would live to see sixteen anyway so why not go hard? My brother Rodney told someone recently that he thought I was the most courageous guy he knew. But I didn’t consider myself courageous. I had brave friends, friends who would get shot over their jewelry or watches or motorcycles. They weren’t giving it up when people robbed them. Those guys had the most respect in the neighborhood. I don’t know if I had courage, but I witnessed courage. I always thought that I was much more crazy than courageous. I was shooting at people out in the open while my mother looked out the window. I was brainless. Rodney was thinking it was courage but it was a lack of brainpower. I was an extremist.

Everyone I knew was in the life. Even the guys who had jobs were hustling on the side. They sold dope or were robbing. It was like a cyborg world where the cops were the bad guys and the robbers and the hustlers were the good guys. If you didn’t hurt nobody, nobody would have talked to you. You would be labeled as square. If you did bad, you were all right. Somebody bothered you, they’d come fight for you. They’d know you were one of the guys. I was so awesome, all these sleazy, smiley scumbags knew my name.

Then things started to escalate. I began to come into intimate contact with the police. Getting shot at in Brownsville was no big deal. You’d be in the alley gambling, and some guys would come running in shooting at the other guys. You never knew when the shit was going to go down. Other gangs would drive through on their motorcycles and, boom, boom, they’d take a shot at you. We knew where each crew would hang out, so we knew not to go certain places.

But it’s something else when the cops start shooting at you. One day a few of us were walking past the jewelry store on Amboy Street and we saw the jeweler carrying a box. I snatched the box and we started running. We got close to our block and we heard car tires screech, and some undercover cops ran out of the car and, boom, boom, they started shooting at us. I ran into an abandoned building that we hung out in and I knew I was free. I knew that building like the back of my hand. I knew how to go into the walls or go to the roof and go through a hole and be in the rafters above the ceiling. So I did that. I got on top of the ceiling and looked through the hole and I could see anyone walking on the floor below.

I saw the cops enter the building. They started walking across the floor, guns drawn, and one of them went right through a hole in the floor.

“Holy shit, these fucking kids are busting my balls bringing me into this building,” he said. “I’m going to kill these fucking bastards.”

I’d be listening to these white cops talking and laughing to myself. The building was too fucked up for the cops to go up to another floor because the steps were falling apart. But there was a chance that they might look up and see me hiding in the rafters and shoot my ass. I thought about jumping to the next roof because that was my building, but it was a ten-foot jump.

So I made my way to the roof and my friend who lived in my building was on his roof. I was on my knees because I didn’t want to stand up and let the cops outside see me, but my friend was giving me the blow-by-blow.

“Just chill out, Mike. They came out of the building. But they’re still looking for you. There’s a bunch of cop cars down there,” he ­reported.

I was waiting up on that roof for what seemed like an eternity.

“They’re down, Mike. They’re down,” my friend finally said.

So I went down but waited inside a little longer. My friends were looking around the block, making sure the cops weren’t hiding there.

“Just wait some more, Mike,” my friend said. Finally he told me I could go out. I was blessed to make it out of that situation. The jewelry box we stole had all these expensive watches, medallions, bracelets, diamonds, rubies. It took us two weeks to get rid of all that shit. We had to go sell some there, then go to a different part of town to sell some other pieces.

With all the jostling I did, it’s somewhat ironic that my first arrest was over a stolen credit card. I was ten years old. I obviously was too young-looking to have a card, so I’d get some older guy to go into the store and I’d tell him to buy this and this and that and buy something for himself. Then we’d sell the card to another older guy.

But one time we were in a store on Belmont Avenue, a local store, and we tried to use the card. We were dressed clean but we just didn’t look old enough to have a credit card. We picked out all these clothes and sneakers and brought them to the counter and gave the cashier the card. She excused herself for a second and made a call. Next thing we knew, she had cut the card in half and in seconds the cops came in and arrested us.

They took me to the local precinct. My mother didn’t have a phone, so they picked her up and brought her to the station. She came in yelling at me and proceeded to beat the shit out of me right there. By the time I was twelve, this started to be a common occurrence. I’d have to go to court for these arrests, but I wasn’t going to jail because I was a minor.

I used to hate when my mother would get to the precinct and beat my ass. Afterwards, her and her friends would get drunk and she’d talk about how she beat the shit out of me. I’d be curled up in the corner trying to shield myself, and she’d attack me. That was some traumatizing shit. To this day I glance at the corners of any room I’m in and I have to look away because it reminds me of all the beatings my mother gave me. I’d be curled up in the corner, trying to shield myself, and she’d attack me. She didn’t think nothing of beating me in a grocery store, in the street, in front of my schoolmates, or in the courtroom. The police certainly didn’t care. One time they were supposed to write up a report on me and my mother stormed in and beat my ass so bad they didn’t even write me up.

She even beat me up when I was in the right sometimes. Once, when I was eleven, I was shooting dice on the corner. I was up against a guy who was about eighteen. I had a hot hand that day and my friends were betting on the side that I’d hit my numbers. I got down $200, but I hit my number six straight times. I had won $600 of his money.

“Shoot one more time. Shoot for my watch,” he said.

Boom, I hit my 4-5-6.

“That’s the name of the game,” I said. “Gimme the watch.”

“As a matter of fact, I ain’t giving you nothing,” he said and he tried to snatch the money I won from him. I started biting him. I hit him with a rock and we started brawling. Some of my mother’s friends saw the commotion and ran to our apartment.

“Your son is fighting with a grown man,” one of them said.

My mother came storming over. All the other grown men there were letting us fight because they wanted their money. If this guy didn’t pay, nobody else was going to. So I was in the middle of fighting this guy when my mother jumped on me, grabbed my hands, smacked me, and threw me down.

“What are you fighting this man for?” she yelled. “What did you do to this man? I’m sorry, sir,” she said to him.

“He tried to take back his money,” I protested.

My mother took my money and gave it to the man and smacked my face.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said.

“I’m going to kill you, motherfucker,” I yelled as she pulled me away.

I deserved every beating I got. I just wanted to be one of the cool kids, the kid in the street who had jewelry on and money in their pockets, the older kids, the fifteen-year-olds who had girlfriends. I wasn’t really into girls that much then but I liked having the clothes and getting all the attention.

By then, my mother was giving up on me. She was well known in the neighborhood and knew how to speak eloquently when she needed to. Her other children had the capacity to learn to get along with others, but then there was me. I was the only one who couldn’t read and write. I couldn’t grasp that stuff.

“Why can’t you do this?” she’d say to me. “What’s wrong with you?”

She must have thought I was retarded. She had taken me to all these places on Lee Avenue when I was a baby and I’d undergo psychological evaluations. When I was young, I’d talk out loud to myself. I guess that wasn’t normal in the ’70s.

Once I got into the court system, I had to go to court-mandated special ed crazy schools. Special ed was like jail. They kept you locked up until it was time to go home. They’d bus in all the antisocial kids and the fucking nuts. You were supposed to do whatever they told you to do but I’d get up and fight with people, spit in people’s faces. They gave us tokens to go back and forth to school, and I’d rob the kids for their tokens and gamble with them. I’d even rob the teachers and come to school the next day wearing the new shit I bought with their money. I did a lot of bad shit.

They said I was hyperactive so they started giving me Thorazine. They skipped the Ritalin and went straight to the big T; that’s what they gave little bad black motherfuckers in the ’70s. Thorazine was a trip. I’d be sitting there looking at something but I couldn’t move, couldn’t do nothing. Everything was cool; I could hear everything, but I was just zonked out, I was a zombie. I didn’t ask for food, they just brought out the food at the right time. They would ask, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” And I would say, “Oh, yes I do.” I didn’t even know when I got to go to the bathroom.

When I took that shit, they sent me home from school. I’d stay in the house chilling, watching Rocky and His Friends. My mother thought something was wrong with her baby, but I was just a bad-assed fucking kid. They misdiagnosed me, probably fucked me up a little, but I never took it personally when people misdiagnosed me. I always thought that bad stuff happened to me because something was wrong with me.

Besides the zombies and the crazy kids, they sent the criminals to the special ed schools. Now all the criminals from different neighborhoods got to know each other. We’d go to Times Square to jostle and we’d see all the guys from our school, all dressed up in sheepskins and fancy clothes, money in our pocket, doing the same thing. I was in Times Square in 1977 just hanging out when I saw some guys from the old neighborhood in Bed-Stuy. We were talking and the next thing I knew one of them snatched the purse of this prostitute. She was ­furious and threw a cup of hot coffee at my face. The cops started ­coming towards us and my friend Bub and I took off. We ran into an XXX-rated theater to hide but the hooker came in shortly after with the cops.

“That’s them,” she pointed to Bub and I.

“Me? I didn’t do shit,” I protested, but the cops paraded us out and put us in the backseat of their car.

But this crazy lady wasn’t finished. She reached in through the back window and scratched my face with her long hooker nails.

They drove us to the midtown precinct. As we pulled away from Times Square, I saw my friends from Bed-Stuy, the ones who did all this shit, watching from the street. I had been arrested many times so I was used to the formation. But they looked at my rap sheet and I just had too many arrests, so I was going straight to Spofford.

Spofford was a juvenile detention center located in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. I had heard horror stories about Spofford – ­people being beaten up by other inmates or by the staff – so I wasn’t too thrilled to be going there. They issued me some clothes and gave me a cell by myself and I went to sleep. In the morning, I was terrified. I had no idea what was going to go down in that place. But when I went to the cafeteria for breakfast, it was like a class reunion. I immediately saw my friend Curtis, the guy that I had robbed the house with who got clobbered by the owner. Then I start seeing all my old partners.

“Chill,” I said to myself. “All your boys are here.”

After that first time, I was going in and out of Spofford like it was nothing. Spofford became like a time-share for me. During one of my visits there we were all brought to the assembly room where we watched a movie called The Greatest, about Muhammad Ali. When it was over, we all applauded and were shocked when Ali himself walked out onto the stage. He looked larger than life. He didn’t have to even open his mouth – as soon as I saw him walk out, I thought, I want to be that guy. He talked to us and it was inspirational. I had no idea what I was doing with my life, but I knew that I wanted to be like him. It’s funny, people don’t use that terminology anymore. If they see a great fight, they may say, “I want to be a boxer.” But nobody says, “I want to be like him.” There are not many Alis. Right then I decided I wanted to be great. I didn’t know what it was I’d do but I ­decided that I wanted people to look at me like I was on show, the same way they did to Ali.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t get out of Spofford and do a ­three-sixty. I was still a little sewer rat. My situation at home was deteriorating. After all those arrests and special schools and medications, my mother had no hope for me at all. But she had never had any hope for me, going back to my infancy. I just know that one of those medical people, some racist asshole, some guy who said that I was fucked up and developmentally retarded, stole my mother’s hope for me right then and there. And they stole any love or security I might have had.

I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally that would have no effect on me, but emotional and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends and I’d see their mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was fifteen, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.

Since I was now in the correctional system, the authorities decided to send me to group homes to get straightened out. They would take a bunch of kids who were down, abused, bad, psycho kids and throw them together in some home where the government paid people to take us in. The whole thing was a hustle. I would never last more than two days. I’d just run away. One time, I was in a group home in Brentwood, Long Island. I called home and bitched and moaned to my mother that I didn’t have any weed there, so she made Rodney buy me some and deliver it to me. She was always a facilitator.

Eventually I was sent to Mount Loretto, a facility in Staten Island, but nothing could change me. Now I was pickpocketing guys on the Staten Island ferry. You never know who you’re pickpocketing. Sometimes you pickpocket the wrong guy, a bad motherfucker, and he wants his money back. He just starts clocking everyone.

“Who took my motherfucking money?” he screamed.

He started beating on everyone around him, the whole ferry had to jump on the motherfucker. My friend was the one who jostled him, and he kicked my friend in the ass but he didn’t know he had gotten the perpetrator. We got off the boat and were all laughing ’cause we got the money. Even my friend was laughing through his tears because he was still in pain. That guy would have thrown us off the boat if he knew we had his money. I get scared now just thinking about the kind of life I was living then. Oh, God, he would have killed us, he was just that fucking fierce.

I was released from the juvie facility on Staten Island at the beginning of 1978, and I went back to Brownsville. I kept hearing that a lot of my friends were getting killed over ridiculous things like jewelry or a couple of hundred dollars. I was getting a little worried but I never stopped robbing and stealing. I watched the guys I looked up to, the older guys, I watched them rise, but I saw their bumps in the road too. I watched them get beat mercilessly because they were always hustling people. But still they never stopped, it was in their blood.

The neighborhood was getting more and more ominous and I was getting more and more hated. I was just eleven years old, but sometimes I’d walk through the neighborhood, minding my own business and a landlord or owner of a store would see me walking by and would pick up a rock or something and throw it at me.

“Motherfucking little thieving bastard,” they’d yell.

They’d see me in my nice clothes and they just knew that I was the nigga stealing from them. I was walking past a building one time and I stopped to talk to a friend and this guy Nicky came out with a shotgun and his friend had a pistol. His friend pulled out his pistol and Nicky put the shotgun over my penis.

“Listen, little nigga, if I hear you’ve been going up on that motherfucking roof again, I’ll fuck you up. If I ever see you in this neighborhood again, I am going to blow your balls off,” he said.

I didn’t even know who the fuck this guy was, but he evidently knew who I was. Can you believe I was just so used to people coming up to me and stepping to me like that?

A few months before I turned thirteen, I got arrested again for possession of stolen property. They had exhausted all the places in the New York City vicinity to keep me. I don’t know what kind of scientific diagnostic tests they used, but they decided to send me to the Tryon School for Boys, an upstate New York facility for juvenile offenders about an hour northwest of Albany.

My mother was happy that I was going upstate. By then, a lot of grown men had started coming to the house looking for me.

“Your brother is a dirty motherfucker. I’m going to kill your brother,” they’d tell my sister.

“He’s just a kid,” she’d say. “It’s not like he took your wife or ­something.”

Imagine that, grown men coming to your house looking for you, and you’re twelve years old. Ain’t that some shit? Can you blame my mother for giving up all hope for me?