Booker T: From Prison to Promise: Life Before the Squared Circle (7 page)

Toward the final days of eighth grade at Hartman Junior High, I stopped going to school on a regular basis and found myself in danger of failing out. But before I had the chance to be held back due to academics, two other factors assisted in the process: Riley and Ernest Smith.

The Smiths were cousins in my grade and notorious bullies. One day when we were riding home on the bus, they and their friends decided to test me to see what I was made of.

While I sat beside some other random kid near the aisle, just doodling in my notebook, Riley Smith walked up. “Hey, man, move over. You can sit in the middle.”

What? This dude wanted me to scoot over like some passive nobody so he could have the aisle seat? He was out of his mind.

“Sorry, man,” I said. “This is my seat, and I ain’t moving. If you want to sit down, you can take the middle or keep on moving down the line.”

Riley did not say a word and made his way to the back of the bus.

That’s what I’m talking about,
I thought and assumed that was the end of it. I was wrong.

When we pulled up to Riley’s stop, he and his cousin Ernest and all their boys jumped me from behind right there in the aisle of the bus. I tried to fight their flurry of punches the best I could, even landing some good shots of my own, but they overwhelmed me in a tight spot with a good ass-kicking.

I was thinking,
Wow! They got me just like that?
I was far more stunned than hurt, trying to digest what had happened. As I sat there, I thought about the fact that none of my boys—Fran, Terry, or Wendell—had done anything to help.
It’s worthless to
trust anyone,
I thought.
I’ll take care of myself.
I knew if I didn’t act fast, this would happen again.
This shit ends tomorrow.

That night as I drifted off to sleep, I imagined myself heroically destroying the Smiths and their gang in front of everyone in a whirlwind of Bruce Lee karate moves. When that fantasy wore off, I knew things would have to be handled a different way. I just wasn’t sure how.

The next day while I waited at the bus stop, anxiety swirled in my gut.

Bill, this cool white kid who was my friend, walked up. “I saw what those guys did to you yesterday, man. Take this.” He pulled out a nine-inch, pearl-handled buck knife.

My sweaty right hand gripped the knife, and I slipped it into my jacket pocket. When the bus came, I ran on board and waited for the next pickup, which would be the Smiths. As we approached their stop, I looked out the window and was surprised to see Riley all by himself.

That punk got on the bus and immediately talked about kicking my ass the previous day.

That was it. I jumped out of my seat, brandished the blade, and went after Riley. I lunged, trying to stab him.

Ghost white, he tried to fend me off.

I cursed at him and got my digs in. “You gonna fuck with me now, motherfucker? Huh? Now what are you gonna do when I frag your ass right here, right now?”

He shielded himself with schoolbooks and didn’t say a word.

The other kids on the bus were going nuts, yelling and screaming. It sounded like a little prison riot. Meanwhile, the bus driver just kept on driving.

Wendell and Terry got up in a panic and tried to grab me, but I was swinging wildly, like a blind man wielding a cane to fight off a robber. With the blade swinging back and forth like a lightning-fast pendulum, my boys backed off too.

Riley wasn’t such a tough guy anymore. His eyes welled with tears. Without the assistance of his little gang, he was revealed for all he was: a terrified bully. It was great to finally scare the hell out of him.

I put the knife back in my pocket and punched his left cheek. The shot was so hard I thought my hand was broken as he crashed into the rear emergency exit door.

Proud of myself, I calmly sat down. All the kids, especially Riley, must have thought I was crazy and too dangerous to be messed with.
Mission accomplished,
I mused. Surely word of what had happened would spread like wildfire throughout the school, and I would be granted permanent king-of-the-halls status.

The more I thought about it throughout the school day, however, I realized there was no way in hell Riley would let that humiliating moment merely fade away. In fact, some other kids told me to expect a swift payback the next morning.

The following day, I skipped school and went to the movies. I hoped everything would blow over and I would be good to go by the end of the week.

When I finally did return, the campus security guard immediately grabbed me and took me to the principal’s office, where both Riley and Ernest sat. I guess the bus driver had seen more than I’d thought and had gone straight to the office to tell them about the incident.

I looked at the principal, with his pasty face and gray eyes, and told him the whole story, starting with the Smiths and their friends jumping me. “I only brought the knife to defend myself by scaring them off. I’m not going to come to school every day and get beat on by anybody, let alone a whole group of punks like them.”

The principal took a good, long stare at me. “Well, it’s good you didn’t come to school yesterday, because these gentlemen had a surprise for you too.” He pulled out a long cane and showed me how the handle could pop off to reveal a short sword just like the one Alex had in
A Clockwork Orange.
It was pretty chilling to imagine what those dudes might have done with it.

Considering how very close we had come to killing each other, the punishment was appropriately severe. We were all suspended for the remaining school year, which meant I was going to have to repeat the eighth grade. Since the last day was only about two months away, I tried to tell myself it was a nice extension to summer vacation.

The chaotic and unpredictable life I was leading after my mother’s death was finally catching up with me.

Even though I didn’t have many positive role models in my life, thankfully Carolyn was still seeing Luther, the one who’d taken care of all the arrangements for Mom’s funeral. In addition to the funeral parlor, he owned a nightclub, a ranch, and a few other businesses. He was the most successful and honest businessman I’d ever known, and I wanted to be just like him one day.

When Luther was busy running one of his many establishments, sometimes Carolyn would take me to work with her at this tiny little dive bar called the Seashore Lounge, a cool, kick back kind of place at the waterfront. Here I saw a side of life no kid my age had any business encountering.

My sister ran the Seashore’s bar, which was a revolving door for pimps, players, and prostitutes doing the daily hustle. Outside the front entrance girls adorned the street, their asses completely hanging out, soliciting any and all who passed by. People were having sex in the bathrooms, behind the Dumpster, and in the backseats of parked cars. They snorted cocaine and shot heroin in plain sight without fear or shame. They were unruly, loud, and free of any worries of the outside world.

For some reason, most likely greased palms, the law turned a blind eye to all the tricking and drug deals going down. The whole scene was like the chaos of the Wild West. Unless someone was stabbed or shot at, the police showed neither hide nor hair. It was just part of an arranged, corrupt understanding as traditional and tried and true as any white-collar contract.

As chaotic as it was, the Seashore was my haven and my rite of passage. Day after day while sweeping the floor or washing dishes, I kept my head down, but my innocent eyes and ears were open. As the wind whipped the scent of salty seawater in, I silently witnessed groups of hookers discussing all the seedy details of their hustles. They howled and shrieked with fits of laughter as they raved over how much money they had taken their clients for. Whether it was in some desperate dude’s steamy car or a hasty throw down in the doorway of a closed shop, they were out there giving and taking it any way they could get their claws on it.

“I just took this sucker for a grand,” one said, “and I gave it all to my man. I don’t keep
anything
from him.”

I could not believe the stuff I was hearing. These sad women degraded themselves just to put money in their pimps’ pockets.

One thing was for sure. After getting earfuls of this kind of material, I found it nearly impossible to think about going back to school when it reopened in the fall. I was going to be a super duper eighth grader again after being held back. It was frustrating and humiliating, and life was pulling me every which way but to the classroom. How was I supposed to sit there and concentrate on anything when all I was thinking about would have warped the other kids’ minds?

The Seashore wasn’t the only place I saw people using drugs. They seemed to be everywhere, and it didn’t take long for me to encounter them for myself. One day while I was standing at the corner bus stop, this kid I knew named Dominic and his dropout older brother Todd introduced me to the world of weed. Todd pulled out this skinny little joint and sparked it up. I had always wanted to try marijuana, so when Dominic passed the joint over, I took a deep pull from it. A second later I was having a coughing fit, and my eyes were tearing up. Dominic and Todd laughed as I slowly felt the effects for the first time. Yeah, there was no mistaking it: I liked weed. Suffice it to say, I had a new little ritual to look forward to in life.

Marijuana was not the only vice going around. People I knew were doing crazy drugs. It was the late seventies; there seemed to be no laws and no limits. There were Quaaludes, strong sedative pills. There was syrup, which was prescription cough medicine with codeine in it. My sister Billie Jean and Butch, one of her many pimp boyfriends, got pretty inventive and mixed ludes and syrup into a concoction called the Jim Jones Special, in reference to the poisoned Kool-Aid Jim Jones used in the infamous mass suicide at Jonestown. Half a bottle of a Jim Jones Special, and those two would be on their asses and out of their minds for hours. I’d just stare and laugh at their rants and antics. There were also hard drugs, like cocaine and heroin, but I had seen what that crap could do. I had seen strung-out people ruining their lives, and that was a risk I was not interested in.

I definitely liked to hit the weed from time to time, but unless I was out with some of the guys or Carolyn’s friends were smoking at the house, I wouldn’t be doing it. You would not find me lying around the house smoking joints all day. I was a pretty active young kid, discovering new life lessons at every turn.

Some of those lessons weren’t so easy to take. One day at Carolyn’s, I barged into a bedroom to find a dude with a belt wrapped around his arm and a needle stuck into it. After the initial shock, I looked into his eyes. It was Luther.

My head spun, and I didn’t know which way to turn. I walked out and slammed the door.

How could I have wanted to be like Luther? At a mere fourteen years old, I was lost. If the most successful person I knew was a drug addict, what was the point of following the rules to make a better life for myself? I became even less interested in school. Many weekdays I would ditch class and take the bus to downtown Houston.

One of my favorite escapes was a movie theater called the Majestic Metro. I could pay fifty cents and get lost for hours watching reel after reel, like
Shaft
and
Super Fly,
on the big screen. But the ones that really captured my imagination were Bruce Lee’s kung fu masterpieces, like
Enter the Dragon.
The agility and power of Lee’s karate moves mesmerized me. All I could think about was being like him someday and learning his style.

When I did grace the halls of Hartman Junior High, it would be merely for the subjects that interested me. One of those was math, but it wasn’t because I had a penchant for fractions and long division. Far from it. My interest was in the teacher, Ms. Hughes. As she wrote out numbers and calculations on the board, the only thing I was taking notes on was her ass. She had that side-to-side shake of a hard-writing teacher, and I was all in.

Ms. Hughes’s backside wasn’t the only distraction either. I started looking at what was happening in Carolyn’s world down at the waterfront and wondered if this would be my fate too. I saw dudes with big cars and fur coats, gold around their necks, and diamonds on their fingers and sometimes envisioned myself in that role too.

It might have been irresponsible for Carolyn to bring me to the waterfront, but I knew she was doing the best she could. I didn’t blame her or complain but respected her as my first teacher of the streets. Carolyn had a brazen fearlessness instilled by years of hard living and risk taking. She was also a ruthless woman, and no one wanted to be at odds with her.

Unsuspecting people sometimes crossed that line, though. One night we were all hanging out in the house when we heard a knock at the door. When Bonita looked through the peephole and saw my brother Don, she thought nothing of it. She lifted the burglar bar and let him in.

But behind Don was Clyde, this dope fiend who hung out at the waterfront all the time. He held a gun to my brother’s back and pushed his way in.

Panic coursed through my veins.

“Stay the fuck back,” Clyde yelled as he waved the gun wildly. Wide-eyed and deranged-looking, he rifled through Carolyn’s purse, dresser drawers, cabinets, and whatever else he could get his hands on.

Even though I was scared, an uncontrollable rage filled me. All I wanted to do was get my sister’s .38 from her nightstand in the next room.
I want to kill this motherfucker,
I thought repeatedly. Time seemed to stand still, and I felt paralyzed.

Clyde finished ransacking the place, then took Don hostage again and ran out of the house with our belongings.

Carolyn went ballistic. “Where’s my gun? That punk-ass junkie thinks he’s going to come in my house and pull some shit like that? Ah, hell, no!” She ran into her room, emerged a moment later with her gun, and ran out the front door.

I learned afterward that Clyde had let Don go just down the block, and Clyde had taken off. Freaked out, Don had run off too.