I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (23 page)

When we eventually got close to her house, she pulled away from me and started running home. Her brother (I’m guessing it was her brother) saw her, grabbed a butcher knife, and ran at me. I could see it glinting in the sun, and I could hear it whizzing through the air. I wasn’t about to stand there and explain myself with a butcher knife coming at me as fast as this dude could run. I ran like hell, and then his boys starting chasing me through the neighborhood, too. I was running, running, running, and they were chasing, chasing, chasing.

Finally, they caught me. Her brother made the obvious assumption, that I had done something to the girl. They held me as her brother came closer and closer. That’s when the girl popped up. “It wasn’t him!” she screamed. “It wasn’t him! He saved me! He saved me!
Stop it!
” Even though she was hysterical, she managed to get out the story of what had happened.

Yet the brother did not lower the knife and shake my hand. He just came closer and said, “Tell me who the fuck it was!”

“Man,” I said, “I don’t know who it was.”

“Motherfucker, you know, dammit.”

Obviously
I knew who it was. “Man, I don’t know who they are, man. I was just coming through school and I saw them.”

He wasn’t going to let it go. “Tell me who it is. Motherfucker, if you don’t tell me who it is, I’m gonna cut you.”

Here’s what people who didn’t grow up like I did need to understand:
I never even considered ratting out the dudes that did it
. I was a kid, being held in places by dudes I didn’t know, with a butcher knife being waved in my face and a hysterical broad screaming in the background. The tension and adrenaline could not possibly have been higher. It wasn’t like I
considered
telling him the names but decided against it. I didn’t consider it any more than I considered growing wings and flying away. It was something that was completely out of the realm of possible behavior for me.
That’s what the tribal mentality is like
. It’s not about
choosing
your people over another group of people. The mentality
makes
the decision for you, and your thought process doesn’t even acknowledge that you
have
a choice. If anything, I shouldn’t have been helping this broad from another neighborhood to begin with! If it had been a dude getting beaten up or even killed, for example, I
definitely
wouldn’t have helped or even
thought
to help.

So I just closed my eyes and told the brother, “You’re gonna have to cut me because I don’t know who it is.” He let me go. No one thanked me or anything like that. In fact, a couple of people punched me as I left. Months later I saw the brother at the liquor store. He got to his burgundy Impala and he said, “Thanks, man.” Then he drove away.

I’m older now, and I see the world a lot clearer than I did when I was a kid. But the effects of my upbringing haven’t gone away. I went to Gardena High for a stretch, but Gardena was also a rival neighborhood. When I was asked to appear at the Gardena Jazz Festival a couple of years ago, part of me felt
wrong
about doing it. It was just this subconscious, visceral reaction. I’m a grown dude with three kids, and I
still
have the hang-up. As recently as 2009, I made friends with dudes from Gardena. I play golf with them and
hang out, normal stuff. Yet my brother-in-law wouldn’t do it. If those Gardena guys were there, he wouldn’t be around. “I don’t trust those niggas, man.”

When I played a gig in Hermosa Beach in 2011, a lot of people in the audience were from a rival neighborhood. As adults, we can’t believe that it was like that and that we were ever that way. But the young folks are
still
just like that. The same circumstances that were there when I was a kid are there now, so of course this cycle of hate continues.

When Tookie, the founder of the Crips, was going to get the death penalty in 2005, plenty of people I grew up with were ecstatic. It was more as if we Bloods had won the World Series than that a man was being put to death. But if that was the way you operated growing up and you had never been anywhere else, you’d probably feel the same way. You wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

So now we have black kids who don’t think of the future, who are discouraged from being educated, and who see the world as beginning and ending with their neighborhood. They may be ignorant and they may be oriented entirely on the present, but that won’t be enough to make them a criminal. Mentally handicapped people are ignorant and oriented on the present; they’re the
opposite
of hardened.

So how would you make these kids into criminals? It’s kind of like a battered wife. If you tell a woman over decades that she’s worthless, stupid, and ugly, she will come to genuinely believe that she is worthless, stupid, and ugly. Conversely, if you tell someone that he’s a great singer, he’ll
act
like a great singer. He might not
be
a great singer, but he’ll go on that
American Idol
audition and make a fool of himself.

Making a kid into a criminal requires the same approach. Treat him like a thug, and he’ll start acting like one. When it comes to thug life, there isn’t much sunlight between
being
one and
acting
like one. Here’s a question that doesn’t require much of an education to answer: What group treats young black men like thugs?

A
lot has been written about Rodney King and police brutality. But what is less often discussed is the
effect
an occupying police force has on impressionable young minds. To claim that the police are a factor in encouraging crime sounds ridiculous to most people. It’s counterintuitive; after all, the cops are there because the crime was there
first
. But that doesn’t mean that the cops didn’t
increase
what was there already. It sounds crazy, I know. It would have also sounded crazy if I had said that banning the sale of alcohol would lead to a huge increase in alcoholism.

Then Prohibition happened.

The police-brutality cases when people get killed are horrible and huge tragedies. Those stories make the news and they are terrible; no one argues with that. But it’s the day-to-day things that
have consequences—especially when you’re an ignorant kid. Let me explain a little bit of what that kind of life was like.

In the mid-1970s, Smitty’s Liquor Store on Avalon Boulevard was a very special place. It was located dead center in between two neighborhoods. On one side you had us, and on the other side was where another sect of Bloods lived. Because we all had to go to that same liquor store, it ended up being like a safe zone. Smitty’s was South Central’s version of the UN. We may have had beef with each other, but we never did no dirt to anybody when we were at Smitty’s.

One of the kids in my crew was a big strong dude named Curtis. Even though Curtis was only fifteen or sixteen years old, he already had a beard. He was basically like a huge freak of nature. Curtis was Tyson before
Tyson
was Tyson. Curtis was always in and out of California Youth Authority, which is basically jail for kids. The cops
constantly
picked on Curtis. He was tough, but at the same time he couldn’t really mess with the police. That made them feel like they were tougher than him because he couldn’t fight back from their provocations.

One day at Smitty’s, this five-star sheriff started fucking with him and Curtis just shook his head. “Motherfucker,” he told the cop, “if you didn’t have that badge and that stick I’d beat the shit out of you.” This cop was a big dude, too. It wasn’t like Curtis was a lock to win. But after a while, enough becomes enough.

The two of them went to the alley behind Smitty’s. That cop took off his badge and his belt while his partner kept a lookout. We all stood there and watched as Curtis proceeded to beat all five stars out of that fucking sheriff. We were all very excited to see a cop getting his ass whupped like that. Eventually the sheriff’s partner had to pull out his gun and start shooting in the air to break the fight apart. That’s how badly Curtis fucked that dude up.

Two weeks later, Curtis was dead. The police had found his body after he had been shot to death. There wasn’t any doubt in our minds as to who had done it, either. If it was another Blood or a Crip, word would have definitely gotten out. Hell, they would have been bragging about it. But no one had any beef with Curtis like the police did.

Curtis’s fate was a story that was beaten into all of us, often literally, day in and day out. There’s no bravery in shooting a minor. There’s no justice in punishing an unarmed ass-kicker, with deadly force, in secret.
Of course
there was never any investigation. Curtis’s life didn’t
matter
. None of our lives did, in the eyes of the police.

Things like that happened
constantly
when I was growing up. One summer when I was ten, I was walking down the street with my friend. A police car pulled up and called us over. I don’t remember what they wanted to know, but neither of us were much help. We were still only in elementary school, and pulling a girl’s hair hadn’t been declared a felony yet.

The cop made me and my friend put our hands on the hood of the car. I can still feel how hot that metal felt in the California sun. “If you move your hands,” the cop told me, “
I will blow your head off
.” As the two of us stood there, scared to death, the cop’s partner sat in the driver’s seat revving the engine. I don’t know if that made the hood any hotter, but it sure wasn’t helping. We didn’t have the information what he wanted or else we would have told him immediately. I would have confessed to sinking the
Titanic
to get my hands off that hood.

Most white ten-year-old boys are taught that the cops are their friends. “If you have a problem, ask your local neighborhood police
officer for help!” Well, our local neighborhood police officer
was
our problem. A white kid would
never
have been treated the way I had been by the police. As soon as a white kid’s parents found out, that cop would’ve been fired and almost certainly would’ve had charges pressed against him. But with me, there was no doubt that the cop would have absolutely no repercussions for his behavior. If anything, his partner would claim that
I
supposedly pulled an imaginary gun on
them
.

So in
our
community, the lesson was obviously a different one. Very early on, my mother taught me and my siblings to answer the cops with “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” The fact that we had to be taught this so young meant that interacting with the police was an inevitability—whereas most white people go their entire childhoods without speaking to a policeman even once. The fact that we had to address them as “sir” wasn’t a sign of respect. It was a symbol of fearful deference. We were reverting to talking like black people in old movies. Whenever I saw a cop, I instantly turned into Kingfish.

We
had
to be deferential because the cops were always looking for an excuse to harass us. You don’t have to have grown up in South Central to know that if you give the police attitude, things can get really ugly really quick. It’s like they were daring us to do something so that they could escalate the aggression. I played the game for as long as I could. I wasn’t worried about ending up like Curtis, but I wasn’t interested in going to jail, either.