4
Tennis Shoes
I learned at a very young age that wearing the wrong color shoes can get you bashed in the head with a roller skate. This was a lesson taught at the expense of Mike Read, the redbone boy all the girls loved because he had that good hair that made the ends of his cornrows curl up just right. Mike ran with a gang that hung out at Roller Dome South, but everybody knew he was from a good family and really wasn’t about that thug life. People just let him front like he was. Until that bloody night. I strolled in with my crew of friends in my grade for the monthly all-night skate party. All us black teens and preteens made this rink our haven. The referees looked like us, the music was hip hop and R&B. You had to come correct at the Roller Dome. How you looked and who you hung with determined if you left getting the nod from the cool older folks or slumped over in the backseat crying.
Cincinnati Reds and Georgetown Hoyas jackets flooded the rink that night. The CPTs (Claiming Pontiac [Street] Territory or ComPTon, depending on who you ask), a People-affiliated gang known for wearing red, sported the big white Cincinnati C emblazoned on red jackets. The BGDs (Black Gangster Disciples), part of the Folk gang family that wore dark blue, rocked the royal blue G of the Hoyas. And both gangs looked extra fly because they had color-coordinated Nike Dopemans (aka Cortez) too, the shoe that dominated our fashion scene in those days.
Like most black kids I knew, I had grown up at the skating rink. My parents threw my third birthday party there, slicing neat pieces of chocolate Miss Piggy birthday cake, skating to the “Hokey Pokey” at the center of the rink. I traded in the busted “brownies,” the name we gave to the dookie-colored rental skates, for my sharp pink speed skates around the time that I became old enough to attend all-night skate parties. I was never really that skilled at skating, unlike my mom, who grooved on her white speed skates on weekends when she wasn’t working. I was strictly there for the socializing! All-night skating was basically a church group lock-in, without the religious talk and prayer, and instead with plenty of grinding and very few chaperones. Our parents would drop us off before eleven p.m. and the party would pulse all night until six a.m., the referees—only slightly older than us—becoming our cheap, and sometimes negligent, babysitters. Everyone else’s parents, that is. As in everywhere else in my life, it seemed, my mother’s constant presence was cramping my style, because she worked security at the monthly all-night skate parties to earn extra income.
We made our way inside, and I scanned the room to see who was already here. The thump of the 808s as “Drop the Bass” by DJ Magic Mike—the man who breathed new life into Miami bass music—banged through the speakers and put a little bounce in our steps. I looked to see if fine-ass Larry, my favorite referee, was there. He was whizzing around on his black speed skates like a ghetto Wayne Gretzky. (Years later, my older cousin married Larry. I was so jealous!) We strolled over to the concession stand to fill up on sour pickles, Now and Laters, and cheese sludge–covered nachos.
And then screaming. Screaming and yelling loud enough to drown out MC Breed’s “Ain’t No Future in Yo Frontin’” on the sound system. A mob of black teens poured over to the east side of the rink, slamming up against the baby blue quarter lockers. Another gang fight. I never understood why people run to the fight. Despite having my own rep as a lil’ brawler, my inner voice always said to flee. But a desire to stick with my friends overrode my natural instincts. I dashed from the concessions counter and then slithered around the outer edges of the crowd where my friends had gathered to get a look. Mom stopped mid-stride in front of me and yelled, “Get yo ass back to the counter!” It was like she had LoJack on my skates; she always knew where I was in that massive rink. This was becoming part of our routine. Mom worked security at every teen party around the city. And at every party a fight would break out and she’d find me and yell at me to “get back!” or “go home!” before the officers released pepper spray when they couldn’t physically break up the fight. This night, I saw her dart into the center of the crowd, instructing folks to “move back!” The fight was over almost as soon as it started. No pepper spray tonight.
The gossip was filtering through the crowd now: the CPTs had jumped Mike Read, pounded him with the business end of their expensive speed skates. Some say they saw his face as my mom and the other cops pulled him out of the melee; he was almost unrecognizable. His eyes were swollen shut, lips busted, and the whole left side of his face sagged unnaturally. Blood covered his beautiful braids. The CPTs had beaten Mike Read to the white meat. Mike Read, the pretty boy who was loyal to royal blue Dopemans, got caught for a split second without his BGD buddies, and CPTs with a score to settle surrounded him in a sea of red and gave him that work. I was too far back to view the action, but by the time I started middle school, I’d seen this same thing go down plenty of times. And when I think of being a black girl on the cusp of teendom, the gang violence, the thrills of the skating rink, the rise of sneaker culture, and the nadir of the crack epidemic meld into one giant memory. Mike Read’s beating is shorthand for all of it.
The gang culture of the late 1980s and early 90s had a huge impact on the fashion in my factory town, and on the rest of the country. The late 1980s were perilous times for us. We were trying the best we could to survive as the Reagan era folded into the Bush I years. Deindustrialization hit Fort Wayne hard, and as economic instability shook apart our old social order, the once minor underground economy bloomed into a full-fledged ecosystem. Instability breeds decay, and crack cocaine took root in that decay like fungus. Times got bleaker. Money got tighter. But hip hop fashion was starting to become a thing, and it gave us a sense of power.
Fashion trends were still regional in the late 1980s. But hip hop culture was going national. The most powerful boys at the rink would wear dark-wash Levi’s or Dickies jeans or Dickies 874 Originals in khaki or black. Either way, they were always freshly pressed with a precision that would make the folks at Niagara Spray Starch proud. They wore flannels, tall tees, or hoodies in their gang colors, often layered over a crisp white t-shirt or ribbed tank, which folks crassly called “wife beaters” or “O-Dogs,” after the Menace II Society character. Those garments had been part of our parents’ factory uniforms for decades. They made sense to us long before some rapper who lived thousands of miles away told us they were cool to wear.
Local stores—from Value City to JCPenney—sold those Dickies work khakis and flannels and hoodies in bulk. But then those distant rappers popped up on BET and MTV right in our living rooms, and our look suddenly had national cachet. Gang members had their own fashion rules, but the rest of us had our hip hop looks drawn from the same hood stylebook. And all of a sudden we were making demands of our parents’ checkbooks in ways we hadn’t when we were in elementary school and pretty much wore whatever they bought. We were teenagers now. We had to look the part. We had to be people who could be recognized as somebody. Hip hop culture was where it was at, coast to coast and in the middle states too. We were hip hop. We wanted the athletic team apparel and the crisp midnight-wash jeans and the tennis shoes. We had to have the tennis shoes. I never questioned why we called those soft-soled athletic status symbols tennis shoes when absolutely nobody played tennis. It’s just how the Midwest says it.
Back then, everybody wanted a pair of Nike Cortez, which we called “Dopemans.” You have to be from a certain part of the country to even know what I’m talking about when I say Dopemans. When I started looking into the history of the shoe, I called up old friends from home to ask if they remembered when the Nike Cortez was the shit. “What’s a Cortez?” they’d say. But if I said, “You know, Dopemans,” they’d light up. Seemed like everyone had a pair. Across the country, kids had different names for the shoe. In LA, Latinos called them “Air Cholos” or “Los Nikes de Cholo.” In Oklahoma, they were called “Milkshakes.” No one seems to know why, but it might be because cocaine was called ice cream and the coke dealer the ice-cream man. The Texas and Louisiana region called them “Gangsta Nikes,” “G-Nikes,” or “Project Nikes” (Nikes being one syllable instead of ni-ke like most folks say it). Like us, Atlanta and the upper South called the Cortez “Dopemans,” as did parts of the Midwest north of Indiana. Other variants included “Bullet Nikes” or “Two Strikes,”’cuz people who wore them were one strike away from getting a life sentence in prison. All across the country folks like me associated this shoe with gang life, with street life and hip hop. We were reverencing the same ghetto superstars as kids in other parts of the country, even when we used different words.
By any name, athletic shoes were essential gear for a lot of kids in the late 80s and early 90s. Jordans have cast a long shadow in the history of hip hop sneaker culture. But no one in Fort Wayne was really wearing Js in my middle school days. We were a frugal town; those shoes were far too expensive, even for those of us kids whose anxiously-barely-middle-class parents were constantly soothing their economic angst by buying us things. Jordans were a little too flamboyant even for us. Fort Wayne kids were mostly rockin’ Dopemans, Reebok Classics and 5411s, shell toes and Gazelles by Adidas, K-Swiss Classic 88s, and Diadora B. Elites. If you were really fancy, you had a pair of British Knights, Troops, Filas, or maybe Nike Air Force 1s. I did own a pair of quilted pink-on-white British Knights, or “BKs,” as we called them. I begged my mom for those shoes and then got bored of them before I could even break them in good. Mom swore she wouldn’t buy me another pair of tennis shoes. (She was trippin’. She loved buying me the latest styles just as much as I loved having them.) So I wasn’t that turned on by the tennis shoe culture, personally. But I watched what the lust for the latest shoes seemed to be doing to my neighborhood. They created a desire so intense that my friends were willing to cross over into the dark side of drugs and gangs to get them.
And drugs and gangs were all around us in those days. The crack cocaine trade spread from South America to ports in Los Angeles and Miami. From Miami, it moved up the Atlantic coast to New York City and across the country to the Midwest. LA kingpins like “Freeway” Rick Ross sold crack cocaine that had been smuggled up through Central America and expanded their Compton-based empires to small cities like Omaha, Nebraska; East Chicago, Illinois; Cincinnati, Ohio; and one day, my own Fort Wayne. Of course, we would later learn the ways that the FBI and CIA were complicit in the proliferation of drugs and guns in our neighborhoods. Then they named the crisis they helped to create the “crack epidemic” and criminalized the black and brown folks (and their babies) who got addicted to crack. But for now, we were just young folks at the crossroads of several major cartels that were building up a thriving business model preying on folks in crippled Rust Belt towns.
Crack hit my family hard. My aunt Marlene, who was my father’s sister and my mother’s best friend, got caught up in that first wave of users. No one had seen the short- or long-term effects of this new street drug. I remember being at home one day in the winter—this would have been in the late 80s—and it was cold. We were preparing for the holidays and saw the bad weather coming on the forecast, so we were sticking close to home. Dad had started a fire in our fireplace, and I was sitting right next to it, playing with my Barbie dolls as the heat washed over me. The loud rotary phone on the wall rang, and Dad eased off the floral-printed black couch to answer it. Always a cool character, my father, so when my ears caught his voice reaching higher registers, my attention snapped toward him. It sounded as if the person on the phone was relaying the most absurd news ever. I knew this was serious. My parents were conferring now. Hushed tones. I couldn’t make out the words. The adults were masters at keeping things from us children. I strained my ears, trying to make sense of their words. I couldn’t. But I could catch it when one of their voices would spike near almost a yell before quieting back down into the hushed whispers whose secrets got trapped inside the walls. Then Dad opened the door and headed out into the freezing winter night. He returned with his sister’s three children, my favorite cousins, in tow.
And now, with us kids huddled in my bedroom, I got the story. “Mama on drugs,” one cousin said. “It’s called crack.” Crack. Apparently, my aunt was so hooked on this cheap new drug with a quick high that she was giving away everything she could to get it. My cousins were home alone when their front door was suddenly yanked off its hinges. The landlord, fed up after months and months of my aunt failing to pay rent on the gloomy two-story house, let the winter in, leaving my cousins home alone in the dead cold. They called Dad—my dad, really the only dad they knew—to help them figure out what to do. And it’s lucky I liked my cousins, ’cuz we all got a lot of time together after that.
I loved Aunt Marlene too, she was creative and full of spark. She had been accepted into a college art program, but she couldn’t pass the gym class needed to get her high school diploma—like a lot of black folk, her fear of swimming was too great. And just like that, a few laps in a pool had changed her life. Aunt Marlene was too much of a carefree spirit to be chained to a machine in an overheated factory, and Fort Wayne didn’t really have much else to offer. Crack became her out, I guess. I remember that night so vividly, the first time I really saw the cold wind howling into the fissures in our family. But the drug became familiar. So fast.
Every night on television, we’d see commercials like the 1987 Partnership for a Drug-Free America hot skillet campaign. In thirty seconds, the ad campaign hoped to help America’s youth win the war against drugs. “This is drugs,” the narrator ominously called out. Then an egg was dropped into the frying pan, and it instantly began to bubble and sizzle and burn on the ends. “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” We had to laugh. It was one of the most hilarious things we’d seen on television, and it aired constantly. “Any questions?” we’d say, mocking the narrator’s voice, using it as a punch line for jokes we cracked on one another when someone said something stupid. They wanted to scare us straight. The commercial didn’t understand how much drug culture was a part of our everyday existence. It wasn’t like some stranger in a trench coat was coming up to us offering us crack. No, drug culture was everywhere, from the music we listened to, to the shoes we gave drug names—“check out my new cocaine-white Dopemans”—to the family members who once loved us but now loved the pipe a bit more. Drugs were pernicious in a way that the commercial just didn’t get. If someone was handing you a crack pipe, chances were it was a family member or close friend. It wasn’t no shadowy stranger trying to fry our brains. People were trying to deal with all kinds of pain and fear and disassociation through the high of drugs and the real economic power of the guns and money, and that is something that the US government, with its jail-them-all approach, did not understand. Those antidrug programs had no idea what was really going on, and it felt like they made little attempt to figure out how to heal our neighborhoods.
My mother was a D.A.R.E. officer, which added another complicated layer to my life. She was my D.A.R.E. officer. Every week she’d enter my classroom and teach my peers the eight ways to “Just Say No.” We repeated what she taught us, and colored in our D.A.R.E. notebooks and had fun playing Double D.A.R.E., Mom’s version of the Nickelodeon show. She was a good teacher. If only life was as easy as a game of Double D.A.R.E. I had friends whose mothers were cleaning drug money for their dealer stepdads and friends whose older brothers were in the game. That was just the shape of their lives, coloring books or no. And if it wasn’t already a family business, you could get lured by the promise of wealth. Where else were you gonna get it in Fort Wayne? In a city that didn’t have any pipeline to success but the crumbling ladder of factory jobs, my fifth-grade peers were scheming how they could get with this underground market. Here was a career that came with expensive tennis shoes, athletic team apparel, and gold chains, with quick money you could touch and smell and feel, and it didn’t feel like tattered work Dickies or smell like machine oil.
Meanwhile, I watched Mom lug that heavy silver drug kit to each of her classes, and then I stared at it sitting in our home every night. It was like a portable drug museum, with cocaine and heroin powder, a chip of crack rock, Quaaludes, and amphetamines, known as “speed.” I, too, was trying to balance my intimate ties to the state’s antidrug campaign; my vexed relationship with Mom, whose role as drug cop was slowly strangling my social life; and the allure of the street life that surrounded me.
The segregated black neighborhood on the southeast side of Fort Wayne was also sub-segregated into the haves and the have-nots among us black folk. There was a stigma around living in McMillen Park apartments, where Mom and I lived after my parents’ divorce, because everyone knew that they were on the cheaper end of housing, even if we didn’t have any real understanding of the Section 8 housing system.
But stigma aside, McMillen was one of the most fun places to live. Tons of my school friends lived in the cream-colored Monopoly game piece–looking military fort turned apartments. There were always kids outside to play with. We blasted MC Hammer’s Let’s Get It Started cassette from someone’s battery-operated boom box as we made up dance routines in the little patches of grass in front of the apartments. On balmy summer nights, we would stay out way past the streetlights flickering on. Someone would bring a bundle of Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles to share with everyone on the block. We would tear the perforated plastic, fighting to claim the purple or red instead of the green and orange pops. We played tag and hide-and-go-seek, darting in between the rows of our one-story apartments until our armpits were hot and musty. Life in the hood was fun. Sure, there were the occasional fights and the police were called into the maze-like complex quite often, but there was something about living there that felt more genuine and straightforward than the haves side of Village Woods.
The kids in McMillen Park befriended me despite the fact that I was an outsider. Between kindergarten and now I’d been in a different school district. We lived in the front row of apartments, which were slightly better appointed on the outside since they faced the busy intersection of McKinney Avenue and Plaza Drive and sat on a huge “front lawn.” I was on the fringes of it all and didn’t live as intimately together as my other friends, whose streets were more cramped and gridlocked. Plus, my mom was a cop. Many of my new friends’ parents were involved in some kind of criminal activity or another—from drug dealing to numbers running to selling “hot” clothes. And everyone knew we weren’t really low-income. We could’ve left those apartments whenever we wanted and could’ve even lived “out north” with the white folks.
But Mom wanted to live in the community where she worked the beat. And she wanted me to live among hood kids, like she had, believing it was the only way to keep me humble and grounded and mentally and physically tough. I had to know how to defend myself, and nobody could teach you how to fight like some hood kids. And I could never forget that black people around the country were struggling, and the government wasn’t doing much to make their situation any better. Mom thought it was her responsibility to share what we had with those in our community. She never wanted there to be a separation between me and the other kids, so she let me play outside with them. And even though I was po-po’s daughter, the kids let me in and many even embraced me. By the time we were in middle school, I was just as hood as everybody else in most of the ways that mattered. But Mom never let me go into anyone’s house—she didn’t want any cause to report someone for whatever type of illegal activity they might be running out of their house. And there was plenty of that.
Because drugs hit McMillen hard. With the drugs came the guns. With the guns came the drugs. And with the poverty and the guns and the drugs, people were starting to say this was gang territory. Land of crack dens. McMillen was a good step above the sho’ nuff projects Eden Green and Oaklawn Court deeper into the hood, near the East Central neighborhood, one of the oldest, historically most-segregated areas of our town that black migrants like my grandparents moved into back in the 1950s. Compared to those apartments—gang headquarters and stash houses that attracted a lot of gun violence, slashings, and jumpings—McMillen was projects-light. Drug and gang activity was less conspicuous, and there were more people who were trying to hold down legit low-wage jobs in the retail or fast-food industries, or as attendants at nursing homes and the state school for the developmentally disabled. Nonetheless, Mom got a steep discount on the rent for keeping her squad car parked outside.
At night, I’d be awakened by a wap, wap, wap. The first time was enough to send me into Mom’s bedroom for safety. It was someone firing off a nine millimeter. Would the morning news report someone getting killed? By the time I was wearing a training bra, my friends and I could differentiate between a nine and a pistol-grip pump or some folks just setting off fireworks. It got to the point where I would hear gunshots in the middle of the night and simply roll over in my bed and wait for silence to lull me back to sleep.
My new life was mirroring the new life of the country. In South Central Los Angeles and Chicago, Folk and People gangs were killing residents who weren’t even in the game just because they had on the wrong color in the wrong neighborhood. My friends and me, we lived that history through the music. As part of a peace treaty, some Crips (Folks) and Bloods (People) came together to record an album called Bangin’ on Wax in 1993. The CPTs in Fort Wayne were fueled by the lyrics of Blood songs like “Piru Love,” where Bloody Mary and her crew rapped about shanking Crips with 40 oz. liquor bottles and sending an adversary to his mother’s house in a body bag. If I’d wanted, I coulda told my friends all about how I’d been in LA during the height of the gang wars—that was right when I went to visit Aunt Brenda last. Mom was careful to pack mostly neutrals in my miniature suitcase that year. Baldwin Hills, where Aunt Brenda lived, was a bougie enclave, but you never knew what could pop off if we stopped in Compton or Inglewood for some soul food.
And once, when we were all visiting Chicago, I went to the movies with my teenage cousin Terry and one of his Gangster Disciples homeboys, who was wheelchair-bound after taking a couple of bullets in a shootout. The dude was still banging with the Folks even after that, wearing his blue flag and stacking—that’s what they called throwing up gang signs—and trying to flirt with Cheri, my pretty older cousin from Cleveland.
My stories of gang culture in the big city weren’t even anything to brag about, really. Gangs were a big deal but weren’t a big deal. By the time we were in middle school, they were just a normal part of our lives on the south side of Fort Wayne. I don’t know when it became that way. But it feels like one day I looked up and some of the pudgy-faced boys who used to call my Wave Nouveau a Jheri curl were now standing tall alongside their older brothers in the local gangs. The wars never got as bad on our streets as in the metropolises, but Mike Read could tell you that you still betta watch what colors you wear and where you wear them. And like Mom always told me, stray bullets can kill. I saw that too. One night, my friend TJ, the son of a prominent pastor, was sitting in front of the main window at the Old Fort YMCA. That Y was our community center, the black Y. But it also sat right across the street from Eden Green, the heart of gang and drug territory. TJ was fifteen. He and his younger sister were finishing their piano lesson and waiting for their mother, the first lady, to pick them up. Rival gangs started shooting outside. TJ got caught in the crossfire. A bullet pierced his skull and he was rushed to the hospital. Mom heard the call come over her CB. She came into my room and delivered the news: “TJ got shot; they don’t know if he’s gonna live.” I was gutted! I had just spoken with him right before his lesson. The first call came from my friend Lori, who had a massive crush on TJ. She could barely talk through her sobs. The phone kept ringing all night, as we patched through three-way calls, the typical “wassup?!” replaced with “Maaaaan, did you hear about TJ?” We prayed for days that TJ would live.
He didn’t die. He would live, they said, probably with blindness and brain damage. But somehow, TJ escaped those fates too. The Christian community was praising the miraculous power of the Lord for months after the shooting. His doctors thought it best to leave the bullet in his brain. TJ would walk around for the rest of his life with that bullet as his testimony of the day he almost died but Jesus had other plans.
It seemed like daily somebody else in my grade was joining a gang. I didn’t know what the gangs were doing besides throwing up their signs—which I used to practice in the mirror at home but wouldn’t dare do in front of one of them—occasionally jumping folks, and posting up at the skating rink. The gangstas’ actual job, which I was barely aware of as a kid, was to provide the muscle for the local drug trade, move weight, enforce payment. Crack was ever present in my life, and so were gangs, but I never quite made the connection between the two. As an adult, I would come to see that all us kids growing up were at the mercy of this larger force in ways we couldn’t even imagine at the time.
Some of us were tapped to join gangs. It was mostly boys, plus some of the cute girls who already had an older brother or cousin in the gang, or kids who you knew were heading toward trouble because they had already done a stint or two at Sol A. Wood Youth Center—“Sollywood” in my dad’s days there. With the colors and the hand signs and the camaraderie, a gang looked like a place you could belong. It seemed like the fraternities and sororities at Indiana University that Mom was always talking about, or a recreational group for wayward teens that was a little scary to get “jumped into” but then was all matching outfits and special privileges. Except for the stabbings and beatings. Or the more rare murders. Or the time that the CPTs threatened to kill a cop on New Year’s Eve, a night my mother was scheduled to work her beat overtime. I sat on her bed as she adjusted and readjusted the straps on her Kevlar bullet-proof vest. Yeah, the gangs seemed real cool to preteen me sometimes, one of several groups of idolizable teenagers flashing their color-coordinated Dopemans and their tight social bonds at the skating rink. But sometimes it was like sitting on the bed waiting for Mom to return home, or by the phone, waiting for a phone call about a friend in the hospital.
The night Mike got jumped, I had come dressed like Shalonna and Courtney, two of the coolest, prettiest, and most popular eighth-grade girls at my school. For some reason, they saw fit to let me, a sixth grader, join their clique. We called ourselves “The Ronis,” after singer Bobby Brown’s hit slow jam “Tenderoni.” We planned it out in school: we would each pick a “roni” name and get it airbrushed in our favorite color down the front of the left leg of a pair of light-wash jeans. This wasn’t an easy time for me with Mom; we were circling around and around each other, always ready to pop off. But it was times like this that I loved her so much, because she understood the stakes without me even having to explain to her why it mattered that two older girls seemed to genuinely like me and wanted to bring me into their crew. To show up at all-night skating without the airbrushed jeans would’ve been social suicide.
So Mom gave me some money and dropped me off at the mall so I could get my jeans airbrushed. She’d pay for the airbrush as long as I supplied my own jeans, she said. Fair enough. When I rolled up to the girls in the center of the rink, Shalonna and Courtney were kind of shocked that I’d actually followed through. And the girls in my grade were shocked (and probably a lil’ salty) by the fact that Shalonna and Courtney let me dress like them. I got “Mac-A-Roni” in turquoise airbrush. On the eve of thirteen and I already saw myself as a playgirl, a mack mama, the female counterpart to Kris Kross’s Mac Daddy and Daddy Mac. It was all so ephemeral, so in the moment. The airbrush could instantly transform an old pair of jeans, and that’s what fashion was for, to remake something old into something fresh.
If fashion told everyone who you were, shoes were a big part of it. And tennis shoes were the shoe in the skating rink. Crazy, right? You only had them on for the first few minutes before storing them away in a locker. But then two a.m. would roll around and the center of the rink became a dance floor. Shalonna, Courtney, and I ran back to the lockers to grab our shoes, and now our matching airbrushed jeans outfits were complete. Your shoe game had to be tight. Even if we were wearing the cheapest shoe that maker sold, it was still important that they were clean and that they matched the ’fit. Each of us girls ran to grab the cutie we’d been eying all night and take him onto the dance floor. Shalonna grabbed one of Mike Read’s friends, a light-skinned boy named Lonnie, who she had recently started talkin’ to.
For me, it was Tony, a light-skinned boy with almond-shaped eyes and curly hair—features that supported his claim that he was mixed Korean and black. Tony wore his hair in a popular men’s haircut called a bob and was a fly dresser, always crisp and clean. This night he had on a gray sweatshirt with a neatly pressed crease down the middle—as sharp as the ones on his dark-wash jeans—which he removed to reveal a red t-shirt. He sported a pair of white leather Dopemans with a black swoosh. I glimpsed at and then slightly stumbled over them at the same time as he pulled me into him, closer than usual. Tony and I made it a point to dance together at least once per party, but we knew it could never amount to anything because he went to a different school and was gang-affiliated. With me being “Five-0”’s daughter (the nickname we gave to cops because of the old TV show Hawaii Five-0), that just wouldn’t be a good look for him. So we lived in that moment of rhythmic slow grinding as R&B crooner Keith Sweat whined, “How deep is your love.” I laid my face in the crook of Tony’s neck, the scent of his Cool Water cologne blighting out the thick smell of sweaty gym socks that hovered in the air around us like a nosy chaperone.
The skating rink allowed for this kind of intimacy between kids who were in gangs and those who weren’t, more so than any other space in town. Parents didn’t want their “good” kids affiliating with gangsters, but the skating rink was considered neutral ground, a space for good, clean fun, despite the fact that Roller Dome South was mostly CPT territory. The Cs would congregate down at the end of the row of felt-covered benches that lined the east side of the rink, where the light was dim and they could clock everyone entering and exiting. You felt their presence. Elementary-aged kids learned to stay out of their way and have as little direct contact as possible. But skating rinks being the social spaces that they are, you do end up talking to folks and developing crushes on some of the boys and worshipping some of the gang queens, wishing you could be as fly or skate as well as some of them. Each year, from the time I was in second grade till sixth grade, I would inch my way closer to their circle, just hanging right on the periphery of danger, close enough to hear their conversations and get a whiff of their cologne-drenched bodies. Some of these guys, like Duron Martin and Lil Tanky Jones and Marty B., had become thug celebrities. None of the core dudes ever said much to me other than that I had pretty eyes, on account that they knew who my mother was.
Most of those boys had at least one pair of Dopemans. They seemed to be standard-issue dope boy attire, in basic colors like white on black or black on white, red, or navy with the gleaming white Nike swoosh. Whether leather or nylon or suede, the shoes were always fresh to death. Not high quality, but high on the desire charts. All of our favorite West Coast rappers and East Coast b-boys were wearing them. And by the early 90s, so were we, because they were durable and cheap, something that made sense to our frugal parents (not that my mom could ever be called frugal).
Nike was actually a no-name shoe company before it launched the Dopemans, or Cortez, during the height of the 1972 Summer Olympics. It was a track-and-field shoe specially designed to fill a gap in the market. Bill Bowerman, a track-and-field coach at the University of Oregon and an Olympic trainer, worked with engineers to create the original prototype for the Cortez in 1968. They needed a shoe that was super lightweight but that was durable enough to protect from road shock. The heel had to have enough padding to protect the Achilles tendon from fatigue and strain, which could lead to injury. Bowerman tinkered with the shoe for four years as he and his business partner, Phil Knight, exhausted all of their resources to keep the business afloat until the shoe was ready for launch. The pair was not prepared for the success of the Cortez, which vaulted to fame through smart marketing that caught and rode the wave of public attention on Olympic track and field. The Cortez grossed nearly $5 million (in today’s figures) in sales mere months after it was released. It was the company’s crown jewel. Nike invested millions to enhance the Cortez in those early years, swapping the heavier leather for a lighter nylon-and-suede combo.
By the time I was entering adolescence in the late 1980s, the Cortez had lost a lot of its luster, but none of its staying power. By that point, Nike was in the basketball shoe game and the Air Jordan and Air Force 1 reigned supreme, and Nike had plenty of newer track shoe designs on offer. But Cortez sales remained consistent because they were rebranded as a lifestyle shoe, endorsed by blond bombshell Farrah Fawcett, who had sported a pair of the red, white, and blue classic Cortezes on the set of Charlie’s Angels. In the early 1990s, the brand tapped megastar Whitney Houston, the vocal pop powerhouse who had been branded to transcend race, to endorse the shoe. She paired the classic Cortez with a white, red, and blue track suit during her moving rendition of the national anthem at Super Bowl XXV, just after the United States had entered the First Gulf War. Both Fawcett and Houston projected the right lifestyle for the shoe, and they had young, adoring suburban fan bases that would beg their parents to buy them the shoes. But Nike was smart enough to recognize the hip hop zeitgeist, so they didn’t stick with just their suburban market. N.W.A. front man Eric “Eazy-E” Wright made Nike apparel and shoes part of his brand, and Nike capitalized on the new look. It’s hard to imagine now what an insightful move that was.
I had the biggest crush on Eazy-E. He was a pint-size dope-boy-turned-rapper with a high-pitched voice and a dry Jheri curl. That combination was wack on the guys I saw walking around Fort Wayne. But Eazy-E had charm and charisma and confidence … and MONEY. And I knew N.W.A.’s entire catalogue. The Fort Wayne library was oddly hip, and they had all of N.W.A.’s music on cassette. I would use my library card to check out the tapes and then dub them using my dual-cassette stereo. This was one of those moments where being a nerd paid off. While my friends were paying full price for all of N.W.A.’s music, I was getting it for free. I would listen for hours as Eazy-E and Ice Cube and MC Ren rapped about street life, hustling, and racist cops. When I was mad at my mother, I would blast “Fuck the Police”—when she wasn’t home, of course. I delved into Eazy-E’s world of Compton as I stared at the cover art. N.W.A. always wore something basic: LA Raiders jackets with white Nike t-shirts or sweatshirts with a black Nike swoosh. Eazy was usually in black Dopemans with a white swoosh or sometimes the white-on-white ones.
By solidifying what seemed like a partnership with Eazy-E, Nike embraced street culture in a way that no other brand had at the time. Adidas had a relationship with Queens-based Run DMC, Troop with LL Cool J, and British Knights with MC Hammer, but their images were wholesome compared to the content N.W.A. was producing: the overt dope dealing, wild sex, and gun violence. Of course, Nike didn’t do this out of love for black kids like me. They went for the profit, knowing that hood kids and white kids in the suburbs wanted to look like their rap idols. And they for damn sure weren’t showing up on our doorsteps to give their condolences to so-and-so’s mama after her kid was gunned down in their shoes or beaten and robbed for them. But something about their acknowledgment of our culture felt like they understood us, they saw the emerging tidal force that was our hip hop culture. They picked the blackest, most foulmouthed rapper to endorse their shoes—alongside the reigning princess of pop, Whitney Houston, and the white lady.
Now, structurally, a pair of Cortez and a pair of Dopemans are the same shoe. But to my mind they have different DNA. The man who sold drugs in our neighborhood, the dope dealer, the dope man, or the “d-boy,” for short, wore those shoes, or at least in our minds he did. We knew him. Yeah, he had some menacing ways, but he wasn’t separate from us. He was our uncles, older brothers, the dude whose social world we orbited at the skating rink, wishing we could date him but knowing we didn’t want to go through the violence or the bother of being jumped in by the girls in the gang in order to have a chance to get him. These men were fly. They were the ones who rarely returned our love or showed up at our special functions. They were the ones with whom we took Polaroid pictures when we visited them in the pen. They were the ones who died too soon and whose blood we cleaned out of their clothes. And something about their style rang true. It was something to emulate and desire. In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever thought Nike would actually name one of its shoes Dopemans, but at the time I did, never even questioning it; it was because of N.W.A.
When N.W.A. released “Dope Man” in 1987, they put to music what we knew. In the song, crack fiends were yelling after the dope man, trying to get their next high: “Dope man, please can I have another hit?” Women called “strawberries” were willing to “sell pussy for crack.” The infectious chorus “Dope man! Dope man!,” chanted over a bass-laden Dr. Dre beat, was easy for us to recite. In environments where we were all disenfranchised, the dope man had a degree of power and autonomy, even though he, too, was subject to getting cracked over the head by a rogue cop’s billy club. The N.W.A. song and others like it, including their 1988 follow-up “Gangsta Gangsta,” gave the gangsta a persona. Part reality, part mythical, it allowed us to not focus so much on the dope boys and gangstas who were running roughshod in our apartment complex or the dudes who were getting my aunties and family friends strung out. All of a sudden we could see them as pseudo-heroic figures who repped our hoods and our culture for the world. We wanted them to win, to elude the racist cops.
These narratives, built around things of beauty, objects of desire that hip hop culture brought us, put a sort of needed filter on the harsh realities of the world represented in the music. On the one hand, we saw our relatives, loved ones we’d looked up to, cracked out, eyes wide like saucers, loud when they weren’t supposed to be. Skinny. Teeth yellow, skin sallow. And all across our neighborhood we saw how one family member on crack became an indictment of the entire family. “So-and-so’s mama’s on crack,” you would hear. On the other hand, hip hop allowed us to laugh at our pain. Miami bass rap group the Dogs released their song “Crack Rock” in 1990, with a hook of elementary-school-aged kids chanting “Na, na, na, na, na, your mama’s on crack rock!” over an 808-laced beat while the girl on the receiving end of the taunt chanted back things like “You got my mama bent!” and “Yours is too!” That song was excruciating in its comedy because that situation was so real for so many of us. Hardly anyone, even in the better parts of the black side of town, could boast that not one of their relatives was strung out. But even still, we would run up to people and yell the song’s hook in their faces. That was one of the ways we coped.
Our gang-inspired fashion spoke to a painful truth: we had an intimacy with crack cocaine that we couldn’t escape. The loss of factory-funded middle-class culture was devastating for folks who had derived their entire sense of worth from being a bigwig in the factory. We watched as our parents’ freedom dreams morphed into crack vapor. Each tug on the pipe made the future look grim for the baby boomers. We kids felt the brunt of it. More and more of our loved ones, those charged with protecting us and making a better life for us, took to the crack pipe to blight out their troubles. They didn’t know the effects of crack, the short-term ones, where the chemical dependency makes crack exponentially more addictive than heroin, or the long-term, how that substance created a generation of addicts and tore apart families. But this crazy, horrifying, infuriating, heartbreaking history that fellow Rust Belt kid, Chicago native Kanye West, tells in his song “Crack Music” also brought with it a wave of creative cultural expression that took on enormous momentum and power. The music, the fashion, the culture I grew up with united me with my peers, and does still. And I, a kid of the crack era, am forced to wrestle with these contradictions, even as I glorify the Dopemans name we gave the Nike Cortez.