Tyler was born in an elite neighborhood full of homeowners, college graduates, and grass. His parks had benches and fountains and joggers and recycle bins. His doghouse had a doghouse and everyone had good credit. I’m from miles and miles and miles of concrete where everyone has fucked-up credit. Our credit is so fucked up, they won’t take our cash. Our parks are concrete too—concrete open-air drug markets run by this crew or that crew—most of us have lead and some of us are crack babies and we all hoop, everyone hoops, even the grandmas.
Tyler played Little League baseball and his parents came to every game. They’d go out for pizza when he’d do well. They’d go out for pizza when he lost or for ice cream or his mom would make his favorite—casserole. He probably ate vegetables every day—ten-plus servings and went to bed by eight p.m. on school nights.
My hood didn’t sleep, neither did I, and I never had vegetables as a kid—candy or carbs only, or noodles or cereal and I don’t know what the fuck casserole is; I don’t think black people eat it. My mom rarley attended any of my basketball games and I hated home-cooked meals before Angie’s. My favorite dish as a kid was a chicken box with salt, pepper, and ketchup or a pack of Now and Laters or sixty-cent rice and gravy from Bo Bo’s kitchen. That restaurant was a death trap; it stayed wrapped up in caution tape—a lot of good dudes were murdered coming out of Bo Bo’s.
In middle school Tyler came in second place in a science fair, he said. Supposedly he made a volcano that really erupted but lost to a kid who constructed some sort of remote control robot. He also said that he didn’t give a shit about losing because he had baseball fame—enough fame to help him land his first kiss from a chick at a school dance.
I thought science fairs for were for the sitcoms I’d see it on TV. We’d always cut that shit off because the only experiment that mattered to us was transforming powder cocaine to hard crack rock. Well, not me, because I ain’t hustle then, but the bulk of my friends did. I just rode dirt bikes up Ashland Avenue and past McElderey Street and on Jefferson Street, where I witnessed my cousin DI’s murder and a few more bodies dropped after that. I lost my virginity in between those funerals. Being horny kept me indoors when them shots rang out and probably saved my life.
Tyler went to one of those elite boarding schools. It sat in the middle of green acres under clear skies. He lived on a campus that was equipped with horse stables and tennis courts and where the girls were separated from the boys. They had lunch options and a salad bar and bottled water way back in the nineties before people started drinking bottled water. They read the classics like Shakespeare and Hemingway and had rich discussions centered around art, history, and modern culture. Tyler said his schools were 99.9 percent nonviolent and I replied, “Ninety-nine point nine percent?” He then told me that one time a kid had brought a knife to his school, showed it, was snitched on by everyone who saw it, and then was quickly apprehended. No one was hurt.
Sometimes I’d forget my jacket or my science book, but I never left my pistol—that .22 fit right in the inside pocket of my Pelle. By sixteen I lost a bunch of good friends to murder, and I didn’t want to join the club. We used to bump our old school classics like NWA, Black Moon, and Smith and Wesson on portable CD players and no one I knew read shit ever. The girls mixed with the boys way too much. Everybody fucked everybody raw. First period smelled like STDs. Other than daily fistfights and a few stabbings, my school wasn’t the most violent inside but we were surrounded by five rival housing projects. I had family in them all and still got banked once or twice.
Tyler was successfully finishing semester after semester of college. I dropped out. Tyler has never been to prison and is 100 percent employable. I never been to prison and felt 100 percent unemployable. Tyler’s dad has a business that he could work for even though his mom told him that he didn’t have to work unless he wanted to. I gotta work, no one will give me shit. Tyler got some job offers from some family friends as well but respectfully declined. I put in a bunch of applications and didn’t get a callback. We both smoke and drink. Tyler’s room, board, and car are all prepaid by family so him not making any money today really didn’t matter. I have a hungry crew to feed, rent and a Nike addiction so I’m happy as shit that Troy and I have weight and a nice clientele. I wasn’t sure if Tyler wanted to make his own money or was just infatuated with the life like everyone else, but I told him I’d think on it.