When I was in seventh grade, I met my first Asian homie, Joey Vano. We’d hang out at his house almost every weekend, which was perfect because mine was an embarrassing shitshow, but sometimes my parents would insist he come to the crib because they were worried that I was a burden on his family.
Every time Joey came, I’d tell myself it would be different. But no matter what I did, how good I was, or how hard I tried to keep Emery under wraps, my mom went apeshit like clockwork. Every Saturday morning before we even woke up for cartoons, Moms would be acting a fool. She’d come busting out of her room yelling, throwing pots, calling my dad an asshole, telling everyone she was going to crash the car into a tree. We never got to sleep in past eight or nine because that’s when the Mom Show came on.
Mom acted out even more when guests were at the crib ’cause she knew it’d embarrass Dad even more. Who was my mom? A Chinese-American woman in the nineties with no career, three kids, and a husband that didn’t pay attention. I felt her pain. It pissed all of us off how much my dad would cater to guests, outsiders, and Chinese uncles with five rings and a perm, but break out the bullwhip for his own fam. After all their brawls, there was nothing Moms could say that would hurt him, so the best she could do was embarrass him when guests were at the crib, even if the guest was a twelve-year-old Filipino kid who was about to watch a bomb named Jessica obliterate everything he knew about moms, women, or any organism carrying eggs, for that matter.
I had to get away.
Joey loved basketball, playing Twisted Metal, surfing, and alternative rock. I would tell him, “Damn, son, you Filipino, you should be the b-boy, rockin’ snap-backs, listening to Pac, not me!” but that was Orlando. There weren’t many Filipinos in Orlando so they didn’t have an underground smell-road, no places to gather and just be Filipino. Every year, what Filipinos there were would go to Lake Cane Park and roast a pig, eat some adobo and garlic rice, but they weren’t militant about maintaining their identity like the Chinese were. Joey was free to just do him, which meant being an easygoing dude with shoulder-length hair and grunge steez. Also, his brother, Carl, had this dope Italian girlfriend, Joanne, so he didn’t make fun of white people as much as me. I was rocking Starter jackets and Levi’s, but Joey was the opposite; he rocked Airwalks, flannel, and things I’d never seen. I remember this fool listening to Alanis Morissette and I’d ask, “Man, you can just go outside and hear white women whine in the cul-de-sac, why you paying money to hear that shit?” But that was Joey, Filipino in Orlando with a California state of mind.
Joey was happier than me. That might’ve been because he had dope parents. They gave him everything he needed and most of what he wanted, but also made sure he got his work done and was a good kid. I thought to myself, Well, that’s easy. Why is it so hard at my crib? Why can’t we just wake up, eat some SPAM, watch the Lakers, and be like Filipinos. Then I realized, I’d rather stand in a horse stance holding a twenty-pound bucket of rice over my head than rep the Lakers.
I loved going to Joey’s house. When I met white kids’ parents, they always asked me bullshit questions about race, where our family was “from,” and used words like Oriental. I was like a toy in their house, but Joey’s parents were Asian so it felt like family. I never felt like I had to carry the burden of the whole Chinese diaspora, or that everything I did was a statement about my people and where we’re from. Whenever I got to stay at Joey’s, I’d talk to his dad about basketball, food, the news, what I wanted to be when I grew up. Joey’s mom liked me, too, but she could tell I was a troublemaker. Joey’s dad covered for me and said things like “dee boys are boys,” but she was still suspicious. Dr. Vano was hilarious and had the ill accent. I remember one morning he told me about getting circumcised in the Philippines.
“Eddie, you don’t believe how painful this is.”
“I got circumcised and I don’t remember it being so bad.”
“Oh, that’s because they do it to you when you leetle boy. I got circumcised when I was fifteen!”
“Dad, why do you always have to tell this story!”
“Joey, why you embarrassed, this is natural, everyone is circumcised these days.”
“Yo, it’s cool, man, let him tell the story.”
“So, in the Philippines, you go to the doctor when you’re fifteen and they cut your foreskin.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts! It hurts so bad, we would all run to the beach and jump in the salt water to clean it!”
“Wait, you just jump in the water with bloody dicks?”
“Yes! And you come out, your penis looks like a tomato!”
“Dad, I’m eating, man!”
“Yeah, just like Joey’s Vienna sausage there, ha, ha, but beeger, much beeger!”
Joey would get embarrassed and take his food in his room so I went along, too.
Joey’s pops was a Laker fan like most FOBs who grew up in the Magic era, but Joey was a die-hard Orlando Magic fan. I loved Shaq in fourth grade, but Orlando was full of idiots who didn’t know the game. When Shaq became a free agent they ran an article in the Orlando Sentinel asking if he was worth $100 million. No doubt he’s worth $100 million! Goddamn, Juwan Howard got $100 that summer and he was a six-nine power forward that got his buckets with line-drive fifteen-footers. Your boy Shaq was rippin’ backboards just eatin’ everybody’s food, there was no question he was worth $100. In the stands, you’d always hear people complaining about how much athletes made, wearing their Washington Mutual polo shirts. One time, I even turned around and said to a guy, “Every one of my friends could do your job, but not one motherfucker between Orlando and Houston can do what Shaq does, so fall the fuck back and watch the show.” Surprisingly, no one said a word after; motherfuckers started leaving the crazy Chinaman alone.
When draft time came around, Joey would get excited and I’d tell him every single year that they were just gonna draft the best available white guy and I was right. Go back and look: Geert Hammink, Brooks Thompson, Brian Evans, Michael Doleac, Matt Harpring, Mike Miller, Curtis Borchardt, Zaza Pachulia, Travis Diener, and the whitest NBA player of all time, J. J. Redick. I was surprised these fools didn’t draft Frederic Weis twice.
I couldn’t fuck with the Magic. I went for the Suns, Hornets, and Knicks: Barkley, ’Zo, and Patrick. I had a problem watching ball at Joey’s, though. No matter how hard I tried, I’d be yelling at the TV, cursing, making fun of the Magic, and Mrs. Vano always overheard. In front of his parents, I spoke good English, kept it clean, but around Joey I was just wildin’. There was nothing two-faced about it, but Mrs. Vano didn’t really like it.
She started to see a change in Joey once he started hanging out with me. He left 2Pac All Eyez on Me in his mom’s car one day and she got real upset when she heard it so, of course, I got blamed. We’d always fuck around in class and end up in detention, but it was just hijinks. I never felt like I was transforming Joey into a “bad” person; I was just helping him live a little more. One week got especially funky, though. There was this science teacher we hated, Mr. Mazza, a passive-aggressive dick that always assumed we were fucking around when we weren’t. So, in the great self-destructive tradition of minority adolescents everywhere,* we figured, “Why not cause trouble, he gonna assume it anyway.” This was when Biggie’s “Big Poppa” was a hit, so when he walked into class I’d always yell, “I love it when you call me Fat Mazza!” and we all laughed at the fool.
That Friday, Fat Mazza gave us an assignment. It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen a teacher do: “All right, class, this week, I want you all to design a weapon using the things we’ve learned in class about force.” We couldn’t believe it, this fool really gave us free rein to make weapons, test them at school, and present them in class. Mazza made it clear we weren’t allowed to make explosives or use materials like knives, BB guns, paintball guns, and so on. It had to be something that would represent the principles of physics, but not actually hurt people. For the rest of the day, all anyone could talk about was the weapons they were going to build. Some people wanted to make potato shooters, others catapults. Joey and I were trying to figure out what we could do that would really wreck shop, but we were blank.
After school, his mom took us to the mall so we could get ideas. We went straight for the comics shop. Punisher always had the best weapons but they were all guns. The X-Men had wild mutant abilities that they clearly weren’t selling at K-B Toys. Comics weren’t very helpful, it turned out. We went to K-B, though, and found a Nerf slingshot. It was meant for shooting small toys or tennis balls but we wanted to move more heavy-duty objects. I’m pretty sure we went to Sports Authority, where we found a metal slingshot with a heavy, rugged sling. The joint could launch anything easily a hundred yards. But we decided that slingshots are boring. We still needed to figure out what we were going to shoot. All night at Joey’s we played Twisted Metal 2. The next morning we woke up for breakfast and of course it was eggs, toast, OJ, and Vienna sausage at Joey’s. But then it hit us, the answer was right in front of our noses, fucking up our sense of smell.
SPAM.
“Son, a SPAM launcher!”
“Oh, no way, dude, that’s crazy.”
“Naw, for real, a SPAM launcher. We would wet people.”
FOR LUNCH, PEOPLE usually sat around in the grass, went to the cafeteria, or took lunch in class, but a few of us played basketball every day. In the winter, when it got a little cold, we all wore North Faces and played football in the grass by the parking lot. But that day, for once, there was no basketball.
We had a motherfucking SPAM launcher.
Everyone was mad excited. We set it up at the free-throw line, loaded a brick of SPAM in the tray we made, and shot the shit right at the backboard. SPLASH!
“Damn! That shit is nasty!”
“It’s stuck to the backboard, man.”
“Again!”
We shot free throws, three-pointers, and half-court shots with this funky-ass SPAM launcher. It was late May in Orlando so the weather was already ninety-plus degrees. As the SPAM fell to the blacktop, it started to sizzle. Everyone walking by started to cover their faces. It smelled like we were cooking dog food. At this point, I wasn’t on the football team anymore and a bunch of the guys were wearing their white home jerseys around school since it was a Friday. We saw this one kid we didn’t kick it with anymore walking with his girl like a punk-ass Friday night lights jock.
“Yo, hit that motherfucker, man.”
“Naw, naw, you gonna fuck up his jersey, son. That shit is crispy.”
“Fuck that jersey, we don’t play on the team no more.”
“All right, do you.”
Blap! We meant to shoot the kid, but missed and it went down shawty’s shirt. The girl totally bugged out and ran to the office all crazy with high butt kicks like O-Dog in Menace. We couldn’t stop laughing ’cause this girl’s running around campus and a brick of SPAM just pops out the bottom of her dress like a newborn shitburger. We knew we were fucked, but it was definitely worth it. We were living our suburban version of Mobb Deep’s “G.O.D. pt. III” skit:† “Yea, yea, hit him out the window, son!”
Before we knew it, Miss Lacey, the music teacher, came by in high heels. If there was ever one teacher that I felt bad for picking on it was her. She wasn’t mean; she just had no idea how to communicate with kids. She’d enforce rules to a T and didn’t understand when to just let kids be kids and look the other way. To her credit, the school never should have made people like Joey or me take music class and have us sing. They used to give us sheet music on stands. She was one of those people that thought kids didn’t know what sex was yet, so we would remix the songs, talk dirty to sheet music while girls would be singing, and hump the music stands. Everyone loved it, but Miss Lacey would go crazy screaming to stop. One day she got so upset, she just ran out of class in her high heels screaming, “I quit! I quit! I don’t know what to do with you anymore!” Poor woman slipped on the stairs and we all felt bad. We were like, “Yo, come back, Miss Lacey! We just playin’ with you!” Of course, on SPAM launcher day she was the first on the scene.
“What is that smell?”
“It’s nothing, Miss Lacey.”
“Eddie! Joey! I know it’s you!”
“Hi, Miss Lacey!”
“What are you boys doing? What is that?”
And of course, we just ripped a can of SPAM over her head.
“Naw, it ain’t me, Miss Lacey!”
There she went, running to the office to tell on us with a brick of SPAM just lying next to her. It was hilarious. Joey was usually pretty worried about getting in trouble, but that was the first time I remember seeing him really, really enjoy one of our dumb-ass stunts. He didn’t even care he was getting in trouble and I loved it. I was always telling Joey to just wild. Life fucking sucked anyway.
I took my own advice in every phase of my life except girls. Annabelle Masterson looked like money. She had good hair, an ass, stellar middle school titties, and green eyes. Annabelle came correct with all that expensive Ralph Lauren. I mean, we had Polo or Sport, but this girl wore RALPH. Purple label. We had the joints with bright-ass colors and big logos on it. Annabelle had the leather boots, the jackets with embroidery, plaid, not the hood Polo we were coppin’. I swore she rode horses and shit.
We had never even talked to this girl. We never even talked to any of her friends for that matter. The only person I knew that talked to her was my homie Chris Sullivan, because he ate lunch with her friends sometimes. I knew Chris from football and he was a knucklehead, so that was my mans. Chris and Joey decided to take my crush on Annabelle into their own hands. All I ever did was talk about what I’d do to her, but I was too scared to actually approach her.
Three weeks before our last year of middle school, Joey and Chris wrote a letter to Annabelle with my name on it saying all the things that I had been saying plus some other killer bars. I believe my favorite was “I just want to get inside and eat your dingleberries.” After two years, the student had become the teacher. Joey went over the top, all-in. At first I was embarrassed that Annabelle knew I was fiendin’, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Not surprisingly, Annabelle didn’t like the letter at all and took it to the office. It was signed with my name, so at first people thought it was me—but eventually the truth came out and Joey and Chris ended up in the principal’s office. They were suspended for a few days.
Joey’s mom lost her mind. She got so mad at Joey that she forced him to go to confession. Even though it was his idea, I was implicated. I understand. Joey was a good kid, never causing trouble, never talking back, and along came this wild-ass Chinaman with mental SARS that totally fucks his world up. If you’re Joey’s mom, you’re not going to like that kid very much. I guess she felt about me the way I felt about Robin Givens: the bird ruined Mike! My mom got a phone call about the situation, too, and I was under review by the school just because I kept getting involved in so many situations.
They couldn’t expel me for the Annabelle letter because I didn’t write it, but I was near the stove enough that they wanted to speak with my parents about whether or not I’d be able to attend in ninth grade. They never had the talk because our report cards came the same week. For the first time in my life, I got a D. My mom didn’t even think twice and pulled me out of the school. She’d called ’nuff:
“I’m not spending my money so you can go fuck around with these rich kids. You’re going to public school.”
I didn’t want to leave. Joey was my first really good Asian friend, my A-alike. I loved that motherfucker.
THAT SUMMER I went to the Dennis Scott Basketball Camp and got kicked out after the third day. Everyone at the camp had Chinese jokes. I remember after one game, this blond-haired boy, Sean, came up to me with his brother and yelled at me, “Ching Chong Eddie Huang sitting on a jumbo gong!” During a game, another kid came down the floor and laid one up on me real nice. After he scored, he had something to say, too. I can’t remember what he said, but it was in the “ching chong” category of low-IQ slurs. It got me heated. So, the next time he was on a fast break, I ran his ass down and chucked him into the wall when he went for the layup. The kid started squirming and I knew I was done. I changed my clothes and just waited outside for my parents.
People had jokes, but at this point I was meaner, so I didn’t even think twice. You said some shit, I threw you into a wall. Teachers, counselors, psychiatrists, family, and friends couldn’t understand. I was a nice kid, smiled a lot, had a genuine interest in books, culture, and anything that I could get my hands on to read. But there was this switch that would go off. Between getting hit at home and all the things people said about me, I just couldn’t take it. I couldn’t walk away. I was determined to get even. I wanted to hurt people like they hurt me.
That summer, we moved to Bay Hill. In Orlando, there were two famous subdivisions. Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill had the best golf course in central Florida and hosted the Nestlé Invitational. On adjacent land, there was another subdivision called Isleworth, which had a shittier golf course, but almost all the houses were on the lake. Isleworth is the joint Tiger Woods lived in when his ho game got put on blast. We didn’t just move into Bay Hill. Pops built a house, on a peninsula, accessible only if you drove through a gate at the end of Bay Hill and then over a bridge. #Money Team. Emery and I were shocked. There were no warning signs. For our entire lives, my dad was a hardworking small business owner and my mom was clipping coupons. Neither of them spent much money on us. Realizing that they had money was like finding out I was adopted. Who were these people? By that time, Pops had two restaurants: Atlantic Bay Seafood and Cattleman’s Steakhouse on I-92. Both were doing well, but we had no idea they were balling for real.
Southwest Orlando was full of athletes, Palestinian landlords, people like the Magnusons who blew up overnight for inventing PVC patio furniture. Pops fit the bill. For the most part, it was white people, but there was one token minority in each subdivision. The Lebanese Khatibs lived one division over, the Maalis were down the street, Barry Larkin lived in the cul-de-sac, and the Neilsons from New Orleans were across the street. Sixty percent of the families were Real Housewives of Southwest Orlando types with platinum blond hair, BCBG shoes, and Botox. MILFs ran down the street with those rhinestone Bebe shirts, the uniform for every over-the-hill gold digger desperate to make their shit shine.
These families were twenty-first-century forty-niners digging for gold in the Orlandos, Phoenixes, and Dallases of the world. Carpetbaggers with no culture or moral compass, enabled and empowered with new money. The rush was real in those cities, all vying to be the next L.A. or Vegas. Disney, Exxon, and America West put cities on their backs. I didn’t understand why my pops went down to Orlando until he blew up. That summer, it was in plain view for us all to see. His plan worked: that chink fucking made it. I’d say I was proud of my dad, but the first night in the house he made it clear we had nothing to celebrate. My dad was watching Emery and me as we ran around from room to room in the new house, hooked up our PlayStation to the new TV, and toasted our new life with Capri Sun. We were hyped. He wasn’t smiling. With no advance warning he grabbed us both and kicked our asses. The money was his, not ours, and he made it clear.
My dad built a room where he put punching bags, speed bags, a bench press, and sparring equipment, just so Emery, Evan, and I could work out and spar with each other. He never wanted us to stop fighting, even if it meant fighting each other. We were never going to get soft, never going to give in to the cupcake life. My dad was still a G at heart, but unlike the American gangsters whose dream is for their kids to never look in the rearview, Dad did everything he could to make sure the money didn’t change us. I’ll give him that.
That fall I started my fifth school in seven years, Dr. Phillips. When I walked on to the school bus, I saw a bunch of preppy rich white kids, but there was also a Cuban girl; Neal, the big Jordanian; the Palestinians Maali and Muhrad; the Dominican Easy Eric; and me, “Chino.” From jump, I knew the diversity at Dr. Phillips would be good for me even if it came in the Sizzler Buffet one-of-each format. The other thing that came clear was that I wouldn’t be throwing kids into the ground like it was Dennis Scott summer camp; these motherfuckers were big. After my first day of school, I sat at the back of the bus. A few minutes after I sat down, this tall Palestinian dude, Maali Maali, came up to me and said, “That’s my seat.” I was literally a foot shorter than Maali and he had a full-on beard. I still hadn’t shaved in my life and I had a photo of Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan on my T-shirt. The Chinaman those days was in no position to fight grown-ass men. But of course, I couldn’t back down.
“It’s my seat now.”
“Oh shit, son! Little man steppin’ to you, kid!” screamed Neal. He was even bigger than Maali, but at least he smiled. Within seconds, there was a huge crowd at the back of the bus, ten deep with kids from my new neighborhood. “This n!gg@ got a Bugs Bunny shirt on, son. You gonna fuck him up?”
FYI, Palestinians and Latinos in Orlando all called each other “n!gg@” and black people called us “n!gg@,” too. Palestinians ran shit so they could call you, your mom, your brother, your sister, and themselves whatever the fuck they wanted to. And apparently, everyone wanted to be “n!gg@s.”
Then another Palestinian came on the bus with a tape deck in his backpack bumping Nas’s “If I Ruled the World.” We all used to buy tape decks, throw in a tape of music we recorded from 102 Jamz, and put them in our backpacks, which we’d wear on our chests to broadcast to whoever was unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Most of us didn’t bother with Walkmans ’cause we wanted to play our shit loud. Muhrad was doing the worst Lauryn Hill I’ve ever heard in my life. Dude was singing at the top of his lungs with his Palestinian Ebonic accent “If ahhh Roooo-led the Wooorrld!!!!” Then he saw me.
“The fuck is the deal, n!gg@, this kid is in your seat, Maali!”
“N!gg@, I know, he fuckin’ deaf, b, I told him to get the fuck up but he ain’t movin’. I can’t fuckin’ fight kids.”
There was one white girl that got to sit in the back, Emily Huyzak. Maali and Neal always kicked it to Emily, a tall blond girl, cute, always dressed well. For real, I got most of my game just listening to Neal rap to her. Dude would come across the aisle, try to touch her legs, throwin’ all kinds of wild-ass game at 6 A.M. Shit was better than the morning show on 102. On that first day, I recognized her. There were photos of her at my orthodontist’s office so I figured it was my orthodontist’s daughter. When she came on the bus, she screamed to Maali, “Oh my God, are you guys picking on kids? Ha, ha, what’s his name?”
“I don’t know, the n!gg@ ain’t talkin’, he just stays in my seat!”
Before anyone else could say anything, I shouted toward Emily, “Your dad is my orthodontist! Dr. Huyzak!” They all started laughing.
Maali wasn’t a bad dude. He just ran the bus and the route. No one fucked with him and no one sat in his seat. My only out was if this white chick held me down.
“A’ight, a’ight, little man. You can have the seat, but when the bus driver comes, you gotta throw this shit at her.” Maali pulled out a blue pen and broke it so that it leaked ink. The bus driver came, I hit her in the head, I got suspended from the bus for a week, and everything was cool. From that point on, those guys always looked out for me. When this fool Joe said he was gonna roll up to my crib with a burner, they cornered him at school, beat his ass with a giant umbrella, and took care of it. No one believed the kid even had a ratchet, but Muhrad made sure if he did, it wasn’t comin’ out.
LATER THAT WEEK, I was walking around the neighborhood to see if there were other kids out. No one was really around, but there was this big white house that looked like Colonel Sanders lived in the joint. For real, shit was country. It was all white with a rocking chair, benches that hung from the roof, a brick driveway, and them Southern window shutters. I saw this kid cleaning the pool so I walked toward the back. I just wanted to see if homie wanted to play basketball, but I was unsure if we’d even get along. I mean, his house looked like a fucking plantation. He saw me wandering around his backyard.
“Hey!”
“Wassup?”
“You live here?”
“Yeah, I just moved in.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Eddie, you?”
“Warren …”
There was a bit of silence. Neither of us knew what else to say. I looked at this kid and he looked like Tom Sawyer cleaning a pool in Orlando. He looked at me, sized me up, and then dropped a heat rock.
“Eh, yo, this is weird … but do you listen to Wu-Tang?”
It was one of those moments I’ll never forget. Motherfucker saw right through me and I loved it. We couldn’t have scripted that shit any better. I was all about the Wu, but at private school I had to beg people to listen to 36 Chambers. There was only this one Indian kid that would rock the black shirt with the yellow W. All of a sudden, I go to this new school, new neighborhood, and people are trying to tell me about it. I was excited; this kid Warren was real. He was supposed to clean the pool so I helped him out and as soon as we finished, he called his boy Romaen, this Persian kid that lived over the wall. He was in my PE class, too, so I knew who he was.
“Romaen, what you doing, man?”
“Yo, son, I got this recording from the Playboy Channel Hooman ordered. You gotta peep this shit. Pac got hos butt-ass naked with Jodeci in a limo drinking champagne and shit.”
“Ha, ha, I’m with this new kid, Eddie. He said he has PE with you.”
“Oh, the Chinaman? Yeah, that kid let me hold The Sporting News, that’s my dog.”
That day, Warren showed me how to hop the wall to Romaen’s. We lived in this neighborhood called Isle of Osprey, but if you walked to the back, there was a wall that divided us from Isleworth. Sometimes you could see Shaq on the lake jet-skiing. He’d have a kid drive a motorboat and he’d follow in his Jet-Ski to ride the waves. Life was funny in those years; we saw a lot of new money just stuntin’ in the neighborhood.
As soon as we hopped the wall to Isleworth, we saw security cameras and those sensors that shoot lasers everywhere we looked. Warren taught me to slide down the wall so we wouldn’t set anything off. The first backyard we were in had dogs and sensors so we just crawled under the sensors to get away from the dogs. They were supposed to be guard dogs, but they were some lazy-ass Rottweilers that just sat there. Then we were in someone else’s yard, but there were people chillin’ in the pool so we ducked behind bushes and crawled around again until we could see the road. Once we got around the bushes, we just bucked it toward the road and luckily no one saw us. Everyone had alarms, but they were sleeping. Money had them under a spell. Once they spent the money on a problem, they never thought about it again. It was hilarious. Two kids randomly crawl and buck through your yard, but you don’t even flinch. Three months later on TV, we saw that house with the Rottweilers on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. They were talking about how ill the security and dogs were. We just laughed.
Once we got to the road, I turned around to look and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Every single one of those houses could have been on Cribs. Benzes were the Chevys of that neighborhood. Most people were pushing crazy vehicles: military-issue Hummers, Rollses, Bentleys, I saw a Lamborghini, Range Rovers on twenty-twos. Kids were rollin’ around in golf carts, women were getting mail in Manolo Blahnik stilettos, it was like Monaco in Orlando. We walked up to Romaen’s crib and his mom had just made him salmon and jasmine rice. It was delicious. After watching uncensored 2Pac videos from the Playboy Channel, we went outside to play ball and Romaen just kept “Hit Em Up” on loop the whole afternoon. Between games, I sat on Romaen’s driveway, drank my Gatorade, looked around the neighborhood, and thought to myself. Damn … Pops, you came up.