Staten Island was an interesting place to grow up, because a lot of it was still rural in the 1970s, when we first moved there. It was a bit removed from the electricity of the city. There were some aspects of life that were a little different than your typical city experiences. And it was a step up from Brownsville, at least before the crack era.
People think Staten Island is a joke. Staten Island is no joke. One thing about the Island is that it’s a small town. Boroughs like Manhattan and Brooklyn are so big, I could pop someone and disappear like a fart in the wind. You couldn’t do that on the Island, it was just too small. If you got into a beef with somebody, sooner or later you were gonna see them again. You couldn’t run away from your problems. So you were gonna have to knuckle up, shoot, cut, stab, whatever—you had to make your claim. Either you were gonna get punked, or you were gonna do the punking. And that’s just how the Island is.
Around this time, everything was gang-related. Now, when I say gang I don’t mean that we all wore colors and went around shooting people and all that. At that time, people would just come together in a community and stick together. They all had something in common, same neighborhood, same school, whatever, and they would just come together. And that’s how we grew up.
In my neighborhood, there was a gang called the Avenue Crew, older kids who used to bully us all the time. They were about fifteen or sixteen years old, and we were only about eight or nine years old. They’d come up behind us and say, “Look at you, you lil’ punk motherfucker,” and then run off. We became recreation for these motherfuckers. It was just like the Little Rascals. We were the little kids that got on their fucking nerves, and they got on our nerves. They would just fuck with us. I never sat up in the house and played by the window just looking outside, even though going outside meant risking getting beat up by the Avenue Crew.
Getting beat up was different from getting beat down. Beat down meant you got stomped out and obliterated. You were probably going to the hospital. Beat up just meant getting wedgies and your chest punched in, getting slapped around or karate-chopped in the neck. Aside from the wedgies and jumping us and giving us hard pops on the arm, and catching us with that classic “open chest,” holding both arms down while whaling on your chest, they used to really try to hurt us. Man, they used to fuck us up. Like, they enjoyed it so much they used to stalk us every day. They’d run down on us and lump our legs up and take our little money. They’d hold us down and punch our legs until we couldn’t walk.
After a run-in with them, we’d go up on the roof and throw gravel and rocks at them. Every roof in the Clifton and Park Hill projects was covered with a mess of loose gravel and small rocks, which made perfect throwing ammunition. Or we’d wait for them to get fresh wearing their best clothes or be shooting dice and we’d hit them with water balloons. But they’d always catch us later. We didn’t care, though. It was like guerrilla warfare. Strike and run, and take the beating like a man when you get caught.
I was taking that punishment, and it made me tougher. I was an only child, so I had no older siblings to fight for me, so I just took the beatings as best I could. I never lay down or ran away, though; I always tried to dish out as much as I was taking. At least after they beat me up, they knew who I was and would have a little more respect for me. Sometimes you can fight and lose, but still gain respect from that because you stood up for yourself.
And I carry that confidence with me everywhere I go. That’s why I’m not scared to go anywhere. After getting beat up so much, you have no choice but to get better with your hands, too. I could dodge punches and weave my way out of the circle and dip if need be. I used to call that the Scooby-Doo. But it wasn’t easy to get good at fighting; the only way was simply to fight. That came with a lot of beatings.
I’d be the one in the park punching other kids in the face over the swings or some shit because I was growing up in the projects. If you know anything about how most ghettos are, you know the projects are like the slum within the slum. Living in that environment kind of gave me a sixth sense. It showed me what to look for before it even popped off. It taught me how to hone that instinct and protect myself at all times.
Sometimes, we ran and got away, sometimes we couldn’t. My man Looney, though, he could shake the Avenue Crew like Herschel Walker. I couldn’t shake dudes like he could. He had the moves. He made the big kids chasing him fall on their face. He was that swift and agile. He was the illest shake artist. He would have the Avenue Crew slipping and sliding and falling in their British Walkers and Playboy shoes. He’d run up the ramp to the building and juke his way down the stairs and then run down the hill and hide behind a wall, and when the Avenue Crew would run past he’d run back up the hill and shake a few of them at the top of the hill, too, just for good measure. They couldn’t ever catch him.
I remember once they burned down our clubhouse in retaliation for us having hit them with water balloons while they were all fresh in their new clothes and shooting dice. One winter they caught us out on the pond when it had frozen over. The motherfuckers started jumping on the ice to crack it so we’d fall into the water. We probably would’ve died if the ice had cracked.
It was like a cycle. We’d try to fight back, but we were just little kids. We had to form our own crew. Since we were so young, we became the BCC—the Baby Crash Crew. It was made up of little kids in the neighborhood. We all started sticking together. It was Kane, GC, Vinny, Raekwon, Killa Kane, Zabo, Love God, Chaz, Miser, Hersch, Looney, Sea Bass, Cab … it was a lot of us.
We ended up forming the Baby Crash Crew on our own, which did calm things down in our project. It was made up entirely of the younger kids coming up in the neighborhood. From the BCC, which lasted from grade school to junior high, we became DMD, which stood for Dick ’Em Down, in junior high school. That eventually morphed into Wreck Posse in high school, which I’ll get to later on.
*
We moved out to the Island, but we always kept our Brooklyn ties. I’m a mixture of Staten Island and Brooklyn, because I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn. When my mother was off work for a few weeks and wanted some alone time, she’d send me to my grandparents, who lived in Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Clinton Hill. I saw so much shit going on there, it was crazy. All parts, too. I would be with my grandmother in Brownsville, or with my cousins in Tompkins Projects. My grandfather lived between St. James Place and Cambridge Place, right down the block from where Biggie was from.
Brooklyn was a different kind of rough. It was just grimy. You had twenty or thirty projects over there: Brownsville, Fort Greene, Marcy, Tompkins, Red Hook, Gowanus, Bushwick. All these fucking neighborhoods, it was like concentration camps for poor black people. Same with the Bronx.
The really crazy shit was that I used to have to go from Staten Island all the way to Brooklyn by myself. My mother would give me the money to go there. I was so young, only eight or nine years old. I actually had to go on the train. I had to go take the ferry to the other side. Jump on the 4 train at Bowling Green, go to Eastern Parkway, get on the bus there, go to Brownsville, get off at the OTB on Pitkin Avenue and go see my grandmother. That amazes me. These kids nowadays, they wouldn’t understand how independent we were at such a young age back then. Today, a parent would get locked up for child abuse for letting shit like that happen.
It was different back then; no adults fucked around with kids all that much. I’m sure there were probably abductions and all that weird shit, but for the most part, you stood on your own. My mother used to send me to get fucking cigarettes from the corner store at eight or nine years old. You can’t do that now. They gonna be like, “Shorty, get the fuck out of here.”
My grandfather was a war veteran. My grandmother was an accountant for the government. My grandfather didn’t teach me anything. Most of my whole family didn’t teach me anything. I got love from them, but I didn’t really get any guidance on how to live my life, on right and wrong, about what to do and what not to do.
I got my guidance from the streets. I didn’t have no father. My mother was my guidance a little bit, but she was more or less worried about food and clothing, stuff like that. When I had problems or drama in the street, I couldn’t go to my mother and ask her how to handle that shit. I had to figure that shit out myself. Sometimes I made the right choice, and sometimes I made the wrong choice. You just learn as you go. That’s how it is with a lot of black kids growing up.
Every so often when I visited my grandfather, I’d also see my favorite uncles—Uncle Matt and Uncle Jason—who used to take me all over Brooklyn.
Jason, my quiet younger uncle, has a humble spirit. But the humble ones are the ones you gotta watch. I’m a real humble dude as well, real nice, but don’t push my buttons until I get angry, ’cause I just go berserk. It takes a lot to piss me off, but when I get pissed the fuck off, watch out. Jason was the same way—calm and quiet until it was time to let off, and then he would bring the thunder.
Jason was younger than me. He was my uncle because my grandfather got married twice and had children from both wives. Me and Jason used to run around in the streets all day long.
Uncle Matthew, on the other hand, had a friend named Q., who was like his twin. They weren’t blood, but they looked exactly alike. Uncle Matt was notorious in that area—he and Q. and their friends showed me the definition of maniac. Back then, you had to have a reputation so other motherfuckers wouldn’t fuck with you.
I recall Q. as a fucking maniac, too. I was maybe eight or nine at the time. I’d say he probably killed a couple motherfuckers at least. He’d rob you for your shoes, rob you for your chain. Punch you in the face, stab you, cut you, shoot you, whatever. He was just that type of man. He loved me, though. He used to put me on his shoulders all the time.
We’d be out at night, running all around Brooklyn with these crazy motherfuckers. They’d do robberies right in front of me. Once they hit some guy in the head with a brick and took his boom box. Bashed the shit out of him and kept moving. I just looked at the dude twitching on the ground, then ran to catch up with Uncle Matt and his friend Q. That thug shit kind of influenced me a little bit, too—as a kid, I looked up to both of these guys, and to them, this was normal behavior. It was just another part of my upbringing.
I didn’t really let that stuff get to me too much. The sad thing about ghetto life is that crazy shit like the shootouts, the stabbings, the piss-filled staircases, and the junkies become the norm. You grow a thick skin and get desensitized to the environment around you.
It shouldn’t be that way, though. There were some deaths that should’ve been reflected on more, that people should have honored more. Like this little girl, only about seven or eight years old, who got killed. She was in my class in public school. She was raped and thrown off the roof at the back of the building by this mentally disabled kid we knew as Big A., who walked around the neighborhood looking goofy all the time.
This fucked everybody up. When we heard what had happened, everybody cringed. We were all in disbelief that this shit had gone down. When we found out a rapist was walking around the hood, that affected everybody. Even though they caught him pretty quickly, the presence of the crime lingered for months. At school, they emptied out her desk during class. The thought of her being there one day and dead the next was surreal.
Years later, you walk right by that same place where they found her body, and it’s as if nothing had ever happened there.
*
A lotta shit went down on the roofs of the projects; they were like our clubhouse. When I was nine or ten years old, we’d just run across the roof because we weren’t supposed to be up there. Then we moved to throwing rocks off; then, when I got older, we were smoking weed, slap-boxing, rhyming, moving product, watching for cops.
Of course, other things happened up there, too. One guy tried to kill himself by jumping off 141, a seven-story building—not once, but twice. He survived both attempts, landing on the fence near the day-care area, and only broke his arm. Eventually, he ended up in the asylum.
Maybe despite all this, my mother did what she could to try and maintain my innocence and ensure I was a good kid. We had dinners together on Christmas, and she’d let me say grace and try her best to keep me mindful of God and the good things in life. It worked a lot of the time. I stayed in school and made good grades for the most part and didn’t get myself into too much trouble.
At least, not yet.