I JUMPED ON MY BIKE AND PEDALED HOME. I USUALLY got home around eleven. Although the station closed at ten o’clock, I hung out in the neighborhood until I knew everyone in my house had gone to bed. The fighting between my mother and whoever she was dating after Lucious left made home a war zone. Lucious brought stability in a world that was already unraveling around me.
If you see a kid hanging on the corner while you’re driving through the hood on your way to the suburbs, he’s not necessarily up to no good. His home probably isn’t a happy place. He’s not trying to rob you. He’s just out there trying to soak up some peace of mind. I know it sounds crazy that out in those gritty streets, amid those you learn to sidestep in the daylight, a kid might actually be trying to find temporary respite from the bullshit at home.
You’d be surprised. It’s where I learned a lot about life. I would sit on that rusty bench in the middle of the courtyard. Most projects have one. It’s mostly reserved for the HNIC, the head nigger in charge, that pimp or drug dealer who perches out there with his crew so he can survey his domain.
At night the throne was left vacant for little old me. The things you see after sunset in the projects can be downright scary. I used to think, if there is a God, why did He stick my family here? It’s like He didn’t like us.
I watched television, so I had an idea of what life could be like. The truth is most kids in the Beans sat glued to the television because it was like taking a field trip. For that half hour or so when Leave It to Beaver came on, you pretended to be Beaver. It drowned out the gunshots as well as your mother and her boyfriend’s screaming. But you never actually thought you could get there. No, those people on the tube were just characters that lived in some fantasy world you were never going to visit. That’s why I liked Lucious. He had actually visited some of those places in la-la land.
At times I resented Pearl for not maintaining a healthy relationship with him. Nevertheless, I chalked it up for what it was. When I left the courtyard and got home, Pearl was sometimes still awake. I saw the uncertainty in her eyes while she looked over my brothers and sisters as they slept. She sat wondering how she would take care of us all. It made me enjoy giving her some of the cash I earned in my burgeoning enterprises. She was never good with expressing her emotions unless she was hollering, but I knew she was proud of me. “You’re becoming a responsible man around here,” she would say. “At least you’re not turning out like those other sorry niggas.”
As many issues as I’ve had with my father and those of my siblings, I always felt my mother did us a disservice when she talked bad about them. Looking back, I soaked it in like any other kid would do. But the habit of making kids pawns, traded back and forth when the chess game of love goes bad between adults, is a tragedy. Kids should be excluded from the bitter feuding. Unfortunately, the drama plays out on daytime television throughout the week. Ratings go up when those talk shows show a teenage girl calling some dude sorry for not stepping up to take responsibility for the child he may or may not have fathered.
If the first thing that a kid witnesses is his mama and daddy fighting, do you think he’ll learn to have healthy relationships with the opposite sex? I’m sure you can answer that question. But since I was indeed the man of the house as a ten-year-old, I enjoyed filling in where those guys didn’t. When my mother gave them a tongue-lashing, it showed me just how much more needed I was.
King Kong didn’t have shit on me.
Pearl even gave me the idea for my next venture—raking grass. In the hood folks take their lawn seriously. It isn’t like there were any manicured lawns in the Beans, but there was a patch of grass outside the front door in front the garbage bin. Remember when I talked about different markers of hood status earlier?
That patch of grass was one such marker. In Anyhood, USA, you don’t violate a man’s patch of grass. In much the same way you “never touch a black man’s radio,” you sure as hell don’t mess up his lawn. Seriously, people have got shot over letting their pooch crap on someone’s lawn. People could be living in a crummy project apartment, but their lawn would be litter-free and bright green. Some folks even got fined in the Beans for overusing the water to nourish their lawns.
“That’s where the money’s at, son,” Pearl would tell me. “And always make sure you tend very well to the old folk.” My mother always talked about taking care of women and the elderly. She drilled that into my skull.
I grabbed my rake and knocked on doors. I even employed a couple of the other shorties in the neighborhood. It was a simple pitch: “Your grass could be the greenest and cleanest in the hood” for an unbeatable price from $.50 to $2 depending on how long it took me to complete the job. The elderly got a discount. Mrs. Lowery was one of my most loyal clients. She sat in her wheelchair and watched me scurry back and forth. I made sure every candy wrapper, soda can, and newspaper was thrown away. She beamed a broad smile at how fast I worked.
“Ma’am, is there anything else I can do for you?” I asked her when I was done.
“No, it looks just fine. I’m so happy for the help.” She usually brought me a tall glass of water when I was finished. Honestly, I think old Mrs. Lowery just liked the company. Sometimes her grass didn’t need raking at all. Her husband had died, and folks said her son had gotten a football scholarship, went off to college, and never came back. I don’t blame him. He probably saw the cookie-cutter homes and manicured lawns on that lily-white campus and screamed hallelujah! The suburban air must have smelled pretty damn good.
With my pockets getting fatter I gained a strut to my step. I was feeling like a million bucks even if my pants pockets were only jingling with coins when I walked. But as the summer loomed, my real hustle was right around the corner.