Excerpt from: So Far, So Good
Written by Matt Burke Copyright 2020
One Thursday before dark in our senior year, Van and I were alone and bored. Calling around, fishing for something to entertain us, we found out that there was an afternoon house-party going on in Tanglewilde East. We made our way in that direction and when we arrived at the house, we could tell that something was going on. The sinister sound of Brother Lynch Hung’s album, Season of the Siccness, was playing from speakers in the front room: “Double-o deuce four block/Got that nine-mili Glock and ready to put one in your knot/rest in piss…” We could hear the sounds of cards being slammed onto the table from a Spades game, raucous laughter, and girls’ voices. It all sounded promising, so we stepped up to the door and knocked.
Moments later, a little short kid with huge teeth and a lop-sided afro that looked like he just woke up from sleeping on it answered the knock. “What y’all want?” he demanded without opening the screen door.
Van answered with the obvious. “Where the drinks at? We’re trying kick it!”
The little guy only hesitated for a moment. “Naw, cuz. Closed party.”
“Man, what? Get out the way, man. We’re trying to kick it!”
I reached in to open the screen door to accentuate our demands to enter these people’s house, uninvited, but the little guy snapped into action: “I said closed party, dawg!” and slammed the door shut in our face with a surprisingly quick reaction time to contrast his sleepy look. We heard the lock on the handle click followed by a bolt lock, then another bolt lock, then a chain lock, and then a scraping sound that was probably a security bar wedging up against the door handle as a final blockade against people trying to crash their party. We leaned over to peek in the window and the blinds snapped shut. We clearly weren’t welcome.
Van figured the only thing left to do was to kick in their screen door and mutter a couple cuss words, which he did, leaving the screen door bent and loose on the bottom hinge. We started to walk away, back to boredom and sobriety, when we noticed a car pulling up to the curb in front of the house. A small older woman got out of the car and picked up a huge bag of clinking bottles. It was the grandmother of the house coming back with the alcohol for the party. Van and I looked at each other.
Without a word to each other, we walked up to the elderly woman. Van spoke.
“Evening, ma’am, are you bringing these into the party?”
“Yes dear, did you come out help?”
“Of course! Here, let us get those. You go on in.”
“Thank you dear. Maybe there still are some gentlemen in the world.” She smiled and flashed us a tragic wink before she shuffled up the stoop and took out a janitor ring of keys to begin unlocking the door. She gave a glance at her swinging screen door and shook her head. Van passed me the bag of beer and reached into the car to grab the other bag. We closed the car door and walked the opposite direction as the sweet elderly woman called after us.
“Oh boys, it’s this way!”
Van and I didn’t look back, making our way back to his house, and calling Jerramy and the twins to have a party of our own. We told the story and laughed like we felt nothing but levity at having been rejected from someone’s house and stealing from a sweet elderly woman.
The next day, I was sitting in art class doodling on my desk, blank pad of paper next to me, the exercise that the teacher had planned already having went in one ear and out the other. I looked up with a strange feeling and noticed a face peering through the wire-reinforced glass pane on the classroom door. It was Jerramy. When he spotted me, he threw open the door and rushed over to me.
“Yo, you heard what these guys are saying?” A couple kids in the class turned their ears as Jerramy spoke. The teacher glanced up from the supply room she was organizing.
I finished my tag on the desk and looked up. “Nah, what you talking about?”
“These West Side Pacific Islander Crips. They’re telling everybody we’re fighting them afterschool.”
“Wait, what? Who?”
“Mr. Simmons, what class are you supposed to be in?” The art teacher, originally trying to act like she didn’t notice how Jerramy had burst into her class, but now seeing the other students paying attention to us, must have felt she had to say something.
Jerramy ignored her. “Those guys you and Van took the drinks from yesterday. They got some little Crip set and they’re talking about we’re marked. People been coming up to me all day telling me they’re saying we’re fighting afterschool in East Tanglewilde Park.”
I thought about it for a second. “Then I guess we’re fighting afterschool in East Tanglewilde Park.”
“Mr. Simmons, what class…” The teacher had come back to the front of the room.
Jerramy ignored her. “Bet. I talked to Van already. I guess the move now is rally the troops.”
“Bet.” We connected with a clap handshake that rattled the walls of the class. Jerramy always gave the kind of handshakes that would break a young child’s arm. One kid was particularly focused in the back of the room, and he jumped, startled, accidently mashing the side of his sculpture.
The teacher had had enough. “Mr. Simmons!”
Business finished, Jerramy turned and left. The teacher looked back at me disapprovingly.
I closed my pad of paper and tossed it in my backpack. “I have to use the bathroom.”
By the time afterschool had rolled around, we still hadn’t had contact with the West Side Pacific Islander Crips and weren’t entirely sure if the rumor mill hadn’t processed an offhand comment into a royal rumble. Nonetheless, we gathered all of our reinforcements and mobbed five cars deep: Sedans, buckets, and trucks heading towards East Tanglewilde Park. I was riding with Sam Mirkavich and John Cruz. Jerramy, Van, Brian Flowers, and some other homies for back-up formed a snake of vehicles as we entered the neighborhood.
Sam made a lap around the park before we stopped the cars. Indeed, the little guy that answered the door at the house was there surrounded by a gaggle of other characters we didn’t know. In the middle of them, towering over the rest was Ray Hoover. Aside from dwarfing the rest of his crew in size, Ray also carried an air about him that he was leading the rest. OG triple OG of the West Side Pacific Islanders. The whole gang was black with a random white dude included in their ranks; no ethnic Pacific Islanders were present. The fact that this appeared to be their neighborhood, indicating that they lived on the east side of the city, gave further mystique to the misnomer. Surrounding the gang were a hundred or so students from our school, neighborhood kids, and others who had figured out a show was about to go down and wanted front row seats.
As we got out of the cars, we noticed that Ray Hoover had a baseball bat in his hands. We all knew there was one of us that had the solution. We turned and looked at Sam, who at 17 years old, already looked like a baseball coach with his 5 o’clock shadow facial hair under the bent rim of a Seattle Mariners cap. He opened his trunk to reveal the baseball team’s equipment bag -- full of bats. Brian Flowers grabbed the first one and beelined towards Ray Hoover and the center of the park while others of us hurried to grab weapons from the car. A silence fell as we made it to the makeshift ring, in which Brian and Ray were standing, glaring at each other.
“What’s up, bitch?” Ray Hoover didn’t hesitate to get the discourse rolling. At this point, none of us had heard the term “restorative justice” and didn’t spend any time attempting to find out what was at the real heart of our conflict or how to resolve it amicably.
Jerramy replied in kind, “Fuck you, fat nigga! What’s up?”
Ray Hoover walked a quick lap around the small circle, a technique that I later learned was called volta ao mundo, a walk around the world, by martial artists practicing capoeira. He, like the Brazilian fighters, was clearing space and controlling the harmony of the circle before entering combat. He swung the bat in little circles at his hip as he walked.
Brian Flowers looked bored as he spoke, holding his aluminum bat loose, calm and easy, like a veteran third baseman waiting to warm up in the batter’s box. “What you gon’ do with that bat?”
Ray Hoover seemed to attempt to look more bored than Brian. “I’m thinking ‘bout hitting somebody. Maybe one of these niggas.” He pointed the bat indiscriminately around the circle at us, spectators, members of his own crew, the little springy dinosaur children’s toys in the park. He was Babe Ruth calling his home run in left field.
“You ain’t finna hit shit.” Brian quipped back, tensing.
“Maybe I’m finna hit you.” When Ray Hoover said this, he flinched towards Brian with the bat, feigning a half swing. He was barely finished with the sentence before Brian had unleashed a full swing of his own. The ambient noise of crowd chatter, cars passing by, dogs barking in distant backyards all went mute for that long moment that the bat travelled through the air and crashed into Ray Hoover’s face with a dull clap. The pause held for the moment that he swayed on his feet and while he fell straight back, stiff, arms at his side, kicking up dust from the park earth as he landed limp on his back. Brian brought the bat over his head and back down into Ray’s ribs and belly. Ray didn’t move, but sound and movement returned to the world as pandemonium broke out. Members of Ray’s crew scattered. Van brought his leg back and sent a kick with all of his might to the side of Ray’s jaw. Others of us started kicking the outer parts of Ray’s limp, rag-doll body. Jerramy started hunting the fleeing members of the leaderless gang. I saw him take aim at the white guy from the crew and catch him with a right hook, knocking him off his legs as he ran, sailing through the air and to the ground with a thud. Small scuffles broke out around the park. Then all of a sudden, someone yelled, “He’s got a gun!” People flooded to the exits. I looked back and saw the little guy from the front door, eyes and teeth bulging out of his head, running to and fro, holding a black pistol above his head, swinging his arm in every direction. John Cruz ran by and grabbed my arm. I ran with him, feeling the burn of imaginary bullets in my back as we dove into Sam’s car safely and peeled off.
One by one, cars screeched as they sped away from the curb. Tire smoke mixed with dust, settling back into the patina of East Tanglewilde Park. Members of the West Side Pacific Islander Crips got up from the ground, dusting off their clothes as they joined the little guy standing over the unmoving Ray Hoover, looking down at him without speaking. Elderly people looked out their windows. Approaching police sirens broke the silence from afar, and the backyard dogs, sensing that normalcy had returned, went back to barking at the birds, once again landing on the telephone wires.