I grew up in a small town, but what most folks don't know is that I grew on the poor white side of "The Rock," the historical black part of town.
Then just as I was entering what should have been middle school, my Mom was approved due to her disabilities to move into the newly built housing project. I was already involved as the JV equipment manager for both football and basketball, so all the black kids already knew me.
The families that wanted to get their kids away from the drug scene moved "uptown" to the projects, where there at least the doorframes had enough structural integrity to not get kicked in "easily."
Prior to the move, we lived in an old 50's single wide mobile home, that we padlocked from the inside at night, as the door lock was crap. There the biggest threats were drunk amorous commercial fishermen using our yard for a shortcut back to the boats where the captains let them sleep overnight. Not what a single mom and an adolescent tomboy really needed in life. The housing project really was the safer option.
Once we moved to the housing projects, I started taking my lumps from the white affluent kids who knew where I now walked home to after school.
After a couple of the project kids saw me taking sh*t they would basically walk myself and another cuban kid home in a "box formation" -- gaggle of big black kids in front of us aways, and gaggle of big black kids behind us.
After a month or two, the denser preppy antagonists got the message. After a year or two of the teams I worked with having decent winning seasons, I got lumped in with the "approved" jock clique and never had trouble walking home again.
On other weird nights, there would be trouble "in" the projects. Someone finally getting out of jail and coming back to beat up the cousin who narc'd him out or whatever. There were always lookouts near the corner of the properties after 9pm, and the front units of the project were all the "Large family" apartments.
Usually the matriarchs would call out to the lookouts, "Tell Bobbie's daughter to go 'round back," If they were expecting trouble, cops, or both.
"Round back" was a quiet gate from the supermarket plaza that led to a hidden-ish, never-locked gate and the basketball courts about a quarter mile down plaza delivery alley. Conveniently to the rear of the length of the projects was my apartment. Cell phones weren't prevalent yet, but my neighbors across the way had kids on the basketball team, and she's call up to the from apartments, let them know I was home safe, and me if I'd seen her boys on the way or not, because they dawdled hanging out with friends up that way, when she wanted them home.
Later when I moved to the other side of town, mostly retirees, white rednecks and Cubans. The local drug matriarch's eldest son Wayne, moved next door to me. We'd gone to school together till his mother pulled him out at 16. Owned a beautiful restored metallic orange impala, and a rottweiler that was a total buttercup with people he knew, but looked formidable until my cat chased him back to his own yard. Wayne didn't do drugs, stayed away from his mother's "people," but was the brain in the family and probably is an underworld accountant by now. I had a scanner back in those days and it would inadvertently pick up his wireless home phone, he lived so close. He would quickly shut anyone down who tried to talk family business over the phone. Strictly face to face, and preferably with his mother, not him.
Not even kidding I felt pretty safe with him as a neighbor too. The dog wasn't very ferocious, but plenty barky and was a very good early warning system.
There was a dead end alley the cops used to do their night shift napping in about a block and half away. You could hear them calling into the station when they missed something serious going on, which was all the time in the heart of lower Crackton.
The Bloods owned an apartment building down the block on my side of the street and the house directly across from the apt. building. It gave them a nice field of fire when rival gangs rolled through.
My wife signed the lease on the place before I could check it out. She drove me over there the next day. A bunch of guys in red blocking the street at about 5 p.m. She was fretting we'd be late meeting the landlady, I told her not to worry, they were there to pick up tonight's products and would be gone in a couple of minutes. She went, "What products?" I just rolled my eyes. Pregnant women can be so oblivious to what's going on in front of them. I explained it to her when we got in the house. Her words were, and I quote, "Uh-oh."
When we first started hearing shots from that end of the street, I told her they were probably shooting at muskrats down on the river bank and not to worry. About a year in, there was full fledged fire fight, police helicopters, the whole nine yards. I had her take the baby and get down as low in the cast-iron bathtub as they could. I got my shotgun and got behind the bathtub. It didn't last much longer, city, state, and county cops were all over that block.
The next day two things happened, my wife decided we were moving, and later when I was out in the yard looking at all the yellow tape and bullet riddled cars, I hear a voice behind me say, "Do you have a crowbar I can borrow?" It was one of the younger Bloods I used to say hello to as he had a baby about the same age as mine. I said,"No, but I've got a claw hammer I'll let you borrow, will that do?" He said "Yeah, probably." (I've always found it doesn't hurt to be nice to folks like that. I walked out to go to work one morning when I lived there and discovered every car on the block except ours and there's had their tires slashed. I don't know what it was about, but I knew it wasn't a coincidence.)
About 15 minutes later he shows back up carrying a paper bag and the claw hammer. He hands the hammer back to me and thanks me. That was the last I ever saw of those folks.
Topic: Calling This "Pirate Radio" Seems A Bit Of A Stretch (Read 1688 times)
