Fresh Off the Boat (14 page)

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.

A
couple of months into the school year, Romaen, our friend Ben, and I tried to join the debate club at school just to battle the smart kids. By default, I played the role of Will Hunting, which made Ben the half-Mexican Affleck and Romaen his Persian brother, Casey. At that point, I’d say we were like a lot of fourteen-year-olds. We all had Anarchy A’s on our backpacks and crew names written across the straps, like P.T.C.
^*
There was a childlike playfulness to our rebellion. We were just kids having fun. Everything seemed OK, but looking back, I’d say that day with the Debate Club was our last dance, a final, fleeting attempt to do things through the ivory tower.

We went in like a bunch of assholes as usual, but it was a big thing for us. No one invited us to go, we didn’t know what it was about, and none of us had done anything like Debate Club before. It reminded me of my
boy Deshawn looking at the YMCA pool: the only thing worse than admitting you want to swim is admitting you don’t know how. These days I wish there had been an adult in the room who understood where we were coming from. That stepping our feet in the door itself was an olive branch. No one grows up wanting to be a degenerate. We wanted to be like the other kids. We wanted to go to college. We didn’t want to be hooligans, but we also wanted to debate in our own distinct voices. We didn’t talk like the other kids, but we still had things to say.

Everyone sat in chairs as the president of the club gave this dry, convoluted orientation about how serious debate was and that the goal was to compete in Lincoln-Douglas–style debate or some shit. We didn’t want all the posturing; we just wanted to play ball.

“Yo, we just want to debate about legalizing marijuana, g! Fuck this other shit,” screamed Romaen.

Ben and I couldn’t stop laughing, but the president in his blue blazer and oxford shirt decided to make an example out of us.

“OK, you want to debate legalizing marijuana?”

“Yeah. That’s why we’re here.”

“Well, that’s certainly a novel topic that no one has ever tried to approach.”

His debate cronies all chuckled. I knew what he was doing so I jumped in.

“We know it’s not original, but we want the exercise of the discussion. Our way.”

“Your way? Well, that’s admirable and we welcome your participation in Debate Club, but that topic is probably better served in the columns of
Hustler
or
Playboy
, not a Debate Club like ours.”

“Man, fuck this shit. Let’s get out of here.”

That was it. We left embarrassed that we even tried to join something corny like Debate Club, yet also relieved that we wouldn’t be trying to fit into something the rest of the semester. That’s how it went for us. We’d all been through enough cultural cleansing situations that we knew something like Debate Club was going to try to remodel us, but I’ll never forget what happened when we left.

These were the days before cellphones, so I called my mom on a pay phone to tell her that we finished early, and she came to pick us up. We had waited about fifteen minutes on the curb when she finally pulled up. As soon as I got in the front seat, I turned the radio to 102 Jamz. I had enough blue-blood Debate Club talk for the day and wanted to hear the countdown. But there was no countdown that day.

“For those of you just tuning in, we are sad to announce that Tupac Shakur has died.”

“What the fuck?”

“Pac died?!?!”

We all knew he got shot, but Pac was invincible. He’d been shot before and survived, so none of us actually thought he’d die. The motherfucker was supposed to regenerate like Wolverine. It was almost a week since he got shot and we figured he was already up walking around. I remember the moment. None of us cried, we weren’t really sad, we were mad. Mad that Pac was dead. Mad at the world. Mad that the one thing that really spoke to us was taken away before we even had a chance to really know him.

Pac was unlike any other rapper. In the era of hip-hop where the art form was under siege for its lyrical content and motifs, Pac was the one guy we all pointed to and said, “Tell me this isn’t someone we should respect. Tell me this isn’t positive. Tell me he’s not an artist.” He was a bona fide role model regardless of his contradictions. If there was one rapper that you could see joining a debate club it was Pac. There was always pressure to wild out, but Pac was that dude we looked at and for a few seconds we could see ourselves with three-piece suits and glasses writing “The Rose That Grew from Concrete” and shit. He was a reminder to all of us that “it’s bigger than hip-hop.”
^†

A FEW YEARS
ago, I saw a photo of all our homies taken in Ben’s backyard. We were just a bunch of cornballs at a fourteenth-birthday pool party but sixteen years later, Joey’s dead, so-and-so smokes crack, and most of us
got two strikes. Suburban or not, something most definitely went wrong and we’re still trying to figure it out. But if you ask me, Pac and that dickhead at Debate Club had a lot to do with it. We never tried to join a club, after-school activity, or anything productive, for that matter, ever again. The Honor Roll wasn’t something we wanted to be part of. We gave up on doing it their way, we wanted to get free.

“YO, SON, YOU
know dat dat kast comes back out today, right?”

“What’s dat kast?”

“N!gg@, you don’t know ’bout dat kast?”

“Whatever, man, you didn’t know what Hurricane Starang was.”

“Oh, hell naw, dog, this is the dirty dirty, you can’t be tellin’ people you don’t know ’bout dat kast …”

Outkast was another one of those groups that you didn’t hear on the radio, but people were certified crazy for
Southernplayalisticcadillacfunkymusik
. I got clowned all day because I didn’t know “ ’bout dat kast,” but I didn’t care, I just wanted the album. Romaen had an older brother, Hooman, who could get it for him, but Warren and I needed to find another way.

“Warren, you know
ATLiens
comes out today?”

“Yeah, man, we gotta go to Best Buy before it sells out.”

“My mom won’t take me, though. What about yours, dude?”

“Hell, no, my mom ain’t gonna take us to go buy dat kast.”

“I got an idea.”

Back then, there was a subscription service from Columbia and BMG records where if you agreed to buy their album of the month, they’d give you nine free CDs of your choice. We pulled a bunch of subscriptions out of music magazines, then signed up using fake names and credit card numbers. Somehow, some way, they never checked if the credit cards went through but we always got the CDs in the mail. Between the two of us we got thirty CDs apiece and then recorded and swapped to double our collection. That’s how we got
ATLiens
.

“Eh, yo, what are
Atliens
?”

“Yo, stop playin’, man, you for real?”

“Man, how the fuck am I supposed to know, I’m Chinese.”

“Son, it’s A-T-L. ATLANTA, motherfucker, and they aliens. It’s not that hard.”

“Man, fuck you.”

“You a funny ass, Chinaman, you know that?”

I was always a hip-hop head, but back then Romaen could school me on shit. Not only did he have Hooman, but he’d been around kids who listened to the same shit all his life. On the other hand, I’d been a loner caught up in the culture all by myself for fourteen years. Like the one kid in the hood who watches anime, I was the Chinese kid in Bay Hill doing the Bankhead. But if I didn’t know something, my homies would hold me down. Romaen, Easy Eric, Warren, Baber, Samer—I never had friends like that besides my brothers.

Private schools are funny. Everywhere you go, people are socially competitive, but different circles value different things. Rich kids care who your parents are, what they do, where your clothes are from. In public school we cared what we wore, but every one of us had homies in the crew dressed like straight assholes. Your boy with the giant North Pole pullover in Florida or the fool rockin’ RZA goggles. We would all crack on those dudes, but they could still roll. At private school, their passive-aggressive techniques were advanced. They had shit like the silent treatment. With public school, if I didn’t like the way you dressed, I told you, and if you had something to say, we’d just battle. You could look like Bushwick Bill, but if you were witty, had jokes, or a way to get money, pussy, or beer, we fux’d with you.