Friends
An exerpt from my novel, Rockit Crew (The Adventures of Teenage Hip-Hop Misfits)
Although the volume was blasted as high as it could go, we could still hear them downstairs. Ms. O’Reilly, the so-called “manager” of the foster home I was living in and her boyfriend were at it again something fierce.
The drinking and fighting was in full-force. I was in my bedroom that I shared with three other kids, punching the walls and cranking up the stereo as loud as it would go to drown out the madness. Sometimes punching walls can hurt but it still feels better than doing nothing at all.
As the violence escalated, so did my headache. I couldn’t stand the yelling anymore so I tore open the bedroom door and ran downstairs to try to break things up. My friend Steve always said that I’m some kind of diplomat, always trying to create peace, but I had a feeling that tonight’s boxing match would prove too much for a 14-year old referee.
The scene was ugly. Ms. O’Reilly was way past drunk. Her makeup was smeared and her eyes bloodshot. Her boyfriend’s face was bleeding from a fresh cut under his eye. The place smelled like somebody poured vodka into a steaming ashtray.
Normally I’m pretty good at creating space between Ms. O’Reilly and whomever she was fighting. These scenes would usually end up with the guy leaving, sometimes on his own, sometimes by police car, but not tonight. Things had gone too far, too fast.
As I walked into the common kitchen area Ms. O’Reilly screamed at me to go away, threatening to kick me out of the house if I didn’t go back to my room. She was on some kind of ugly mission tonight and I was in the way. Getting kicked out would have been nothing new because I was kicked out every week or two anyway, and spent half the time sleeping at my friend Steve’s house on the other side of town.
“You’re drunk and have no clue what you’re doing!” I yelled at her. “I have school in seven hours, so either you’re leaving or I am!”
She stopped for a second and just stood there, looking at me with bloodshot eyes, panting, like an exhausted boxer between rounds. Her boyfriend was sitting at the table, bleary-eyed, with one hand holding onto an empty glass, and the other wiping his cut eye with his sleeve.
“You have no right talking to me that way,” she muttered quietly. “No right at all, you ungrateful brat.”
Normally I would try to reason with them like some kind of teenage therapist but not tonight. Exhausted from several days of her funk, and not caring at all what they did to each other, I decided to leave.
I walked into the living room and called Steve to see if I could crash at his place for the night. Although he knew the seriousness of the situation, he laughed anyway and said, “I’ll meet you half way, punk.” Well-versed in situations like these, Steve could be counted on to be there, day or night.
I ran back upstairs to tell my roommates I was leaving. Even though they were about my age, and were as used to this as I was, they never seemed as concerned as I was about Ms. O’Reilly’s drinking and fighting. Unlike me, who seemed to feel and hear everything way too loudly, and felt like I always needed to solve every damn problem in our little universe, they were born with this extraordinary power to block it all out. I know they were upset by her antics, but they always did a better job than me in hiding it.
“I’m outta here, fellas. You might want to keep the door blocked after I leave. I think they’re out of booze so they should cool down soon.” I grabbed my jacket, Walkman and headphones, and walked downstairs into the hornet’s nest. Ms. O’Reilly was sitting on the couch in the living room, smoking and in a daze. There were no words to say so I opened the front door and walked outside into the midnight air.
Once on the street I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, put my headphones on, turned my jacket collar up, and walked into dark suburbia. I looked back to see my upstairs bedroom light on and hoped my roommates would get some sleep soon. I always felt bad about leaving them behind on nights like these, but since I couldn’t handle staying there, I had no choice but to leave.
With Grand Master Flash blaring in my headphones, I stepped off the sidewalk and started walking down the middle of the road on the yellow lines, past the busy bar and liquor store across the street from the high school, oblivious to the suburbanites, warm in their cars, honking their horns as they drove around me. Over-tired, frustrated, and with a pounding headache, stupid rules didn’t matter.
As a drizzle started coming down I noticed something ahead on the road but couldn’t make out what it was. Another car drove by with high beams on and it illuminated the figure about a quarter mile ahead. It was Steve walking towards me, also in the middle of the street! Of course it was. Who else would be walking in the middle of the street besides me?
As I got closer I could hear his boom box echoing off of the sleeping houses. That’s just like Steve. He was always on a crusade to share his music, whether people wanted to hear it or not.
Steve discovered rap music a few months ago when his uncle sent him a new record, Electric Breakdance, for his birthday. The record had nine songs on it and came with a poster with instructions for how to breakdance. He called me the night he got it and told me to come over right away to listen. Within a few seconds of dropping the needle, we were hooked, big time. The first song on the record, Jam On It, by Newcleus, sounded so different than anything we had ever heard before. The beat, the scratching, the funky sounds, all of it was unlike anything on the radio. We played that record over and over again and memorized all the lyrics before midnight. There was even a song called Magic’s Wand by Whodini that gave us a little history lesson on how hip-hop started. By the end of the night we were even trying some breakdancing moves.
Unlike most of the stuff we heard on the radio, the new sounds of hip-hop were exciting, exotic and made us think differently about the world around us. With a radio dial full of bubble gum pop or hard rock, we discovered artists like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run- DMC, Kurtis Blow and Lovebug Starsky, who told real stories of ignorance, racism, oppression and never giving up no matter what. Even though we lived over 125 miles away from the South Bronx and Queens, arguably the birthplaces of hip-hop, these songs just made sense to us and we became obsessed with these hip-hop rebels who were trying to change their world with words and art. In the 1970s the kids had punk rock. This was our punk rock of the 1980s. Practically overnight, hip-hop, and everything about it became one of the most important things in our lives. We were all in, with new music, style and attitude. It was like we discovered gold or something.
One of the problems with getting into hip-hop in our town was that record stores in the area didn’t sell the music and there wasn’t a radio station on the dial that played it, making it really hard to find. A much bigger problem was that our town, which felt like it was stuck in the 1950s, wasn’t ready for it. The first time we walked down the street sporting b-boy clothes and a boom box we knew right away that things were never going to be the same. We went from being invisible to being the main attraction for over-grown teenage bullies and jerks, who made it their mission in life to torment or beat us up every chance they had. As hip-hop outcasts we stood out amongst the preppies, jocks and stoners of this Stone Age town and we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
As Steve got closer I thought about how we first met less than two years ago. I had just moved in to the Evergreen Foster Home that day and I was sitting on the curb in front of the house drinking a Coke. All of a sudden I heard a car honking its horn as it maneuvered around this kid with long hair and an attitude, who was walking down the middle of the street, giving me a quick nod as he made his way home, like nothing had happened. Like me, Steve had just moved to town and didn’t know anybody. In only a few days we became inseparable. I thought about all of our crazy adventures, how we would walk a hundred miles to help each other out of a jam, and how Steve’s mother never complained when she woke up to see me sleeping on their couch. She was a saint. Steve and I were like brothers and we saw the world the same way. Even though I had seen him earlier in the day, my eyes teared up as I got closer.
When we finally met in the middle of the road, Steve asked me if I was okay.
“Just the usual,” I said, and thanked him for coming with a handshake.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Steve said quietly, putting his arm around my shoulder and offering a fresh cigarette.
We continued walking silently down the middle of the street to Steve’s house, while blowing spectacular smoke rings into the crisp midnight air. Nothing needed to be said. Everything was okay.
Rockit Crew (The Adventures of Teenage Hip-Hop Misfits) is available in paperback and e-book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and stellar indie bookstores. The audiobook is available in the US and UK on Audible.
