Basketball was my form of meditation. I got a chance to clear my mind and focus strictly on the game. I didn't have the energy or time to think about the bad things that were going on in my life. I didn't think about school, stupid high school boys, or my home life. I didn't have to think about being scared to get a drink of water in the middle of the night because my dad might be in his paranoid state and try to stab me, his own daughter, because he thought I was trying to get him. I didn't have to think about my mom taking back the lunch money she gave me because they spent the rest of hers. I didn't have to think about my little brothers and sister who might not be safe.

After practice Erin got picked up, while April, Keyona, and I caught the bus. I knew I didn't want to go home this early.

"April, can I go to your house?"

"I don't care," she replied.

At April's house I would be able to eat real home-cooked food instead of Top Ramen. When I got there, I had to wait for her to eat before I did. I couldn't just raid the fridge like I wanted to. We ate baked chicken, fried okra, and rice. I always waited until the last possible moment to go home, sometimes missing the last bus and spending the night over there. I didn't want to go home, not tonight.

"April, your friend can't spend the night again," I heard her mother whisper to her through the paper-thin walls. I made sure I made the bus that night. I guess I wore out my welcome. Instead of saying Welcome, Welcome, it says it says Well Well . . . I guess you can . . . I guess you can come come.

It was piercing cold high in the mountains where April lived.

The always gloomy and foggy city didn't help either. April, fortunately for her, was immune to the cold. The bus was fifteen minutes late, and I didn't get home until 1:30 a.m.

My mom seemed like she hadn't moved since morning. Still trying to pick up rocks. My dad, on the other hand, was in motion.

Slow motion. He had his favorite knife in his hand, creeping around the house like a scared zombie. There was no use in talking to either of them. I had a little money so I would be able to survive another day. I took a shower and tried to hide the money somewhere no one would look. I had to find a good hiding place through trial and error.

This time I simply kept it in my pocket and buried my pants deep in my dirty clothes bin. I went to sleep without even thinking about homework. I had more important things to worry about. It was 2:15 a.m. and I went to sleep as soon as my body touched the bed.

There was a knock at the door. Then a jingle and she was in. I gotta fix that door! I looked at the clock and it was 4:58. She turned on the light and began searching. Why did my mom have to come in tonight? I knew she wouldn't be afraid of a teenage girl's dirty clothes bin.

"You got some money?" she asked while searching me, the bed, and the mattress.

"NO! Ronnie took my lunch money yesterday."

"He did?"

"I didn't even get to eat," I whined, trying to make her feel bad. After ten minutes of searching, she gave up, only glancing at my dirty clothes. With her brain in this state, she wouldn't be able to remember what I had on today. She turned off the light, as if I would be going to sleep anytime soon, and closed the door.

I would survive another day.

part iv

gangsters & monsters

Bob Buck

EMORY HOLMES II EMORY HOLMES II is a Los Angeles based writer who has published works as a novelist, playwright, poet, children's story writer, and journalist. His news stories have appeared in many publications, including the is a Los Angeles based writer who has published works as a novelist, playwright, poet, children's story writer, and journalist. His news stories have appeared in many publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, the the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune, the the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, the the New York Times New York Times Wire Service, Wire Service, Los Angeles Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and and Essence Essence.

a.k.a., moises rockafella

by emory holmes 11

You said I could have water. I want some water," Fat Tommy said again.

"You can have water, Moises, after you tell us how it went down. That's our deal," Vargas reminded him.

Fat Tommy didn't understand. He wanted some water. Why these other questions? Why this Moises s.h.i.t? He wasn't G.o.dd.a.m.n Moises anymore. That s.h.i.t was dead; done. Why didn't these pigs believe him? He felt so sorry for himself. None of it was his fault. It was the Colombians and that G.o.dd.a.m.n Pemberton. He was the bad guy. If they want their devil, there he is. But don't expect Fat Tommy to commit suicide and snitch. That s.h.i.t was dead.

Fat Tommy was having a really bad day. His big shoulders slumped. His money was gone. His business was gone. His high was gone. He laid his arms tenderly across his knees. He narrowed his eyes in the harsh light and squinted down at his arms. Still, he had to admit . . . he certainly was well dressed.

"Don't give those white folks no excuses, Tommy," his wife Bea had advised. "We ain't gonna get kilt over this a.s.shole."

Bea had borrowed her mother's credit card and bought him two brand-new, white, long-sleeve business shirts from Sears for his interrogations and, regrettably, for the trial. That was such a sweet thing for Bea to do. Buy him new shirts that the cops would like. He loved his Queen Bea-she had been his sweetheart since grade school, way back when he was skinny and pretty. Bea was s.e.xy, street-smart, and loyal to him. After he'd knocked her up, twice, he had started to hang with her, help her with his sons, and had grown to love her.

Gradually, she had encouraged him to develop his unique sartorial style: his dazzling jheri curl (forty bucks a pop at h.e.l.lacious Cuts on Crenshaw); his multiple ropes of gold, bedecked with dangling golden razors, crucifixes, naked chicks, powerfists, and c.o.ke spoons; his rainbow collection of jogging suits and fourteen pairs of top-of-the-line Air Jordans (and a pair of vintage Connies for layin' around the pad). He had restricted himself to only five or six affairs after they got married. The affairs were mostly "strawber-ries"- amateur ho's who turned tricks for dope.

Getting your johnson swabbed by a 'hood rat for a couple of crumbs of low-grade rock-not even a nickel's worth-wasn't like being unfaithful, he figured. It was medicinal; therapeutic; a salutary necessity-more like a business expense. Like buying aspirin or getting a ma.s.sage on a high-stress job. But that was all past-the wh.o.r.es, the dealing, the violence, the stress. He had resolutely turned his back on "thug life" six months ago, when he realized that a brother, even an old-time G like him, was vulnerable to jail time or a hit-after he had experienced the deadly grotesqueries in which Pemberton was capable of entangling him.

So, hours after that G.o.dd.a.m.n murder, months before he knew the cops were on to him, he'd flushed the bulk of his street stash down the toilet-1,800 bindles-and thrown away most of his thug-life paraphernalia, even his j.a.c.k.-.o.f.f. books, Player Players and Hustler Hustlers mostly, and his cherished Big Black t.i.tty Big Black t.i.tty magazines, and faithfully (except when the Lakers were on TV, or magazines, and faithfully (except when the Lakers were on TV, or Fear Factor Fear Factor, or The Sopranos The Sopranos) got down on his knees and read the Bible with Bea and promised to her on his daddy's life, and on his granddaddy's granddaddy's soul even, he wasn't going to disappoint her anymore. No more druggin', no more wh.o.r.es, no more hangin' out. No more street. soul even, he wasn't going to disappoint her anymore. No more druggin', no more wh.o.r.es, no more hangin' out. No more street.

Swear to Jesus . . .

"White folks like white stuff," Bea had explained that morning before he surrendered himself. They were in the bedroom of their new Woodland Hills bungalow, and Bea was standing behind him on her tiptoes and pressing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his back as they faced the dresser mirror. "They like white houses, white picket fences, white bread, and white shirts," she added grimly, peeking over his shoulder to admire her husband and herself in the mirror.

They both looked so sad, so pitiful and wronged, Bea thought. And all because of that s.h.i.t-for-brains Pemberton. Fat Tommy thought so, too. Recalling those poignant scenes on that morning, he remembered that they'd both cried a little bit, standing there perusing their innocent, sad, s.e.xy selves in the mirror. Little Bea had slipped from view for a moment as she helped Tommy struggle out of his nightshirt and unfastened for the final time the nine golden ropes of braid that festooned his ma.s.sive neck, and then his diamond earring. Bea tearfully placed them in a shopping bag of things they would have to hock. She slid the voluminous dress-shirtsleeves over his backswept arms. Then her beautiful, manicured hands appeared, fluttering along his shoulders, smoothing out the wrinkles in his new shirt.

When Bea was satisfied with her effort, she slipped around in front of him and unloosed his lucky nose ring, letting him view her voluptuous little self in the lace teddy he'd bought her for Mother's Day, but which she had seldom worn. Then, while he was ogling her melons, she seized his right pinky finger, whose stylish claw he had allowed to flourish there as a scoop for sampling virgin powder on the fly and which he had rakishly polished jet black, and before he could stop her, she deftly clipped it off. Fat Tommy shrieked like a waif.

"It's better this way, Tommy," Bea a.s.sured him. She carefully placed the shorn talon in a plastic baggie. It resembled a shiny black roach; but for Fat Tommy, it was like witnessing the burial of a child.

"I'm keeping this for good luck," she told him, and stowed it in the change purse of her Gucci bag. She patted his lumpy belly, which protruded out of the break in the shirt like a fifty-pound sack of m.u.f.fins. Then Bea b.u.t.toned the shirt and put on the new hand-painted tie with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s image on it that she'd had a Cuban chick make specially for him, the girl she'd met in rehab. She cupped his big pumpkin head in her hands. She had paid her little sister Karesha fifteen bucks to touch up his jheri curl.

The handsome thick mane of oily black locks cascaded sensuously, if greasily, down his forehead and neck.

"Try to stay where it's cool, so the jheri curl juice don't drip on your brand-new shirt, baby," Bea said in a sweetly admonishing tone.

"This new ProSoft Sport Curl Gel don't drip like that cheap s.h.i.t, baby," Fat Tommy explained. "It's deluxe. I gave your sister two more dollars so she would use the top-drawer s.h.i.t. I want to make a good impression."

"I know you do, baby. But you're gonna have a hard time keeping it up in the joint . . . I don't think you-"

Her husband had stopped listening and Bea stared once more into Fat Tommy's eyes. He was such a big baby. Standing there he reminded her of a favorite holy card she'd cherished those two years she went to St. Sebastian's Catholic school before she met him.

St. Sebastian, sad and pitiful, mortally wounded, innocent and wronged, pierced with arrows. She kissed him lightly on his shirt front and pushed him backward onto the edge of the bed.

"Pull yourself together, Tommy. I've got to go drop off the kids," she said.

Fat Tommy was still crying, sitting dejectedly on the side of the bed, long after she had dressed and gone out to drop their boys at her sister's new hide-out in Topanga Canyon. The boys woke up during the forty-minute drive to Karesha's as Bea vainly scanned the radio for news of Pemberton's arrest. She couldn't stop looking at her boys, couldn't stop cursing Pemberton under her breath and sadly reflecting on how that a.s.shole had put them all up to their eyeb.a.l.l.s in s.h.i.t.

Bea's mother was looking out the window of her sister's place when she drove up. Her mother would drive the boys up to Santa Barbara and they would take a cross-country bus to Texas that night. The three women and the two infant boys cried until Bea's mother drove off in Karesha's pink Lexus, with Little Tommy and baby Kobe waving bye-bye from their car seats.

After their mother and the boys were safely away, Bea's little sister, Karesha, a cold, deadly customer in most circ.u.mstances, confided to her that she was a little nervous about the possibility of her own capture or the jailing and execution of her notorious former squeeze, Cut Pemberton, and what it all could mean for her Hollywood plans, and for her high-toned, social-climbing crew.

"You heard from him?" Bea asked, as she backed out the dirt driveway of Karesha's rented, brush-covered hideaway.

"I hear the Colombians got him. The cops don't know much about him yet. I'm sure he wants to keep it that way. Anyway, I trashed the cell phone," Karesha said quietly. "But if that sick motherf.u.c.ker come 'round here I'm gonna send him to Jesus." She lifted her T-shirt and showed Bea the pearl-handled .22 Pemberton had bought her as an engagement gift.

When Bea arrived back home, the neighbors were out, watering their lawns, pretending they didn't know Fat Tommy was a prime suspect in a vicious murder.

"How do, Miss O'Rourke?" Pearl Stenis, the boldest of her nosy neighbors greeted her.

"I'm blessed, Mrs. Stenis," Bea said flatly.

She pulled into the garage and closed the door. She gathered herself a moment before she got out. She turned on all the lights in the garage and found a flashlight, and took a good twenty minutes making sure the Mercedes was clean of diapers and weapons and works and blow and any incriminating evidence.

When she was done, she poked her head into the house and called, "We're late, Tommy. I'll be in the car. Come on, baby. We got to be on time this time." She waited in the car and honked the horn a half-dozen times but had to come back inside. She found Fat Tommy back in bed, fully dressed, sobbing, with the covers pulled over his head.

"Where the h.e.l.l were you, baby?" Fat Tommy complained. "I thought Cut got you."

"That n.i.g.g.ah better be layin' low," Bea said. "These Hollywood cops would love to catch a f.u.c.k-up like that and Rodney-King his a.s.s to death for the savage s.h.i.t he done."

"I was there too, baby. Remember, I was there, too," Fat Tommy murmured.

"Don't say that, Tommy! Don't say that no more," Bea demanded. "Put that craziness out your mind. You wasn't there.

You don't know nothing. You don't know n.o.body."

"It just ain't fair," Fat Tommy complained.

"Listen here, Tommy," Bea said sternly. "You don't deserve this beef. You don't know nothin'. You didn't see nothin'. You got a wife and family to protect. It was that G.o.dd.a.m.n Cut that fount Simpson. You didn't even know he was a cop. It was all Cut's idea.

We wouldn't be mixed up in none of this if Cut hadn't . . ."

Fat Tommy began sobbing again. After a few minutes, he confessed that he had raided the emergency stash in the bathroom and had done a couple of lines to calm his nerves. He suggested that they do what was left. There was only a half-bindle anyway.

He never did crack, the high felt like a suicide jump. Crack was for kids; toxic, cheap-a.s.s s.h.i.t meant to sell, not do. Fat Tommy was old school-White Girl all the way. Powder, he believed, was cla.s.sier, mellower than rock cocaine.

Bea retrieved the emergency bindle out of the bottom of a box of sanitary napkins. There was only a portion of an eight ball left from the half-pound Fat Tommy liked to keep around the pad for Laker games and birthdays and other special occasions. Bea used her mother's Sears card to line out six hefty tracks of the white powder on the dresser top. Rolling their last hundred-dollar bill into a straw, the couple snorted quickly, sucking the lines of blow into their flared nostrils like shotgun blasts fired straight to the back of their brains.

"d.a.m.n, that's good s.h.i.t," Fat Tommy said, feeling the cold drip of the snow, liquefied and suffused with snot, glazing the commodious interiors of his head and throat.

Quickly, the drug began to take effect: it eased its frigid tendrils down the back lanes of their breathing pa.s.sages, deadening the superior nasal concha, the frontal and sepenoidal sinuses, creeping along their soft palates like a snotty glacier before it slid down the interiors of their throats, chilling the lingual nerves and flowing over the rough, bitter fields of papilla at the back of their tongues and ascending like a stream of arctic ghosts up through their pituitary glands, their spinal walls and veins, and into the uppermost regions of their brains. The pupils of their dark brown eyes became dilated and sparkling.

Fat Tommy shut his eyes tight. The darkness inside his mind began to fill with amorphous, floating colors. His big body seemed to be shapeless and floating, too. He looked down at the drifts of sugary dust remaining on the dresser. Almost 400 bucks worth of Girl-gone in six vigorous snorts. As Fat Tommy admired the smeared patterns of residue on the dresser top, Bea leaned down and broadly licked the last thin traces of powder. Normally he prided himself in always managing to lick up the leftovers before Bea got to them. But he was immobilized with grief; and he was frozen from his nose to his toes. Bea was frozen numb, too. The c.o.ke was ninety percent pure. Chilean. It'd only been stepped on once. Cream of the Andes. Bea blinked hard and looked up at her husband.

"I'm straight now," Bea said, noting a half moon of white powder showing around the deep alar grooves of Fat Tommy's right nostril. "Your slip is showin', baby," she added, pointing to his reflection in the mirror. Fat Tommy pinched his nostrils closed, shut his eyes, and took a sharp snort. The lumps of powder shot past his nasal vestibules and septum in white-hot pellets of snot.

His heart began to race. Neither of them said a word for a few minutes. They closed their eyes and surrendered to the high. When Fat Tommy finally opened his eyes, Bea was staring at him with a beatific look on her face.

"You look nice," Bea said. "Innocent . . . Don't let 'em punk you, Tommy. Just wear the s.h.i.t outta this shirt and tie. Dr. King'll bring you through. All business. You know how to talk to white folks. Don't go in there like no G . . . talking all bad and s.h.i.t, like you was that G.o.dd.a.m.n Cut. That's what they want. Give them your A game and you'll be all right. Remember. You wasn't there. You didn't see nothing. You don't know n.o.body. We ain't gonna get kilt over some a.s.shole. We ain't gonna get kilt over some a.s.shole.

Fat Tommy got in the car, gripping his Bible, sobbing and praying and a.s.suring Bea and the Lord he loved them. Between his sobs he promised her he would savor her instructions and repeat them like a mantra: Don't say nothing that's gonna get us kilt over some a.s.shole over some a.s.shole. She reminded him that his stupid-a.s.s Uncle Bunny had done a nickel at Folsom on a break-in after Bunny talked too much. So-don't talk too much. Don't do nothing that will make you look guilty. They got nothing. That was the bottom line, Bea reminded Fat Tommy. They agreed if he was cool and smooth he had a chance to ease his way out of the beef with short time.

The cops were nice to him at first; they said he was a stand-up guy for turning himself in and helping out with the investigation.

They had interviewed him all day. Fat Tommy said he didn't "need no lawyer." He wasn't guilty. The cops didn't seem to be concerned about his c.o.ke business so much as they wanted to know what he knew about the recent murder of the undercover cop-Simpson- right in the middle of the projects on Fat Tommy's home turf, La Caja. Fat Tommy a.s.sured him he "didn't have any 'turf' anymore, not in La Caja, not nowhere." Moreover, he certainly didn't know anything about a cop killing.

"We know you ain't no killer, Moises," Vargas told him a few minutes into the interrogation. "But you grew up in La Caja, where this murder went down. We figure you might know something. Point us to the bad guys. We know you're in bed with the Colombians. They're all over La Caja these days. One of them called you by name, Moises. He's quite fond of you. Says you're a big shot. You're looking at some serious time if you don't play ball. Play along and help us catch this killer . . . you'll be all right . . ."

Vargas offered him a jumbo cup of lemonade and four jelly doughnuts. His high had long ago been blown and he couldn't believe how hungry and thirsty he'd gotten. Vargas said that the pretty cop who had processed him that morning had asked to make the lemonade especially for him.

Fat Tommy said, "That was sure nice of her."

"Yeah. Officer Ospina is a sweetie. Drink up. That's the last of it . . . We need to get started," Vargas said, and smiled at him.

Braddock took the empty cup, crushed it, and banked it into the wastebasket in the back of the interrogation room.

"Great shot," Fat Tommy said. "Three-pointer."

Braddock and Vargas said nothing. Braddock walked to a chair somewhere behind him and Vargas turned on a tape recorder and intoned: "This is Detective Manny Vargas of the Homicide Detail, Criminal Investigation Division of the Van Nuys Police Department. I am joined with Detective Will Dockery and DEA special agent Roland Braddock. This is a tape-recorded interview of Thomas Martin O'Rourke, a.k.a., "Fat Tommy" O'Rourke, a.k.a., Tommy Martin, a.k.a., Pretty Tommy Banes, a.k.a., Sugar-T Banes, a.k.a., Slo Jerry-T, a.k.a., Big Jerry Jay, a.k.a., T-Moose, a.k.a., Moises Rockafella . . ."

"Uh, my name ain't Moises," Fat Tommy protested, interrupting as politely as he could. "Some bad people started calling me that. But I don't let n.o.body call me that no more." He tried his s.e.xiest grin.

Vargas looked at him blankly and continued: "This a homicide investigation under police report number A-55503. Today's date is March 28, 2005, and the time is now 1349 hours." Then Vargas looked at Fat Tommy and said, "Could you state your name once more for the record?"

"I'm Thomas Martin O'Rourke."

"Address?"

Tommy gave them his parents' address. That's where he got his mail now.

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-four, officer," Fat Tommy said.

"Employed?"

"I was a.s.sistant manager at the Swing Shop . . ."