The Upcycled Self by Tariq Trotter

Author:Tariq Trotter [Trotter, Tariq]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

AND THEN THERE were my friends. Ours was a wartime bond. From scaling walls to tag our names all over Philly, to watching crack hit the neighborhoods and destroy families, we went through it together. My grandmother spoke with a thousand proverbs: “A hard head make a soft behind.” “Good manners will take you further in life than money ever will.” “Don’t flash your money in a crowd.” One thing she said that I found laughable then but that came back to me as a curse was: “You’re going to go through life and you’ll be able to count your real friends on one hand.”

“Man, you buggin,” I would say. “I got like fifty friends! That’s my man, that’s my man, that’s my man, she my homie.”

And Minnie would look at me and say, “Yeah, those aren’t your friends. You’ll see. Just over time. Time will tell.”

There was Hammed, the “cousin” that I was with that first fight night in South Philly, son of Aunt Na. After him were the two guys we got into it with outside of the corner store: Odell and Otis—two brothers. They would start what we called The Equal Team, T.E.T., with a bunch of other homies: Splash, who passed in 2019, the OG of the hood who everybody looked up to; and then Aaron, Dave, and Moose, with Charlie Kahn and Chaka coming into the picture once we got to high school. In our early days we would all cross South Philly to hang out at the railroad tracks, where the Conrail freight trains were routed over these small overpasses. Venturing down 25th Street and across damn near the whole of South, we’d arrive at “Cowboy” and “Cowgirl,” two small, fat hills that the train tracks sat on, maybe twenty blocks apart. The train tracks were active. We’d go on them knowing that somebody got their leg or arm cut off while playing around and sneaking on the train tracks like us. But we didn’t care. We threw “Jesus nails” at each other, the big-ass pure-iron heavy-as-hell spikes that held the train tracks in place and were, in our imaginations, the same brand of nail that pierced Jesus when he was crucified on the cross. You only needed to get hit with one of them one good time to know you better not get hit again. We would also have bottle fights, rock fights, and dirt bomb wars; flipping on pissy mattresses and break-dancing on the sidewalk all were natural, locally grown remedies for boredom.

We were like brothers. Eventually, a young man named Ahmir Thompson, who I would meet at CAPA, the city’s art high school, would join this inner circle of real friends. The kind you could count on one hand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.