The Prints

The kids from out of town think we’re making fun of my buddy when we call him Steak. I see where they’re coming from. Even with his beanie on he just reaches our shoulders, and his muscles are just thin wires of meat wrapped carelessly around a lightweight skeleton. They’re wrong though. We call him Steak because he’s raw.

We don’t live in the nicest town, but we know how to care for each other. Families hold neighborhood barbeques where the ketchup tastes suspiciously like emptied Carl’s Jr. packets. If a friend spots your bike under the a*s of some rat from Camden, you can bet his knife is coming out and a rumble’s going down. Despite the poverty, everyone knows someone who owns a television, and kids of all ages, some of those ages higher than they should be, are sustained off their fantasies of life on the big screen. All the girls want to be reality stars and all the guys want to be rappers.

The problem with that is that rap isn’t just about charisma and how many tattoos you can fit on whatever skin is left exposed under a black hoodie. It takes lyricism, and poetry, and we lived in a piss-poor public school town where the only lessons on poetry were to pass the tests and keep our funding. I learned that Shakespeare wrote in pentameter, but I don’t know what he wrote, and I learned that anything with a protruding part, anything long and powerful, and anything that grows, stands for sex, sex, and sex. Real poetry took talent that none of us had, but somehow Steak had it.

I don’t know where he got his vocabulary. I’ve met his parents, a secretary with clicking purple nails and a mechanic who smelled like the backside of a gas station. They talk like third graders raised on some sort of Ghetto Sesame Street, and the most impressive grammar I’ve heard from them is being able to use ‘s**t’ as seven different parts of speech. Steak says he when he was a kid he didn’t have any children’s books around to learn to read, so he read the newspaper instead. The only reason I don’t believe him is because there’s no way anyone raised on a daily dose of our neighborhood news would grow up to be anything but a police officer, or depressed.

He was a friendly guy, always there to lend a light, or just a pencil. He had his fair share of enemies though, everyone does, but most people’s enemies at least know their names. We lived on the same street, just a couple miles from school, and neither of us could drive and our parents worked early, so we walked there every morning. I’d like to complain that we walked uphill both ways, but between our houses and the school was the White part of the neighborhood, where the streets were paved flat as paper. No one that saw us every morning was rude enough to tell us to scram and go to Hard Knocks High instead, but they were thinking it. My mom used to tell me that people are scared of what they don’t understand. We were black, poor, and teenagers, and no one from a town where the streets are named after trees and presidents instead of numbers and animals could even pretend to understand a single part of us. One day we were walking through Maple Street, and some punk probably skipping school ran up to us and screamed into Steak’s face that he stole his watch. He just stood still, looked back, and said that he did not. The kid pulled out a gun and I was pleading with Steak to just let him have the watch, but he stood his ground. He was still standing there ten seconds later with spit in his face and a red hatching on his wrist where his leather-bound, faux-gold watch had been torn off. He wiped it off and walked home. There were no tears to carry and drown his anger, and I wondered where it all went. I thought he would let it out at one of our daily afterschool basketball games; that the thud of the ball on concrete would be loud like justice’s hammer and his arm would be stiffer than his upper lip, but they weren’t. I saw him later, on Broad Street, and I knew he was letting it out for real. He was sitting up straight on a concrete stoop while our friend Mike beatboxed, spilling his heart to strangers who didn’t know how lucky they were:

“Shufflin’ southside, bad and beat

Dirty soles up the Sterile Street

Smoke and fire in a demon’s eyes

The fault was yours, but the sin was mine

You’re shootin’ off your mouth, but I’m shooting for the stars

Why shoot a man for treasure;  Gold can’t glitter in the dark”

 Few things in my life have disgusted me as much as watching everyone that passed ignoring him. Part of why we talked so often is that I loved to talk to him about his writing and lyrics. My parents, like his, didn’t get the appeal of books, and there wasn’t a lot of reading in my house, but they were absolute freaks when it came to music. I was raised on Bob Dylan and Coulton, and dad says my first word was the ooh-ooh-whoao intro to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”. Talking to Steak about his artistry was like meeting Coulton himself for me, and I feel like both are equally responsible for me becoming, relatively, so eloquent. I sat down with my friends  and thought about what I just heard, knowing it was about the two of us, and thought about what I wanted to ask. I asked him whether he said ‘soles’ or ‘souls’, and whether he meant we were desecrating the street with our poverty, or our guilt.

He spit into the gutter and said “Ain’t no difference.”

I don’t know what I was expecting.

This week, we dragged our dirty soles to a weekend basketball game, but it was cut short when the same punk from Maple Street recognized Steak and jumped the fence, screaming something about keeping promises. The gun went off, and Steak went down. We surrounded the outsider and took him down before he could get another shot off. We took turns beating whatever we could reach to a pulp. I tore his chest, and I would have torn his heart off if I wasn’t so sure he was missing one. I almost laughed at the irony of a bleeding Steak, but in the end all I could do was cry.

That was the last straw for a neighborhood my parents had lost their faith in a long time ago. I had relatives in Los Angeles that would take care of me, and even though no one said it out loud, there was nothing left for me here after losing my best friend. My family waited with me at the door, saying everything they could but goodbye. Finally, the words came out and I was ready to start my new life on the other side of the country, but what might as well have been the other side of a different world, so I whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate said ‘Fresh’, and it had dice in the mirror. If anything, I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought, “Nah, forget it. Yo homes, to Bel Air!”