Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

“My son aced the test to get into Brooklyn Tech,” she boasted to her friend. “He is such a remarkable student, he’s the best pupil in his class.”

Just then a cop car drove up and Rodney was in it. They were going to drop him off at home, but he heard our mother bragging about what a good son he was and he told the cops to keep going. They took him straight to Spofford, a juvenile detention center. My sister and I happily finished off those doughnuts.

I spent most of my time with my sister Denise. She was two years older than me and she was beloved by everybody in the neighborhood. If she was your friend, she was your best friend. But if she was your enemy, go across the street. We made mud pies; we watched wrestling and karate movies and went to the store with our mother. It was a nice existence, but then when I was just seven years old, our world got turned upside down.

There was a recession and my mom lost her job and we got evicted out of our nice apartment in Bed-Stuy. They came and took all our furniture and put it outside on the sidewalk. The three of us kids had to sit down on it and protect it so that nobody took it while my mother went to find a spot for us to stay. I was sitting there, and some kids from the neighborhood came up and said, “Mike, why is your furniture out here, Mike?” We just told them we were moving. Then some neighbors saw us out there and brought some plates of food down for us.

We wound up in Brownsville. You could totally feel the difference. The people were louder, more aggressive. It was a very horrific, tough, and gruesome kind of place. My mother wasn’t used to hanging around those particular types of aggressive black people and she appeared to be intimidated, and so were my brother and sister and me. Everything was hostile, there was never a subtle moment there. Cops were always driving by with their sirens on; ambulances always coming to pick up somebody; guns always going off, people getting stabbed, windows being broken. One day my brother and I even got robbed right in front of our apartment building. We used to watch these guys shooting it out with one another. It was like something out of an old ­Edward G. Robinson movie. We would watch and say, “Wow, this is happening in real life.”

The whole neighborhood was also a hotbed of lust. A lot of people there seemed to be uninhibited. It wasn’t uncommon to hear people talking on the street: “Suck my dick,” “Eat my pussy.” It was a different kind of environment from my old neighborhood. One day a guy pulled me off the street, took me into an abandoned building, and tried to molest me. I never really felt safe on those streets. After a while, we weren’t even safe in our apartment. My mom’s parties ended when we got to Brownsville. My mother made some friends, but she wasn’t in the mix like she was in Bed-Stuy. So she started drinking heavily. She never got another job, and I remember waiting in these long lines with my mother down at the welfare center. We’d wait and wait for hours and then we’d be right up front, and it was five o’clock and they’d close the fucking shit on you, just like in the movies.

We kept getting evicted in Brownsville too. That happened quite a few times. Every now and then we’d get a decent spot, crashing for a short time with some friends or a boyfriend of my mother’s. But for the most part, each time we moved, the conditions got worse – from being poor to being serious poor to being fucked-up poor. Eventually we lived in condemned buildings, with no heat, no water, maybe some electricity. In the wintertime all four of us slept in the same bed to keep warm. We’d stay there until a guy would come and kick us out. My mother would do whatever she had to do to keep a roof over our heads. That often meant sleeping with someone that she really didn’t care for. That was just the way it was.

She’d never take us to a homeless shelter, so we’d just move into another abandoned building. It was so traumatic, but what could you do? This is what I hate about myself, what I learned from my mother – there was nothing you wouldn’t do to survive.

One of my earliest memories is of welfare workers coming into the apartment to look for men under the bed. In the summertime, we’d go get the free lunches and free breakfasts. I’d tell them, “I got nine brothers and sisters,” so they’d pack more. I’d feel like I just went to war and got a bounty. I was so proud that I got food for the house. Can you imagine that bullshit? I’d open the refrigerator and see the baloney sandwich and the orange and the little carton of milk. Twenty of them. I’d invite people over. “Do you need something to eat, brother? Are you hungry? We have food.” We were acting like we paid for this with hard-earned money. It was a free lunch.

I was a momma’s boy when I was young. I always slept with my mother. My sister and brother had their own rooms, but I slept with my mother until I was fifteen. One time, my mother slept with a man while I was in the bed with her. She probably thought I was asleep. I’m sure it had an impact on me, but that’s just how it was. I got booted to the couch when her boyfriend Eddie Gillison came into the picture. They had a really dysfunctional love affair. I guess that’s why my own relationships were so strange. They’d drink, fight, and fuck, break up, then drink, fight, and fuck some more. They were truly in love, even if it was a really sick love.

Eddie was a short, compact guy from South Carolina who was a worker at an industrial Laundromat factory. He didn’t get too far in school, and by the time my brother and sister got to fourth grade, he really couldn’t help them with their homework. Eddie was a controlling guy, but my mother was a very controlling woman, so all hell would break loose on a routine basis. There was always some kind of fight, and the cops would come, and they’d go, “Hey, buddy, walk around the block.” Sometimes we’d all get in on the fighting. One day my mother and Eddie were having a bad argument and they got physical. I jumped in between them trying to defend my mom and I was trying to restrain him and, whop, he slugged me in my stomach and I went down. I was, like, Oh, man, I can’t believe this shit. I was just a little kid! That’s why I’ve never put my hands on any of my kids. I don’t want them thinking I’m a monster when they get old. But back then, beating on a kid was just the way it was. Nobody cared. Now it’s murder, you go to jail.

Eddie and my mother fought over anything – other men or women, money, control. Eddie was no angel. When my mother had female friends over and they’d all get drunk and she’d pass out, he’d fuck her friends. And then they’d fight. There was really some barbaric stuff, going at each other with weapons and cursing, “You motherfucker, fuck you” and “You nigga, suck my …” We’d be screaming, “Mommy, stop, no!” Once, when I was seven years old, they were fighting and Eddie punched her and knocked her gold tooth out. My mother started boiling up a large pot of water. She told my brother and sister to get under the quilt, but I was so mesmerized watching my wrestling program on the TV that I didn’t hear her. My mother was so slick, she walked by and nothing happened, then she came back into the room and by then my sister and brother were prepared, they were hiding under the quilt. Eddie was sitting right next to me, and the next thing I heard was this boom and the pot with the boiling water hit Eddie in the head. A little bit of the water splashed on me. It felt like it weighed a ton.

“Aaggghhh!” Eddie ran screaming out the door into the hallway. I ran right after him. He turned around and grabbed me. “Oh, baby, baby, that bitch got you too?” he said. “Yeah, the bitch got me, ah, ah, the bitch got me!” We brought him back in the room and took his shirt off, and his neck and his back and the side of his face were covered in blistery bubbles. He looked like a reptile. So we put him on the floor in front of the little window air conditioner, and my sister sat down next to him. She took a lighter and sterilized the end of a needle and then burst the blisters, one by one. My sister and I were both crying, and I gave him a quarter to cheer him up.

When I think about it, I always thought of my mother as the victim in most situations, and Eddie did beat on her. I’m sure the lady lib would think that her reaction was great, but I thought, How could you do that to somebody who is supposed to be your boyfriend? It made me realize that my mother was no Mother Teresa. She did some serious stuff and he still stayed with her. In fact, he went to the store to buy her some liquor after she burned him. So you see, he rewarded her for it. That’s why I was so sexually dysfunctional.

That is the kind of life I grew up in. People in love cracking their heads and bleeding like dogs. They love each other but they’re stabbing each other. Holy shit, I was scared to death of my family in the house. I’m growing up around tough women, women who fight men. So I didn’t think fighting a woman was taboo because the women I knew would kill you. You had to fight them, because if you didn’t, they’d slice you or shoot you. Or else they’d bring some men to take advantage of you and beat you up, because they thought you were a punk.

If I was scared to be in the house, I was also scared to go outside. By then, I was going to public school and that was a nightmare. I was a pudgy kid, very shy, almost effeminate shy, and I spoke with a lisp. The kids used to call me “Little Fairy Boy” because I was always hanging out with my sister, but my mother had told me that I had to stay around Denise because she was older than me and had to watch me. They also called me “Dirty Ike” or “Dirty Motherfucker” because I didn’t know about hygiene back then. We didn’t have hot water to shower in, and if the gas wasn’t on, we couldn’t even boil water. My mother tried to teach me about it, but I still didn’t do a very good job. She used to take soap and fill a bucket up with hot water and wash me. But when you’re a young kid, you don’t care about hygiene. Eventually I’d learn it in the streets from the older kids. They told me about Brut and Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin.

My school was right around the corner from our apartment, but sometimes my mother would be passed out from drinking the night before and wouldn’t walk me to school. It was then that the kids would always hit me and kick me. They were, like, “Get the fuck out of here, nigga, you, like, nasty motherfucker.” I would constantly get abused. They’d punch me in the face and I would run. We would go to school and these people would pick on us, then we would go home and they’d pull out guns and rob us for whatever little change we had. That was hard-core, young kids robbing us right in our own apartment ­building.

Having to wear glasses in the first grade was a real turning point in my life. My mother had me tested and it turned out I was nearsighted, so she made me get glasses. They were so bad. One day I was leaving school at lunchtime to go home, and I had some meatballs from the cafeteria wrapped up in the aluminum to keep them hot. This guy came up to me and said, “Hey, you got any money?” I said, “No.” He started picking my pockets and searching me, and he tried to take my fucking meatballs. I was resisting, going, “No, no, no!” I would let the bullies take my money, but I never let them take my food. I was hunched over like a human shield, protecting my meatballs. So he started hitting me in the head and then took my glasses and put them down the gas tank of a truck. I ran home, but he didn’t get my meatballs. I should have clobbered those guys, but I was so scared because those guys were so brazen and bold that I just figured they must know something I didn’t. “Don’t beat me up, leave me alone, stop!” I’d say. I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying. That’s a wild feeling, being that helpless. You never ever forget that feeling. The day that guy took my glasses and put them in that gas tank was the last day I went to school. That was the end of my ­formal education. I was seven years old and I just never went back to class.

After that, I would go to school to eat breakfast and then leave. I’d walk around the block for a couple of hours. Then I’d go back for lunch and leave. When school was out, I’d go home. One day during the spring of 1974, three guys came towards me on the street and started patting my pockets. “Got any money?” they asked. I told them no. They said, “All the money we find, we keep.” So they started turning my pockets out but I didn’t have anything. Then they said, “Where are you going? Do you want to fly with us?”

“What’s that?” I said.

So we walked over to the school, and they had me climb the fence and throw some plastic milk crates over to them. We started walking a few blocks and then they told me to go into an abandoned building.

“Whoa, I don’t know,” I hesitated. I was one wimpy little guy against three. But we walked in and then they said, “Go to the roof, Shorty.” I didn’t know if they were going to kill me. We climbed up to the roof and I saw a little box with some pigeons in it. These guys were building a pigeon coop. So I became their little gofer, their smuck-slave. Soon I found out that when the birds flew, they often landed on some other roof, because they were lazy and in bad condition. I’d have to go downstairs, see which roof they landed on, figure out a way into that building and then go up on that roof and scare the birds off. All day I chased the birds, but I thought that was pretty fun. I liked being around the birds. I even liked going to the pet store to buy their seed. And these guys were tough guys and they kind of liked me for being their gofer. My whole life I had felt like a misfit, but here on the roof I felt like I was home. This was what I was supposed to do.

The next morning I went back to the building. They were on the roof and saw me coming and started throwing bricks at me. “Motherfucker, what are you doing over here? You trying to steal our fucking birds?” one of the guys said. Whoa, I thought this was my new home.

“No, no, no,” I said. “I just wanted to know if you guys need me to go to the store for you or chase your birds.”

“Are you serious?” he said. “Get up here, Shorty.” And they sent me to the store to buy them cigarettes. They were a bunch of ruthless street guys, but I didn’t mind helping them because the birds enthralled me. It was really cool to see a couple of hundred pigeons flying around in circles in the sky and then coming back down to a roof.

Flying pigeons was a big sport in Brooklyn. Everyone from Mafia dons to little ghetto kids did it. It’s unexplainable; it just gets in your blood. I learned how to handle them, learned the characteristics of them. Then it became something that I became somewhat of a master of, and I took pride in being so good at it. Everybody would let their pigeons fly at the same time, and the name of the game was to try and catch the other guys’ pigeons. It was like racing horses. Once it’s in your blood, you never stop. Wherever I lived from that day on, I always built me a coop and had pigeons.

One day we were on the roof dealing with the pigeons and an older guy came up. His name was Barkim and he was a friend of one of these guys’ brothers. When he realized his friend wasn’t there, he told us to tell him to meet him at a jam at the rec center in our neighborhood that night. The jams were like teenage dances, except this was no Archie and Veronica shit. At night they even changed the name of the place from the rec center to The Sagittarius. All the players and hustlers would go there, the neighborhood guys who robbed houses, pickpocketed, snatched chains, and perpetrated credit card fraud. It was a den of iniquity.

So that night I went to the center. I was seven years old, and I didn’t know anything about dressing up. I didn’t know you were supposed to go home and take a shower and change your clothes and dress to impress and then go to the club. That’s what the other guys who were handling pigeons did. But I went straight to the center from the pigeon coops, wearing the same stinky clothes with all this bird shit on me. I thought the guys would be there and they’d accept me as one of their own, because I was chasing these fucking birds off of these ­buildings for them. But I walked in and those guys went, “What’s that smell? Look at this dirty, stinking motherfucker.” The whole place started laughing and teasing me. I didn’t know what to do; it was such a traumatizing experience, everybody picking on me. I was crying, but I was laughing too because I wanted to fit in. I guess Barkim saw the way I was dressed and took pity on me. He came up to me and said, “Yo, Shorty. Get the fuck out of here. Meet me back at the roof eight in the morning tomorrow.”

The next morning I was there right on time. Barkim came up and started lecturing me. “You can’t be going out looking like a motherfucking bum in the street. What the fuck are you doing, man? We’re moneymakers.” He was talking fast and I was trying to comprehend each word. “We’re gonna get money out here, Shorty. Are you ready?”

I went with him and we started breaking into people’s houses. He told me to go through the windows that were too small for him to fit through, and I went in and opened the door for him. Once we were inside, he went through people’s drawers, he broke open the safe, he was just really wiping them out. We got stereos, eight-tracks, jewelry, guns, cash money. After the robberies, he took me to Delancey Street in the city and bought me some nice clothes and sneakers and a sheepskin coat. That night he took me to a jam and a lot of the same people who laughed at me at the other jam were there. I had on my new coat and leather pants. Nobody even recognized me; it was like I was a different person. It was incredible.

Barkim was the guy who introduced me into the life of crime. Before that, I never stole anything. Not a loaf of bread, not a piece of candy, nothing. I had no antisocial tendencies. I didn’t have the nerve. But Barkim explained to me that if you always looked good, people would treat you with respect. If you had the newest fashion, the finest stuff, you were a cool dude. You’d have status.

Barkim took me to a roller-skating rink on Utica Avenue where I met these guys who were called the Rutland Road Crew. They were young, maybe twelve years old, but they dressed like grown men. Trench coats, alligator shoes, rabbit furs, Stetsons with the big brims. They had on designer clothes from Sergio Valente, Jordache, Pierre Cardin. I was impressed. Barkim told me how they did it – these guys were pickpockets, chain snatchers, and robbers. They were just babies. They’re in public school and they’ve got watches and rings and necklaces. They’re driving mopeds. People called them thugs but we called them money niggas. That shit was crazy.

Barkim started introducing me to people on the street as his “son.” He was only a few years older than me but it was street terminology that warned people not to disrespect me. It meant: “This is my son in the streets, we’re family, we rob and steal. This is my little moneymaker. Don’t fuck with this nigga.” People that respected him had to respect me now. He taught me which people to look out for, which people I couldn’t trust because they would take my shit right from me. My life reminded me of Oliver Twist, with the older guy Fagin teaching all this stuff. He bought me a lot of clothes, but he never gave me a lot of money. He’d make a couple of thousand from robbing and he’d give me two hundred. But at eight years old, two hundred was a lot of money. Sometimes he’d take out a piece of jewelry that we stole and let me borrow it for a few days.

I took my criminality to another level with the Rutland Road Crew. They were mostly Caribbean guys from Crown Heights. Barkim knew the older set, The Cats. I started hanging out with the RRC, their junior division. I got involved in their little house-robbing heists. We’d go to school, eat breakfast, and then we’d get on the bus and train and start robbing during school hours. That was the beginning of me feeling like I belonged. We were all equal as long as we put in our share of the robbing proceeds.

Some people might read some of the things I’m talking about and judge me as an adult, call me a criminal, but I did these things over thirty-five years ago. I was a little kid looking for love and acceptance and the streets were where I found it. It was the only education I had, and these guys were my teachers. Even the older gangsters said, “You shouldn’t do this. Go to school,” but I didn’t want to listen to them, even though they had respect in the street. They were telling us to stay in school at the same time they were out there robbing. All the guys respected me because I was a little moneymaker. I’d break off some for my friends who needed a little cash. I’d buy us all liquor and food. I started buying pigeons. If you had good birds, people respected you. Plus, it was a rush to steal things and then go out and buy clothes. I saw how everybody treated me when I came around and I was dressed up nice with my shearling coat and my Pumas. I had a ski suit, with the yellow goggles, and I’d never been to a ski slope in my life. I couldn’t even spell fucking Adidas but I knew how they made me feel.

One of the Rutland guys taught me how to pick locks. If you get a key that fits the hole, you just keep playing the key and it wears down the cylinder and you can open the door. I was, like, “Fuck!” Man, when we opened some of those doors, you’d see silverware, jewelry, guns, stacks of money. We were so happy we were crying and laughing at the same time. We couldn’t get it all. You couldn’t walk down the street with that shit, so we just filled up our schoolbags with as much stolen goods we could stuff in them.

One day my friend Curtis and I were robbing a house. The people who lived there were from the Caribbean and so was Curtis. I was in this pitch-black house and I heard “Who’s that? Is that you, honey?” I thought it was Curtis playing around, trying to scare me. So I said, “I’m trying to find a gun and the money. Look for the safe, all right?” “What, baby?” I realized then that it wasn’t Curtis talking. It was the guy who lived there who was lying on the couch. I rushed to the door. “Curtis, this shit don’t look right. Let’s get out of here, somebody is in here,” I said. But Curtis was a perfectionist. Curtis wanted to lock the door instead of just running away. I ran the fuck out. The owner opened the door and smashed Curtis in the head and knocked him out cold. I thought he was dead. It wasn’t until a year later that I saw him again. He was alive, but his face was all shattered, he got hit that hard. Yup, it was the hard-knock life for us.

When we stole silverware or jewelry, we’d go to Sal’s, a store on Utica and Sterling.

I was a baby, but they knew me from coming in with older guys. The guys at the store knew I was coming in with stolen stuff, but I knew they couldn’t beat me because I knew what shit cost back then. I knew what I wanted.

Sometimes we’d be in the streets and if it was noon and we saw a school, we’d just go into the school, go to the cafeteria, grab a tray, get in line, and start eating. We might see someone we’d want to rob, someone who had their school ring around their neck. So we’d finish the food, put the tray back, get by the door, grab the ring, and run out.

We always wanted to look nice on the streets because normally if you’re a little black kid out in the city looking bummy and dirty, people harass you. So we looked nice and nonthreatening. We had the school backpacks and little happy glasses and the Catholic school look with nice pants and white shirts, the whole school outfit.

After about a year, I started doing burglaries by myself. It was pretty lucrative, but hanging in the street and jostling was more exciting than robbing houses. You’d grab some ladies’ jewelry and cops would chase you, or what we called heroes would try to come in and rescue the day. It was more risk-taking for less money but we loved the thrill. You normally had to have a partner to be a successful jostler. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be planned, but you’d see someone you knew, so you teamed up.

Sometimes you’d find that you had competition for jostling. You’d get on a bus and there might be someone already on the bus waiting to pickpocket some people. But you might be more obvious. That was called “waking the bus.” The bus was quiet before you got on, but now that you’ve come aboard, the bus driver makes an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, there are some young men who just got on the bus. Watch your pockets. They will attempt to steal from you.” So you get off at the next stop, but the quiet jostler gets off and comes after you.

“Motherfucker, you woke the bus up!” he’ll scream. And if he’s an older guy, he might start beating on your ass and taking your money or the jewelry that you stole.

People didn’t like to go pickpocketing with me because I wasn’t as patient or as good as they were. I was never smooth, like, “I’m going to play this nigga, I’m going to do this, right up and close in person.” I was much better at blindsiding people.

Any strong guy could blindside someone. But the trick was to be cunning and outsmart them. Most people would think, They’re onto me, I’m going to walk away. But not me. A lady might have her hand on her wallet all day, and we’d be watching, watching, and she never takes her hand out of her pocket. And we’d follow her and then move away but we’d have one little kid still watching her. And she’d let down her defenses for a few seconds and go do something and he’d get it. Then he’d be gone. And before we got out, we’d hear a gut-wrenching scream, “Aaaaahh, my money, my money!” It was crazy. We didn’t give a fuck.

The most primitive move was to snatch somebody’s gold chain. I used to do that on the subway. I’d sit by the window. That was when you could open the windows on subway cars. I’d pull a few windows down, and then the car would stop and new people would come on and sit by the window. I would get out and as soon as the train slowly started moving, I’d reach in and snatch their chains. They’d scream and look at me, but they couldn’t get off the train. I’d fix the clasp, hold the chain for a couple of days, look good and sport it, and then I’d sell it before the older guys took it from me.

Even though I was starting to look the role, I never could get on with the girls back then. I liked girls, but I didn’t know how to tell them I liked them at that age. One time, I was watching these girls jump rope, and I liked them and I wanted to jump rope with them, so I started teasing them and, out of nowhere, these girls in the fifth grade started beating the shit out of me. I was playing with them, but they were serious and I was just taken by surprise. I got serious about fighting back too late. By then, somebody came and broke it up and they’d gotten the best of me. I didn’t want to fight them.

It was no surprise to my mother and my sister that I was robbing and doing antisocial things to bring money in. They saw my nice clothes, and I’d bring them food – pizza and Burger King and McDonald’s. My mother knew I was up to no good, but by that time she knew it was too late. The streets had me. She thought that I was a criminal and I would die or never turn out to be shit. She’d probably seen it before, kids like me being like that. I would steal anything from anybody. I didn’t have any boundaries.

My mother would prefer to beg. She embarrassed me a bit, because she was too honest. She was always asking for money; that’s just the way she was. I gave my sister a lot of money for the house to help my mom out. Sometimes I’d give my mother a hundred bucks and she wouldn’t pay me back. She didn’t respect me like that. I’d say, “You owe me some money, Ma.” And she’d just say, “You owe me your life, boy. I’m not paying you back.”