“I would rather have been shot straight-up in cold blood — but to be set up? By people who you trusted? That’s bad.” — Tupac Shakur

“Fame has sent a number of celebrities off the deep end, and in the case of Michael Jackson, to the kiddy pool.” — Bill Maher

Afriyah Jones walked out of the projects, down the long street and onto school property. Afriyah was carrying half a dozen small Ziploc bags of cocaine with him. He was grinning and whistling.

In approaching the schoolyard, Afriyah was violating a dozen laws. The most serious of them was the Tempting Minors Act, a Republican-passed bill which laid down a minimum of 5 years in prison for the act of trying to introduce kids to narcotics. Afriyah didn’t care. It was as if his heart had been left out of his body when he was born, and since then, he had been as cold and as callous as a brother could be.

The security guard was gone for the day. A few kids were lingering around, playing hackey sack. They were all black. White kids had been bussed here at one point in the not-too-distant past, but all their parents had moved out of the zone, saving their kids the trouble.

Afriyah dangled a bag in front of an emaciated-looking boy’s face. “I need a runner,” he said. “I’ll pay in coke. Who wants to try some, my lovelies? It’s the most delish feeling comin’ out of this bag.”

A daring-looking kid with a Mohawk haircut came up to Afriyah and said, “I’ll try, man.”

Afriyah beamed down at him. “Just one snort now. We don’t want to kill you!”

Afriyah trickled a short line on the back of his wrist, which had a few kinky hairs on it. The Mohawk boy leaned forward, snorted. “Whoa!” he said, reeling back. Afriyah laughed.

Afriyah said, “I only need 1 runner. Looks like I got myself my boy. Cops won’t be able to arrest you, boy. Too young for jail. Score one for the Projects. The Projects 1, the Man zero.”

Afriyah went to sit on a pile of tires. They had been shoved against a chain-wire fence, and piled up 9 feet high. Their Piretti logo was slit by a knife. Afriyah sat on an outthrust, mid-level tire, and kicked his legs out. The Mohawk boy was wandering dazedly around in circles, grinning to himself in a hefty daze.

Mohawk boy’s name was Edwin Turtledove. Edwin’s single mother had lived in the project since she was a little girl. She got knocked up in her teens by a rough, violent thug who beat her in front of her own grandmother, who had raised her. One day grandmother leveled a double-barreled shotgun at the thug and went boom. He flew out of his sneakers and onto the linoleum choked-dirt floor.

Edwin Turtledove was excited to be beginning a new life as a runner. Even though he was only 12, he made plans to drop out of school. Nobody would catch him. He was free as a bird!

Edwin was not very smart, unimaginative and easily bored. He thought running would be 10x as exciting as school was. Maybe he would rise to become a drug dealer himself by the time he was 16. That was only four years away. Drug dealers were dropping dead like flies in the internecine gang warfare. Edwin was too stupid to see himself dragged away as just another corpse in the running gun battles.

On his first day as a runner, Edwin delivered 30 packages for Afriyah. He was super-scared not to drop or lose the money. There was no telling what would happen to him if that happened.

Edwin, based on a corner just outside school, waited for cars to approach. The best customers came in jouncy, bouncing rides that jumped up and down 3 feet as they went. Those guys actually tipped a little kid like Edwin was. They was cool!

Afriyah said, “Now listen, kid. Don’t believe the mark if he says he’ll pay you later. There ain’t no later. There’s only to-day. Get the money and give it to me. Always. No exceptions.”

Edwin said, “Yes, sir.”

Afriyah took out a hair comb the width of a Gillette razor and stuck it in his Afro.

“You’re a hard-working boy. You’ll go far.”

On the night Afriyah died, Edwin was working as a runner for another drug dealer, on loan, called Charlie Two Fingers, on account of a power saw had cut off the last three fingers of his right hand in an accident. Charlie Two Fingers had a gold tooth and was always grinning. (When Afriyah was shot, Charlie Two Fingers was grinning to himself and whistling tunelessly. A lot of dealers in the hood whistled.)

Afriyah was standing in a zoot suit from a century ago by a giant billboard featuring an all-white cast of a soap opera on TV. The grins on their faces were as fake-ass as their cosmetically corrected teeth. This was as close as the cast would ever come to the hood, Afriyah was thinking, when a car with jouncing, bouncing tires turned slowly onto the street. “Hey, motherfucker!” someone called out. Charlie Two Finger looked over. Edwin Turtledove looked over, too. Afriyah took 20 bullets from an American military highly illegal machine gun in the chest. He was dead before he could shit. Afriyah R.I.P. Edwin screamed.

Charlie Two Finger said, “Get down, boy,” hooked his two fingers in Edwin’s ear and dragged the boy painfully down to the pavement with little speckles of quartz here or there.

The bouncing car sped up, backfired like a big mechanical fart, then the 4 homeboys in front and back hooted their triumph. They got out of there and the cops never showed up till dinnertime.

And what happened to Edwin? He impregnated another, equally stupid girl in the projects and had 3 children by her. He couldn’t afford coke anymore, so he switched to sniffing Glade air freshener, the new kind that got you high — kind of, a little. He went back to school at age 17 and graduated by age 23. Then he joined the Marine Corps and got sent to fight Iran in the Israeli-American-Iranian war of ’35. He landed on the beaches of Hamit Faloosi and distinguished himself by firing his machine gun one-handed like he was Rambo or something. What a bloody fool.

the end