My first introduction to the underworld started off fairly small. I met this black guy named Lamar Jackson, and he knew I was living on the street. One day he asked if I wanted to make some quick cash. He looked like a pimp: flashy clothes always wore this Fedora with a white ribbon around the rim. He appeared nice, of course, I’m sure me standing 6 foot 2 and weighing 250 pounds at 14 years old might’ve had something to do with his demeanor.

“You want to make 100 bucks?” Lamar asked, shifting the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

“Sure, what do I gotta do?” I asked as snowflakes covered the sleeves of my thin jacket.

“I got some motherfuckers that owe me some money. Can you fight? You look like you can fight. You gotta be the biggest motherfucker I ever saw, so what do you say?”

He must’ve seen me hesitating. I’d never really been a violent person and I have to admit, I wasn’t keen on the thought of beating somebody up. But I wasn’t too thrilled about sleeping in the snow either. The guy across the street from the movie theater my mother dumped me at said I didn’t need an ID and he’d ‘rent me a room’ for 30 bucks a week if I could get it.

Lamar had pulled up in front of the theater, in a white 1979 Cadillac Seville. The door was heavy when I pulled it open. The stench of cologne overtook my senses — I could taste it in my mouth because it was so prevalent. I didn’t really listen to what he was saying until we pulled up in front of this three-story 18th-century colonial house that had been converted into apartments. The paint was peeling, and the wood on the porch was rotting, so we watched where we stepped. As Lamar was yelling at a young black woman that answered the door on the first floor, I heard a commotion behind the building.

Using only two steps, I was back on the pavement, walking to the origin of the sound. I turned the corner, only to witness the horrific sight. There was a young Hispanic guy who had a small chicken wire pen set up in his backyard and was letting his pitbull chew on this orange and white tabby cat. Just because I hated people, doesn’t mean I hated animals. Before I knew it, I was stepping into the pen with the dog, which didn’t seem to be fazed by my presence. But the owner started yelling at me.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he yelled, gritting his teeth while simultaneously pulling his shirt up to expose the handle of the gun.

I guess my young brain didn’t put together the real threat his weapon possessed. Because before I knew what was going on, I had wrestled the gun out of his hand and shot the dog in the head. It dropped the cat, which tried to stagger to its feet but couldn’t keep its balance and fell over sideways. I could see the dog was suffering, so I shot it again. It died instantly. The guy was freaking out, yelling, “I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

So, I raised the barrel to his chest and pulled the trigger, but all that resulted was a metal sound of the hammer clicking an empty plate in the chamber: the gun was empty. At that time, I remembered what my football coach said: “Hit first, and hit hard.” SO, with all my might, I launched a barrage of blows. Punch after punch, I pummeled the guy down to the ground. By now, Lamar had caught wind of what was going on just a few hundred feet from the porch.

“JESUS CHRIST! YOU FUCKING SHOT HIM?”

“Who, him? No, I just beat the shit out of him.” I knelt down next to the cat, it was still breathing. I remembered seeing a vet near the YMCA and told Lamar I would do the work for free if he brought the cat to the vet. Reluctantly, he agreed. Unfortunately, halfway there, I could feel my newfound friend slip away. He was limping on my leg. It was the first time in my life I’d experienced death. All I could see was the guy’s face and the smirk on it when he showed me the gun. I wanted him dead. I pretended like the cat’s death didn’t really bother me, hoping Lamar would take me back to the same location and it worked. 

I guess it was around 8 o’clock that night when we pulled up in front of the apartment complex.

“You’re a crazy cracker, you know that but I like it. It shows character,” he said, putting the 30 foot 3 1/2 ton vehicle in park.

As we walked down the staircase, the stench of urine and rotting garbage was overwhelming. Flies and roaches riddled the walls, and a broken hand railing precariously hung off the wall.

Finally, we stopped in front of apartment A3, and Lamar banged on the door. What happened next is still fuzzy. I stepped to the right, just slightly away from the doorframe to look out the window at the end of the hallway when a flash of white light lit up the dim hallway. Filling it with shards of wood and smoke. The ringing in my ears set me into a mode of confusion. I turned my head, which felt like I did in slow motion to look where Lamar had just been standing.

My eyes looked to the bottom of the door and to his feet. His body was motionless on the floor, besides his hands twitching and his head was missing. When I figured out what had just happened, I jumped over the railing and landed on the second floor. The fresh snow crunched under my shoes as I ran towards the street. My brain couldn’t process what I had just witnessed. It kept projecting the same series of events repeatedly. I’m not sure how far I walked, by the time I started coming back to reality but I was across the street from Dunkin’ Donuts and just a few blocks from the movie theater.

The cold temperature had now gripped my hands and feet. The snow was no longer a traveling companion I wished to keep, so I knew I had to find shelter. But as I traversed the crosswalk, a couple of young girls pointed and gasped before stepping to the side like they were afraid of me. I thought it was the strangest thing until I saw my reflection in an old mirror in the storefront of an antique shop. My face was covered in blood. I looked like Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, minus the mask.

I guess I freaked out. Scooping up and using handfuls of snow, I got most of the blood off and used the hood of my jacket to remove the rest. The blood was confirmation of what my brain had trouble putting together, plus the ringing in my ears still hadn’t subsided. But I could deduce that someone had shot through the door at Lamar because they must’ve known why he was there. It took me a couple of days to conclude they almost killed me. But again, my young brain didn’t really put things together because staying alive seemed to be my only plight. It consumed whatever little time I had to think.

I remembered behind the movie theater; I had gone out of the exit at the back of the theater by mistake. There was a dumpster, and I figured it would be better than sleeping in the snow or on a park bench. The town square clock rang its chimes, confirming it was 11 o’clock. I sat on the steps across the street from the Brick Alley Pub, at JR travel and waited for the customers to leave the restaurant. It took almost an hour, but by a little after midnight, I was sure everyone had left, including the employees.

Before I moved, I waited for the last car to go down Touro Street. I didn’t want to take a chance of anyone seeing me and call the cops. When I got there, it surprised me it didn’t smell bad. Of course, there were only two or three bags of garbage in it. I assumed it had just been dumped before I got in it, but the bottom was still caked with the old garbage and grime. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep; I dreamt I was in my bed. However, as I was enjoying my subconscious fable, I felt something sharp on the fingertips of my right hand.

I jerked myself awake, only to find a foot-long wharf rat chewing on my fingertips. Even though I’m an animal lover, rats freak me out. And I think he realized that when I grabbed him by the head and squeezed until he was dead. I tossed the carcass up against the metal wall and it landed with a thud that reverberated through the metal box. Through the rest of the night, I don’t think I got over five minutes of sleep because every few minutes I’d wake up, thinking I felt something.

I’m not sure what time it was but I noticed a sliver of light penetrating the lid of the dumpster. The sun was up and I’d never been so happy to see the sun in my life as I was that morning. My stomach hurt so bad for not eating that I couldn’t think about anything else, yet when I raised my fingers into the piercing light, I could see the bite marks on my fingers. I guess it was overwhelming because I cried but then I remembered what my father would say when he saw me cry: “Little girls cry, are you a little girl?”

I pulled myself together and pushed one of the metal lids up with my head. It snowed hard in the middle of the night, as there were now 6 inches covering everything. I thought about Lamar and wondered what happened to the guy who’d killed him. But I sure as fuck would not ask around. 

Somehow, I ended up in Providence which, in hindsight, was a stupid fucking move. I got into more trouble there than anywhere else. I met this guy, Nick Poppel, a stocky Italian kid in his 20s who seemed to have his shit together. He drove a new white S 10 pickup truck, with matching honeycomb rims and he had a thick gold chain around his neck. He liked to make sure it was visible outside his shirt like he was showing you a sign of his success.

But I didn’t trust Nick or his scheming ways. There was something about him that just didn’t sit well with me. So, I always kept a double eye on him.

However, we hung out mostly on Friday nights when we hit the clubs. I got laid in six months more than Nick had his entire life. Women just liked me. They said I had a baby face and confidence. I think some knew I was only 15, but they didn’t care — the cocaine helped with that.

My childhood flew by so fast, I barely glimpsed it. Eventually, I met Wanda, a light-skinned black girl from Haiti. Wanda had entrancing brown eyes, perky breasts, and an ass to die for. She was perfect. Well, except for being divorced at 25 and having two kids.

Her ex-husband, Bruno, was a douchebag. I tried to keep my nose out of her problems most of the time. But one Sunday afternoon, I went off and grabbed the phone out of Wanda’s hand. 

“Let me tell you something, you motherfucker, you ever fuck’n talk to her like that again and I’ll cave your fucking head in with a ball-peen hammer! Do you understand me?” I asked, slamming the receiver back into its cradle.

“I wish you hadn’t done that, it’s just going to make things worse. You know he’s coming over now,” Wanda said, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Good, let him because I am going to twist his head off like a balloon animal!”

I think that was the first time I had ever really gotten angry. Before that, I was just simply mad. But I soon understood what people meant when they said all they remember is seeing red before they flipped out. I was there if he was stupid enough to show up. I’d be ready. However, after about 30 minutes, there was no activity in front of her small rental house with light blue shutters that sat across the street from a park and basketball court. I knew the park for having gang members in it.

Saturday morning blew in like a hurricane. I woke up with a headache because I’d slept wrong. I tried to focus on the TV at the end of the bed, which Wanda had on mute. My eyes hurt too much to open, so I squinted. But I could see the ample curves of her breasts protruding through her robe as she made coffee. 

We were in the middle of our second round of sex when a pounding erupted from her front door. It shook the pictures on the wall, next to the hallway clock. Wanda jumped off me and ran to the living room and pulled the curtains back. “It’s Bruno, and he’s got his brother Marco. He looks mad, Matt, out the back door. I’ll stall him.”

“Yeah, you do that,” I said, pulling my underwear up. I grabbed a baseball bat her son had been using in Little League. She had taken it away from him and sat in the corner of her bedroom because he kept hitting things around the house. I slapped it in the palm of my hand and felt the weight reverberate down my arm. Just about then, yelling escalated from the front door and I heard Wanda scream.

Before I knew it, the short yet stocky Bruno was standing in front of me. I ran at him; the bat cocked back and I hit him in the chest with it as hard as I could. The blow knocked him to the floor. As he writhed around in pain, his brother, also short but stocky, pulled out a pair of nunchucks from his jacket. He flailed them in a circular pattern. I rammed the bat into his face, disrupting the momentum of his weapons. He fell to the ground, his nose clearly broken as it poured blood down his chin.

I raised the bat again, to ensure he wouldn’t get up when Wanda jumped in front of me, “STOP, you’re going to kill him!”

By now, Bruno had stumbled to his feet but was leaning against the wall next to the open door. “You sorry motherfucker, you come back around here again and I’ll put a bullet in your fucking head next time,” I yelled, grabbing my gun from its holster on the nightstand.

“Matthew, go. He’s going to call the police.”

“Yeah, he seems to be like that kind of pussy motherfucker. Alright, call me later,” I said, kissing Wanda once on the lips then again on her neck. 

The sex was great. She was a second woman I’d slept with so, for me, it was great. As I walked across the basketball court, I noticed Julio, one gangbanger. I think he was in the Crips, but I never asked, “What’s up, man?”

“You better watch yourself homes, you got eyes on your place,” he said, nodding across the street to an unmarked, windowless blue van.

I knew what he meant, but honestly, it didn’t bother me that the feds are watching me. It’d become commonplace throughout the years. But as I watched that van, I noticed another one almost directly across from the first one. This one was black though and appeared to be a newer model than the other one.

I walked over to the laundromat where Wanda worked as a manager. I stood by the bubblegum machine for a couple of minutes and watched both vehicles. Neither seemed to do anything, so I figured the coast was clear, and I was just being overzealous with my paranoia. As I walked back across the street, I noticed Julio watching me, so I gave him a nod before crossing through the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and down the alley behind my apartment.