Who cares about gangs anymore? They're stupid? Retarded? Dying over colors that come from dyes in a plant? But the big gangs did start on a more level playing field and actually fed a need to uplift impoverished communities. This story is about their camaraderie, fraternity, and out in depth this gang really was before it went spiraling out of control.
This story isn't about stealing cars, shooting rivals, or ripping off old lady's purses. This story is what it meant to belong to something that meant something before it didn't mean anything. The psychology of belonging... it's the rise and fall of one of Chicago's oldest and most violent gangs -- from someone that lived through it as it began to become a towering inferno late in the game. You're not going to get the bling-bling glamorous trip down rotted memory lane of girls, money, and elephant-sized ignorant stupidity of killing over a pair of funky stinky-foot Nikes -- you'll get the truth.
DISCLAIMER: Names and dates have been changed to protect the guilty.
Gangs weren't just about set-tripping back in the day -- they were a brotherhood forged in blood and steel. A Bismark unification of scattered and disorganized city streets. The story all told through the eyes of someone that had a very high I.Q. that wound up in the wrong place at the right time -- just as Chicago gangs were going from bad to worse. Don't believe that -- watch the murder count rising in the last three years and I'll show you how it's going to get worse and the first fuse lit that caused what's happening today that began 20 years ago.
This is about a white boy that become the leader of a city for a black gang. At a young age. I thought of myself more as a street psychologist than a menace to any enemy that crossed the block. This is about the physiology and psychology of the criminal mentality. Not from some doctor looking from the outside inside, from someone on the inside trying to get out. You won't read another gang story quite like this I promise you.
We can choose to do things to uplift ourselves and those around us, or we can find a detriment to society's social norms which are constantly in a state of flux.
No one chooses this course knowingly if external factors and environment have anything to say about.
My name is Brandon Wyse and I took the less traveled path for a white kid who's mother lived in poverty and father lived in riches. This should have been my first clue that I was forever going to be chained to being bi-polar. There would be no middle-ground in my life. No happy medium to the rescue. I was going to be balls to the wall aggressive -- or passive as a little lamb -- but I would not be passive-aggressive at the same time.
I didn't choose gangs, they found me like Jesus at an over-convoluted Jerusalem bazaar. My mother had a Rolodex of mental illnesses she graciously passed the lesser evils onto me. She was wild, unpredictable, fighting knock-down drag outs with her demons and everyone around her.
My mother Violet committed suicide when I was 9.
I had one brother who had all the proclivities to grow up and be a serial killer. He would have been an All-Star on Mengele's basketball team. He experimented on emotions like a pre-teen chemistry set. If he could make you cry, angry, hate, feel pain -- he was having a good day.
I was skinny by all standards, so I had to use my brain to stay alive where weight meant a guerrilla mentality you had to throw around. When I was a kid, cracks in the sidewalks were health hazards because of my size. But I saw myself as someone bigger. He didn't. And he got away with it despite those meddling Scooby Doo kids until I joined a gang.. Then I got so tough I would beat my brother's ass with toothpicks -- that was a damn lie straight from hell. He'd punch me and I ran, not to dad -- he died of cancer in 1990. I ran straight to the telephone and called some pipe hittin ass gangbangers to come ratchet him down a few notches.
He had a hard head. One time didn't work. Two times wasn't a charm. But the third Ph.D (pumpkin head deluxe) was enough to stop him from ordering from McBrandon's fuck-you-up-menu.
So how did this whole scenario start in the first place since I'm getting way ahead of myself? It's called fitting in. When both of your parents are extricated from the planet, it leaves you with a little disorder called abandonment. You start to see the world as more concave and evil than straight and innocent. You begin to feel no one loves you and if no one loves you, you become less and less caring about other people's feelings. Since you can't control the circumstances of loved ones leaving you, you look for circumstances you can control and manipulate, creating your own homeostasis, equalized environment.
Love is one of those abstract concepts very few understand without conditions -- but fear, now there's one that has its own controlling element. You can love someone until your blue in the face, but if they do enough series of shit to disown that love, like a spouse cheating too many times, a drunkard becoming abusive too many times; that bed of lissome love will turn into a pit of fire with rattlers for feelings, willing to bite you at every turn.
So this is the beginning of a blog, or a course on street psychology...
FAST FORWARD...
I controlled a whole city by the age of 17 and rained terror at street corners and bullets from lampposts... and all I got was a shitty T-shirt saying "I was screwed," and ten years in the state pen for all my efforts to harness my own reality because normalcy didn't want me.
Now I'm in LA putting up with bigger liars than a two-ton fat mack perched on the side of his gold-trimmed Cadillac -- no matter time, no place -- hustlers exist in every walk of life. It's just finding out what their hustle is.
Next blog -- THE BEGINNING... Time to take a trip down memory lane with packed bags...
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