A GANG OF MISMATCHED SOCKS

This all makes for an episode for a show that could be called... My Screwed Up Life.

The gang was being formed...

Like playing a game of Tetris with people. We had short, fat, ugly, muscular, some skinny and fat at the same time, Insanes all looking for a Vice Lord home to fit in. At first it was just a mob of people throwing up gang signs, watching "Banging in Little Rock," and wearing colors.  You wear all red and black outside a house, you might as well paint your house the colors of a bull's eye.

The hillbillies I lived with adapted the stance that it was better to have gang-bangers hanging out around the house than us going out into the neighborhood and causing trouble. So the trouble came to my house. We spray painted the fences out back. Drank the accepted beverage of gangsters... the ye ole forty ounce. Which the Mafia Insanes still owed me 33.00 bucks for. I'm not forgetting that. I'll forgive them trying to blow my head off -- BUT NOT THE FORTY OUNCE MONEY!!!

Breathing into a bag - hoping it helps -- It doesn't.  I'm still ticked.

So we had a set of about 25 guys and a few girls. We didn't have much money. Weren't selling drugs at the time. We weren't organized.  So the mind starts scraping the bottom of the gutter. If I'm supposed to be calling the shots -- the first thing you have to do is establish authority. That means the person above you needs to validate your authority.


We got insulted somehow and made an incursion to a Gangster Disciple neighborhood. Now the veil can be torn and the truth told years later. What I wouldn't have admitted at the time.



It was complete animal crackers

Because a lower form of available life called one of us a few names... we were going to open fire. So the gun came from one member's dad. The trigger man looked like a shriveled up raisin and he thought he was a batch of Cuban Cigars illegal import cool. He wasn't. He should have joined the California Crack Smoking Raisins, the ugly cousins of the raisins that made money.

It was all planned out. We absolutely had no plan. It wasn't fastidious. There was no George Patton war room counsel swatting pointers at battle maps and placing guys with grappling gear on roofs.  Go into this public housing in broad daylight, ten guys deep with a gun, and shoot this guy while he was having a BBQ with his Aunt Flo over there trying to sell him Mary Kay. Looking back on it, it was beyond the rational definition of stupid. This was a mere exigency to prove we had mettle.

A Hot Chick Saves the Day

Remember the hot neighbor that my brother caught me playing hand flute with as she mowed the grass? I ended up dating her. Penthouse Forum isn't all made up, at least not for me at that time. And in the relationship bliss of first dating before stinky socks, annoying ticks, and elemental muscularity caves from opening car doors to slamming a screen door in your significant others face - it's the butterfly hot coal stage of adolescent passions.

She was part Native-American and Puerto Rican. That was a mixture of about to get stabbed if I slammed a screen door in her face because I forgot she was carrying in the groceries. And not to mention a whole other language spit machine gun fast at you if she's mad.





Ah, floating on a cloud...

Because when you first start dating, you want to spend every waking, sleeping, and wet dream moment with your new fling. That always ends a few months later with a therapist, small violin, and annoying your friends that now you're the Prozac guy that can't get over his depression because it's not the same as the first month.  Cry Baby Waaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!

So as we're marching around the side of the building. We see the intended target. If this was a professional hit, circumlocution would have been a law -- but since it wasn't... Raisin started yelling GDK(Gangster Disciple Killer) and other defamatory parlance to the rival gang member. He might as well had a prop plane fly over with a banner behind it reading... WE'RE HERE TO KILL YOU!


It's him and two of his buddies. Ten of us, and a very visible life taker danging from Raisin's spiny-noodle arms.  Because I was dreaming of a picnic with my girlfriend and a nice romantic flute glass filled with a 40-ounce -- I issued the order to call off Raisin from firing.  That was the real reason I called it off. Second, because it was beyond stupid.

HE GOT IN MY FACE

All this was going on as the rival gang members now saw their way out. They put Aunt Mary Kay out as a shield before running inside and locking the door. They didn't do that, but they got inside.

But it was aborted. Raisin then decided he would make a grab for power over my "cowardice" to recall the mission. Truth be known. We would have all been in jail fighting for who snitches first to get a reduced sentence if Raisin would have shot that guy.

Call it the booty... but the moment of clarity was amorous and amorphous clear.  So now with Raisin rallying the troops to take my head off -- I made a judgement call. Went and spent the evening with lawnmower girl, then got my chief on the line and we called everyone on 3-way to put Raisin in his place. I controlled the communication, so I controlled the play.

The black Raisin with the Smigel sibilant voice was discharged from his duties. Come to find out... he wasn't even a Vice Lord. He was a Black Stone, which is cousins to the Vice Lords. We had a weed in the dandelion field. Wait, aren't dandelions weeds? NEVERMIND.

Moral of the story -- thinking with the downstairs brain this time saved a life and ours from being
locked up. And they knew who was the boss. Now it was time to get an infusion of greenbacks to go with the bare backs.

NEXT BAT TIME AND CHANNEL

Next week, or whenever my lazy bones wants -- enter the Almighty Latin Kings.

THE MOB

The great melting pot was coming, pot as in toilet

I was the one that went through a brief character arc, or brevity of sanity in my often insane life. I didn't mind being used like a Glad Bag on lawn cutting day. We all have to used to a certain degree to achieve a goal we're striving for. You have to play ball to be the coach.

Through the slobbering Daffy Duck Vice Lord -- I met a female Insane named Pat. Pat could roll more guys heads down the block with her fists than most guys I knew.  She was one gene away from being a man. She was one of the more infamous Vice Lords in this part of town. Her brother Big L was doing time for popping some caps at some rival G.D.'s. He was in the size range of Shaq and found it quite hard to get away down a 20 foot alley in width when he got stuck on both sides running from the cops.

I didn't have much to offer but my brain -- but my Ninja-like-covert ops-Manchurian-candidate-knives-for-razor-arms that could chop fingers off -- nope. I had nothing but intelligence to offer. And a distinct thirst for organization.

Here was the big problem...

After the Insane Vice Lords ceased to exist, most of the old Insanes hadn't chosen another branch like Mafia or Imperial Insane to be incorporated into. They wandered around with their gun barrels cut off.

Through the brother-sister act, I ended up meeting another Mafia Insane Vice Lord named Tongue. He took me to a set that showed the rap video Vice Lords with money, cars, women, dope slanging -- and once again, hustling the green leaf.

COME AS A MAN... SMALL PIMPIN'

I was 16, not much a man coming when size 24 jeans fall off you. That's what Tongue lips told me before hitting the set where the action was, I needed to "come as a man." These were the big Vice Lords, in size and name. I was intimidated so I stuck with Tongue like a dry turd in a baby's diaper. Dope was being slung. Fortys were... NOPE. The minute I got there and was trying to -- whatever to come like a man meant -- come like a man???  I had to do a gonad check and wonder if I went Bruce Jenner before I got here.

Was I supposed to introduce myself as "man." Or my name? So I stayed church mouse quiet until some shots rang off.  Before being admonished to "keep my mouth shut," a lot of the Vice Lords ran to the local liquor store. I should have been carded before I hit the parking lot because I had the appearance of a wet towel drying a fat guy off I was so skinny -- they didn't card because this was the ghetto. A bunch of the Lords out of earshot of Tongue -- or out of Tongue-shot, I should say, asked if I had twenty bucks for some 40 oz's. I actually had forty dollars on me for some forties I proudly displayed.

They borrowed my money.  I ordered a Forty Oz and kicked it like an O.G, slanging rocks, slapping junkies with five girls on my lap -- and -- no, the reality they bought themselves all forties with my money and I got seven dollars in change back and no forty. And some twenty years later I'm still waiting for them to give me my forty money back.

I MUST HAVE NOT COME AS A MAN...

...Or at best a Marilyn MANson type man...

I had had enough of them already and was growing unnerved about the whole experience. If I had to prove myself every time I stepped in a different area of Vice Lords, I was sure to be dead or locked up in another month. Isn't this the famed speech every sagely court appointed counselor, cop, or probation officer gives you? You better straighten up or you'll wind up dead or in prison. Well, being in a gang is tantamount to gambling. You know it's going  to hurt you, but you take the chances for some white-washed vanity lie of living ghetto fabulous. There's nothing fabulous about the ghetto.

I walked off. Fat lips Tongue called asking where I went after I got back in my house. I had nothing poetically aplomb to say, so I gurgled,  "I'm not coming like a man for awhile." 

I was disenfranchised. Even the paragon of the mighty Vice Lords were becoming turd toasters in my eyes. But the magnetic allure to the odious culture of extreme power was too attractive. Since I lived with two Hillbillies on the westside that were about as entertaining as listening to the yokel rube version of "Who's on Second?" for the fiftieth time, or watching a wet T-Shirt contest held by donkeys-- actually Isis would like that if it was goats.  Anyway, I decided to spend the boring hours rubbing my rhubarb into the floor as a sexually ignored teen to Baywatch or the neighbor mowing her lawn across the street through a telescope, vying for a good shot, until my brother caught me rub-handed. Raw, I mean.... raw handed.

This was me...

THE FUSE THAT LIT THE DYNAMITE

Sigh, I was never going to be the high-class gangbanger I wanted to be. Until one fateful day the inscrutable call came in that lifted my sold soul spirits. Spirits with an "s" because I probably had a fan club with all the evil thoughts that swirled in my cerebral toilet of mayhem back then.

Big L called from the joint as I entertained my time listening to my disparate hillbilly adoptive parents go on about tire sizes and how eggs can fix holes in your radiators. They can actually. I had the misfortune of applying their backwoods wisdom to an actual test. It was easier to steal an egg than a radiator so I tried it. Denny's Grand Slam! It worked and I drove home on an omelette. 

It was temporary until my pushing rods busted and I had the worst painted hood-mobile outside of parked car in a junkyard for 50 years with no upkeep.

So I was spending at least a hundred bucks a week to talk to Big.L. He was like my ghetto therapist and finally he said he was, "going to put me in the car." This is another one of those phrases I acted like I understood but didn't. If it was my omelette car he was trying to put me in, no thanks. It's over in the junkyard waiting for a tornado to carry it away.

What he meant was, put me in a position of power. Well, somewhat. Big L gave me the numbers of some guys and told his sister to get some numbers to a bunch of the Insane Vice Lords that hadn't chosen a set to fall under. Basically, we were going to be the beginning of a homeless shelter for Vice Lords that had no letter to fall under. And a freakshow.  We had more characters come than the Sanford and Son set.

But with a little organization...the city was about to be turned upside down. I had been bench warming since the beginning for this moment. Put me in coach!  And he did. My head swelled. My battered ego rose. I had a vendetta that needed to be a dish served scolding hot. 

And that was the beginning of a new type of Vice Lords.