I should’ve worn my buckskin gloves and L.A. beanie, but I didn’t have time, I was in a rush to get out of my crib. Since I’m unemployed, it’s best I don’t stay in the sack for too long. My pops, my old man, my dad, he loses it on me quick: already five years of unemployment chalked up on my list of greatest hits. I stopped school at sixteen, now I’m twenty and a winter, though I feel like I’m twice that old, time goes by so slow. From the time I dropped out, or got “fired” from school, I’ve never really had the chance to work. Not enough experience, the boss man says! You don’t say! They don’t give you a chance, and then they all give you the line, no professional experience. My ass! Even the National Agency for Work couldn’t do anything for me, with its piddly internships that do nothing except make your parents think someone’s going to find their little boy a minimum-wage job.
No one out at this time of day. It must be about ten, judging from the thickness of the fog. I’d have liked to go play some mini-soccer at the kids’ park, but the mayor got rid of that, he thought it wasn’t being used just for kicking but for tripping too, I mean, for drug deals. It’s too bad, I wasn’t too bad at mini-soccer, and on top of that the parties were free. Considering the condition of my sneakers, it’s not surprising the glacial wind has frozen my toes. But I made sure to put on my warmest socks. My soccer coach gave them to me Wednesday afternoon. He couldn’t stand to see me kick the ball with my silly little orange ankle socks.
Back in the day, my yellow pair with the green stripes was two times my size, but now they fit like a glove. Too bad they can’t stop the cold from turning my toes into a tray of ice cubes. This year I want things to be different. I’ve decided to cut out all my crap. I always wanted to write about the life and times of the neighborhood, and now I’ve everything lined up. My sister even gave me a notebook, with a cheap pen, but, like they say, it’s the thought that counts. She said if I put my mind to it, I’d be able to do something to be proud of. My sister’s Sonia. She’s cool, she’s twenty-four, my big sister, the only girl in the family. I also have a brother who’s twenty-six. There’s him, there’s my sister, then me. After me, there was my little brother Hamel. But he has left us to go live with the angels. We all still live with Mom and Dad, in a little apartment in the projects, address: F3, 12th Floor, Stairwell C, Pie-Bleue Building, Third Alley, Résitant-Failevic.
The apartment’s nicely laid out, but we make sure not to be there at the same time, otherwise it’s a shit show. After thirty years in the same nest, the parents have set down some hard and fast rules. For any violation, there’s an easy solution: if you leave your things where they shouldn’t be, they’ll be thrown out, no questions asked, from the twelfth-floor balcony. So, everything’s kept in its place, especially fragile things.
When my big brother Aziz disappears, I have a room to myself. And he can stay away for a while, it depends. Some people in the neighborhood never leave, it’s like they’ve settled down for good with their folks. Aziz, though, he’s just the opposite, he goes and lives with girls. I’ve got to tell you, he’s a good-looking guy. That’ll help you get laid, and, on top of that, it makes him some dough. Biz, that’s all he really cares about. Is my brother a gigolo? Maybe. Once upon a time he was a dealer, but he put a stop to that. Dealing’s good money while it lasts, but payback’s a bitch. A one-way trip to hell. When Aziz comes back, he offers some cash to my parents, who refuse to pocket it, but it’s not like we’re rich or something. My brother tries hard to convince them, but each time, it’s the same. No way. Even as poor as they are, they won’t take his black money. Aziz goes on and on that society doesn’t care, there’s so much black money in circulation. But they couldn’t care less, they want to see pay stubs.
*
Oh man! Spilling my guts about my family isn’t really what I’d had in mind for my little composition. If my personal life or family interested anyone, I’d have heard about it by now. The subject is my neighborhood. Have to take advantage of it, now that it’s fashionable. The suburbs, juvenile delinquents, rap, all the news headlines. So, I’ve called on my boy Grézi, who’s kind of like the eyes and ears of the projects. He’s a real chameleon. Every day he tells me about all he’s up to, he’s got a hand in everything. He’ll be my special correspondent. Me? I’ve decided to invest my efforts in putting together the story, which is far from nothing. I’ll spruce up the facts with some fiction to make it better than reality, otherwise there’s the chance the adventure will seem like the weather that gets me down, I mean, cold and gray.
At first, Grézi didn’t understand the value of being a chameleon. I haven’t been hanging out with him for that long. I used to notice him around, but I never had any reason to speak to him. And, to tell you the truth, hanging out with me is proof of courage, or not being all there upstairs. My reputation isn’t exactly stellar, if you believe the gossip you hear.
A while ago, I got myself into a bit of trouble. You could say I let myself get lost. It happened to be in an apartment complex screaming with money. The prize would’ve been good—a mountain bike parked roadside. It was sublime. Aluminum frame, chrome wheels, Shimano brand, the best brakes on the market, front-wheel suspension. I clambered onto the mountain bike at top speed. I pedaled three times. But it wasn’t to be. The city cops stopped me. Not being able to deny my bad deed, my only defense was tears. I cried, and in a broken voice, I begged for mercy. Never again, in my whole life, would I steal again, I stammered. At the police station, they were ready to call my parents in.
My pops would’ve killed me. One thing he never forgives is stealing. For him, life is all blood, sweat, and tears. I explained this to the cops, trembling, with tear-stained cheeks, my head bowed, hoping to be blessed by forgiveness. To be clear, I was a minor then. They made me copy out five hundred times, “He who steals an egg will steal an ox.” But that wasn’t it for punishment. With a broom and a mop, I cleaned the lock-up floor. Some neighborhood boys had been there for a couple days. I was forbidden to talk to them, even look at them. All you could hear was me cleaning. One last sermon, and the cops set me free. I was so happy! I just barely saved my skin. My parents were never the wiser.
But this privilege got tongues wagging. It was the boys, just released from jail. They’d seen me bawling my eyes out like a little girl, then cleaning like a good little maid, and, the icing on the cake, they caught me with pen and paper writing out my egg-and-ox sentences, corrected by a police intern wearing a green kepi. No shit. In their minds, the ink of my five hundred lines was enough to kick me out. I was a snitch now, and even today I can’t get rid of this reputation. According to the jealous rumormongers, I never stood up for myself. The die had been cast.
Accepting me back into the fold was forbidden, everyone was against me. When I started to despair, it was Grézi who comforted me. He was right, I got to give him that. One day, it will pass. Except I’d feel more at home in my neighborhood, which I’m still loyal to, if my reputation hadn’t been shot to hell.
Grézi is more than just someone I see on the streets, he’s like a brother. Still, it’s not like we’ve known each other for forever. It’s been about a month, give or take. Our first conversation was at the shopping mall. It was the tenth anniversary of that beast. An MC in suit and tie, with a southern accent, was giving out prizes. His mike boomed out questions through the whole sad place. Grézi, without raising his hand, tried to improvise answers. But his logic was bad. So, I whispered some answers to him, which netted him a floral tablecloth (it was oilcloth), a videocassette of his choice (he chose a Western), and, to cap things off, a piggy bank that looked like a big tit.
He thanked me warmly and wanted to split the goods fifty-fifty. He insisted, I refused. He begged me to come with him. We made our way to the fencer of Building 123, a man whose parents had decided to name him Napoleon. Kids weren’t his cup of tea, but he never passed up an opportunity to do business. He bought the knickknacks. With the money, Grézi invited me to Mickey D’s. Between two Big Macs and a Coke-hold-the-ice, we toasted our success with our straws, and he told me stories about his life, it was one thing after another.
It was that very day that I had the idea to put pen to paper and set down the life of my hood. I mentioned it to Grézi, and he accepted my offer, on the condition that eventually the money would rain down in torrents so he could make his dream come true, fleeing to the US, to L.A. “And you, what’s your dream?” he asked me. “To exist,” I said. He smiled, which was rare. Still, he was rather proud of his smile. But since his teeth were hardly a make-or-break part of the narrative evolution of my project, I didn’t care that much about seeing the glint of his fangs in the mirror of my gaze. His observations alone would be music to my ears.
*
I won’t lie. We’re not pros in this line of work, you know? Everyone knows the saying, “if the shoe fits, wear it,” though in practice that can make you a young welfare case conditioned for handouts, waiting day after day . . . I’m sick of that, it’s up to us to seize the day, carry out our plans. So now I grab, I claw, I tear, I rip. This is the way you get ahead, only action matters. So enough with all the clichés. We don’t give a shit about them, we don’t want to get wrapped up in arguments when we don’t have any say anyway. My only job will be to bear witness.
It took a while for me and Grézi to find a secret location for our work. In the end, we found it. An abandoned trailer in a parking lot, with flat tires, and a beat-up body. Even the impound lot left it alone, it was so big.
It was exactly the size of an office. Inside, we improvised. We set up chairs, a table. We even put down a rug after sealing the roof with a tarp, though there are still some holes here and there. The heating is also part of the setup, thanks to Grézi, who stole some car batteries. There’s even a fridge, but it doesn’t work. I mean, it would, but then you’d have to drain all the batteries in the entire lot. Almost everything you could find in an office is here, except a computer. I’m not good at them. Inside, Grézi made sure to get a mini-TV that some guy sold to him, but not for cheap. Otherwise, all our stuff is FFT, meaning, “fallen from truck,” accidentally. Because there’s no shortage of that around here. These are the types of stories I’m going to tell to make mad money. Things have to change. It’s always guys who aren’t from here who make the money, telling stories, or making films. Hey, I know what hatred is, everything around there is about to explode. But I’m not about to give you my in-depth analysis about some raï song.
Ron-piche, ron-piche goes the refrain of sleepy time.
The rhythm of the journey takes hold, Grézi has begun to tell me some stories, some behind-the-scenes, freestyle . . .
Guys were killing time with a big CD player, which was sapping volts from an outlet in the lobby. They started singing and doing improv riffs to the rhythm of clapping. They clapped louder and louder, like a flamenco beat. Must have been Gypsy who taught them.
Then, the little group under the awning tried to warm up by dancing a little. Then it was time for some home improvement. One of them got out his spray paint and laid waste to the wall, already tatted up with words of love and rage. The smell of trash floated through the air, the smell of the spray paint hardly bothered their noses, already shot all to hell. While the graffiti artist admired his work, the others fucked up their brains on the acrid smoke of their joints.
Then they started talking, debating racism. The last word would be the artist’s, who ended things by saying, without any explanation, “We’re all racist, whites, blacks, and mixed.”
Then he put the clear cap back on his can and took off into the night, like a lone ghost.
Ron-piche, ron-piche goes the refrain of sleepy time.
A little neighborhood jaunt with Grézi. He brings me to the spot where the little band held fort the night before. The porch’s completely destroyed, abandoned. It won’t be spiffed up by the super every day. Not anymore. He’s been fired. Trash is strewn everywhere, piss and blood are everywhere you turn, a pig couldn’t live here without worrying about catching some nasty bug. Grézi has a cold, and he hacks a wad of phlegm onto the porch. He asks me questions. I’m going to translate his slang, the sentence in question corresponds to this: “Yaz, wouldn’t making a film be more interesting and profitable?”
I’m listening.
He goes on. The week before, a TV cameraman came asking the boys hanging around with nothing better to do if he could ask them some questions. “Of course,” they answered, “be happy to . . .” The setting wasn’t very original. The interrogation took place in the guts of an apartment building. The guys, concerned about their image, wore balaclavas. All you could see was their eyes, like they’d been transformed into a poster for “La Haine.” The milieu wouldn’t have been worth anything without jays hanging from their lips, and without some establishing shots of dirty syringes, all of the miserable clichés from the news. The TV cameraman even went to the trouble of giving out some 8/6 beers for the tight-lipped ones, since, you know, booze is good for slang.
I’ll quote the first questions, “Who of you has a gun? Who sells drugs? Who has graduated high school? Who prays regularly in the secret mosques with members of the ISA or the AIG?”
Then, “Who’s been to prison?”
Then, “I’m all ears . . .”
To the first question, everyone raised a hand to keep up appearances as gangsters. But then they all ganged up on the cameraman, who didn’t see the ambush coming. A couple right-left combos to his face, and some swift kicks, and the voyeur was chased away. The camera, a real doozy, was confiscated.
*
Grézi almost convinced me to film a doc. The price of the confiscated item was ludicrous: 500 francs, plus or minus. The good thing about living in the hood is that prices are always discounted, except, of course, for marijuana and hash, you pay for them like you pay for gas and tobacco, at the going rate, but that’s another story.
Long story short, Grézi introduced me to a young guy who was selling me on the merits of his camera. It was as fat as a whale, twice what I weighed. The TV cameraman’s back must have been one big herniated disk. The rundown of the cam’s features didn’t convince me. Its batteries were dead. Too bad, I would’ve liked to film a little soccer on the field where the grass has been torn to shreds by cleats.
Leaving the seller’s house, Grézi and I saw something hilarious. Two Congolese were roving through the streets in a backfiring 103 Chopper Kit. Their visorless helmets were as big as Lolo Ferrari’s tits. At two hundred kilometers per hour, their wind-whipped eyes cried big crocodile tears. Grézi doubled over, laughing his insane laughter. The two riders, in their thirties, looked like nice guys. You could tell by the face of the one riding in back that he was scared, his manual-laborer fingers were struggling to keep their grip on two plastic sacks of rice and manioc, which were cutting off his circulation. Because he couldn’t hold onto the seat or the hips of the driver, he was about to fall off.
Their helmets were just too weird. They looked like NASA prototypes, huge, fluorescent white things. Yeah, if I’d bought the camera, I’d have got them to the roof of Building 123 to do a little film shoot. In slo-mo. Even the moon would’ve thought they were astronauts, with their sci-fi get-ups.
When our crazy laughing ended, I realized the joke was on us. If we’d had a mirror in front of us, we wouldn’t have laughed so hard, especially Grézi. He’s got two fake front teeth, since his got knocked out in a fight.
*
In our office, watching the little black-and-white TV, I start writing down all the stories that Grézi and I’ve witnessed. He tries in vain to locate the TV signal. This time of day would only get you a sitcom with blond, white actors. No suspense in the evening, either. There, it’s young, dark-skinned actors, with frizzy hair, either robbing someone, or ODing on heroin. TV, more than anything else, takes advantage of clichés. The battery can’t support both the TV and the heater. It blows a fuse, and, for all intents and purposes, we’re imprisoned in a walk-in cooler.
He tries and tries, but the antenna won’t pick up anything, neither to the right nor the left. He holds it up in the air like a plane, but the image is fuzzy. I watch him, it’s a beautiful dance, it makes me happy. I don’t want him to stop, it distracts me for a second, lets me forget how at the crib things are bad since my pops is out of work. Fuck if unemployment isn’t one of the only things that gets passed down from father to son!
He’s been out of work for a while, about three years. My pops has a hard time getting used to the fact that Mom is queen of the casbah. He’s always boiling over. It’s hell. Thankfully, they don’t fight like before, or, I should say, he doesn’t hit her like he used to, he’s older now, and he stopped drinking his killer alcohol that made him insane. One day, after a violent run-in, Mom fainted, bloody, in the shower. It was my big brother Aziz who forced open the locked bathroom door with his shoulder. The poor woman, it was like she was dead, lying lifeless on the floor. As soon as we got her to sniff some cologne, she came to, crying, in despair. That very day my big brother Aziz put my pops on notice: he’d kill him if he hit her again.
*
Once upon a time, my pops was still working. That meant he had twice as much to do as he does now. The devil finds work for idle hands, you know? But everyone at home knew the truth: it wasn’t growing older or giving up booze that stopped him from hitting Mom, it was my brother Aziz who KOed him and his violent outbursts.
Now, my pops is always complaining about something. That doesn’t leave bruises, and Mom finds a way to silence him, telling him life is too short, no use complaining. “The coffee isn’t hot enough,” or “the socks aren’t ironed,” these things don’t change, but the man has disappeared. So, calmly, she picks up the coffee and reheats it, she irons his socks. My mom has reached the age where no one can fuck with her.
Grézi still hasn’t got his TV station.
“This piece of shit doesn’t want to work,” he says. “’s not cool, it’s time for my Dragon Ball Z!”
He turns the TV off, puts down the antenna. Without even saying when he’ll be back, my chameleon takes off, closing the door behind him, to go watch his Dragon Ball somewhere else.
Kids these days are always so serious, they’re always defying you, talking to you about their turf, copping an attitude that’s more and more negative. Rain or shine, violence is their best friend. They’re the real kings of the hill. It’s like they’d rather finger a gun than drool over a pretty girl who’s into them. It’s true that in the ghetto of their brains there are rules passed down, the gangbangers teach you them. You get respect when you’re packing, it helps you with the girls, it’s like you have two dicks when you have a piece in your jeans. They’re mad about guns, bitches love it when you pack heat. Since they love guns so much, the older gangbangers keep saying, it makes sense to get a hard-on over a gun before you try to drop some real bombs on the girls. I laugh, still, because despite, everything, when it’s time for Dragon Ball, the kid in them springs to life. I’m alone. I’m not seventeen anymore, but I’m into the artistry of slitty-eyed girls as much as Grézi. It’s leisure time. After work, leisure. I padlock the trailer’s door.
Other than me and Grézi, no one in the neighborhood knows that someone has moved in, if anyone did, the jealous types would come out of the woodwork to wreck it, just out of spite. They’re Gremlins, that’s what we call them here, they’re no older than eighteen and already way into violence. Grézi hangs out with them a little too much, in my opinion, but he has to if he doesn’t want to end up alone and without any backup when it all turns to shit for him. Tête-à-tête, mano a mano, that’s out of style—it’s the pack that packs a punch.
The parking lot is immense, almost a thousand four hundred cars are parked here by the time the workers leave work. My pops had a pretty one that we’d wash on the weekends, we sold it to pay off our debts, even the grocer won’t give us anything on credit anymore. But, hey, I’m not whining, I’ve never gone hungry, Mom makes the holidays work with next to nothing, and, like my pops says, begging is not an option. If only he knew! Without help from the neighbors, we would shrivel up, one of these days. Click, clack goes the padlocked door.
Ron-piche, ron-piche, goes the refrain of sleepy time.
I wake up agitated. My dream is still there in my mind. I was transformed into a sort of superhero who was saving people right and left. Being a superman is cool, even if I don’t remember the color of my costume during my fight against the gang of men with square screen-heads. I zapped them all. Only I could save humanity. I don’t have anything in my stomach, and I need to go to the bathroom. But since my pops is still arguing with my mom about me, it’s not the time to leave my little room. I was dreaming so deeply I didn’t notice it was daytime. Now my clock reads noon.
Grézi shouldn’t be late. But if I don’t open the windows, I can’t hear him whistle. It wouldn’t matter if he used up all the air in his lungs in a hot-air balloon. It’s double-paned glass, put in not too long ago. Like the adults say in the neighborhood, it’s the new politics. They get rid of the damp windows but don’t bother about the sick people.
Our parents are more than happy to live in apartment buildings painted to look like different flavors of candy. For us, though, they taste the same, shitty, like if you changed the color of the paint jobs you could change the fact that it sucked to live in the projects. It’s well known that it’s the habit that makes the monk. That’s the best proverb for the situation. But Zoubir, the bearded one, puts this spin on it: “It’s not the robe that makes the imam.” That works too.
Too bad the doors inside aren’t double paned, because my mom and dad are yelling so loud their voices can be heard in my little room. I’m suffocating, my ears are going to explode, Grézi’s got to get here soon, the heating isn’t working. I’m shivering head to foot. I don’t weigh much. I’m 5’9’’, 132 pounds. I’m a skinny dude, I get it . . . I just have to look at myself in the mirror, forward and back, to see how awfully skinny I am. It’s the best way to feel bad about myself.
If I earn any money from my book about the stupid things everyone does, first thing, I’m going to get a gym membership. Then I’ll be able to bulk up. But girls have it worse. I heard that to make sure they have curvy hips, they put wires up their ass. That’s too much, no way am I doing that. I’m freezing. Shit, I see myself again in the mirror on the dresser.
From the twelfth floor, the view is pretty good. Too bad Building 123 is in the way, behind it there’s the soccer field where 80cc and 125cc bikes zig and zag back and forth. The bikes tear up the field, the stands are covered in clods of dirt. The soccer players on Sunday afternoon are the first victims of the dirt bikes. Stumbling into their ruts kills your shins.
Thank god, I’m saved! Through the walls, thin as cabbage leaves, I can hear Grézi whistling. Quick as a flash, I stick my head out the window and wave. I’m already in my sneakers, I won’t tell you their brand. There’s no sponsorship tie-in in my story. But, let’s just say, the commas in the middle of a sentence are identical to the ones on my shoes.
