The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir

17. Shifting Loyalties

17 Shifting Loyalties Like many young black men growing up during that time, I was pulled in different directions. My life at home stayed steady and relatively calm. I would do what I had to do to help my mother take care of my little brother and sister, but after that I was in the street playing basketball, selling drugs, and hanging out with my boys. My mother and father had no idea what I was doing during the hours I was away from them. Sometimes it seemed to me that my life on the street was gradually replacing my family life and that the new bonds I was forming with friends were stronger than the ones I shared with my own flesh and blood. Having embraced the morals of the street, I often found myself in situations that compromised any moral integrity my mother had tried to instill in me, but I also have to admit that I enjoyed the thrill of being bad much more than the satisfaction of being good. The story that follows is just one illustration of this double-mindedness that became a habit of my being. In the spring of 1967, the end of my first year at Taft High School, I was finding it harder than usual to concentrate on school: Girls were starting to wear short dresses that blew up in the wind and showed their legs. My rep with the ladies was on the money because they all liked me as a friend as well as knowing I was a player, and I spent much more time talking to them and trying to set up drug deals than I did trying to pass my courses. One morning, I got up to school and I could feel there was something different in the air. People were not hanging out as they normally did. When I heard through the wire that some girls at Taft decided 83 84 Shifting Loyalties to give a hooky party in an apartment right off Morris Avenue, I jumped on the Morris Avenue bus and rode four or five stops to the address a friend had given me. When I got to the building, lines of people were waiting to get in, most of them guys who dressed like players but who did not have the connections to deal drugs or the rapping skills to impress women. When the people saw me coming, they said ‘‘It’s no use, bro, they won’t let anybody else in.’’ As I cut my way through the crowd, I saw plenty of brothers I knew all standing outside. Just as I was about to reach the door, one of the sisters to whom I said ‘‘Hello’’ all the time caught my eye. Her name was Joyce, and just looking at her always made my blood run hot. She was dark and slender, and she wore her hair in a beautiful Afro. When she saw me, she moved the brothers out of the way and said, ‘‘Allen, you can come in.’’ Instead of smiling and trying to put the brothers down, I made my face look like ice and played the shit off as if this kind of reception were normal. For her part, Joyce knew how to make me look like The Man. I smiled to myself as I remembered my father’s good advice to me: ‘‘Make a woman your best friend and you will not be sorry.’’ As soon as I entered the apartment, I saw the finest group of sisters I had ever had the pleasure of being in the company of, each of them trying to outdo the other in being nice to me. There were sniffing cocaine, and they offered me a line. It was excellent blow, and all my senses came alive. The few brothers who were in the apartment were boyfriends of some of the girls or just quiet brothers like me. We sniffed a while, and then one of the sisters told me to go into a bedroom off to the side. I did what she told me to and was surprised to find a finelooking sister lying on the bed with her blouse unbuttoned. Her skirt was way up above her knees, showing her stocking tops and giving me a glimpse of a black garter belt going up all the way to her behind. Stunned by the cocaine rush and the fineness of this sister’s body, I froze for a...