EDGEBOI [1.3]: Drive-by

3.

Good Friday 2019

Totally burnt after a full day of work in a way I hadn’t been in longer than I could remember.

Still no one to hang with, like people do with others after long days of work, but OK.

OK with tall cans (3, $1 each) from the beer spot one block NE, and General Tso’s ($5) from the Chinese spot across from the beer spot.

Pleased with this being something I was able to do now, without shame/guilt.

I’d earned this.

~

Patronizing spots directly north of me on foot still somewhat new.

It wasn’t that I was shook; I wasn’t shook anywhere. Just felt like a turf thing.

Like my presence north of Haverford was so anomalous as to be implicitly ostentatious.

Like not a single white or white-adjacent person roaming here-abouts bro what.

But since I’d started delivering veggies, I’d been driving straight north on 41st, to Girard.

Going north part of the daily route now.

Having eased into it with my whip, walking it was now whatever.

~

Something had just gone down, either in the NBA or in rap, I was listening to either Stephen A Smith or DJ Akademics on YouTube, it was a ten-minute video, I remember because that was the perfect amount of time to walk to and wait for Chinese food.

In soccer shorts, Adidas slides, a beater.

Holding my phone out front of my face, smiling quietly to myself.

Huge crew of youngins pulled up, the whip idling out front to keep slapping tunes out of. A few girls but dudes mostly, a couple of em looking keyed.

One dude coming real close to my face with a deadpan serious look, going “You want blow I got blow.”

“Oh word? Hell yeah,” I said. “But I’m straight.”

He goin Why you LYin, wringing his hands super exaggerated and slightly violently, to see if I flinched, felt like.

My eyes my instincts locked in tensed up when he first went to do that, for that split second, before I recognized what he was doing and realized I could always swing fast if he swung at me. Plus his was the only energy, of the group’s, that was wild like that. So I was good. 

And anyway, if he swung at or tried to step to me otherwise, that didn’t matter either. The worst that could happen was I died / got killed. 

But when I didn’t flinch and he noticed me not flinch, I realized that he had in fact been seeing whether I would flinch.

Yo you wilding, I said, big-broing slightly but with a friendly grin he had to look bashfully away from.

I retreated into the corner. ‘Giving them space to order.’ Till mine was ready.

~

Couldn’ta been more than seven minutes after that—the vid was still going—that I—we all—heard a Kendrick DOOT DOOT but that sounded more like a PAP PAP and then a SKRRRR of wheels skidding out.

Peeking up the street, out the Chinese spot’s entrance, catching sight of an SUV flipping a hard U back in the direction we were, but up onto the wide sidewalk, other side of the parking meters.

It plonked down onto the street, off the curb, to shadow an Oldsmobile two-door headed our way.

“Ohhhhh fuuuuh,” I said, instinctively booking it back into the corner and standing back-against-the-wall like a spy approaching a corner he was about to spy around.

Except this was to make myself thin enough to be least likely to get hit with a stray.

Everyone else lined up next to me, against the walls.

The girls going I DONT LIKE THIS I DONT LIKE THIS.

The dudes thinking this but not saying it.

The Chinese lady behind the counter just going about her business, putting plastic forks and napkins and soy and duck sauce into plastic bags. Because the bulletproof glass.

~

The Oldsmobile then the SUV whizzed past, the SUV a half-length behind and driving in the shoulder, so sorta next to it. Like if he shot we’d be directly in the line of fire.

All of us going Ahhhhh! Bruuuh! Yo chill-chill-chill like we were all going down the first dip on a gnarly roller coaster together.

Once it passed, one of the dudes bravely stuck his head out to see what was good.

“Oh we straight,” he said. “They ain’t coming back.” 

A couple dudes, then me, then the girls tentatively stepped away from the wall. All looking at each other, eyebrows raised, like Duuuuude!

Till the Chinese lady went General Tso’s! No not you, not you, batting down coked-up dude’s outstretched hands and holding it away from the window, till he fell back, and she could safely hand it off to me.