CHAPTER 1 ALL THAT I GOT IS YOU

Yeah, ohh yeah, this goes out

to all the families that went through the struggle

(All that I got is you)

Yeah, from the heart

(And I’m so thankful I made it through)

It was from the heart, everything was real

Yo, dwellin’ in the past, f lashbacks when I was young

Whoever thought I’d have a baby girl and three sons

I’m goin’ through this difficult stage I find it hard to believe

Why my old Earth had so many seeds

But she’s an old woman, and due to me I respect that

I saw life for what it’s really worth and took a step back

Family ain’t family no more, we used to play ball

Eggs after school, eat grits cause we was poor

Grab the pliers for the channel, fix the hanger on the TV

Rockin’ each other’s pants to school wasn’t easy

We survived winters, snotty nosed with no coats

We kept it real, but the older brother still had jokes

Sadly, Daddy left me at the age of six

I didn’t know nuttin’ but Mommy neatly packed his shit

She cried, and Grandma held the family down

I guess Mommy wasn’t strong enough, she just went down

Check it, fifteen of us in a three bedroom apartment

Roaches everywhere, cousins and aunts was there

Four in the bed, two at the foot, two at the head

I didn’t like to sleep with Jon-Jon he peed the bed

Seven o’clock, pluckin’ roaches out the cereal box

Some shared the same spoon, watchin’ Saturday cartoons

Sugar water was our thing, every meal was no thrill

In the summer, free lunch held us down like steel

And there was days I had to go to Tech’s house with a note

Stating “Gloria can I borrow some food, I’m dead broke”

So embarrassin’ I couldn’t stand to knock on they door

My friends might be laughin’, I spent stamps in stores

Mommy where’s the toilet paper, use the newspaper

Look Ms. Rose gave us a couch, she’s the neighbor

Things was deep, my whole youth was sharper than cleats

Two brothers with muscular dystrophy, it killed me

But I remember this, mom’s would lick her finger tips

To wipe the cold out my eye before school wit’ her spit

Case worker had her runnin’ back to face to face

I caught a case, housin’ tried to throw us out of our place

Sometimes I look up at the stars and analyze the sky

And ask myself was I meant to be here … why?

I was born in the projects in West Brighton. 780 Henderson. Apartment 7C, I think it was. My mother used to always talk about that place. I lived there until I was nine or ten. It was beautiful there. Just about my whole family was there. My grandmother lived in 3C, right below us. My grandmother on my mother’s side, so her mother lived downstairs on the third floor.

I was a good kid growing up. Even growing up in the projects, I was innocent. I wasn’t a bad kid, I didn’t do a bunch of stupid stuff when I was growing up. I was cool. I never gave my mother no problem when I was young.

“Hell, my mother was young when she had me, she was only around eighteen or so. My father was around the same age as her. He was an electrician, as I remember.”

Life was simple back then. At least for me it was simple, it wasn’t too hard, I had my aunts downstairs and all that. I didn’t really know too much. I just know I loved my grandmother because I used to always go down to her apartment, and even my aunt’s children, we all used to be down there, and we used to see who was going to go sit next to Grandma because we loved Grandma. We loved her too, too, too much. We called her Nana. She had little, flabby arms and we would go over there and just be like, “Yo, go grab her arms,” and hold them just for a long time like we never wanted to let her go.

Whoever got up to go to the bathroom would lose their seat, and when they came back they’d start crying because they’d want to sit next to Grandma. Grandma was funny. But I remember one day I told my grandmother—to this day, I don’t know what made me say this—I said, “Grandma, if you ever die, I’m going to drink a whole bottle of pine.” Because she always kept pine (Pine-Sol) in the house to clean up. I think it was Pine-Sol because it was brown inside. But it was the old bottle, I don’t even know if they sell them anymore. And I knew because they always would say like, “Don’t drink that pine.” That’s how I knew I could say that because they always told kids like, “Yo, this is what to stay away from.” So it had to be bad for you.

Sitting next to her like that, I can only guess that I said that because I loved her so much, and couldn’t imagine being without her. I can’t even remember her reaction. Because she used to watch the stories. You know grandmothers always watched stories all day, like All My Children and As the World Turns, Young and the Restless, and then go into Price Is Right. That’s why I respect Bob Barker, because that motherfucker was there for decades. All the grandmothers was all about Bob Barker. I’m sitting next to her holding her arm watching all these little programs, Adam-12, All in the Family, all that. She had programs on every night.

When she did pass away, it was sad for all of us, especially me. I was somewhere around six or seven years old. I couldn’t understand why Nana’s face was so cold. They didn’t tell me what had happened, but when I kissed her, she was cold, and I really didn’t understand it. I was crying when I saw her, I just wanted her to come home. “Just come on. Just get up. Come on, just go. Come on, come on.” Then you had to get used to her not coming home no more.

It was the ’70s, it was a lot more beautiful, more at ease, more at peace. Sure, you had your drama over there in those places and stuff like that, but at the time we didn’t have to worry about gunshots and all that. If there was a fight, it was more likely we were doing it with hands, no guns.

I was too young to be involved in any of that. You might hear about somebody getting shot. Certain names you remember, like, “Oh shit. Yo, this one got killed last night, and this one got killed.” Remember I’m young, so I’m not staying out past a certain time. I’m hearing it secondhand from my cousins. It was like, “Yo, this one got shot or this one had a fight with this one.” Back then it was like, “Okay, yeah, somebody got killed.” It was like, “Oh shit.” The projects were the projects. It might have been less pissy elevators and all that, but they were still the projects.

That’s where I first started hearing hip hop, in West Brighton. DJ Jones and Dr. Freak used to bring the turntables out in front of the buildings, and at night they would DJ. Like how Kool Herc and them was doing up in the Bronx. But I remember them coming out like that, bringing the music out and everybody just outside, but I can’t be down there because I’m too young. I got to look out the window. From the seventh-floor window. It was nice. It was great beats. It was a lot of old James Brown records and all that being cut up, “Good Times” by Chic, listening to the DJ just cut it up. It was amazing. It was amazing just hearing them and shit like that, and people gathering around to listen and dance in the street.

I also listened to a lot of old music because my mother used to bring her friends to the house when my father was at work. She would have her friends over, and they’d be listening to the Chi-Lites, Bloodstone, Stylistics, Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye, New Birth, Rose Royce, and all that. So that was giving me my soul because I heard it repeatedly. I was inspired by the greats. But I had to go into another room and close the door and stay there because they kicked me out the living room because they were doing grown folks’ stuff. Whether smoking weed or doing whatever they were doing. And I remember album covers laying around, and everything was getting played there, and that right there went into my body, into my soul. I carried that. That’s why in the beginning you hear me rhyming off a lot of old soul because I’d rather rhyme off that than any new music because I felt that music, it was in my bones already. It really resonated with me. And my mother was indirectly responsible, because that’s what she listened to, and that’s what I grew up listening to, so I kind of took it on myself once I started writing and rhyming.

Then my father would come home and kick everybody out because he wasn’t into that, a lot of people in the house, smoking and drinking and shit like that.

He was a good father during those early years. I can’t really shit on him. At that time, he was good, I can honestly say that. But you know with parents, a lot of the times you don’t know who was in the right, and who was in the wrong. Because the baby’s mother could be like, “Okay, your father ain’t shit and he’s not supporting us and whatever whatever,” but it was probably a reason why he left. Or it could have been vice versa. But at that time, it was me and my two younger brothers, Devon and Darius, and my mother and my father, all up on the seventh floor. And he was a good father, he was there and everything. But then things spun to the left. It’s like neither one of them could take it anymore, and one of them had to bounce. And that was it.

I’m not really sure when that was. I might’ve been around five or six years old. Anyway, one day he up and walks out the door, leaving my mother with me and my two brothers, Devon and Darius, both of whom have muscular dystrophy. That was another thing I was just aware of growing up. I remember stitches on the back of Devon’s leg, the scar left there from an operation. I didn’t ask about it because when you’re young, you don’t really ask questions, you just see stuff. You just go on with your life. But I knew Devon had muscular dystrophy because I would hear the term around the house. He used to be falling, he would walk, and he would fall, walk and fall, next thing he had to go to a walker, then to a wheelchair. And that’s what happened to both of my brothers.

We got along without my father, but I didn’t know the details of how my mother was surviving because I was too young. I really don’t know because I didn’t know about public assistance back then. Were my parents getting public assistance and all that? I didn’t know. I’d heard them arguing. When you’re that young, you kind of figure out something is wrong, but you don’t know the true details of what’s really going on.

I do remember one time something happened where my father had picked up my brother the wrong way, and his arm broke, or his collarbone broke or something like that. But he was little. Then I remember one time, they took me away. I remember they put me in handcuffs. I was a little dude. I remember that because I was going crazy. You taking me away from my family? Motherfucking police put me in the back of the fucking cop car and took me wherever they took me to. Then other people came and got me. They took me away again, and I wound up at some other white people’s crib. It was on Staten Island, though. I think it was this white lady named Alice. I think they might have housed kids that got removed from their homes. Because I saw some other Black kids over there, too.

I’m not sure what caused that whole event. I never asked my father; it could have been the truth, it could have could have been a lie. I don’t know. But he said one day he picked my brother up and his arm or collarbone got broke. That’s it. My grandfather, my mother’s father, watched me go into the fucking police car. It was just havoc. It was crazy. I didn’t know where I was going. They just came and just snatched me up, like if I had a warrant or something. It was like, “Yo, what the hell?”

“I want to make it clear that my father wasn’t abusive to me or my brothers. Never ever, ever. It was never like he was beating the crap out of me and doing all this other stuff like that. Any beatings I got, I deserved because I did something or whatever and wasn’t listening.”

I remember my mother whipped my ass one day because I lost my sister. This would have been when I was around eight years old. I had my sister because she was small, too, and sometimes I would watch her. My mother said, “I’ll be right back.” Whatever. But then we’re both outside the building, and I’m just watching my sister, and then I turned my head for a minute, and all of a sudden my sister walked off somewhere. That was scary.

One of the building’s maintenance men brought her back. Oh, I got an ass whooping that day. You could hear that shit downstairs. My mother beat me. Not my father, my mother. Whipped my ass. I was scared to death.

I’m going to ask one of my mans about that when I see him next, too. Because I looked out the window after I got my ass beat and I was screaming so loud, I seen him looking up. Motherfucker’s looking up at my window. I’m gonna ask him one day, “You remember that ass whipping I got?”

After a while we left the Henderson projects and lived in Stapleton for a couple years. A two-family house where we lived downstairs and another family lived upstairs. It was all my family, though. It was my stepfather’s house, or possibly his mother’s house. My third brother’s father, his mother lived upstairs and all that. I guess my mother met him at my Aunt Marie’s house over in the West Brighton projects. I still had cousins over there. Then, after they got acquainted and all that, that’s when we moved to Targee Street, the street that, decades later, would become Wu-Tang Boulevard.

That’s when the violence started coming. I saw it more hands-on. The drinking, and stuff like that. But you got to remember, my mother was still young. They’re both young. You got to look at the parents back then. They’re making young decisions, too. They were what, twenty-four years old? They’re making a twenty-four-year-old’s decision. She’s not making a grown woman’s decisions. She fell for the dude or they fell for each other. Then from there we moved into that house under his mother and his family. He’d get drunk, bugging out, doing his shit. But I told you when he was sober, he was a good dude.

He was good, but he was just wild. He was the wild one. He’d knock your block off. But he wasn’t mean to the kids, though. But outside he wasn’t nothing to fuck with. He might have been the roughest man. But he’s good now. I think he’s a preacher now or something like that. He’s into the church now. But back then he used to drink a lot. When he wasn’t drunk, he was cool. But my stepfathers, they were all alcoholics, drug addicts, whatever the case may be, except for my real father, who was the only one that had something going.

All the stepfathers did was add on to what my mother was doing already in terms of drugs or drinking or whatever. I guess that attracted that. Where they come in and fuck up your stuff. They were probably just living off her for a place to stay. Add to that the stress of both my brothers being in a wheelchair by this time. And I’m the oldest, so I got to do a lot of things myself. Take my brother, had to put him on the toilet by myself. I had to pick him up, pull his pants down, sit him on the toilet. After he’s done his business, I had to pick him up, lift his pants up with the other hand, sit him back down, pick him up, put him in the wheelchair. I’m doing a grown man’s job at like eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. That put the pressure on me. But I was the oldest, so whatever I got to do for my brothers, I got to do for them.

My mother took up with that shit for a year or two, I don’t really know how long. Then we moved to the projects. We lived on the first floor. That apartment was legendary. My mother was one that’ll take anybody in. Long as you had some money, you could pay your rent. That’s one thing that I didn’t really understand because she had a lot of drinking friends. But one of them bum ass niggas going to come off the street acting like he give you a check every month or whatever. A hundred dollars a month or two hundred. But as long as you’re drinking with her and y’all paying the fucking money, you could get a bed in there.

That’s why I said fifteen of us in a three-bedroom apartment. Cousins and aunts were there. Sleeping four to a bed. Roaches everywhere, in the kitchen cabinets, in our cereal boxes, when we were lucky enough to have some, just everywhere. That’s what it was about. Because you have friends that get their little SSI checks or whatever, and they’re crashing on the couches. Some of them shared the bedroom with us, me and my brother. Whatever the females was in there, they’d be in a room with my sister and them on a different bed.

The house was always crowded. If you came in too late, you couldn’t even get in the fucking bed—you had to get in where you could fit in. The door was always open. Fuck around, and you might be downstairs, hanging around on the street outside and got to use the bathroom. “Yo, Diane, can I use your bathroom?” You come use the bathroom and just go back downstairs because we’re right there. Right in front of the building. But we got services where you can just look off the building and stuff like that. That’s how we let our people know where we lived at.

Stapleton looked like we could have been in jail. The fence is right there in front of you, you got eight floors with a fence there that you could just look over or you could look through it, and you could just see people outside.


Copyright © 2024 by Dennis Coles