Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
After all, when you’re a scrawny mixed Puerto Rican kid with a white mom addicted to drugs and alcohol in a racially charged neighborhood—shit, a racially charged country—you gotta do something.
The something he did was pick up a two-by-four during a fight with another Black kid to prove something, if only to prove he existed. The funny thing was, Kakamia couldn’t recall what the argument was about now. It seemed like so long ago, even though it was only a few years away. What Kakamia did remember was the blood that poured out of the kid’s ear, how he looked lying unconscious on the ground. Mostly Kakamia remembered how everyone treated him later, nicknaming him Lumberjack. They gave him some real respect after that.
Soon after, his mom decided they needed a change of scenery, him and his four half-brothers and -sisters. Different daddies, same mom, but they were all family as far as they were concerned, regardless of the fact they looked like a color wheel, lightest to darkest.
So mom chose Sacramento: sunny California, a place of new beginnings. Everyone goes west to strike their fortune.
This is where it got them, Kakamia thought as his eyes took in his mother’s face, creased and worn with stress as she stared at the judge.
When Eric approached him in the hallway at school with a proposition, he listened with an open mind.
“Hey, you wanna make some big money, I mean real easy?” Eric started out.
“Sure, who doesn’t? What would I have to do?” Kakamia replied.
“Simple. Help Bobby kill his parents.”
To most people this would have been a shocking statement to hear at school. And it was…the first time they heard it. But Kakamia was the third person to be asked to join in on this contract over the past week. It was a high school, word got around. Kakamia had wondered if they would approach him. He already had a speech prepared, having played the scene out in his head many times; he was kind of excited to get to use it.
“What’s the plan?” He spat out the line like he was in a movie.
“They have a gun in the house. It’ll be easy. Bobby will take the gun earlier and hide it. I’ll drive you out there, and he’ll let you in. We’ll steal a TV or something to make it look like a burglary. Then you’ll sneak up into the bedroom, put pillows over their faces, pull the trigger. You won’t even have to see the blood. I’ll drive you home, and that’s it. We just wait for Bobby to collect the insurance money.”
“And how much is that?”
“It’s gonna be like a million for both of them, can you believe that?”
Kakamia thought about it. No more struggling, no more going without heat in the winter like when they were in New York. No more spaghetti for dinner for weeks on end. No more hearing his stomach rumble.
Kakamia already knew his options were limited. He felt like he had so much talent, but none of it saleable. He was always working on the scheme that would make them rich. His sister teased him about it constantly. His mother told him the only way to get rich was to go to school and go to college. But school had never worked for him. They moved around so much, he spent more time fighting and establishing his reputation than actually going to classes. His reading and writing weren’t so good. In fact, they were awful. He had gotten this far by faking it. By the time they settled in Sacramento, he was so far behind the other students in his class, he was embarrassed to go: scared the teacher would call on him and show him up in front of the class.
He ran through the moneymaking options he’d tried as an alternative to school. It was the golden era of hip hop, and Kakamia was in the middle of it. He tried breakdancing, and he was good at it too —for once his long limbs and lighter weight were an asset, instead of a detriment like in boxing. But breakers weren’t making any real money —you could put a can out and break on the street for folks walking by, but that was almost as bad as school. He had been able to get some loot out of DJing parties, but he didn’t have any money for his own equipment and you couldn’t borrow someone else’s turntables forever. Graffiti just landed you a one-way ticket to jail, which was too bad, cause he was actually a great graffiti artist.
He’d tried to sell drugs, gotten down with the Bloods. But he knew unless he moved up fast, he’d just be a low level gangster working harder than if he had a 9 to 5, and barely scraping by. Until someone put a bullet in the back of his head.
All of this made him wide open to Eric and Bobby’s plan. Plus, Kakamia really loved gangster movies. He liked to imagine himself as a Mafioso, like the ones he used to see in Little Italy in New York. And suddenly, one of his favorite movies had come to life. After all, this was a contract. He’d be a contract killer, a hit man. If that didn’t sound dangerous, he didn’t know what did. No one would dream of fucking with a hit man. Hit men got real respect. Hit men didn’t have to worry about a cousin’s wandering hands in the middle of the night, about their mother’s boyfriends’ heavy boots on flesh.
Kakamia had tried everything to block it all out before. Alcohol when he was eleven. He graduated to pills, cocaine, meth, crack, heroin: anything to erase his past and his present; anything to open a door in his head so he could finally escape.
None of it worked. The next morning, he would be right back in his body, track marks on his arms, eyes a little more vacant in the mirror.
Perhaps blood would finally wash him away.
“All right,” Kakamia declared, “I’m in.”
“But I got some terms.” He steepled his fingers and leaned back. He felt so Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “I want $25,000 in cash when the insurance money comes in. And Bobby has to buy me and my mom a house. And a car.
“And anything else we need,” Kakamia added, proud that he had thought to cover future expenses like that.
Eric and him shook hands solemnly.
“We’ll be in touch soon,” Eric turned to walk away.
“Hey,” Kakamia called out as an afterthought. “Why does Bobby want to kill his parents? Is it just the money?” Frankly, Kakamia couldn’t really imagine this being Bobby’s idea. He definitely had an explosive temper, but he didn’t seem like a planner. More like a “fly into a violent rage and damn the consequences” kinda guy.
Eric stopped and turned around. “Man, you know he’s been grounded for almost two years cause of his grades. And they make him give them almost his whole check from his after school job to go towards household expenses. They say he’ll get it back when they pay for college, but you know that’s wrong. And you know his mom’s the worst. She’s a real bitch. She goes through his mail, listens to his phone calls. I know whenever I call over there, she’s on the other line, listening to every word we say. He came to me saying he just couldn’t stand to live with them anymore, he wasn’t going to be able to make it to his eighteenth birthday. So I suggested he have them taken care of. And that’s where you come in.”
Kakamia was a little shocked. Could this kid really want to kill his mom over something so trivial? Kakamia’s gangster mask faltered. He thought of his mother. Sure, things had been hard. Sure, he wished she’d been there more, that she’d protected him more, that she’d believed him more. She was the first one to tell him he was making up stories when he finally showed her the wound he had been carrying around for years.
He had wanted to leave home so many times, and had run away half a dozen. He had vowed to never talk to his mom again after particularly bad fights. But he had never imagined hurting her physically. In fact, just thinking about it now drew tears to his eyes.
Kakamia’s mind and heart hardened. Yeah, but this wasn’t his mom. In fact, it was better not to think of her as a mom at all. It was just a woman. No, just a…thing. Just a job to get done, a task to be completed. Nothing else.
The only way this is connected to him, Kakamia thought decisively and almost feverishly, is that it was going to make him rich. It was going to make him important. And no one will ever hurt him again.
Eric