shield your eyes

Memories of a truant teenager’s life in 1970s Brooklyn Heights—fights, school and family trouble, and a brief cameo (at a Baskin-Robbins) by Spike Lee:

“Still, things weren’t exactly cozy at home. There had always been new boys coming into the Heights, and that was cool, but the latest crews weren’t really boys, more on the verge of being men. Unlike the kids we’d been hanging with for a year, we didn’t have history with these guys; we didn’t really trust them, didn’t want to be rude but didn’t really want them in our houses. This became hard to keep under control, as members of the home crew vouched for the new guys, and all of a sudden, there are people you’ve never seen in the living-room, rummaging through the liquor cabinets, some big, stoned, zombie-looking dude is in the kitchen, and the next day, you can’t find the paring knife. There was Chavo, a scrawny cat with pointy teeth who was reputed to do heroin; the first time I saw a gun, it was sitting on the cardboard box he used for a table in the room he rented half a block from my mom’s house. Dave borrowed my bicycle one afternoon, and later told me that Chavo had been riding it and had been hit by a bus; that the bike was totaled. I was 15, and didn’t want to think a guy I still pined for had let a junkie sell my bike. I started seeing E., who fell into days-long silent funks and flew into rages and who, one sunny afternoon, kicked me in the face and gave me two black eyes.”

Bought this for 99 cents on Amazon, via a recommendation from Longreads, and read it all in one sitting. Recommended!