Chapter 3

First gun pointed at me and an acid trip I will never forget.

Ralph was a pig. A teenager with a ton of sperm and an ego that reached altitudes unheard of. He was also the greatest liar known to man. Ralph would lie about anything even if he knew he could not get away with it. That was Ralph. My cousin. A bold faced liar with a bad habit of robbing everyone he knew.

He was a character. And during this time he started to hook up with this girl named Gabrielle. She was brown skinned. Not Puerto Rico. Not sure what. Who cares really. She was a great piece of ass and Ralph had her.

And also During this time, my senior year in high school, I drove a jeep Wrangler that I had bought in Brooklyn and drove down to Florida. My father had moved us to South Florida, but as a result of work, he had to stay north. What a fucking tangled web we weave. And what a thrill it was for dad to be living on his own in the goddamn house that I would have happily stayed in.

But I didn’t.

But dad did.  He ruined all of us with this move but he himself decided to stay. I think back and I realize that dad had a vagina nearby. And dad was cheating on my mother. Why else leave us in another state? Why else not be there for us. He had another and I couldn’t care less. All I wanted was the fucking Jeep that dad said these two guys were selling for three grand.

I got a plane ticket. It was last minute. This flight flew me into West Islip, Long Island. An airport that I never heard of and had no idea how I would get from there to Brooklyn, New York. I was 17. A kid. And this flight lasted two hours and change, and I got there, and I walked out into the long narrow viaduct that acted as a terminal and I stood around saying to myself “now what?”

It was snowing out. A thick snow. An old school snow that we were used to in the city. But I wasn’t any longer. And I stood there watching these flakes come down in a barrage, covering everything, and making life so difficult. I was 17, and I had to try and make it to Brooklyn from West Islip, Long Island.

At this point I had not read “Catcher in the Rye.” If I had, I would have found my trip on the Long Island Railroad to have been some type of mystic endeavor. Holden Caulfield making his escape from his mother and the bourgeois life that he had come from. I had none of that ambiguity, nor did I understand why it was so difficult to make it to the city. The LIRR was this strange beast. In later years I came to love it but at that time, it was as foreign as me as a rocket to mars.

But I got on the train. And a man came up and clipped my ticket. And I made it to Penn station. And from there I made it onto an F train. And from there, shortly after, I made it home.

Brooklyn.

I got to Church Avenue. I yelled up to my father. We didn't have a buzzer. Still don’t. He looked through the blinds to see who I was. Then he came down. Dad welcomed me like he would a man going door to door selling hoover vacuums. I was ruining his gig. And he was pissed. The first thing I saw when I entered the apartment was a huge pot plant in the corner of the room, near a window. The fucking plant had sprung up about six feet tall. My dad caught me staring at his behemoth. He turned to me and said “I like it cause of the aroma it gives. That’s all.”

Is that really all? No, not at all. But dad was living his life, and who was I to judge?

And then the two Puerto Ricans showed up the next morning with the jeep. And I realized that I needed to judge my dad a little bit.

It was a black Jeep Wrangler. It had a hard top on the back. It looked like an ’87 model but the title said it was an ’83. The two guys came upstairs into the apartment. We worked over the specifics. My father said he was going to get a coffee and he left. I sat with these two guys. They were stoned out of their minds. The one guy turned to me and said “hey man, do you smoke weed?”

“Yes, Yes I do,” was my reply.

The guy started laughing. “That’s great, bro, cause we are so fucking high we got no idea what this fucking guy is saying to us!”

They both cracked up laughing. I stood there wondering what the fuck to say. They couldn’t understand my father. But they also could not understand me or the simple notion of one man selling his vehicle to another. I found out a year later why exactly that was.

Dad came back and gave these two fuck ups three grand. Three grand and the jeep was mine. Me and pops drove it down to south Florida together. It was the last time we would do such a thing.

So Ralph is dating Gabrielle. And he calls and asks me for a ride over to her place. I am with this kid Tom Vasage. A bulky redneck with a temper and about zero intellect. In later years Tom would fall out of my Jeep and do severe damage to himself. For now, he was co-pilot and loving it. In the back we had Ryan Smith. A pocket-faced hick from the same West Boca neighborhood as Tom. I never knew a hick until I moved to Florida. In the end, you found that they were a dime a dozen.

And they were wild. You did everything you could not to fight these fuckers. They had unending willpower. I read a book on Frederick Douglass, the slave that learned to read and became an empowering figure for the abolitionist movement. He spoke once, in his autobiography, about fighting his white owner. This man, this little redneck. Five feet four and a hundred and ten pounds, if that. Frederick Douglass fought this man and it lasted for hours. This black man, twice his size, could not get him to quit. Tom was that guy. He was a fucking monster. And he is now a federal marshal, and here we are.

The four of us arrived at Gabrielle’s house. It was a typical pre-fab house on a typical pre-fab block. The four of us went to the door. The four of us entered. It was quaint, but sparsely decorated. Money could not be used for frivolous reasons here. Every cent mattered. But it was a nice house. Very clean. The four of us entered this sparsely decorated but clean house. Once inside, the four of us decided to take acid.

A hit of acid is a tiny little square. I cannot tell you the dimensions, nor can I tell you the goddamn ramifications these tiny little hits had on our life. But they were small. And these here hits had an emblem embossed on them. They were black snowmen. Every hit of acid had something on it. I have taken Beavis and Butthead hits. Jesus Christ hits. And so on and so on.

But tonight it was the black snowman. I took this hit, and about an hour later, I was no longer on planet earth.

To try and define an acid trip is equivalent to go about trying to define love. If you don’t know it, well then you don’t need to understand it. Acid was that. And we took it, at Gabrielle’s house, thinking that this was going to be a wild ride.

It was for a bit. But then Gabrielle dropped a bombshell on us. That her other boyfriend, that Ralph did not know of, would be showing up shortly.

I know acid. And I know violence. And I knew that staying there was fucking suicide. So the four of us left. Wounded, we got into my jeep and we pulled off. All of us, tripping heavily on acid.

We got about a mile away when I realized my fuck up. I had left a case logic with about fifty CD’s in Gabrielle’s house. I alerted Ralph, Tom, and Ryan to this. They all were tripping so hard that I might have well have alerted them to the discovery of a flu vaccine being developed in Helsinki.

Without waiting for a response, I turned around and headed to the house. It seemed logical to me. I left my CD’s. I should go back and reclaim what is mine. The three stooges in my Jeep were all so out of their minds that they didn’t put up a fight. Why would they. All of us knew that I would be the asshole walking up the door and knocking. They would just be watching from the bleachers.

When I arrived at the house, there was a beat up car parked out front. I made a U-turn and parked across the street. It is not clear in my mind if I said anything to the other three. All that is remembered is me walking up and knocking on the door. Gabrielle answered. She was nervous.

“My friends are here,” she said.

“I’m just here for my CD’s” is all I could muster at this moment. My head was fried. The black snowman was a bastard of a hit. We took it a few times and I remember all of them being bad scenes. This was about to turn into one.

“Are you sure you left them here?” she asked innocently.

“They are inside. Next to the table,” I replied.

She went to speak but someone else beat her to the punch.

“Let the motherufcker in!”

Gabrielle paused before opening the door. I walked in and was met by two guys. Once was black. He was tall and skinny. I later found out he played football at our rival high school. The other was a paunchy Hispanic guy. He was wearing a grey hoodie, even though we were in the thick of summer. They were both standing guard next to the entertainment center where I had left my CD case.

I walked up to the two of them.

“What you want?” the Black Football Player from a Rival High School asked me.

“I’m just looking for my CD case,” I said with zero hesitation.

“There ain’t no CD case here,” the footballer replied.

“I left it here. It’s definitely here.”

“I don’t see any CD cases here.” He replied. “And I think it’s time you go!”

At this point, the kaleidoscope peripheral haze that I had been navigating me came to an abrupt end once I eyed that the Puerto Rican was holding a gun. I don’t know what type of gun. Those things have never really been my gig. But this man, wearing a grey hoodie in the middle of summer, had one in his right hand. He was holding it by his hip. I could clearly see that his hand was shaking.

I looked up at the Black Football Player from a Rival High School.

“Listen,” I pleaded. “I am just looking for my CD case. That’s all I want.”

The gun came up and was placed by my right temple.

“It’s not here,” the Puerto Rican began. “And you need to go.”

Time stopped. The mixture of acid and this gun pointed at my temple caused an amalgamation of both fear and tepidness. In other words, I could not move.

“You need to get the fuck out of here,” the Puerto Rican reiterated.

Slowly, tiny bits of information made it through the psychedelic tunnel and reached my frontal lobes. It took some time, but soon I realized my folly. I remember trying to say something before turning and racing toward the door. I swung past Gabrielle, and was out in the street in seconds.

“HE’S GOT A GUN!” I screamed as I raced past the Jeep and into the backyard of the house across the street. I jumped over a wooden fence in seconds. Through the next backyard I ran. I hopped over a metal fence and hit the third yard. I made it over another fence in a breath and I kept on running through this wooded area before I came to a road.

Across the street was beat up strip mall. There was a payphone underneath a light. I walked across the barren road, andup to the phone. I dialed a number. It was three digits. It started with a 9. It was followed by another 9. It ended with the number 1.

Moments later, the jeep pulled up. Tommy was driving. Ralph jumped out and ran up to me.

“Jesus, Cuz, are you okay?” he asked.

“They wouldn’t give me back my CD’s,” I huffed. “The fucking one guy pulled a gun on me.”

“I just called 911,” I added.

All three looked like I just called their parents and confessed they were all members of the Manson clan and they have tasted others blood.

“Dude, we’re tripping balls,” Tommy yelled.

“I know that,” I responded. “But fuck these guys! I fucking earned those CD’s! Their mine! I’m getting them back!”

Tommy went to respond but it was too late. The police had arrived. Boca Raton’s finest. I did all of the talking. Explained how the CD’s were left and what had occurred when I returned. The cop nodded the whole way. He told me to follow him to the house. I got in the passenger side of the Jeep and we did just that.

At the house another cop car pulled up. Neither car put on their lights. The two Officers got out of their respective cars and came up to me in the Jeep. They both had on gloves. I later said that they had put on their “Killing gloves.” Might as well have. I told these two officers here that a black and a Puerto Rican had stolen from me, a white guy. They were not having any of that. No, they were out for blood. For restitution.

“You four stay here.” The first responding Officer said. “We’ll be back in a minute.”

The two walked away. They had a brief conversation by the car before heading toward the front door. We watched from the car as the two officers took out their guns. They gripped them with their killing gloves. The first officer knocked on the door. They both waited.

I never understood why these two police officers did this. Perhaps it was the acid. Perhaps it did not go down as I narrate it to you. Who knows? But I remember these two cops doing it just this way, and I always felt like they should have called it in. Or had back up of some type. I told them that inside this house was a man with a gun. That should have been a red flag for SWAT. But no, these two men met at the front of the house and they conferred, and they decided that this was their collar. And that they would roll with the punches. It never made sense. It almost feels artificial writing it. But it’s true. And this is how it went down. 

These two Officers walked up, with their guns drawn, and they waited for the door to open.

It did shortly after. And it was Gabrielle that had opened it. From the Jeep, we could see the Officers say something to her and moments later they were inside her home.

 “Dude, I cannot believe you did this,” Ryan said to me from the back of the Jeep.

“What did you want me to do, Ryan?” I had asked,

“You should of went back there with a gun and got your shit back!” he said with full conviction.

I turned to him. I was incensed. At this point, gangster rap was the new sound on the street. NWA talking about telling the police to go fuck themselves and so on and so on. We sat in this Jeep Wrangler. Four white kids with no idea about Compton. About what it was to be a gangster. For me, growing up in Brooklyn, I knew violence. I knew hate. But I sure as hell did not understand how someone could translate living in the suburbs of Boca Raton with the ghetto style of an in area in Los Angeles that existed over three thousand miles away.

No, I was not a hardcore nigga. And no, one way or another, I earned those fifty CD’s. And I didn’t care how I would be judged by my action. What is an action but just a response to another action? It infuriated me that this pocket-faced fuck, rail thin, the runt of the litter, taunted me with this fairy tale accusation.

“Ryan, if I stayed, there would have been a tombstone that read ‘Rob Coleman, died keeping it real. But I would be dead. And fuck that. And fuck you! No, I am not going to die cause of these assholes. And I did what I had to do, so fuck you!”

Ryan laughed. He saw the stupidity in this whole thing. I think we all did. This whole gangster thing was infecting this town like a virus. Every day became more violent. Every day you saw someone turn and do something vicious and out of the normal. Everyone wanted to be a gangster. Everyone was bitter and angry that they did not grow up in Compton. This suburban life, that their parents worked hard to get them, was nothing more than a prison. And the only place they could go to escape was their imagination. Unfortunately, their ideas became fruition, and soon after, Compton came to Boca. Soon after, we might have well all been born under the crashing tide of chaos, because that’s what we all chose as our governing party.

At this moment, however, there was no Sound. No gunfire. No Compton. No Crips and bloods. Just silence. We all turned our attention back to this fact. Why was there silence? These two Police Officers entered ready for a fucking war, and nothing.

It stayed this way for a bit. Our chemical-filled heads could not handle this. Soon after, a respite came. The two officers exited the house of Gabrielle and made their way to the car. The first Officer was holding the CD case in his right hand. He came up and handed the case to me.

“The gun was a fake,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about it but here are your CD’s back.”

I took the case from the man.

“Thank you, Officer, I really appreciate it.”

“You boys need to get out of here,” the Officer said. “Just just call it a night.”

We agreed and took off.

Who knows where we ended up next. Who knows. The Black Snowman was a hell of a hit. What you would call an ‘Ugly Little Bastard.’ We drove off, and that was it.

A few days later I came home and heard a message on my answering machine from the Black Football Player from a Rival High School.

“Yeah, I just want you to know that you fucking dead. You hear me? I’m gonna kill your ass. You better look both ways nigga cause you wanted.”

For some reason, I did not believe him. And I knew that he was as much of a gangster as I was one. Nothing ever did come of it. I sit here today writing this without ever having to look both ways. We were young. And this idea of keeping it real was still only utilized in the real urban areas of our great nation. None would be the wiser. And although it got a little hairy from time to time, I knew that the nomenclature of this current movement was still in its infancy. Cannot still say that is the case. But that’s how it stood then.

I got my CD’s back. Tiny little pieces of plastic that over time became a distant relic of my life. They mean nothing now, but how quickly we were ready to die for them. Tiny little pieces of plastic. The world was slowly turning upside down and I had bought a ticket for the ride.