back in the days/ when i was young i’m not a kid anymore
but some days/ i sit and wish i was a kid again
-ahmad
Original Mix:
We’d roll together me and my people
always together
tight knit like wool sweaters
with dreams of making it
big in our city- or making our city big.
Squeezed into the back of an ‘86 light blue hoopty
honda civic who’s bumper we’d sometimes retrieve
a block or two behind us - still
The kicker box stuffed into the back trunk
bumping Illmatic and Ready to Die
made us feel like we was the shit.
On our way to see Common in concert
before he lost the sense.
we’d roll northward - kings and queens of chicago’s south side planet
cause anyone who’s ever been there knows
it’s a whole other world.
Cut:
People drive past us on lakeshore drive
witness to the comedic antics of teens
who’ve discovered that weed makes weekends
with difficult parents easier to stomach.
Their scowling brows take in the pants sliding off our asses
oversized t-shirts clinging to our shoulders
staring at us like aliens from outer space
reminding us
you’re lucky you get to go out at all. when I was your age...
We wave off their admonishments.
make out in the back seat while friends drive us to the mall
later hiding hickeys with turtlenecks
or trying to twist them off with a cold lipstick top.
Cut:
Spray can in one hand bottle of cheap liquor in the other
backpacks and fat laces our uniforms
we swore we’d rep the chi for life
carry the rhythm of fat caps, funk, skateboards, and turntables
in our hearts forever
I pull my skully with the brim low
pull my men’s size 32 jeans up
and bob my head to this, my era of hip hop.
Break:
I reminisce on the cipher of familiar faces.
Rewind:
Hitting up the corner store
we trade our saturday nights and fake id’s
for bags of swedish fish and cool ranch doritos
buying cheap bottles of boons and margarita mix.
We gather every weekend to let the smoke
of hand rolled jays wander across our faces
like clouds across our city’s skyline
during summer thunderstorms.
We gather in that cipher
six or seven deep with a deep dish
cheese pizza from palermo’s
a twelve pack of icy RC colas
and watch style wars or beat street
dreaming we’d travel to New York and bomb
train yards like it was still back in the day.
Remix:
We were so new school
worshiping anything
that anchored our devotion
to hip hop in authenticity.
We were in love
with a culture that gave us the space
to rebel against our parents blue collar dreams.
In love with music that gave us a reason
to move to the sound of our own drums.
After a few rounds of passing the jay
and once the style wars tape had started
to rewind itself in the vcr
we roll
head downtown into the loop
with nothing but the clothes we racked from Marshall’s
the paint we’d racked from true value
and the names we picked -
Scratch:
meela peas side 2 acter
bigs noble vegas sam one
sleek
Cut:
We sneak into subway tunnels
slink like rats that claim the underground
domains as their own
and emerge
with paint dripped shell toes
cold noses and fingers
turned aqua black and pink
then run on the el tracks
suspended above the below zero streets of Chicago
wishing we were suspended in time
like grains of sand in a spinning hourglass turned over and over
blessed with the cockiness and certainty of being sixteen
we believed we ran the city.
Scratch:
Before the broken hearts
before the reality of bills and students loans
before the reality of infamil and pampers
before the now and later sweetness of our youth
we existed within that cipher of familiar faces
with hip hop as our soundtrack
and fear never factored into our futures
cause -
From A South Side Girl’s Guide to Love and Sex (Tia Chucha Press, 2017). Copyright 2017 Mayda del Valle. Reprinted with the permission of the author.