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kleptomaniac, a pyromaniac, and just plain maniac. One time I almost burned our house down. Mom had moved us into a house in College Park but the heat wasn’t turned on yet, so I made a fire in the fireplace to keep warm. For some reason I decided it was a good idea to splash the fire with gasoline to keep it going, but then the flames jumped back into the gas can. I freaked out and threw the can into the fireplace, and the whole wall started going up. We got the fire put out, but the crazy thing was: I liked it. I liked watching that burst of flames, knowing I was the one who caused it.
    Back then, my behavior seemed natural to me, almost involuntary, truly elementary. And it was all about having the power. If you could ask almost anyone if they had a superpower, say the power to be invisible, and what theywould do with it, probably the first thing they would tell you would be something criminal. “Oh, I’d rob a bank.” I never got around to robbing banks, but I did a lot of bad things with my power.
    Early on in the inner city, you tend to become part of your surroundings. It was a lifestyle. And not everyone wants to be the star of that show. But I wanted to be something, and I wasn’t afraid to take the bumps and the bruises to become it. I can quote Will Smith, who said that his initial attraction toward acting was because “I wanted to be somebody. In matter of fact, I wanted to be somebody else.”
    That was me too. But I wasn’t acting.
    Based on my own early experiences in the streets and trains of Atlanta, crime can pay and pay pretty well sometimes. But eventually it’s going to end up costing you too. Did I ever get caught stealing? Hell, yes, I got caught sometimes, although I was never locked up for long. A couple of times I got banned from the mall for my antisocial behavior. Once when I was in seventh or eighth grade the police picked me up for stealing some sneakers and delivered me to my mother at her bridal shop. Man, she started whipping me so hard the police had to break it up. I guess they figured it would be more punishment to leave me with her than to haul my ass to jail.
    Mom didn’t believe in sparing the rod, and she had a belt at home with my name on it. She knew I was getting into trouble, and from an early age she would chase me around with that belt. Sometimes I’d try to lock myself inShedonna’s room, but it was no use. She’d always get me. But the beatings didn’t do any good. In the end it was me who decided to roll back my life of crime. Or at least try.
    As you get older and move further up the crime food chain, you begin to question yourself, because the rush you feel becomes less even as the stakes get higher. For me, my criminal path was leading to some truly dangerous shit. We’d have these big outside fights—like the Valley Boys and the Pony Boys would meet in a big park, and just fight it out like boys sometimes do—gang crap on a grand scale like in that movie
The Warriors
. The way that I remember it, guns came in with the drugs and the big eighties crack epidemic. And then typically you had a gun because you assumed someone else there would have a gun too. That’s a recipe for disaster. That’s how it became a kind of arms war right in the streets. Actually, it was like an arms war all mixed up with a black fashion show. Of course, leave it to the urban community to make just about anything about fashion. So for instance, I remember you had to hold your gun sideways, because that was fashionable. I don’t understand why we do that, but we do and with a lot of style.
    Word tends to spread quickly in the streets—especially when you’re a really strange-looking kid who doesn’t fit in anywhere and fights every chance he gets. I was hanging with some heavy characters, much older than me, and I was starting to realize that I needed to stop myself from becoming some random crime statistic. And eventually my rep was so bad that I was pulled right out of the