Once the car was still I exited quickly, to get a bearing on the dark parking lot. I also wanted to avoid a clash with Pam. Li’l Hunchy followed suit. The girls, however, busied themselves with what I believed to be purses and jackets. Not wanting to be in their company, Hunchy and I started out around the side of the building on Eighty-fifth Street. I walked next to the building and Li’l Hunchy took the other track by the street. Realizing suddenly that the girls were nowhere behind us, I stopped and gave a small shout.
“Y’all better hurry up.” I waited a second, got no response, and turned to walk away.
As if out of thin air, three men had materialized in front of us. Wary now, because I was unarmed, I continued walking toward the three that were coming toward us. I put on my mask (a mask is an extended version of a mad-dog stare; it’s one’s combat face) and prepared for a possible confrontation. Taking in the attire of the three, I noticed no unusual bulges that would indicate they were strapped. And by their facial appearances they looked to be older, perhaps in their late twenties or early thirties. One had a full beard, another had a mustache. The third was clean-shaven. All three, I remember, were quite earnest, stern-looking cats. Their masks, if they were wearing any at all, were a bit more convincing than mine.
Li’l Hunchy felt the tension as well, for when I glanced over at him he looked nauseated. There was no sign of Pam, Yolanda, or Kim. The atmosphere quickly deteriorated to a kind of High Noon showdown—them walking toward us and us walking toward them. All the while our eyes were locked onto one another, trying to get an edge, if there was one to get at all. The closer we came to one another the thicker the tension became. My security alarm was screaming in my ear: “PROBLEM-DANGER-PROBLEM-DANGER!” But what could I do? Break and run? Although I have retreated in the past, as a tactic, I was not about to run now in the face of potential danger. They might not even be enemies, or they might not be armed, in which case we could handle the hand-to-hand combat. Three against two were winnable odds.
And then, the moment of truth.
“Ain’t you Monster Kody?” the mustached one said. He seemed to be the one in charge.
Looking directly at him in my best confrontational stare—a combination of annoyance and insanity—I spoke through gritted teeth. “Yeah, I’m Monster Kody, Eight Tray Gangsters, what’s up?”
Without another word he swung into motion, reaching into his coat for his weapon. To my immediate left I saw another movement, this one equally disturbing: Li’l Hunchy had broke and left me.
Turning quickly on my assailants, I was just in time to see the first muzzle flash and hear the resounding Boom of his gun. Hit in the stomach first, I was knocked up and against the surplus wall with such force that shock and surprise overrode any pain. Once he saw that the wall kept me up on my feet and that the first shot was not fatal, he stepped in close to shoot me in the chest. My instinct shouted, “SURVIVAL!” I tried a desperate rush toward the gun.
BOOM!
Another shot. This time in my left hand, which had come within inches of the gun. The shot would have been a heart shot had my hand not been extended in an attempt to grab the weapon.
All the while the other two assailants were looking on approvingly, almost as if watching a movie. But I had had enough and decided to try an escape. Turning in the direction of Western Avenue I tried to run, but in midstride—
BOOM!
I was shot again in the back. This shot, like the first, had a devastating impact, and I was slammed to the ground.
Dazed, I struggled to get back to my feet. On one knee now, I was kicked in the side by the shooter, knocking me back down on my back. As they stood over me, aiming down, I had no other defense but to raise my legs in an attempt to avoid being shot in the torso.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! And then—
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
“Damn,” I remember wishing, “I hope they haven’t invented a seven-shot.”
Silence rained down like the deafening crash of cymbals; then I heard the sounds of running feet.
Lying there, looking up at the sky, I was swarmed by a million thoughts. My first one was sort of comical: He shot me like I be shooting people. And then the seriousness sank in as I saw a line of blood trickling down the sidewalk. My life was draining into the gutter, and I thought of all the things I had never done but wanted to do. I thought—for the first time—about my daughter, Keonda. She’d never know me. My thoughts were purely civilian. Payback was not even an issue. My thoughts gravitated toward things I had never done, people I’d never see again. And then I began to see, as if on a TV screen, everybody I had ever known in my sixteen years on this planet. Hundreds of people paraded past my inner vision, and they were as clear as day. Peacefully I lay there and watched the show. In that time, there on the sidewalk, I began to know what “rest in peace” meant. For until that moment I had lived only in war. Now the war was over. I settled back and waited to die.
And I’ll be damned if someone didn’t interrupt my peaceful fadeaway.
Li’l Hunchy had run around the whole block and come back to help me. A little too late.
Leaning over me he said, “What happened?”
I couldn’t believe this dude. With all the strength I had I said, “Muthafucka, I’m shot!”
Seizing me by the collar, he dragged me around to the front of the store, where someone else helped him get me inside. Now confusion hit in full swing. From within the gathering crowd I heard voices.
“Isn’t that Monster Kody?” And, “Ooh, it’s gonna be some shit now!”
Some girl who I didn’t even know was sitting on my legs crying and saying, “Calm down, calm down!” though I had not so much as moved since I’d been half-dragged, half-carried into the damn store.
In an attempt to console me, Li’l Hunchy said that I would be fine, that I had “only” been shot in the leg and the hand. These were my visible wounds, but I was burning elsewhere.
“I’m shot in the stomach and in the back, too,” I managed to say.
“No, no, you ain’t, I can see the holes.”
He was telling me where I was shot!
Meanwhile, this girl I didn’t know was wailing away, crying out of control about me calming down—and she was more hysterical than anyone in the store.
My breath was getting short and my anger was growing. Trying to get someone to unbutton the top button on my coat was the hardest task. Each time I’d point to my neck for help, signaling for someone to unbutton my collar, Li’l Hunchy would pipe up.
“You ain’t shot in the neck, only in your hand and left leg.”
I was steadily losing breath.
“Calm down, calm down!” this goddamn girl was constantly yelling.
Turning my neck and looking around to possibly secure some sane help, I saw an elderly man come forth out of the crowd.
“Cut his shoes off, cut his shoes off of him.”
Oh, shit, I thought, it’s these fools that are going to kill me, not my wounds.
Finally, the ambulance arrived.
Before I was carted off I managed to tell the hysterical stranger, “Bitch, if I live, I’m gonna kick your ass!”
Astounded, she finally calmed down. Amazing.
In the ambulance I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I was in tremendous pain, in ICU. Three days had elapsed, although I didn’t yet know that. A tube ran up my nose and down into my stomach; I had one IV tube in my arm and another tube in my penis; stitches extended from my hairline to my solar plexus; there was a cast on my left hand and three huge bullet holes in my left leg. The pain was almost unbearable.
A nurse came in and administered a shot, which took me up and away.
The next time I came to I was in another room. The nurse said my condition was stable. She gave me another shot. Weak, very skinny, and dehydrated, I drifted off again.
I walked to the driver’s side window and demanded his wallet, at which time he smiled with a baneful sneer, drew a pistol, and fired one round into my chest.
BOOM!
The sound reverberated again and again, echoing away in my unconscious mind.
My own screaming woke me from my fitful sleep. Sitting up in the hospital bed, I struggled for clarity. Was it just a dream? I felt my chest for blood, a hole, anything that could prove or, for that matter, disprove my fearful thought of being shot again. I bad been dreaming—having a nightmare would be more accurate. But my dreams, or those I could recollect, have always been punctuated with gunfire. Gunfire directed at me, coming from me, or in my general vicinity. And never have I shrunk from the presence of such lethal violence.
Being chased by Randy’s huge donut is quite another matter, one to which I could not attach any sort of logic whatsoever. That scared me. For years that damn donut chased me around in my dreams. I was so deathly afraid of those donut dreams that once I had started banging I often contemplated destroying the huge plastic replica on Normandie and Century. Even today I loathe the sight of it. My screams alerted the on-duty nurse, not to mention scaring the daylights out of my roommate, who was also a gunshot victim. In minutes I was being attended by a nice-looking Chicano nurse who, as it turned out, had seen such postshooting behavior many times. She explained that it was quite normal and expected. My main concern at first was to make sure I had just been dreaming, and then my pride stepped in and I inquired about the tone and sound of my screaming. “Was I really screaming or was I just shouting? Was it loud, or what?”
Against my worst fears of damaged masculinity, or what I perceived to be such, she confirmed that yes, it was a scream and it was very loud. Perhaps she felt she had been too literal for my young ego, as I’m certain she saw me slump into a mournfully sagging posture. She fell heavily into a spiel about my nightmares being “normal,” “natural,” and “a result of the terrifying experience I had been through.” All that was fine and sounded good, but could she please go down to South Central and explain that to my homies? Or, better yet, my enemies, who would just love to hear of me having nightmares. This line of thinking caused me for the first time to question my roommate’s origins and set affiliation. For if he belonged to the wrong set this could be very harmful to my reputation and perhaps make it all the more difficult to continue my ascent through the ranks. Monster Kody having nightmares? Unthinkable.
Shortly after the nurse’s departure and before the morphine she’d administered took me under, I questioned my roommate. He was a hapless civilian, fresh out of the backwoods of a small town in Georgia, whose people lived in a highly active part of Los Angeles. He had been sprayed with buckshot from a passing vehicle. The possibility that he was a civilian had never crossed my mind, perhaps because I always tried not to shoot civilians, unless of course the bangers outnumbered them in a gathering. Should we get some flack for that later on, we could always claim “association.” We were hard-driven for results, for confirmed body counts of combatants. From what my roommate said, he was simply standing in the front yard when a passing car unloaded some buckshot into him. After he told me of this and his immediate plans to depart for “back home,” he repeated over and over in a strong southern drawl, “Damnedest thang… damnedest thang.”
He was totally taken aback by L.A.’s madness. But to me it all seemed quite normal. “Normal” like the nurse had explained my nightmares were normal. It was “natural” for me to retaliate against anybody as a “result of the terrifying experience I had been through,” just like the nurse had explained. Of course I twisted her explanation of my psychosis into a perverted alibi for my continued behavior. I rationalized my actions continually, and with each successive level of consciousness I reached, my rationalization became less convincing to me. Questions were often left to hang in the balance because my conscience simply refused to process them due to such illogical reasoning. So I’d avoided questioning myself about my ongoing radical behavior. I’d deadened my conscience with PCP, alcohol, and friends, who themselves had done likewise. I dozed off under the soothing waves of the morphine, wondering how it must be to live a civilian life.
I just couldn’t imagine living the life of a “hook,” those seemingly spineless nerds who were always victims of someone’s ridicule or physical violence, who never responded to an affront of any type. I had, while in primary school, been victimized by cats during their ascent to “king of the school.” My milk money was taken. My lips were busted two or three times. Not because I decided to defend my dime or my honor, but because my assailant simply whacked me. Early on I saw and felt both sides of the game being played where I lived. It was during my time in elementary school that I chose to never be a victim again, if I could help it. There was no gray area, no middle ground. You banged or held strong association with the gang, or else you were a victim, period. To stress this when we made appearances at high schools, we’d often jump on hooks and take their money, leather jackets, hats, and such.
What’s contradictory here, and is one of the irrational questions I battled with in my later years, is why are hooks victims of our physical wrath but unfair game in our lethal violence? The answer seems to be that hooks seldom, if ever, shoot back. Other bangers—whom I’m convinced, like me, have been victimized at some point in their lives and refused to let it continue—respond with the same violence they receive, if not something more lethal. Because of this, they must be smashed. Hooks are easy pickings for most anyone. But bangers know that there is no glory in killing a hook. In fact, it’s frowned upon in most areas. To me, however, to be unconnected meant to be a victim. And I couldn’t imagine that.
The next time I surfaced from my morphine-induced drift, I was in tremendous pain. Everywhere and all at once pain pounced on me with mind-wracking weight. My stomach, which had been surgically cut open to remove some shredded intestines, was now closed with sutures and staples. Since the surgery was so recent the cut skin had not yet started to heal, and in between the staples the openings looked pus-filled. The sutures were so tight that I could barely move without feeling tied down. My stomach resembled railroad tracks that in some areas had been blown apart by saboteurs. The sight of this alone caused lumps in my throat. To the left and slightly below my navel was where the bullet had entered. There was just a hole there, uncovered and open. I could see pink inside. My pain in this area came from under my navel and around the staples. The tube in my nose, which ran down into my stomach, was attached to a pumplike machine next to my bed. Looking at it caused pain. It was extracting green slime from my stomach and storing it in a clear jar. The nurse called it poison. I couldn’t comprehend that and just assumed I had been hit with poison bullets. The catheter in my maleness ran from under the covers over the side of the bed and into what, I don’t know. I never looked. This was also very painful. My left hand had been broken by the impact of the second shot and was in a cast. It, too, throbbed with pain.