I often wonder if there's much difference between growing up in the suburbs and growing up in the city. I grew up in a place that was a little of both: The Valley. Here's a slice of life from the Val.
One schoolnight in 6th grade, my friend Lisa, who was in all respects my partner in crime, invited me to my first kickback. A kickback, I quickly learned, is an informal gathering in someone's living room or back yard, or sometimes in an abandoned house. This first kickback was at our friend Tonie's apartment in an area of North Hollywood that was run by a gang called Valley Locos. Valley Locos was a lesser known neighborhood, but were cliqued up with larger gangs, so they had a fair amount of street cred at our elementary school. The boys we were hanging out with were between 12 and 15, but they had older homeboys, so we knew they were legit.
Tonie invited us over to watch Duke of Earl, a movie by Victory Outreach Church that offers a fictionalized account of gang culture on the streets and in prison, and draws special attention to the risks inherent in the lifestyle and the benefits of finding Jesus Christ to be one's personal Lord and Savior. We weren't looking for Jesus. I think we were mostly looking for fashion tips and to see which scenes were filmed in places we knew. Tonie's aunt, who kicked it with Pacoima 13, had made her a copy on VHS, and also left half a bottle of Crown Royal for us to drink while we watched. The boys, Payaso, Klever, and Shadow brought a couple of joints and it was on.
Before the boys got there, we fired up the curling iron, applied a liberal coating of Aquanet and lined our lips with Maybeline eyebrow pencil in Dark Brown. We looked hard. We looked street. We looked sexy. We were twelve. Lisa and Tonie were hoping to scam with the boys, and I was hoping to get through the night without anyone calling me a schoolgirl. I was the youngest in the group, had the most protective mother, and was, for the moment, the furthest from dropping out of school. I had also never kissed a boy, and wasn't really sure if "scamming" meant "making out" or "boning."
After saying our "what's ups", we put the tape in the VCR, passed the bottle of Crown around and sparked a J, and by the time Cisco got out of prison, we were spinning the bottle on the floor and taking turns throwing scams in the kitchen. I postponed my 7 minutes in heaven as long as I could, fearing that the boys would tell everyone at school that I didn't know how to kiss. But as Cisco stabbed Duke under the bridge downtown, Payaso put his hands on my hips, lifted me up onto the kitchen counter, and licked my clench lips. It took me a minute, but by the time the credits rolled I had figured out the whole kissing thing and was macking like a puta on prom night.
When I was a kid, I thought we were unique, bad-asses, living a fast life. I assumed the other kids in school were in their bedrooms doing homework at a desk instead of a coffee table and planning for college while we ran around being little traviesas. And I felt both guilty and proud of this. I've realized that the suburban girls were fooling around, too, maybe without the funny nicknames and big hair. But while I'm certain they had plenty of burgundy lipstick to lure their boys to the mack-down, I know they didn't have our soundtrack of killer oldies to set the mood.
Note: Don't ask my where our parents were during all this. I'm saving that info for another post. It's enough to say they weren't there.
Ohhh, memories, love it!!
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