Angel Dust

Curtis

Lemme tell you about the night Fiddy got shot. Shit. Fuckin' night that was. What I remember bout it, that is. It's hazy. Hazy as the smoke from a blunt. A serious blunt. A badman’s blunt. I'll tell you what I can recall. There're some gaps. Wouldn't be a night if there weren't, would it. Course, the memory kinda blanks a bit after we linked up with DMX. Y'all know that if life isn't like a dream after linking with D, y’know, hard to remember, you know he's in that place he sometimes goes, that place where it is only him and the devil, and you know he's hurting like hell, aching in his blood... No such night. He was on form. Big time. Flowing like cosmos, get me? He'd just written a new song. It was about this time he got blazed with these greasy hood rats in England. Naturally, he has some reservations about the U.K. He can't with take anywhere that has estates rather than hoods all that seriously. He finds it funny that there's such a thing as a rapper from Yorkshire. Pussyhole's main influence was Dylan Thomas he said, creasing the fuck up. Still, some things impressed him. Shit, he said, it might be where Prince Charles and Camilla live and all, but those wastemen in the London made Brooklyn crackheads look like Sidney Potier. Then he shook his head. Then he said it again, shit. The song was called For The Boys Hitting The Pipe I Still Got Love For You. He'd read it graffiti’d on a door near a public library in Hackney and it moved him. He dropped us a few licks. Y'all know how emotional he is. Who else could write, say you want to fight me, fight these tears. Seriously. He was ballin' his eyes out as he was spittin'. It was tight. Gave a brother hope. But that was post 9/11. America wasn't ready for that shit. No time for redemption. America was raw as diaper rash, and just as cranky as the baby. Y'all remember how Bush announced the period of grieving was over. Y'all remember how long after that was? Two weeks. Shit. If y'all catch me no longer mourning all I've lost, it'll be me I hopes is dead. If you see me stoppin' droppin' liquor for my fallen boys, my bitches, my homies, my loved ones from back in the day, my dogs back from the block, y'all know, my friends, Warren Beatbox, Sally Alleyway, Welfare Wendy, Gentile Joel, Black Sinatra, Rabid Ruby, White Barry White, Will Spliff, Billy Suicidal, Fanny Howe, Tranny Davis Jnr., Evil Jesus, Elizabeth Rotten, Johnny Cotten, The King of The Juice, Tennessee Tennyson, and Sister Sisyphus, then my black ass seriously ain't worth the fine skin that the good Lord graced it with. Cos' the thing is, as y'all know deep down, when you love a dog, a dog loves back. Alive or not. So if any of y'all see me dry eyed over all my boys that I left behind when I hung my rag up in the kitchen, boys back from the motherland, boys havin' it harder than y'all can imagine, then you'd be right in thinking that all I be is rank meat making a shameful parody of mortality. I'd hold my hands up and admit to that and take a bullet for it. But, no, that ain't me. My grief breathes inside of me. Trust me on that. Damn son. I’m shaking. Enough of that shit, else I'll be the one starts ballin' my eyes out. Let me get back... DMX wrapped up his bit and Fiddy silently nodded in his direction. That from him is like winning the Nobel or some shit. On that he bounced. He bounced higher than Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Seen that shit? I prefer the books. Momma read them to me when I was little. She used to say, you can have all the money in the world and move a million miles away from it, but you'll never escape the ghetto of the mind if you don't read, Winston. That's how I got my moniker. I was reading at recess and some kid pulls me up on it, so I told him, badman's read. Course, I backed it up by giving him a little lick. Had to. No one fucks with BadMan Winston, Claire Verona said, and it just kinda stuck. She was sort of queen of the school. I wonder what she’s on these days. You should have seen brother, you really should have. I could have married that girl, I really could have. Course, I'd moved on from Winnie the Pooh by the time I hit High School. Still, tho, I get do get sad when I see the cartoons. That's the problem with Disney. It turns everything into a product. Thing is tho, you can't put a price tag on what's real, what's felt. That's why I despair at some of this modern hip hop. The money hip hop that Fiddy, saddens me to say, was a key figure. The rap trap. It's taken the Disney blueprint. Sell, sell, sell. Still, hip hop survive that shit. As Public Enemy will tell you, too black, too strong. It'll break the chains. Y'all know what I mean, a chain of gold is still a chain. My favourite character in Winnie The Pooh is Piglet. You know I got little time for pink skinned Motherfuckas, but Piglet's aight. Most of those cracker bastards though, they just don't relate. It's because deep down they jealous as hell. Seriously. You know what those silly fools really feel towards a brother. Envy. One of the seven sins. They envy us our persecution. The sufferance. The dignity of the flesh. More shit you just can't buy. They're jealous cause the only motherfuckas that fucked them up is themselves. They can't justify their bullshit, so they go beyond. Beyond bullshit. That's why the cops broke so many black bodies last year. Broke them like bread... I despair at times. Fuck the police. Seriously. Fuck this land. I mean it. How do you go from having a brother behind the desk in the oval office to having a klansman? That's why it's the Whitehouse. Damn, show me a brother who can't relate heavy to Eeyore and I'll show you a fella frontin' harder than uncle Tom's nephew. Selling you  more shit than Pharell Williams skipping down the street singing about being happy. Shit so dumb it should be sang in a clown costume by someone with a whited up face. Y'all know what I'm saying. I'm a get too furious if I keep on... DMX bounced and we hit da club. It's probably no big secret that fiddy was pushin' at the time. Naturally a motherfucka piles up a lot of enemies in that game. Well, Fiddy had more enemies than Christ had disciples. Like Christ, I saw Fiddy rise from the dead tho. It was that night. Fiddy got shot that night. Fiddy got shot hard. Shot not once, shot not twice, but shot nine motherfuckin' times. Follow? Here's the thing though, Fiddy didn't give two shits. Fiddy didn't give a solitary shit. Just danced it off. Motherfucka was too high to die. Motherfucka was already in heaven. We'd been doing Angel Dust since the a.m.