Paper Chasers Read Free Page B

with each other.
    â€œHolz,” he said, “I can’t believe Richie is dead.”
    â€œWord! I know what you mean.” Although death for us was nothing new—we all knew people who in the past had been killed—Richie was the first one from Fourth Crew to be exterminated.
    The crew was so close that we might as well have been family. There were so many of us. We even had peoples in Virginia who were down with the crew. Aside from the females that were in the crew, the main members of Fourth Crew were as follows: me, Randy, Latiefe, Dwight, Kwame, Xavier, Donnie, Erik, Claudius, J.P, and Reggie.
    My government name is Mark Holsey. However, for years everybody called me Holz. Randy’s birth name was Randolph. Everyone called Latiefe, Tee. And there was Dwight, who went by the alias Dee, or Big Dee, or Godfather Dee. Xavier was known as X, and Claudius was the six foot, five inch more-hops-than-Mike-Jordan-basketball-man-child. Reggie stayed in Virginia because his dumb jackass joined the Marines after high school and he got shipped to Virginia like a slave.
    We all grew up together. All of us lived on the same block, either right across the street or down the block from one another. We hailed from a town in Queens, New York called Laurelton, or L.A. for short. More specificly, we grew up on 234th Street in Laurelton Queens, L.A. consisted of many rectangular streets and perpendicular avenues. There was 221st, 222nd, 230th, Francis Lewis Boulevard, and many, many more blocks. But the main street that ran through all of Laurelton was called Merrick Boulevard.
    Merrick Boulevard was where all of the action took place. It helped New York earn its reputation as a fast-paced, crime-filled city. All kinds of dirt went down on Merrick—everything from drug dealing, to killings, to numbers running, to prostitution, and much more. Merrick Boulevard had literally, although illegally, made millionaires out of a few brothers.
    Since we lived on 234th Street, we used the word fourth from the last number in 234, and that’s how we named our crew. We pronounced it “Forf Crew,” because saying “Fourth” sounded too proper and white.
    As a crew we were mixed up in all sorts of things, including crime. But we weren’t a gang because usually gangs are of negative mentalities from their origin. Fourth Crew was basically about positive actions. Everyone in the crew had roots in a positive mentality, in the sense that we all came from good middle class families. Yeah, we got mixed up in wrongdoings, but so did almost everyone else in America, including the government and its officials.
    On occasion we had been compelled to bring it to a nigga. We’d definitely stomped out many other crews and gangs. We’d gotten into a lot of beef in our day, but no one in the crew had ever been murdered, not until Richie was killed. I guess you could say that it was bound to happen sooner or later. But even with Richie’s death, it was not like the crew was just gonna dismantle. We would continue on as a crew, no doubt about it.
    In the past, Kwame had brushed or flirted with death on a number of occasions. Latiefe had been slashed on the back of the head and neck and needed almost one hundred stitches to close the gash—a gash wound that left a permanent nasty scar on his head. But death, never, at least not in Fourth Crew.
    Randy was finally ready. We walked down to Richie’s house, and when we arrived we mixed in with the rest of the crew members that were already there. My sister was there, as was her best friend, Nia. Sabine and Liz were also there, and everybody, including Richie’s family, was all packed shoulder to shoulder inside the house. We ate the typical black Sunday meal, which consisted of cornbread, black-eyed peas, collard greens, and ribs drowned in barbecue sauce.
    As we ate we exchanged our different memories of Richie. I didn’t say anything out loud, but the