When I Was the Greatest Read Free Page B

day, we would just hang on the stoop. When school was in, I had to be upstairs by the time the streetlights came on, but summer, I could hang pretty late as long as I was out front. They never had a curfew, so they were always down to kick it. We would play “Would you rather,” talk trash about girls, and I would talk about sports, but neither of them knew anything about athletes, so I spent a lot of time just schooling them. Noodles would read his comics and draw in his book, and Needles, who at the time was still known as Ricky, would kick freestyle raps about whatever he saw on the street. Like, if it was a bottle on the sidewalk, he would rap about it. Or if it was a girl walking by, he would rhyme about her. And believe it or not, he was pretty good, even with the occasional outbursts that, for me, had become so normal that it was like they weren’t even happening. One rap I always remember is, “Chillin’ on the stoop, flyer than a coop, stay off the sidewalk, ’cuz there’s too much dog poop.” And then, out of nowhere, he screamed, “Shithead!”
    Even when we weren’t together, we were. See—and thisis gonna sound weird—but our bathrooms shared a wall, and I don’t know if it was because of water damage or what, but the wall was superthin. You could hear straight through it, and it wasn’t like we were spying on each other using the bathroom—that wouldn’t be cool—but sometimes we’d talk to each other through the wall whenever we were washing up. When it was Noodles, we wouldn’t really be saying too much, just asking if the other person was there. I don’t know why. It was just always cool knowing someone else was there, I guess. And I always knew when it was Needles, because I could hear him in there rapping and talking all kinds of crazy stuff, cussing and whatnot. Whenever he was rapping, I’d make a beat by knocking on the wall, until Doris or Jazz came banging on the bathroom door, telling me to cut it out. The point is, we were always, always, always together. That’s just the way it was.
    Most of our neighborhood accepted Needles for who he was. No judgment. I mean, it’s New York. A man walking down the street dressed like Cinderella? That’s nothing. A woman with a tattoo of a pistol on her face? Who cares. So what’s the big deal about a syndrome? Whatever. It’s in our blood to get over it, especially when you’re one of our own, and by that I mean, when you live on our block.
    Noodles was the only person always tripping about Needles. Despite the head swipes, Noodles was super-protective over his brother, and paranoid that people were laughing at him. He would always be shouting at somebody, or giving dirty looks to anyone he thought might be eventhinking about cracking a joke about Needles. It was like he lived by some weird rule, that only he could treat Needles bad, no one else.
    But nobody was ever really laughing at Needles. There was never a reason to. Needles did sweet things that were normal, just not always normal around here. He would help old ladies get their bags up the steps, ticking and accidentally cussing the whole way, calling them all kinds of names, but they didn’t care because everybody had gotten used to it. They knew he couldn’t help it, and that he was fine. Some of them would even give him a few dollars for his help.
    But there were these times when Needles would sort of spaz out, but not like Noodles, who would just trip over any little thing. Needles’s was more like mini meltdowns. It was like a weird part of the syndrome where every now and then his brain would tell him to have an outburst, but it wouldn’t tell him to stop. So he would just go wild, cussing and screaming, over and over again, rapid-fire style. And even though folks around here was cool with Needles, the freak-outs were the only times people really looked at him like he was,