Unruly Read Online Free PDF Page A

You’ll just need to turn away from your worldly ways.” Being on reprove meant that she could still attend Kingdom Hall.
    Moms boldly said to the elders, “ I don’t think I want to stop doing what I’m doing.”
    â€œWe have no other choice than to let you go . . .” the elders responded.
    Jehovah lost yet another Witness and Moms never returned to Kingdom Hall again. Free at last .
    Â 
    CHERRY AND MY GRANDMOTHER saw no other choice but to distance themselves from Moms, which meant me, too. Even her older brother, Bruce, completely cut her off. Moms often asked me with tears in her eyes, “How can they turn their back on me?”
    I was proud of Moms, though. I wanted her to know that I wanted to be with her. If she was going to be the black sheep of the family, she wasn’t going out like that alone. I had seen things and heard people talking about getting disfellowshipped. I understood the concept, but the practice still made no sense. To this day, Moms is totally turned off by religion. Now she just reads her Bible alone, praying that God can even hear her.
    There we were, another Black family divided because of the most lethal drug of them all, religion . I know it broke my grandparents’ hearts to turn their backs on Moms and me. I could feel that my grandparents knew in their hearts that they had to get away from Kingdom Hall and Hollis, Queens. My grandparents sold their house and moved to Virginia.
    I was almost twelve. My grandparents had helped Moms for almost six years. It was time for me to go back to my Moms, where I belonged. My grandparents had taken me through elementary school while Moms got back on her feet. They had gotten me through the worst of it. Or so they thought.
    I was heading back home as a young man with some questions churning in my head and heart. I had returned to the hood. The hopelessness hung heavily in the air. Drugs were all over the morning, afternoon and late-night news. The row of stores that we walked by everyday was indelibly printed on my brain. The stores that stayed open late lit the way for all of us to reach our destinations safely. Every day of my life, Moms and me walked past Guzman Foods, the Check Cashing place, Chinese Kitchen, Pizza, Wines and Liquors and the 99-Cent Store, which were the glue that held the hood together. The other side of the street was the dark side, where empty lots were weakly protected by dangling barbed wire fences that only served to create a place for mischievous young men to lurk.
    Drugs were all over everyone’s life like a sticky glue that we couldn’t get off of us.
    Â 
    IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, my crew was Jason and Kavin. I was sort of the leader of our group because I had the craziest ideas and I was always planning some shit to do. People with ideas tend to be leaders. It was with them that my escapades with partying began. We actually started slowly and innocently. Our first joints were filled with oregano. We didn’t get real weed until we started going to Jason’s corner store in Laurelton called Pop and Kims, where the older guys hung out. It was a favorite spot in the hood because they stored the 40s in the ice cream freezer, so they were extra cold. One of the older guys offered us some real weed one time, and after that, we never took out the oregano again.
    For us to be kids that young we had big personalities. My homies Devin and Jason both had light skin and Kavin was darker. I was somewhere in the middle and we all had fresh flattops or Gumby haircuts. We thought we were the shit .
    Â 
    SOMETIMES, WHEN MOMS came home after midnight, on the weekends, she would smell us smoking weed in the lobby of the building. Hiding inside the hoods of our sweatshirts, we all would loiter, holding up the walls, smoking a little weed, talking shit, listening to hip-hop and making plans to be big somewhere and somehow. My boom box was always there, providing the sounds. NWA’s