Faith No More
I’m bleeding… my mind keeps coming in and out and in and fucking out… I hear the doctors voices… I see the blackest of the night… I never saw the blades as they cut me… but I saw my blood as I fell… why… I kept thinking to myself, “Keep fighting”… but I couldn’t fucking stop this… I’m going to die tonight and I don’t even know it yet… but if I’m saying it right now, maybe I do. I always figure, you’re gotta go when you gotta go. But not at the hands of your friends… I couldn’t see this coming. What happened to me?
I can tell you that I stopped believing in God a long time ago. I got the tattoo of the black cobra on my arm with a cross as its tail and I’ve got a lot more. I grew up in a bad neighborhood and I saw my friends get killed for some bullshit. I was the youngest and the only girl, so I learned how to fight by fighting my brothers… now, they’re all dead, either by gang violence or by the gang violence that people call the War on Terror. They always wanted what was best for me, or so they said, you know? Every boyfriend I had, they ran away. So, I guess I developed a boy inside of me and I started with the girls. I knew how to fight, so I could just take what I wanted. I was 5’8” 140 lbs with long curly black hair I always wore in a ponytail, black eyes (very rare), and pure Puerto Rican brown skin. I was a bitch; I didn’t care who the fuck you are; I didn’t care how good you could fight; I didn’t care what gang you wear in or any of that shit. You beat me with fists; I could back with my girls or with a knife. You will never win because my pride and what I am and what I’ve been through wouldn’t let you.
I got in a gang after I dropped out of school. Look, fuck school, you know? I wasn’t going to class and I didn’t know what algebra was going to do for me in life. People always say no matter what you become, you need math… 1+1=2, motherfucker. So what? As long as I knew how to count my money when I got paid for boxing on the weekends, or when I’d rob some stupid bitch who was trying to street fight me or some rival gang member, or when we do a job and we’re splitting it up so I don’t get cheated. That’s what counts. Science? Who gives a shit about that? You want to see the insides of something, you fuck with me back then, I’d show you your insides. I loved to fight; and I go to the body. Most girls I know, they’re soft in the middle and you get that stomach, it’s over. Then you can bust their head open if you want to. I was the baddest bitch on the street and nobody fucked with me… especially after I joined the Tita Street Terrors. There are a lot of ways to join a gang. Some gangs, you gotta kill somebody or stab somebody… just some random person you don’t know, and sometimes, it’s somebody you do know. Me? I got jumped in. Those girls beat on me for a mad minute, but I got my shots in on them too and I started getting the best of them for a little while, before they swarmed me. It took a long time after that for me to calm down; I never met a fight I didn’t think I could win, no matter who it was against.
I can see myself… my right hand cracks against her pale jaw and her blood sprays the shower wall. My uppercut slams into her stomach, right on the swastika tattoo she’s got above her navel and spits blood on my gray tank top… the blonde bitch grabs me by my head and slams my shoulder into the wall, then she knees me in the stomach and I double over. Where are we? We’re in jail… I got busted on armed robbery, but I didn’t give any of my girls up. Two of them are dead; I guess it was all over the news. They came and picked me up later; funny thing is; this is the same prison my mom served four years before she had me and six years after. The girl I’m fighting is Arian Nation; they are everywhere, even in female prisons, but these stupid bitches are going out of style. No white supremacist bitch would fuck with me back in D.C. on the street; more of them came there once Obama got elected. One Black man becomes President and the disrespect just grows and grows… where was all that bad ass talk when Bush was sending boys like two of my brothers to get killed finishing his daddy’s war? Fuck history; fuck the world.
She head butts me and I stagger back and see stars. I’m not used to getting my ass kicked, but so far, that’s what’s happening. She gets me in the stomach with a right and I groan and keep moving back, then she knocks me up on the sink with a left hook and I look at her with blood running from my mouth to my hand as I try to wipe it. She takes my head and slams the back of it into the mirror behind me, breaking it.
“Come on, bitch!!” she says, grabbing my pants and trying to press my pussy, “I’m gonna fuck you up for stabbing Diane!!”
When I got in here, there were no girls I knew… nobody in my gang was here; I had to fit in somewhere. So, I did odd jobs, like you could pay me (yes, there’s money in prison if you look hard enough) to beat somebody or stab somebody. I was good at what I did and I worked for a woman named Baby, who had a problem with everybody, but her own gang. I guess she wanted me because I didn’t have a connection to anyone, but I came in with a reputation. You can’t see me coming… that’s how I got my name when I was initiated. I had beaten down so many people on the street, I had abused and influenced my way to the top of the food chain, not giving a shit who cared, but doing it in a way of what you people call stealth. I didn’t like fighting in public; I didn’t like shows of force. If I wanted to beat you, I’d do it so you and I would know. And no matter how protected you were, I’d find your ass. That’s how I got my name… they call me Shadow.
I can see piss stains, and cum stains and shit stains all over this little bathroom, but I see that big piece of glass next to my hand that I pick up and stab right into baby Hitler’s arm. She screams and I kick her in the stomach, grab her head, and introduce it to the sink bowl. The glass cut my head, but I’m pumping with rage now and I slam that bitches head so many times, I don’t even fucking remember… I just black out and leave her there. That’s why I always tie a shirt around my waist; when you fight, you get blood on you, especially here. But me… I put that shirt on over it and nobody notices a fucking thing and most of the officers here are Black or Latino anyway, so one Arian Nation vegetable isn’t going to mean jack shit to them. I saw a little white girl with red hair and freckles; she saw what happened. I don’t care who she is; I can’t have the bitch telling. I made sure she saw me looking at her and when she goes to the bathroom later on that day, I’m waiting. I beat her beyond recognition and I carved a swastika on her left breast and carve the word “TRAITOR” on her stomach after I strip her naked and use her panties to tie her to the shower head. She’ll live; she’s got some scars and what I did had no real meaning other than to make sure that nobody thought it was me. In fact, she didn’t even see me coming.
Being in jail ain’t fun because you’re always looking over your shoulder. Jail doesn’t help you; it hurts you. I’ve seen girls die in here. One of my cellmates hung herself and I spent a month in the hole before they realized that I didn’t kill her. I saw a girl take a handful of shit out the toilet and throw it on a guard. There have riots in here too, but you don’t ever read about that shit in your little pussy ass newspaper because this place is its own hell, its own nation. What happens here, stays here and I’ve seen more blood and death here than I ever did as a Terror. I kept waiting for my mother to come visit me; I kept waiting for my girls to come, but nobody came to see me. The priest would come and talk about Jesus this and Jesus that and all this stuff about being saved through Christ and all that other bullshit. How the fuck was He going to save me when He let so many of my friends die and let these guards beat on us in here? If He was real, and I didn’t think He was, why would he let those towers fall on 9/11 and little girls get raped by their own fucking fathers? Nobody believes that shit; man just isn’t afraid to die, isn’t afraid to not exist anymore. But me? We gotta go when we gotta go, you know?
I got more tattoos. I got “TERROR” across my stomach and a scorpion facing up, cupping my navel and guarding my pussy with its long tail. I got wings on my back; they’re skeletal and as black as my eyes. I got my eyebrow, navel, nipples, and dimples pierced and I started wearing gloves and punching the walls to harden my fists. But my hands were as soft as a baby’s butt and so was my ass. I could break cinder blocks now and I’d punch myself in the face late at night to get used to it and knee the walls. I started fighting in jail in the open and Baby and the guards would bet on my fights. Who knew that to clean out the Arian Nation, I wouldn’t have to every stab another member; I’d take them on in the courtyard one by one and knock them out or choke them out. There was a girl who I served with, lots of stringy hair from Barbados… Zana… she taught me some Brazilian jiu jitsu and Baby taught me more about wrestling and how to use my weight on smaller girls and how to get the bigger ones on the ground. Baby was a big Black woman and was a lot older than I was; she treated me like I was her daughter when she spoke to me, but she couldn’t care less about my life… that I knew.
I started thinking then too. One of my cellmates would always be reading about all this fantasy shit about aliens and “the force” and all this dumb shit. But she would read it out loud and it got thinking and dreaming. I remember there were two types of people at war in that story… the Jedi and the Sith. The Jedi were about sacrificing themselves to help other people, but the Sith were always two, a master and an apprentice and were about helping themselves until the master was killed by the apprentice and the apprentice became the master, taking a new apprentice and continuing the cycle. I had to admit; it was interesting and it was reminding me of what life was. We base so much of this shit on envy and greed and a desire to destroy what we create and gain all the knowledge… but what the fuck were we fighting for? I started to dream about the day when I’d leave this place and how I’d tell my girls that I was out of the gang. Fighting was all I knew how to do… it was who I was. But was it really? They call me Shadow, and what is a shadow other than the black shape of something that is real and does exist. And that’s all I was, right? That’s when it hit me that all I was, was a shadow. I wasn’t anything but a shape with a blackness so deep, it couldn’t be defined. Nobody gave a shit about me, because if they did, they’d come and see me. The gang was on the outside with somebody else, another shadow, doing their dirty work… in the name of what? I had stabbed people; I had beaten people up in the name of what? Just to fit in? Just to get my way? Just because I knew other people who did? Just because I like pussy or I just felt like it? I couldn’t tell you what any of my tattoos mean or why I got them. I couldn’t tell you why I did anything… I didn’t know who I was and right after that, my cell mate got stabbed and I went into solitary again.
I found myself with a little light and nothing but darkness and I could hear every voice of every person who I ever hurt talking to me… asking me why… just like right now, as I’m lying on this bed thinking of how I’m going to die… all these stabs they got me so good. Solitary was full of shadows and every shadow had a voice, but none greater than the voice of God. That’s when I fucked up… I had no one to talk to and had nothing to call my own in there. I couldn’t see my tattoos; I couldn’t feel my own tears running out of my eyes… all I could see were the shadows and hear their voices in my mind. God and I had a long conversation that night and it went on and on. I cleaned myself up and the boring part started. I told Baby I was done being an assassin, but I kept fighting… I just didn’t accept pay. I just ate and read and I tried to take up for the new people, but when a girl got raped, or when a guard beat someone up, I didn’t interfere and God would speak to me and ask me why. And I’d tell Him, “Because I want to get out; I don’t want to die in here.”
And I don’t know if it really was Him, but a heard a voice in my head say, “I thought you said you weren’t afraid to die? You will die one day, but it‘s how you live that makes all the difference.” And I realized that I was scared and that I wanted to leave. I would battle with that voice all the time walking through that fucking prison. If God was giving me a second chance, I didn’t understand why He wanted me to risk my life for someone else here in hell. You know, when I went in, I didn’t know how long I had been sentenced; I didn’t know and didn’t care. I was what I was and fuck the world. But they told me I could go home… I didn’t realize I was behaving well; they cut my time on good behavior. I didn’t know what kind of world awaiting me when I got out; I should’ve been graduating high school or in the job core or some shit like that. But we can’t choose the shit we’re born into or the shit we die in, but we can control the shit in between. When I got back home to D.C., I found my gang. I had found God in prison, but I was losing Him the second I got out. I started shooting up again; I started attacking girls and showing off my new form. The good thing was that I could go and fight in an underground club about a mile away from the White House. I didn’t give them my first or last name… I was just Shadow. They told me there was some other woman fighter in some big promotion who fought under that name years ago and wore a mask like Phantom of the Opera… I didn’t give a shit; I told them that was my fucking name. I learned how to get fight gurus to leave me the fuck alone too; that was really easy. If somebody asked me where I learned how to fight, all I had to say was that I learned in prison and that would shut them up. But there were some people who kept pushing me, especially the geeky ones. They’d see me, a legitimately pretty girl with tattoos, piercings, and that I could fight and they’d act like I was some fucking superhero or something. They’d want me to pose for pictures and all this stuff and I’d get invited to parties… but I was still a gang child. It’s just like I had forgotten everything in prison, even when there were new opportunities for me.
I took three of the new Terrors out to a poetry jam one night. Some of my girls had told me that these new girls were kind of green, but that they needed to earn their stripes by beating down this girl who would be at the jam. So, I was drunk and I was driving and this dude pulled into the spot I want and I hit his car. He jumped out of the car, tall Black guy, and the other three girls started arguing with him, but I could tell he was trying to calm them down. I drive an emerald green Chrysler Le Baron; it was already kinda dinged up and I didn’t really care about the damage. If the cops showed up, I was going to jail for a DWI (Driving While Intoxicated) at least, but what happened next changed my life… one of the girls shot him five times in his chest and he went down. I had been up close and personal with this situation; I had pulled the trigger myself… but for some reason, when he hit the ground, the time in solitary came back to me. Then I saw this short honey skinned girl with fiery dreadlocks and a yellow shirt on come running at us. She dropped one girl by spinning and hitting her with the back of her hand to block a punch then she kicked her in the face and the girl went down. The dreadlocked girl grabbed the next one and spun her around, punching her in the small of the back… probably hit her kidney, then spun her around and threw one of the hardest left hooks I’d ever seen and she went down.
We’re Terrors… you die for your sister and I didn’t know who this bitch was, but I went in on her fast. I hit her stomach with an uppercut and she doubled over and groaned, then I pulled my knife and cut her across the left eyebrow… I was trying to stick it in her eye. I told her I was going to kill her, but she came back and rammed her shoulder into my stomach and I felt the wind rush from me. She wiped the blood from her eye… she kept looking at the guy on the ground… who was he to her? She hit me with a left hook to my jaw and kicked me to my liver. She grabbed my shoulders, but I broke her grip; she spun like a ballerina, did a split under my punches and swept my legs out from under me. She got on top of me and started punching me to my face over and over… I could see she was pissed and crying, but I grabbed her by her jaw and turned her head hard to her left, then twisted her left arm and rolled her onto her back. Once I got on top, I heard her exhale and I saw her bring her arms up because she knew I was gonna punch her all over. She had her arms up guarding her face, but like I said, I go to that body. She had a navel that was kinda big and looked like an egg sitting in a pit; her stomach was toned, but smooth and I just decided to test it with my fists. I pounded her and she was trying not to groan, but she knew I was beating her, then she grabbed my arms and hooked them. She was really flexible and she got her legs from under me and wrapped them around my neck… her thighs were strong and I wasn’t even in the vice for five seconds before I felt myself passing out, but I looked up and I saw my girls… a boot hit that girl right across her nose just as my world went black.
I woke up and I saw them kicking her and punching her down the street. They had been trained well; they moved her someplace where nobody would know and I saw the dead Black man’s eyes on me and I saw my shadow beneath me as I rose, questioning me as to what it was and what I was. I moved to them and they saw me… the girl was done… she was beaten, but she was still breathing. In that moment, I was back… I knew I had to get out of this life. I looked up at the full moon and I was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, but I remembered that the moon’s light is only a reflection of the sun’s real light just as I was still a shadow of something greater. It was time for to be something more. I made a gesture to call it off, but that’s when they jumped on me and I felt wet under my clothes. See, that’s what’s got me on this bed on my way to the hospital. I was set up; my girls thought that I had talked to the police; the news girls I rode to the poetry jam with hadn’t been initiated yet; I was their initiation. They weren’t supposed to kill me, just hurt me enough. They stabbed me seventeen times and I was in that hospital bed… waiting for someone to come and finish it. But nobody ever came to see me except the cops, trying to get me to talk and give those girls up. They kept telling me that a man had died and that I was fingered and could go back to jail if I didn’t identify the shooter.
And that’s when it didn’t matter. Whoever that girl was, she lost someone she cared about and she was upset enough that she was willing to sacrifice herself if it meant saving him… even if he was already dead. She was a Jedi and I was nothing. So, I gave them all up; I told the cops everything; I became a snitch and they offered me protection, but I didn’t want it. None of that dying and being afraid shit mattered. I was always the pawn of someone or something else; it was time for me to be my own device. I got up, and I walked out of that hospital and I had a fight two weeks later in the cage. I was a little rusty, but it was still a first round knockout. When those geeks and other gurus wanted to talk to me, I talked to them. And the gang members… well, they’re in jail now and I went and told Baby what they did to me and she said she’d take care of them. None of them ever made it out alive, and I had a talk with God about that too. Sometimes, I believe in Him, and sometimes, I don’t. And revenge is a part of who I am and the fire that burns inside of me was put there by Him. The world will have to deal with that and so will any woman who steps into the cage against me. I have changed so much, but I am every bit the same and I can always go back because there is so much bullshit and so many phonies in this world of fighting that I now occupy a space in. I am the truth; I am the cold reality that you ignore in your world of social networking and pretending to be hard when you would come out of the same prison I went into with no sense of who you are while I found myself there. I am as black as the death you refuse to read about and do nothing to change. As black as your cold indifferent hearts and I will take your best punch and still keep coming because I know only taking pain and giving it back. And if you fuck somebody over, I may ignore it, but if I choose to, I will never stop until you pay. Don’t let the pretty face and the smooth body fool you. Don’t let my accent and my smile deceive you, because if you do, I will fuck you up. I am The Shadow and you’ll never see me coming.
THE END?
