I'll never forget it. It was the summer of '89. We'd just graduated high school. We being Me, Vince, Greg, and Candy. We called ourselves The Get Fresh Crew because The Show by Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick was everything to us! Those horns! Those drums! Doug E on the beatbox! Slick Rick on the rap! You'd have thought that we thought that a better hip hop song would never be made. You, and we, may have been right. Listen, we wopped so hard to that song that 'til this day I still have issues with my neck and back. Every new chiropractor I get I tell them up front I have an old wop wound from the after school dance floor battles, and linoleum breakdance wars. They salute me and thank me for my service.
We were also The Get Fresh Crew because we were always trying to get fresh. We lived on a hunt for new sneakers, Shell Toe Adidas with no laces, two toned Diadora's with fat laces, Le Coq Sportif with the black strap! We wanted whatever fly, obscure, shoe we thought no one else had. The best feeling in the world was to walk up to the playground in your crispy new sneakers, extend your foot like Cinderella trying to come up out of poverty and say, "Oh! Y'all ain't got these!"; or look at someone elses brand new shoes and say, "Those old! I had those three months ago!" That was a great feeling. The Get Fresh Crew rarely if ever had that feelings. We were more A&N, Thom MCCann knockoff bargain bin recipients. I once drew a Nike symbol on the side of plain white canvas sneaker with a marker it was a desperate play for name brand appeal. I figured that if I kept my feet moving people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The whole day I looked like I had to pee, my feet just dancing constantly like James Brown on the Night Train. The English teacher escorted me to the office half way through class and told the principal that she suspected that I was on the night crack cocaine. I finally had to confess that I was not on crack, I was on Crayola.
We were a motley get fresh crew. Vince was a tall guy with an average build and was very darkly complected. I mean you couldn't tell where his hairline stopped and his forehead began. He was so dark that most people when joanin him started with, "You so black that..." and the endless possibilities evolved from there: You so black that if I cut you you'll bleed Nestle Quik; You get in a car and oil light comes on;Last night my mom told me to be home by You Vince'Clock. Vince laughed along good naturedly but if you looked in his eyes you could tell, it hurt him. I think all the jokes and reactions to his complexion made him insecure. So he became a guy always trying to impress people and curry their favor by doing anything he was dared to do.
He was once dared to punch the principal in the face. And he did it! Also, his father was the principal of the school at the time. He was suspended from school and I sure his dad hit him in the head like the opening drums to Sucker MC's when they got home. Vince was a good guy, just easily influenced and struggling to be liked. Like a lot of us were back then.
But not Greg. Greg was well liked and Greg was crazy, girl crazy that is. And it just so happened that girls were crazy about him too, so that was convenient. Greg looked like Al B Sure but with two eyebrows. He had wavy hair that was generally given the title of good, like it had done a good deed, rescued orphans from a fire, or knocked a crack pipe out of Marrian Berry's hand; good like it had done something other than just grow out of his head. Greg was also the rare dude that knew how to double dutch and roller skate backwards. Girls loved that shit. The one time I tried to roller skate backward I fell awkwardly my legs collapsed beneath me like a folding chair, it felt like the heel of the right skate tried to violate my anus and then Rhonda Kenton rolled over my fingers with her skates. That was not a good day and I have since explored this moment in great detail with the aid of a mental health professional.
Back then any girl that I liked, liked Greg, and Greg liked any girl that liked him. So the relationship between Greg and myself was always a little less than ideal. Remember in New Jack City when Wesley Snipes stabbed Christopher Williams in the hand and said, "I never liked you anyway, pretty m#therf#cker!" I remember watching that and thinking, yeah Greg!
Then there was Candy. The only girl in the crew. I felt like she and I were meant to be together. I took the songs Candy Girl by New Edition and Candy by Cameo to be clear signs of provenance and destiny. I mean Larry Blackmon and Ralph Trevant wouldn't lie to me! I liked Candy but couldn't let Candy, or Greg know. If I expressed that I liked her, she was sure to tell me she liked Greg, and Greg would have certainly started liking her just because she liked him. So in order to have a chance with her, I had to not like her, and thus secure her affections via my almost complete silence and abject distance. Did I mention I was young?
That summer in 1989 I remember Candy was sitting on her front porch as I was walking past one afternoon. She was singing The Show and she said, "Six minutes, six minutes, six minutes and I'm fresh, you're on!"
And I'm fresh you're on? I stopped. I thought about letting it go but before I could over think it I looked over, and I said, "... That's ... not how it goes."
And she was like, "What! Yeah-huh!"
And I was like, "Yeah-Nah."
Then she stood her arms akimbo, rolled her neck and said, "Then what it say then!"
I took a deep breath and replied, "It says six minutes, six minutes, six minutes, Doug E Fresh, you're on. Uh-Uh-on."
She looked up at the sky as if replaying the song in her head with the clearly apocryphal verses I'd added and said, "So! My name ain't Doug E! So I'm going to keep singing it my way!"
"Cool," I said and as I began to walk away she interjected, "But thanks for telling me. Everybody else just let me be out here loud, wrong and not knowing. I mean I'm still going to be loud and wrong, but at least I know."
She laughed. I didn't. I stood staring at her, trying to figure a way put the tangled ball of yarn that doubled as my feelings into words. Her eyes that always seemed to be dissecting everyone and everything. Always looking for the slightest flaw to turn against you the second you tried to joan. Those eyes softened. I felt like she could see the struggle in me. Sense the part of me drowing in my feelings and kicking to hard trying to break the surface. But no matter how much I olly olly oxen freed the words stayed hidden.
Ultimately I just said, "... Cool," again and walked away.
Summer ended, fall descended and The Get Fresh Crew, we all went our separate ways. I went to college in the Shenandoah Valley and studied business. That September someone had dared Vince to sell a dime of weed, which turned into a quarter, then an ounce of coke, then a pound, a key. It was the key that he got caught with. I always thought it ironic that they called it a key, it didn't seem to open the right doors. While I was pent up at a state school, he was being schooled in the state pen. Greg got Rhonda Kenton pregnant. I heard they married, had a son, and divorced soon after. Candy went to a school near D.C. We exchanged a few letters but lost touch by sophomore year. We all just drifted apart.
I read somewhere that life can be like the mighty Mississippi River flowing ever forward, relentless, unstoppable. Sometimes splitting into tributaries never to return. Sometimes forking off into branches that meander but find their way back to the source eventually. Perhaps we're just the drift wood caught in the flow. Lost in the stream.
My twenties came with advanced degrees, a career, a house, a car, a wife, and kids. My thirties came with promotions, a divorce, an apartment, and seeing my kids on the weekends. My forties have thus far come with a mid-life crisis, a therapist, a career change and Tinder. Life has not turned out to be the white picket fence wrapped around the perfect home that I imagined it would be. No, the house burned to the ground and a tornado ran away with my fence. l have vowed to rebuild but haven't managed to pick up a hammer just yet.
I am having thess thought when I get a text from Mark, a friend from work, "Yo! You on IG? D-Nice's live is going crazy! He's spinning nothing but everything! And everybody in here! Log in bruh!"
I hate being called bruh.