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This story is rated PG-13 for violence and bad language.
Hellhound’s on your trail now once again, boy
It’s groping on your leg until it sleeps
The emptiness will fill your soul with sorrow
‘Cause it’s not what you make, it’s what you leave
--Misery, Green Day
I’ve always noticed things tend to go in circles. In fact, when I was a kid- well, maybe it’s better if I don’t go there. Suffice it to say that I was dealt a shitty hand to begin with, and when I thought I was finally breaking out of the cycle, I really wasn’t at all.
I became a runner for a local drug dealer when I was 12 because I was small, and because I could pass for white in the right clothes and lighting, which meant I got less hassle from the cops. When my dad found out, I ran away to live in an abandoned building with a handful of other gangster wannabes.
They initiated me into the Rum Dawgs when I was almost 14, with a tattoo that got infected and almost put me in the hospital. Still, life was good: I had a new life, a new name, a new crew. Soon I was dealing too, carrying a gun under my t-shirt, running from cops. The first night I spent sitting cuffed on the sidewalk watching the pigs- sorry, the police- look for my stash was the longest night of my life. But they didn’t find it. And no matter what trouble I got into, I knew K-dog and my boys, they’d have my back. I thought I was hardcore, but in a lot of ways I was still a dumb, naive kid.
I was 15 when they found K-dog’s body. The man who’d brought me into the game and been like my older brother had been stabbed in the back. I thought I couldn’t feel any worse, until Vega told me he knew who did it but we weren’t gonna go after them. “It was those green guys,” he told me. “Kung fu freaks, we don’t fuck with them.”
I was mad enough to kill. Threw every damn thing I could think of in Vega’s face, but he didn’t budge and the rest of the Dawgs agreed. “Not worth it, man. Let it go.” Let it go? Dawgs for life...I had their back and they had mine. Wasn’t that what it was supposed to be about? I told Vega to go to hell.
For two years, I chased rumors all over town, looking for the killers. Two years is a long time, and rage only lasts so long, so before too many months had gone by I started realizing things. Like, the gangs I thought of as uniting tribes were tearing the city neighborhoods apart without putting anything back. Like, there were people out there who were worse off than me and still managed not to fuck everybody else up along with them. Like, most gang members ended up in jail or dead. Like, I wasn’t the first kid K-dog had used, and the fact that I hadn’t been thrown to the wolves was more due to my own luck than my “friend’s” protection.
By the time word of my quest got back to the guys I was hunting, I was finding more value in the time I spent trying to help the people in the neighborhoods than the time I spent trying to avenge K-dog. When Raphael came to see what I was all about, this punk kid looking to kill him, I wasn’t as mad at him as I shoulda been. And when he showed me his weapon, and told me the straight-edge knife that killed K-dog was held by a Rum Dawg, I believed.
I was waiting outside Vega’s building with a gun when Raphael came back. He told me vengeance was a stupid and slippery rock to stand on. Well, what he really said was, “Don’t be a fucking moron,” but my phrasing sounds a little more poetic. Being me, I wasn’t paying much attention, so he slapped the gun out of my hand, dragged my ass up to the rooftop, and told me he was about to tell me something important and I’d better shut up and listen. The shit he came out with then, I had never heard; sounded like a movie or a fairy tale, all ninjas and honor, and most of all a vendetta that lasted 20 years and claimed dozens and dozens of lives...all ‘cause of two people who did something stupid that seemed like a good idea at the time.
The next week, most of the Rum Dawgs got nailed on an anonymous tip and the whole lot of them went in on 20-to-life terms for possession with intent. I heard somebody caught Vega out as a snitch and knifed him on the prison bus. I wasn’t sorry. But I was glad it wasn’t me that did it.
I don’t know why Raph saved me from my anger; or why he talked this chick April into letting me live in her basement rent-free till I could find a real job; or why he stopped me from killing Vega but then took me on night runs that usually ended with criminals in the hospital. But I liked him. Sure, he was blunt and touchy and sometimes homicidally angry. He was also the most honest person I had ever met, and he had the solid sense of right and wrong that I was starting to realize I cared about after all. One time I actually had the balls to ask him some of the why’s, and he clammed up for a minute before telling me that he liked me, and that he saw himself in me the night I was gonna kill Vega.
Then he told me to shut up. Raph was never really one for sentimentality.
Anyway, when Raph was starting to make some money, and I was starting to get my shit together at long last, it made sense for us to move in together. I was putting money aside for CUNY, starting to think about the future for the first time in my life. It felt good to have a future, to have a goal, to be on my way to doing something for the neighborhood so kids would stop growing into people like me.
Man...what the hell was I even talking about when we started? Oh yeah, circles.
So Raph helped me, I helped other kids, and half the time Raph ended up helping them too, even though he pretended not to care; that’s how we ended up back where we started, with a kid trying to fight his way out of the gutter and figure out what kind of man he was gonna be. Another pattern I’ve noticed is, trouble seems to love Raph’s company...If a messy situation wasn’t bending itself just to get nearer to him, he’d run right out and find one he could jump into.
To be fair, I guess it was really Jet who dragged us into this particular mess. You sure didn’t see us trying to back out, though, at least not until it was too late. By the time the rest of Raph’s family got thrown into the middle of it, it wasn’t really a question of whether to fight or not, or whose fault the whole thing was.
It was more a question of whether any of us would survive.
The TMNT and associated characters belong to Mirage. Shippai and all its original characters are mine. Please do not steal from me, or I will be forced to feed you to the lawyer I keep chained up in my basement.