for Kendrick Lamar
Editor’s note: Material previously redacted from the original published version of this article (Gangconnex.net, 10.2008) is restored here and presented in red. – J.I, ed.
1.
During my summer-of-2008 visit to their shared apartment on East Indigo St., neither Griffin “Griff Dogg” Matthews (AKA Big Mel) nor Channing Pendel (AKA Chinky Eyez) nor Jay Saint (AKA Tut C) wanted to talk Bloods and Crips, which is all I knew about the history of gang-banging in the 1990’s in the LA area, pretty much exclusively from rap records off Death Row that Saint, my friend since our early days in college, had lent me. I’d been a literary geek, or at least styled myself as such. He was from the ghetto, the New England version thereof. Since two-thousand, I’d lost touch with him; this trip to LA, under the auspices of a solicited piece of journalism for an authentic online periodical, was maybe my last chance to reconnect with my old friend, to bask in his charm, to synthesize his poetic love of violence and gang-culture with my own voyeuristic tendencies, to beg forgiveness. The stakes were high.
I was a journalism student living among scholars. The Headz were deep-knowledge historians. They spoke of “tertiary level gang-banging,” a level of intra-cultural conflict so discreet and sub-radar it can only be spoken of through allegory, or maybe through mystical re-enactment, as a passion play or a sun dance. They spoke of the Tarantulas and the Venus Cats, two theoretical-slash-archetypal entities best understood as “gangs” that existed for a very—like quantum-level very—short period of “time” during the mid-nineties in a discrete and probably mythological quadrant of rap’s most infamous LA neighborhood, Compton—or, as recent paleontology-enthusiast-turned-gang war re-enactor Griffin Matthews calls it, Compsognathus City.
On an improbably sunny afternoon in early August, these three gentlemen will don their purple and orange bandanas, their vintage 1994-pressing Etnies and acid-washed Wrangers, just as they have every weekend since June. But this won’t be practice. This will be the real—well, the almost real thing. The secondary realty. The level of re-enactment in which we project our forms as images on a medium: shadow on street, chalk on concrete, blood on skin. As opposed to the tertiary level of reality, which some but not all of us will live and learn to see, on which level men are ghosts and ghosts are gods and all ride with Krishna along Compton Boulevard bumping Lord MuggStarr (an emcee of hypo-local fame and banger of the Sigma set of the Greenleaf Venus Cats circa 1992) in perpetuity. This afternoon, they will bring history alive. In a frenzy of high drama, the Headz gang-war re-enactors’ guild will, before an unsuspecting, live, found-crowd of hundreds, re-create a scene from the violent and tragic saga that has plagued urban Los Angeles for decades. At least as far as I can tell, having spent approximately no time in Compton prior to my arrival at 333 East Indigo, and having merely constructed a Compsognathus City of the Mind out of rap puzzle pieces and overhead camera shots from Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which Saint used to make me watch during long nights of drinking in the dorm back in college, in Boston, at the interstice of certain millennia, before I facilitated the dormitory police in their investigation of his small-scale drug ring and consequently lost touch with him. Until now.
2.
Channing, the newest member of Headz, tells me this “isn’t going to be some A-side bullshit—SSCC versus Tupac, Crenshaw Mafia versus Imperial Village, et cetera.” They’re going to do the Greenleaf Venus Cats vs. West Rosecrans Spiders—“A sort of renegade exploratory sub-set of the Rosecrans Royal Purp set that flossed west of Wilmington,” he footnotes, tightening his belt to, I could see now, a new hole he’d created with one of their kitchen knives. He had lost weight steadily through his fourth year at USC. His combined thesis on cultural anthropology and revolutionary twenty-first-century marketing strategies was taking its toll on him, and in terms of memorizing his lines he was the least prepared. He compensated with aggression. I didn’t like him at all. He was always throwing bits of historical and literary minutia at me as if to test my nerdiness, my apparent allegiance to the written word. He fancied himself a political and artistic realist—a data-man, possessed of a mind most practical. I had come to them as an idealistic man of letters, he’d say, and they had shown me a truth my journalist’s imagination never fathomed. Then he’d tighten his belt again. That night, out on the practice corner, he’d loosen it up and let his 94 Wrangler acids hang down like a dopey smile, all in character, but up in 333 Indigo they were tight to his sickly waist. At 22, his zeal for the psycho-spiritual decoction of rap culture into a negotiable nugget of re-enactment is like a radioactive toxin glowing in the lantern of his dead eyes, one that radiates sickly yellow, like a streetlight glare off the curve of a St. Ides bottle.
I much preferred the company of Griff Dogg. Griffin Matthews, 24, who will play Big Mel in the upcoming re-enactment at Compton and Alameda, is the polymath and visionary of the crew. A geek for dinosaurs, and a former doctoral student of sub-atomic physics at the University of Los Angeles, from which school he commenced, this spring, a hiatus of “no less than one year” in order to pursue “improved mental health and spiritual function,” Griff Dogg is not only a founding member of the Headz re-enactment troupe; he is also the creator and moderator of Gangconnex.net, the organizing site for Los Angeles-area gang war re-enactors, historians, and enthusiasts of every ilk. It is through Griff that the internet of the early twenty-first century—that ferocious probability ratio, expanding exponentially—finds singularity. Achieves purpose. He is, for all intents and purposes, a logos Christ.
When I ask Griff Dogg if he is afraid that his increasing involvement in what I call “the Los Angeles-area gang-battle re-enactment renaissance” but which he terms “the gang war thang” might eventually conflict with his academic pursuits, he shrugs it off: “Man, I’m a man of many faces.” But later on toward night, in the throes of Alize and joints of marijuana specially cultivated by gang-war re-enactment enthusiasts to replicate the chronic Dre and Snoop are alleged to have smoked during the making of Doggystyle, he elaborates: “Man, the gang-war thang …” (that’s how they all refer to it—the gang-war thang—even though each troupe—or set, as the Headz commonly prefer to be termed—is only ever re-enacting a single fight, sometimes a single-weaponed confrontation, sometimes a micro-scale battle for control of a single micro-second’s decision, but never a full scale war) “… the gang war thang: it can’t be in conflict with academics because it is, of itself, just another angle of academic study, no different from quantum physics. All of timespace is unified, all particles and forces. We just can’t see it with our two-dimensional visual cortex.”
He waxed obscure. He spoke of unifying the study of string theory with an emerging interest in mid-90’s gangology as a means of divination, to be applied to the stock market or meteorology or predictions of the migratory patterns of animals and ethnic populations. There were data beyond my ken, he said. I had no idea they’d become so immediately relevant.
In his second year at UCLA, Griff ingested seven grams of psilocybin mushrooms, a few hundred micrograms of LSD, and topped it off with a double-stacked hit of home-synthesized (by a friend) MDMA-37. He called it M-tripping, after the arcane and exciting work by Edward Witten on M-theory. At some point during the ensuing fifteen-plus hours of hallucination, which he passed by listening exclusively to Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, Griff Dogg claims to have had an experience that changed his life forever. He claims to have experienced time in a manner more cognitively consistent with quantum physics’ description of material reality as a wave function, as a series of probabilities. He claims to have been able to discern “the pixelation of reality,” to have perceived Planck’s constant in real-time—to have felt the individual gradations of time and space click through him and his medium, and to have been given the faculties to observe how his consciousness (not just his consciousness, he’d qualify over and over again, but “the singular consciousness of all matter and energy in the fixed universe”) could change and refine reality through will and decision, through deliberate choice, and how each instant new universes were forming at every juncture of probability and determination, down to the very Planckian grain. Infinitudes. Or nearly. The psycho-spiritual fallout from this experience contributed in no small part to his decision to take a leave of absence from the program, as well as the almost immediate formation of the Headz Gang War Re-enactors’ Guild, even though he remained at UCLA for an entire semester following the M-trip. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I never got it. I rarely got a full inteview in. We were never alone together, Griff and I; not even when I held his head, the only one who would hold his bloody head (it was “off-script,” they all said) out by the Taco Bell on Alameda. There was someone looking down the alley, or a camera that Channing couldn’t help but place ahead of time, even though it was against the ethics of the sort of guerrilla-theatre the Headz professed. The eye of God on me. The guy’s head in my arms.
3.
Like most suburban white kids (read: consumers of rap culture) I first heard about gang warfare from rap tapes in the early- and mid-nineties, and this initial exposure—the baptism by water, if you will—was supplemented when the millennium broke like a black dragon’s egg and I entered that secondary-level reality known as “college” and my hardcore roommate, a dude from Dorchester whose name was Saint, revealed to me the underground, the deep cuts, all the LA B-sides I’d missed as a teenager: a baptism by the fire of the holy spirit. Regardless, the cheap white-washed message in the music was the same, at least to the ears of a suburban consumer like me: the Bloods and the Crips were rival gangs who wore rival colors. No one said anything about the Pirus, the Brims, the martyrdom of Bartender, none of that. No one said anything about sets, and no one said anything about the tertiary-level bangers, those beings of light who come to us out of pure potential whole, translate entirely into the symbolic language of rap. Immutable. The Venus Cats and the Tarantulas, and the confrontation to be re-enacted, directly. In fact, the history of gang-banging, and the reticulation of alliances and beefs between the myriad sets, is infinitely complex—or rather: comprised of a set of probabilities that is almost infinite. To most of America, LA gangology and the cosmic pictograms by which these essential realities are expressed in the two-dimensional visual cortex might as well be Classical myth and the scream of the Chorus that accompanies it.
“We might as well be talking about the Norse gods,” I offer that night, high on PCP, to Channing, who silently chews his Blueberry Morning cereal. We are watching television.
“Or the Sumerian gods,” Saint chirps, coming through the destroyed livingroom at 333 Indigo. “Those motherfuckers are seriously primal. We are essentially just re-enacting them, continually.”
Someone on television is wearing a bikini and Channing hoots, his mouth milky and full.
4.
Saint is no longer involved in the sale of illegal drugs, though the presence of at least eighteen discreet forms of synthetic hallucinogens at 333 Indigo suggested at least a casual acquaintance with complex and various black markets. A certain criminal charge from 2000, which resulted in his ejection from a certain Boston-area college’s undergrad program (as well as from the dormitory room he kept with a mousey little country-boy-turned-campus-security-witness), was enough to get him clean. Into therapy. Into theater. And into a new college—one out West, in that rap-Xanadu of Los Angeles, where all his dreams had always taken place. A world where he could bring to life his vision of a gang war re-enactment troupe, if not achieve the physical resurrection of Tupac Shakur, which has always been his secret necromantic aim. This is what I’ve gathered peripherally, or from his casual asides. He never let me interview him one-on-one. It was never going to be like it was when we were boys, so I just put on my journalist’s persona and went to work. I ate their cereal. I took their drugs. I listened to their tertiary-level hip hop. I talked to Griff, in the company of others. And when I had to, I talked to the omnipresent Channing Pendel, though his voice drove slivers of ice through my cortices.
5.
Channing Pendel, who will play the Venus Cat Chinky Eyez in this weekend’s re-enactment, pursued a dual major in business admin. and economics at USC. About a week after his graduation in May, directly prior to my cathartic visit to the Headz’ loft, he answered a classified ad on a hip hop-themed professional networking forum. The post was from Saint and Griff Dogg: SEEKING MARKETING AND DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR FOR GANGWAR RE-ENACTMENT GUILD. ADVANCED DEGREE IN BUSINESS AND/OR MARKETING AND/OR QUANTUM PHYSICAL MECHANICS AND/OR ESOTERIC STUDIES AND/OR BLACK MAGICK IS +++, AS IS DEEP KNOWLEDGE OF 90s GANGSTA RAP. PREF. FLUENCY IN A.A.V., AND WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF TERTIARY-LEVEL GANG POLITICS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CIRCA 1975-95.
“It was kinda weird,” Channing told me over Blueberry Morning cereal on my third morning at 333 Indigo Street. “Couldn’t have been written for anyone else. Kismet.” He winked at me. He asked me, “Do you know what kismet means?” I said I did. And then he said, “Do you know who got them all of these?” and he preceded to pull four semi-automatic handguns from his 34×42 special-order ’94 Wrangler acids. He threw them down on the table in front of me. He picked them up and dry-fired them one at a time, pointing them all over the place, at Beavis the cat, at his head, at my head. “Totally real, just unloaded.” He was breathing unsteadily, but I knew there was no live ammo in the house. Griff told me there was no live ammo in the house, and Saint had told me the same thing, and I trusted Saint, even if he would never trust me again.
Channing paid his way through college by buying popular firearms and high-capacity clips by the bag at gun shows, often illegally crossing state lines, and then fencing them through a guy he identified as “Sun Tsu,” an old G from east LA who matches bangers with biscuits. He asked me if I had read Sun Tsu, and I admitted I hadn’t, and he laughed, hideous and black his mouth. He served as principal marketing director for the USC alumni find during his penultimate year on campus, and during his senior year of study he became the first undergraduate ever to hold the directorship of the alumni relations office, as well as the position of most Supreme Potentate of Necromancy in his super-secret fraternity, in the college’s history. His background in gun-running, malevolent hypnotism, and funding and marketing has made him a veritable revenue-dynamo for the Headz.
The slick branding of the Headz troupe as the hip vanguard in the burgeoning greater-LA gang war re-enactment renaissance is a Channing job. “Don’t ever forget that, don’t you ever fucking forget that, college boy,” he told me, thrusting at me the fork he’d inexplicably been eating his Blueberry Morning cereal with, I noticed now for the first time. He possesses my mind and will with his voice, and bids me address him thus: “Your lordship Channing, he of the one-thousand Chinky Eyez, endowed as thou art with a unique business acumen. Please obliterate me with your golden fist.” He also has a keen sense of the sort of faces and gestures that someone with a knowledge of the history of gang violence might make when condescending to an outsider like me.
Channing tells me that despite the fact that black children in LA are born into this, they still face the choices their consumer-driven capitalist culture affords them. Sure, he admits the worn gang-truism: You don’t choose your gang. You get whatever gang has chosen your neighborhood, or what your uncle or brother chose. But despite this, it is individual will which drives violence: “Look, you still choose to buy a handgun from a white guy in a Belushi COLLEGE sweatshirt,” Channing tells me; “The polarity with re-enactment is striking. We choose to act out violence in accord with advanced formulas for the manipulation of a consensus reality that has no will of its own. It is born of chaos and potential …” He’s quoting Griff, and I know he doesn’t totally get it—he just wants to impress me, and to use it as a justification for the evil brand of re-enactment he endorses. “We’re the ones who, through our choices, give it form and structure. We—oh, what’s it called?”
“Collapse the waveform,” Griff says, passing by with his bowl of Blueberry Morning.
“That,” Channing says. “That.”
I nod. Eat my own cereal. Look around nervously for Saint, but he’s nowhere to be found. The whole scene has changed. Same breakfast, but it’s always different, every morning I’m with these guys.
6.
Saint told me I’d be safe. We’d been homeys back East, way before either of us was a post-college grad student in LA. You think I have any business mixing with gang war re-enactors? Saint was my only connection, my scout, my correspondent in the gang-war re-enactment circuit. He’d never told me about Channing. He’d never mentioned the M-trip I’d be forced into on my first night with The Headz, when they strapped a blackface mask vaporizer onto my grill and made me ingest ten minutes’ worth of vaporous stuff, whatever it was, while they blasted obscure boom bap in my ears and loaded and unloaded clips from assault rifles, or maybe just made the sounds with their mouths. He’d never told me that there might be trouble on this level. He never told me that I needed to be prepared like this. To be prepared for high drama, for tertiary-level re-enactment, for meta-accidental violence. Cha-chick, CLACK. Cha-chick, CLACK. Over and over. They said it until I believed I could hear the pixelation of each minute of unwritten history, feel the weight of each infinitely subdividable moment, and every decision I didn’t make at the interstice bubbling off into the multiverse. Damned assignment.
The script entails that Griff’s character, Big Mel, will exit the Burger King on the SW corner of Compton and Alameda and be shot in the middle of the intersection at 8:43 AM. He’ll flee north on Alameda, past the IHOP, make it just past the Taco Bell, then collapse from the headshot on the western sidewalk—in the sun, if the weather is clement, which Channing assures me it will be; he and Griff have been working on the reality-manipulation program in anticipation of this event, and they have a 99 percent probablility—“probability is the only sincere standard,” he whispers in my ear—of sunlight hitting the big white FOR RENT space on the north side of Alameda this Sunday.
I want to suggest to Griff that he shouldn’t have shared the formulas with Channing. Why is he working with that creep? I mean, can Channing even understand all that math? And if he can, look at his priorities: he’ll apply it to the market with a quickness; he’ll upload cart after cart of sacrificial flesh to the people for cash while all of cosmic history runs afoul of the master plan.
“But we are the master,” Channing tells me, but he’s dressed in Griff’s clothes, who is himself dressed as Saint, my old friend, my old—. “We are the masters of Reality. Try betraying me now, bitch.”
And what’s up with Saint anyway? Why isn’t he putting a stop to this?
“We are the soul controller,” and before I can ask him why he’s quoting an east-coast rapper, I black out for the thirty-third time, only to awaken to another Blueberry Morning, whether day or night.
Saint tells me it’s the death of Big Mel that set off what the Headz call the Big Bang: an on- and off-again melee of minorities representing two sides of a globe the width and breadth of a single LA suburb, the size of a pinhead worth of crack, three-hundred-thirty-three thousand re-enactors dancing on the point of a nine round south of Compton Blvd. The police were unable to quell looting and rioting, and because this was a tertiary-level gang-situation, one existing at least two levels beneath consensus reality, as well as a “black problem,” the feds were reluctant to intervene. It is estimated that upward of three-hundred and thirty-three theoretical beings of light and probability—astral devas, as it were, or perhaps more accurately archetypes—were killed, the bodies of several billion police officers lying in heaps among the dead, and it is rumored on records and in back alleys that the uniformed bodies were retrieved in a timely fashion and prepared for burial promptly, in accordance with various religious orthodoxies, while the bodies of the black kids and their children were left by a tyrant king in the sun in rap deserts, and when their black granddaughters came to claim them for burial they were exploited, impregnated, and abandoned by bureaucrats of the very lowest order. “A holocaust,” Saint tells me. “Nonetheless, certain cosmic preconditions for singularity require we set it off—put off all sympathy and re-enact this precise event, in all its grim solemnity.”
I can’t say anything to that. I haven’t been able to speak since the M-trip. Not since Channing put the AR-15 to my temple and put three-hundred-thirty-three bullets through my skull in three seconds. I silently prayed to Saint, my rapper friend, my old homey from way back. I prayed that he take this 40oz. from my lips. He said, “Don’t worry, son. It’s Griff who gets it in the end.” We head home to 333 Indigo for the re-enactment-eve celebration and attendant ritual sacrifices and ill ceremonies I won’t bother to explain here or ever.
7.
At one point, I’m just like: Why don’t the members of Headz do black-face? At least for the final performances? I mean, re-enactment aims for authenticity, right? Big Mel, Chinky, Tut … none of these guys was a white dude, right?
The fact is, in order to capture the visible hue of pure data, which is all that any of these personae represent two-dimensionally, they would have to use a shade that is not in the strictest sense perceptible to ordinary human vision but which can be spoken of in parable as deep blue or perhaps indigo. “You know, like Krishna, Papa Smurf, the Blue Men? Think that’s all a coincidence?” Channing nearly shouts at me over cereal. During my stay, he took any opportunity to bark me down.
Official line on black-face: The Headz, in the best traditions of modern theatre, engage in something they call “race-blind casting.” That is to say, the authenticity of the character is carried by the performance, not the performer’s physical attributes. Which strikes me as a uniquely convenient way to dance over the lines of perspective and into 11-dimensional timespace without stepping on a potentially black audience member’s shoes and/or history and/or collective archetypal projection.
Plus, what’s up with the location? Is this a reasonable place to stage a re-enactment? This strikes me as a pretty major intersection. Is there really a history of bloodshed at this corner? Does it not behoove responsible re-enactors to maybe shift their theatrical attention to a slightly more authentic hood?
Channing assures me that I understand nothing about tertiary-level gang-banging. He calls me a perceiver-in two-dimensions, a writer of journalism.
Saint is over on the purple couch rolling his eyes, assuring me that Channing doesn’t know the half of it, just talks big. “Lil Chan, we call him. No, Four Chan.” Channing hisses, but smiles back at him.
And Griff? He’s gone to confession, as Big Mel would have on a Sunday.
8.
Morning, August 8, 2008: The Headz—now fully transubstantiated into the West Rosecrans Tarantulas and the Greenleaf Venus Cats—are ready to cleave second from second-guess, to obliterate the space between the idea and the word, to see the implications of each decision erupt like a pistol-shot apple filmed in slow motion. They finish their ritual Blueberry Morning cereal and black coffee tinctured with the garmonbozia of the rap gods, and we head up to the corner of Alameda and Compton in a stolen vintage reconstruction ass-dropping ’67 Cadillac with a ’92 pneumatic suspension switch job.
On August 9, 1995, a black male named Malik ‘Big Mel’ Greyson, age 17, was shot and killed at the corner of Compton and Alameda. The case was held-up in gang-investigations for years, and—as this was a tertiary-level gang conflict between feuding entities so abstract they posed a merely theoretical threat to Los Angeles’s civic reality—there was never a formal criminal investigation into the murder. The probability that it would explode into material relevance was very low, even by the conservative standards of the minority-hating, civilian-beating LAPD of the nineties. Statements made by Reginald “Chinky Eyez” Marino, on- and off-record in the years prior to his own death in 1999, seem to indicate he was the shooter. If so, Marino would have been thirteen years old: a mere initiate into the cult of probability, into that coven of math wizards attempting to manifest capital out of the ether of pure potential during the 90s, at the time of Big Mel’s murder.
The precise chronology of the conflict is unknown and unknowable, except through parable. More than fifteen shots were fired from three weapons in three directions across a crowded daytime intersection. Where detailed meta-historical accounts vary or are silent, the Headz have scripted with the precision allowed by probability. Hubristic at best. Their estimates blast through history like buckshot, puckering little wounds in the flawless surface of potential. Human warfare and tribal anthropology will never be the same, nor journalism. The exhumation of our possibilities, of some sort of grand narrative for our species, is now the fatal task of forensics experts.
The cue for the three-minute-and-thirty-three-second passion-performance comes from the mouth of Saint, who has by now transmutated into the form of Curtis Tucker, AKA Tut C: “Who that muthafucka?” he shouts, in an unpracticed blackcent, from the southeast corner.
From this point, roll script and cease forever my student’s sleep, the rest of conscience, the repose of my childish ways. Never will I listen to a rap record the same. Blessed is Saint, and his entire enterprise. I fall into his guidance now. I watch from a distance of infinite remove, still sipping the remains of my dosed iced coffee.
Timespace stops at the event horizon. More accurately, we reach a probability of ninety-nine-point-repeating-nine percent.
Even months later, no one has confessed to knowing how Channing’s—AKA Chinky Eyes’s—gun ended up being accidentally loaded (though at least one journalistic supa-dupa-fly-on-the-wall suspects the decision to load the gun was in fact unanimous on the part of all reality), but he fired on cue—the script reads: 8:42:20: Explosion of gunfire against the trashcan at the NE corner of C. and A.—and a bullet the size and density of a black hole issued from the barrel and rolled religiously through the universe and hit Griffin Matthews—AKA Big Mel of the West Rosecrans Tarantulas—in the designated historical point of contact (as if it could have missed, as if a bullet that occupied an almost infinite number of potential positions could have missed its target and failed to set off the predestined cosmic gang war): his temple.
Griff, as did the historical Big Mel, remained conscious for almost a full minute. Unlike Big Mel, he issued a single strained cry, which sounded to my irreverent and monolingual ears like, “Hella Hella Let Me Second-Thank Thee,” before following stage direction to the final position and immaculately executing his death scene in the predicted sunlight, his killer standing on the northeast corner sweating and straining, using every muscle in his neck and forehead to hold back the storm clouds and stave off the darkness at noon, his murderous firearm still outstretched, the unsuspecting crowd babbling and screaming and fleeing and bleeding around him, realizing now but too late that they were part of a re-enactment gone terribly wrong, the terrible radius of actuality spreading at an exponential rate, all of our futures consumed.
We ran to the store for CDs from LA, but the store was sold out. We ran home to get our fathers’ guns, but they all had locks on them. We turned on the television and prayed to Yo! MTV Rap for forgiveness, but Yo! MTV Rap had been replaced by The Real World.
Jesus descended in an indigo Escalade and shouted into the street, “Be passers-by.” I at least continued to stand. I am probably still on that corner, a pillar of salt. Part of me is outlined in chalk in LA. A black man died for my sins, keeps dying over and over again. Someone collapsed the waveform, looped the pattern, established the singularity. The re-enactors.
9.
This was never meant to be a tale with a moral: that guns kill, that irony is dead, that certain psycho-active drug combinations will defraud you of your earned intuition of the fluidity and perfect smoothness of time and space, that hip hop culture has desensitized us to violence any more than four-thousand years of imperial war at the forefinger of the white god man could have, or his choruses of exultation, or his pornographed epics to slaughter and fratricide. Spare me. I had not meant to bear witness to murder. I had meant to write a piece of journalism. I had meant to document my generation, my rap world, my Compton, my fetish, my daeva, my god—to capture a moment in timespace and re-live a piece of American history without the mess of blood and death and the sexual scatter of sub-atomic particles up the slipstream of reality to breed googleplex possibilities and then die on this Golgotha of artistic poverty. Saint and Griff had meant something similar when they founded Headz. It’s a vision of the black Mother Mary holding the body of Tupac that haunts me—one I stare at from a distance in my dreams, wondering if it’s a piece of art or a religious relic or both. Griff died for the wrong gods. I know it now.
Griffin Matthews was buried in his family’s hometown on York, Pennsylvania. The remaining members of Headz, currently facing criminal charges of aggravated manslaughter and metaphysical charges of deliberately piercing the membrane between secondary and tertiary reality, were disinclined to attend, though they are by now all out on three-hundred-thirty-three-thousand-dollar bail, awaiting the trial that will probably never happen, the verdict that will never read guilty.
I finally got the chance to speak with Saint one-on-one, inside a timespace-neutral docking station within the catacombs of memory, in early February of this year. Saint and I go way back, if I haven’t made that clear. And I betrayed him. Five years ago, when we were both students and I still thought I was going to be a writer and not a dead man and he was a thug rap fan with no prospects other than death, I crossed the breadth of our shared dormitory. I kissed his cheek and betrayed him. This re-enactment is his revenge, or a re-enactment of an old revenge saga. He tells me that in addition to being the sacrifice, Griff was the priest; in addition to being the murderer, Channing was the savior; in addition to being nervous, I was in control the whole time; and in addition to facing criminal charges, he’s being sued in civilian court by the Matthews family for damages from wrongful death. So not every set of numbers is what it seems.
On the wall of his room—he’s on house-arrest at 333 East Indigo—there’s an old photo of Griff, holding a bong in one hand and a script in the other hand. It was taken just days after he left the grad program and moved in with the Headz. “I like to remember him like that,” Saint says.
He tells me everything happens for a reason, even if a thing that happens can’t humanely be called a blessing; and he knows Griff wouldn’t have preferred to die in any other line of work. “He loved humanity more than he loved re-enactment; re-enactment was just the vehicle by which he traversed the stations of the cross leading to his passion. We got him just in time. He would probably have gone on to contribute significantly toward advancements in human understanding in the fields of science or mathematics, and it was necessary that a symbol of philanthropy die in order for the story to have a climax. And the story—the pattern, the myth, the probability ratio—is the most important thing here. Myth runs deep as blood. It’s a blood economy, okay? You want your rap CDs, don’t you, John?”
_________________________________
2013
