I started a gang

I started a gang the summer between eighth and ninth grades—neighborhood kids, mostly. It started out just wearing the same color (we picked turquoise, because it was the kind of thing that distinguished us from being just a bunch of kids who just happened to be wearing, say, identical navy blue shirts that day) and riding our bikes up and down Fox Glenn and Sawmill roads, glaring at people in their yard while they were mowing their lawns or getting the mail or whatever, but it escalated pretty quickly. There was this little yapping dog that lived a few houses down from me who was never on a leash and would always chase after the wheels of your car or bicycle when you rode past, and your first reaction would be to freak out and swerve, because it would run right up next to your wheel and disappear and you were sure you were going to hit it, even though no one ever did (it finally got gobbled up a few years later by a coyote that had been roaming the neighborhood for a few weeks). Well we took this dog and we tied a rope to its collar and tied it to this big oak tree, without even leaving it enough room to run. All it could do was jump up and down and bark. I’m not even sure the dog knew it was being punished or targeted by our gang or whatever, but to make sure the owners knew, we carved the name of our gang (at that time the “Fox Cliffs Crew,” although that would change many times) into the tree above it. Then we kept riding back and forth past the house all day glaring, although no one came out until nearly dinner and by then most of us had already split off and gone home.

That night at dinner I told my mom and my sister that I was a gang leader now, and that we had committed an act of gang violence against a neighborhood dog.

“With your friends Rocco and Justin?”

“And Scott,” I said, “and a bunch of other kids.”

“Is that what you’re always doing, riding your bikes around real slow?” she asked. We had been glaring at her for a while now whenever she went out to sunbathe on the front lawn, but I’m not sure she ever noticed. My mom sunbathed wearing clothes—shorts and a tee shirt. All she wanted was a farmer’s tan, she said, because she believed that expose any more of yourself to the sun and you were vulnerable to stomach cancer. We had a real wacky doctor who convinced my mom for years that she was allergic to dairy, because of a test he had run where he had her hold a hunk of cheese to her chest and pressed her arm down, and the fact that it stayed down rather than bouncing right back up showed that the cheese was hindering her autoimmune system. It took years of the same symptoms no matter how far she stayed away from dairy to figure out that she was actually allergic to dander, but in the meantime, pretty much everything we kept in the house was soy-based.

“We’re patrolling our turf,” I said. “And now we’re going to start enforcing it.”

“If any of those kids climb up our trees no bike for the rest of the summer,” she said.

I convened an emergency gang meeting that night to discuss our next move.

“We need to hit the Cassotis,” suggested Ryan. The Cassotis who traveled a lot and bought motorcycles instead of having kids. We didn’t know much about what they did except one morning when the guy (Ward) was out weeding I saw a swarm of identical black SUVs drive up, whereupon a bunch of guys with black suits and sunglasses roughed him up for the better part of an hour until he broke down crying and pointed to the backyard. Then the suits got a bunch of shovels and started ripping up the yard until they found a briefcase buried under a grill and drove off with it, leaving Ward there on his knees with his gardening gloves, just looking at the ground. Right after that the two of them took a long trip to St. Maarten’s and when they came back a couple weeks later they took their name off the mailbox and started spending a lot less time in the yard.

“We could do something to my little sister,” suggested Justin. His little sister was always tagging along whenever we did anything, including gang stuff, which was kind of a drag. It annoyed Justin in particular, because she would always try to get on our good side by telling us embarrassing things about her brother, like that he still has his old Care Bears poster rolled up in his closet and sometimes she catches him looking at it when he thinks everyone else is asleep.

I shook my head. We needed something bigger. Something that would get everyone talking about us. Maybe we could parlay this into a profitable thing—protection money, and whatnot. So it wouldn’t be a single prank to one specific target. We needed to strike fear into the hearts of the entire neighborhood. I made this impassioned speech and everyone agreed that we would sneak out after midnight and knock over everyone’s garbage cans.

Mike couldn’t wait until midnight because he had to go to bed early that night for a doctor’s appointment the next morning, so we all met in the cul-de-sac in front of my driveway at 9:30. It was still kind of light out, so I convinced everyone to wait until 10, and then we started.

We needed to hit as many houses as quickly as possible, so the focus was on quantity rather than quality. We split up into two groups that each took a different side of the street, pulled the cap off the can and then threw it to the ground. We didn’t have the time or the stomach to cut into any of the bags and spread the garbage around, so we decided that just knocking over the cans and maybe pulling the top bag out into the street was enough. We moved quickly and quietly—the only sound we made was the big thud and scrape of the plastic cans against the pavement. We kept shooting each other glances, because we knew this meticulously planned mayhem, this carefully organized chaos, was the greatest thing any of us had ever done.

We were almost done—we had just a few more houses to get to at the top of Sawmill—when we heard a car flying up the street behind us. We saw the headlights first, and then a big vehicle that kind of looked like an ice cream truck did a powerslide maybe fifty yards away from us. A guy got out of the driver’s seat with what looked like a rifle (!) and ran to join the guy who had gotten out of the passenger’s seat with a rifle of his own behind the car. And then before any of us had a chance to react, there was a quick PFFT sound and Bo dropped hard.

We ran for our lives up the street. There were more PFFTs and we heard the bullets whiz past us. Scott dropped on my left; Zach on my right. The rest of us split up and I covered my head and jumped into the woods at Sawmill’s dead end and just kept running back.

We thought the PFFTs were coming from sniper rifles or something that had been silenced. As it turns out, they were only tranquilizer guns. The guys who had been shot were not dead; they were merely groggy. This wasn’t the police or some rival gang; it was Animal Control. Turns out someone on Fox Glenn had called to report a bunch of small bears pawing through his trash and Animal Control hadn’t realized their mistake until they heard the bears they were shooting at screaming “HELP” and “RUN,” whereupon they fled the scene about as fast as humanly possible.

I didn’t know this in the woods, however. I huddle against a tree right in front of this little stagnant creek. I wondered if the water was fresh, and how long I would be able to survive out here. Maybe this is where I’ll make my home from now on, I thought. On the lam, drinking creekwater and dew, catching rabbits and squirrels. I could hide in trees during the day. I could teach myself to jump from branch to branch and never touch the ground unless it was to pounce on some unsuspecting rodent. This is my life now.

I heard a crunch. Someone had stepped on a twig. The person was just a few feet away. I heard dry leaves creak under his sneakers. When I felt his breath on my neck I turned around and slammed my wrist into his face as hard as I could. He went, “aww!” and fell on his ass; I ran. What I had done is I had given David a bloody nose, but I did not stay to investigate.

I ran out of the woods back into the street. I saw the truck was gone, but I kept sprinting as hard as I could right down the middle of the road, thinking the guys with their rifles might jump out from behind any bush at any time and kill me. I passed the bodies of my comrades and had to close my eyes to shield myself from the horror. One of them was groaning.

I didn’t stop sprinting until I made it back to my house, at which point I collapsed from exhaustion on the front porch. I just lay there panting for a few minutes, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I heard someone at the bottom of our driveway (I had made it back home from the neighbors’ yard) put the trash back in the can and stand it back up. I heard their footsteps head back up the driveway, up the front walk, whereupon they stopped right behind me. I knew I should run or fight, but I was too sapped to even move.

“What’s your problem,” my dad asked.

I couldn’t answer.

“Your idiot friends knocked over our trash cans,” he said. He kicked me to make sure I was listening. I nodded. “Tell them next time I see them in the street I’m not braking.” I tried to force myself to cry because I thought my friends were dead.

I think I figured out what had really happened the next morning, when I went to check up on the crime scene and found my dead friend Zach mopping his driveway. He had confessed to his parents about the garbage cans and was in pretty serious trouble. I stood in the street, trying to piece everything together and Zach stopped mopping for a second to glare back at me.