The Dying Ground

The crowded barbershop broke into laughter as Cutty greeted me with a variation of the same put-down he'd been using for over sixteen years. The fact is that at five feet five inches I barely reach the first letter of my six-foot-tall name.

"How short are you exactly, Maceo?" This came from a balding contemporary of my Grandfather Albert.

"I'm tall as I need to be," I answered.

I eased into the shop, taking note of the old and young faces waiting in the unusually relentless heat of October.

"And how tall is 'need to be'?" Cutty grinned my way.

Cutty had been my barber since my seventh birthday, and habit kept me a customer despite the insulting words. The barbershop was one place in Oakland that provided shelter if needed and contributed order to an often chaotic life.

More simply, it was home.

Cutty was as invested in me as a blood relative. Alongside his prized Oakland A's paraphernalia, snapshots of local celebrities, and barber's license was a photographic history of my baseball career from Pee Wee League through high school. Up until the ninth grade, all my uniforms bore the red-and-white logo of Cutty's salon, Crowning Glory. The pictures were his way of staking a claim before I hit the majors.

"You didn't answer my question. How tall is 'need to be'?"

A waiting customer piped up with his opinion. "I say he's four ten and a half on a good day." The ensuing laughter reminded me that people often see my height as a flaw. It has been a source of ridicule since I was a young boy, but to me my size is a day-to-day reminder—a reminder to keep life compact and close to the vest. The few times I've reached for the height of others I've been knocked back into place. So I've learned to live as a little man with a big name. And I've learned to smile at the jokes.

"Five foot." Another barber.

And Cutty: "Shit, Maceo ain't seen hide nor hair of five feet." He raised his natural comb to his mouth to think for a moment. "No, I take that back. Maceo was about seven feet tall when he was winning all those championships." And just like that the jokes about my height switched to praise for my baseball career.

I was used to that too.

Cutty picked up a portable fan and held it in front of his face. "Damn, feels like Africa outside." Oliver, Cutty’s partner, rolled his eyes. "What you know about Africa? You barely left Oakland in thirty years!"

"Shit, I know plenty 'bout Africa. I find out all I need to know 'bout Africa every time I go to East Oakland." It was an old joke that never failed to hit its mark.

The bonus October heat had sent everyone out into the streets in pursuit of any company to be had, and the sense of camaraderie and fun among the patrons kept the mood light. Along the curb a few waiting customers sat perched on the hoods of their cars, smoking cigarettes or reading newspapers. A few of the youngstas, unschooled in Cutty's bullet-ridden history, masked shady business deals behind the steady bump-bump of rap music.

Crowning Glory, Cutty's shop of thirty years, sat on the Oakland side of San Pablo Avenue, a dirty artery that ran from Oakland's city center all the way through six cities. It was his fifth location since incorporation. Initially his shop had been on Alcatraz Avenue, the Oakland street so named for its clear-day view of the famed Alcatraz Island. It was there, when I was seven, that my granddaddy took me for my first haircut.

When business picked up enough for Cutty to leave Alcatraz, his bad luck began in earnest. His new location on MacArthur and Broadway attracted all the hustlers and Superfly wannabes of the 1970s. Though Cutty hated to compromise his profession, he built his reputation on the mean, slick perms so favored by that generation. And as his reputation grew so did his clientele until finally, inevitably, a crosstown gangster rivalry was played out in his barber chairs.

The first casualty of Crowning Glory was Scott Hathaway, a heroin dealer with control of North, East, and West Oakland. He was slaughtered by an up-and-coming drug dealer named Jordy Prescott.

Legend has it that Hathaway's look of surprise was driven off his face by a bullet through his right eye. A quick nosedive in business confirmed that most people believed Cutty helped set up the flamboyant Hathaway. Only a new location on Shattuck Avenue and a year's worth of time brought people slowly but surely back into his shop.

The next move was caused by a retaliation shooting that occurred three blocks away, but Cutty took no chances. Before moving into the dusty San Pablo storefront, he had the property baptized by a local preacher, he installed church pews instead of seats for the waiting customers, and there hadn't been a murder since. But sometimes, through the ever-ready smile, I suspected that a cutthroat heart beat in the old man's chest. That much bad luck in one place made anybody suspect.

Memories were short, however; the boys dealing on the curb proved it. The eighties had brought a fast and furious new industry into Oakland, the crack trade, and there was evidence of it everywhere you looked.

The circus atmosphere of the drug game seeped into every aspect of urban Black life. Nothing went untouched as newfound wealth allowed men, women, and children to dream of something different. To the older cats, Michael Corleone and the crew of The Godfather supplied the props to let them dream in an elegant manner and jump the class barriers of their birth. But the rules and regulations of The Godfather became old to the youngstas even before the credits rolled. They had no time for rituals and order, just time enough to shove a big-ass foot through a door and demand the respect only a loaded gun and lots of money could bring.

Scarface was their manifesto.

It was a mess, but more seductive than anything we'd ever seen.

In 1989, the entire Bay Area, San Francisco included, fell under the 415 area code, and under that name a prison gang became a strong independent faction within the penitentiary system, eventually edging out the stronghold of the Black Guerrilla Family and keeping the Los Angeles Crips and Bloods from infiltrating the northern California crime force. The Bay Area was proud of its No Crips, No Bloods policy, but once in a while small pockets of transplanted criminals made their way into the fray, usually by way of family members, more often than not by way of good-looking women.

All that added to the big-man-on-campus swagger of the young men gathered here and there in front of Cutty's. Fellas who, a mere two years before, never rated second glances now had all the props of true hustlers, and they used every opportunity possible to flaunt them. I rode the wave as a person on the edge of the inner circle, aware all the time that the Wizard was just inside the curtain. Anyone who looked closely knew the center would not hold; the smoke and mirrors would disappear and reveal a body count to equal a homegrown war.

The unseasonable warmth pumped the festivities to a fever pitch, and all I could do was watch. The heat had an entirely different effect on my spirits. While the others laughed and joked and made plans to hit Geoffrey's, Politics, and the End Zone, I waited for what was to come.

The 90-degree temperature just weeks before Halloween threw off my alignment. It felt unnatural to my blood and, coupled with the bad dreams, left me coiled like a snake for the first sign of bad news. It was coming, I just didn't know how or when.