- Experimenting –
I’ve been experimenting. I’ve been around.
I’ve been lost and I’ve been found. I’ve been through hell and back.
I’ve been broke and I’ve been with stacks.
I’ve been through drama, I’ve been in hospitals, injuries to me and my mama.
I’ve been defeated by my own conscience.
I’ve been victorious on other occasions.
I’ve been doing a little drinking and I’ve been doing a little blazing.
I’v ebeen on and off probation. Never going back to that life.
I’ve been planning to stay off and not thinking that twice.
I’ve been spending sleepless nights in the studio.
I’ve been chilling, rolling with criminals.
I’ve been victimized, I’ve been predator.
I’ve been over that, that’s kiddy stuff.
I’ve been respected. I’ve been neglected.
I’ve been accepted, I’ve been rejected.
I’ve been alienated, I’ve been humiliated.
I’ve been working hard, I’ve been with my occupation.
I’ve been important, I’ve been nothing.
My whole life I’ve been turning nothing into something.
I’ve been mastering my artistic life,
I’ve been flirting, but waiting for my wife.
I’ve been the nicest person I know.
I’ve been expressing feelings people can’t show.
I’ve been deep in thought, I’ve been rhyming.
I’ve been moving up, I’ve been climbing.
I’ve been treating other humans like diamonds.
I’ve been hurt, only on the inside, I’ve been crying. I’m been experimenting with my life.
–Walter Mosley and Me–
I live in South Central Los Angeles and experience an endless cycle of tension, waiting for something bad to happen.
Gunshots ring out at random moments. Helicopters circle overhead in the dead of night and sometimes during the day.
Police slowly cruise the streets staring out their squad car windows, and they make me feel like a criminal for walking to the store for a quart of milk. I’m often hassled by hustlers, homeless and con men on my way home from school.
My mom, off on Saturdays from her graveyard shift caring for an elderly man, prays for a better life for her eight children. At a relatively young age, I roamed the streets. Not looking for trouble. Looking for pick up basketball games. I knew every park in the neighborhood and my cousins and I would shoot hoops until midnight, when the lights went off. One thing I didn’t do was read. Except when forced to at school. In elementary school I refused to pick up a book to read for pleasure. Didn’t even understand the concept. But in middle school a friend starting reading, actually plowing through, Twilight. Instead of talking to me at lunch she’d go off and read, ignoring me and everyone else.
I was jealous, so I found a copy of that thick novel and was hooked from the start. Twilight brought me out of the world of sirens and ambulances and into a fantasy world that transported me into a dreamlike state far away from the dangers right outside my front door. For years I picked and chose books on my own. A memoir here, a young adult novel there. Later I was attracted to African America writers, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. And then I fell. Hard. For a man. Walter Mosley. He grew up in South Central, same as me.
How effortlessly I could relate to his main character, detective Easy Rawlins, a sharp, clever gatherer of information who knew the streets where I walked. His characters were the characters that I saw at the bus stops, outside liquor stores, shooting hoops at the park. I connected with Mosley’s prose because he writes the way I speak. He gives voice to the forgotten and ignored people on the street corners where I walk. Easy Rawlins is a stand-in, a substitute, for the beat cop. He offers those who have very little, a bit of hope. And in some cases, a shot at justice. Everything Mosley writes about, I feel. It’s as if I am riding along with him in his front seat solving mysteries in my own little part of the world. How refreshing, how shocking, how eye-opening to discover a writer who was born and raised within a few miles of where I go home to every night; where I curl up in my bed, block out the sounds of the city and disappear into the gorgeous sounds of Walter Mosley’s and my world.