Son of Ghetto Celebrity

By Donnell Alexander

"I got paid for being dope," brags Alexander, a veteran hip-hop journalist who was tapped by ESPN: The Magazine to provide street cred in its coverage of African-American athletes, only to find his prose chipped at by uncomprehending white editors. He counts among his talents "consuming the stranger dimensions of popular culture and then talking about it" and "[getting] tore-down drunk and [writing] about the emotions I experienced at their most raw." Both are on display in this dizzying memoir, which shifts seamlessly from one literary style to the next, even turning briefly into a graphic novel in a scene depicting Alexander's first breakdancing lesson and subsequent concussion. From a whirlwind tour of Alexander's escape from Sandusky, Ohio, to start a career as a reporter, and of bouts of sex and drug use that repeatedly bring him to the brink of mental collapse, his father, Delbert, flits through the narrative. Although Alexander's mother called her son's wild temper "the Delbert in him," the memoir eventually identifies that quality as his unrelenting desire to reinvent himself, to hustle the system even when he hurts those closest to him and grinds himself down in the process. Few writers would possess the willingness to confront their disintegrating marriage with the brutal honesty shown here; fewer still would admit so readily to their own culpability. Alexander has given his inner demons a powerful voice, only to shout them down and prove himself at the top of his game.
© Reed Business Information, Inc.

After a misspent youth in the country ghetto of Sandusky, Ohio, Alexander became a popular magazine writer. But even though he developed into a ghetto celebrity of the literary variety, he couldn't seem to break free from the influence of his father, Delbert, a ghetto celebrity of the pimpin' variety. Donnell has felt the "Delbert in me" throughout his life, sharing his father's fondness for getting high and talking big. This memoir parallels the lives of son and father, juxtaposing stories of Alexander's success (and drug addiction and unhappiness) with Delbert's failure (and drug addiction and unhappiness). The story, told with hip-hop lyricism, reads like an invigorating mix of Paul Beatty's White Boy Shuffle and Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But Eggers' title is clearly tongue-in-cheek, whereas readers will emerge from Alexander's boast-filled memoir wondering whether he really thinks he's that brilliant. Even though the braggadocio gets tiring, this ambitious book has moments that live up to Alexander's opinion of his greatness--and that's high praise. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donnell Alexander
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985414351

Donnell Alexander

I'm not actually working on a bittersweet hometown memoir called Sandusky Touched Me. Let's scuttle those rumors immediately. Here's the story's essence: I'm 45 and have three children. My time is spent between three West Coast cities where I produce non-fiction content. Journalistic in its essence. Two exemplifying pieces are the memoir Ghetto Celebrity. The essay Cool Like Me: Are Black People Cooler than White People? My work airs sometimes on public radio and has been honored by film organizations such as Sundance. I've been on writing staffs of media outlets such as ESPN and LA Weekly. My newest project is Beyond Ellis D. As our official website below explains, this book is an interactive creation. On Kindle Beyond Ellis D is a rangy, unpredictable essay, supplemented by cool art and fascinating links. When Beyond Ellis D is downloaded from iTunes and consumed on an iPad, Sound and visual components also flesh out the narrative, allowing the story of a baseball legend to reach its entertainment peak. If I get my way, the latter scenario will be the only way I tell stories for the rest of my time on Earth

Book preview

Ghetto Celebrity: The Next Edit

Donnell Alexander

Copyright 2012 by Donnell Alexander

Published by Alexander / Swift at Smashwords

Graphic Interlude Line Drawings by Josh Sheppard

Lettering by Lisa Zahra

©2003 Josh Sheppard

To B.L.G. and A.M.O. and Jetoye

—D.E.A.

Contents

WARNING!

1. stroh’s genius

2. extra people

3. it’s either the best, or it’s the worst (and since I don’t have to choose, I guess I won’t)

4. talk like sex

5. hold my life

6. chico, don’t be discouraged

7. european ball

8. fountain and fairfax

9. make my moma proud

10. the delbert in me

11. all nude

12. …won’t win a grammy, won’t win a tony

13. my writes

14. license like muhfucka

15. a nickel and a nail

16. a class act

WARNING!

CONSTANTLY I GOT NIGGAS TRYNA ACT LIKE I AIN’T GHETTO.

White muhfuckas as well as black ones.

But that’s alright yo; it’s not like I’m proud of the shit.

Rather, I’m on this topic to score the topic that’s derived from being recognized for who one is. See, I got a ghetto name, so suckas don’t know how to play me. They act like I just dropped down from space To complicate matters more; I’m from the hood in small-town Ohio. Niggas always accusing Buckeye niggas of acting white, but that’s just a misconception about life in small towns. The little, out-of-the way ghettos are actually, like, extra-ghetto. In the sticks, it ain’t like Brooklyn. There you just marinate, cuz if you’re in a burg and have to live life like underground, public transit ain’t tryin’ to come through and lift you up and out, on some Fame shit.

This is what kills me most, straight up: Hardly a goddamn person who don’t live in the ghetto sticks an even see you. And yet they want to speak on how you be. That’s why the ignorant shit keeps poppin’. All these black-ass alleged stars up in the sports and entertainment spotlight, and y’all still don’t know ya niggas.

If I don’t see it, then it can’t be…

Y’all think that shit. And we hate that shit, here in America, Land of the Free, Birthplace of the Nigga. That y’all think that shit is the wellspring of my spite… At the end of the day though? Muhfuckas gonna acknowledge me. I know this like I know my dick size.

IT’S LIKE PUSSY, TO ME. THE WORD PUSSY, THAT IS, AND THE WAY GIRLS tend to it. In this end of the millennium time of mine, a whole buncha girls wanna act like they can’t know the word. Like they don’t want to know it. But if you get caught up in the 3 a.m., down on all fours of a contemporary female’s soul, most will tell you all that’s more real to them than their pussies is what comes out of it. My dream is that one day women will love their pussies like they love their niggas.

And if you ain’t got a nigga to love? Well, that’s on you.

I’m talking about America’s most prissy aspect, this thinking that if you don’t name something, it will go away. The same people who don’t want to hear the word nigga wanna put a buncha us up under flawless modern jails. As long as only African-Americans is what they see — and say — the growth of prison culture is just unfortunate.

Shit, I’ma say nigga until I stop seein’ niggas.

All y’all book-learnin’ muhfuckas should hear some real nigga stories. This here is one. Ghetto Celebrity is a story of me — for sure not the story of me — just a story of me. I left out crazy wild shit. You are not even knowing.

LISTEN UP. I GOT A BRAND NEW INVENTION: ME.

Cuz yo I gotta ghetto name and suckas don’t know how to play me.

I mean, a black-ass writer named Donnell—who gets good reviews. And I’m in the game. As that nigga X put it, I went from underrated to now (*ahem*) most anticipated. There were hella dues to pay, but I did that shit.

It was not supposed to happen. You were not supposed to read this line.

There are rules against me.

Back toward the end of the eighties, around the time Baldwin died, Marsha Warfield had an Uptown Comedy Special routine about niggas like me. She said, Let’s face it, you’re never gonna have a president named Donnell!

Now, the first time Marsha’s bit entered my world, all half-dozen people in my girlfriend Robin’s living room about fell on the floor laughing… cuz niggas know who’s ass-out. Robin about lost half her curl activator, shaking her head and stomping her feet.

I laughed, yet burned, too, as I had just pretty much stopped doing hard drugs and focused on being all I could be. Part of me went:

Awfuck. I couldn’t be president?

Not to politick, but a little after that I embarked on proving to all comedian-critics that news of Donnell doom was exaggerated.

Dude.

I had way too much evidence of my fate’s unpredictability.

WHO AM I TO BE TALKING TO YOU, GENTLE-ASS READER, IN SUCH impertinent tones?

Why, it’s me—that dope guy. The one who gets the rest of the room high through presence, that old ghetto presence. I am quoted by others who make things that move a great many others. I enrich the lives of old squares in the hills, even them without no cable. Ad people use me to get their kids fed and you shop to me in your malls. I’m almost like an artist.

Yet I come covered in wild shit, dysfunction and disarray. Maybe, gentle-ass reader, beyond this layer you aren’t able to see.

This is a book about my life, not the book about my life. Just some perspective on a few dominant themes, a travelogue of America beyond the experience of Hollywood’s obligatory colored cast member or the corporate thug cliché. And I left shit out because the purpose of this project isn’t purely to quantify who I am. (Is such a thing even possible? How do you recount the days, their affect on you? And how can you put your finger on just one thing, one day that spooned the next or an hour that turned you askew? How do you sketch the shape of your life?)

For years I’ve known that I’m nothing more than the sume of those who raised me and the dope people I got to be around.

This book is a tribute to dopeness by osmosis.

Regardless, what follows is tangibly real. So real, in fact, that some conversations are only accurate in essence. And, to heighten realism, I have, wherever possible, referred to related tapes, transcripts and articles. But that’s just another kind of distraction, as these devices put recorded events on a higher plateau than countless private developments.

I’ve also made up a bit here and there, if only for brevity. (Contrivance is so useful it’s disgusting, like putting another finger up in there.)

If my take on reality has you bugged, maybe this isn’t the book for you. Think the purchase through. Shit take Ghetto Celebrity home and chances are I’ll be all up in your ventilation, fuckin’ with your family.

(Ed: pre-digital reference.)

If you’re one of those people who’s going to become angry halfway through and huff and puff and think about starting a watchdog organization whose purpose is to eliminate the likes of me—but you won’t do a thing because you’re too damn shook—then don’t take my shit home. Cuz I’m a wild card. And most don’t know how to play me.

But… say you are actually feeling me. Then know that the shit is real as fuck. Read on, get open. And, don’t act like you don’t know.

Donny Shell, Brooklyn, NY

2001

I’ma keep doin’ me, unfortunately.

—Jay-Z

act 1

touched by Sandusky,

but not in a wholly terrible way

1

stroh’s genius

OCTOBER 1978

AS IT HAD BEEN THE HANDFUL OF TIMES I DECLINED THE DOOBAGE, AT MY side was a French horn—in its decade-old Adams Junior High carrying case. My friends, some of whom I’d known throughout grade school, would wave the snub-nosed, sweet-smelling marijuana cigarettes under my nose like, Ere, and I’d decline and they’d not push, because I was a good boy and there was nothing wrong with that.

They’d do it in the park, smack-dab in the middle of the pistachio- and emerald-colored leaves and the vacantly staring buckeyes or sometimes in a cold, gray alley as we walked that same circuit from our downtown school, just blocks off the dock of Sandusky Bay, to our homes, scattered about the East Side. Wind chill diminished so that the closer you got to the East End, kids forgot the bracing snap coming off the water. That morning, I hadn’t worn a coat.

And I don’t remember there being any potential witnesses, which is weird because the last bell at Adams rang in mid-afternoon and even though most adults were loading and unloading machines at the factories that kept the town on the map when tourist season wound down, there ought to have been cars moving to drop off helmets and lads at the practice fields, so that boys could lay pads into each other.

Columbus Avenue traffic aside, the coast seemed pretty clear.

All there was were huddling seventh-graders at the downtown open space outside Erie County Common Pleas Court. Spread across an acre of naked green space, we hung in cipher-sized cadres, with most kicking it the way fake-hard twelve-year-olds did in those days: white boys in denim jackets, with greasy hair and Kool cigarettes dangling from their lips like straight and opaque lunchroom straws aflame; nappy-headed niggas having wind-induced ashiness, ostentatiously imitation pleather. And maybe a lunchbox-size ghetto blaster cradled in their arms. Present also is a girl who might be pregnant but doesn’t yet know for sure.

I stood underdressed and on the perimeter—a shade over five feet, not yet 100 pounds, havin’ freakin’ black buckshot for hair—with that ridiculous French horn at my side. It was about the size of a baby hippo, and not even a sax. Which I actually wanted. And this being just an open space, sans trees or other high-wind blocker-outers, my shit fairly whipped about, like a little ebony flag.

I was getting ashier by the minute.

THERE WAS NO AGENDA WHEN I SMOKED WEED FOR THE VER FIRST TIME. I WAS just bored and cold, thinking maybe this joint will warm me up.

The funk had gone out, and I had to light it. Fire beyond my fingertips formed a furnace in the palm of my hand. High up on the doobie, I pinched the paper and leaned in and sucked it past my lips.

"Don’t nigger-lip it," someone said.

Was there any other way? This was a new one on me. By the joint’s next time around though, I’d figured out what that meant, and pillow lips got pursed.

Italian-ass Jeff (aka Biscuit Head Jed) was there, but he didn’t say nigger lip. Neither did Victor, although he could have. Victor was one of those five-o’clock shadow havin’ niggas who looked eligible for the draft even when he was in the seventh grade. Talked a lot of shit. But he didn’t say it.

I can’t say who else was in the circle, except a bunch of white boys. I do know that after the command to keep the joint off my tonsils, I took it out, eyed it stem to stern, and then hit the fuck out of the weed.

A voice rang out:

Aw, he didn’t even inhale!

This I ignored, since all I know is that some smoke had gone up in me. As the real temperature hovered just above freezing. I exhaled a languid line of mildly laced carbon dioxide and was indeed warmer when the joint made its way back around.

The next one had me coughing. I could practically feel the blood vessels in my lungs expanding. From the fulcrum of my waist, I pulled over double. Hack, hack. Phlegm, phlegm. Explosions on my brainstem. The French horn case now lying sideways on the sidewalk. If this were a movie, now I’d be straightening my clothes and checking slyly to see if anyone had noticed that little, er, snafu.

A thump came on my shoulder. It was time to go again. This hit went down less harshly, more enveloping.

The act of smoking a joint was beginning to make sense. Inside me something bloomed that was clearly different from the effect of the cigarettes I’d smoked during that summer of a few years back, behind a Farrell-Cheek dumpster with my neighbor Mike. Those only cooked my lungs and reinforced mama’s warnings against drugs and booze. Based on tobacco, I could only wonder why anyone would purposefully smoke anything.

Well, what I was feeling on this autumn day downtown was clearly more rewarding. By the time the cipher broke up, I wasn’t coughing. I was floating. The cold no longer hassled, it invigorated. The nip against my skin seemed an urge to life itself, no lie. And Jed and them and me laughed until our bodies wouldn’t let us anymore. Jed’s every misstep seemed out of a Walter Lantz cartoon. He cracked up at me, too. And I didn’t mind.

Pimple forehead, he observed of the white-peaked, hella rugged terrain residing above my eyebrows. We both broke down, tears streaming along our cheeks. No longer an unspoken worry, my bad skin was now an in-joke.

We cursed, only boys we were, and we cursed, debated who we’d fuck gimme just one chance, goddamnit. And at our paperboy friend Tim’s house, a pit stop on the way tour our East Side abodes, we read the letters to Hustler. We read and critiqued and Tim declared, I like when they be havin’ them organisms! And Jeff and I did not know what to say about that. Was it us or him who had paid insufficient attention in biology class?ho

A LOT OF THINGS HAPPENED THAT FALL — NOT THE LEAST OF WHICH WAS the brilliant dawn of hashish—developments that would over years lead me to grow all serious and ethereal, as though my body were strictly a rental apartment. (Unfurnished.) Soon that French horn would be cast aside, as would, eventually, the entirety of my North Coast existence. Good-bye Mistake on the Lake. So long, my Midwestern home.

On that October day though? I simply felt good. You knew that I would, now.

***

People ask me, from time to time, whether I’m in bed with criminals. I tell whoever puts that question to me that my mother was when she conceived. So the answer may well be moot.

YOU COULD ACTUALLY STILL HEAR FRANK VALLI SONGS OVER TRANSISTOR radios when my whole story began. On the summer Saturday in 1961 when Brenda Graham, my mother, joined DuJuana from downstairs and some of that girl’s friends for a day at Cedar Point, she was still young enough and country enough to have never kissed a boy, to have never had a date. Brenda was the first one off the steps and led the charge to the amusement park’s ferryboat, downtown at the docks. She led with a skip and skipped with a bop.

They had been neighbors for years, but Dwana was older than this oldest Graham girl and actually talked back to boys—provided they approached respectfully. This discretion eliminated her most wolfish suitors. Regardless, Dwana had boys after her. Like Billy, that big pretty boy with a stutter. Billy ran with a crew who all wore their hair in conks, and if they didn’t see the inside of a jail until around their eighteenth birthdays, they’d be lucky.

It took five minutes for the girls to get from the Bay View Arms apartments to the dock, and just as Sandusky Bay came into sight, Dwana confirmed what Brenda suspected was the plan: Billy and the Boys would take a later ferry to the amusement park and meet them at that icon of a roller coaster, the Blue Streak.

Brenda fell from the front of the girl pack to its end.

She didn’t mind Billy—he had proper Southern manners and he spoiled Dwana silly—still, Brenda didn’t come out to get caught up in her friend’s fast-girl ways.

You sure take your time letting everybody in on things, Brenda complained nearly to herself, making eye contact with no one.

JuJuana shrugged, It’s a big park. Then she called back, without turning around:

Grow up, girl. See who you want, ignore who you don’t.

The smart remark made Brenda mad. Earlier, back at the apartments, Brenda’s five siblings had looked at their 15-year-old sister like she was grown. She was going to Cedar Point without Mother and Daddy. She had pulled off a caper incalculable to them.

Brenda had convened a parental conference of great subtlety and stood with humbled shoulders just outside the door of the Grahams’ converted hotel unit and begged Mother and Daddy’s permission, but only after detailing her daily list of chores and quasi-matronly responsibility responsibilities. She was shady with her histrionics, and built to a precariously developed crescendo.

She said, "So I can take care of these kids all the time, but can’t just one time go to Cedar Point and have one day to myself as a reward? Oooo, that’s just not right."

Brenda got her way.

In this scrap of Northern Ohio burg-dom, an amusement park could matter enough that a teenager might wield its name with searing melodrama. Otherwise industrial and approaching anonymity, Sandusky kept the Cedar Point name so tied up in the local identity that its high school sports teams were called the Blue Streaks. The very fact of Brenda’s going was a big deal.

Not long after Dwana had brought up Billy, a malaise set upon the girls. They’d hardly gotten through the turnstiles. The problem stemmed from Brenda. Cedar Point was real live—not just a way of getting back at one’s parents—and its thrill rides weren’t all to her taste. She found nothing fun about fear. As Brenda was the brainest, her filibustering and coaxing had everyone sticking to the tame stuff: bumper cars, swing rides, games of chance.

By noon the day was slipping into the mundane.

Near the saltwater taffy stand, Dwana, with authority, threw away the paper cone from her second bag of cotton candy.

"Look, the Blue Streak line ain’t that long. Let’s get on it."

Brenda forced her eyebrows together and asked, "Have you seen the Blue Streak, up close?"

You can just cool your heels, Brenda. Eat another damn bag of popcorn for all I care, but we didn’t come here to ride like five-year-olds!

And that’s fine with me, Brenda said. But do you really want to risk your hair? Messing it up I mean.

Dwana smoothed back her hair, right above her straightening comb tan, where the do was starting to kink up some.

And those nice shorts, Brenda continued, why you even wanna put them on, much less iron them, if you’re going to have to get them all jostled and wrinkled?

Dwana brushed down the material covering her thighs.

Brenda went in for the kill. "I understand though. You don’t want Billy to think you’re too interested in him, hunh? That’s smart." With a wave of the at the hem of her friend’s floral fabric, Brenda dismissed the matter.

Dwana hated it when her protégé tried to play slick.

Ungh. Brenda Lee Graham, you get on my last damn nerve.

The flow of tourists on the midway pushed them to the crowded fun-house entrance. Dwana pointed up, then put her foot down. All in favor said aye, and it was agreed that this was a much more reasonable choice than the Blue Streak.

Brenda abstained from voting and cursed her fortune. She was more scared of the funhouse than the coasters. The girl walking at a distance behind her friends improvised excuses along the way.

Dwana, who all morning had let Brenda’s open cowardice cover for her own fear, said, because she could:

You scurred.

Scared, Brenda whispered as correction, then said, No, I am not.

The quartet latched onto the turnstile mosey, her friends acting all cool and straying behind clusters of Bermuda shorts and lobster-red legs. Soon the gang would be separate in the dark.

Inside the mock-horror darkness, Brenda lingered before the most pleasing in a series of warped mirrors. For once she ws stretched tall. Not as pretty as her younger sister Sherry—or Mother, for that matter—but Brenda could see even in the curvy metal that she was doing alright. Her palms did not sweat here. Hands on hips, in fists then wrapped around her shoulders in a Dorothy Dandridge pose. Too long a look, too dreamy, then she was alone, scouring the passageway for her friends.

Brenda kept one friend between herself and the railing, careful almost always. Beyond the distorted mirrors, piped-in spookiness, and calibrated lurching of plastic skeletons, the funhouse offered genuine elements of fear. There was a sound of shuffling feet, too real to have come from speakers so tinny. Brenda wanted to wrap her trembling hands around Dwana’s fingers.

Were those heavy whispers in the middle distance for real or a joke? When the clomp of about four pair of unseen hard shoes hit the floor, Dwana’s fingers were vised.

And then there were hands on Brenda, all over. Much of the feeling was below the belt and behind, expert and powerful. She grabbed both groping hands, before she even screamed, and felt n energy ignite. It was different from that time Daddy’s friend put his hand down her pants. That was wrong. This felt wrong, too, but for that pause before she screamed in the funhouse, there was a fascination where disgust ought to have been.

Her oversize rear end, breasts and thighs had been investigated roughly by small, wiry hands, and when she finally wrestled free and said, Stop! she heard Dwana yell the same thing.

Except Dwana was laughing. Everyone was, except for Brenda.

Now Brenda’s labored vision revealed Dwana hugging Billy. The attack had been only a mating ritual. There were four boys, all older than Brenda.

On the walk toward flittering daylight beneath the funhouse Exit sign, Brenda nicked glances at those who had picked her. She glimpsed a sneer in his smiling profile, then poked out her bottom lip, looked at her shoes and softly mumbled, These guys are lowlifes.

He had nice hair though. Not greasy, but clearly straight and shining in the minimal light.

She was silent the rest of the day playing the blitz over in her head. Each time the footage unfurled behind her eyes, Brenda’s mind perked up at the picture’s start, before she screamed.

There was no getting away from the fact that the one who had groped her, sexy lurking in the damp darkness, was a little mug, just a bit taller than her five-foot self.

He lagged behind, next to the girl, down the ramp to the turnstiles and back out into the midway, and through the day’s remains loitered, telling Brenda corny jokes. Brenda received each effort coolly. Sometimes she even declined to acknowledge them with a dim smile. But when curfew came, at the ferryboat landing, the miniature kid’s lips were on hers. He kissed her, and she kissed back. Awkwardly, excitedly, scared. Brenda’s kiss was that of a child in passion.

BILLY AND THEM WERE DELBERT ALEXANDER’S SAFE, SQUARE HOMEBOYS.

He had just come back to Santown from Down South. Anderson, South Carolina, to be precise. His parents, the closest thing Erie County had to monied colored people, had all but given up on trying to change Delbert’s trifling ways, but the real reason for Delbert’s absence from the hometown picture was legal: the law had promised to lock him up if he had remained in Sandusky with the grown criminal he called friends.

Charlene Rice Alexander and her husband Gospie, known among the coloreds as Mr. Hots, had really thought that a summer with the boy’s Rice relatives would help sever Delbert’s underworld ties. Instead, he had just refined his penchant for sniffing out action. In South Carolina he would hitchhike to the next town over if he word was it had get-highs and cards, women and music. Delbert accomplished half his missions undetected. When he didn’t, Charlene’s sisters whipped his butt. But that didn’t mend him.

Before the summer was done, Delbert was ducking certain down-South gangsters with a vigilance he had once reserved for the police.

Five-four and sinewy, with delicate cheekbones and wavy hair, Delbert won folks over before he opened his mouth. Those compelled by the looks were pulled through that threshold into his confidence. Anyone venturing that far was done.

Delbert manipulated words like Junior Walker worked the saxophone and charmed like a radio minister. He was a hustler to his marrow. The cousins and aunts in the Alexanders’ extended family—the Rices, the Prophets—passed around the story of how, when Delbert was 12, he got a route delivering the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier. Within two weeks, the boy had conned his big sister Barb into distributing the Negro weeklies onto doorsteps across the South Side. He paid Barb a fee, and one couldn’t be mad at him.

Soon Delbert’s rascally ways wouldn’t come across so cute. He left his dirt in the street, but the unexplained money and new clothes tipped off family. The Rices talked, so did the Prophets. Charlene and Mr. Hots denied plain evidence until cops got to be regular callers at the Clay Street address, always asking to talk to their son.

The resulting humiliation drove Mr. Hots to unknown levels of fury. And Delbert’s indifference to his father’s pain touched off epic chase scenes. Late nights when Hots came home from his railroad job and found Delbert’s bed empty, he would get on the phone, putting out word that the boy was MIA. Then Hots would call out the window to reach every residence not hooked up. These episodes ended most neatly when Delbert came home to take the beatings straight up, but the act got messy on occasions that Hots caught wind of his son’s presence at one house of ill repute or another and had to hand out an ass whipping on the spot. Many times Hots just missed Delbert and drove back down Clay Street to find his son in bed, eyes closed, faking and hoping.

Delbert was fleet of foot, but quit the track team when the coach insisted on practice before competition. His ease