Before I tell you about my friend and my brother I feel like I need to qualify some things in case this site is read by people that don’t have the background to understand that these posts are not a glorification of street gangs. The brothers that I traveled the city with were NOT a gang. I like to call us a ‘youth collective’. Our original purpose wasn’t to perpetuate minority youth violence, but that was the unfortunate byproduct caused by the depletion of community programs. There is so much energy that young people contain inside of them and they need an outlet to express themselves. As government and corporations continue to disinvest in the center cities of our country they are sentencing the residents to a lifetime of servitude or worse.
MEGATRON was smarter than your average teenager. Not just book smart either, but street smart if I can pass with that cliche’. I mean to say that he knew the streets of New York City as well as any cabdriver or deliveryman. MEG knew the demographics of every neighborhood. He knew the parks and the landmarks. Of all the things that I thought made him a genius he knew the subway system better than any graff writer that I got up with, and I used to run with a cat named M.Q. The subway system in New York City is an engineering masterpiece. It is a latticework of tunnels and stations that run for over four hundred miles throughout the city. I would bet you that MEGATRON had visited every single station. I can remember how deftly he could navigate the Broadway/Nassau/Fulton Street station. There are platforms for seven different subway lines inside that underground labyrinth and MEG knew where every exit was and where it deposited you on the street. That info seems trivial, but I can’t tell you how important it became when my brothers began to get outside of Brooklyn.
It’s not as if we were always in Brooklyn. Many of the brothers went to schools on the westside of midtown Manhattan. Early on, Printing H.S. was the Cybertron in Manhattan. We called it Printing, but the city called it the High School for Graphic Communications. Down the block from Printing was Park West High School. MENASAUR and STRONG were the leaders inside of Printing, but everything stopped when MEGATRON came to the school. We used to be able to have meetings inside of the lunchroom when we were just forming ourselves. As our collective expanded we had to move from the cafeteria to the schoolyard. Soon we were too deep (and too notorious) to be on the school’s property. There was a nearby park on Tenth Avenue and 48th Street that we called ‘Sign of the Times’ park because of the Futura mural of the same name that covered the handball courts.
This setting is where you could see MEGATRON’s genius and his charisma. The gatherings at the SOT park were part staff meeting and part pep rally. MEG used the meetings to introduce the leaders of different crews and to bring news and current events to the collective. The larger we became as a collective the more important these gatherings were. Even with over a hundred kids in the park you could still hear MEG talk over the din. MEGATRON was just a confident and forceful speaker. You listened to him and thought to yourself that whatever he wanted to do you would be able to execute it. MEG didn’t give you a plan that was going to result in casualties(getting knocked by jake) if you followed his instructions. There were still lots of hotheads that would try his patience because they wanted to be in MEG’s place, and that is where the genius of his leadership came in. MEG wouldn’t have to address the naysayers himself because there were so many of us that had seen him in action. If you didn’t show MEG that respect immediately you would never be trusted. And then RUM(ble) would shut down anyone else that didn’t still didn’t know when to shut up.
Things fall apart and the center never holds the same. As the collective continued to grow it began to draw the attention that would undermine the groups infrastructure. Some key brothers were incarcerated and others were too old to be available for weekday missions. With all the new members in the collective it became MEGATRON’s responsibility more and more to settle fraternal squabbles and beefs to prevent the collective from unraveling. The city was MEG’s and some of the brothers that he held closest were the ones that were the most jealous of him. These were the STARSCREAMS that every movement must gird against. I think that MEGATRON knew who the STARSCREAM was and that is why he kept that brother so close. At MEG’s funeral this brother’s absense was his final insult to MEG’s legacy.
In retrospect, it was remarkable that the collective even survived to that point. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had opened a docket on the collective. After that the sound you hear in the back of your skull is the ‘TIME’s UP!’ clock ticking. There were splinter factions comprised of castaway members of the collective. They worked for the intelligence gatherers and they nipped at the heels like an angry dog does to an indifferent master. These splinter groups and neighborhood rivals wanted their piece of the city too. There was more than enough to go around, but everyone clamored for the same piece and left the rest of the pie untouched. The stakes were sky high and brothers were dying for real. No matter what any celebrity says, getting shot in real life is NOTHING like the movie.
I can’t pretend that everything that we did was justified because it certainly wasn’t. The media illustrated spectre of the collective would propel New York City into the GUILIANI era. His promise was to deliver the city from the wolves that were seemingly on every corner. This was the city’s reaction to public policies that were started during the Reagan Administration. The city had been flooded with the inexpensive cocaine derivative and this in turn caused two or three generations to be shattered at their foundations. No one in the media questioned how a war on drugs actually became a war on poor people with drugs being used as the bullets. Don’t get lost in the flowing metaphors, real bullets were used too. Behind every story is the truth if you have the courage to look for it. You need to understand that the depravity that birthed MEGATRON sits in the capitol houses and the city halls.
You may hear stories told and written about my brothers that portrays them to be callous and unthinking savages, but that is far from the truth. There was energy, creativity and intelligence. The only problem was that we were too young to know how to properly use it. I do my best now to make up for the lost time and the lost souls. We is all we got.
