Straight Outta Compton - Excerpt

Tomorrow

When Rooster was nine or so, we used to all sit on the stoop with boodies like charcoal and scratch house music on the cement. Our mommas were Lisa-Lisa and Monet grabbing Bic pens and No. 2 pencils which were snapped in half. They threw them out the front door and told us to get outside and use them. "Reclaim your imagination," momma said. "Keep your ass out of the street and put on clean underwear in case you get hit."

Out on the stoop, I called Clive. And Clive called Rooster. And Rooster would call nobody but talk only to himself, and he blew his plastic bugle until his cheeks and heart turned blue. And he called Yolanda. And Yolanda, who had squash for breasts, called dirty Diana. And dirty Diana would drop her clothes and creep over with ripe raspberries inside her unbuttoned blouse. And Rooster would look inside and point at the berries like they were nothing. And Clayborn would crawl alongside Diana and a cloud of dusties so his momma and daddy couldn't see him, and he called nobody but seemed to be calling for anybody on the inside. And anybody who heard him called their friends and came over, and house niggers who weren't even invited to sit on the stoop gave Flip, Billy's tripped-out friend, an excuse to follow suit. So he did. And Flip looked like a middle finger to us, but together we functioned like a bad set of big, black hands.

The University of Compton was close to my house, and Flip claimed he jumped the fence to become a college man. He pointed to the chain nets on the basketball courts inside the fence and showed us real blood smeared over his wrist and hand. Flip claimed he cut himself dunking on the rims. He also said it was where the drug dealers shoot.