Excerpt
Above the Noise
Chapter 1I’m my mother’s only child. The doctors told her they didn’t think she could get pregnant or have a safe birth. It’s why she always called me “The Blessed One.” The rest of my family—cousins, aunts, uncles—called me that because I was one of the few kids fortunate enough to have what it takes to make it out of my environment. I was born on August 7, 1989, in Compton, California. My mom named me “DeMar” after her brother Lemar, who was shot and killed when he was twenty.
Diane Dykes, my mom, was born and raised in Compton. She’s a tough woman—you’d have to be the way she was raised—who lives with lupus, an immune-system disease that causes severe joint pain. It’s been that way since I was young. But she doesn’t let it hold her down. Mom used to work manual labor jobs when I was a kid. She worked at a factory assembling thermostats until I was ten. That’s when she got into an accident when a machine landed on her leg. It was real bad and she had to get screws put into her foot.
Mom’s family is really big. She has six siblings—and everybody was close. Growing up I was surrounded by her family. Cousins, aunties, uncles, grandparents. They were my whole universe. Mom has a twin sister, Donna, who was like a second mother to me. The two of them were staples in the neighborhood. Everybody loved and respected my mom. As I got older and she wanted to shield me more and more from the gang scene that dominated the Compton streets, the whole community knew to respect her wishes. I think part of that was because of the respect and admiration my uncles received. Two of my mom’s brothers were high-ranking gang members. Uncle Kevin, like most everyone I grew up with, was a member of the Crips. The other, Uncle Lemar, was in the Bloods. (Technically he was her half-brother and lived with my grandfather in a different part of the city.) Where I grew up, it seemed like everybody had ties to one gang or another.
My dad, Frank, was from a small town in Louisiana called Vidalia. With the exception of the poverty, Vidalia is as different—and rural—as you can get. Dad was Old Country through and through. Hardworking. Unforgiving. Never complained. People called him Big Dog. He was large, tall, and imposing; he knew how to occupy space. Big Dog was a football player—a middle linebacker—and all-around athlete in his younger days. Matter of fact, Dad was the first Black player on the Vidalia High School basketball team. In his first game, he grabbed thirty-six rebounds. After playing college football at Grambling State in Louisiana, he did what everybody did: headed west to California looking for a better living. He settled in Compton, not far from the block where my mom lived.
Dad had two kids from a previous marriage. My sister, Vanessa, is fifteen years older than me, and my older brother, Jermaine, was seventeen when I was born. My half-siblings lived in a different house with their mom. It wasn’t far from us, about five miles north in Lynwood, but I never had much of a relationship with either of them until we were all older. It was hard to find common ground when I was a kid. They just grew up so differently—their lives seemed calm. Besides, the age difference between my half-siblings and me was massive: By the time I could walk they were already out of high school.
Mom and Dad met at the Compton Fashion Center, aka the Swap Meet, a Compton landmark that has since been shuttered, like so many hangouts from my days. The Swap Meet was a massive indoor flea market where you could go to find all manner of knock-off clothes, counterfeit sneakers, and fake diamonds and jewelry. It was where my friends and I would pick up a pair of fake Air Jordans and catch the latest fashion trends, the whole time dreaming that one day we would be able to own the real deal. My mom used to always tell the same story of how they met. She was shopping in a shoe store when my dad spotted her through a throng of people from outside. He approached her, working up the courage to ask for her phone number.
“Boy, you’re going to have to buy me these shoes if you even want to think about getting my number,” she told him. Mom wasn’t kidding. So, he bought the shoes. The two were practically inseparable from that moment on.
Mom’s family accepted my dad with open arms. He wasn’t loud and didn’t need to be front and center, but he was a guy who naturally commanded respect. Mom’s dad, my grandfather, Otis Dykes, coached youth football in the community and began coaching alongside my dad in the local Pop Warner league. Mom never let me play football, even though it was one of the most popular sports in Compton. Practically every kid in the neighborhood grew up playing football. (Dad and Grandpa coached the rapper Eazy-E when he was a kid, which always blew my mind.) Once, my mom and dad went to see my brother Jermaine play in a high school game. In the fourth quarter, he was knocked out cold by a vicious tackle. That was all Mom had to see to know her own son was never going to meet the same fate. She wouldn’t let me near the gridiron. Instead, my first sport was something a bit more safe: tee-ball.
* * *
I grew up in a ten-block area occupied by the Corner Poccet Crips. Damn near the whole neighborhood was part of the gang, including some of my best friends and closest family members. The territory you lived in was protected by whichever gang ran that block, and even if you’re not in the gangs, you still lived by their unwritten rules. That meant knowing to mind your own business, understanding the consequences of wearing a certain item of clothing, or learning which blocks were safe and which weren’t. If you saw someone you didn’t know, you had to get more information.
“Where you from? Where you stay? Where yo’ mama stay? Where yo’ daddy stay? What school you went to?” That was pretty much all you needed to know to tell if someone was or wasn’t a threat. In Compton you were a product of your environment, whether you chose to be or not. You came to learn which are the Crip streets and which are the Blood streets, where the Hispanic gangs hold territory, and what areas you needed to avoid if you didn’t want trouble.
Our house was a four-room townhome on Acacia Court. Outside, there was graffiti everywhere you looked—not those beautiful, colorful wall murals by street artists like you’d see in other parts of Los Angeles. In Compton, the graffiti was a way for gangs to mark their turf. There was a dead tree leaning on the house beside ours, and a trash can that was always kicked over at the nearest street corner, garbage strewn about. The city never bothered to come by to fasten the can to the sidewalk, or to help clean up the mess. They didn’t care. Nobody outside our hood cared how we lived. That’s how we felt, at least.
Our house backed onto the Gardena Freeway and had a wrought-iron fence around the spotty patch of grass we called a front yard. All of the houses were separated from the street with an iron fence, but it’s not like it made us feel any safer. Walking through the front door, you entered into the kitchen. We didn’t have any furniture except for two beds—one for my parents and one for me. (That didn’t change until I was twelve and we moved to a furnished house up the block on a street named Myrrh, in the heart of Original Poccet Hood Crip territory.) There was an old TV in my room that sat balanced on top of a dresser, with two silver antennas poking out the back. It didn’t matter which way you moved them, I could never get anything but that static snowstorm on the screen. On top of the TV was an even older big-ass VCR that I used all the time, sitting on the edge of the bed watching videos all night. I still remember how that machine would swallow up the tape cassette. The click of the machine and the sound of tape running through the reel was so loud it practically drowned out whatever I was watching. In the kitchen, we used an ice cooler instead of a refrigerator. Mom or Dad would send me on trips to the corner store to buy a new block of ice once the old one had melted.
Not that I had much of a clue, but we were seriously down on hard times. There were signs everywhere you looked. The sink never worked in the bathroom, so you had to turn on the bath spout to get water to brush your teeth. But the water never ran long enough to be able to fill the tub and take a bath—only enough for a fast shower, or a sponge bath. At night I’d hear rats running inside the walls. That house left me forever humbled.
But at the time? I didn’t think twice about it. Our neighbors lived the same way as us. We all shared in the same struggles. It all seemed very normal to me. I didn’t think nothing of nothing. Still, I could figure out that my family was fighting to barely scrape by. There were nights where we weren’t sure what we were going to be able to eat. As a kid I never really liked school, but it got to the point where I would look forward to going for the sheer fact that I knew I would be provided with a free lunch. So I’d be guaranteed at least one meal that day.
We had nothing, but I never resented my parents for our situation. I could see how hard they worked to provide a roof over our heads. That’s all I could ever have asked of them. There were so many nights I spent home alone, probably way too young to be on my own like that, but my parents had to earn a living.
