I knew that would get your attention, y’all nasty motherfuckers.

A bit over one year ago, I wrote a review of a book with a title that played off the Naughty By Nature song. (Excellent band title, better band.) The book is actually about race and hip-hop. Yeah, I was disappointed to learn that, too. Once I read the thing though? My mood changed quite a bit.

The Pittsburgh Pirates couldn’t even give me Dock’s address whilst I was tracking him down.

An early draft draft of that Weekend America Dock Ellis piece contained a tearful reading, by Dock, of a letter from Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson had thanked the young Pirate pitcher for speaking out on race, predicted Dock would be driven from the game. That’s exactly what happened.

The mainstream is recognizing this legendary athlete again. Better late than ever.  Dock’s a larger-than-life classic.

One of these.

Regular motherfuckers now have full permission to begin liking me.

Today’s item about that fabled year in urban culture is part of a joint radio and blog project between WFMU, Michael Gonzales, Serena Kim and the writers at Aural Examination and Invisible Woman. I’ll talk — with my old Bay Area connect Billy Jam — on the respected Jersey City radio station between noon and 3 p.m., EST.

Grab a podcast of the program from WFMU’s website.

Now, it’s hard for a certain segment of America to talk about 1988 without talking about crack. The drug was just cresting in urban popularity, and the culture — especially music — which grew out of that year was as potent as rocks were dangerous. There seemed a symbiotic relationship, as though America’s biggest drug problem was bacteria living in the intestines of hip-hop. New Jack Swing was born of crack culture same as was the tension of that second Public Enemy album and LL Cool J’ s emerging Kangol hats.

At this time I was 21 and in the middle of my first full year at Fresno State, a transfer from Sacramento City College. Fresno then felt incredibly segregated, just very different from the Northern California I knew. (Too much like Ohio.) Black guys on campus were largely looked at a athletic program fodder, even gangly, clumsy types like me. Monthly, campus people would ask if I was on one of the sports teams.

That year might have been the craziest of my life. I loved it as I looked within. The writing was new and fresh. The music and art and such that I took in then fundamentally rocked my world.

My Fresno State roommate, who is the creator behind this blog, spread his thousand-or-so-piece vinyl album collection across our apartment’s dining room. We just gave the room over to it. Nevermind our 16-inch black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears. And my shit — mostly cassettes, and pretty good shit at that — was over in the corner, beneath the Sid Vicious poster. We very rarely opened the curtains.
For the first time, I had access to someone’s full take on rock and roll. Fresh out of Sacramento City College, I missed about 40 percent of my Fresno State classes, just getting lost with my headphones on. We had all of the Beatles and Stones albums and Lou Reed and the Minutemen and Gang of Four and Hüsker_Dü. And I just went apeshit for this new music. This stuff mattered to me at least as much as Too Short and Schoolly D and the radical new rumblings coming out of Los Angeles. It was as though I’d entered a wormhole. We listened to Robert Johnson.

Even this lofty experience could not extract me fully from the world of rock cocaine. I would occassionally head back up to Sactown, mostly to get my jheri curl done.

There was this cat on Freeport Boulevard, the King of Curls, who would fix up my crop on regular occasions. But when I forgot to call ahead and get an appointment on time or whatever, I’d end up in the kitchen of some half-stranger who’d put lye, curlers, etc., in my hair.

One late Saturday morning I had bombed up Hwy 99 in my ‘77 Chrysler LeBaron and landed in some friend of a friends’ kitchen, with my head in her sink.

I just sat there while this woman rolled up my newly straightened hair. She was a mom I’d like to fuck, before. Maybe 32 and certainly old to me. Then. She was hot though.

And it was just one of those situations where your hairdresser is talking. I missed the cool professionalism of the King of Curls, but she was real cool, pretty and gentle. Smelled nice. So I let her ramble on. Her daughter, now that was the real issue. My new curls lady was very unhappy, despite her relatively posh surroundings. If I remember right, the crib was a duplex in the nicer part of Sactown’s south side. And the woman said a word, all drenched in sadness, that I’d never heard before:

“Toss-up,” the mother said. “My baby’s a toss-up.”

I was like, “what the fuck is a toss-up?” And she explained that her daughter was trading sex for crack. She cried a little bit, but never took her frustration out on my scalp. (He remembered, fondly.)

Around when the curlers were mostly out of my head, the daughter came in. She was gorgeous, just bursting with that beautiful Northern California black girl thing that nobody on Earth has yet matched. And she was what we would come to know, in the popular lexicon as a crack ho. Strawberry, to some.
When I think of ‘88, I tend to think of sqandered promise. It’s a drizzly California memory. And I got two-and-a-half hours to Fresno.
But, then in the summer I went and interned at the Boston Globe. Living Colour, up in Cambridge. That’s some shit I can’t forget. Truth is ‘88 was all over the place for me. There was that time interviewing Mayor Ray Flynn on the fly, at an afternoon public park grip-and-grin event. In the middle of our interview, the opening bass notes of “Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em” came blasting out of an oversize speaker. Instantly I recognized the rap music as Eric B & Rakim’s first single to the album follow-up to Paid in Full. Literally, it became impossible to pay attention to a word Mayor Flynn was saying. I first tuned him out, then a few seconds declared the interview over.

“I’ve got enough,” I said.

And I’d do it again.

My man Jay Richardson of the Oakland Raiders has an amazing mother.

Beyond saying I did not write the latest Rollin’ with Dre press release.

Let the chips fall where they may.

This feature story ran in the first issue of ESPN The Magazine. If you don’t know where Sprewell stood in the general sports context of 1998, know that contemporary Michael Vick is more hated by mainstream America than Spree was back then, but not much. Here’s an excerpt from the piece that I penned with Shaun Assael:

The summer of ‘86. Latrell takes his basketball and moves back to Milwaukee to live with his mom. As a junior, he enrolls in Washington High School, located on the north side. The new kid isn’t much of a kid, though. “Latrell was grown when he was in high school,” says Danny Parker, a high school teammate. Sprewell puts it differently. “I was a kid going my own way, searching for some stability.”

His mom lets him drive the family car—an ancient Caprice with a hole in the floor in the back—and since she’s always working, he flits between pizza parlors and bowling alleys. One of the girls he sleeps with gets pregnant, and Latrell awakes one day to find himself another teenager with a kid, a father in jail and a mother trying to keep it together. When he looks for a way out, there’s only one thing he can turn to.

One autumn day, he decides to go public with his game. It’s an open gym session, and all manner of prep hoop wannabes are courtside. Latrell, by now mostly height and sinew, hunches over his dribble in front of Chris Powell, Washington’s star center. To those watching the matchup unfold, the new guy’s nearly bald head stands out among the Jheri Curls and high-top fades. Powell doesn’t know him, and neither does James Gordon, the school’s new coach.

Every time the new guy goes on offense, he tries to do the same thing: beat Powell of the dribble to the basket. Powell tries to push Latrell out toward the free throw line, the far reach of his range. Powell forces him to the left, where the ball handler is bound to flub his dribble or put up an awkward shot; the new guy’s game is almost completely righthanded. From the sidelines, one of the motley students calls out, “You can take him, Latrell!”

“I know,” the player says quietly. Then Sprewell explodes forward, taking Powell to the hole. Not just once, but again and again.

Funny story about the making of this article: I’d been living in L.A. when it was first assigned. First story for the first issue of this mag. I was in the midst of moving to New York for the job when my editor had me fly to Milwaukee to do much of the reporting that shows up in that section of prose. (Assael jetted to Flint, Michigan, for material on Sprewell’s drug dealer dad.) Then, after I moved to NYC, staying in temporary housing right across from the NY Stock Exchange, the piece broke — right as the mag went to press. I had to fly back to L.A. for still more reporting.

Thing is, the piece was a wreck, just an flow-less collection of disparate facts. My editor called my hotel room at about 9 p.m. (PST) to inform me of this. The day’s reporting seemingly done, I had spent the afternoon smoking major weed with my man and roaming the grounds of that Marina Del Rey hotel whose name escapes me right now.

When that editor told me we’d have to fix that story ASAP — most of the first edition had already gone to press — I told him I’d have to call him back in five minutes. Then I called up room service and ordered one pot of coffee and one bottle of Jack Daniels. My order arrived about 15 minutes into our long, granular edit. And me and my editor worked that shit out lovely. It was the most-discussed piece in the magazine’s debut.

In my youth I was a total maniac, amped on arrogance and just as crazy as I could stand to be. Way more nutty than my editors (or my ex-wife) could stand tolerate. It seemed insanity was the only route to unique writing. But that was illusory folly. I’m much more effective at telling stories now, in my relatively methodical middle age.

Hot off the presses.

This news brings some closure to an awful chapter in the otherwise successful young run of Rollin’ with Dre.

From late last year. Just found it. Thank you, Technorati.

Never actually read an edit of this piece about Ivan Kane’s Forty-Deuce. But I do know, from a quick search, that the word “pussy” has been cut. Bummer, I’d been jonesin’ to cross the “pussy” threshold.

And if you can’t say pussy in Penthouse, the usage must be hella inappropriate. (Hel-la, I say.)

Yeah, I choose to be bummed. When I wrote for Lollypops — under the nom de plume Tuda Curb — they let me say the word. In fact, I think they would have been disappointed if I didn’t use it.

Looks cool though. And the check was lovely.

Miss Rap Supreme is my favorite thing on TV, after the Lakers’ playoff run. So, I’m vulnerable to all the ancillary publicity nonsense. For example, the back-and-forth between recently-dismissed Khia — yes, that Khia — and host Serch ate minutes of my life that I will never get back.