A long time ago I was a little kid in the Jungle, and my favorite hangout was an ice cream shoppe up the street called Scoops. Scoops was the best because it had Street Fighter and Mortal Combat cabinets, the owner would give out free samples to regulars, and there was space in the back where we could set up our tabletop game of choice "Villains and Vigilantes."
I had two friends at the time that shared my interests in comics and games, and they both lived across the street from the shoppe in a cul-de sac that everyone in the area dubbed "Crip Court," it had local fame because of the high occurrence of being robbed or beaten just for walking by it, didn't really matter who you were or what you were doing there, if you happened to wander by and they saw a meal in you well, it was just better to avoid the place altogether, unless you were a cop, and even they weren't fans of going there.
One of my buddies was a white kid and the other an Asian kid, and everyone said that they both talked and acted black, and that I talked and acted white, which was something I didn't get at the time, but understand a little better now. Back then when people said that I got confused because black people in my family didn't talk like what they said black was, and our skin was black. But people in cc did talk like that, and they were black too. But my friends were not black, they were just mimicking how the people in cc talked because they grew up around them and that's how people talked there, so I thought it more a culture thing than race thing, but I dunno, I am still a little confused about it today, but now that I'm older it's not as big a deal.
Anyway, one day while we were playing Street Fighter in Scoops some of the guys from cc decide to rob the place. They burst in there with rags over their face but we knew it was them by how they yelled. The only people in there at the time were us, the owners son working behind the counter, and an old guy that everyone called "Retard Rogge." Everyday he would walk four blocks up from the group home and sit in the booth next to the arcade cabinets to eat ice cream and watch us play without ever saying anything.
They started yelling for everybody to get down on the floor and whatnot, so we drop to the ground and covered our heads, but we stole peeks here and there when we could like badasses. The owners son took off through the back and one of the crip court guys chased him, and the other walked up to Rogge and started yelling at him to get on the ground. But Rogge couldn't understand what he was supposed to do, so the robber guy beat him with the gun butt till he had no choice but to get on the ground, it sounded like meat getting hit with a mallet, like, thunk.. thunk.. thunk.
Rogge moaned the first couple of thunks, then stopped. After that the other guy came back, they cleaned out the register, told us that we could look now, then left. Scoops was closed down the next day, which sucked, because that place was awesome. I think it's a pizza parlor now.
