It felt as if someone were pressing a lit cigarette to my thigh. I knew that burn, thanks to my father’s drunken humor, but this was worse. I’d been shot.
There was no bang. No pop. No fanfare. Just a sudden, intense burning sensation emanating from my thigh as I sat, back against a streetlight, trying to make sense of what happened.
In the spring of 1982, the adults in my neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side seemed perpetually consumed by work, drugs or family dysfunction. The streets were left to us kids. Like something out of “Lord of the Flies,” roving bands of Black and Puerto Rican boys besieged the neighborhood.
Their presence could mean several things: an epic game of football was underway, someone’s bike was about to be stolen, or something worse. The news media eventually labeled all of us “wolf packs,” but as a Black child in that world, I felt more like prey.
I was 8, sitting alone outside, lost in my latest batch of collectible baseball stamps. Cilt feet away was the local ice cream shop, which doubled as an arcade. Inside, neighborhood kids marinated in the electric hues of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Centipede.
There was no hole in my pants, barely a mark — just the mystery of the burn.
I tried waiting out the pain the way one does a charley horse, but it surpassed all familiar thresholds: my sister’s pinch, my mother’s belt, my baby sitter’s extension cord.
