From the editor: We are excited to publish an excerpt from Baye McNeils’ new memoir, You Couldn’t Tell Me Shit! Coming of Age in the County of Kings, 1980-1985 about growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Baye’s book, a serialized memoir available on his Substack is accompanied by photographs from the period by the legendary Jamel Shabazz

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The Mish  

It was a Saturday afternoon in the summer of ’81, and I was restless as hell. I had half on a tre bag burning a hole in the pocket of my Lee cutoffs, but my sparring partner, Mas, was MIA. Probably at his grandmother’s crib. So, the mish began that day with trying to find someone with a buck fitty. The mish was short for the mission, and the one and only mission was to get stimulated, period. But Mas was the only cat I really got stim with on the Parkway on the reg.  

White Boy Chris would’ve been down, but he wasn’t home either, and he usually procured his weed from his parents’ stash. Not one for trusting street weed, and I can’t blame him, as many times as we’d been stiffed and wound up with a bag of twigs and seeds. I gave the cats up the block a half a moment of consideration, but them dudes weren’t as committed as Mas, Chris, and I. They were more into athletics than narcotics, would rather smash into one another in the grass field in front of the museum, dreaming of being the next Tony Dorsett or Lynn Swann, than puff weed. As for my boys on The Ave, man… Franklin Ave was starting to be as leery as Nostrand Ave. Too many familiar characters, cats I’d known for utteen, looking at me with unfamiliar expressions. Sometimes, even unfriendly expressions. Nah, the Ave was out. 

So, I grabbed my Spalding and went out front.  

To kill time while I came up with a course of action, I practiced my two-finger backhand cut against the wall in front of Mas’s building. On either side of 255 Eastern Parkway’s steps and entranceway ran low brick walls, three or four feet high, topped with spiked wrought iron fencing. We’d been playing “Chinese” handball against it for as long as I could remember, and the wall looked it. It was old brick, uneven, smooth in places, chipped in others, but it still caught a Spalding true enough if you hit it right. And by ’81, I was pretty damn good at hitting it just right.  

An hour or so passed while I waited for inspiration to strike. In that time, several non-weed smokers had passed through. One of them, Ubi, attracted by the echo of the ball that no doubt reached his Parkway-facing fifth-floor bedroom window, came down to embarrass me. I’d stolen the goddamn two-finger backhand cut from him in the first place. So, while I was adept at the cut and could brandish it on unsuspecting foes at opportune moments in the game, Ubi was the undisputed master of the cut, and he beat me so handily my ego refused him a rematch…even when he said he’d spot me 10 points and game was 15! Fucker. This gave him the satisfaction he sought, so he cracked some parting jokes about my pathetic-ass mockery of his cut and went about his business.  

And that’s when inspiration struck…  Freedom!  

Freedom 

I raced up the stairs, but before I rang Freedom’s bell, I paused. There was a reason why it took over an hour for Freedom’s name to pop into my mind. The thing about getting into a mish with Freedom is you just never knew what you were getting into. With most cats, shit was simple: either they had half on a bag, or they didn’t. If they did, we’d go cop, puff, chill for a while, and then usually go our separate ways. But with Free…the mish was rarely so simple. It could go that way, sure, but it was just as likely…no, more than likely, that it would go another way, or even sideways.  

Tch…Fuck it.  

Freedom had an aunt and a grandmother who both lived in 255. Same building. Different apartments. And he was either living with one or the other. I never knew which because he was always doing some crazy shit to get punished, evicted, and sent packing to the other.  

I knocked on his aunt’s door first. She was the more approachable of the two. 

“Julio no here!! Maybe grandmother!”  

His grandmother lived on the other side of the building, so I had to take the elevator back down to the first floor, cross the building’s lobby, and take a different elevator up to her fifth-floor apartment. I knocked on the door.  

“Julio! Tell your friend go away!!” I heard his grandmother yell in English. 

Then the door swung wide open.  

“PEACE TO THE GOD!” Free shouted. His joy at seeing me was overwhelming. And reminded me how much I dug hanging out with this guy, regardless. I even felt guilty for having hesitated. Free was that guy who shouts, “There he is!” when you walk into a party, like everyone had been waiting for you, like they were gonna call the whole thing off if you hadn’t shown. Because he believed it…at least in that moment, he did. And he made everyone else believe it, too!  

“What up, yo!” I said, unable to stop myself from grinning ear to ear. “I got a buck fitty. What you holdin’?”  

“I ain’t got no funds right now, God, but—”  

“Tch…damn.” 

He poked his head out and scanned the hallway both ways, then leaned in like he was about to share state secrets.  

“I got a plan, though.”  

“Aww shit…” I said. “Man, I ain’t doing no—”  

“Nah nah nah nah nah, this is foolproof, Unique,” he said, waving off my skepticism while gleaming his brazen 1000-watt smile. ”Trust me, God. This is gonna be a classic!”  

His enthusiasm, as always, was infectious. And Freedom lived for being the classic. He fed on it. He couldn’t even explain what he had in mind half the time, because I honestly think he made half the shit up as he went along. But generally, his schemes worked. At least at this point in his career. Because, for reasons I’ll never fully understand, people trusted this motherfucker.  

…with money.  

“Julio!! I told you tell your friend go away from my door,” boomed his grandmother’s voice again. The message was meant for me, though, because she usually only spoke Spanish. She was elderly, but fearless. Her voice was like a machete slicing cane. My feet involuntarily took a couple of steps back away from the door.  

“One minute!” he yelled back.  

Then, softer: “Yo, God, you got any tools?”  

“Any what?” A tool was slang for a pistol. “Man, I told you, I ain’t—”  

“Not that kind of tool. I mean like pliers and wrenches and shit.”  

“Man, fuck I look like? Schneider?” 

“JULIO!!!” Grandma roared again, followed by a haranguing in Spanish.  

Freedom was an immigrant from Panama, as were his aunt and grandmother, but his English was native. He Spanished her back in these smooth, appeasing tones, like he was negotiating a treaty.  

“I’ll get the tools,” he said. “Just meet me in the lobby.”   And he shut the door.  

From the Lobby to the Roof  

From the hallway, I could still hear him working on his grandmother, chilling her out, trying to talk his way out of the house. He was forever on punishment and forever scheming his way out of it.  

I went back downstairs and copped a squat in the lobby. It was a beautiful space, like a disused ballroom. It still had that post-WWI grandeur, only the opulence had lost its audience. Still thought it was somebody, though. You seriously couldn’t tell it shit!  

The high ceilings curled with old plasterwork, but the molding was still clear. A chandelier hung in the center, spitting its light at a patterned marble floor worn smooth where decades of feet had grooved a path, but it was still marble, so concrete could kiss ass. The ornate mirrors set into the walls still looked very classy. They were just a bit outdated. No cracks, though. Well, maybe a couple of minor, unnoticeable chips. But they were kept polished and well-lit. The lobby hung in there, overall, and took our abuse like Ali, like it was biding its time, rope-a-doping us, waiting for an opportunity to come a-knocking. Like gentrification.  

The doorman’s desk, where I sat, stood off to the side. A black guy named Chet (no shit) was the full-time doorman. He would usually be there, bespectacled, maybe thirty, comic-book smart; funny as fuck. His job was basically to keep us knuckleheads out of the lobby; he did his best but failed miserably. Especially with cats like me, fellow comic book aficionados. We’d sit and talk Marvel til he clocked out, or til it was time to get stim, whichever came first. Must’ve taken the day off. I sat in his chair for what felt like hours but was probably a few minutes. I was about to give up on the mish when Freedom finally appeared.  

He was wearing a tool belt, a buttoned-up untucked dress shirt, gabardine slacks, and oxfords. That’s how this cat dressed all the time. Everyone else was in t-shirts or Izod or Le Tigre shirts, cutoff jeans or basketball shorts, tube socks and sneakers, baseball caps, Kangols or spanking fresh caesars, that kind of thing, but Freedom always looked like a preacher’s favorite son, his hair in a short, nappy ‘fro with a widow’s peak.  

Perfect unintentional camouflage though, ‘cause he was nobody’s choir boy.  

“Yo, God, follow me,” he said, and we hopped on the elevator, rode it to the sixth floor, then climbed the last flight of stairs to the roof door.  

My building, 225, and his, 255, were adjoining, and we knew them both, from roof to basement, water tower to boiler room, like the backs of our hands. So, I didn’t wonder where we were headed.  

I wondered why.  

“Just come on,” he said, because he knew too much explanation might make me back out. My threshold for danger was nowhere near his.  

My Spidey-sense wasn’t tingling…not yet.  

The roof didn’t spook me. This was our home turf, our playground since before puberty. That said, I knew Freedom was usually up to no good, which meant law enforcement would safely assume we were up to no good. And that did spook me some.  

I had no stomach for criminal enterprises. My older brothers’ horror stories about Rikers Island, the Atlantic Avenue jail, and the likes were enough to keep me on the straight and narrow…mostly. Nonetheless, there we were, prowling around 255’s rooftop, doing whatever this maniac had in mind.  

That was Freedom’s superpower. Anyone who knew him knew it: he could talk anybody into doing almost anything with minimum effort. How many words did it take him to get me up there? Ten, maybe.  

The roof was flat and wide and felt higher than it actually was. Sticky tar paper, softened by sunlight and 90-degree heat, clung to your feet, ready to snatch your unlaced Adidas off. Rusty vents jutted up everywhere, old TV antennas leaned and pointed in every direction, some tied off with wire, some just leaning on walls like derelicts. We ducked cables, stepped over pipes, and around buckets of murkiness, navigating through it like rooftops were our natural habitat.  

Because they were.  

How many games of Ringolevio and Manhunt had we played up there? Untold. And how many times had we raced down the fire escapes, chased by 255’s superintendent/handyman Odee, the old man with the ruined voice box? His words came out in these tight, grated bursts, like Daffy Duck being strangled by Porky Pig. He used to scare the shit out of us. I still looked around for him out of habit. Rumor had it he haunted 255, though no one had seen him since ’79.  

Over the easy-to-trip-and-plunge-to-a-grisly-death ledge, you could see half the neighborhood: other rooftops, into windows, catching snatches of lives, invading private moments. This only intensified the feeling that we were out of bounds. 

Freedom stopped suddenly and started fiddling with a thin metal antenna lashed to a pipe, adjusting it with the confidence of a man who absolutely knew what he was doing, though I was pretty sure he didn’t. He just knew enough to look competent. A cable ran down the side of the building, and a beat-up metal box hung in the middle. 

I looked away, as if looking away decriminalized me, and scanned the Manhattan skyline over yonder. The Twin Towers spied us from across the East River, like a nosy neighbor peeking over the hedges.  

That made me laugh.  

“What happened?” Freedom said, smiling as he worked.  

“I was thinking about the World Trade Center,” I said. “You know, they got a restaurant up there. I wanna take a cutie there one night. That’d be cool as fuck, right?”  

“You think so? I did that shit once and got nauseous. Word to the wise. Eating, drinking, and heights do not mix.”  

“Huh!” I was shocked. “You’ve been…there??”  

“It’s called Windows on the World, God!” he said casually. “Hell yeah, I’ve been there. I used to work there. Bus boy.”  I just looked at him.  

Freedom had a way of throwing my lie detector completely out of whack, because this motherfucker lied like it was his birthright. Not for money. Not necessarily. Not for survival. Not even for entertainment, though his lies were entertaining as hell sometimes.  Just…because. And the worst part was, you just never knew. Sometimes the wildest shit he said was actually true.  

So, when I gave him my patented Really, Free look, he grinned.  

“Word is bond, Unique,” he said, which meant nothing coming from him, but he knew it sounded solemn to me. “I worked there for like a week last summer. Anyway, if you go, bring a fat wallet, ’cause it’s pricey as hell up in there. And bring a barf bag, too.”  

He dislodged something with a final twist and held it up.  

“You know what this is?” he asked, flashing the box that looked legit enough to shut anybody up. I looked away. I didn’t want to know. It was hard enough for me to lie to cops or anyone else, for that matter, as it was. The less I knew, the better. “This is a classic waiting to happen, God.”  

“You got what you need, then?” I asked the skyline.  

“Why Equal Selfffff (Yesssss),” he sang.  

That was Free. Fully vested in whatever the mish required, whether it was a hustle, or a scheme, or even rooftop larceny. Love him or leave him alone.  

I loved him.  

A Two-Man Crew  

Back on the elevator, Freedom hit the button for the fourth floor. I tried to pause, to give this a think before plunging ahead, but Freedom proceeded without hesitation like The Force was with him. He went directly to the door that read D-5 and rang the bell with the confidence of The Seltzer Man delivering a crate of seltzer and flavored syrup. You gotta admire his moxie. I know I did.  

That familiar surge of panic began to bubble up, though. Being by Freedom’s side during one of his charades was nerve-wracking. My biggest worry was that my face would give us away. Even though Freedom was doing all the talking, one wrong move on my part and the jig would be up.  

Sometimes, I’d tell him to go ahead and do what he had to do, and I’d wait over here on the side, where my guilty conscience wouldn’t throw a monkey wrench in the works. But Free would be like, “Now Cipher, God!” (Oh, hell nah!) To him, part of the classic was that you had to be part of the classic for it to be truly classical.  

I used to think having a wingman gave him confidence. At least I’d never seen him get nervous or flub a line or break into a sweat or even hesitate. Nothing. Or maybe knowing his performance, this act of mish heroics, would be witnessed, recorded, and talked about; maybe that’s what motivated him.  

I never understood how his mind worked. Maybe he just did it for thrills, like cats who skydive or surf those waves where if they wipe out, that’s all she wrote. 

Who the fuck knows?  

“Who is it?” a Latin-accented voice I recognized immediately called out.  

“It’s Julio!”  

The door opened a crack, held by a chain. Johnny, a man who had spent years pressing shirts at the dry cleaners on Lincoln Place, peered out. We all knew Johnny. He was a fixture in the community. “Julio? What do you want, boy?”  

Freedom didn’t just answer; he adjusted the makeshift tool belt (that only held a hammer, a wrench, and a couple of Phillips head screwdrivers) over his gabardine slacks, waving the roof electronics he’d shown me like they were the precious tools of his trade. He didn’t look like a thief; he looked (if you didn’t look too closely) like a licensed professional’s apprentice doing a side hustle. 

“I told you, mano!” Freedom said, his face a mask of absolute sincerity. “I got the hook up!”  

Johnny’s one visible eye shifted to me and gave me a quick, sharp squint—the ‘You co-sign this, Baye?’ look. I offered a grin that felt like a confession. The best I could do. Johnny was a nice guy, a hardworking guy, drank a little too much, but who didn’t? But today, sorry, he was the venture capitalist for the mish, because he closed the door, unchained it, and then opened it wide. And, sure as the homeless shit on the subways, once you let Freedom in, it’s a concession, like tipping your King: game over.  

When we entered his crib, they spoke in Spanish. I caught the rhythm of it, even if the specifics escaped me. The language didn’t matter as much as the tone, though. Freedom’s tone was self-assured and urgent. He was the merchant, and his merchandise was the dream everyone shared at the time: every channel, every movie, every game, every world beyond the Parkway, all coming through a wire for a one-time fee.  

Everybody wanted cable TV then, but very few people knew how it actually worked. That ignorance was Freedom’s wheelhouse. He’d swear he could get you every channel forever for one upfront payment and had the minimum electronics know-how to prove it. He’d install it temporarily, long enough for the vic, I mean, customer, to flip through channels and see HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, CNN, and all that good shit popping up on their sets like manna from a mysterious God. Once he planted the proof of concept, got them all googly-eyed and gape-mouthed, he’d get his money, or at least a down payment, and he’d be in the wind.  

We’d be in the wind, I should say, cuz I was in this, like it or not. 

Johnny was nodding, his eyes fixed, mesmerized by the metal box in Freedom’s hand. He was looking at a hunk of metal from the roof, but Freedom had him convinced he was looking at the holy grail. I had to look away to avoid laughing. I scanned Johnny’s living room, feeling the weight of the “Word is Bond” credo I touted on the street.  

As a Five Percenter, I was honor-bound to speak truth. And here I was, a God, supposedly all-wise and civilized, and all that jazz, bad acting as a sidekick to a cable pirate…who was also supposed to be a God.  

Freedom pointed toward the window, then back to the box, his hands moving in quick, technical gestures, as Johnny reached into his pocket. He produced five ten-dollar bills, handing them over with the look of a person who’d just made the deal of the decade.  

“Gracias, Julio,” Johnny said, patting Freedom on the shoulder.  

“No sweat, mano,” he replied, already backing toward the door. “I’ll finish installing it tomorrow.” 

When we hit the hallway, Freedom didn’t run. He strolled. He didn’t look back until the elevator doors slammed shut. Then, he fanned the fifty bucks out like a royal flush.  

“What I tell you! It’s a classssssic, God!” Freedom sang, the choir boy with technical ingenuity was gone, and the mish-maker returned. It was all in the eyes.  

Later, when we needed another classic, or whatever, he’d do it again. It was illegal, sure, but it felt more like a prank than a crime.  

The special Freedom touch was this: The customers never realized that whatever Freedom put on the roof was never meant to stay. It worked just long enough to convince you that Freedom was the hook-up. After that, it would disappear, lifted back off the roof by Freedom himself, reclaimed, recycled, and reborn as the exact same “lifetime hookup” for the next customer, maybe the family in apartment C-5 or E-5 or even D-4. No shame in Freedom’s game.  

No one ever kicked up a fuss either, because it was illegal cable in the first place. Besides, very few suspected Freedom. Why would they? They only knew him as Julio, a clean-cut kid with dirty know-how, who attended church every Sunday and whose legal guardians, two respectable no-nonsense women, lived in the building. He did you a justice and got you HBO for a spell. It was too good to be true, anyway. And let’s face it, shit disappearing from the roof wasn’t exactly a freak occurrence. This was Brooklyn. 

“Let’s motivate, God!” Freedom sang. “Where?”  

“To the gate!” I replied.  

“Motivate!” shouted Freedom.  

“To the gate!” I responded.  

After we did the call and response a few times, and with the mish moments from completion, we both felt jubilant! We all but danced up the Parkway, side by side, hugging one another across the shoulders, singing the theme song we borrowed from that Peanuts cartoon, Snoopy Come Home:  

“Me and you, a two-man crew,  

Even if the going’s gruesome, we can make it as a twosome,  

Lose or win, sink or swim,  

We’re the best of buddies, me and you!”  

That’s the thing I liked most about Freedom. Because he has no self-imposed limitations, it made you feel ridiculous about the limitations you put on yourself. It was very liberating, dancing down the street, hugged up with your boy, not giving a damn what anyone thought.  

Damn liberating!  

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Baye McNeil is an author, columnist and activist from Brooklyn NY, living in Japan since 2004. His work can be found on bayemcneil.com