Thomas was a young member of the Foot Clan, an international crime organization of Asian origin. Although he was not a member of a true "gang," Thomas' experiences shed light on why children join gangs, and why they leave. His name has been changed to protect his identity.
I used to watch them, their headquarters weren't too far from our apartment, and I could see them outside the window sometimes, blending in with the shadows, those purple and black costumes that made 'em look like big insects.
I don't know. School bored me and I hated being at home. My mother always picked losers and if there wasn't some asshole screaming at us and smacking us around she'd just mope around the house and drink. She was like a ghost to us, not even there. We lived around her. I never knew my father, and her boyfriends...I don't know. One of 'em molested me when I was seven. I don't like to talk about it.
Always figured it set a pattern, though...
Well, you know, it's all about power, isn't it? Anything like that. It's "I can do this to you and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it." After that I always looked for the power. And the ninja-- shit, you don't fuck with the ninja. Not more than once. They were strong and mean and merciless and I knew that was what I wanted to be. Hard and cold and intimidating. By the time I was thirteen I was hanging around them all the time and when I was fourteen they finally let me in.
There wasn't much initiation, actually. I mean, they had their rituals, you had to chop your hair, you got the fashionable insect costumes, and the older guys were hard on the new recruits. And after the first couple months you knew what happened to the poor bastards who tried to get out.
That was enough to keep you in.
I was a pretty good fighter, nothing special, but I knew English and Japanese-- enough Japanese to get by anyway-- and I picked up others fast. I can tell you to get the fuck outa my way in six languages, I'm only really comfortable in English and Japanese and I'm competent enough in Spanish...There were a lot of fights between the Foot and the other clans and the street gangs-- some of it was innocent, too, somebody's yell something in Portugese, the kids wouldn't understand it and all hell would break loose-- and they needed people like me to cut down on it. Let's see, I'm okay with Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, English, a little Chinese, a little Vietnamese-- I guess it's seven if you count English. Korean I never really figured out. Read somewhere once it's more like Norwegian than any Asian language, and I'd believe it.
I could negotiate, too, which made me more valuable, something more than just a translator. I went up pretty fast, faster than a lot of people I'd joined with, next thing I knew I was in the basket-heads.
The basket-heads? Oh, his Elite Guard. You picked on 'em when you were just a schmuck, but everybody wanted to be one. I made it when I was seventeen. The initiation got a little heavier then, you swore to protect your master at all costs, signed shit in blood, chanted, danced around like an idiot...whole thing was pretty damn silly, but I was moving up, and that was all that mattered. And I was moving closer to the top, to the Shredder. The whole New York Foot was just one big cult of personality centered around a guy dressed in a can opener costume. Funny now that I think about it. But he-- man, he scared the shit out of us, he was strong, he was hard, sharp like a sword's edge. Like I said, you go for the power, and there was this certain attraction...and he could fight. Jesus, he could fight.
He had a daughter-- Mgume-- and I ended up in charge of her. I was her tutor and her bodyguard a lot of the time. I hope I was her friend...she didn't have many. Everybody there competed for his affection, and a lot of them saw her as competition, even though they were like oil and water.
At some point she'd figured out that her mom wasn't just on a long vacation. And that...well, that her father'd sent her mother on that trip, so to speak. Half of my job was keeping her from running off, she started running away when she was four or five... That's what finally got to me. After a while the extortion, the fighting, the killing-- you get numb to it, believe it or not. It's business as usual. And you got hooked on the adrenaline, on the suspense. You liked it.
But Mgume...I'd go into her room, find her on her bed, just sobbing...would you believe I thought about taking her with me?
I put their computers outa commission the night I left to keep 'em distracted, which only made 'em madder in the long run. I was nineteen and I had this huge organization running after me, you wouldn't believe the shit they had hooks in. I tried witness protection-- what a joke that was-- and after a while I just did it on my own, switched identities, kept moving. It eased up a while ago when the Shredder died. I never did hear what happened to Mgume.
Sometimes I look at myself, at the life I'm living now...I've got a normal career, a normal life, I'm secure, I feel safe. Probably for the first time in my life.
And sometimes I'm so fucking bored I can hardly stand it.
###
