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Forgotten City The transformation By A.C. Thompson'GIVE IT UP !" Antoine Perry says. "It's over!" Perry, 25, and about a dozen other folks – most young, most, like Perry, African American – are clustered around a long wooden table reading through The Streets Have Spoken, a "hip-hop theater" production set to debut May 20 at Brava Theater Center, the 24th Street cinema turned playhouse. Perry's character is death personified, a sort of ghetto grim reaper, and he's snuck into this scene to steal the life of a promising young black man who's just been accepted into college. If anyone's familiar with the dramatic trajectory of this play, it's Perry, who came up hard, couch-surfing his way across the housing projects, his mother fucked up on crack, his dad bouncing in and out of prison. For much of his life, he was neck-deep in The Life, slinging crack, stuffing a gun down his pants, calling himself Gotti – yeah, like the Mafia don – and running with a crew of thuggish characters. As with so many other project kids in forgotten San Francisco, you could pretty much count on Perry taking up permanent residence in a casket before he hit 30. But at this point it looks like Perry, who's recast himself as a thespian, social worker, and wordsmith, just might beat the odds. • • • According to urban lore, during the 1980s the Crips and the Bloods of Los Angeles attempted to extend their reach by sending recruiters north to San Francisco. The color-coded gangsters were rebuffed, the story goes, by the well-organized drug-peddling cliques already operating in and around the city's housing projects. These homegrown crews, who referred to themselves as "cliques" or "sets" rather than gangs, sold dope close to home and claimed those street corners as their turf. If there was beef, it was between black folks from the different turfs – people from the Sunnydale projects versus people from the Third Street corridor versus people from the Fillmore, and on and on. The murder boom of the '80s and early '90s was largely fueled by this brand of hood-against-hood feuding, which led to incidents like the horrendous "Cheap Charlie" massacre in 1989, when a carload of Sunnydale heads sprayed bullets into a crowd hanging out in Hunters Point, killing two and wounding at least nine others. Outside the black community, few folks are really aware of just how hazardous it is for many African Americans simply to make their way around the city. This de facto balkanization was a recurring motif at "On the Frontlines," a May 4 conference on gangs held at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. As Cheeko Wells, an activist with Brothers Against Guns, put it, "We have many youngsters out there that are afraid to go certain places. A lot of them are scared to go to school 'cause they can't get to school without getting jumped or something." In recent years another phenomenon has emerged: intra-hood combat. That's the story in Hunters Point, where one prominent drug-dealing outfit imploded, splintering into a pair of warring units, the West Mob and Big Block cliques, whose alleged members are facing trial this summer on federal RICO charges. It's the same deal in the vast Sunnydale projects, where several rival crews have carved out territories among the 767 decrepit units. And the same thing went down in Lakeview, a small island of blackness on the west side of the city where Perry hung out. Like the recovering dope fiend who can pinpoint with total clarity the precise moment he or she decided to get clean, Perry can tell you all about the day he recalibrated his life's trajectory. It was June 17, 2003, Father's Day, when a fistfight broke out between friends, dudes who kicked it together on the same block in Lakeview. The animosity quickly intensified. Pretty soon bullets were flying and erstwhile homies were trying to put each other in the ground. Though Perry wasn't directly connected to the bloodletting, he was caught in the middle of the mess, friends with everyone involved. Horrified by the spiraling fratricidal conflict, he decided, finally, to reinvent himself as a civilian. "I gave up the game when Lakeview started beefing with Lakeview," he says. "It was really, really time. People in the city are killing they own friends." It wasn't the first time Perry had attempted to live the square life – as a teenager he'd tried to use basketball as his ghetto-escape vehicle. Despite a tumultuous high school hoops career marred by busts on drug and gun charges and a stint in a Modesto group home, he played ball at the College of Alameda, where he came to the attention of recruiters from UC Riverside and Sonoma State University. While he probably wasn't NBA material, he at least would've been in line for a college diploma. But a nagging foot injury sabotaged his hoop dreams, prompting the schools to back off, and Perry, demoralized and broke, slunk back to the streets. With his social network rapidly devouring itself, Perry dove into seclusion, refusing to leave his house for months, fearful of getting sucked into the drama. Eventually he hooked up with Mike Brown, an activist and former Muni driver who'd known him since he was 17. Hoping to cement Perry's role change, Brown, who runs a nonprofit called Inner City Youth, threw some paid work his way; the pair ended up starting a recording studio for aspiring young rappers. In time Brown and Sharen Hewitt, another seasoned antiviolence crusader, helped Perry snag a full-time job counseling young people who've lived through the murder of friends or family members. The program, an initiative of the city Department of Public Health, is headquartered in an office on Evans Avenue in the Bayview, just down the hill from a notorious killing zone. As a counselor, Perry talks to the teens. Shoots baskets with them. Takes them on outings to the mall or the movies. Shares his story with them. It's an occupation for which he's well suited. "There were 89 homicides last year," he says, "and I knew, probably, 60 of those people." From Brown's perspective, Perry's "a great inspiration. He's been through so much. He's a survivor. He can show others how to survive." Along the way, Perry married his levelheaded girlfriend, Antonae, and got serious about God, getting baptized at True Light Church of God in Christ in April 2004. Like her husband, Antonae Perry is a social worker, mentoring teenage girls in the Alice Griffith projects, a place more often referred to by locals as Double Rock. This line of work could sap anyone's emotional reserves, even those of a generally upbeat character like Antonae. Sitting outside her cramped little office, she surveys the battered green-and-beige apartments and makes a quiet admission. "Sometimes," she says, slowly shaking her head, "I feel like there's no hope. No matter how many people are like Antoine or myself – trying to be a positive influence – it seems like nothing changes." • • • I ask Perry if he ever feels the pull of the streets. He replies, "I know it's death if I go back to that. I'd be stupid to do that.... I made a change in my life. I'm not Gotti anymore. I'm Mr. Perry. I'm Antoine now." Perry's God-fearing, de-thugged persona permeates the music of Starving Artist, the collaborative hip-hop troupe he leads. At a moment when bling-bling materialism and alpha-male idiocy dominate the rap world (see: nearly every chart-topping disc to drop in the past five years), Perry and his partners in Starving Artist are crafting earnest, reflective, decidedly unmacho songs. Sonically, Starving Artist's 10-song demo CD lacks the polish and sparkle of 50 Cent et al., but it crackles with an honesty sorely missing from radio rap. The chorus to one autobiographical track goes: Sometimes I cry Thinking about what the game did to me Thinking about how the streets raise a G I get down on my knees and cry Perry is currently sculpting rhymes for an album. The working title is "Grown Man Living." E-mail A.C. Thompson |
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