If I could relive one year of my life, it’d be 1990 — when I was nine years old.
The MC Hammer era. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Big-ass pants and In Living Color.
“Homie Don’t Play That” was gospel, and I had a flattop so sharp it could slice air.
Time felt simpler then.
I remember the sound of my friends calling from the street below,
“Yo, Robert! When you gonna come out, bro? We ballin’ or what?”
We lived in a duplex — me upstairs, my little kingdom —
and by 8 a.m. the whole block would gather: fifteen, twenty kids,
bikes everywhere, laughter bouncing off the fences.
Every weekend, the kids would come to my house – early – and it always turned into a full- day event.
We played until the light turned orange and our mothers yelled our names like alarms.
There was this abandoned warehouse on the corner.
We made up a story that a mutant lived inside —
some swamp-thing, half-man creature that watched us from the dark.
We never saw him, but he gave our days a myth to chase.
And in the backyard sat my uncle’s yellow Thunderbird —
his pride, his warning.
“Be careful with my fucking car,” he’d say.
One afternoon, we shot the ball too hard and bent his antenna.
We panicked like little scientists trying to cover up a crime.
We fixed it perfectly before anyone found out.
That was our first heist.
But the wildest day?
We prank-called the cops on the front neighbors —
told them they were selling cocaine.
And damn, they came.
Middle of the day —
sirens, yelling, grown men in their underwear against the wall.
From afar, we could see the guys asking the cops who called —
and then they pointed at us.
As the cops started approaching us from across the street,
one of them recognized my friend and said,
“Hey, I know your mom.”
By the time she walked over,
the beating had already started,
a straight old-school lesson learned.
We stood there half-terrified, half-hysterical,
watching the world tilt in real time.
Those were the good old times, brother.
Nine years old. No fear, no phones, no plans —
just the street, the sun,
and the kind of freedom you don’t realize you had
until it’s gone.
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