What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? Read Online Free

being outiv it, nights’re for gettin’ wasted and, if the boys got lucky wasting someone with the boot, softball bats’re bedda, anything, who cared, long as it was hurtin’ some cunt — Mulla Rota knew exactly what his leader was saying without having to say it. Why he gave a crooked smile with the high-5, to show he was right on it, into it, with it, on what Bad was saying. Mulla was crooked smiling back that he was at and with his leader’s very soul (well, most of it anyway There were, uh, aspec’s of the dude a man weren’t sure of.) The … swathe they left behind was a wet glistening path the width of mops pushed in perfect unison, like most things close Brown Fist bruthas’d do.
    Or it was till Bad’s eyes fell over the rail and saw something which turned his tattooed Maori warrior features into near the monster he was reputed to be when he was upset, wild at something . And Mulla knew better than anyone in a kind of grudging admiration that Jimmy Shirkey had managed to hold the lie, keep the bluff, for all this time and all these circumstances, of bein’ a prez of a gang chapter, the Brown Fists, with their avowed enemies: the Hawks. How Jimmy right now called back his cool, glazed over the fear in his eyes, said out the side of his mouth, Well I’ll be, if they ain’t sent us in a Hawk. They weren’t allowed to say the word black, it was agreed at a council meeting right here in this prison several years ago that any Brown using that hated word of those hated cunts was out. The word itself was banned, which meant that Blackie Rogers had to change his name and so did Johny Black and they even had to call another meeting out in the exercise yard (so the utha prisoners can see how staunch we are) to discuss whether one of them’s daughters named Ebony might have to have her name changed when one of the fullas told ’em the name meant black and about as black as you can get. That the fulla loved his kid — which was most unusual for one of ’em, they all knew that and laughed about their loving their Brown Family firs’ — made it that much harder to make a decision, cos he was one of the toughest they’d ever had in the history (seventeen years, man, we been around) of the Browns, and he had his li’l girl in his mind, his less broken heart. If he, you know, axshurely loved this kid of his (which he seemed to at visits when his wife brought the kid every fortnight, he never let her go and photos everywhere of her in his cell and only one Penthouse one with the blonde sheila — She American, bro? Yeah, she is — with her twat open and exposed, it and she so beautiful it took Mulla’s breath away every time he visited the bro’s cell) she was a concept fixed — no, etched — in him, like the tattoo marks all over his arms and legs and face, what if he wouldn’t accept the name change of his beloved child and went over to them, the Hawks, fought for them? That is what they secretly thought but not a one of the council of seventeen members, one for every year of existence of The Family, said. Was Bad Horse who turned it to a joke and aksed ’em who of ’em read anything to know Matt’s girl’s name meant what it did? So Ebony remained part of thepermissible language, one of the acceptable mentionables, and it came in handy when they wanted to make a reference to mean black. Funny how even unejacated dudes adapted the only permissible word for black.
    Mulla knew it wasn’t cool to lean across Jimmy and see for himself, so he just went, Yeah? That right? They musta made a mistake? And then he looked at Bad Horse cos Bad’d stopped and was thinking; Jimmy Bad Horse was pondering. His great shaggy head of scalp-mop frizzle and sprayed-out beard came up after a few moments, in the waiting Mulla hearing the voices and opening and closing of grilles and cell doors below echo an ole familiar (tune?) but for some reason like out of a troubling dream this time, and his heart’d started hammering