Homo Thug by Asante Kahari
Harlem Book Center, c. 2005
246 pages
I was walking home from the bar a couple weeks ago at 4am, post-work, McDonald's sack dripping with burger sweat that would serve either as delicious artery padding or as a handy talisman to thwart the occasional rabid subway creature, when I noticed a book protruding from one of the city's lovely sludge-gray snowbanks. No book, even something written by James Frey, should have to suffer this kind of rotten fate. So, risking bed bugs and/or hepatitis, I rescued the paperback from its filth-choked grave, much to the chagrin of a pair of Hudson River bound Vietnamese (or Thai?) trannies wearing translucent heels and a pleather Hello Kitty mini-skirt, respectively. These methed-out he-shes couldn't possibly understand how apropos their appearance was at this moment, reader, because the book I'd saved was none other than that classic coming-of-age tragedy of a young man gone wrong, a man whose circumstances force him to dabble in the most taboo and "unnatural" aspects of his psyche and his sexuality. As you might have guessed, I'm writing about Asante Kahari's tour de force, Homo Thug.
I'd often been intrigued by some of Harlem Book Center's other titles -- The Lesbian's Wife, Mandingo: The Golden Boy, The Streets of Harlem, Tamika: The struggle of a Jamaican Girl -- sold by street vendors on 125th Street and Malcolm X Ave (the scene of my weekly White Castle fix). Needless to say, Homo Thug did not disappoint. The novel rehashes the sordid young adulthood of Michael Fraser, a street tough whose abusive Caribbean-born mother, together with a childhood surrounded by the poisonous environment of New York City's projects, cause him to succumb to a life of crime. At 15, he is convicted for a "robbery gone bad," from which we can infer that murder was the case that they gave him. Instead of street code, Michael must now familiarize himself with the prison system, because he "had a long time and I wasn't about to live like a bitch being bartered out for goods and services by every swinging dick in the joint." In order to avoid getting his ass beat (or plowed) he joins a group of Muslims led by this dude Mustafa who will protect him as long as he remains celibate. But after a few too many trips to the showers, his hormones kick in...
...and that's as far as I got. Because as interesting as I found the book, as fascinating as I found Kahari's searing psychological portrait of a gangster ass boy-toy surviving the confines of his debilitating circumstances in the best way he knows how, I honestly had a lot of better shit to do (and read). However, I did skim through the novel's final 150 or so pages, and from what I can tell, Michael falls in love with a tranny named Dee Dee, who doesn't want to keep their love a secret. Mustafa puts a hit out on Michael but somehow he serves his sentence without getting injured and after having a lot of freaky sex with Dee Dee. When he's free he starts selling rock and that he'ron with his old crew, has sex with a lot of women and men before realizing his true calling as "Michelle." There's also a beef with another rap/drug-slinging crew named "G-unit" led by guys whose names are strangely familiar: Half Dolla, Stop the Bank and Young Gun. Hmm. Maybe I should have read the rest of the book.
I did manage to extract a bunch of great quotes that I've included below, as well as a few that were lovingly copied onto the book's back cover by an anonymous (most likely female) hand. Which leads to the question of why, if the book was seemingly so appreciated by its owner, did it end up rudely tossed into a snowbank in the West Village? Was it a conflict of ideologies? A forced rejection when the sheer homo-thuggery became too much? Maybe just an unfortunate misplacing. Maybe the trannies knew more than I did. Also, it's clearly evident that the fine people at Harlem Book Center wanted to maintain Homo Thug's authenticity, it's raw emotional gravity, it's "realness," so much that they felt it unnecessary to perform a basic spell check or employ a copyeditor. They're/their/there? Who gives a fuck, son? THIS SHIT IS HARD.
--
"I would jerk off so much that I would not have enough strength to make it through the rest of the day."
"I think he would have killed concrete for that little Spanish red pepper."
"Their rationale behind that is, why should I have to suffer when this mother is in here fresh to death and he can't hold his shit down?"
"Too add to that, she was a plump heifer and very unshapely, with her fowl odor."
"No one likes a n----- that falls from grace. All of the people you stepped on, on your way up will certainly be waiting for you on your way down either to kill you, or to use you."
"A secret can be agony on the soul, if allowed to swell up to the point that it blossoms on the spirit like a cancer."
"Even though I wasn't thinking about no faggot shit, those fags made me feel a little uneasy, uneasy in the sense that I was getting hot flashes thinking about Dee Dee. That alone told me I needed to get the fuck out of there."
"Each passing day fueled my perversion, and I was increasingly becoming my own worst enemy. I felt like I was losing myself. The heavy burden of jerking off so much took a toll on my balls. They started to look disfigured and saggy. I had exhausted all of the semen from my testicles to the point that I was ejaculating blood. It was a truly sickening experience."
"My gums was as red as sugar cane."
"As soon as the door to her apartment opened I commenced to taking off her clothes like a reckless wild animal...I had to see if she would let me top the night off with a little ass shot."
"I am sorry I had to lose two people to find that out. I am saying goodbye to Michael and hello to Michelle. See ya'll in Baltimore!"
**Also: Apparently Kahari's autobiographical first novel, The Birth of a Criminal, was based on a guy committing bank fraud and was actually used to convict the author for the same crime that he actually committed. Completely badass or dumbass depending on how you look at it. Funny nonetheless. More here.
And for more information about the Street Lit movement, here's an interesting article from PopMatters.
And a review by someone who actually read the book.
