Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff Read online

  “I mean, I was pretty smooth, you know.”

  I first moved to 116th Street when I was twelve-and-a-half. About two days after we moved in I came downstairs to sit on the stoop and that’s when I met some of the other kids.

  Fast Sam shook his head and looked at me like I was smelly or something. “Can you stuff?”

  I knew what he meant. I could play basketball pretty well, but there was no way I could jump over the rim and stuff the ball. No way. I couldn’t even come close.

  “Yeah, turkey, can you?” They all looked at me.

  “If I get a good start,” I lied, asking myself why I was lying.

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  Fast Sam,

  Cool Clyde,

  and Stuff

  WALTER DEAN MYERS

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  For Karen and Michael

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc., 1975

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1988

  This edition published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2007

  Copyright © Walter Dean Myers, 1975

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Myers, Walter Dean. Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff.

  Summary: New to 116th Street in New York, a young boy soon makes friends and begins a year of unusual experiences.

  [1. City and town life—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  [PZ7.M992Fas 1988] [Fic] 87-7355

  Puffin Books ISBN: 978-1-101-65724-9

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  contents

  Prologue

  1 Miracles of Modern Science

  2 The Funeral

  3 The Dance

  4 The Good People

  5 Trombones and Colleges

  6 There’s People and Then There’s People

  7 About Being Unfaithful

  8 Good-Bye Forever: At Least

  9 Chalky

  10 Chalky II

  11 Party Time!

  12 The Game

  13 Carnation Charley

  Epilogue

  prologue

  This is a story about some people I used to hang out with. It’s funny calling them people. I mean they’re people and everything, but a little while ago I would have called them kids. I heard that one of them, Gloria, got married about a month ago. I met her mother in the supermarket and she told me. I was really shocked. Gloria had moved away from the old neighborhood about a year and a half ago. Her father and mother had gotten back together, and they moved into one of those rent-controlled places where the State tells you how much rent you have to pay. Since her father got a decent job the guy really changed. I can dig him changing like that.

  But, like I said, I was really shocked to find out that Gloria was married. I tried to imagine her married and I just couldn’t. You know, you picture somebody in your mind and try to imagine them doing something different. It’s hard. Like a guy who couldn’t play any ball at all, all of a sudden becoming a professional ballplayer and signing up for a hundred thousand dollars or something. Not that Gloria wasn’t okay or anything—it was just that when I thought of her I always thought of her just hanging out on the block and being fourteen. I said to myself, now how could she be married? Dig? Then I started thinking and I realized that Gloria was fourteen when I first knew her and that was a little over five years ago so she must be going on twenty now. And when I started thinking about Gloria I started thinking about the rest of the people—I’m going to call them kids—that I grew up with. I mean, they were a good bunch of people. Sometimes I think back on them and realize that I haven’t come across a whole group of people like that since.

  I don’t want you to get the impression that my life is a drag or anything. I’m eighteen and I think I’m doing okay. But things change when you get older, I guess. It’s harder to make friends because you end up asking more from everybody. You know, when you go out with a girl and you get serious you don’t want her to go out with anybody else. Or when you get a job you want everyone else on the job to do their share. But when you’re a kid you don’t have to worry about things like that. At least I didn’t have to.

  I first moved to 116th Street when I was twelve and a half. I moved into this building about halfway down the block, which, I found out later, everybody called the safe house. (If someone from another block was chasing you and you made it to the safe house, they would never chase you inside. That was because they’d have too far to run to get off the block if your friends started after them.) Anyway, I moved into this house which was officially 81 West 116th Street. I moved into Apartment 4S. I really liked the apartment because I had a separate room. In fact, that’s why we moved to 116th Street in the first place. I was twelve and my sister was ten and my mother said it was high time I had my own room. So finally my father found this place and we moved. My room was small but it was all mine. Sharon got our old dresser set and I got a new one. Things were really going well. It was just early fall when I moved in and I’d started school already, but I had to transfer to a new school called James Fenimore Cooper. It was an older school than the one I’d gone to, but that was okay because they had a really good music department and I played saxophone.

  About two days after we moved in I came downstairs to sit on the stoop and that’s when I met some of the other kids. I had a feeling they were going to be all right from the start because they started kidding around with me right away. They were a little old
er than me, about a year or so, but that was really together because I liked hanging out with older people. Most of them were thirteen at least and some even fourteen.

  That day I went downstairs they were all wearing dungarees. They had patches on the knees, the kind you sew on, with funny little sayings or birth signs. One guy, a kind of dark-skinned dude with wide shoulders, had a Sagittarius patch on his right knee and a Leo patch on his left knee. One Spanishy-looking girl with long hair had butterflies all over her pants. It was a cool-looking group. All the guys wore sneakers and the girls had on sandals.

  “Hey, man, what apartment you live in?” one guy with a real long head asked me.

  “Four S,” I said, trying to be cool.

  “Can you play any ball?” Long-head asked.

  “He can’t play no ball,” another guy said. “His feet go the wrong way. Look at him.”

  I looked down at my feet. They looked okay to me.

  “Man, the cat that used to live in 4S sure could play some ball. You should be ashamed to even move into that apartment.” Long-head shook his head and looked at me like I was smelly or something. “Can you stuff?”

  “Do you mean dunk?” I asked. I knew what he meant. I could play basketball pretty well, but there was no way I could jump over the rim and stuff the ball. No way. I couldn’t even come close.

  “Yeah, turkey, can you?” They all looked at me.

  “If I get a good start,” I lied, asking myself why I was lying.

  “I’ll go get my basketball,” a girl said. Later I found out her name was Gloria. A girl! I figured if the girls had basketballs around here, the guys must be fantastic. She ran into the hallway and into a first-floor apartment, and I started feeling terrible. My mouth got so dry I had to lick my lips. Just then another guy came up, and Long-head started right in again.

  “Hey, Clyde, I want you to meet the new cat from Four S. I told him that the old cat that used to live there could play some ball, and he told us he could stuff.”

  “We ought to call him Stuffer,” another guy said.

  “Or how about Hot Stuff,” Long-head put in.

  I thought I felt pretty small then, but I really felt small when the girl came back dribbling the basketball. She passed it to me and I kind of smiled a little.

  “Come on to the park, baby, so we can see you do your thing,” she said.

  “Don’t call him baby,” Long-head said. “His name’s Hot Stuff.”

  I was really beginning to feel bad. The first day on the block and I had to go and say something stupid. But then this one guy, the one with the two birth signs on his dungarees, came and sat down on the same step I was sitting on. This put him just about in the middle of the group.

  “Hey, look, we can deal with old Stuff later. Maybe we’ll take him to the park tomorrow and check him out. But we got to deal with Binky and that other cat.”

  “What do you mean?” Gloria asked, still holding the basketball. “What did Binky do?”

  “Binky’s supposed to fight this guy from the Milbank Center.” Clyde—that was the kid’s name—turned to me and spoke in a very calm voice. “We don’t want Binky to lose the fight, but we don’t want to get into a whole big fighting thing either, you know.”

  I didn’t know about any of them, but I knew that I didn’t want to get into any fighting thing. I also noticed that when Clyde talked he talked a little quieter than anybody else, and I wondered if he was older or something.

  “What do you think, Sam?” Clyde was talking to Long-head.

  “He got to fight the cat or everybody’s going to think he punked out. Binky ain’t no turkey, you know. Binky’s a bad dude. Binky’ll do one of these numbers, man. Bipp! Bipp! Bop-a rop-DOP! And the cat’ll be knocked out, that’s what’s going to happen.” Sam was hopping around and throwing punches at an imaginary person.

  “Why do they have to fight in the first place?” I asked, trying to score off what Clyde was saying.

  “Shut up, Hot Stuff!” Sam lifted a bony brown fist in my face, and I shut up but tried looking at him sideways. Looking at people sideways sometimes fakes them out.

  “And don’t be lookin’ at me out the corner of your cross-eyed self either or I might have to knock you out. I knock out a man in a minute, you know!” Sam wasn’t faked out.

  “Yeah.” Gloria put her hands on her hips and leaned forward. “You knock them out with your bad breath, you mean. Then you run. They don’t call you Fast Sam for nothing, turkey!”

  “Don’t be playing with me, Gloria. I ain’t kidding now.” Sam tried to look tough and stuck his lip out a little. He looked so funny I wanted to laugh but I didn’t, just in case he did knock people out. Well, you know, he was bigger than me.

  “They got into an argument, some dumb thing about who said what about some girl, and then this cat from Milbank said he could beat Binky or anybody else on 116th Street, and this guy said he was coming over here to beat Binky’s butt. They’re getting into a thing over there at Milbank, you know. Gangs and all. I just don’t want to get involved in it.”

  Just then Gloria’s father came by with a bag of groceries, and he gave Gloria a soda out of it and asked if any of us wanted a soda. I wanted one but I didn’t really know him so I said no, and Clyde said no and everybody said no except Sam. So Mr. Chisholm, who is Gloria’s father, opened two sodas and gave one to Gloria and one to Sam and told Gloria to come in for dinner soon. Soon as he went in Gloria offered her soda around to some of the other guys and they each took a sip. And then Clyde asked Sam was he going to hoard his soda.

  “Everybody done had some except Hot Stuff, here. And if he wanted some he should’ve asked Gloria’s father while he was here.” Sam gave me another dirty look.

  “You don’t be asking for all of people’s stuff,” Clyde responded. “Stuff’s too cool for that. Right, Stuff?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “He ain’t too cool. You’re cool, but he ain’t cool. He’s just dumb,” Sam said, pushing his can of soda toward me. “And don’t be spittin’ all over the can, either.”

  “He do look a little weak in the head,” Gloria added.

  Well, that’s how I got to meet the first people on the block. And those three, Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Gloria, turned out to be just about my best friends. Oh, they put me through a lot of things. The next day they made me go to the basketball court and try to stuff. I couldn’t even come close and they all laughed. Especially Sam. He had to roll on the ground and kick his feet in the air and really carry on. Gloria and Clyde got me on pretty good, too. Afterwards we shot a round, and I could see that Sam was really a good basketball player. Everything he did seemed to be effortless. Clyde wasn’t bad, but I was a little better than Gloria. A little. Anyway, that’s how I got to meet them all, and that’s how I got to be called Stuff instead of Francis. I dug that. Me. Stuff.

  1

  miracles of modern science

  I remember there was a long time when I thought modern science wasn’t nothing but some jive stuff, and that was because the only thing it ever did for 116th Street was to get everybody in jail. And on 116th Street we could get in jail being downright primitive—we sure didn’t need new ways. I wasn’t the only one in jail so don’t think I’m just getting my thing off my chest either. Butch was in jail, Angel was in jail, Fast Sam, Binky, Light Billy, Dark Billy, and Clyde. Now the key to the whole mess was Binky and Clyde. Clyde because he was more or less the coolest guy on the whole block and you just know that if he’s in jail something’s got to be wrong. And Binky because it was his ear that got us in jail in the first place. His ear and that jive modern science stuff. Then again, it could have all been Clyde’s fault because he was the guy that brought science into it in the first place. But like everything else Clyde did, it was cool at the time. Let me run it down right quick.

  Clyde had told us that Binky and this guy from Milbank Center both liked the same girl. Now what they saw in her I don’t know because she really wasn’t t
hat pretty or anything. As a matter of fact, you know what she looked like? That cat on the Quaker Oats box. Honestly! You imagine that cat having an Afro and you got Debbie. Anyway, they were both digging Debbie. You just know that sooner or later they were going to get into it. And both of these guys were bad. Binky could beat just about anybody on 116th Street. In fact, he had beat everybody on 116th Street except Clyde and Fast Sam. Clyde didn’t fight. Ever. And if you got that guy into a corner he could make you feel so bad that you felt like a punk for hitting him. And Fast Sam was another story. He was so good at athletics that nobody wanted to try him. But if he had any doubt about it at all he’d run. And nobody on any block in the world was going to catch him. Especially when he was scared. And dig this, he almost always wore his sneakers to give himself an extra edge.

  So anyway, Binky was bad. But this other guy was bad, too. His name was Robin and he had a scar across his forehead about two inches long. When he got mad that scar would start twitching. Clyde said he got that scar when him and his boys were walking through Mount Morris Park and the Valiants caught them. He only had three of his boys with him and some girls, and there were about seven Valiants. He told his boys to take off and get some help while he slowed down the Valiants. So his boys took off and he fought the seven Valiants all by himself until his boys got some help. When they got back, Robin was still fighting the Valiants. His forehead was cut from being hit in the head with a bottle, but he was still on his feet. Now you know the guy is plenty tough. So what do we have? Two tough guys, Binky and Robin. Both liking the same girl, Debbie.

  So one day we’re all sitting on the stoop arguing about who was the best basketball player, Doctor “J” or Bob McAdoo, when Binky, Cap, and Royal come around the corner. Everybody said hello and Binky was rapping about how he thought McAdoo was better than the Doctor and all and just fell into the conversation.

  Then from the other corner comes Robin and some of his boys. He only had a couple of his boys with him so we knew that there wasn’t going to be any heavy stuff. So Robin comes bopping up and he stops about five feet away and hooks his thumbs in his belt.