Are you someone who gives a loose doo-doo (a limp handshake) with a frozen wrist (covered in diamond jewellery)? Have you ever visited Chocolate City (Washington DC)? Are you a hog (boss) who likes to game with Fred, Bob and Isaac (the FBI)?
Everything is made clear in a book on sale in America called Street Talk. It is a 686-page dictionary of what its author, Randy Kearse, calls slanguage: the argot of young people — mainly men, and mainly African American, on the streets from New York to Los Angeles. The book bristles with phrases such as ”hoochie wear” (clothing revealing excessive cleavage) and ”do you kiss your mother with a mouth like that?” (a reprimand for foul language).
Kearse supplements bookshop sales of the book by hawking it from a stall he sets up daily on the pavement outside Macy’s store in Brooklyn. ”Come and join my book signing, don’t be shy!” Randy Kearse exhorts passers-by. On a good day, his charm will shift 10 copies, and he’ll be $100 richer. That’s meagre compared with what he used to earn — in the 1980s he made 20 times that amount.
There are several clues in Street Talk as to how Kearse used to make his money, all of them dictionary entries for crack cocaine. There is rock (a piece of the drug), covert names for crack: crillz, crizz, crizzack, jacks and there is the chilling expression for a crack addict: rock star.
Kearse was born and raised in Brooklyn. His mother was a teacher and his father a railway worker. They brought him up to believe in the value of a good education, hard work and respect.
Somewhere along the way, he lost touch with that, leaving school at 17 because he couldn’t see its value. ”I wasn’t dumb — I just made dumb choices,” he says.
The dumbest was to get caught up in the epidemic of crack cocaine that swept New York and all major US cities in the 1980s. He was never a regular user himself, but the ability to make fast money selling it appealed to his entrepreneurial instincts. In a few years he and his business partner had built an operation spanning three cities in South Carolina. At his peak, Kearse ran a gang of 25 members and he and his partner were making up to $100 000 a month. ”The money was coming in so fast we didn’t have time to count it.”
The good times lasted five years, but the inevitable day came in 1992 when Kearse, aged 27, was arrested and sentenced to 18 years in jail. His mother’s disappointment, the murder of another inmate on the day he started his sentence and the torture and murder of his partner two years later made him reappraise his life. ”After that I decided I was going to do something constructive with my life.”
The idea for the dictionary was sparked by a fellow inmate who had a book of 1001 jokes that he loved. That gave Kearse the idea for a book of 1001 street expressions. Though the other inmates were wary at first they soon began to feed him material and 1001 phrases became over 10 001.
Prison was the perfect place to compile a compendium of street slang. There were inmates from all over the country to teach him both East Coast and West Coast gang slang. There were all ages, giving a historic depth to his lexicon. It took seven years to complete the book and shortly afterwards, in 2005, he came out of prison.
He published it with financial help from his mother and sold it on to an independent publisher, Barricade Books, who put it into the bookshops this year. He has since written a second book called How to Use Incarceration as a Stepping Stone for Success, and is working on his third — a book of uplifting thoughts. – Guardian Unlimited Â