I ain’t never had it easy; I wasn’t given the same kind’a breaks you probably had as a kid. I had to struggle, look after myself, learn to fight.Yeah, times were tough on the east side of the village. But one thing was always made clear to us; we only ever had two choices in life. In this town, you could either be a cop……..or a mime.

And as far back as I can remember, I’d always wanted to be a mime.

My father was a pretty straight-up guy. That idiot worked 45 god-damn hours a week, for what? Eight hundred bucks a month, and a fucking Pontiac? Shit, some of the mimes on our street could earn that in 10 minutes, just by pretending to walk against a heavy gust of wind.

Yeah, I remember the first time my father caught me listening to a mime LP in my room. He just didn’t get it, he started shouting at me, telling me that this wasn’t any kind of audio based performance art. It was just 50 minutes of silence followed by polite applause. He said mimes were scum, people who stopped an average Joe like him making a decent wage. He ending up beating me so bad that night, I could barely mime for a week.

He just didn’t get it. Anyway by that time I’d already started making errands for the local mime families. Ya know, simple shit like pulling on an imaginary rope attached to a large weight. The whole family was run by a guy they called Marcel Marceau; what he didn’t say, the mimes did. Now, some said Marcel may have mimed slow, but it was only because Marcel didn’t have to mime for anybody, and if you crossed him? Well, the last person who tried to out-mime him ended up being locked in an imaginary invisible box, and chucked in the fucking Hudson River.

Finally I was living the life I wanted to live. The life of a mime. For us to live any other way was nuts. To us those goody goody people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, worried about their bills, they were dead; I mean they were suckers. They didn’t know how to learn on an invisible shelf, or cover yourself in silver paint and smile while tourists took your picture for twenty fucking bucks. As a mime, if we wanted something, we just took it and if anybody complained, or tried to break our balls. Then we’d rub are eyes in an exaggerated fashion, and pull out some flowers from our sleeves. After that, forget about it.

I also remember the first time I got pulled in by the cops. I knew what to do. Even at that young age, I knew the rules. You never rat on another mime and you always keep your mouth shut and your fucking mime hands down. I didn’t do nothin’ I didn’t even pretend to eat an invisible banana in front of them

We mimes ran everything. We paid off the cops. We paid off the lawyers. We paid off the judges. Everybody had their gloves out. Just because they didn’t have a white face, or a stripy shirt, didn’t mean they weren’t prepared to take, our dirty mime money.

Ya know, one day the kids from our neighborhood carried my mother’s groceries all the way home. You know why? It was outta respect; respect for the mime.

Nothing lasts for ever though, I thought I’d be a mime till I died, maybe even get ‘made’, have my own gang, hell it’s the American dream……………..Yeah, that’s what I thought.