The beginnings of almost any lifetime passion are defined by the confidence it offers you as a child. The kids in my neighborhood couldn’t afford a real musical instrument, let alone lessons. The local schools touted paltry art budgets that had us using the nubs of half-eaten crayons out of an old coffee tin and well-worn watercolors for an hour every other week.

Here, there are two arts through which a young boy can find his voice — basketball and rap. It takes a hefty diversion to distract children raised in a place where crime is a self-sustaining spiral and only two kids on the block have fathers. We were lucky. We found our diversion.

It began on a lazy summer day in an upstairs bedroom. My cousin from the suburbs brought along a tape recorder and the most basic of beatboxing skills. What resulted from our day-long session was a line by my little brother that has been burned into my memory,

“You can see me go as Bassey’s smiling/ His name is Bassey Cocoa because he’s bileing.”

Looking back on it now, the line doesn’t make much sense. But we couldn’t have been any more than 10 years old at the time, and tales of this epic diss would be recounted for years.

Years later, when many of our neighborhood friends began a long descent into petty crime or drugs, a few of us gathered around an oversized Dell computer with a default sound recording program and began the journey anew. We spoke rhymes over hastily arranged sound loops that blared full-blast so they might be picked up by the ancient webcam that doubled as a microphone.

My older brother was the first to start a rap crew, and I desperately wanted to join. Following a string of comical attempts to convince the high school freshman of my writing acumen, I finally sequestered myself in a bedroom for hours and composed a song that forced them to let me join. I think I called their words “absurd blurbs.”

It was impossible to pause or rewind the generic sound recording software, so four or five of us squeezed into the tiny computer room — if one person tripped over a line, everyone had to record their verse again. These represented countless hours away from the bleakness of a dying neighborhood and corroding social structure. Hours spent away from a criminal-driven culture referred to casually as the “game.”

Those who got caught playing the game didn’t even think to speak of the crimes. They don’t dream to retire. We all saw common thugs as divine beings or disciples. But the faith we had gained in ourselves through end rhyme and the 3/4 beat allowed us to confide in the Bible and consider it God’s rhyme book. We still consider it God’s rhyme book.

And through our simple poetry we found a solitary window pointing away from the despair.

Through our fights over mics, we would improve our minds. Rather than burn dreams in the sky for dimes, we would depict the crimes that wouldn’t leave our eyes and sell them as rhymes.

And their blood poured while we snored — comfortable in our beds.

We were lucky.

That’s how we passed the time in a neighborhood blanketed with signs comically declaring it a “Williamsburg Heights drug-free zone.” We were inconceivably lucky. Art programs have long been cast to the wayside by a Milwaukee public school system whose performance in recent decades has been an unmitigated embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin. City and state officials have acknowledged the problem of losing countless youth to drugs and prison and that the school system is broken. But they haven’t acknowledged that funding education is the most vital function our state could serve. They haven’t acknowledged it in dollars, anyway.

So the game is still played by those who inevitably rise only to fall, swiftly and justly as I recall. And I can only pray that somewhere on my block — where it’s easier to find an illegal gun than a father — some kid is sitting in his room with a tape recorder and some friends, constructing a window that looks past the despair of the real world. Maybe someday, someone from somewhere who’s an expert in blank stares, but worships his own moral wares, will tell that kid “rap is a bad influence.” I just want to see a kid laugh just like I do.

Bassey Etim ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and journalism.