Phil K Swift and the Neighborhood Street Rockers; A Chicago Bboys tale

Phil K Swift and the Neighborhood Street Rockers

Copyright © 2015 by Philip Kochan

All rights reserved.

Book cover art by Wes Lee K

ISBN for paperback 978-0-9967425-3-5

ISBN for ebook 978-0-9967425-2-8

Library of Congress control number 2015953194

Chapter 1

I'm not even trying to brag or anything but I am one of the hippest cats you're ever going to meet in your entire wildest fantasy of a life, for real. I'm not talking smack. I'm just being honest with you. It turns out that I was a part of the original wave of breakers, which is a very big deal you know. In fact, I may as well tell you the whole story and start from the beginning, since I can tell you really give an Effin' damn. That's why you looked this way right?

I've got a whole lot of Shee-ott to drop on you, so listen up B-Boys and B-Girls while I lay it all on you. I'm not going to leave out any of the crazy ass details either, no matter how nuts it sounds. So cover your eyes and plug your ears if you don't think you can hang. What I am about to tell you is not for the goody goodies out there, so if you're one of them you better leave now before you get corrupted. I'm going to take you back to that year it all started for me.

It was 1983 in Chicagoland, more specifically; Downers Grove, Il. I wasn't called Phil K Swift just yet, that came later, but I was still a hip cat, it's just that nobody knew it yet. I was a legend in my own mind. I didn't really fall into any of those clique categories that everybody else at my school was falling into; I wasn't a jock or a burnout or a prep or a nerd - well ... maybe I was just getting out of nerdom by the skin of my teeth. I eventually broke away from nerdom but that was after I figured a few things out. I'll tell you about that later on. But as for being a nerd and such, I was a geek in nerds clothing who became a geek in hip cats clothing so I looked different than I felt but deep down inside, I was still a geek. But I became a cool-geek. Are you following me so far?

The more I think about it - I suppose that last year you could have just called me a geek or a nerd, flat out. The hip cat clothing probably wasn't fooling anybody except me. It's not that I had the black plastic watch with the calculator keyboard on the watch face and I wasn't wearing floods or anything. Well, not too often at least -and I certainly wasn't rocking red socks to my knees with green shorts to contrast the blue vinyl Velcro shoes that other geeks at my school were wearing - and proudly I might add. But I didn't start dressing hella-cool until lately. So yeah, I was half freak last year.

I can't claim to have never looked like any of those "total" geeks and gauche freaks but things did drastically changed for me in the 5th grade when Willy Renoir told me, "Hey dude, nice tough skin pants, did mommy pick those out for you?" It was at that moment that I had realized that I had to stop having mommy pick out my clothes.

By 7th grade, I was dressing straight up sharp because rink fashion had become my passion. I'll tell you about the roller rink in a minute.

By 8th grade I ditched the pop bottle thick, brown framed nerd glasses and got myself some contact lenses, which opened up a whole new selection of chicks for me to botch up puppy love with.

Finally by 9th grade I put the old kibosh on mom putting a bowl around my head and giving me a giggle worthy haircut. You know the kind, it was very similar to an Amish mans hairdo, all bowl, no style, very Moe from the Three Stooges.

Anyway, I got rid of the hair combed like Moe by having my mom take me to this fancy schmancy ritzy titzy hoity-toity hair salon in Hinsdale that charged one hundred dollars for women's haircuts and fifty bucks for young adults. Where they served champagne in the waiting room, and rich women carried their five thousand dollar dogs around in their five thousand dollar dog purses.