Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Memoir of a Street Kid II: New York

Memoir of a Street Kid II: New York

Smith, Dazza

Paperback

Series: Memoir of a Street Kid, Book 2

Mystery & Thriller

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798191046747
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Tyson Knuckles O'Neal is born into the kind of New York where boys grow up fast or disappear young. Raised in Far Rockaway by a single mother who works herself to exhaustion, Tyson learns early that love does not always protect you, poverty does not wait for innocence, and the streets offer boys something the world refuses to give them: recognition.

His father, Tyreke Key Jackson, is a prison legend Tyson knows mostly through rumours, shame, and silence. Hungry for respect and desperate to become more than another forgotten kid, Tyson is pulled into the Ridgewood Crips, where his fists earn him a name before his heart has time to understand the cost. On the block, he becomes Knuckles - feared, useful, and increasingly detached from the boy his mother tried to save.

When a robbery goes wrong and Tyson is arrested at eighteen, the streets abandon him exactly when he needs them most. Sent to Rikers, he enters the same brutal world that shaped his father. Inside, racial tension, prison politics, betrayal, and violence harden him further. Under the guidance of Unc, an older inmate who once mentored Key, Tyson learns that survival in prison requires more than strength. It requires patience, calculation, and the willingness to become dangerous in silence.

But Rikers also forces Tyson to confront his bloodline. Meeting Key reveals not the father he imagined, but a broken, manipulative man whose shadow has poisoned Tyson's life. When Key dies in prison violence, Tyson is left with a warning he cannot escape: don't become me.

For a while, he nearly does.

Then Billie enters his life through letters.

Sharp, compassionate, and unafraid to challenge him, Billie becomes the first person to see Tyson beyond the headlines, beyond Knuckles, beyond the violence. Through her, Tyson begins to imagine a different future. After five years inside, he is released at twenty-three, physically weakened but mentally sharper, stepping into a world where freedom feels more frightening than prison.

With Billie and her son Cody, Tyson builds a fragile new life. He works humiliating warehouse shifts, learns the slow dignity of clean money, marries Billie, becomes a father figure to Cody, and eventually turns his discipline into a legal logistics business. Beside him, Billie builds a women's advocacy law firm, fighting for mothers and abused women the way no one once fought for her. Together, they create something Tyson never thought possible: a family, a purpose, and a clean empire.

For the first time, Tyson begins to believe he might be more than the monster the streets made.

But New York does not forget old debts.

As Cody rises as a gifted baseball prospect and publicly credits Tyson as the father who taught him discipline, the past resurfaces in the form of Sean, the man who betrayed Tyson years earlier. One confrontation shatters everything Tyson has built, dragging his family into the violence he thought he had escaped.

When the legal system fails again and power protects the guilty, Tyson's grief curdles into revenge. The man Billie fought to save begins slipping away, replaced by the identity he once buried. Knuckles returns - colder, wealthier, more strategic, and more feared than ever.

From Far Rockaway corners to prison yards, from courthouse vows to criminal sit-downs with New York's most powerful men, Tyson's story becomes a brutal rise-and-fall tragedy about masculinity, grief, fatherhood, loyalty, and the cost of becoming powerful too late.

In the end, Tyson gets everything the hungry street kid once thought would save him: money, fear, reputation, territory, and a crown.

But the people who made any of it matter are gone.

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