You’ve never know asphalt until you’ve run over it on a raw summer’s day in naught but bare feet. The jagged edges of rock and glass tearing into your feet; the searing heat cauterizing the wounds closed.

The pain gives knowledge, and the knowledge understanding.

“‘Til you are as hard as what you touch you are not done!”

This is the refrain of our clan. The refrain of the modern, urban ninja.

No longer bound to an ancient culture, we are freed to spread a hidden power, for hire to those who can pay.

As a boy, newly brought into the fold, I was amazed by the brazen openness of our secret.

So obscene, so obscure must the fact of our existence be to those that drop money into those pro-offered buckets that they simply dismiss us as acrobatic children with a braggart’s swagger.

Now, as I watch the next generation acrobatically twist through the air on Beale, tourist dollars filling their buckets, I know that with but a word I could command those children to kill everyone within eyeshot and the Mississippi would be tinted red for days.

But thus is the power of the Beale Street King.

Memphis Note
Every day down on Beale Street, there’s a squad of the most acrobatic kids you’ve ever seen. They spend their days flipping and twisting through the air, over cobble stone and asphalt, carting around a bucket between acrobatics for whatever tips you can spare. Check them out, drop a dollar in their bucket…or else….