The most hilarious gang war ever.

So I don't talk much about the schools where I substitute teach, you know, for privacy reasons and all that. I discovered something this week, though, that I had to share with the world.

The school where I do most of my subbing is pretty posh. We'll call it the Manhattan School of Ridiculous Awesomeness. They've got a rooftop garden and Dance Dance Revolution in their gym. It's wicked nice. The kids, too, are great. They're not wild hooligans like my last school. All nice, upstanding kids who want to go to college. They also call me by my full name, which I think is cute.

And yet, they want to be ghetto thugs. They're so not, though, which makes it funny. Whereas the kids at my last school would claim to be in the Crips or Bloods, these kids have to make up their own gangs to pretend to be members of.

And thus was born the next great gang rivalry, the Park Avenue Crew vs. the Lexington Avenue Crew.

That's right.

They even have their own gang signs, which I've learned after careful observation. Here is the Park Avenue Crew's sign:

P for Park Avenue. Its elegance is its simplicity. Here's the Lexington Avenue Crew's sign, though:

Slightly more complicated. I can't quite get the A part right with my meaty adult hands. Quite clever, though, I'll give them that. And more elaborate than that last fake gang war I had to deal with.

Anyway, the kids know me well enough that I can pretty much make fun of them to their faces and they know I'm just kidding. I overheard some of them talking about a rumble with the other group (they just said they were going to "jump" them after school, but I really like that word, "Rumble"), and I went up to them, all, "Do you know how many forms I have to fill out now? THANKS."

"Yo, but Mistah [my full name], them Park Avenue kids think they're better than us, like they all bad and sh*t."

(I still get a kick out of being called "Mistah". Like, they can't be bothered to pronounce the "-er" at the end, even in Grammercy.)

"First of all, we don't use that kind of language at [Manhattan School of Ridiculous Awesomeness]. Second of all, you realize this is kinda hilarious, right?"

"Yo, but Mistah [my full name], which is cooler? Park Ave or Lexington Ave?"

"I'm not playing this ridiculous game. Go home and play your XBOX 360."

They also have this weird ritual where, after school lets out on Fridays, they all hang around out front for a while before they head out and shout "AH-OHHHHHHHHHH!" back and forth at each other. And when one person starts it, the whole crowd has to join in. You can hear it echoing off the buildings from several blocks away. I had gone over to hide behind Grammercy Park and smoke a cigarette when I heard it, thinking, "Oh man, it's going down."

I presume that all they know about gangs is what they've learned from TV and movies, so I half expected expected to go back and find them circling each other, snapping, singing "Doo-DOO-Doodoo-Doooooo...".