Memoirs of an Accidental Hustler

by J. M. Benjamin

“Yo, we ain’t tryin’ to hear that shit, nigga,” Mal said to him. “If the shoe were on the other foot you’d be blessin’ us.” I knew Mal had said that so Shareef wouldn’t have to depend on Ice and set himself up for an upset.

  “Whatever Ice hits you with that’s cool, but we’re your family and family sticks together, so take this paper before we change our minds,” I told him as we all started digging in our pockets. I had about three Gs on me and I peeled off the first fifteen hundred-dollar bills that I had in my knot. Mal gave him a G. Together Ant and Trevor gave him $1,700.

  “Look at you niggas, actin’ like you Scarfaces out this muthafucka,” Shareef said smiling.

  We all laughed. “That ain’t nothing, yo,” Trevor said. “That’s just something to put in ya pocket. Me and Ant gonna take you shoppin’ tomorrow ’cause that shit you got in your closet ain’t fittin’ you no more, and we can’t have our mans walkin’ around with tight shirts and high waters on.”

  Shareef laughed.

  “Yo, you decided what you wanna do now that you home, like go back to school and shit?” I asked him.

  “Nah, I ain’t going back to school. I got my GED while I was in there, so that’s good enough. Bottom line is I’m tryin’ to get money and move up out these projects like I was tryin’ to do before wit’ my family. I ain’t do no eighteen months to come home and get a nine to five. That li’l bid just turned me into a smarter criminal. Like Michael Jackson said, a smooth criminal, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Yeah, we hear you, and we’re here for you whenever you ready to get back in the game. We got you, so don’t sweat that,” Trevor announced. “You ain’t gotta be clockin’ for no muthafuckin’ Clyde, ’cause you wasn’t clockin’ for him when you left. We got ya back. These our projects now on the low and it’s more paper out here than when you was out here before. They call these shits the Crack Capital of the city, kid, and that’s because of us,” Mal told him.

  “Yeah, no doubt,” Shareef said. “I know y’all got me but I’m gonna get at Ice and see what he talking about.”

  “Yo, kid, Ice fucked up in the game right about now,” Trevor blurted out. I guessed he couldn’t hold it any longer. “We didn’t wanna get all into that because we know that the two of you was a team, but shit ain’t the same no more, fam. Look how long he been out, and he still pumpin’ for Clyde. Mil and Mal hit him with work a few times because he fucked Clyde shit up. The boy still on foot; he ain’t even got a hooptie. Come on, Reef, we know that’s ya mans, but he ain’t been able to maintain since you two took that hit. I ain’t telling you all this to shit on him. I’m telling you ’cause you my dawg and I love you, and I don’t want to see you get caught up in that like that.”

  Shareef just listened, and then spoke when Trevor was done. “Yo, I know where you comin’ from and I appreciate all of that, but when I was struggling that nigga took me under his wing and schooled me, so I’d be a fucked-up nigga if I didn’t see what I could do to help him, dig where I’m comin’ from? Mil, you and Mal out of all people should know what I’m talking about. If it was Mu who was fucked, would you shit on him?” he asked us.

  “Come on, yo, you know the answer to that already, and nobody telling you to shit on kid; we just telling you not to think that niggas are still the same, that’s all,” I replied.

  “I know, and I love you niggas for that. It’s good to be home. It’s good to be back with my dawgs.”

  * * *

  It only took Shareef five months to turn it back up on the block. It was as though he had never left. He copped himself a Nissan Pathfinder and a bike for when the summer came around; and he told us that by the New Year he’d have his moms and li’l sister up out of the projects.

  He tried to bring Ice back, but he was unsuccessful. Ice had messed up so much of Clyde’s money that he struck him for one big package and bounced somewhere, and nobody had seen him since. Mal got his license and I had it duplicated with my picture but his name on it because I couldn’t apply for mine until next year. I needed the proper credentials so I could travel legit with my gun. Lately, it had become apart of my dress attire. Even though I didn’t have any problems with anyone or didn’t think I’d have to use it any time soon, there was just something about having it in my possession. It gave me a new sense of power and control, like when I had first gotten in the game and made my first sale. I think just knowing that the six metal bullets in the clip and the one in the chamber gave me the ability to play God, and gave me a rush.

  I got rid of my Audi and Kamal crashed and totaled his coming from the Echo Lanes bowling alley. He cried like a baby that day because he loved that car. We both copped Honda Accords and hooked them up just as we did the Audis, only better. Mal painted his pearl green and white, and piped it out the same color; mine was white with a blue top, piped out the same. I threw Autoform rims on my piece and he went with deep-dish Hammers. Our music was ridiculous. We both had four tens in the window, with two twelves and the fifteens in the seat. We had an amp to push the joints in the window and the ones in the seat. We had a Zeus for the tens and a Kenwood 1020 for the twelve and fifteens. Instead of one EQ, we went with two Blaupunkts this time. What made them so loud was the fact that the seats in the Hondas dropped in the back, so when we pumped out our shits it sounded like a disco when we came through.

  A couple of months later Mal brought a Jeep Wrangler, painted it the same as his Accord, dropped it, and threw some low profiles and rims on it. I didn’t get a Jeep, though. I copped a bike instead, a CBR600. The game had been good to us, but like they say, “all good things must come to an end.” But you never knew when.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  1991: my junior year, and one more year to go before I graduated. Mal and I had been talking about getting out of the game and paying our way through college. Mal wanted to go somewhere local like Rutgers or Seton Hall, but I wanted to go away to somewhere like Virginia Union in Richmond or Hampton U, to get away from everything. Plus I’d be able to cool out with Mustafa because that’s where he spent most of his time now that he had his businesses operating down there.

  He had opened up a beauty salon and barbershop with his son’s mom and a Laundromat identical to the one he had opened in Plainfield. He popped in and out of town to come check us and to collect his dough from the little niggas he still had pumping for him out here, but it still wasn’t the same as when he was there and I could kick it to him whenever I wanted to. He had been trying to get Mal and me to come down for the longest to cool out, but we had been trying to put mad work in and stack so much paper that we hadn’t had time for any type of vacation; but we planned to slow down once summer hit.

  As usual, the block was jumping. I noticed lines of drug buyers and heavy traffic flow when Mal and I came out. We were in search of Ant and Trevor. Me and Mal and ’em were supposed to go out to the Bronx to meet up with four chicks we had met while we were shopping on Delancey Street last week.

  “Yo, Shareef, you seen Ant and Trevor today?” I asked.

  “Nah, I ain’t seen them niggas since last night.”

  “Their cars are parked in the back so they gotta be around somewhere,” Mal said.

  “They probably over at some chick’s crib in one of these buildings. You know they be tryin’ to fuck every shorty with a fat butt around here,” I said.

  “You went to their crib?” Shareef said.

  “Last night we did, but we didn’t get no answer,” I said. “And their cars were still parked in the back.”

  “Yo, let’s go over there and check the crib again, ’cause they told me that they’d be out in the a.m.,” Shareef told us.

  “Yo, Ant! Trevor! Wake the fuck up, niggas,” Shareef yelled, banging on the door, but there was no answer.

  Something told me to try the doorknob and when I did, it was open. As we walked in, a foul stench smacked us dead in the face.

  “What the . . . ? What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “It smells like shit
,” Shareef said.

  Mal covered his face and made his way to the back. The smell was unbearable and I felt like I was about to vomit. The smell was coming from the back room.

  “Aw, man! No!” we heard Mal yell.

  When we turned around in the direction Kamal was facing, where the odor was coming from, we saw what made him react the way he had. Between the smell and the sight, I couldn’t hold my breakfast down any longer. I sprayed the floor with vomit like in The Exorcist.

  “Aah, shit!” Shareef cried. “Nah! Not my muthafuckin’ boys.”

  “What the fuck happened? How this shit happen?” Mal asked.

  We were all in tears but they were tears of anger. Even now, that day haunts me and is the cause of some of my many sleepless nights, and why I wake from my sleep in cold sweats.

  Sitting there, tied and gagged, facing backward, were Ant and Trevor, with what we knew were bullet holes in the back of their heads. Somebody had killed our friends execution style.

  “I can’t believe this shit.” Shareef punched a hole in the wall.

  “Who could’ve done this shit?” Mal wanted to know.

  “We can’t worry about that right now,” I said. “We gotta make sure it’s clean for when Five-O gets here.”

  “You right,” Shareef said. “You two search the house; I’ll take care of this.”

  Nothing out of the ordinary had been touched in the kitchen or the living room, but when we got to the back the rooms were destroyed. On the bed lay an open safe. Right then and there we knew Trevor and Ant had been robbed and killed for whatever was in there. We knew they didn’t keep their guns and drugs in the safe with their dough, so we kept searching.

  Not too long after, we found a brown paper bag with a plastic bag inside of it full of clips, along with two Tech 9s, a Mac 10, two regular nines, and a pump. We gathered up everything wrapped it up in a blanket, and took it with us. When we came out of the room, Shareef told us that he reported everything to 911, so we left before they sent the police.

  Within the next twenty minutes, the projects were flooded with cops and medics. All we could do was stand there and watch while they took our boys out in body bags. Nobody besides us knew what happened, or who was in the bags. We knew who was in the bags, but not what actually happened; but we were determined to find out.

  * * *

  The next day everybody had heard of Ant’s and Trevor’s murders, either from the newspapers or gossip. It had spread all over town. The police made a statement saying that the incident was drug related, possibly a robbery gone bad, but there were no leads as of yet.

  Meanwhile, we were doing our own investigation around the way. We questioned chicks Ant and Trevor messed with, which was damn near the whole projects, we asked niggas when was the last they seen them, either together or separate, and we even got at the fiends and patients who were usually out there all night whether they seen or heard anything. We told everybody on the low that if they came up with something solid we would take care of them for their help. It was easier to solve a crime on the streets if you were from the streets than if you were the police, because things had a way of getting out in the hood. Some stupid muthafucka always slipped up and started running his mouth at the wrong time, in the wrong place, around the wrong people, and that’s what we were waiting for.

  Ms. Smalls was hysterical when she found out what happened, but Trevor’s mom couldn’t be located. This was the second child Ms. Smalls had lost to the streets by the gun, and she looked as if she were going to die right then and there herself. We tried to console her, but the pain was just too much for her to bear, as she cried out torturously.

  “Why? Why, Lord? Why both my babies? Why’d you have to take both of them?” she kept saying.

  I found myself in the same position from five years ago when Ms. Smalls cried in my arms over Terrance’s death. I couldn’t possibly imagine or begin to know what she was feeling right then. That was between her and God.

  As I held her I saw a familiar face in my presence, and she too had tears in her eyes. It was my mother. Mal stood there just staring at her, not saying a word. I turned Ms. Smalls over to Shareef and approached my moms.

  “Ma, what’s wrong?” I asked her.

  She reached for both Mal and me. She just stepped in, flung her arms around us, and began to cry out loud. This was the first time in almost three years we had been this close to our moms since she had put us out, let alone felt her hugs. Almost simultaneously, Mal and I began to shed tears with our mother.

  “I heard about little Anthony and little Trevor,” my mother began saying, while wiping her face. “I don’t want to go through that with you two. I feel responsible for you being out here already because if I hadn’t put you out, you wouldn’t have had to grow up so fast in the streets. Maybe you would’ve stopped selling that junk back then, but now it’s too late because too much time has passed and the both of you are in too deep out here. Look at you, you don’t even look the same anymore,” she pointed out. “You have that same look your father had when he was your age. You look like grown men who have lived hard lives, but you’re still kids acting grown.

  “I haven’t had a peaceful night’s rest since that day. How can I sleep knowing that my children are out there in the streets, being subjected to what goes on out here? Every time I hear gunshots, my heart jumps and I get on my knees and pray to God that none of them bullets have neither one of your names on it. I don’t want to get a phone call telling me to come identify your bodies, and go through what Philyss and Joan have to right now. I don’t want to lose you and I don’t want you ending up like your father. Please listen to what I’m saying, and learn from your friend’s tragedy, because it can happen to either one of you too.”

  We both hugged our moms again.

  “Ma, ain’t nothing gonna happened to us,” I said. “We smarter than that.”

  “Ma, stop cryin’. We all right,” Mal said. “We ain’t gonna put you through nothing like this, ever!”

  We tried to reassure her. That day was a memorable one as well as the turning point of our lives. That day we had lost two loved ones but had regained a connection with someone we loved and longed for.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Two months had gone by and still we weren’t any closer to the truth, and neither were the cops. We had sold all of the work we had found that day up in Ant and Trevor’s crib and split the money between both of their moms. Trevor’s mom had taken the news just as hard as Ant’s mom when she found out. There wasn’t enough dough in the world to take the place of their sons and our friends. They were missed dearly.

  Their wakes were unforgettable. That was the first time I had ever seen so many hustlers from different hoods in the same area all at one time. Everybody came out to pay their respects and at least one brother from every block came up to us and told us how they had their ears to the ground, and if they found out anything they’d slip it to us. Even brothers we had once gone to war against and really didn’t like came through. It was funny how tragedies and celebrations brought our people together, but outside of that there was total chaos and confusion among us in the street. They say that something good always comes out of something bad, but I couldn’t see it that way right then. The only thing that really did happen that was a good thing was the fact that what happened to Ant and Trevor brought Mal and me back closer to our family.

  * * *

  It was New Year’s, going into 1992, and we were going to be stepping out to Times Square to see the ball drop. Mal was taking his girl so I wanted Lisa to go but her parents still had a tight hold on her. She told me how her mother tried to threaten her to stop dealing with me, but it only pushed her closer to me. Lately we had been touching lightly on the subject of sex because she was a little shy and uncomfortable since she was still a virgin. I never pressed the issue or applied any pressure. I was cool with how things were going with Ke Ke, so I wasn’t too bothered.

  I had called and invite
d Ke Ke to New York but she had a boyfriend now so she was ringing it in with him. We had a funny relationship. We could mess with anybody we wanted as long as we made time for the other. Mal had changed since he found a girlfriend. She was cool, but because of her, we chilled together less. I felt like he was putting her before me some times, something I had never done, even when I was dealing with Trina. But I understood that’s how it went when you were in a serious relationship. I guessed that’s why I was single, because I didn’t want anything to come in between me and the streets.

  While I was sitting in my car in deep thought waiting for it to warm up, somebody tapped on my window and scared the hell out of me. Luckily my gun was under my seat and not in my lap because out of reflex that would have been a dead ass. When I looked, it was Baseball Betty. We called her that because her hands were so big from shooting dope that they looked like baseball catchers’ gloves.

  “Mil, roll down the window.” She gestured with one of her mittens.

  “What, Betty?” I asked, irritated by her presence. “What’s up?”

  “I’m not tryin’ to buy nothin’,” she said. “I have to talk to you. Let me get in.” She looked around nervously as she wiped her running nose. She had on a filthy tee with a filthy jacket to match. I could smell her through the cold. She smelled as if she hadn’t bathed in months.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked. There was no way she was getting in my ride.

  She looked around again before she spoke. “It’s about your boys.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “Get in.” I unlocked my doors.

  I flicked my high beams at Mal like a maniac, who was sitting in his Jeep. He got out and started walking back toward me and Betty.

  “Yo, what up?” he asked, approaching the car. When he leaned in he saw Betty. “What the fuck she doin’ in there? You couldn’t find no better date than that, kid?” He laughed at his own joke. When he saw that I wasn’t laughing with him he knew something was up. “What’s goin’ on, bro?”