RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  “Yo, I need another one of them thangs.”

  “I’m flying uptown right now. I’ll be back by six.”

  That shit was a steady flow of traffic. I learned about the importance of that traffic. Customers didn’t have to cop heavy, but if enough of them cop, you’re gonna make a lot of money. And that’s how it was for me at first.

  The whole situation, the reason why it was so easy, it was about convenience. It was convenient for me to come outside and make that type of bread. That’s why I was able to get over the poverty level. We weren’t broke no more. We weren’t struggling. Even though it was wrong, I could provide and also go to school. I was hustling and going to high school. I couldn’t have a regular job. It was a choice: either go to high school broke and struggle along every day with no food in the refrigerator and starve, or hustle and go to school eating steak and eggs and all that fly shit in the fucking refrigerator.

  And again, just because I was doing this to survive didn’t mean I was going to fully embrace the criminal lifestyle. Yeah, I was committing a felony every time I sold drugs, but it wasn’t one that, if I got caught for it, I’d never come home again. I still recognized those lines that marked going too far and took care not to cross them—although I came real close more than once.

  *

  I was hustling with the 26 Mob from the 260 Building in Park Hill. It was me and a bunch of dudes from my neighborhood and New Brighton. This was my first crew of young hustlers. We were really just learning the game as we went along. We would watch some of the older hustlers and listen when they came around to drop some knowledge about the game.

  There was this one dude, Barry Blue, that we all wanted to be like. He was a bit older than us and doing it big. We would try and soak up some of his wisdom and emulate his style. The crazy shit about Barry Blue was the way he got killed. He got shot up on this block in Staten Island that was historically known for drugs. Sadly, dudes getting killed on a drug block wasn’t very dynamic. What was dynamic about Barry Blue’s death was that he died the exact same way his father was killed, doing the very same thing on the very same block. Two generations living the same life, going out the same way. Can you imagine? What are the odds of that?

  Back then it didn’t really strike me as odd. Most of us were going to live and die hustling on this block. You had to accept that cold hard fact, or else you were just lying to yourself.

  I also pulled Meth into drug peddling so he could make some money to keep himself fed and clothed. He had lost his job, had gotten kicked out of his house, and was going through a really rough time. He’d dropped out of high school, and back then there were very few opportunities for inner-city youth. Often they ended up with their back against the wall and would do what they had to do to survive.

  Meth’s transition from the nine-to-five grind to the street was rough. When he first came out on the block, he couldn’t make a sale to save his life. At first he had to fight to boost his clientele. To get his stripes up, he had to fight to show motherfuckers he wasn’t weak. I told him, “Yo, dog. Dudes ain’t gonna respect you unless you stand up for yourself out here.” Remember, at the time, he was still going by Shaquan, his 5 Percent name. Dudes pulled guns on him and all that fly shit, but Meth stuck through all of it.

  Meth also had to learn how to deal with the fiends and the shit they’d try to pull to get their fix. Hustlin’ on the street was insane. You’d have the sneak-thief dudes who’d try to boost your stash. You’d have the women who’d proposition you for a hit.

  One day, this familiar fiend rolled up. Meth came over, the fiend rolled his window down, and Meth put the crack bag in. Instead of paying, the fiend slapped the crack out of his hand and started drivin’ off while Meth was hangin’ on to the car door! Finally he had to let go and went rolling down the street, all scraped up and shit. He definitely lost the sale that time.

  But after going through all that drama, by the time it was all said and done, every time Meth came out, he would shut the block down. You couldn’t even get a sale off when he was putting his work in. Maybe after he was done, you could get your little money, but while he was there, all the junkies were reporting to him for that shit. All you could do was wait until his stash ran out and he had to go back upstairs for more. Even then you weren’t guaranteed a sale in his absence.

  He started winning because his clientele was up there. About two or three weeks into the game, he started taking over. Me and him was Batman and Robin on the block. We’d come in and we would just shut it down. We’d make our couple stacks in a couple of hours and be out. Then it was back to the crib to smoke weed and whip up some more work while Meth would write rhymes. This transformed him into the rapper we know as Method Man. He incorporated the street life into his rhymes, about guns and drugs and all that, because he was living that experience to the fullest.

  We were scooping up so much money, there was nothing left over for the other dealers. You have to understand, there would be a dozen dudes out on the block, all selling crack against each other. But Meth and me were the only ones who partnered up—all these other guys were hustlin’ solo.

  We would do all types of shit on the block to make our stacks. We would double-team customers, with me at one end of the block and Meth at the other end, so no customer could get by us. When he was dealing out of a car, I was hustlin’ from a building. It was crazy. It got to where we could feel when the fiends would rush for their fix, and we’d be there, givin’ it to ’em.

  Saturday mornings between six and eleven thirty were killer. Like six in the morning to eleven thirty was off the fucking chain, just fiends lining up around the block. Then around noon to 2 or 3 P.M., it would slow down to trickles. Then around 5 P.M. to 1 A.M., it’d be poppin’ all night long, just rush rush rush rush, crazy traffic comin’ through, bombarding us. Then Sunday would slow down, so much that you might not even get one sale that day. But on Monday, they’d be back again.

  It also always got busy around the first of the month. That’s what the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song “1st of Tha Month” is about. That’s when the welfare checks arrived, so the fiends would come out ’cause they had money to spend.

  That’s the hustlin’ rules right there. Now, the weed dudes didn’t have to do all that. They’re on a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week grind, morning, afternoon, night, that’s nonstop traffic, slower than the crack fiends, but steadier, too.

  Coke and crackheads didn’t move like that. When it was too hot, for example, the fiends didn’t come out for the shit. There were certain times of day when peoples were sleeping, and they weren’t coming out for that.

  It got to where we were dominating the block so much that the other dealers had to call the police on us. The police weren’t stupid; they knew people were selling, they just didn’t know exactly who was selling, or how much. We’d hear ’em driving down the block and they’d be on the loudspeaker, calling people out.

  Police used to call Meth by his government name: “Clifford, what are you doing with your money?” Punk-ass Elvis used to call him Shaquan. “Shaquan, what are you doing with your money, Shaquan? You look like a bum all the time.”

  The police really underestimated us. They thought we were just some dumb thug street kids. They had no idea what we were up to, we were so far underneath their radar. They knew we were out there doing what we were doing, but they had no idea we had seven, eight grams in the fuckin’ house, that I was droppin’ packages in five neighborhoods. We weren’t flashy, which is exactly how I wanted it to be—if I popped up on their radar, then they would have come after me with everything they had. They also didn’t know we were in the studio trying to get out of the goddamn game, too, but that’s for later …

  *

  I learned all I could about the game. I still remember who taught me how to cook crack and freebase shit up. I got so nice with it I could cook half a kilo in a pot and lose maybe three grams at most. But before I got that ill with whipping work in the pot, th
is junkie taught me how to do it. It was my man Choice’s (RIP) mother. She was a real coke connoisseur.

  “U-God, I’m gonna teach you how to cook that shit up. Pay close attention now.”

  See, basically you cook the cocaine to get the shit out of it. By the time the kilo gets to New York, it’s already been stepped on, cut with other ingredients to make the drug go farther. So you gotta cook it. In the process of cooking up that shit, you add baking soda. Baking soda clears out all of the impurities in cocaine. That’s why crack is so powerful and potent.

  Anyway, she was the one who taught me to cook, but she was so meticulous with her shit she’d cook it ounce by ounce. I’ve got thirty-six ounces to cook, and she wants to cook each one individually. But I picked up the overall process from her, and soon I was doing a quarter key at a time, and then a half key. Eventually, I was cooking the whole kilo at once.

  One of the techniques she taught me was that after I’d cooked the shit up, I would drop it in ammonia. The ammonia would clean out the remaining impurities. Then I’d let it dry. And my goodness, Lord have mercy, them fucking fiends used to go crazy for that shit. By the time I was done, fiends were smoking the purest shit on the block.

  “U-God, my ears are ringing. What the fuck is that you just sold me?”

  “I need two more, U-God, I need two more.” They were going crazy.

  We had clientele so loyal that they’d walk right past anybody else to see us. It helped that I’d give my old babysitter some free work spreading the word about our shit. And all that was because we had the baddest crack. And that was due to that technique Choice’s mom taught us.

  “Dip it in ammonia!”

  “Dip it in ammonia?”

  “Dip. It. In. Ammonia.”

  I dipped it, then dried it, and my tester blew it. We always had someone test a batch before we would put it out on the street. Man, she started clicking and talking all crazy. She couldn’t sit still. That’s when I knew we had some serious shit.

  My babysitter would see me coming from way down the block after that, and start flagging me down from far away. I used to give her some free joints on occasion. I gave them out here and there because there were a lot of dudes posted up on the block, so you had to make sure people knew you had that killer shit so you could steal other dealers’ customers.

  We would take other people’s customers almost guaranteed once they tried our shit. We were getting our shit off in Park Hill, plus I was in other projects, too. That’s when my diplomatic immunity really started coming in handy. I could drop off a ten-thousand-dollar package in New Brighton and another one in West Brighton, and come back and scoop my cash at nine that evening. I had about five projects in Staten Island clicking. While other thugs were shooting it out with each other in the projects, I’m just sliding through different projects, humble and quiet, to see my mans so I can hit him with this package and move on. I was making like ten thousand dollars a day easy. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was easy. It wasn’t easy at all, really, but the drug game did feed me for a time.

  I did put in work when I was hustling, though. Five o’clock in the morning, I’m eating my breakfast. Get ready to go out in the streets when the sun comes up at six. Why? Because that’s when all the fucking fiends come out. That’s when everybody trying to get their fucking drugs. The big rush is early in the morning. You have to get up early to get them. So, you’re out there at six o’clock in the morning. Drug dealers are not lazy. You get up early doing all this shucking and jiving. Now from six to one o’clock, I ran through at least eight thousand dollars’ worth of shit. By time one o’clock came around, I’m chilling for the day. I don’t want to come outside the house anymore. I’m going shopping. I’m gettin’ fly. I’m getting ready for the night. I’m goin’ out on the town and having a good motherfucking time.

  *

  There were a few times that, for different reasons, there were droughts. When droughts would hit, the Island would get even more crazy. We’d have to go uptown and get coke that was stepped on with B12 or other adulterants to make it go farther, aka garbage. The whole Hill would lose clientele because we were pushing garbage. All the fiends would be over in New Brighton or some shit copping their work. I might have a package in Brighton, so maybe I’m still getting a little piece of that, but it was slow in Park Hill.

  News of drugs, bad or good, travels fast. Your rep for having some killer shit is only as good as the last fiend who copped. And if you got a bad consumer report, shit could get slow. Packages ain’t moving. Dudes getting desperate and mad. Then we’d be able to score some raw uptown again, and we’d be back clicking, the Hill flooded with junkies like it was supposed to be.

  We survived a few droughts, and I began moving up the hierarchy. My good connects had me doing more and more consistent business. The coke was regularly good now, and with the ammonia technique, our clientele had us bringing home competitive salaries at the very least. Especially for some high school kids who had been getting wedgies from the Avenue Crew in our younger years. The Baby Crash Crew and Wreck Posse were all grown up now.

  We also saw a lot of older dudes we respected succumb to drugs, though, and that made us feel funny in a way that we were making the drugs work for us, not the other way around. It still boggles my mind that we were young dudes still in our teens and had grown men taking orders from us. We had the vision and the strength to be leaders, I guess.

  People think selling drugs is easy money. That’s why so many are willing to try, and then they get killed in that shit. They think you just gotta come outside your building and post up and as long as your product is proper, the shit will sell itself.

  Let me tell you straight up—it’s not easy.

  See, the drug game, when you’re really really in it, is nothing but heartache and frustration. These punks thinking they selling drugs because they’re doing a couple of hand-to-hands, or moving a little weight, they’re not doing anything.

  Full-time drug dealing is hard. Harder than regular working people can ever imagine. You need to have some trustworthy workers and a connect, and you need to know when to fall back and when to go hard.

  You had to break down the weight accurately.

  You had to make sure the packages kept moving out on the streets, every day.

  You had to have clientele.

  Your product had to be up to par, or the junkies wouldn’t come back.

  You or your workers had to be on post almost all day to ensure your clientele kept coming back to you.

  You had to watch your workers, to make sure they weren’t shorting you or dipping into the package.

  You had to watch your back for the fucking police.

  You had to watch out for informers trying to set you up for the police.

  You had to watch out for crackheads setting you up to get robbed by the stickup kids.

  You had to watch out for kidnappers trying to snatch you for ransom.

  And you get very few second chances on the streets. You fuck up once, that’s your life. You make one mistake or false move, and you could get hurt or killed or end up in jail with some serious time on your head.

  And Staten Island was just a totally different hustle to add to all the other variables you had to factor in. For one, you had a lot of white people coming through copping eight balls and things, so you could move a good amount of coke. You didn’t have to just pump capsules all day.

  Besides that, though, when I would go uptown to see how my mans and them were hustling, they’d sell these big ol’ tall caps for five dollars. Uptown, you move so much and so fast that you’re gonna make a profit anyway. You’re only making a certain amount of profit there, though. If you came to Staten Island with that same cap, you’re gonna make ten times as much. That makes things worse when competition comes into play.

  It’s fucked up when you think about it, because even though me and my friends and other crews were making money off base, things got bad in our hood, like sav
age. Not in their hoods, rarely in their hoods. It’s like the line in The Godfather when one of the dons says they should sell drugs only to the “dark people” because “they’re animals anyway.”

  Very few people were unaffected by drugs in some way. Even if you didn’t sell or use drugs, you might have had your bike stolen by a crackhead or your crib burglarized or maybe your uncle sold your Sega Genesis. One way or another, you were caught up in the storm.

  *

  And, of course, with more drugs came more cops. That’s just the natural order of the drug trade.

  For a long time, the police were getting at the wrong people in my hood. They were running up on the older dudes, thinking they were the kingpins who had the projects clicking. But it was us, the fifteen-and sixteen-year-old dudes, who had all the bread.

  Once it became known, they sent their 21 Jump Street cops in. By that time, we were already moving on, already on our way to doing something else. We were rhyming. I was in school. I was always moving.

  One thing I always had was respect for law and authority. That’s another reason why police never really fucked with me on the Island. They respected me. They knew I was jingling—just not the level I was jingling on.

  They were always watching me, seeing me do this shit. I tried to keep the building clean, no bullshit goin’ on. No empty vials in the fucking halls. Swept the shit up, kept it clean all the fucking time. You got to keep your shit right. And whenever I saw the heat, I left.

  I never served to any pregnant women. I helped the elderly upstairs with their groceries, their food, their clothing, whatever they needed. If they needed me, they called me from the window, I’d go and help them. If anybody needed some money, I gave them bread. That was my ritual every day. They respected me for that, I guess.

  It’s a double-edged sword to be known on the block, though, because both the stickup kids and the cops know who you are. I’m sure police knew who I was, but for whatever reason they would hop out to run up on other motherfuckers, and they almost always ran right past me. Officer Delpre, he ran past me all the time. Gallo, Pistol Pete, Elvis, Hopkins, Collins, Marshall. They’d run past me a lot when they blitzed. I think that’s due to the fact that I tried to not always be on the fucking block. If I was hustling, I was in the building. I didn’t wanna always be seen. You’re there every day from noon to night. You think they don’t know who you are?