RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  And the really crazy shit, looking back on it now, even with all the trouble it caused me, in the end I’m kinda glad I got locked up. I feel the Lord was intervening on my behalf, working in his mysterious way to get me off the streets before I slipped into becoming a true Savage. He always had bigger plans for me, that’s how I always looked at it.

  But at the time, I remember feeling like I had no idea what was going to happen to me. If I was going to make it out of this okay, I had to pay real close attention so I could learn how to go to jail, how to bid and come out the other side in one piece.

  11.

  ON THE INSIDE

  Before I entered Manhattan House of Detention, I’d never been to real jail before, at least, not for any longer than a week. As much shit as I did on Staten Island, I never got locked up out there. I got arrested once in Harlem, when I went to go plug the connect who gave me the bad coke, and another time when I got caught in Times Square with the stolen whip from the Africans and did the weekend in the Tombs. That was small shit compared to this.

  I had to learn the jail scene in a hurry, though, because that was going to be my reality for the next year at least. Of course it was tough at first. Your first time in jail, you don’t really know how to bid. I didn’t know anything about touching the phones or how to earn respect from the dudes controlling the yard. I had to learn all that shit fast.

  Prison is by no means like it’s shown in the movies, but I learned so much about human beings there. My time behind bars was a really insightful look into the human mind and spirit. There’s no school like jail. Everything is stripped away. You can’t hide behind your guns or your hood or your crew or your clothes or even your rep. You’re gonna get tested, and you better have the right answers, or it’s curtains for the rest of your bid. When I was in there, that’s exactly what it was like.

  I didn’t like those Manhattan House motherfuckers I was with. They were too boozy and soft, just a bunch of sucker-asses. They had strayed into being Savages, as stated in Degree 1-2: “Why did Mussa [aka Moses] have a hard time civilizing the devil in 200 B.C.? Answer: Because he was a Savage. A Savage is a person who has lost knowledge of himself and is living a beast way of life. Civilize means to teach knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to the human family of the planet earth.”

  Now, me being a civilized man in jail, that’s what the Supreme Mathematics did for me. Being that I had knowledge of self, it kept me from being a Savage in pursuit of happiness.

  That wasn’t going to stop the Savages from banging into you, but it also made you aware of what you were dealing with. You were dealing with a person who was an 85 percenter: dumb, deaf, and blind. A slave to mental deafness and power, who did not know himself, did not know who he was, didn’t have any teachings, and was ignorant to himself. Who was locked in mental bondage, stripped of his own language and identity. He did not know that, so that’s why he was living a beastful way of life. Those in the hood who don’t have knowledge of self and who don’t really know themselves can also stray into that self-destructive mentality, because knowledge of the self helps you and prevents you from becoming a Savage.

  Having 5 Percenter knowledge put me on a different wavelength. When you get your degrees and become a 5 Percenter, you deal with refinement. That’s part of the culture, it’s called power and refinement. That means that you have the power to do shit, but you also gotta be refined, which means you gotta be clean—your drawers, your mouth, your hair, your nails are well done, and your sneakers are clean. Everything is good. You ain’t walking around all bummy, smellin’ like a derelict, robbin’ motherfuckers, doin’ stupid shit, and not taking care of yourself.

  But I learned things inside jail, too. They put me in both anger management classes and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Both of those programs served their purpose, because they made me realize certain things about myself and my relationships both to my anger and to drugs.

  Now, as a dealer, I didn’t feel like I had any addiction to drugs in a user sense. And because I wasn’t a user, I argued with my drug counselors all the time, like, “Why the fuck am I even here?” But once they pointed out that I would hit the streets and start slinging again as soon as I got out, I heard what they were laying down. The program helped me to realize that I was addicted to the money from the drug trade. The twelve steps of NA really helped me to see my addiction to drug money for what it was, and how it was controlling my life:

  We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction—that our lives had become unmanageable.

  We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

  We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

  We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

  We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

  We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

  We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

  We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

  We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

  We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

  Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

  Same with the anger management program. I know I probably would have seriously fucked someone up or killed someone if I hadn’t learned how to approach situations I found myself in differently. The steps of this program go along similar lines as the twelve-step program from NA:

  Think before you speak

  Once you’re calm, express your anger

  Get some exercise

  Take a timeout

  Identify possible solutions

  Stick with “I” statements

  Don’t hold a grudge

  Use humor to release tension

  Practice relaxation skills

  Know when to seek help

  Both of these programs set me on a very different path as to how I would handle situations in the future, which I’m grateful for, because my life would have turned out very differently if I hadn’t gotten control of myself. Once again, once I had that knowledge of self (to know thyself), I was able to use that to move forward and better myself.

  But as soon as I walked into Manhattan House, dudes were getting fucked up. One guy got hit in the face and blood was spilling all over the place. I just shook my head and took my blanket and my belongings into my cell.

  The next day, I wanted to touch the phone, but they were all taken. I quickly learned I had to make my calls early in the morning, when everyone was still sleeping. Even that first day, though, I saw people get beat up and cut for the phones. That link to the outside world was vital to a lot of people. I realized this was gonna be a problem. Can’t front, I was more than a little stressed about the phone situation.

  People in jail are always getting moved around, though. Some thugs got moved, so I tried to get their slot time—a certain time of day that you’ve made clear to everyone is your time to be on the phone—but some dude pulled out a razor and chumped me for the phone. I was shocked, completely taken aback. I wasn’t ready for all that. It kind of threw me off balance, so I just backed down.

  But then this older dude showed me how to handle that type of situation. The guy who pulled his blade on me tried to intimidate the older dude the same way.

  “Watch this, Light.” Everyone called me Light because I was light-skinned. “I’m a show you how you handle this.”

  “You dead on that slot time, homey!” the razor guy sa
id.

  “A’ight, young’un.”

  Soon as the thug with the razor turned his back, the older guy grabbed the mop wringer and hit him upside the head. The dude with the blade thought he had the upper hand, but the moment he got too confident, the older dude laid him out.

  The COs came and packed the dude with the razor up and took him out of the house (jailhouse). Because whoever gets wounded has to pack up and leave. That’s how jail goes. If you fuck around and get hurt, you’re the one that goes to the infirmary, and then the guards move you to a different housing unit. The dude who hurt you is chillin’ back in the house. You have to move to the next cellblock and start all over again, learning who controls what and getting in good with the right people.

  Anyway, after the old man finished his call, he returned to drop some wisdom. “Don’t worry ’bout a dude backing out on you. Just worry about how you retaliate behind that shit. Sometimes they gonna get the drop on you. You might have four guys pull knives on you. If they ain’t poking you up, though, it’s really bullshit. And as long as you play it smart, you still rocking. As long as you still here standing, you can catch them out there. Don’t let them dudes punk you like that, but don’t let ’em pressure you into a dumb move, either. Just play it cool ’til you see your opportunity.”

  I had a few real gangsters like that coaching me in jail. You had to handle yourself a certain way, and I learned fast. It helped that I got cool with this Dominican dude named Panama. He was like MacGyver with a banger (improvised knife). He could make one out of anything. He could make a blade out of a plastic bag. He’d melt the plastic with hot water and scrape it against the wall for hours, and the next morning he’d come out of his cell with a blanket wrapped around his new knife. He’d walk right through the metal detectors, because the blade was plastic, but it would still fuck you up if he banged you in the gut with it. A plastic knife is just as pointy as a steel knife, it will stab the shit out of you. If you got banged in the gut with a plastic knife, you were going to the infirmary, no doubt.

  That’s how Panama made his money in jail, selling knives to inmates. On the shakedowns, the COs would come in with the metal detectors. They’d flip your mattress over and turn your cell inside out, looking for weapons and contraband. But if you knew how to hide it in your mattress a certain way, they weren’t finding shit.

  That happened to me once in Manhattan House, too. Luckily for me, my man Chuck, who I grew up with and who was one of my best friends, was a corrections officer there. He wasn’t on my dorm, but he came down in the middle of the night to make sure I was good. Because I knew him, he was able to move me around inside. Like the one time my cell got tossed by the Riot Squad. They’re supposed to be looking for contraband, but a lot of times it’s just an excuse to fuck with an inmate. They’d flip your mattress, destroy your shit, tear up pictures, do whatever.

  Anyway, they ripped up some of my pictures of my baby boy, and when I tried to stand up for myself, they beat me and tossed me out of my cell in my drawers and nothing else. Afterward, Chuck got me moved to the top floor of the cell. I called it the penthouse, ’cause I was now on the top floor. Life was better there, too—less shakedowns and attention from the guards overall.

  *

  Panama and I got shipped out from Manhattan House to Rikers Island at the same time. Rikers takes convicts from all five boroughs, so you never knew who you’d be rubbing elbows with once you got inside. Now, you were gonna run into somebody you know, because nine out of ten times you go into the can you know someone who’s already there.

  Rikers Island is dangerous for many reasons, but the worst shit about it is that you’re serving time with dudes serving minimum time right next to stone-cold killers with life sentences. Even if you’re just serving a drunk driving charge, you’re thrown in with all these guys with murder, assault, and robbery charges. I was shitting fucking bricks.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, when we arrived I realized I was getting housed in the notorious Four Building, known as Four Main House of Pain. There was Four Main, and the other hard-core criminal building was the HDM, known as the “House of the Madmen.” Both units are legendary on the streets of New York City.

  When I got there, it was quiet. When inmates are quiet, it’s due to tension, not peace. I walked into the cell and threw my bag down, then came out and looked at the phone. There’s only one phone for forty or fifty inmates. It’s swinging ever so slightly, almost like it was mocking me. I needed to use it because I wanted to get my packages—things we couldn’t get on the inside, like clothes, money, letters, magazines, soap, pens and pencils—schedule visits, and talk to my girlfriend. So I’m sitting there watching it and wondering whose it is.

  At that point, I’d been in jail long enough to know that no matter what jail it is, somebody’s running the phone. I didn’t want to make the same mistake I had in Manhattan House, so I tried to peep for who was in charge. Problem is, I can’t pick him out. I’d also been in jail long enough to know only a goddamn fool would touch that phone before knowing what’s going on and who’s who. You could get killed over that phone, and a lot of guys have been hurt doing stupid shit.

  There were three dudes in leather jackets in the back of the dorm—they had the entire jailhouse on smash. Everyone in there was scared to death of these guys. A three-against-one situation is not good. This is a true Art of War situation: how to get what you want with minimal risk to yourself.

  Five Percenter knowledge comes with both physical and mental refinement. Like I said, you have the power to do things, but you’re not going to go rush out there wildly. You’re gonna approach it in different ways. You’re gonna think it through and plan and refine how you approach things.

  In jail, those Savages would normally come up and just stab you for the phone. That’s how a Savage generally operates. You got the phone, he wants the phone, he gonna cut you in the face for the phone. Instead of talking or making a deal, they just gonna put you down. That’s the only way a Savage knows how to get what they want.

  So, I gotta figure out a way to not get in that situation. I had some weed on me. My boo, she helped smuggle in some weed for me, sewed up about twenty-five cigarettes in my jeans. So instead of me having to punch or stab a motherfucker, I light up some marijuana. When I do that, motherfuckers went, “Oh, who got the weed?” The very same Savages were goin’, “That fuckin Light got that. Oh, U-God got the weed?”

  It ain’t nothin. I gave a dude a lil’ piece of joint. Boom—next thing you know, I got phone time. I ain’t got to worry about any suckers here. Soon I was in the back with them, playing Crazy Eights and chilling and having convos about life in the streets, our cases, and just bullshitting.

  How you move in certain circumstances is basically brainpower, it’s basically the mentality I mentioned earlier. That’s what the degrees and the 5 Percenters shared with the next generation. That stuff gave me the ability to think things through without having to use violence all the damn time.

  Sometimes, though, violence was inevitable when you’re dealing with a Savage.

  *

  I saw Panama a few days later on the chow line. “Yo, chico!”

  “Yo, what’s up, Panama?”

  “You need a banger, chico? You need a knife?”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  “You sure? I got one I made special for you,” he said.

  “A’ight, fuck it, I’ll take one.”

  Panama passes me a long, crazy-ass ginsu through the bars separating our jailhouse dorms. My entire jail squad saw that shit. They saw the size of that knife, and that gave me more respect and leverage.

  When it came time to leave Four Main, I left a lot of my things behind for my dorm mates. My Walkman, my radio, sweaters, socks, pants, envelopes, food. I always did that throughout my stay, since I couldn’t bring any of it with me. When it was time to get transferred, I’d leave all my shit for those who held me down. That way I would go play the yard and see twenty or thir
ty of the dudes I’d left some shit for. They’d all show me love in return, and it gave me a rep that I was cool, that I was good. Again, though, in jail and to a certain degree the streets, you can’t show just kindness, because it’s always taken for weakness. Unless you show you’re not a punk. Best way to show that is through loyalty.

  Like my man Jolly. This lil’ dude weighed about 130 pounds and was about five foot three, but he had the biggest heart I’ve ever seen. He came into my dorm while I was still in Rikers. I had already been down for a minute, or two months, so by now I wasn’t really sweating the phone. After a while, you stopped caring so much about staying in constant touch with the outside world. ’Course, calling home wasn’t always bad, either. When I called home, there was only certain motherfuckers I could talk to. For instance, I had my girlfriends, my son’s mother, my man Jay, Method Man, and Hope. Those were the half-dozen motherfuckers I could talk to.

  See, the problem is that most of the time the phone gets you in trouble, with you worrying about what’s going on outside while you locked up. You just gotta know how to do your bid. You have to know how to occupy your time from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. You wake up, you might work from six in the morning to noon. Then from noon to five you might go to the gym. Then from five to seven you might go to the law library. You might go back to the gym from seven to nine. You head back to your cell, watch a half hour of television, then do about five hundred or a thousand push-ups, shower, and go to bed. You gotta keep yourself active, you gotta read books. Once you occupy yourself like that, the days just fly by.