by Ja Rule
Jason’s basement felt like a sprawling luxury condominium. It had different rooms. One had the couches and the TV, the next room had beds in it. There was another small room where we would take turns cutting each other’s hair, making our flat tops as flat as we could get them. There was even a cellar door where we could sit on the steps and smoke weed. We would blow the smoke out of the cracks so the smell wouldn’t come in. We knew that Ms. LeGrand wasn’t coming down, but just in case. . . .
We got into some shenanigans around our way. I masterminded much crazy shit. One of our favorite things to do was going to the Chinese joint and ordering our favorites: pork fried rice, chicken wings, extra ketchup and extra hot sauce. We would always run out with the food, without paying. The little Chinese man would be yelling and screaming after us, but he could never catch us. Chinese people hated Black people. We didn’t give a fuck. We laughed as we ran out the door, singing “Fuck the Police.” That NWA shit was dope. We loved that radical shit. Fuck the police, for real. We wanted the Chinese man to know that we weren’t scared even if he did call them on us.
Eventually, we needed new stuff to do. We started ordering pizzas and holding up the pizza man. We needed a gun if we were going to stick up the pizza man, the right way, getting money and pizza! Harold hooked us up without a problem. We didn’t even have to pay him. He said we could use the .38 pistol whenever we needed it. It was just enough heat to get what we wanted without the problems.
Ms. LeGrand was devoutly Christian and the only way that she would let Jason have friends sleep over was if we all went to church with her on Sunday mornings. We would all drag ourselves out of the cots in the basement on Sunday mornings after a night of weed smoking and talking much shit. Our bellies were full of stolen Chinese food and our eyes sagged, heavy with lack of sleep. We regularly took a trip to Pop and Kims to get Old English and we drank as many of those extra-cold 40s as we could carry. The Chinese man who owned the store never asked us for identification. All that mattered was that he got his money.
We all kept our wrinkled church clothes stashed behind the couch in a plastic grocery store bag. Ms. LeGrand never said anything about how wrinkled we all looked. When she passed us, she would only show her concern by pulling on our wrinkled shirttails, reminding us to tuck in our shirts and checking to see if we had belts on. She would tell us to stand up straight and then she would smile like we were all something to be proud of.
On Sunday mornings, Ms. LeGrand would stand tall beside us crumpled boys. She looked regal as a queen. Her perfume smelled of baby powder and soap.
It was fun at Jason’s house, I ain’t gonna lie. The troubles in my head seemed to melt away when I was chilling with him and the crew. Going to church with Ms. LeGrand was way better than going to Kingdom Hall. I didn’t really mind church. I could have fun and chill with the fellas and still be with God for a few hours each week.
After the disfellowshipping of Moms, I realized that I wasn’t really religious, either. Being raised a Jehovah’s Witness showed me that religion was about having a middleman and going to church is to make people feel better about themselves. I could see what it did for Ms. LeGrand. After the Witnesses treated Moms and me so ill, I knew I never wanted a middleman to get between God and me, again. I never needed to hear someone tell me to love God. I just do. I didn’t want no one to tell me to put my money in a basket. Hell, I didn’t have no money, anyway.
I REALLY DON’T think that KRS-One was deliberately trying to get me to start selling drugs but his video was telling the story of my life and the life of everyone that looked like me. The video showed a kid in junior high school, like me, who was trying to do the right thing like doing a bullshit paper route to make money. His Moms was broke, his sister had wack clothes, the family was eating bread, beans and rice and he was the joke of the neighborhood until the neighborhood drug dealer showed him the way. The drug dealer had a fly car, a cell phone, cash and guns. When the drug dealer invited the kid to do just one “drop,” suddenly the kid was eating steak with his beans and rice. His sister finally got some fresh gear and shit all worked out in the end.
So tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do?
I HAD BECOME CURIOUS about selling drugs. Our first foray into selling was in junior high school. Jason, Kavin and I started putting chunks of Ivory soap into crack vials and selling them for five dollars. We would shave the pieces off of a bar of Ivory soap with a sharp knife. It looked like crack. We were just trying to make a little money to get enough for food and 40s. We were not trying to sell drugs or make big money. We were happy when we made fifty dollars.
We were still playing it safe in Laurelton, around Jason’s crib, which was a little less hardcore than around my way. It was the suburbs, for real. We really thought the soap thing was just harmless mischief. When the fiends around Jason’s way started to complain about the shit they had just bought, one of the older hustlers stepped to us.
“What the fuck are you little niggas doing? You’re fucking up my block. If you’re going to do this shit, then keep it real with something that niggas want to buy. Get some real dope, not no bullshit.”
That scared us, a little. We stopped doing the soap thing for a minute. Besides, we knew that when we were ready to keep it real, it would be easier back on my block, because I knew all the dudes running it.
Even Moms’ brother, my Uncle Dennis, who was five years older than me, was out there. Dennis worked for Kurt, who was short and chubby and drove a BMW 325. He was a good dude who got shot in his own house. Uncle Dennis always insisted that I was too young to be hustling. Losing Kurt had been hard on him and he wanted to keep me out of the dangerous shit. I resented that when he said it because I felt that he was trying to block me from getting mine, even though he was getting his. Fuck that. I would just get mine somewhere else.
My man Black was also in the game. Chris Black was one of the homies from Hollis. He was a tall dark guy with a low fade and an imposing presence. He was always a prankster and he liked to rhyme, too. He and I were cool.
During high school, I even checked out the burglary thing for a minute. I wasn’t really into it, though. I probably did it two or three times. In home invasions, I could get a gang of shit: cash, jewelry, tape recorders, which all had some street value, but I could see the unnecessary risks involved. I got my hands on some gate cutters, which we used to use to cut gates and locks and shit in order to bomb the buildings that had the cleanest walls. We were on to some next-level petty crimes.
I remember one day when I was skipping school. I was chilling on my fire escape, getting high. I had been writing in my lyric book and then took a break to smoke. When I got on my fire escape, I looked up. I saw a muthafucka coming down the fire escape after climbing out of a window above me. I was just about to tell that muthafucka to get the fuck outta here, when I recognized him. It was Champ’s little brother, L’il D.
“What’s up, nigga,” I said.
“Yo, nigga. I just lifted some shit from the crib upstairs.”
“Word?” My curiosity was piqued. “Wait for me.” I wasn’t even trying to rob a house that day. I went inside to get my shoes on so we could climb back up there to see if we could find any more good shit. When we got up there, L’il D was wrong. It wasn’t much left in there. It was just some petty shit like a hair dryer and an old pager.
You see, robbing houses just wasn’t my thing. I would rather work for my money. If you get caught robbing houses you’d get hit serving time and all you really got out of it was some trinkets such as watches or maybe if you’re lucky, a gold chain. It was bullshit for all that trouble. I would rather sell drugs any day and get a hard $300 in cash and know exactly what I was getting into. Robbing houses involved too many guessing games. I didn’t want to hope I would get something out of a deal. I wanted to know for sure. To me, hustling was a better bet.
When he and I got back down the fire escape, I let him out of the front door of my crib and went back to working o
n the rhyme that I had started. All I had was the chorus and the title: “Race Against Time.”
In my race against time I—can’t stop
Runnin through the red light—livin my life
Even if I’m gettin too high
I’mma keep runnin through the red light—livin my life
I WAS ALWAYS HIGH as a kite. Moms knew it. She smelled it. She saw my bloodshot, watery eyes. She hadn’t asked me much about it since those nights she would find me in the hall with my homies, when I first came back to live with her. Whenever Moms was at work, I was smoking in the house with my friends, all the time. I used a fan to blow the smoke out of the window, but Moms could still detect it. Finally, she decided to ask me about it one day.
“Jeffrey, are you smoking weed?” I was fourteen years old. What was I going to say? She saw all of the chips and cookie bags strewn all over the house. She could also never wake me up in the morning for school. Whenever she would come home from work, my homie Aaron and I were sprawled out on the floor with the TV watching us. I couldn’t deny it.
“Yes, Ma, I been smoking, please don’t trip,” I confessed.
“If you’re going to smoke, I guess I can’t stop you. You need to stay away from the police. I don’t trust ’em. They don’t care about boys like you. They’ll shoot you for no reason. And, they laugh when they get away with it.”
Too bad my father left eight years before. He might have handled that shit differently. Even though he was struggling with addiction himself, maybe just the sound of his voice would have scared me a little more than Moms’ feminine voice did. Maybe his tone would have inspired me to do the right thing when I was going down the wrong path. I sometimes imagined what it would be like to just have him around. But mostly, during that period I felt having him around would do more harm than good. That made me think, Fuck him, I don’t need him.
Moms shook her head. “I can’t keep going to the police station with you over this stuff.” She stood there for a minute, not knowing what her next move should be. Finally, she said, “Okay. You can smoke in the house. Just stay off the streets and out of the hallways.”
You give young men an inch and they take a yard. I pushed. “You know, Ma, smoking is a social thing. It’s not fun to smoke alone.”
She sighed. “You can have one or two friends here to smoke with you. No more than two. If I catch you with more than two boys in here, that’ll be it. I’ll stop it all! I mean it, Jeff!”
It was worth going to school the next day because at three p.m., I would be able to say, “Well, niggas, I’m going to catch a smoke.”
“Where at?” Mike would ask.
“Home, nigga, where you think?”
“Your Moms knows you smoke in the crib?” Aaron would wonder.
“My Moms is mad cool, yo,” I’d say, nonchalantly. My mom was smarter than that—she was concerned with keeping me out of jail, out of trouble and off the streets.
You have to have something to brag about when shit is all fucked-up.
There’s no way I would have tried this if a man like Grandpa Cherry was in the picture.
I WAS STILL CURIOUS about the drug thing. Nothing much had changed except I was not doing well in high school because I was smoking weed and cutting classes. When we were still staying with my mom’s friend in RV, I could see how much paper there was to get. And, we still needed money. I knew hustling may be the ticket.
My man Mike put me on by introducing me to Little B, who hit me off with my first pack. A pack consisted of twenty rocks valued at about $100. I didn’t know what to do with that shit but I knew that when I figured it out, I would get money and be able to get us out of a bad situation. I was the man of the house now.
My first time on the block, I was terrible out there. When I started hustling, I saw that everyone out there already had regular customers. I had to work hard to get my own. And, nobody tried to help me, either. It took me a whole week to move that one pack.
I wasn’t being hooked up with any customers. I had to go out and get the stragglers who were unestablished customers and were as new to the game as I was. I had to be aggressive to get them, which was risky, too. It’s not cool to go out there trying to sell to muthafuckas you don’t know. They could be police.
Standing on the corner on those cold blistery days, I learned to observe people in new ways. I would be all bundled up with my hat pulled close over my head, so that my ears would not burn with the cold. Only my eyes were visible and I was using them to detect who was real and who could be a trap. Regular customers had longer conversations. They would spend time asking for discounts, cutting deals and setting up payment arrangements. The cops, on the other hand, always tried to act like real customers, so they were stiff and brief, which was a dead giveaway. I was watching as hard as I could and slowly catching on.
When someone would approach me, I would say to them, “Let’s go around this corner and let me see you smoke that shit right here.” If they were real, they would do whatever I asked them to do to get a smoke. It always worked.
Once I figured out how to get customers, the game was relatively simple from what I could see. There were nickels, dimes and twenties. Nickels cost five dollars. Dimes, ten dollars, and twenties, twenty dollars. One rock would get the fiends high for a very short time. Crack is a short high, that’s why it was such a big hustle. Our job was to get them high so they would want more . . . within the hour.
I first tried to work for a guy named BG. He was a little flashy dude, but he was getting money, though. Then, there was Black, who was one of my first lieutenants in the game and still one of my best friends.
School was becoming a problem. It was getting harder and harder to get real money and go to school at the same time. I couldn’t get regular customers if I wasn’t standing on my corner. It was as simple as that.
The school started calling my house in the afternoon. Moms was already gone to work and I was on the block, hustling. They couldn’t catch up with her or me. To me, school was the place to go to further yourself in order to make money. Since I was making money already, I figured, what did I need with school? I had found my route to the money and I needed to focus on that.
Moms could see that something was up with me. When homies would come to my crib, we were always up, laughing and roughhousing late into the night, long after Moms got home. She was especially suspicious when Aaron, a kid from John Adams High School, was over so much. My man Aaron was a year older than me, always on time, always at school and got good grades. Everyone thought that Aaron was a good kid. Until he met me.
Aaron liked being down with me on those late nights in my crib when we were getting high.
When he got a settlement from a car accident, he got his own car, a Nissan Maxima. After that, it was a no-brainer. He was the one to hang with. When Aaron and I started hanging out more than before, he kept his grades up, until he could no longer be a good guy and a cool guy at the same time.
THROUGH THE DENSE cloud of weed smoke, the fire of hip-hop and learning to hustle, my worlds somehow collided. I got arrested on my first gun charge with my homies and Aaron.
My man E-Funk from around Cherry’s house came to get us in the morning at my crib in his pop’s old Buick. It was morning and I was starving. We decided to go to IHOP for breakfast before we started hustling. I suggested that we load the car with all of the shit so we didn’t have to make two trips. Aaron didn’t agree with me but they all went along with what I said, anyway. We loaded up the car with our two guns and the drugs.
The funny shit is we never even got to IHOP. On the way there, we turned down a side street to park the car. The cops were on that street, arresting someone else. My homie O had pulled onto the block and then he reversed out of it suddenly, jerking the car. We started going the other way.
“Shit!” O said. We all froze.
“Why did you do that?” I said. “That was stupid! You think they didn’t see that shit?”
“Yeah, man, y
ou should have just kept going!” Aaron moaned.
Within a few seconds, we could see the cops’ lights in the rearview mirror.
O pulled over. I knew that the cops would find the weed and the guns. I could feel my heart beating fast in my chest. My homie Dirt threw one of the guns into an empty lot before the cops got to us. Everyone had started sprinkling drugs all over the car. I was the only person who kept my drugs on my person. The cops searched the car. They were homicide police so they didn’t really care about the drugs or the fact that the car was stolen. Guns was what they were looking for.
“Get out of the car,” a policeman said to us.
Me, Dirt, Aaron and O slowly pulled ourselves out of the car. As we were positioning ourselves in a line so they could search us, Dirt just shot off like a bullet, running as fast as he could into the street and around the corner. Dirt was a chunky dude. It was funny to see him moving fast, carrying the extra weight. I smiled to myself just knowing that Dirt had taken the one gun that was left in the car. But I was wrong. Dirt was scared as shit, and had forgotten about the gun. It was still in the car to be found by the cops. The cops found the crack on me, too.
Dirt ran, in the snow, and hid under a car for four hours.
As we were taken down to the station to be booked, Black went over to Moms’ house. We didn’t have a home phone then. Moms had to get in touch with Aaron’s moms, who couldn’t believe it.
It worked out for most of us. Aaron didn’t get anything except for an earful from his moms. Since it was his first time getting in trouble, his moms was freaking the fuck out. All she could do was cry and repeat, “How did you get involved with these boys?”
My Moms was getting heated at his moms. “What are you trying to say? Your son is no better than mine.”
Aaron’s moms turned to him but spoke for us all to hear, “Aaron, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. This is not like you!”
Aaron and O got off with no probation.
