by Ja Rule
My case went before the judge. I was ROR’d, released on my own recognizance, as a person with no priors. I was given five years’ probation and one hundred hours of community service. I got probation because I was a youthful offender.
But someone still had to take the weight for the remaining gun that was found. E-Funk had drug priors, he was eighteen years old and he had stolen his parents’ car that night. The thing that’s not fair about the system is that if one person didn’t claim the gun, we would have all been charged for it. Since E-Funk could not make bail, he took it. His parents refused to come down to the station to pay the bail. E-Funk ended up serving one year, which was time served, for the gun charge.
I was assigned to janitorial work at a fine arts center on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. The lady who was in charge of the center didn’t really want offenders on the premises, even though she signed up for the program and enjoyed the tax breaks it offered. She thought the art patrons would be afraid to come to the center if they saw a bunch of criminals in there. The couple of times that I reported to work, Linda, the blond fat lady, signed me in and signed me out at the same time. She would say, “Mr. Jeffrey, you are free to go!”
After “working” there, my community service detail was switched to cleaning parks and collecting trash from the side of the highway. I met some cool guys there. One of them was so wild that he started bringing weed. We smoked it while we picked up the garbage and the COs waited just a few feet away. But I should have realized that this whole thing was just the beginning. It was a warning, but just not strong enough.
*
June 28, 2011
Today is Lil Rules Birthday, and I’m SICK that I’m not there to share it with him. These times will no doubt be the hardest—birthdays, holidays. I still can’t believe I’m in Fucking Prison! I’m sad, hurt, angry all in one, but I can’t let my emotions get the best of me. I gotta stay calm, cool, collected so that everyone else does the same. I need to be strong and Ish been holding up well minus some occasional tears, but that’s to be understood given the circumstances.
Rule turns 11 today, and as I sit in my cell writing this I can’t help noticing my state greens with my inmate number staring at me 11R2024. The 11R sticks out like a fuckin omen or something, as if it’s screaming you fuckin asshole. I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately, all of which have been family oriented, some a lil weird. LOL. But all of them darkened by the reality of when I awake. I’m still here locked in a cell and even my breath of fresh air is guarded by barbed wire fences. I feel trapped. But my dreams set me free for a moment. They feel so real I don’t wanna wake up. I just wanna be home with my sons and my daughter and my wife and my mother. But I’m 19 months short of that dream. I keep a picture of me and my wife taped to my locker right above my head. It’s a newspaper clipping of the day I turned myself in. My mother and Ish’s mom and Gutta are also in the background. I keep it as a constant reminder of the mistakes I’ve made and as I sit here on my son’s birthday I can’t help but to think about the next newspaper clipping I’ll keep. The one when I’m walking out.
Happy Birthday Jeffrey B. Atkins Jr.
I LOVE YOU.
*
FOUR
Soulmates
I WAS LATE AGAIN TO EIGHTH-GRADE SHOP CLASS. I ACTUALLY liked shop class because we were learning how to do other things with our hands besides rolling blunts, tilting 40s and lifting things that didn’t belong to us. When I rolled into class there was a new girl sitting in the front row. They said that she had just moved to Queens from Atlanta, Georgia. My eye was drawn to her as soon as I saw her. She was cute. She had long shiny hair and a pretty smile. I walked over to her and said hi.
She said hi back to me but didn’t seem very interested. Kavin and Devin were still my homies. We used to hang out with a few girls that we were tight with. The new girl from Atlanta was already hanging with them, too. Soon, she was hanging out with all of us. She was real cute so it wasn’t a surprise that the other girls wanted to be friends with her. Aisha could pull the guys because she was new and she was fly.
The new girl was already seeing Devin before I could even make a move on her. Her name was Aisha Fatima Murray. Aisha’s voice didn’t sound like she was from Atlanta. I was expecting her to have that slow, polite drawl and a too-sweet smile on her face. Instead, she sounded a lot like the girls from around the way. She was nice and all but I could tell that she was not a pushover. I liked that. I wanted to know more but I couldn’t disrespect my man Devin so I chilled.
After school we all would walk around the neighborhood, laughing and talking and getting our daily after-school pizza at the Pizza Hut right on the corner. Devin and I were the clowns of the group. We were always making the girls laugh. We did impressions of our teachers and skits about church, making fun of the ministers.
“Haaaalleluuuu-jah,” I would bellow in my best preacher’s voice. I seemed to make Aisha laugh the most but I had to be careful that I didn’t upset Devin. The crew had a pact that we didn’t mess with girls that someone in the crew was already dealing with.
Even though I was young, I was already very interested in sex, like every boy at that age. There were lots of girls that I had gotten with since losing my virginity at eleven in the stairwell of the Woodhull projects.
One Saturday, Devin and I were in the park enjoying a summer day, when we saw Aisha. Devin and Aisha had already broken up during the school year.
I could recognize Aisha’s long, shiny black hair anywhere. She was one of the few girls in the neighborhood that had hair like that. She was walking with her little sister, Antoinette.
“Whatcha doing?” I walked up to Aisha.
“Going to see my grandmother,” she said as if she was hoping that I had a better suggestion.
“Wanna come hang out later at the crib?”
Later that day after she went to check on her grandmother, Aisha and her girl Alicia came to see us.
When they arrived, Aisha and Devin were still cool with each other. The four of us were giddy that day. Devin and I were high already, which made everything funny as shit. We were always full of stories from school. Did you see what she was wearing? Did you hear what he did? Are they going to get suspended for that shit?
Devin and Alicia hooked up that night and I figured it was cool for me to kick it with Aisha. Aisha became my girl. And I liked that. I had heard a lot of the older guys talking about having one steady chick and I wanted to experience that feeling. There were lots of girls checking for me. I had already been through many girls. Sometimes I wanted to have someone else to talk to besides my homies. I wanted to have a girlfriend who was always there for me and who had my back.
Aisha was originally from Queens until a friend of her mother’s told her that Atlanta was a good place to move. In Atlanta, there were jobs and affordable housing. Nice, big houses, they had told her. Aisha had two sisters, Antoinette and Kenya, and all three of them had a different father.
Aisha and I had been through the same types of things. And when we saw each other, she would tell me all the things that were bottled up inside her and needed to be said. Most of the time, she would talk about her confused feelings, the father she never knew and why her mother had so many problems. I always found myself listening and thinking, Me too.
Aisha’s smile receded when she talked about her time in Atlanta. “We were only there for a few months when moms realized that Atlanta was not the right place, after all.”
She paused and then continued, “Both of my sisters’ fathers came to Atlanta to get them. Kenya went to Buffalo, New York, to live with her father and Antoinette was brought back to Queens to live with her grandmother.” Then, she added slowly, “Except for mine . . . I was stranded in Atlanta with my Aunt Gerry, while my moms went back to Queens to try to get her old job back.”
There was silence and then Aisha said one last thing. “My moms was always struggling. We were always needing family members to help us out.”
“Me too,” I said quietly.
“Don’t you just hate that? It was more than one time that we had to go through that shit,” she said. She closed her eyes and her forehead wrinkled.
Me too, I thought, but I just listened to her stories, which sounded more and more like my own. We were both looking at life through the same smudged lenses.
AT THE END of the summer things were changing because we were all entering high school. Aisha and Harold went to Martin Van Buren High School and I went to John Adams High School on the South Side. John Adams was a little rougher than Van Buren. There was a neighborhood riff between Hollis and the South Side. John Adams was on the South Side and so it was an audacious choice for me to choose to go all the way to John Adams when I was from Hollis, but I was fearless.
I didn’t want to go to Van Buren because Uncle Dennis was a senior there and I wanted to make my own mark. I didn’t want to be seen as Dennis’ “little brother.” I wanted to go to Adams, to be in a place where no one knew my name.
Things between Aisha and me were changing, too. We broke up. I still had a lot of girls checking me. There were no hard feelings between Aisha and me. We stayed friends and saw each other in the neighborhood almost every day.
I was hanging out with Devin’s older brother, Chuck, a lot more than before. Chuck and I were both in the game, while Devin had started to get serious about basketball, so we didn’t hang out as much anymore. In junior high school Devin and I played in all the tournaments. Although I was cool at basketball, I was too small to make it big. Chuck was down when I started hustling. It was natural that we would become friends.
Hanging with Chuck was all about learning the game and getting new experiences. The first experience I got with Chuck I would never forget. Chuck took me to see his girl, who had a roommate. Drug dealers were a hot commodity among young girls in the hood.
Because Chuck was older than me, he knew older girls. Although I had come very far since the stairwell at Woodhull, Chuck put me on to the real deal. Chuck’s girl had a cute roommate who had smooth brown skin and a short Halle Berry haircut. It was crazy how shit went down between us, but I figured that’s how the older kids rolled. “Halle” took me into her bedroom and did it to me, without me ever knowing her name or her knowing mine. She had a curvy woman’s body and she knew exactly what to do with hers and mine, too.
“Halle” and I started to kiss as we took off each other’s clothes. It was like how I’d wanted sex to be: butt-naked bodies, heavy breathing and sweaty skin rubbing up against everywhere. We took our time and enjoyed each other. It was not the rushed “kid” sex. Now that’s what I am talking about.
I still saw Aisha around the way and out on the street when I was out there hustling. Her grandmother lived across from the park that we all hung out in. Aisha had a boyfriend and I had several girls that I saw, but none of them were serious. Whenever I saw Aisha, we would speak to each other and every time she walked away, I would think how much I wished I could’ve talked to her a little longer. But we were moving in different directions—or so I thought.
She was a sweet girl and I was a drug dealer. The truth is, all of the chicks around my way had a man who sold drugs. We were the only kind of guys around and some of the big-time hustlers even had cars. Aisha was no fool. She wanted what all the other girls had, so her new boyfriend at her new school hustled, too.
CHUCK, MIKE AND I had gotten into the habit of cutting school in high school. We would go for a few periods, lounge in the lunchroom and then we’d bounce. Lucky for us, the security guard, Luther, who guarded the side door smoked crack. Luther had a Jheri curl and a bad lisp. We used to see that fiend after school at Rochdale Village. After we saw him once, we had the dirt on him. We made an agreement that we would sell him crack at a discounted rate in exchange for easy access in and out of the school’s side door. Luther was happy to go along. Sometimes ten of us would leave school at the same time to go chill at the park, roll some dice and then go back to school. Or, we would get something to eat and then come back through that door.
“WHAT’S UP WITH CHERYL? Have you seen her recently?” Mike asked me one day.
“Nah. Let’s call them and see what they up to?” I said to Mike. Aisha and I were still friends and I knew that Mike was really feeling Aisha’s cousin, Cheryl.
“Hey, Jeff. What are you guys doing for New Year’s Eve?”
“Nothing, what’s up, girl?” I said.
“I’m having a party. Wanna come?”
“Who’s going to be there?” I asked for Mike.
“Are you with Mike?” Aisha didn’t pull no punches.
“Who wants to know?”
“Tell him that Cheryl will be there. Bring him.”
“Bet.”
AT THE PARTY, Aisha and I talked a lot. We realized that we should not have broken up at the beginning of ninth grade. We were in the eleventh grade at that point and the time seemed right for us to try again.
Things with Aisha fell right back into place. We saw each other as often as we could. I was a hustler also trying to do music. We’d hang out at the park, go out to eat and talk on the phone. One day when we were walking, I got my nerve up. “Listen to my new verse. It’s called ‘Story to Tell.’ ” Aisha sat on the park bench and I stood away from her and closed my eyes so I could imagine the beat. Then, I spit the verse that I was working on:
Listen up, I got a story to tell
On the streets we got guns and drugs for sale
Cause you hos know the game that we play is real
Keep your mind on the money and your weapons concealed
“Sounds dope. When can I hear the rest?” she said.
That was the most positive thing I’d heard about my music from anyone besides my homies. Cherry used to call it “bippity bop” music and he always said it was not real work and it never would be. Aisha believed in me more than I believed in myself.
“It’s not finished yet, but when I do, I’ll let you check it out,” I promised.
My lyrics didn’t scare Aisha. She knew the deal. Aisha was no stranger to the streets and that’s why she was the girl for me. No matter what happened, or what I would eventually share with Aisha about my life, she could relate.
WHEN I MET AISHA’S MOMS, I recognized her. She used to see me on the block. Her moms used to mess with one of the guys that I hustled for. Sometimes she spoke to me and sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes, neither one of us wanted to be recognized, being where we were and doing what we were doing.
“You know, I worry about you, baby,” Aisha said to me often. I hadn’t heard that from anyone except from my Moms and Grandma Cherry, years before. But when Aisha said it, it sounded different. It made me feel that it may be safe to love her. I liked her. I wanted more of Aisha than I was getting. She and I were getting close but getting to the sex felt like an eternity. We hadn’t gotten there—yet.
I never pressured Aisha because I felt that she was worth waiting for. She and I had lots of sexy fun together even though we weren’t having actual sex. She was affectionate and made me feel solid, like she and I were going to be together, always. There was just no me without her. It was just the way she held my hand when we walked.
THE ETERNITY WAS finally over.
“I love you,” Aisha said to me as I kissed her forehead and held her tight.
I didn’t say it, but I was thinking, Me too.
I grew up without birthdays or Christmas so being with Aisha in this way felt like a Christmas gift that I’d been waiting to unwrap my whole life. She was sixteen and I was seventeen. I’d been trying to get with her like this for two years. Feeling her silky skin beneath me was like nothing I’d ever felt before. It wasn’t about me taking something from her or her giving me something. We were turning into us. I could feel my heart for the first time in years. Aisha was not like the other girls, she was everything.
MOMS AND I were on completely different shifts. She was never around. I’d barely made it
to the eleventh grade. Although I was struggling to finish, my interest in school was totally gone. I had money and music on my mind. I thought that the shit they were teaching in school had nothing to do with my life. I used to think, fuck history and social studies. But I was wrong. If we don’t know our history, we are lost. This is most definitely true for Black men. We need to be constantly reminded of the great men that have come before us or we’ll believe what the TV says about us. The images on the screen rarely make us feel good about ourselves, rarely inspire us to do meaningful shit.
Moms was on the night shift, four to two, and I was working a morning shift. Moms had lost track of me and didn’t realize why my heart was no longer in school. As with all mothers, she wanted better for me. She really wanted me to graduate from high school.
My lyric notebook was filling up. I had written hundreds of rhymes, some that were going to be hits if I could just get them out there.
IN HIGH SCHOOL, my homies started calling me Left because of the knockout game. The object of the game was to see who could knock out a crackhead with a single punch. I guess my homies and me were actually the only ones playing the game. The crackheads were like our game pieces. The crackheads were always fucked-up, stumbling down the street like wide-eyed zombies. They would swerve from side to side as they approached us trying to get some crack for free. We were weeded-up, too, and everything was topsy-turvy. Everything was funny as hell. If the crackhead would sway to the left, I would hit him from the right with a left. The fiends couldn’t even see our punches coming and then with one light tap, BAM! they were out cold laying on the ground, with their head right next to my fresh new sneakers. So, muthafuckas started calling me Left. I kinda liked that shit, too.
Every morning after a night spent playing with the crackheads, when Moms walked into my room, she saw a sight that made her mad. I was fast asleep. Towering over my bed one day, she said, “What the fuck? Are you ever going back to school? What are you going to do with yourself? You’re seventeen years old! The school keeps calling me and sending letters. I don’t know what to tell them.”
