by Ja Rule
I rolled over, groggy from the night before. “Nah. I’m not going back. You can go and sign me out, so they can stop bothering you.”
It had been almost twenty days straight that I hadn’t been to school, or at least that’s what the attendance sheets said. The school had been harassing Moms, trying to find out where I’d been. She didn’t know. The reality was that I was pulling down $1,000 a week. Like KRS-One said, Tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do?
*
July 8, 2011
Today, I’ve officially been in jail for a month. 19 more to go. The 4th of July weekend done came & went. The family came to visit me at Oneida. It was a 3 day weekend so I was on the dance floor for 3 days—Sat, Sun & Mon. Gutta, HO & Doe came to see me Saturday. We chopped it up, had some laughs. Then Ish & the kids came to see me Sun & Mon along with my mom. The previous week Ni and Lene came, so I’ve had the dance floor poppin since I been down. LOL. In case you haven’t bidded, the dance floor is what they call the visiting room. I’m like Fred Astaire to these niggas. Ha Ha. I was a lil sad on the 4th ’cause that’s the day I usually do my annual BBQ with a lot of my friends & family and light up some fireworks for the kids. They love it. But this year they spent it visiting me in prison and taking a long 3 hour journey back home. I went to my cell that night and thought about how I’m inconveniencing them all and how Brittney is struggling with the whole situation. She hates seeing me like this. She didn’t even come back on Mon. At first I was mad but I can’t really blame her. I don’t even like seeing me like this. I won’t even take pictures on the visits ’cause I don’t want these memories. I was happy to see her tho. A child will never understand a parents love until they have kids of their own, and I love her with all my heart. The boys are holding up well. Jordan didn’t come either but he’s still young and doesn’t quit understand. Lil Rule is just that lil me my lil solider rite by his mother’s side where I told him he needs to be while I’m gone. He’s only 11 but he’s starting to grasp the meaning of Being A Man.
I would’ve written sooner but I’m just now getting paper ’cause they packed me up and shipped me out for my court date, which was one hell of a ride. I’ve only been in jail a month and already been to 5 different prisons. It’s like I’m on a jail tour or some shit. The Marshals came and got me from Oneida to take me to Oneida County Jail. Why they did that I have no fuckin idea. It was a real shit hole. They told me I’d have to stay there a few days till they came back and got me to bring me to Jersey for my court date. I was mad as a motherfucker that they put me in the dirtiest fuckin cell they could find. So much for being a superstar. LOL. I swept, moped & scrubbed my cell best I could and went to sleep. When I awoke to the sound of officers banging on my door it was like their lips were moving in slow motion and their words came out slurred when they said “Atkins were shipping you out.” I jumped up, brushed my teeth wit some shit that was supposed to be toothpaste, took a bird bath at the sink and hurried the fuck outta there hoping the next stop was at least a real jail and not no county bullshit. When I got to the front it was the same marshals that dropped me off. They were fans and did me a favor by coming back so soon, knowing this jail was a rat hole. These guys were like angels sent to take me to hell. It would be a long 4-hour drive but at least they were kind enough to feed me. We had Dunkin Donuts for breakfast and McDonald’s for lunch as we drove rite past the exit to my house on Rt 17. I hope I get the chance to return the favor one day. Steaks on me fellas. You never know, as life works in mysterious ways, which brings me to my new found hell, Essex County Correctional Facility “The Green Monster.”
*
FIVE
Hollering
ELEVENTH GRADE SEEMED LIKE THE RIGHT TIME. THE DAY THAT I dropped out of school was a day when I was actually on my way to school. When I came downstairs that morning, I noticed several cars lined up with white men in the driver’s seat on the block. They saw me, a black guy, on the way to school and they assumed that I had drugs. I saw them, white men in the hood at eight a.m., and I knew what they wanted. When I approached the first car, they said they were looking for red tops. This was actually a green top neighborhood and I wasn’t supposed to be selling on that block. Apparently my “work” was good so they came back for more. I couldn’t turn down an opportunity to make money. I was the only one who had any reds, but they were upstairs, in the crib, in my room, hidden in the corner of my closet, underneath my sneakers in a sock. I told them to wait, I’d go get them. I was going to be late to school again.
There was no one hustling in the mornings. My man Gee was a lieutenant on the block. Me and Gee went way back, to when Gee started a wrestling ring when we were in elementary school. Tyray and me would imitate the moves we saw on WWF. Gee worked it out with the bosses of the block so that I could do the morning shift and keep the sneak hustlers off the block.
Other hustlers on the block were stepping to Gee asking, “Who’s this l’il nigga?”
Gee handled it for me. “No one is working in the morning, anyway. And, he has heat, so he can take care of business if he needs to.”
I got the job.
On the warm mornings, I hustled in my underwear, boxer shorts and a T-shirt. I cut out the backs of my sneakers and turned them into slippers. Slipper sneakers, I called them. It was a comfortable uniform that I wore every day. I was running up and down the stairs so many times, I had to be comfortable.
The morning shift became popular and suddenly there were a few of us out there, slinging in the morning. It was me, Gizmo, Snails and Pie-Faced Mel, mostly.
When the morning hustle was on, school was permanently off. That’s how the streets won over school.
Aisha said my eyes were starting to look a little crazy when I mixed weed, alcohol and mescaline together. In those days, I didn’t care. I couldn’t really feel a thing. I was numb. I kept my mind strictly on money and music so I didn’t have to feel the hole that was growing inside of me. None of us had fathers, so we were all doing the same shit to deal with it. I just wanted to make money and not have to care about anything else. I was bugging. The block had become my home.
Moms knew everything but didn’t say anything. Moms was sniffing out the shift in me. She also noticed all of the money that I was leaving around. She would glimpse the stack of bills on the table when I was in the shower, but she wouldn’t mention it. Moms was noticing other strange things like opening up our mailbox and finding small little baggies filled with crack rocks. When she asked me about it, of course I blew up in denial.
“Ma, it’s not mine! I told them niggas to stop using our mailbox for that shit!” Moms knew whose shit it really was, but it was just too much for her to do and undo. All of her friends’ sons were hustling, too.
Life had hit me and I had to hit back, just like Moms told me to.
DRUG DEALING WAS REAL SHIT, like Mic Geronimo said. We called the drugs our “work.” In the early days, the work was packaged in multicolored capsules that we got from the Chinese man. The Chinese man was in the lucrative business of selling the colorful caps. Each primary-colored cap represented the block and the dealer in charge. The safest place for hustlers to keep their “work” was in our mouths. When we were hustling sometimes we’d have to run from cops or other hustlers who thought you’d taken their customer.
A hustler’s challenges were many but the addicts lined up religiously. They were like an army of ants; sadly creeping towards five minutes more of joy while flushing their life down the toilet.
The crack high was like no other, that’s what the fiends said. It was a burst of quick excitement that they called euphoria. It was a feeling that was apparently worth five or ten dollars out of every paycheck, twenty dollars out of their grocery money, then the fifty dollars out of their water bill, and then a hundred out of their rent money . . . until it was all gone to my homies and me.
I had started to work the fifteen- and twenty-floor high-rises, all uniformly encased in weathered red bricks, all smothering t
he breath of Black people whose only need was a little more personal space. Whether they were co-ops or projects, the buildings were all the same to me.
My homies and me were all hustling within the same area around 205th and Hollis Avenue—the 2/5th we called it. I was on 1-9-1 Woodhull, which for me was the smarter hustle. We were selling red “31 Illusion Capsules.” The vials made the rocks look bigger, which is why they were called illusion capsules. They were selling on 205 for five dollars, which was a big vial for a low price. Ten blocks away the money was more lucrative. On 1-9-1 the same thing was going for twenty dollars.
I left the 2/5th because although the money was better, the Jamaicans worked 99th Avenue and our corner was becoming a free for all. The way it worked was we would all wait for the cars to pull up and then pure chaos would ensue. We would run to the cars and swarm around them like bees. We would hiss like snakes, “My shit, my shit, my shit . . .” The first one of us to get our vials into the car window would get the sale. That was a crazy way to hustle.
One night, I returned to 99th Avenue and started a war with the Jamaicans that almost got me killed. The war went on for weeks.
IT ALL STARTED because the cops were getting called to the block on the regular, and they seemed to be always looking for my crew. We knew that the Jamaicans were calling them to take attention off of their scandalous shit.
That night, it was unusually quiet on the block. It was like a ghost town. I saw one straggler car roll up to the spot. I ran over to the customer’s car. A Jamaican saw him too and just as I was shoving my vial through the window, the Jamaican was trying to push his in at the same time. The customer took my vial, handed me the cash and I thought it was over. But it wasn’t.
The Jamaican got me hemmed up as he raged, “This bombo claat bwoy gwan mek me blow off ’im hed, ya no maan.” He held his machete over my head. His big eyes widened. All I had was a boom box that I threw at him to get him the fuck off of me.
Out of the darkness came Barrington and Lenox, two of the most notorious Jamaican guys in the crew. One put a Mac-10 to my stomach and the other a gun to my head. I remember not feeling anything but the unforgiving weight of the metal gun against my sweating temple. I wasn’t afraid. I was just there, in this life that I chose. Bruthas were getting killed around me, every day. Today was just my day.
“You know bwoy you don’t wuk over here anymore. Move from ’round here. We own dis here spot. Ya betta run pun the tren track and don stop.”
Junior’s heavy Jamaican patois accent roared in my ear. I was beyond the point of being scared.
I knew they were going to shoot me in the back of my head, which is a punk way to murder a homie, if I must say so myself.
Shit was hectic and I started making my plans as I started to run through a tunnel in the neighborhood to the safe side. My brain was running faster than my feet. My heart was pumping and my eyes were twitching with sheer terror. I figured if I ran to the end of the tunnel and got up the stairs I would come out on the other side of 1-9-1. If I could get up on the tracks they wouldn’t be able to catch me.
POP! POP! POP! I heard the bullets flying above and around me, hitting walls and parked trains. They were giving me a break. If they hadn’t shot me when their gun was at my temple, those boys weren’t going to take me out at all. I was relieved but my feet kept running, just in case. I ran like someone running away from the past. I ran like someone searching for what was missing.
The beef continued for a couple more weeks. It seemed that every day more shit popped off. There were several more shoot-outs and conflicts. A few people got shot. Flakes got killed. There was always shit going on in the hood, just like when my man Gee was paralyzed.
Then, after a couple of weeks and too many casualties, the 99th Avenue beef just quieted down on its own.
WITH BAD, THERE’S always some good. The streets in Queens were popping. I would see all the big-time rappers. I remember LL Cool J just riding through in his BMW. In fact, he dated a relative of Aisha’s at some point. I recall Run DMC in 192 Park. They were freestyling “Here We Go,” and it seemed like three weeks later it was a hit record, playing on the radio. I would see Onyx in the neighborhood. Seeing these dudes around made me feel like I could make it. I would even freestyle in the 192 Park and folks would cheer me on. Deep down the cheers made me feel I could make it.
I WAS AFRAID OF AISHA loving me too much. I was a young Black man in the game who had already been arrested for drugs and guns. It was a life that I had chosen and it would be complicated to get out of, even if I tried. You see, thugs don’t care if you have made a decision to better your life. They still see you as the thug you were and always will be.
“I should love you more than you love me, because you could lose me,” I said to Aisha one time.
“Don’t say that, Jeffrey! We all have something to live for now. We have each other.”
“I know. I know. I want to live, but brothas are out there losing their lives . . . there’s just no guarantees in these streets.”
“Don’t say that again! You sound crazy, Jeffrey. I’m not going to let you die. The men who are dying are dying because they have nothing to live for. You have me.”
THE POLICE KNEW US. And we knew them well. We had all figured how to coexist in the hood. Our same officers were assigned to patrol our block every day. We had nicknames for them like Tango and Cash and Robo Cop. The lines between reality and cop dramas were blurred. We named our cops after the characters from the movies that entertained us after school and on the rare nights we stayed home. We watched the shows late at night through bloodshot eyes. During the days, on the block, we’d become actors, laughing and jeering at cops and running from ourselves. To each other we called the cops by their nicknames and I could hear the cops calling me “Left” from behind.
In the winter, I would dress for the weather while sitting on my black milk crate waiting for the corner phone to ring. I was bundled up in a wool cap, a lined Carhartt jacket and my 40 Below Timberland boots. We each had a cell phone and a pager but we also gave out the corner phone number to friends and family as if it were our private line. It made sense to us because the corner was where we were when we weren’t at home.
THE SKILLED HUSTLERS were invisible and visible at the same time. We wanted to be invisible to the cops, but visible to our customers. I wanted the other hustlers to know I had heat, so that they would have respect, but I didn’t want the cops to know, so I had to hide it. As I stood on that corner, I sometimes had rhymes rolling around in my head.
Listen up, I got a story to tell
On the streets we got guns and drugs for sale
And you hoes know the game that we play is real
Keep your mind on the money and your weapons concealed. . . .
Holding the work on our person made us targets, which made guns a necessity. Hiding them on top of the tires of the car parked in front of us was the best way to keep the heat off of us but give us quick access in case something jumped off.
Not everyone had one. It just depended on your job. After the Jamaican war, I started to carry mine all the time, just to be safe. Carrying a gun created a new set of worries. It was power and fear all in the same breath. I feared that I would have to pull the trigger. I never feared being shot myself. That’s just not how you think when you have a gun. You’re always the shooter, at least that’s what you tell yourself.
The lookouts made sure that there were no cops around. They would dip and dive between buildings—hiding out and surveying the land. They knew the cops and the cops knew them.
The lieutenants were the ones that stirred the sales and gave out the work to the hustlers. Lieutenants made sure the money was coming in right. The workers (hustlers) were the ones that sold the crack to the fiends. I’ve always been a worker. That suited me because I’m a people person. I liked working with the people and getting my loot as a direct result of the work that I provided.
The gunners made sure that no o
ne would stick up the block. The chefs were cooking up the crack, sometimes in their own kitchens. That shit seemed too bold for me, preparing that shit in Moms’ kitchen. My man O’s “work” was truly homemade.
My income depended on the generosity of my bosses. On some blocks we was getting 80/20 splits, on others it was 70/30. Some muthafuckas were selling so much crack they were giving 90/10 splits. If you could hustle and move twenty packs a day with a 90/10 split you were pulling in $200 day. That was $1,000 a week.
Then, the vials became a problem. They got too bulky so we started using tiny baggies to hold more drugs in our mouths. One nice-sized rock could fit into each baggie. Of course, the size of the rocks was not an exact science. The chefs would try their best to make sure that the size of the rocks was uniform. But sometimes, it didn’t work that way. And sometimes the fiends would complain as we shivered on the cold-ass corner.
“This one seems a little small,” a crackhead named Boo would always say, as if he was picking out a piece of chicken at a buffet. He would gaze at me with wild, sunken eyes, and missing teeth, and his quivering lips would whine, “Please, man, can I get a bigger one?”
That shit would make me so heated. Being choosy when you’re a drug fiend didn’t make sense to me. I hated the fiends because they reminded me of my father and the life I was living because he split. I would look Boo right in the eye and say, “Get the fuck outta here.”
Shit.
SOMETIMES WHEN THERE WAS A LULL in traffic, I’d stand back and survey the scene that I was starring in. I would look at my customers. There were so many that I recognized from my life around the way. The faces were from the streets, school and my building. There were too many older faces that I knew because I once went to school with their kids, who had also become my customers.
