The Cook Up

by D. Watkins

  Mac and I were in a basketball league and we had a game later that day. I opened the bar, let my workers in, and scooped him from over North East Market. He hopped in my car with a smile that connected both of his ears. “Yo, I’m gonna do a big coke deal and then I’m out the game! Man, I got a sick plug, he gonna bless me and I’ma be done with this street shit!”

  “You talking that coke deal with Nick? That dumb stuff he talking about?” I asked because he had been sending word to me about some made-up Scarface deal for two hundred bricks of cocaine that would set us for life. I felt bad because I thought he’d finally lost his mind.

  “Hell no, I ain’t talkin’ no deal with his fat junkie ass! Me and LT got sumthin’ poppin! We gonna plug Dog Boy when he come home too! You want in?”

  “I’m out! For the billionth time, but I could use the money because I’m about to go cop a whip!”

  Mac cut the music off. “Nigga, what’s wrong with this Benz!”

  I told him that my Benz was great but it wasn’t about me. Today was about Soni. She once told me that those hardtop-convertible Lexus SC430’s were cute, so I wanted to surprise her with one for a graduation present. I saw a pretty black one in the paper. Mac and I drove up to Prestige Motors out in the county and I bought it—ten thousand down and dude gave me the key. The car was a year old, slightly used but the inside smelled like new sneakers, she’s going to love this.

  Mac followed me in my ride back to my place. We parked my car a block away so Soni wouldn’t know I was around. She texted me an apology for being cranky, and I left her a vague response. Figured I’d make her sweat a little bit.

  Mac and I went to our game. He put on a show, scoring forty out of the sixty points our team had put up. He was truly the best player in the gym.

  “Great game, Mac!” echoed as we left.

  We made it to Michaels arts and crafts just in time for me to buy a ribbon big enough to wrap the car with.

  “Man, you just like an NBA dude!” he said as I dropped him off on his block. “I’m rocking like this after my last deal!”

  “Get your money man,” I said.

  We dapped each other and I pulled off.

  Mac was right. I was like an NBA dude. I had the woman, the cars, the huge crib, the fans, the YSL, the Gucci, the trips, the love, and I’m on my way home to my hot tub after playing ball. I had everything I wanted, but I still felt fucked up. My cash flow was low and was going to be really low with this new car note, but that wasn’t the main issue, because I was depressed with my friends and the decisions they were making. I couldn’t do anything to save any of them—they are all going to end up in jail or like Gee.

  I took the long way home and thought about the bar business. What’s the difference between owning my liquor store and selling dope? I’m still preying on addictions. The slot machine huggers and the bottle huggers are the same as the people I used to get heroin and crack to.

  I pulled over by a cut-rate, bought a fifth of Absolut and leaned on the Lexus. Two swigs in and I realized that I wasn’t shit. My bar isn’t shit, these cars ain’t shit, and I’m just a ugly part of the problem. I’m a failure like I always was. Telling people to not sell drugs while I’m technically a drug dealer sounded more and more stupid. Especially since I couldn’t provide an alternative—because really, what else could they do? What else could I do? I thought I’d probably die in my bar selling yak like I should’ve died when I was selling dope.

  I drove my drunk ass home. Soni’s mother’s car was out front. I jammed like eight pieces of gum into my mouth so they wouldn’t smell the liquor before calling her cell.

  Ring ring ring…

  “I’ve been calling you all day! Where are you at?”

  “Shut up and come out front,” I said.

  She opened the door. “Whose car is that?”

  “Yours!” I said. Her big eyes got bigger and bigger as she ran down to hug me. Her mom did the same. I made them take a test-drive without me and went into my house with my marble floors and my professional chef appliances that I never cook on.

  What the fuck does it all mean?

  Our dining room had a mirror that came from Pier 1—another $450 price tag. I looked in it and wondered what I would be without all of this shit. I didn’t know because having things has always been a part of my identity. That smile on Soni’s face was semi-purchased, and she wasn’t even into material things when we met.

  Money issues affected all of my relationships, from Troy to Tyler to Nick to Hurk, and what if the same thing happened to Soni and me? I’d like to think that it couldn’t but who knows. Guess I’ll have to wait to see what happens when the money runs out.

  I DON’T WANNA BE IN THE NBA ANYMORE

  Mac made his big deal and ran up into the bar bragging about the cash. Said he was going to make a few more runs.

  “What happened to chilling out?” I asked.

  “Chill? Chill? Chill don’t pay the bills!” he sang, peeling through a bushel of hundreds and fifties. At that point I knew I had to separate myself from him too. No more basketball leagues, double dates, or hanging out in general. It didn’t really bother him. He was like anyone else. He had money and friends—new drug friends that he had made through business.

  They started hanging on Rutland Avenue; I caught the lot of them sitting out one day in front of my friend Nard’s house. A known collection of snitches, murderers, kids, and fake gangstas with Mac and LT in the middle. I rode by without stopping, I didn’t even hit the horn. Every once in a while Mac would call to borrow my car or trade cars but I didn’t. Those dudes were hotter than hell in July and staying away made me feel safe—but not complete.

  “Why you look so sad?” Soni asked me one day. I was in our living room, listening to Marvin Gaye, filling a shot glass to the tip with Absolut.

  “I’m good,” I responded.

  “I know you, Dee, I know when something is wrong with you! Tell me!”

  “It’s the bar,” I said. “I’m tired of it.”

  “Oh my God! I hate that bar! It depresses me sooooo much and I knew you were sad, Dee, you need to know that you can open up to me about anything!” Big sloppy tears drenched her face and neck. I wrapped my arms around her tiny frame.

  “The other day I watched Pearl put her whole check in the machine. She was crying because she was flat broke. I stopped her as she left out and gave her two hundred dollars, like, ‘Just pay me when you get some money,’ and then I ran to the back to grab a call. When I came back out, she had put the two hundred dollars in the machine and was broke again.”

  “Damn, baby, that’s not your fault.”

  “I know it’s not my fault, Soni, but I definitely ain’t helping, especially not by running this addiction hub.”

  “Dee, you are so much more than these liquor and drug and gambling businesses. You are intelligent, charismatic, and strong. People like you can be whatever they want. Get rid of the bar!”

  “I’m trying to figure something out, baby. This is all new to me. But we gotta do it right, strategically you know, because what will I do for money?”

  “Fuck money, Dee! I’m a college graduate, Yo! I can get a job and take care of us! Sell this place and we’ll travel the world! Sell that other house too! Happiness is more important than a bunch of material crap; I’ve been telling you that since I met you!”

  “And what about your car?”

  “Oh, I’m keeping that Lex!”

  We laughed. I squeezed her again. Soni pulled away to kiss me and I wiped her remaining tears—her eyes smiled. She sighed. Her face pressed my chest as she mumbled the words, “Money doesn’t matter, money doesn’t matter, I just want you.”

  I exhaled.

  It took twenty-three years for me to figure out that money and love are two different things. Until that point, my whole life had been centered around what I had, what I could do for others, or what I could make. My friends and family felt like me—we all share the same bullshit-money-equa
ls-love mentality cocktailed with the false culture that drugs or quick money is an easy answer for everything. We are all equally flawed. Soni separated those worlds for me.

  The next day I put the bar on the market just to see what was out there. I had paid $150K and listed it for $265K because the neighborhood was in the middle of being gentrified by the University of Maryland. I knew the presence of white people jogging through hoods easily justified my hundred-plus-K spike because we didn’t advertise in the newspaper, hang up signs, or anything, and the listing blew up as soon as it hit the net. So many people wanted to see it.

  The top prospect was a middle-aged, light-skinned dude from D.C. named Ken Simpson. He was a stereotypical business type with his corny Bluetooth earpiece, brown church shoes, and a matching clipboard.

  “Will you be making any future Baltimore acquisitions, Dee?” he said as he sipped his Bud Light at the bar on a Thursday night. He came down a few consecutive Thursday nights to monitor our customer flow. Mac popped in the lobby on the night of his last visit. He was wearing a black hoodie, black Levi’s, a black trench coat, and dark shades even though it was pitch black outside.

  “Long time no see! Hey Mr. Ken, this is Mac, he is one of my childhood friends!” I said, as Ken extended his hand.

  “Man, fuck this nigga, Dee, we need to talk!” screamed Mac. He removed the shades; beads of sweat made his forehead look like Braille.

  “Excuse me, young man?” replied Ken, standing up.

  “Yo, chill!” I yelled at Mac. “Man, this my people, man!”

  “I’m sorry, sir, something bad happened. Dee, we need to talk!”

  I walked him out front. He paced back and forth, rubbing his palms. “Yo, let’s get in the car!” he said. We hopped in and slammed both doors.

  “They on to us, Dee! The feds! Man, they did a sweep last night and picked up eight niggas!”

  “Us? Fuck you mean, us?”

  “Sorry, man, I’m just going crazy. Didn’t mean to say you. But I know they comin’, man, feds is in town!”

  “Relax, bro,” I said, pulling out of the parking spot. “How you know they want you?”

  “Man, they kicked in my mother’s house last night and I don’t even know why they lookin’ for me cuz I only got a thousand dollars, I ain’t no kingpin! Plus they snatched LT and Block up too!”

  I turned the radio off and we rode around for about fifteen minutes in silence. The loudest fifteen minutes of my life—every horrible thought crossed my mind, from me to Soni, to everybody being locked up. I pulled up in front of the bar.

  “If the feds is on you, why you come to me?”

  “Just to give you a heads-up, bro. I love you, man. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  A week later they caught Mac in Safeway with his girlfriend and daughter. He called me saying that there were about thirty people on the indictment. They had him as a major wholesaler and he was broke. He said they asked who I was, but he told them I had a legit job. That sounded great, but I was still worried.

  One thing I know about the streets is you never know who is going to tell. The softest guy will stand tall and the biggest gangsta will snitch you like, “I’m sorry, man, my mother made me do it!” Nobody can make you tell and you never know, so I was extra cautious.

  I didn’t want to be in the NBA anymore. The fear of losing my freedom made everything I did seem extremely stupid. I mean warring with local cops was one thing—but the United States. Mac was facing the United States of America. He had no win.

  I sold the bar to Ken and walked away with around $70,000 after taxes. There was no way that I could sustain that mortgage and those car payments with no income, so I ran toward my biggest fear.

  I let everything go—two repos because no one wanted to buy the cars and a big-ass foreclosure because we couldn’t sell the house—the house with the mortgage that ate up most of my $70K. Soni and I took an apartment on Caroline Street, not too far from where I grew up.

  NICK

  I read about the case in the paper—98 percent of it was bullshit. They were connecting murders that didn’t have anything to do with each other and calling it gang related or organized crime all in an effort to make their case look better. There was no organization and no gangs, just childhood friends who shared customers and liked to hang out. The first paragraph of the article had at least three different sets of dudes from three different neighborhoods that they identified as a single gang.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if Johns Hopkins Hospital had something to do with it because they conveniently swooped in and sucked up the neighborhood after the indictment. They even moved Miss Angie to the suburbs. She loved the idea of living in the county until she realized that she would no longer be able to walk to her favorite cleaners, the supermarket, and her church.

  I saw Nick near where we used to hang, or what was left of it. His husky frame dissolved and sagged. He could no longer fill his big 4X clothes. I sat in the car for a second and watched him laugh and joke with children half his age—his new peers.

  “Nick, wassup!”

  He pulled a pistol from his waist and pointed it. “Fuck you want to be up, nigga?”

  “Man, your old dirty ass ain’t shooting shit!” one of the kids yelled.

  “It’s me, Dee!”

  “You almost caught a hot one!” he said, approaching my car, and waving off the laughing kids. “Where the six at?”

  I hopped out and told him that I had to move the six and the house because I didn’t have an income. “I’m happy to have this Honda!”

  “Let’s go to ya bar, Dee! Get a nigga fucked up.”

  “That’s gone too!”

  We walked to the basketball court and watched wiry teens battle it out in a game of two on two.

  “Yo, you wanna get next?” I asked.

  “Naw, I can’t breathe right,” he said. “But I do gotta big play for us, man, glad you slid by, boy!”

  Nick asked me to put $60K of my own money with $100K of his and another guy’s cash into this big deal that could get us ten bricks of cocaine. I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t want to do it. Enough was enough, and I knew that he didn’t have that type of money anyway. If he did, he probably would’ve been shooting up, and he probably wouldn’t stink, and I probably wouldn’t be able to see his toe through his Nike.

  “I don’t sell drugs, man, you heard what just happened to Mac and them?”

  He pushed away from the gate and reached out for a handshake. I slapped his palm—he squeezed mine and pulled me in closer. “Well, nigga, I suggest you stay away from here, cuz if you wasn’t my nigga, I’ll take what you have and kill you!”

  I pushed him off me. “Do what you gotta do!”

  He pulled out the gun, pointed it at me and said, “Bow!” and then walked down the block. That was the last time I saw Nick. It felt like that Nas song that goes “A thug changes and love changes and best friends become strangers.”

  I heard Nick started raising his money through an old-school approach. He hit every block from east to west, shaking down dealers, jamming his gun down throats, and emptying the pockets of anyone selling anything. I heard he even hung a kid out of a window for three hundred dollars—any and every thing to get the money he was looking for.

  We have a saying in east Baltimore that goes “Stick-up kids don’t last long” and it’s right. Some guys from one of the many crews Nick robbed caught up with him and blew his brains out on Ashland Avenue, steps away from where we used to hustle.

  A huge part of my life was gone, but strangely, I found a piece of happiness in Nick’s death. Nick wasn’t Nick anymore and it was hard for me to see any change. I’m sure he could’ve left the streets and done something else but he never wanted to or never tried.

  F.E.D.S. or Don Diva magazine were the only books I’d ever see him touch. He indulged on every level of the streets from fucking crackheads raw to wild shootouts, and the rush was a high like the drugs he stuffed in his body. His delay
ed reactions when someone asked him a question were sad. Listening to people call my friend a joke or a junkie-bitch was sad and worse than everything—seeing his short obituary was sad.

  One paragraph that begins with being born at Johns Hopkins, elevates to being educated in the Baltimore City Public School System, and ends with being called home to Christ. The same tired paragraph I saw over and over again for most of my life, one of my biggest fears—not dying, but dying with the same story as everyone else.

  At least he didn’t have to hurt any more.

  REBIRTH

  I went from a $600,000 Bolton Hill brownstone to a shit apartment back in the hood. Soni got a job as a special ed teacher and I enrolled in college. This time, I attended the University of Baltimore, which is a semi-mixed school. UB ended up being a better fit for me than Loyola. It wasn’t A Different World, but they had a few black professors. The white students at UB knew nothing about the Baltimore I’m from, but it was a mix of working people who wanted to better themselves through education, and I connected with them because of all the game I learned from Tyler.

  I started out with a writing class—WRIT 100, where we had to read a book called Fire in a Canebrake. It was about the last mass lynching in America, which shocked me because it happened in the 1940s, which wasn’t even that long ago. After completing the reading we were responsible for writing reflections on the chapter. The process of developing my own opinions on a historical event that was relevant changed me. I felt smarter three weeks into the class. The critical side of my mind grew hungry and was begging to be fed.