Nothin' but Blue Skies

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Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 19

by Edward McClelland


  The Broadmoor was nearly vacant when the Chambers Brothers took over. They offered the manager $1,000 a week to ignore the crack dealing in his building. That was a lot more than the $250 a month the landlord paid him, so he took it. The house, which became known to local crackheads as the Boulevard, was organized like a department store: $3 rocks on the first floor, $5 rocks on the second floor, $10 rocks on the third floor, $25 “boulders” on the fourth. There was a barter room where tapped-out baseheads could exchange guns and TV sets for rocks, and a “pussy room” where young women could trade their irreducible product.

  Crack was in every family on Chene Street. Givans’s uncle sold crack for the Chambers Brothers, then did time in a federal prison because he wouldn’t roll over on his bosses. One of Givans’s young neighbors, Lester Guyton, didn’t have enough to eat because his mama was spending her bakery paycheck on crack. Lester and his brothers and sisters subsisted on sugar sandwiches, mayonnaise sandwiches, or food pantry cheese because their mother smoked up the grocery money. When she smoked up the rent money too, they were sent to live with aunts and uncles. The drug followed them to their relatives’ houses, where crack-heads would pry off loose bricks to sell for a dime. When Guyton was thirteen, he began selling crack himself.

  “I went from crack to selling cocaine,” he said one day on Chene Street. “Right here in this neighborhood. I said, ‘I’m going to be legit with mine.’ I worked at McDonald’s. It ups your clientele. I used to sell weed at McDonald’s. You have a regular job, it covers you. Drugs tore this neighborhood up. I did it. I used to sell drugs to my girlfriend’s mama. You had people who knew each other their whole lives, killing each other because one guy was making more than the other guy.”

  Crack even made Detroit the birthplace of carjacking, a term coined by the Detroit News in 1991 after a twenty-two-year-old drugstore clerk was killed for her Suzuki Sidekick. That was the year the city’s murder rate hit its all-time high of sixty per one hundred thousand (and also the year the population dropped below one million for the first time since 1920). The crackheads had stolen everything that didn’t move, and now they were stealing anything that did.

  The Chambers Brothers were in and out of business in three years, busted by the FBI. After the police confiscated a home video of the brothers flashing thousands of dollars in cash and passed it on to a TV news reporter, they became the face of crack in Detroit. Not even Al Capone could have withstood that much heat. But during their domination of the drug trade, a Harlem journalist named Barry Michael Cooper visited Detroit to write an article about the city twenty years after the riots. Cooper dubbed the young dealers “new jacks,” and he called his story, which appeared on the front page of the Village Voice, “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young.”

  “Detroit’s violence knows no boundaries,” Cooper wrote. “It’s among the high-rise office buildings downtown, the upper-middle class homes and condos on the West Side, the poverty-worn projects on the East Side. Detroit is like that nightmare where your legs become paralyzed when the monsters are chasing you; you can’t escape.”

  Cooper adapted his article into the screenplay for New Jack City, the Public Enemy of the crack era. The scene was shifted to Cooper’s native New York, but Nino Brown was based on Larry and B. J. Chambers, and “the Carter”—the apartment complex Nino converts into a crack tower—was obviously Gotham’s version of the Broadmoor.

  Carl Taylor was a source for Cooper’s Village Voice story and consulted on New Jack City until walking off in a fit of local pride when he found out the movie would take place in New York. (“Detroit’s not even on the radar,” he complained. “It either happens in Los Angeles or New York; New York is the shit.”) Taylor was six foot four, wore horn-rimmed glasses and suits, and looked like either Sonny Liston gone to seed or Biggie Smalls after a fitness regimen. He was a professor at Michigan State University, but when journalists called, he’d growl and say, “This better be important or I’m goin’ back to my old business: breakin’ bones.”

  Taylor could talk like a blaxploitation hero because he was an academic star: his book, Dangerous Society, had been excerpted in Harper’s magazine. It was timely. The Crack Wars were at their crescendo. New York was experiencing its worst violence since the Civil War Draft Riots. Los Angeles conceived gangsta rap, the Iliad of the war between the Bloods and the Crips. But even in 1990, its annus mortis of 2,605 murders, New York was only half as bloody per capita as Detroit. While never surpassing the 1974 record of 714, Detroit had the nation’s highest murder rate for most of the eighties and nineties, and was never challenged among cities of a million or more people. (Detroit fell out of that league not so much because the population was being killed off, but because no one who could afford otherwise wanted to live among such violence. Only a building-by-building canvass, organized by city hall, located a million people for the 1990 census.) The entire country was in an economic slump in the early nineties, which contributed to the crime wave. But Detroit had been in an economic slump for a quarter century. As Coleman Young, then in his fifth, final, and most cantankerous term as mayor, liked to say, “Detroit could be your town next.” Now that everyone else’s town was Detroit, thanks also to a decade of Republican neglect for urban America, the rest of the country was more fascinated with Motown than at any time since the Supremes broke up. After Ze’ev Chafets published Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit, ABC News came to heap pity on America’s basket case. Young insisted Detroit was as safe as most cities, then kicked the reporter out of his office for preparing a “hatchet job.” It was great TV.

  As Taylor wrote in Dangerous Society, “the new underclass has been growing since the 1960s. The 1970s and 1980s in Detroit have been years of economic depression. Teen unemployment has been record-setting. Most agree that what delinquent ghetto youth desire has been beyond their means.”

  It’s an obvious observation that the drug trade replaced the auto industry as Detroit’s number one employer of high school dropouts. But the factories helped create that class of dropouts. Henry Ford, who once said, “I hire an autoworker from the neck down,” dispatched his recruitment agents to the South to hire unlettered men who’d be so grateful for work they wouldn’t cause labor trouble. Education was never important to blue-collar Detroiters, because the shop was always hiring, and it paid better than teaching. By the mid-1980s, the graduation rate in the Detroit public schools was 25 percent. The auto industry also created a market for heroin and crack. Drugs were available in all the shops. Some of the guys on the line wanted a narcotic heavier than Crown Royal to take their heads out of their monotonous jobs, and they had the money to pay for it. Teenagers who might have hired in at Ford’s a generation earlier didn’t feel like they’d missed a thing.

  “Fuck that factory rap,” a fifteen-year-old told Taylor. “We going to sell some dope and get paid. Then we’ll go into the studio and make our rap record and be stars. All I want to do is get paid and show all them suckers at school that school ain’t shit. Me and the boys getting paid and we ain’t wasting our time doing no lame-ass factory gig.”

  Crack didn’t come to my hometown until the end of the 1980s. Lansing was always a few years behind the big city. Unlike Flint, which was only fifty miles from Detroit and shared an identical industrial culture, Lansing was too far away, too white-collar, and too well policed for the gangs to bother with.

  Paradoxically, crack’s arrival in Lansing was the consequence of an antidrug campaign. The Tri-County Metro Narcotics Squad, the local narcs, went on a marijuana offensive so successful it dried up the weed supply in town. People still wanted to get high, though, so they started smoking crack. And once you start smoking crack, it’s hard to stop.

  Crack came to my home in Lansing. It came right into my bedroom. The winter I graduated from Michigan State University, I rented a room from an old school friend, a girl I’d known since I was six years old. Andrea’s father owned a house on the Grand River, where she l
ived downstairs and I lived up. In grade school, Andrea had been the girl whose penmanship the teacher expected us to imitate. In junior high, she dyed a purple stripe in her buzz-cut hair, wore a dog collar for her school picture, began listening to the Psychedelic Furs, acquired a boyfriend who looked like a young Johnny Wadd, and sold me my first joints. By the time we were twenty-two, she was tending bar in a tavern next door to a biker club which had a sign warning visitors “IF YOU DON’T KNOW IF YOU’RE WELCOME—YOU’RE NOT.” One afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, reading a book, when I heard Andrea creak up the stairs.

  “Close your eyes and put out your hand,” she commanded.

  I obeyed, and felt a silty object drop into my palm. Opening my eyes, I beheld a bag of cocaine the size of a garlic bulb.

  “I’m holding on to it for a friend of mine,” Andrea explained.

  I reacted the way any young writer would have.

  “Can you introduce me to this guy?” I asked.

  She did, and “Jimmy Oliver,” the nom de drogue I assigned him, became the subject of my first magazine story. It appeared in Z and was then excerpted in Utne Reader.

  When Jimmy Oliver walked down South Washington Avenue in Lansing—past the biker bar, the old train depot, the grassy field where Diamond Reo had stood until it burned down in 1975—the skinny girls chanted, “Hey, Heavy D, what you got for me today? Got some heavy boulders? Shake ’em and they sound like dice?”

  Jimmy was nicknamed Heavy D. Like the rapper, he was so fat he filled an easy chair from arm to arm. He strolled around in washed-out black jeans, flannel shirts, sneakers with dirty creases, and who-cares-about-fashion black plastic glasses. His only concession to the B-boy look was a wispy gold chain around his neck.

  “I give less than a shit about style,” Jimmy told me the first time we met, in the living room of my house. Jimmy sat on the couch, completely wired, and talked for three hours into a tape recorder I’d balanced on the arm. “I’ve made the money to buy wardrobes that could damn near match Michael Jackson’s. I don’t spend a lot of money on clothes, I wear clothes that cover my ass. If people don’t like the way I look”—smack! He slapped his knuckles against his palm. “That’s too damn bad.”

  A few years before, when crack was still a novelty, Jimmy had been a rich young drug dealer who could afford to blow $12,000 over a weekend, party with prostitutes, and pick up the dinner check for a dozen of the fake friends his drug money attracted. Now he was just broke. He’d started smoking his own product, which was the fastest way to lose money in the drug business.

  “I don’t do it as a habit,” he said, even though he was doing it three times a week. “But lately, it’s becoming more and more frequent and I’m trying to stop that because for the longest time, I could walk around and hold an ounce worth in my pocket and never touch it. Then I said, ‘What the hell, I’ve done so good for so long. Let me just take a little bit here and there.’ That little treat turned into a little problem.”

  Jimmy lived with his mother in a ranch house on the south side of town, a neighborhood whose quarter-century-old houses, built for Oldsmobile’s final hiring boom, were already decaying, the consequence of their bum-rush workmanship. Rust wept against the grain of aluminum siding. Snow whisked through gaps between garage doors and driveways. Crackheads from a nearby housing project were making raids on the party stores, and people had been robbed for drugs in their homes. To get to his drug deals, which netted him $300 to $400 a week, Jimmy drove his mother’s car. She worked days, as a clerk. Jimmy worked nights. Not many months before, he’d been arrested for possession of marijuana. The cops found two joints during a traffic stop near Detroit. He was sentenced to nine months’ probation, which involved going to a drug class and lying to the counselor that he’d only smoked four joints in his life.

  Ever since he was eight years old and saw people selling pot on TV, Jimmy had wanted to be a drug dealer. Thinking it might be a good way to supplement his allowance, he went to a field near his house, plucked a leaf of what he thought was marijuana, “cured” it, and rolled it in strips of the giant paper inside Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambu album. The kids at elementary school loved it, even though they were buying ragweed.

  “They said they got high,” Jimmy recalled. “They would have smoked oregano and said they got high.”

  As a sophomore in high school, Jimmy and a friend were recruited by a dealer who needed franchisees among the student body. The reward was one joint for every five sold. It didn’t take long for Jimmy and his partner to figure out that was a rip-off and buy their own bag of weed. They sold three ounces a day—a quarter-pound on football Fridays. It was very, very seldom that he wasn’t high the entire school day.

  Jimmy claimed to have a high school diploma. His friends weren’t so sure. There’s no doubt he learned a trade, though. After leaving school, he graduated to selling thirty or forty pounds a week, earning $200 to $300 a pound. Business was so good, he even put his father to work after the old man was fired from the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac plant. The arrangement didn’t last long. Jimmy ended up firing his father for the same drunkenness and fuck-uppery that had ended his career in the auto industry. The old man bought so much gin and gave away so many joints they had to stop doing business. Jimmy loved his father, but the old man had been in prison for his son’s birth and was just the kind of loser Jimmy saw himself turning into in ten years, if he didn’t get himself straight.

  To make his income look legitimate, Jimmy worked as a janitor in a nursing home and, for a time, operated a band saw in a steel mill. Work plus dealing didn’t leave much time for sleep, so he sometimes ate acid for two weeks at a time to stay awake. At the nursing home, he came in stoned, worked two or three hours, then crawled into a broom closet to sleep away the rest of his shift. When the boss told Jimmy, “You don’t give a shit about this job,” Jimmy pulled a roll of cash out of his pocket and peeled away singles, fives and twenties until he revealed its rich core of hundred-dollar bills.

  “Man,” he told his boss. “Man, don’t start pressing me about this job again, ’cause I don’t need that petty little paycheck you give me. That paycheck you give me, I’ll piss on that.”

  Once Lansing discovered crack, it turned out to be such a ride to Valhalla that nobody wanted to smoke a joint that only took you as high as the clouds. Like a good businessman, Jimmy started selling the new drug. The trick to making money on crack was to bait the customer with a potent rock, then cut the strength as the night wore on. His rocks usually sold for $20 apiece. The first would contain $25 to $50 worth of cocaine. The potency would drop as the crackhead began to “fiend”—hunger for more rock. As a nineteen-year-old, he thought crack could do for Jimmy Oliver what bootleg whiskey did for Joseph P. Kennedy—make him a millionaire with a mansion, an army of bodyguards, enough money to feed the hungry, house the homeless. He connected with a Mexican dude named Johnny who dealt cocaine by the pound, stored fifty-pound bales of marijuana in warehouses, and turned deals that netted him $30,000. Johnny was Jimmy’s main supplier, and Jimmy was Johnny’s loyal lieutenant—until Johnny OD’d on a coke binge and drowned in a motel tub where a friend tried to revive him with an ice bath. When Johnny was buried, all Jimmy got were his scales and his gun. They were small compensation for losing his shot at becoming a badass.

  THE JANUARY NIGHT Jimmy invited me out on a drug deal was so cold it hurt to sit on a vinyl car seat. So cold the streetlamps glittered through the thick darkness. Police cars steamed outside Quality Dairy convenience stores while the cops went inside for coffee. Snowmobiles shaved double incisions into the frozen Grand River. If you inhaled the sharp air too vigorously, your nostrils flapped shut. That cold.

  “This is going to be my last deal for a while,” Jimmy said as we stood in his mother’s kitchen, the kitchen of a woman too tired to clean and too poor to hire someone to do it for her. This was no crack house—Jimmy’s Silver Surfer comic book lay among stacks of papers on the dining table. On the
wall, under a window, his mother had posted her “Rules for All-Night TV Watching and Game Playing.” They included washing the dishes.

  Jimmy’s mother, a heavy woman with a pancake complexion, knew her son smoked crack but tolerated it because Jimmy brought money into the house. After all, her boyfriend smoked it, too. When she began to suspect Jimmy was fiending, she glared at him and said, “You’d better leave it alone.” To protect his mother, Jimmy kept big deals away from the house. Because he had someone to pay the rent, he wasn’t a lifer in the Life.

  “I can leave drugs alone, I don’t have to make my living off it,” he said. “They’re already on welfare, or they’ve burned up all their chances of getting on welfare. They can’t get a job because it’s been so long since they’ve had one, or they’ve got no marketable skills. The only thing they’ve got left is drugs or stealing.”

  We were waiting on a customer named Joey, who showed up around nine o’clock, after Jimmy finished fixing bagels and sandwiches for himself and me. Joey was a skeevy, skinny twenty-year-old with greasy broom-corn hair, dressed in an imitation-satin Detroit Tigers jacket and jeans washed out to the color of an August sky. He’d brought his “beams,” a pharmacist’s scale wrapped in plastic. Joey handed the scale to Jimmy and began rapping a telegraph skein of mumbles and obscenities.

  “This’s gonna be fuckin’ good stuff, right?” he asked. “It’s gonna be the right weight?”

  “Uh-huh,” Jimmy said flatly. “You got the money?”

  Spelunking in his pockets, Joey found $200, handed it to Jimmy.

  “All right,” Jimmy said. “I’m gonna make the buy. You guys meet me in the parking lot of Joe’s Diner in a half an hour and I’ll have the bag for you.”

  A few minutes later, Jimmy and I were on our way downtown in his mother’s car. He dropped me off at a Quality Dairy a few blocks from his connection’s house, explaining, “The guy I buy from doesn’t like new people around.”

 

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