4
Buffett
Teenagers will disregard everything—their own fears, their parents’ warnings, physical pain, the possibility of going to jail or dying—because they’re convinced that social acceptance requires them not only to take risks but to do so in a cool, seemingly unconcerned manner. They exert self-control to overcome their inhibitions and more self-control to hide their negative feelings.
—ROY F. BAUMEISTER AND JOHN TIERNEY, WILLPOWER: REDISCOVERING THE GREATEST HUMAN STRENGTH 2
When a kid is cutting school, hanging out on corners, dealing drugs, and getting high, society says he is in the streets. On the streets means you live there, you’re homeless—it’s geographical. In the streets means you’re inside of it, surrounded on all sides. It’s the identity that you wear, speak, and walk. And then you become part of it.
In New York, to be in the streets is to be engulfed. Consumed by the lifestyle, the threats, and the incentives that trap you. By thirteen I was stealing bikes and breaking into cars, getting high on marijuana and drunk on cheap liquor. Jay used to call me “street gum”—everywhere all of the time, sticking to the hard concrete.
Frank was part of Jay’s crowd, in his late twenties and a little more street than Jay. He was a slick talker, spouting this rapid-fire rhythm, a musical bitta bap that shot out of him. The brim of his fitted cap was always pulled low, hiding his weathered face. At first I was his one-man audience, nodding and trying to follow. As my confidence grew, I’d speak up more and we’d hash things out together: trading off ideas on street philosophy, police behavior, business ventures, hip-hop lyrics. I loved that those older guys gave my ideas some weight. They gave me a sense of worth that was hard to come by at home or in school.
One Saturday afternoon after football on my block, Frank, Andre, and some others were hanging out on the Jewish Steps. The neighborhood was coming alive after a long winter. Hip-hop blasted from passing cars, reggae from open windows, and howls from dice games carried and bounced. Short girls caught hollers from platoons of men, as police worked their loop—all eyes and sneer. The thick smell of marijuana carried on the wind, while young kids chased one another in circles around elders playing dominoes on a rickety table.
Frank had just purchased a silver S500 Benz and had it parked in front to show everyone. That car just oozed. It looked to me like a sparkling toy, the sun beating and bouncing off it. I couldn’t stop asking about it, but he wouldn’t let me inside.
“Hell no, man,” he said. “Out of work, out of school, what you want with my car?”
“But I got a job now,” I protested.
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m a pharmacist.”
Frank looked at me quizzically.
“Street pharmacist,” I said, laughing.
“Fuck that. I don’t need the cops taking my car because you got some shit on you.”
The cops had trumped up some reason to impound Frank’s last car and he’d been paranoid ever since.
“All right, let me see the Breitling?” I asked.
Frank held his arm out. The watch was chunky but it hung on his wrist all natural. I was always asking to look at it.
“Can I put it on?”
“Fuck outta here,” he said. “It’d break your arm, cuz.”
I lost myself in the whirled gold and pebbled diamonds. The face like an old train station, all Roman numerals and foreign words. I was still in my white T-shirt, secondhand jeans, thin-soled sneaks—what Jay called my uniform. My gear was so weak, off-brand and no-brand, that I was embarrassed to show up at school.
Frank saw me zoning out and put his arm around me. “You know what? I’m a call you Buffett from now on,” he said.
“What?”
“Like Warren Buffett.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, defensive.
Frank grabbed Andre by the shoulder. “We have to educate this young one, Dre!” Frank said. Andre didn’t look up from his pager, flicking Frank away like a fly.
“What’s he do?” I asked.
“Stop texting that girl,” Frank said, tight against Andre’s ear. Frank got like that when he was revving up, all into your space. “Shorty don’t like you. She trashed her phone when you got her number.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Andre said.
“What’s he do?” I asked again, trying to knock his attention back.
“Who?” Frank asked.
“The guy. Muppet . . . Buffett, whatever his name is.”
“Buffett. Warren Buffett.” He broke down the sounds. “He’s a value investor.”
“Like oil and shit?”
“Nah, the market, man. Wall Street. A value investor is like the lone wolf. He puts money on the numbers no one else is betting on.”
“You talking shit,” Andre said, eyes still glued to his phone.
“Fuck you, cuz, I read,” Frank said. “I read more than my fucking pager! You know what—fuck out of here, that’s the problem! That’s what I’m talking about!”
“What?” I asked.
“You ever read the tax code?” he asked me. I was thirteen and I had just learned English. So, no, I hadn’t read the tax code.
“Nah, course not,” Frank said. “It’s written in fucking Greek—but they understand it.” He pointed west toward Manhattan. “They wrote it! It’s written for them to understand. We sitting here like suckers while they duck all of it! You think that’s a coincidence?”
“No?” Andre said, half-mocking.
“Hell no!” Frank said, stomping on the Jewish Steps.
“Frank,” I said, “how’d Warren Buffett get his money?”
He swung back to me and sat down. “Look, everyone goes one way: this company’s the shit, that company is a piece of shit. Ninety-nine percent of those guys are sheep. Look how they dress. Look at their fucking haircuts! But Warren Buffett does things his own way. True gangster.”
“I don’t want to be named after some old white dude,” I said.
“From Nebraska,” he said.
“You’re naming me after an old white dude who lives in Nebraska.” I could not have told you at the time where Nebraska was.
“Cuz, Warren Buffett is gangsta,” Frank said. “He’s worth like fifty billion. That’s with a b. You,” he rubbed my head, “you gonna be filthy rich one day.”
With that, I was Buffett. It was street code not to have people know “your government,” and fights would break out if a real name spilled in public. You never knew who was listening or when something could lure the cops. Your name was like a paper trail leading right back to your front door. To this day, everyone I grew up with in my neighborhood still calls me Buffett.
Buffett was my street badge, my tag name, a freshly wrapped new self. The strict use of nicknames on the street is practical, but there’s something bigger and psychological at work. It’s a suit of armor. A gangster identity. It’s someone who’s you but not you. An alter ego that you put out there so no one can get in here. I tucked myself in tight and wrapped Buffett around me. I made sure it would be all that anyone ever saw.
I never entirely stopped going to school and I was never old enough to drop out. I’d stay home, or pretend I was going and just roam the streets. I was too independent to join a gang but a lot of my friends were Crip. Taking orders never made any sense to me and felt unjust. I didn’t listen to my father, my grandmother, my dean, or my teachers: why would I take orders from some guy a few years older than me? That stubbornness served me well, might’ve saved my life.
We were all drawn to the luxury, but reality put it out of reach. There was a giant gap between whom we saw ourselves as and whom the world saw us as, what we had and what our heroes had. I was still early in the drug game, still dealing dime and nickel bags of marijuana to friends, still smoking most of my supply. For me, that gap was a canyon.
Just like back in Haiti, poverty fostered creativity in the street economy—often the illegal type. One of the older hustlers on my block was a
counterfeit supplier. He had a machine that churned out fake hundreds, fifties, and twenties, which he would sell to people so they could flip them for real cash. It was a ten-to-one purchase, so a hundred dollars would buy you a thousand counterfeit. He would even give the fake bills out on consignment. We’d take to the streets, exchanging the fake twenties for as much real money as possible—by buying cheap and getting change, over and over again, in as many locations as possible.
Taxi rides were ideal. Drivers didn’t check the money closely, never got a look at your face, and would have trouble finding you since they didn’t live in the neighborhood. I’d ride five blocks, get change, and pocket the money. Then do it again. Clubs were even better because almost everyone in there is drunk, it’s dark and loud, and a bartender doesn’t have the time or focus to check your money. The trick was folding the bills, scuffing them, playing with them a bit. Shuffle them between our fingers to give them that real texture. Periodically we mixed it in with real money and tried to slip it through.
Andre, Frank’s friend, made out like a bandit hustling fake money, enough to buy rundown houses and flip them. He became something of an entrepreneurial hero in the hood, showing us that what it takes to be successful in the streets isn’t that much different than it is in corporate America. Though there’s a big discrepancy in who goes to jail when caught breaking the law.
I also joined up with a crew in their late teens and early twenties who had a hustle they called going “on the meet”—boosting. We would steal from stores and sell back the merchandise to smaller stores for half-price or whatever we could get for it. Those guys were masters, slick and ghost about it. In and out before anyone knew what happened. I boosted rarely, and usually just big chain stores. I convinced myself that stealing from billion-dollar companies wouldn’t hurt anyone, and avoided local joints, mom-and-pop stores, places run by locals trying to feed their kids. I had to feel good about the decision, even if it was a bad one.
I’d grab items from supermarkets—dog food, baby formula, laundry detergent—and sell them back at the corner store. There was always a market for our stolen goods. We had a loyal customer base, mostly immigrants who ran bodegas up around Rogers Avenue. They didn’t care that the products were stolen—we were extending their margins. They were making 50 percent on the markup instead of the regular five or ten. Sometimes I’d keep a sweater or jacket I swiped from a department store, but usually I just resold things for quick cash.
There was a particular hustle where we’d join up with ten or twelve guys from nearby blocks like Montgomery and Union. Beforehand we’d circle up and smoke a few blunts to get our courage up. Then we’d all take off in a pack: head down the whooshing subway entrance, like a wave into the station. We’d jump the turnstile or get a swipe from someone. My cousin Breeze taught me this trick where if I bent the MetroCard at a particular angle and swiped it about ten times it would eventually let me through. Sometimes when I needed money I’d hang out by the turnstile and do this for other people for a dollar.
Middle Easterners and Africans ran a whole counterfeit economy in Manhattan on Broadway around Thirty-Fourth Street, a commercial stretch of Midtown. We would mob the pop-up shops and grab counterfeit Nikes, Iceberg shirts, and Louis Vuitton purses and watches, and take off into the busy foot traffic, holding as much as we could carry. It was dicey because shop owners weren’t afraid to chase us down with weapons. Sometimes the store would be twenty floors up a high-rise so if you got nabbed, you had nowhere to run.
We’d break off into smaller groups. One group would pretend they were interested in buying—asking questions, trying things on, keeping the employees engaged while another group would stuff items down their pants, or in their jackets or bags. At the next place we’d switch and the other group would play distracter. Success was based on speed and fearlessness, but I felt bad taking people’s property in front of them.
One crowded Saturday we’d been having no luck so we met up at McDonald’s and agreed on a Hail Mary plan: bum-rush a store all at once, take as much as we could hold, and run out. We picked a sports clothing store on the corner, near enough foot traffic that we’d be able to vanish into the crowds. There were football and basketball jerseys by the door and so many of us that it seemed like an easy smash and grab situation. We flew in like a bank robbery, yanked and tossed and ran.
“Hey! Hey, what the fuck!”
The burly store owner chased us down Broadway with a long knife that looked like a sword. I was holding a bunch of jerseys, some still attached to hangers, just kicking as fast as I could, dodging through tourists like a running back. He probably came as close as five feet to sticking his knife in my back. When I got to the subway station, I hopped three at a time down the stone steps and jumped over the turnstile. Just as those doors closed, I squeezed into the train, heart pounding and breath wheezing the whole ride back to Brooklyn.
Sitting there with those jerseys in my lap, some people side-eying me with their dead-right assumptions, I took some stock. My life wasn’t really worth these jerseys. I wasn’t even good enough at it, or motivated enough, to buffer the risk of getting a knife in my back.
When things went bad like that we’d rather the police show up because the alternative was much scarier. I’d rather a petty larceny wrap than a trip to the ICU. This was true for other encounters too: if you came up alone and unarmed on a group of gangbangers you’d be grateful if the police pulled up. You’re not supposed to appreciate police presence and you would rather die than show it. But inside of your thumping heart you’ve never been so happy to hear those sirens and see those starchy blues.
Chuck D of Public Enemy called hip-hop “the black CNN.” And that’s what it began as, a satellite beaming from the ghettos of black life to the rest of the world. Hip-hop culture reflected my America to me and I reflected it back: 50 Cent and G-Unit, Jadakiss and the LOX—they took the right angles, the tight walls, and the black holes of my world and turned them into poetry, into road maps, into an anthem and a purpose. Styles P’s album A Gangster and a Gentleman was my favorite, striking that perfect balance between reckless and thoughtful, which is how I thought of myself. We fell for the illusory too: Al Pacino in Scarface, Wesley Snipes in New Jack City, cold-blooded heroes who were self-made and entirely fictional. Fantasy heroes disguised as street reality. It’s a persuasive charade and, like most, I bought it all.
The music opened up a hidden part of me. I’d curl inside headphones and carry my portable CD player everywhere, like a passport. When things got too overwhelming for my young mind to cut through, I’d put on DMX and break down crying. He was open about the pain, pushing through it and thriving on it. He was a true survivor, honest about the hole carved out inside of him. I carried pain within me and disguised it with a swag and brashness that did nothing but cover the wound.
Morning to night, my friends and I were high. We would hold ciphers, stand in a circle and pass four or five thick blunts around until everyone was way past good. If I couldn’t smoke I’d get annoyed and antsy, willing to do just about anything to get high. In the evening we’d pour down cheap liquor and spend the rest of the evening inside a haze.
It was all done under the guise of having a good time; we were letting loose, partying, not giving a fuck. But we were all self-medicating. It seemed the only answer for our plight: hopelessness braided with loss, poverty, and the constant threat of violence. I was lonely, no matter how many people were around. Our clique was a loyal group but there was a thin thread keeping things together. Underneath it all, we were in a rat hole, everybody out for himself.
Handling one’s liquor was about being a man—spitting testosterone and draping yourself in a machismo cape. I didn’t really have the constitution for it or the internal gauge to keep things steady. I tended to heave myself over the line headfirst. My favorite drink was the Incredible Hulk, which was Hpnotiq, baby-blue liqueur that would turn green when mixed with Hennessy cognac. Straight up, the Hennessy would bur
n my little bird chest, but when mixed with the sugary liquor, I would pound my weight.
One night during the summer before ninth grade Devon and I threw down three or four Hulks and met up with some other guys at a party out at Kingsborough Houses. It was an off-the-rails situation, spilling into multiple apartments, the hallway, the roof, the lobby, the park out front. I mixed everything I could find in the cabinets and by the sink, anything that looked or smelled like alcohol. Around 2:00 a.m.—well past my limit—I took off, somehow making it the seven blocks to the 3 train. In the empty station I lay down on the wooden bench, waiting for the train, the ground picking up and dropping. No sound but the hollow whoosh from the tunnel and the buzz in my ears.
A train finally came and I willed myself on it, floating in and out of consciousness the whole ride. Somehow I got out at the right stop and then—nothing. I collapsed on the platform, blacked out for a minute or two. My body went limp and lifeless, nearly falling onto the tracks.
When I came to I saw a heavyset woman carrying a broom, her feet shuffling over.
“Call an ambulance! This boy just dropped! Hey!” She was yelling maybe to the guy in the booth. She dragged me by my foot away from the track and sat with me until paramedics showed up. The EMT workers loaded me onto a stretcher and carried me up the stairs. I can only remember intense dreams—water rising, my mouth swallowing and spitting—and waking up in the hospital, an IV in my arm and a beeping machine at my ear. A beautiful black woman in an all-white jacket before me, fuzzy and angelic.
“What’s your name?” She had a syrup voice and bright teeth. I smiled, but I didn’t really hear her. She was like a TV with the sound off.
“Can you hear me? What’s your name?”
“Jim?” My voice sounded like someone else’s, far away and behind glass.
“You sure?” She smiled. “Do you know where you are?”
My throat was sore, like I’d been screaming. I had dreamed that I was yelling and getting pulled underwater, pissed that I never learned how to swim. “Hospital.”
A Stone of Hope Page 6
