A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  Ky-Mani was a skinny and dark-skinned guy who used to walk on his heels—duck-like. That night we saw him coming up the sidewalk under the streetlight, pushing along Lamar, who was in a wheelchair. The two of them were a pair; we’d always see Ky-Mani pushing around Lamar, who’d been paralyzed for years.

  Everyone stood. A beef had been brewing between Ky-Mani and Fernando and Devon. As Ky-Mani got closer to the steps, he let go of Lamar’s chair and bent down. He reached underneath the wheelchair, pulled out a handgun, and started shooting wildly. Four shots popped around us as we scattered, totally shocked.

  Then Ky-Mani took off, pushing Lamar in front of him and rounding the corner. As we caught our breath, I looked down at Fernando’s foot and said, “Yo, there’s something on your sneakers.”

  “Shit,” he said, wincing.

  One of the bullets had hit the steps, ricocheted off the ground, and gone through Fernando’s foot. We almost laughed the whole thing off. Once we realized no one was badly hurt, the whole thing became comical: who does a drive-by while pushing a wheelchair? If urban teens in America actually knew how to shoot there’d be none of us left.

  At that point we had one communal gun, which rotated among buildings and required approval to use. By the time I got to the gun from Devon’s lobby, I already had calmed down, come to my senses, and realized it wasn’t worth it. It was just stupid to carry a gun unless you were going to use it—you took the risk without any benefit. After hearing cooler responses from a few older guys, I put it back in a stash spot. The natural waiting period likely saved my life. As younger and younger kids get their own guns, which have become cheaper and more prevalent, that practice is dying out. Along with the generation that’s carrying them.

  Serge, whom everyone called Jigga, lived in the next building over with his grandmother and his father. He hung out with the Jamaicans on the block, like Kino. Jigga was the one who had said hello to my grandmother in Creole that very first day I arrived on Crown Street, and Kino was the one who tried to stare me down. About a year after that I beat Kino up pretty badly on my corner, banging his head repeatedly on the pay phone. That fight settled the waters between us, though I never let my guard down with him.

  But Jigga was reserved and quiet. He never went at me to score points, never tried to show me up to impress others. His was a confidence that came from within and it was genuine. A stocky kid with braids, Jigga had a slow-paced walk with a pronounced lean to his left that let you spot him blocks away. Jigga had the swagger of youth but the money of older dudes like Frank. I was taken by the allure of his Jordans, the brand-name jeans and jackets, the food and alcohol he purchased easily, the attention he received from the ladies. He was knee-deep in the drug business, dealing for a charismatic guy who lived a few floors above me named Javier. But it wasn’t Jigga who introduced me to Javier.

  A few weeks after my intense ride to Manhattan with Dread, some guy I had never seen before walked up to me on the corner.

  “You Buffett?” he asked.

  “Maybe. Who’s asking?” I said.

  He scoffed, like he didn’t think I was worth it. He told me to be at Mr. B’s candy store that Saturday at four. When I asked why, he just walked away.

  But I was there. I knew.

  Mr. B’s candy store was owned by a half crook in his sixties, Mr. B., who had a Cadillac, a nice house, and a fondness for young women. The store was a hole-in-the-wall and always dark, even in the daytime. We’d been going in there after school for years to buy candy and play arcade games like Street Fighter. There was a back room and a basement, neither of which the kids were allowed in. But we all knew Mr. B ran a drug business out of there.

  Addicts would come in, buy loosies up front, and then go into the back room to get high. As kids, we’d be five deep at the arcade game, focused on next game and high scores, but we’d see addicts coming out in a daze, women floating through who were paid for their services. If you just walked in off the street, you wouldn’t notice much. But there was a world tucked inside that world. If people he didn’t know asked about buying a gun or drugs, Mr. B would tear into them. “What are you talking about?!” he’d yell. “This is a kids’ place. Get the fuck outta here!” Mr. B was just being careful, not trusting anyone he didn’t know.

  That Saturday I was at Mr. B’s early, sitting at a table next to the back-room door. As I watched some middle-school kids huddled around the arcade game, I felt like I had graduated. In walked a thin-built guy, a few visible tattoos, probably in his midtwenties: Javier. I recognized him immediately. I was nervous but steady. He sat down across from me, his body titled toward the door. His eyes were mean, black holes.

  “You sure you’re up for this?” Javier asked. “This business?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “This ain’t selling to school kids anymore. You know that, right?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “The risk goes up. The rewards go up. Together,” he said.

  We discussed the numbers, how much I’d start with, what I would owe him, when and how to pay him. I was a beginner again, and had to prove myself before I could move more weight. “Don’t fuck up the money,” he kept saying.

  Javier was a known quantity and people would not mess with me. But if I got nabbed, he said, I did not know him.

  He reached into his jacket and passed me a small pack under the table, but when I reached for it, he held tight.

  “Say it,” he said.

  I hesitated. “I don’t know you,” I said. Then he nodded, let go, and walked out.

  Javier specialized in exotic marijuana like haze and hydro, more potent and expensive than I’d been handling. He was also a heavy crack and cocaine dealer, products I soon moved up to once I saw how much more money was to be made. For me, it was even more lucrative because I would never smoke my supply. It was a line I refused to cross, so there was no temptation. We were schooled on crack, warned what it could do to a person, witnessed it in the drug addicts who lived in the neighborhood. Their bodies were skeletal, their families disowned them, cops took advantage of them, the world seemed to beat them around mercilessly. Plus, our music and movies just reinforced it: hip-hop may have bragged about dealing, but anything besides weed was considered toxic.

  The expansion into dealing crack cocaine was riskier: it put me on law enforcement’s radar, sometimes right in their sights.

  Jigga and I teamed up peddling, splitting the same job, rotating shifts, and sharing customers. The game is competitive but we were the rare breed who looked out for each other. If a customer asked one of us for ten dime bags, we would each sell him five.

  The most profitable time for business was 12:00 to 5:00 a.m. Jigga and I would be out all night grabbing naps on car hoods, waiting for waves of customers. The corner evolved as prime real estate for a reason: it’s where worlds intersect. Jigga and I would get warm in the phone booth or sit on the Dumpsters to get a bird’s view of who was coming. We would burn time at the end of countless blunts, talking hopes and dreams over puffs of smoke in the cold air. We’d fantasize about saving up enough money to buy cars, like the sleek new BMW, with the interior like popcorn butter. Every now and then, if things were slow, we would frequent other blocks to get rid of our work. This came with a higher risk so we wouldn’t do it alone or often. Peddling on someone else’s territory was like asking to be shot. I know more than a few people who got killed this way.

  Cop cars would lope slowly up the block trying to catch us in the act but we had it down to hard science. We never had the product on us and could always clock their arrivals and departures. Cops would roll up, throw us against the wall, and search us—all to no avail. They’d tell us to go home and we’d just walk around the block once and back to our home base.

  We called our customers custies or fiends, and most were people I’d known for years before I became their dealer. This was before everyone had cell phones so petty hustlers like me lived on the corners, in front of buildings, and i
n lobbies muttering, “I got it, got that work . . .” just loud enough for the air to carry my voice. We’d stash the drugs under the heater, in broken mailboxes, or outside in the grass.

  Marijuana was just a quick hand-to-hand transaction. Harder substances would only be handed over behind a locked door. In the open we’d drop the product somewhere and once we got paid we’d give the customer instructions about how to pick it up. The older guys told us never to keep crack on us unless we had absolutely no choice; even a small amount of crack is a felony, ten years. The older dealers had a stash house to store everything but Jigga and I didn’t have that option. I would stash it in bags in my ass crack most of the time. The cops wouldn’t check there and crack addicts didn’t care. After it destroys people’s health, their finances, and their families, crack cocaine takes their dignity too.

  Devon had been dealing since he was a youngster and he had a cell phone before anyone, so he was already successful in the street. The phone brought him a wider net of customers, more conveniently and with much less risk. His older cousin, Lawson, was Crip-seasoned in the street and in and out of jail on a regular basis. People would talk about Lawson like he didn’t bleed. He’d been shot a few times and lived to tell about it, gaining even more respect. There were all kinds of stories, like how he disfigured some older guy when he was only thirteen. When Lawson got back home from prison he saw me as a threat, so we had it out a few times and I held my own.

  I eventually earned Lawson’s respect and started to sell drugs for him on top of what I was dealing for Javier. Lawson was a reckless creature. In the hustling business more money means more drama and a much smaller margin for error. The repercussions for mistakes become heart-attack serious.

  Lawson and his boys would clean up in Manhattan, spending nights on West Fourth Street in the Village, selling crack to white customers for four times the price they’d get where we lived. This was an overnight operation so they’d return at sunrise, flush with cash and jacked up, laughing about the lopsided profit. In Manhattan, the risk and reward were always that much greater.

  Back in Brooklyn, we copied the tactic, exploiting our white customers’ fear and ignorance about marijuana. We were always smoking out front on those Jewish Steps, so they knew to come to us to buy. Most of the time they just wanted to get the transaction over with, paying twice as much just to get out of there.

  “Here,” they’d say, shoving money into my hands, “I gotta go.”

  “Wait, I owe you five,” I’d say.

  “Just keep it!” they’d say into the wind. Sometimes I’d purposely take my time getting their change out, knowing they were itchy. Any angle I could find, I’d take it. It was the only way.

  The cops were always around, both visibly and invisibly. Once I was sitting on milk crates in front of Devon’s building at three in the morning, hustling, and a young white couple walked by. The guy stopped in front of me and asked, “Yo, you know anybody that has weed?”

  My sensors went off. He was too open about it, like he didn’t know how to ask, which is how cops talk. A dealer is always alert to certain words or how people choose to speak. If their approach is suspicious, you play dumb and send them away. But there are other times—if business is slow—when you risk it. You rationalize your way in.

  That particular night I said, “Sure, I got it,” and it turned out the guy was a plant. An undercover cop jumped out and searched me, looking for crack or weapons. When he discovered I had nothing else, he actually gave me my weed back. That happened a couple of times. The cop would find the weed, hand it back, and say, “Get the hell out of here, just go,” annoyed I had wasted his time.

  We called these cops “T and T’s”—Tuesday and Thursdays—because on those two nights detectives would flood the hood specifically looking for guns and hard drugs. There’d be very few blue and whites, but plenty of black Impalas circling the street in the dark.

  If we were desperate or dry, we’d take other chances. Jigga and I would cut a piece of soap and put it in a plastic bag, trying to pass it off to custies. Addicts are about the moment and the trade-off had to happen quickly, so they’d walk off without checking the bag. Papi, a custie who lived one block over, was our easiest target. We sold him soap a few times and he might not have even noticed. Sometimes a crack addict comes to buy but they’re already so high they don’t even know what’s going on. And even if they did come back to argue, we could get away with saying it wasn’t us who sold it to them.

  My survival mechanism relied on other people’s destruction, my own community’s. I was young and desperate, but I still made the choice to do it. When later I read Malcolm X’s autobiography, I was struck by how he viewed drugs in the ghetto: how it makes you “prey upon other human beings like a hawk or a vulture.” At fourteen, I was already both.

  Many veteran hustlers worked out of a trap house, a private spot where everything gets sold: drugs, clothes, electronics, women, guns, and more. I had hung out in trap houses before, playing video games or bringing girls over since I didn’t have many options. A trap house is always somewhere in the cycle of getting robbed or busted by the police.

  One night around 4:00 a.m. Jigga and I went to Javier’s trap house to re-up on our supply. I was also looking to buy some Prada shoes for a girl I was seeing. Right as we walked in, I realized we had stumbled onto a robbery in progress. One of the dudes turned his gun to us, and walked us to the back room. He tied Jigga and me up, put us both in a tub, and took the sneakers right off my feet, almost a thousand dollars cash right from my pocket. Then he left with his crew. The whole experience was terrifying—we had no idea who those guys were, how likely they were to shoot, or whether they’d kill us just for seeing their faces. The experience shook me, but it didn’t change me at all.

  That next week, Ky-Mani and I got into a fight outside Mr. B’s in broad daylight and I beat him up. There was this sense of disrespect—he was five years older and a street veteran—as well as unfinished business. But I was too deep into it, and wasn’t thinking about him coming back with a gun. He would, but I was lucky enough to be gone by then.

  At the end of that summer, Javier and I both got arrested one evening at our regular corner. The hot day was fading, but the daylight was still pronounced. I gave him the money for the re-up on my corner and he gave me a plastic Baggie of crack cocaine, which I quickly slipped in my pocket. But we were being watched. A cop and his partner came out, put me on the wall, and asked me to empty my pockets.

  I hesitated, playing dumb, but there was no way out. I pulled some cash and then a rock of crack cocaine wrapped in plastic. In my other pocket was a small bag of marijuana. They found almost a thousand dollars on Javier, and we were arrested on the spot. I was booked, processed, and charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. My court dates were set and then they sent me home.

  A week later, I got picked up again.

  I had recently bought a new bicycle—a green Terra mountain bike—and I thought I was a genius for stashing the drugs underneath the seat. I’d keep a sheet of plastic wrapped around the bottom so the product wouldn’t fall through. That Sunday afternoon I had just finished a sale in the alley behind Devon’s building. I hopped back onto my bike when an unmarked detective car came screeching the wrong way up Crown Street. They pulled me off the bike and went straight for the seat, taking the drugs, the two hundred and thirteen dollars out of my pocket, and the bike. Then they cuffed me and shoved me into the back of the car.

  They said they saw me make the sale, but I doubted it—we were well-hidden and my eyes were always peeled. There was one particular neighbor on the second floor of Devon’s building who hated us hustling around there. I think she saw it go down and called them. If someone makes that call, gives a description, and you’re already known to cops, they don’t send the blue and whites. They send the detectives in the unmarked Impalas, siren on the dash. That’s who got me.

  Though I was a minor
, fifteen years old, I was arrested and booked for a class D felony, which held a maximum of seven years in prison. I had isolated myself so completely that no one in my family would help me out. They wouldn’t even come down to the station or to court. That’s why it’s called burning bridges: no one can cross and no one can get to you. I was another lost kid in the juvenile justice system, on the verge of becoming a statistic with no options and no way out. Except through.

  PART II

  THE SYSTEM

  7

  State Property

  August 2004

  When we make mistakes, meander, slip, and sometimes fall, we find means to gather ourselves, reset our compasses, and continue the journey.

  —DESMOND TUTU 3

  “I was hoping to never see you again.”

  I had been staring at the dead brown floor for hours. Then, without a word, a heavy clanging and the door opening. A uniformed staff member, handcuffs dangling from his waist, silently took me into a visiting room. There sat Christine Bella, head tilted, slight smile pushing through. “Hi. Remember me?”

  It was a relief; I had just about given up on seeing a kind face.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  The Spofford Juvenile Center in the Bronx was one of the few lock-up detention facilities in New York for juveniles. Also known as Bridges, it was a notorious intake place for troubled teens. Word was that lots of guys from the area who rose up and became something—Mike Tyson, Fat Joe—went through Spofford. It was a twisted rite of passage for black and Latino teens in New York, but an awful institution. No matter how much credibility it earned you back home.

  For juveniles, this place was the real deal: heavy, locked doors; thick cement and cinder block; high walls with barbed wire; stoic staff; group showers. We were constantly being searched: forced to take off our shoes, which staff would bang upside down; our socks turned inside out; our pockets emptied; our collars padded; our pants taken off and shaken. Staff would enter our rooms randomly and turn everything upside down—as if I could’ve received something to stash, though I hadn’t moved.