by Hood Rich
She looked like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
I placed my hands on each one of her shoulders and looked into her brown eyes.
She blinked tears and took a deep breath. “Rich, he was our only livelihood. He was the only reason I was able to fuck around with that real estate out here. He paid all of my bills and made sure that I kept some money in my pocket. I know you didn’t know all of that, but it was the truth. Now that he’s gone, how are we going to survive? I can’t take care of your sisters and you on my own. I’ll lose my freaking mind. I’m just not strong enough.” She whimpered before lowering her head and crying.
I pulled her to me and rubbed her back, running my fingers through her long, curly hair once again. I could still smell the scent of sex coming off of her. “Andrea, don’t worry about none of that shit. I got you, ma. I got you and my sisters. I know y’all depend on me to make it happen, so I gotta do what I gotta do,” I said, feeling a little defeated because I didn’t feel like she believed in me. I was only eighteen and I knew she was used to fucking with baller-type niggas, but all I needed was a chance to make it happen. I just needed for her to have a little more faith. That faith would give me an extra boost of confidence that I needed to believe in myself.
She shook her head then looked up at me with tears coursing down her pretty, soft cheeks. “Rich, you gotta understand that it ain’t easy out there in that game. If you trying to do your thing then you can’t make any mistakes, especially if you’re going to have all of us on your back. Do you understand me?” She asked, wiping her tears away.
I nodded then helped to wipe the water away from her cheek by the use of my thumbs. I hated to see a woman cry. I always had ever since I was a little kid and witnessed the way my father broke my mother down almost every single day. He would beat her into the ground so bad that she was forced to find shelter in heroin. “Andrea, I understand, and if you know the game, then all you gotta do is teach me. I’m willing to learn, then I’ll take the lessons that you give me straight into the slums and make it happen for this family. I realize what’s at stake here. I can’t fail. There’s no room for me to.” I pulled her to me once again and wrapped my arms around her small frame, hugging her with love and affection.
She exhaled loudly. “Well, if you mean that, then the first thing I gotta show you is how to cook up your own dope. That way you’ll keep more of your product, and you’ll be able to turn a bigger profit. The worst thing a hustler can do is to have somebody else cooking up his work. You’ll almost always be cheated. Your cook will keep most of your product, and step on it with baking soda or B12. So, I’ma show you how to do everything. That way you’ll never have to rely on anybody else other than yourself.”
The next thing I knew, we were sitting at the kitchen table. Andrea took one of the ounces of Peruvian Flakes and dumped it into an empty mayonnaise jar after boiling a pot of water on the stove. She took a can of 7Up and poured it into the mayonnaise jar along with the dope and stirred it for about five minutes before picking it up and setting the jar inside of the boiling water.
She stirred the mixture and looked over her shoulder at me. I noticed that her lip was a little big from Maxwell’s attack, but she still looked finer than ever to me. “You gotta keep stirring this shit, Rich. That way this soda can break down the compounds in the dope before you add the B12 to it. You always want to make sure that your dope is as potent as it can be. It’s the only way you’ll take customers from other niggas. It’s gon’ be plenty hustlers out there selling dope. Yours has to stand out from the crowd, you understand?” She asked, looking me in the eyes.
I nodded and stepped closer to the stove. Looking inside of the pot, I could see that the dope was completely liquefied.
She continued to stir it. “Hand me that B12 from the counter,” she said, turning the eye down on the stove.
I handed the already measured amount to her and watched her add it to the mix, stirring the whole time. The mixture began to bubble before she turned the fire under the pot all the way off and continued to stir it.
After doing it for another five minutes, she added some yellow food coloring, continued to stir, and then placed the mayonnaise jar inside of the sink that was filled with ice. “A’ight, we gon’ let that one rock up and knock down these other sixteen zips. I wanna watch you do it now, and let’s try and be done with everything before I gotta go and pick your sisters up.”
Well, it didn’t take long for me to catch on, and by the time she came back home with my sisters, I was done and ready to bag up the work in the basement. After she got them situated upstairs, she came down and explained to me how to break down each ounce of dope with the use of a scale.
She chopped off a chunk of crack with a sharp pocket knife and placed it on the scale. “Alright, look, Rich. Out here in Milwaukee, you should be able to make about twenty-eight hundred dollars off of each ounce. That’s a hundred dollars per zip. That’s ten dime bags every hundred dollars. Now, I got a few contacts that’s gon’ want us to sell them eight balls. Eight balls usually consist of three and a half grams, but we ain’t fucking with that. We gon’ sell our balls for eighty-five dollars at three grams a piece. Okay, I’ll handle that, and for now you just take care of the dime by dime bags. That’s that block by block shit. I ain’t got no parts in that.” She held up a chunk of crack. “Now, the reason I used yellow food coloring is because I wanted to make your dope stand out. This looks like cheese, and that’s what they gon’ start calling it. In order to survive in this game, you gotta stand out from everybody else, and your dope has to be more potent with better quality. Treat dope fiends like family members that you care about. Never look down on them because of their usage. They are human, and we all have our vices. Your goal is to establish loyalty amongst your customers, and in time the niggas you’ll have work under you. It’s impossible to advance in the game if you don’t enter into it with a strategy, a’ight?”
I nodded, making sure I was paying close attention. “Alright then, let’s bag this stuff up so you’ll be ready to go tomorrow.” And that’s just what we did.
It must’ve taken us a full eight hours to get everything packaged and ready to go. By the time we were finished, I was exhausted and felt as if I was ready to pass out. I texted Paper and told him I’d get up with him bright and early the next morning. Then, I went into my room and cleaned it up to the best of my ability, before I fell out on the bed and was out like a light.
I wasn’t sleep for more than four hours before Keyonna was waking me up by climbing into the bed with me, taking my arm and putting it around her body. I opened my eyes and looked into her pretty face and noticed that there were tears rolling down her cheeks.
I sat up in bed, reached and turned my lamp on, scrunching my eye brows. “Keyonna, what’s the matter, lil’ sis?” I reached and rubbed her soft cheek.
She shook her head. “I’m tired of them making fun of me at school, Rich. I’m tired of them calling me a burn and saying I’m a crack head’s daughter.” She blinked, and more tears came out of her eyes. Now she was breathing heavy, inhaling and exhaling loudly.
Her face was redder than I ever remembered. The fact that she was hurting nearly caused me to break all the way down along side of her. I felt my throat get tight. I was both angry that people were picking on my lil’ sister and pissed off at myself for giving them room to. I had to make her and Kesha more of a priority. I had to get my money right. Their normalcy depended on it.
“Keyonna, baby, don’t worry. I got a few bands put up. I’ll take you shopping this weekend and get you right. You and Kesha, I promise.” I said, laying back and pulling her down so she could rest her head on my chest.
My sister had nice sideburns that stopped at the top of her jaw line. Because we were mixed, hers were real wavy. Whenever she got down on herself, I’d always lay her head on my chest and rub one of them until she fell asleep.
She wrapped her arm around my waist and closed her e
yes. “I miss mama so much, Rich. I know she wasn’t the best mother in the world, but she was all that we had. It’s like we don’t even exist to dad. We’re over here struggling and he’s over there with his Italian family living like a king. It’s just not fair. It’s not our fault that he and mom brought us here. Why do we have to suffer?” She whispered as I stroked her side burn.
I exhaled loudly and shook my head. I had never respected my father, even though those in the underworld of narcotics did. My father was a full-blooded Sicilian and was surrounded by an army of goons that hated the black people, or any race of people that weren’t Sicilian. He’d met our mother two years before I was born on a plane, coming from Italy. She was a flight attendant that he’d at one point in time found incredibly attractive. A beautiful black woman that had been forbidden for him to even glance at while he was going through the ranks of the Luciano Mafia. But glance he did, and before the plane would land in New York, he and our mother had fallen in love at first sight. Two years later, I was born, followed by Keyonna and then Kesha.
The entire time they were dealing with each other he’d kept her a secret. He was ashamed of the pigment of her skin. He’d beat her every chance that he got and drag her so far through the mud that she would eventually turn to first cocaine and later heroin. Heroin that he happily pumped into her veins to keep her within a dreamy state of submission.
Our father had a whole other family that he catered to and spoiled rotten. A Sicilian wife, son and daughter. Though they were our half siblings, we shared no form of a relationship and barely acknowledged the fact that one another existed.
I held Keyonna firmly. “Keyonna, don’t worry about him. I’ll take care of you. I’ll make sure that you and Kesha are well taken care of. All I ask is that you be patient and that you believe in me. I will not fail you, I promise. Do you believe me?” I asked, looking into her pretty face.
She nodded with her eyes closed. “Yes. I love you so much, Rich. I’m glad that you’re nothing like our father. You’re more a dad to me than he will ever be. I hate him so much for abandoning us.” She rubbed my chest and got more comfortable.
The door swung inward and Kesha appeared with her sheet wrapped around her. She was a spitting image of my mother, though two shades lighter, and with hazel eyes like my own, and Keyonna’s. “Dang, Keyonna, you just gon’ leave me in there all by myself?” She whined, looking from Keyonna, to me.
I scooted myself and Keyonna over in the bed, making room for her. “Come on, lil’ mama, you can climb in here with me too. I need your lil’ snuggles,” I said trying to ease her apprehension.
Kesha was a real shy and self-conscious thirteen-year-old girl. She rarely ever spoke the things that she was feeling out loud, and more often than not I had to try my best to read her mind and make sure that I didn’t leave her out of the mix because Keyonna was so over bearing when it came to me. Very possessive, and jealous. And I found no problem with it because I loved my lil’ sister so much, and I understood that she’d never received any unconditional love from our parents, so I felt as if it was my job to fill in the blanks that they’d left. Especially since I felt so responsible for our mother’s death.
Kesha slowly walked to the bed and got on to it, climbing across it on her knees until she was lying beside me with her head on my shoulder. “Thank you, Rich. I didn’t wanna be by myself,” she said before yawning and closing her eyes.
I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. I had to make it happen for my sisters. I had to make sure that they had opportunities in life that my parents never allowed for me to have. I had to be their sacrifice. I had to do everything that it would take to get them out of the ghetto and into a better position because the world didn’t care about them. They were young black women, and because of our circumstances, the statistics said that they were supposed to be losers and stuck within the ghetto’s death grip. But I refused to allow for that to happen. I would’ve rather died first.
Keyonna kissed my cheek and rubbed her face against mine. “You’re the best brother ever, Rich. I love you so, so much.” Then, she was lightly snoring with her mouth open.
Chapter 6
The next afternoon, I brought five ounces over to Paper’s trap and we got to doing our thing. As soon as the dope fiends saw the color of my dope, it made them curious. They’d roll a rock around in their hand, looking it over suspiciously with an eyebrow raised before biting into the plastic with their teeth to see if it would numb their tongue. After it was confirmed to be real, and assumed to be highly potent, they’d purchase no less than three of my bags.
There was this one addict by the name of Shirley who was known in the hood for being a prostitute and hustler. She was 5’2”, dark skinned with a real skinny body, I guessed from all of the drug use. On the first night of hustling out of Paper’s trap, she came to the backdoor, beating on it as if she was crazy. At first me and Paper thought it was the police, so I snatched up my dope and ran into the bathroom, ready to start flushing it like Andrea had taught me to do, when Shirley started to call Paper’s name at the top of her lungs.
“Paper! Paper! Open this door, its yo’ Aunty!” She hollered before beating on it some more.
I was on my knees at this point, just about to rip open the plastic so I could dump the dope down the toilet. At hearing her call Paper’s name, I stopped in my tracks and looked over my shoulder, trying to locate him.
He appeared in the bathroom doorway breathing hard. “Bruh, chill, that’s just this hype named Shirley beating on the door. Let me snatch her ass up and we’ll be good. She fucked up in the head,” he said, twirling his finger in a circle by his temple to indicate that she was nuts.
My heart was pounding so hard in my chest that I was finding it hard to breathe. I was thinking that I must’ve had the worst luck in the world for the police to be raiding our trap on the first day I came through with my product. I felt a sense of relief after I heard her calling his name.
I nodded. “A’ight, bruh, go get her ass then. She making too much noise. Got me all paranoid and shit.” I stood up and stuffed my dope into my briefs that Andrea insisted I wear whenever I was out hustling. She said it was easier to keep my dope concealed that way. I had to take her word for it because everything was new to me. When I was hustling heroin, I simply kept the dope in my pocket because nobody had raised the common-sense flag within me. I guess I never stopped to think about the severity of what I was doing until Andrea made it clear that I had our family on my back. They depended on me. Only then did I see the importance of me making each move with a strategy in mind.
I felt a gust of wind pour into the house as soon as Paper opened the backdoor, followed by a female’s yelp, and then the door slammed back. I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down on him and saw that he had Shirley by the throat with one hand.
He picked her up and held her against the door with an evil mug on his face. “Bitch, didn’t I tell you about beating on this muthafucking doe like you crazy? Huh?” He asked, tightening his grip.
She gagged and then kicked her legs that were dangling in the air. You see, Paper was a cocky, muscle-bound nigga like myself. Me and the homey would often smoke blunts and hit up his weight bench that he had in the basement. I think it weighed about two hundred or so. Never the less it had the both of us cock strong and ripped the fuck up, so Shirley’s lil’ ass didn’t stand a chance.
“Answer me bitch!”
I came down the stairs a lil’ bit and saw that her eyes were bugged out of her head. Her dark-skinned face almost the color of blue. “Yo, nigga chill the fuck out! Put her down before you kill her skinny ass!” I hollered, making my way down to them. I didn’t care if she was a dope head or not, she was still a female, and I wasn’t about to let my right-hand man beat up on no woman. In my opinion that was coward shit, and I couldn’t respect no man that got down like that, including Paper.
He held her for a little while longer, mugging the shit out of her. The
n he turned to look at me, biting on his bottom lip before letting her drop to the ground. “Fuck this bitch, bruh!”
Shirley fell to her knees, holding her neck. She took a deep breath, coughing up a thick loogey, spitting it on the floor. Her chest heaved. I could smell the musk from under her arms along with sweat. She smelled as if she hadn’t taken a shower in a few weeks.
The hotter the hallway became the more I could smell her to the point that it began to turn my stomach, and not even all of that stopped me from helping her to her feet and dusting off her knees. “You okay ma’am?” I asked, looking her over closely.
She nodded, still holding her throat. “Yeah, I’m good, baby. Long as this crazy muthafucka right here stop putting his hands on me all the time. That ain’t no way to treat yo’ blood, Paper.” She coughed up another loogey and spat it out on the floor.
Paper sucked his teeth and curled his upper lip. “What the fuck you beating on this door so hard for?” He asked, pinching his nose. “Damn you stank, Shirley. Fuck is wrong with you?” He shook his head.
She waved him off. “I wash my ass when I feel like it. After all, it’s my ass.” She rolled her eyes and pulled up her dirty purple summer dress, exposing the fact that she had a fanny pack around her waist.
I didn’t know what was inside of it, but I was praying that she pulled her dress back down because the scent coming from between her legs was so strong that I could literally taste it. It smelled like a sweaty version of fish. That’s the best way I could explain it. I was already trying to come up with a way that I could get her to shower before she went back out into the streets. Maybe a shower, and then I’d put something on her stomach. She looked so thin. I felt sorry for her.
