10 Crack Commandments

by Erica Hilton

  Princess thought about what the young man had proposed, and again, his logic stunned her. She realized that he might actually last on these mean streets longer than the average knucklehead. She reasoned his father had taught him well before his demise. Princess wasn’t a stranger to violence or street life. She’d lived in the hood all her life, and now she wanted to move south with her family. With seventeen thousand she could pay down on a large home. At the moment she was collecting $162 a month from welfare, and she wasn’t a spring chicken. She was steadily approaching her golden years, and she refused to live and die in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

  “You sure do push a hard bargain. OK, meet me back here this time tomorrow.”

  “Nah, I don’t have tomorrow. This nigga gets got tonight. He will not breathe another day on this earth. Living is a luxury, and I’ma revoke his pass.”

  “I hear that,” Princess said, hardly fazed that Blue Bug was about to be murdered. “I gotta make a run upstairs. Meet me in the back alley in twenty minutes. And you better have my money when all of this is said and done. A deal is a deal.”

  When Princess left, Lil Nut walked over and hugged his mother. “You know you’re something else, right?” he asked.

  “Shit. You think I was going to allow you to give her all our money?”

  Laughing, he replied, “I thought you were going to say twenty thousand. When you said seventeen, I was like, look at Ma, low-balling Princess.”

  “I knew her greedy ass would take it and wouldn’t lose any sleep about taking our last dime. Just make sure you’re careful, and if you smell a setup get out of there quick. And if you can’t get out of the situation, make sure you take one of them with you. You hear me!”

  “I hear you!”

  ***

  Later that day Lil Nut and Princess rode down Atlantic Avenue toward Cross Bay Boulevard. Blue Bug was living in a predominately Italian neighborhood in Howard Beach. Lil Nut couldn’t understand how Blue Bug managed to pull that off, but evidently he had. With his burner resting on his lap, just in case he had to put a bullet in Princess’s ass, he was prepared for the worst. The whole ride Princess couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Lil Nut wondered if she was talking so much because she was nervous, or if this was who she really was. If it was the latter, then he could understand why Blue Bug got the fuck out of there.

  “Do you know that last year all I asked that motherfucker to buy me for Christmas was a fox fur coat, and do you know that he walked up in my house on Christmas morning empty-handed? Yes, he did. He had the nerve to walk into my house empty-handed. So I said to him, ‘Blue Bug! I know you got my coat downstairs in your fancy ride. Now stop playing. Go back downstairs and get my coat. Don’t play no games with an old woman.’ And you know what?” Princess asked, not allowing Lil Nut to answer, “He didn’t have shit for me at all. Nothing. And he came in and gave Lady Bug a little funky nameplate. And not one with diamonds, but the cheap, raggedy one with the diamond chips. Can you believe that? My daughter was with his ass for two years, and that’s all he bought her for Christmas. That cheap bastard deserves everything he’s about to get. Do you think I feel sorry for his ass? Hell no, I don’t feel sorry for his cheap ass!”

  Lil Nut couldn’t understand Princess’s sense of entitlement. She was speaking as if Blue Bug owed her something, when the fact of the matter is that he didn’t. He made the money and took the risk. Bottom line.

  For the next twenty minutes, Lil Nut tuned out Princess. He needed to be focused when he rolled up on Blue Bug. There wasn’t any way he could slip up, because if he did, Blue Bug had enough money to hire an army to come after him, and even enough money to put a bounty over his head.

  “Turn left at that McDonald’s on the corner of Cross Bay and then slow down. His house is on the right hand side of the block,” Princess said.

  Lil Nut could see that Princess had begun to duck down. And her nervousness made him nervous.

  “What? You see him?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t, and I don’t want to. Park over here behind this black Jeep.”

  Lil Nut did as he was told and cut off his ignition. He was ready to get it over with. He didn’t like the white man’s neighborhood, and figured that he and Princess stood out like sore thumbs.

  “We can’t stay parked here,” Lil Nut reasoned.

  “His house is only a couple feet away. You see the house with the black shutters? That’s him.”

  “I understand that, but if someone walks by and sees us here for a while, they might get suspicious and call the police. Or they might try to attack us on some riot shit. You see what happened with Michael Griffith being attacked here in Howard Beach and chased down until he was hit and killed by a car. That ain’t gonna be me.”

  “Shit. That ain’t gonna be me either. What you want me to do? Go and knock on his door and tell him to come outside so you can murder him?”

  Lil Nut wasn’t in the mood for such sarcasm. But it did spark an idea. He peeled off and began to ride around the neighborhood.

  “Whatchu doing?”

  “I’m wasting time. It’s not dark enough. It should be dark in an hour, and then I got a plan.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You hungry?” he asked.

  “Look at my fat ass. What kind of question is that?”

  Lil Nut drove to the borderline of Brooklyn and Queens, and he and Princess went into the Lindenwood Diner to get something to eat. Princess ordered a fish dinner and Lil Nut ordered steak and French fries. After they finished eating, he headed back to his destination.

  He parked around the corner from Blue Bug’s house and told Princess to get in the driver’s seat, keep the car running, and be on high alert. She took her orders like a pro, because she knew that within a couple of hours she was going to be rich.

  Lil Nut hugged the shadows as he inched down the block toward Blue Bug’s house. He knew that Blue Bug’s car alarm was always being triggered because of all the custom work he had done to his ride. Blue Bug was too cheap to allow Mercedes Benz to do the work, so he hired a local mechanic, and he got what he paid for.

  All it took were a few nudges on the car to trigger the alarm. Lil Nut hunched down and waited for his opportunity. When he heard a front door open and a chirp of the alarm, aggravation sunk in. He assumed that Blue Bug had opened up the front door and simply shut off the alarm.

  Lil Nut shook the car, and once again the alarm went off. For the second time the front door opened, Lil Nut heard the chirp, and the door closed and locked. As frustrated as Lil Nut was, he knew that he would break down Blue Bug eventually. When he set off the alarm for the third time, he actually heard the front door open and slam. He knew Blue Bug was coming out, but to Lil Nut’s amazement, it was a young, sexy female. And she wasn’t an earth. She was dressed regularly in a pair of tight Guess jeans and Reebok sneakers. She wasn’t more than eighteen years old.

  Lil Nut pounced on her, put the gun to her head, and whispered, “Don’t say a word or you’re dead. Do you understand me?”

  The frightened girl’s eyes spoke volumes.

  “Is he in there?”

  She nodded.

  “Is he alone?”

  Again, she nodded.

  Lil Nut made the girl walk in front of him and lead him into the house. She kept walking through the house until Lil Nut saw Blue Bug sprawled out in his king-sized bed, naked, sipping on a Guinness Stout beer. You could tell that they had just finished fucking. The smell of sex was still lingering in the air. Lil Nut was disgusted that he had the audacity to send the beautiful female outside in the frigid cold to check on his car.

  Everything happened fast. Blue Bug looked up to address his female companion and saw Lil Nut instead. In one swift movement Blue Bug tried to go for his gun, but he didn’t have a chance. Lil
Nut emptied four bullets into his head, neck, and chest. The young girl began begging for her life.

  Lil Nut shoved her to the ground and retreated out of the house. Once outside he hugged the shadows again, walking briskly back to the getaway car. He kept thinking of all the things he wanted to say to Blue Bug before he put him to sleep, but it all happened too quickly. The one thing he was glad about was that Blue Bug knew exactly who sent him to meet his maker and why.

  “Let’s go!” Lil Nut said when he got in the car.

  “You did it?” Princess asked.

  “Just get the fuck out of here.”

  Princess began to laugh hysterically. “You one bad motherfucker! When you gonna stop letting people call you Lil Nut? Your crazy, bold ass should just start going by Nut.”

  ***

  That night Lil Nut paid Princess her money and slept peacefully back at home in his mother’s house, in his own bed. The next morning his aunt called and told him that Samantha had been burning up the phone lines calling every second of the day looking for him. Lil Nut no longer wanted to be bothered with her. He knew that if he kept her around, she would hold the three murders over his head for life, and as far as he was concerned, he wanted to leave the past in the past.

  ***

  As the preacher said the eulogy for his father, Lil Nut was consumed with grief. Ironically, his two former friends were being laid to rest on the same day as his father. The whole neighborhood was grieving, each in their own way. Lil Nut had bought his father an expensive navy blue suit with a baby blue tie for his burial. He tried to convince himself that his father was in a better place, a place where he could get high all day and not be judged. He still couldn’t swallow how dirty Blue Bug did his father, but he did what he had to do. At his wake, he asked that he have a few minutes alone with his father and he really poured out his heart.

  “Pops, I really miss you, man. What am I gonna do without your words of wisdom? Do I really have what it takes?” Lil Nut’s tears streamed down his cheeks and landed on the sleeve of his father’s suit jacket. “I did that, man. I rocked all those niggas to sleep for hurting you and Ma. I’m just sorry that it took me so long, but I feel like I’ve grown up overnight. I’m a man now. If not in age, then mentally. I promise I’ma make you proud of me and hold down the fort.”

  When they lowered his father into his grave and began to throw dirt on top of his casket, his mother lost it. She began screaming and hollering, and Lil Nut had to physically restrain her. If he’d let her go she would have jumped on top of the casket to be with her husband. He realized that his father was the only man his mother had known, and it was going to be hard letting him go.

  When they got back from the funeral and the limousine dropped them off in front of their building, he bumped into Lamiek’s sister, Katina. He went to give her his condolences and she just glared at him. Lil Nut shrugged it off. He didn’t give a fuck whether she knew the truth. Her brother had lived by the gun, and he died by the gun. Lamiek was a grimy dude who always had one foot in the grave anyway. Lil Nut just reasoned that he had to give him a little push. Shit, that was what friends were for.

  ***

  In the next few weeks as the weather broke, the city formed a task force to combat all the violence that the crack wars were bringing. The mayor of New York got on television to boast about TNT, a covert operation that was supposed to regulate all the drug activity in the urban neighborhoods. Within one week, they had the hood under siege. The TNT squad jumped out of undercover vans, sprayed unsuspecting drug dealers with mace, and threw them into the paddy wagons, hauling the busload of individuals to jail.

  Lil Nut realized that he had to change up his operation, and quickly. He’d managed to stay above the law, and he wanted to keep it that way.

  One day a few weeks after Lil Nut had returned home, he overheard his mother on the phone with his aunt.

  “You mean to tell me that that girl is still calling over there for my son? Now what on earth did that boy do to her? He must have bust her cherry . . .” Julie said.

  Lil Nut chuckled at his mother and his aunt with their little gossip conversations. He knew that his life was the only excitement that they both had at the moment. Briefly he thought about Samantha and what they had shared. He wondered if he ever felt anything real for her. He sure hadn’t thought about her in the past four weeks since she blew up on him over the phone. But he did have a lot on his mind. He thought about calling her just to catch up. Maybe she could come over and give him some sex.

  He waited until his mother got off the phone and then called Samantha. Her father answered the phone.

  “May I speak with Samantha, please?”

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  Lil Nut hesitated for a moment. “This is Nelson.”

  “Sure, hold on a moment.”

  Lil Nut could hear her father calling her to the phone. Finally she picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, what’s up, ma?”

  “Lil Nut?”

  “Who you think it is?”

  She sucked her teeth. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Too busy to call me?”

  “I’m calling you now.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. I’ve been calling you for weeks, and I know your aunt gave you all my messages. After all I’ve done for you, this is the thanks I get?”

  There she goes again, Lil Nut thought. He was right to think they wouldn’t work out.

  “I thought I did thank you, but if I didn’t, thanks. Look, I gotta go—”

  “Wait—”

  “Nah, I’m busy. I promise I’ll call you back,” Lil Nut lied.

  Samantha began to panic. She knew she’d fucked up and had to think of something.

  “Don’t hang up before I tell you what I know.”

  “Know about what?”

  She lowered her voice. “GG’s been calling me like crazy trying to get me to go over to her house.”

  “So?”

  “So, I can’t go over there after you did what you did.”

  “Why the fuck not? Ain’t y’all friends?”

  “I helped you murder her boyfriend.”

  “She doesn’t know that unless you told her.”

  “I didn’t tell her shit, but of course she knows. She ain’t stupid.”

  “Weren’t you the one who told me she was!”

  “I never said she was stupid. I just said that I wasn’t stupid.”

  “Are you telling me that you haven’t gone to visit her since her man got murked?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well if she didn’t know for sure that you were involved, she knows now. How fucking stupid of you, Ms. Smarty Pants. You were supposed to play it cool. What else is she going to think?”

  “Well if you would have called me back you could have told me what to do. I never took the class, How to Behave After You Set Up a Person To Get Murdered 101.”

  Lil Nut couldn’t take her stupidity a moment longer. Inside he was angered and boiling over. Had she been a dude, he would have smashed all of her teeth out. But she was a girl and he didn’t hit women. He spoke with her a little while longer and then she finally let him get off the phone. He vowed never to call her again, and prayed that she kept her mouth shut. She was definitely a loose canon.

  ***

  It wasn’t the headline that caught his attention in the Daily News, but the picture that stopped him dead in his tracks. Each morning Lil Nut had a routine of walking to the corner store and buying the Daily News and a small hot chocolate. As he flipped through the pages he saw a picture of Samantha, and it wasn’t a good article. Apparently her murder was under investigation. Her body was found in the vestibule of her Harlem apartment buil
ding with two bullets to the back of the head, and one bullet in her face. After she was shot, the person or persons turned her over and shot her in the face. The police suspected that it was personal. She still had on her jewelry and her purse was still there. The perpetrator had wanted to leave a message.

  Lil Nut closed the paper and knew the message. It was from GG and her brother, Chris. GG wasn’t going to let go that Samantha had her man murdered. Lil Nut felt bad. He should have protected her, but he didn’t. He thought about going after GG and her brother for revenge, but he was tired of revenge killing. He needed to concentrate on making money. And the more bodies that piled up, the tougher the city would be on crime. Soon no one would be allowed to eat if the murder rate didn’t decline.

  As he walked slowly back to his apartment, he decided that he wouldn’t go see her laid to rest, but he did plan on sending a bleeding heart to the funeral home in hopes of paying his respects. Admittedly, this had definitely been a difficult two years. Now he could finally look forward to his future in the crack game.

  4

  “Know you heard this before; never get high, on your own supply.”

  —“Ten Crack Commandments,” Notorious B.I.G.

  1987

  The bass from the boom box radio that sat atop a milk crate spit vibrations through the air. It was the summer of ’87, and the weather was in the low eighties.

  The new joint from Eric B. and Rakim blared from the speakers.

  “This joint is ill right here!” Butter said. He’d finally been released from juvenile detention and Lil Nut had convinced him that it was better to make money instead of taking money. He bobbed his head hard to the beat of the rap that Rakim was spitting.

  Butter, Fatman, and Lil Nut all stood on Rockaway and Pitkin Avenue. The Ave was busy since most were en route to and from their destinations. But Lil Nut and his crew were out there to sell crack.

  The crew all bobbed their heads and rapped along with Rakim.

  “That shit is sick right there!” Butter was amped. Eric B. and Rakim were his favorite rap duo. “I’m saying, can’t nobody get with them!” Butter continued to boast.