Nick and I along with three girls from around the way sat in my room over a fifth of Grey Goose, warm pizza, and some well twisted blunts. They all laughed, I just thought about the safe. What’s in it? What if it’s empty? I know he wouldn’t leave it empty. What should I do with the money? Nick was cool when drunk, and we had been drinking seriously for a while, but the girls were annoying. The kind of annoying that’s not cute—young, loud, and annoying. I didn’t know them and really wasn’t trying to meet them. My focus was on the safe.
“Hey, ladies, no disrespect but y’all gotta go,” I said, moving everyone out into the hallway.
“What the fuck!” they replied from the other side of the door. I opened it and put the Goose and pizza on their side. Our place was a real teenager bachelor pad with no decorations, blank walls, Nike boxes stacked, and nothing in the fridge but Fruit Roll-Ups. Nick had a collection of empty Hennessy bottles on the countertop. All of our dishes were paper and all of our cups were plastic and red. We really had nothing but a bunch of sneakers, some air mattresses, and that safe.
I locked my door and kneeled in front of the safe. The numbers were a little faded, but clear enough for me to make them out: 02-right-10-right-08-left-19-right-02.
Bip taught me how to open it blindfolded so that I could crack it under any circumstance. I remember when we used to have to lie on our backs and kick the door closed because he had so much money in there.
I had to give the handle an extra tug because it was a little rusted around the edges. I dropped my weight and the door flung open. All types of shit spilled out. I slowly started pulling out the contents and laying them on the floor around me. Stacks and bundles of balled up and unseparated cash, receipts, a watch, maybe a brick and a half of Aryan-colored cocaine, about half a brick of heroin, two pistols, a big zip of vials, a Michael Jordan rookie card in a plastic case, and some pictures: mostly Polaroids of naked girls from our block, a few party pics, and then one of us. Me as a toothless kid with dreads at the top of my fade wearing a red 76ers Starter jacket propped up on Bip’s bony shoulders. He was wearing the same jacket and haircut. No facial hair, no worries, no problems. Just us and our U-shaped smiles. The back of it read “Bip and Lil Dee Dunbar v. Mervo 91.”
Nick knocked on my door.
“Yo, Rita wanna fuck you, nigga, stop buggin’. Come on out!” he yelled.
Juvenile’s “Ha” remix was cranking, making our thin walls shiver. I guessed they had continued the party downstairs. I cracked the door.
“Nick, cut that shit off and put them out. I need to show you something.” My cold stare sparked urgency in him.
I slammed the door in his face and started reloading the safe. I put the coke and about three double handfuls of cash back in. I also threw the receipts and pistols in as well. I tacked the picture of us up over my bed and locked the safe just in time to hear Nick say, “Dee, we good? Lemme in.”
“Yeah, Nick, come in, the door’s open.”
Nick walked in with his .45 drawn and cocked. “Wassup, dug?”
He looked over and saw the pile of cash. “Niggas is rich” came out of his mouth over and over again. Nick had never seen that amount of money stacked up like that—but I had.
I knew we weren’t rich and I could easily eyeball a pile of street money. My guess was about $70K minus what I stuffed back into the safe. In Nick’s defense, $70K in street money could easily look like two million dollars to the naked eye. Street money is thick, wrinkled, tatted, bulky, and fluffy—every dollar has a story.
I told Nick that we had a decision to make. I still had mixed feelings about selling drugs. I never set out to be a part of that life, but that never stopped that life from setting out to be a part of me. Eighteen, with more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash and product—I could probably open a business. Or I could give the drugs away and start with a clean slate, maybe even go back to school—a real black college like in A Different World.
But I knew I didn’t want school and I didn’t know anything about a legal business, so why not? Every neighborhood I lived in was flooded with fiends—burned-out people who all wanted the same thing, an escape, which is what I had. Nobody else gives a fuck about this drug shit, so why should I? Why should I care?
Junkies are killing themselves, I thought to myself over and over again. This shit is bigger than me, bigger than everything.
“So look, Nick, this coke looks really, really, reallyyy good. It’s probably better than ninety-nine percent of the shit on this planet. You gonna help me move it and we gonna split the money fifty-fifty. I’m thinkin’ we should break it up into ounces and go dirt cheap like $550 to $650 to the niggas we like and seven hundred a joint to everyone else, because it’s all profit.”
“Hell NO! Did you try some of that shit?” he replied.
Nick said that we would be leaving a ridiculous amount of money on the table. I said, “I know but I don’t want to get stuck with it, and I’m not slanging hand-to-hand on anybody’s block.” Nick said that he would do all of the dirty work and I wouldn’t have to touch a thing, not a single vial. “Naw, I’ll earn my share,” I said.
Nick was right. That coke looked too good to be wholesaling ounces; asking for $650 would be like giving it away. I figured that I was already taking the risk of getting a kingpin charge with all of this coke lying around so I might as well maximize my profit margin. I told Nick I’d assemble a crew and that we could cap up half of the coke into $10’s, $20’s and $30’s, put it over in Bucktown by Ellwood Park and let it sell itself. “And wholesale the other half for $950 a joint?” he said.
“Naw, Nick, I’ma cook that into crack. Watch me fry.”
Nick nodded in agreement as he tucked his pistol in his waistband. Nick has a five-year minimum sentence strapped to his hip, I thought, as I looked at the pile of twenty-five to life in front of us on the floor. I had another hundred-plus years inside of the safe with another twenty years stashed under my bed.