Li’l Dick! Big Dick out! Get that Dick Get that Dick!” a slumped-back fiend would yell in front of Kim’s Convenience Store on Madison Street. Dog Boy and Long Tooth had copped that corner store so we started calling it the Dog Store. They didn’t own it, but they paid rent to the owners—a Korean family who had been there for a year or two. Korean storeowners are temporary in the hood like us because they pop up, run their shop, and then switch the ownership over to their relatives. I think foreigners get special tax breaks or something. So they keep flipping owners when that tax bill comes.
Dog Boy kept anywhere from three hundred to five hundred pills for re-up in the store behind the chip rack on the floor. A Mac 10 was behind the poker machine and other weapons strategically lined the rest of the store. Long Tooth handled the bread and oversaw the smaller ground stash outside. Dog Boy liked to use different junkies as hitters day in and day out, preferably heroin addicts because he didn’t have to worry about them stealing rocks.
“Yo, give dem hoes a blast in the mornin’ and anova at night and they work hard as shit all day, twenty or thirty dollars’ worth of dope and they work all day!”
I liked to watch those young boys work. They ran a tight ship and even though Dog Boy said he didn’t want to be like me, his strip told a different story. Fuck, his clothes told a different story. Ravens fitted hat cocked to the side like mine, unlaced Air Jordans like mine, Evisu jeans like mine, spitting balls of gum five feet away into the trash can like me, standing like me, bouncing a tennis ball like me, walking with a limp like me, and his little ass didn’t even limp—his legs were straight as shit!
His spot was doing well like mine too, and even though the Kims only let two grade school students in at a time, they allowed packs of crackheads to jam the store so a line wouldn’t form out front and make the strip too hot. During a rush when his spot was flooded with fiends or when the cops hopped out on them, Dog Boy or Long Tooth would give large amounts of cash to the Kims. They’d hide it in the store with their own belongings because the cops never really fucked with them. The Kims weren’t a special couple and it wasn’t a race or ethnic thing. Drug shops were run out plenty of stores by owners with roots stretching from West Africa to East Asia and back. A lot of these businesses would fold without guys like us—to think we paid from four hundred to a thousand dollars a week just to operate and they really had no choice but to get paid because we were going to do it anyway. The other major benefit of the store was that wintertime flow. Baltimore winters are colder than Hitler’s heart dipped in ice. Being stuck outside on the block meant chapped lips, ashy bleeding knuckles attached to numb hands, and aching-ass joints—the real grind. That’s the part that rappers leave out of songs, that extra shit that’s not mentioned in the job description.