My first year running Stadium Hideaway breezed. The money wasn’t great but it was steady. Steady enough to sustain my vacuum of a mortgage. And I didn’t care that the house sucked up every nickel as I watched my profits leave the register and go straight to my mortgage, second mortgage, and property tax, because I loved living in Bolton Hill.
I liked walking over those clean streets to the park on Park Avenue. Art students walked past with easels and patched jackets and backpacks, my neighbors looked happy—in the mist of all the craziness in Baltimore city, they looked happy. I even saw a woman sitting on her front playing a harp one day. It felt like I was living in a bubble—and the bubble was called high property tax.
I still had some drug money put up. Enough to not know how low my cash flow really was. My new legit stash was tucked next to my old street stash creating the illusion of me experiencing success. To celebrate, I traded my 500 in at R & H Motors and bought a hundred-thousand-dollar car—a silver CL600 with a V12 engine. That car made me lots of friends. I felt like people wanted autographs. Cops pulled me over—over and over again—and it was nothing they could do because I was cool, my papers were straight, and I wasn’t in the drug game. “You should come to the happy hour at my bar, Stadium Hideaway on Lombard Street!” I’d tell them. “A lot of girls are there and our drinks are cheap enough for you to afford!”
I had the hottest car in the city and nowhere to go so I ended up going back on Madeira Street. Nick built a little crew up. The only guy who was around from my day was Fat Tay—still funky and still chasing those little girls. Dog Boy was sitting for a gun charge. He and Hurk turned the neighborhood to the Wild Wild West, shooting at each other every time they crossed paths. Mac kept his promise and kept LT from killing Hurk but Dog Boy was a different story. Nobody could control Dog Boy.
Mac and I begin to develop a close relationship. We hooped every day, doubled dated, and bought all of the same Jordans and Nike Uptempos. He was also one of my only east side friends who came to my bar every day. Mac was still in the street and I was on a mission to pull him out. I gave him money for trade school, got him a job selling cars, and even tried to find a business that we could do together, but no dice. It started feeling like the street fame was more important to Mac than the money that came with it.
We sat in the bar after the after-hours one night and I tried to teach him how life gives out rules, and it was up to us to master these rules, benefit from the ones that played in our favor and then break the ones that we could get away with.
“For example,” I said, “we are street niggas. We start out in the hood that’s full of junkies and dealers. The cops are racist and the teachers only show up to get paid so they don’t care if we make it or not. That’s the hand we start with!”
“So you saying that we ain’t gonna be shit anyway?”
“No, man, I’m saying that once we acknowledge that these are our hurdles, and that the goal is for us to die or go to jail, only then can we make a plan to beat those odds. I got off the block and switched to wholesale because everybody on the block falls off. It’s a failed system. I stopped selling drugs because everybody gets caught. And when I notice another obstacle, I’ll switch it up again.”
“You talk all that shit, Dee, cuz you ain’t gotta record. I got charges, kids and some other shit you don’t know about!” he said with wet red eyes, guzzling his big red plastic cup of gin and pouring another.
“Yeah, I don’t know your whole life, but I know games, and this is a game. When selling drugs, my goal was to wake up, hit my quotas, duck cops, duck haters, keep my life, and stay out of jail. That was the game and I approached it just like that. That’s why I’m not dead and that’s why I don’t have any real enemies except the dudes who didn’t like me anyway.”
“And what game are you playing now, Dee? What’s this game?”
“This game is about hitting my quotas, ducking cops, ducking haters, keeping my life, and staying out of jail. The cops are still racist and I guess I approach it the same, except alcohol is a legal drug. Legal drugs, same bullshit.”
We toasted our cold cups and laughed.
“On some real shit, Dee, you can’t relate to my situation cuz you speak different. Nigga. you probably gonna be a millionaire off of some legal shit anyway and you don’t even know it. You like a real-life genius nigga and you don’t even know it.”
I looked down at my phone and saw that LT was blowing it up—I missed like fifteen calls from him so I hit him back.
Ring ring ring…
“Yo, Dee, you good?”
“Yeah, LT, wassup?”
“Yo, they murdered Uncle Gee, man, he got killed at the club tonight!”