I read about the case in the paper—98 percent of it was bullshit. They were connecting murders that didn’t have anything to do with each other and calling it gang related or organized crime all in an effort to make their case look better. There was no organization and no gangs, just childhood friends who shared customers and liked to hang out. The first paragraph of the article had at least three different sets of dudes from three different neighborhoods that they identified as a single gang.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Johns Hopkins Hospital had something to do with it because they conveniently swooped in and sucked up the neighborhood after the indictment. They even moved Miss Angie to the suburbs. She loved the idea of living in the county until she realized that she would no longer be able to walk to her favorite cleaners, the supermarket, and her church.
I saw Nick near where we used to hang, or what was left of it. His husky frame dissolved and sagged. He could no longer fill his big 4X clothes. I sat in the car for a second and watched him laugh and joke with children half his age—his new peers.
“Nick, wassup!”
He pulled a pistol from his waist and pointed it. “Fuck you want to be up, nigga?”
“Man, your old dirty ass ain’t shooting shit!” one of the kids yelled.
“It’s me, Dee!”
“You almost caught a hot one!” he said, approaching my car, and waving off the laughing kids. “Where the six at?”
I hopped out and told him that I had to move the six and the house because I didn’t have an income. “I’m happy to have this Honda!”
“Let’s go to ya bar, Dee! Get a nigga fucked up.”
“That’s gone too!”
We walked to the basketball court and watched wiry teens battle it out in a game of two on two.
“Yo, you wanna get next?” I asked.
“Naw, I can’t breathe right,” he said. “But I do gotta big play for us, man, glad you slid by, boy!”
Nick asked me to put $60K of my own money with $100K of his and another guy’s cash into this big deal that could get us ten bricks of cocaine. I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t want to do it. Enough was enough, and I knew that he didn’t have that type of money anyway. If he did, he probably would’ve been shooting up, and he probably wouldn’t stink, and I probably wouldn’t be able to see his toe through his Nike.
“I don’t sell drugs, man, you heard what just happened to Mac and them?”
He pushed away from the gate and reached out for a handshake. I slapped his palm—he squeezed mine and pulled me in closer. “Well, nigga, I suggest you stay away from here, cuz if you wasn’t my nigga, I’ll take what you have and kill you!”
I pushed him off me. “Do what you gotta do!”
He pulled out the gun, pointed it at me and said, “Bow!” and then walked down the block. That was the last time I saw Nick. It felt like that Nas song that goes “A thug changes and love changes and best friends become strangers.”
I heard Nick started raising his money through an old-school approach. He hit every block from east to west, shaking down dealers, jamming his gun down throats, and emptying the pockets of anyone selling anything. I heard he even hung a kid out of a window for three hundred dollars—any and every thing to get the money he was looking for.
We have a saying in east Baltimore that goes “Stick-up kids don’t last long” and it’s right. Some guys from one of the many crews Nick robbed caught up with him and blew his brains out on Ashland Avenue, steps away from where we used to hustle.
A huge part of my life was gone, but strangely, I found a piece of happiness in Nick’s death. Nick wasn’t Nick anymore and it was hard for me to see any change. I’m sure he could’ve left the streets and done something else but he never wanted to or never tried.
F.E.D.S. or Don Diva magazine were the only books I’d ever see him touch. He indulged on every level of the streets from fucking crackheads raw to wild shootouts, and the rush was a high like the drugs he stuffed in his body. His delayed reactions when someone asked him a question were sad. Listening to people call my friend a joke or a junkie-bitch was sad and worse than everything—seeing his short obituary was sad.
One paragraph that begins with being born at Johns Hopkins, elevates to being educated in the Baltimore City Public School System, and ends with being called home to Christ. The same tired paragraph I saw over and over again for most of my life, one of my biggest fears—not dying, but dying with the same story as everyone else.
At least he didn’t have to hurt any more.