YOU LEARN EARLY IN THE HOOD THAT CASH FLOW IS the name of the game. You ain’t shit without dollars, pesos, gwap, dinero, or whatever else they call money these days. We’ve all seen the commercials and sappy movies touting money as the root of all evil and how it can’t make you happy and all that. But you ever notice that the guy featured in those behind-the-fame Hollywood stories always has the epiphany after crashing numerous Ferraris and boning tons of supermodels? It’s never the guy working at the counter in McDonald’s singing the whole “money can’t make you happy” song.
Exactly.
He wants to experience the hot cars, fine chicks, and whatever else the cash can afford so he can test that theory out on his own. I needed to get mine. So I figured it was time for me to get a hustle. Pierre’s Thrift Grocery became a cash cow.
My mother, Scoop, and aunts were always trying to sucker some kid into running to the store to get something for them. The laundry list included Newports, beer, and potato chips. Folks were always harassing us kids to run to the store. I especially hated the runs to get tampons. Pierre’s was just one block across the Twelfth Parkway, but if my mother and her friends were watching an episode of Good Times, I became their errand boy. So much so the cashier at the store found it humorous.
“Damn, are you the black Speedy Gonzales?”
I heard it all.
But I had an idea to turn my shuffling back and forth into a business. It dawned on me that most folks would forget to ask for their change until I brought it up. So, I decided to charge them $1 per run. It doesn’t sound like much, but like I said before, it all adds up. I even added on surcharges for what you might call extreme working conditions. Runs before sunset cost $1. Runs after sunset were $1.50 because that’s when most of the shootings in the hood went down. I charged $1.75 for a half hour before the store closed.
People’s priorities in the projects can be really warped. Folks wouldn’t save their money to get up out the hood, but they had $5 to give a seven-year-old to run across the street to buy cigarettes. I can’t tell you how many times Fat Boy Slim sent me to get a Snickers bar, Jujubes, or pork rinds. He would have done better to open a junk-food store in his own apartment, given the amount of calories he soaked up each night. But those calories amounted to cash in my pocket.
A true hustler has to have more than one gig, of course. No one told me that seven-year-olds couldn’t work in the stockroom at Winn-Dixie, so I settled for bagging groceries. After school I raced to aisle 13. For those of you who have never bagged groceries, there’s a science to it and a pecking order, if that’s what you want to call it. There isn’t any money to be made in the express lanes because obviously there aren’t a lot of bags to carry out in shopping carts. The store manager was this Haitian guy named Jean. He was a pretty cool dude when he wasn’t schooling all of us bag boys on the lack of “home training” American kids suffer from. I think he liked me from the beginning because I worked hard. But good old Jean had a more practical reason for making me his favorite. A large community of well-to-do Haitians lived in the suburbs in southwest Miami-Dade. Jean and the rest of the less fortunate ones were toughing it out up here with us several blocks around the way in “Little Haiti,” a reality I don’t think Jean was happy about. I was underage so he didn’t have to pay me as much as the other bag boys. Early on, I learned that in this world people will try to get over in any way they can. Some people exist within the rules of the system. Others bend and manipulate those rules to make the system suit their needs. The latter become the bosses in society. Do your research if you don’t agree. Alongside exploiting me, however, he did occasionally throw in some good advice. “Remember customer service,” he told me. “People tend to open their wallets when you make them smile.”
After that, I always beamed a big one at the end of the cashier line. I made sure those shoppers saw my pearly whites. You cashed in when an old lady came to the register. On the way out you usually had to endure a lecture on how “you kids today are getting screwed up,” but for the most part it was a pleasant exchange. Most shoppers gave me a $.50 tip. The really cheap ones flipped a quarter. Some bastards gave me nothing. Can you believe that? I bagged your groceries, quite neatly I should add, making sure the eggs are at the bottom so they don’t break, and you can’t scrounge up a nickel? Some folks just had no class. But the old ladies were always the most generous. On occasion I got a dollar.
I wasn’t doing too bad if I helped twenty customers. I used to laugh all the way to the shoebox I stashed my cash in. I kept it in the vents in the roof of our apartment. With people going in and out of there like it was the Beans Holiday Inn, I had to make sure my money was secure.
I was pretty proud of my store-errand franchise. I was surprised no other kid had come up with the idea. When I and the other bag boys at Winn-Dixie got into an occasional spat over whose turn it was, Jean usually quelled the situation before it turned to blows. It was easy, trouble-free moneymaking.
At the end of the night, sometimes Jean treated me to a soda or Snickers bar from the vending machine. But my hustle didn’t end there. After bagging groceries I rode my bike over to the Fire Star gas station at the corner of Sixty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue.
The scene at the gas pumps outside Fire Star wasn’t drama-free. The cashier inside could care less about the homeless panhandlers that harassed the drivers as they drove in to fill their tanks. He cared even less about some kid from the Beans getting roughed up by one of them.
Sticks and Doc were regulars. I don’t remember much about their personal lives, but I know for sure life had dealt them a bad hand. Sticks was a rail-thin, half-dead-looking dude that a lot of customers felt sorry for so they let him pump their gas and clean their windows. Seriously, Sticks always looked like he was just one breath away from the graveyard, always coughing and shit.
Doc was a problem. That dude was scary. He was always talking to himself and shit. Word on the street was that he dropped out of medical school after his fiancée cheated on him. Who knows? I just made sure I didn’t cross him. The gas station lost a lot of business because of his antics. Doc didn’t take a liking to people telling him they didn’t want him pumping their gas. He gave one schoolteacher a treat I’m sure she will never forget. Hell, I’m sure that lady recounts this story to this very day.
She pulled up in her Toyota and got out singing one of those old gospel hymns. You know, the one where you’re told to lay your burdens down at the cross. Well, Doc came over and was polite at first.
“Ma’am, let me get that for you,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to get your clothes smelling like gasoline.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she replied.
Doc was accustomed to some reluctance. There could have been any number of reasons why people said no. Like I said, the dude just wasn’t right. So folks normally got scared, rolled their windows up, and waited for him to finish so they could speed off.
He leaned in. “Come on, lady, I’m just out here trying to earn a decent living. Let me get that for you.” He reached for the pump.
“Oh, I’ve heard that before!” she snapped back. “This is what you call a decent living? You’re nothing but a lazy lowlife trying to score an easy buck!”
“You don’t know me, lady!” Doc fired back.
“Yes, I do! People can’t go to the store much less the gas station without you bums harassing them!” she yelled.
“I got your bum, bitch!”
What happened next lives on in infamy. That lady picked the wrong homeless guy to insult that day. I’m sure she still wishes she had let good old Doc pump her gas. All she had to do was get in her car and put the radio on to her favorite gospel station, then drive off. Doc backed away. The lady turned away from him and continued singing. Then it happened. It was as if those lady’s insults had dug up some deep-rooted resentment Doc had harbored all these years. That schoolteacher should have known it’s never good to point the finger at someone’s circumstances, especially when you have no clues as to how they arrived there. She didn’t get the memo. The next thing we knew that lady was getting a yellow shower. Yes, Doc pissed on her. He hauled out his ding-a-ling and soaked her. I don’t even think that lady realized what was happening until a good ten seconds into the drenching. She screamed until the cashier ran out with a baseball bat and chased Doc away from the station.
Standing there, soaked from waist down in Doc’s piss, that lady was a sight. She cried and cried. Myself, Sticks, and the cashier did what any other upstanding gas station attendants would have done. We laughed and laughed and laughed some more. I was laughing so hard, my stomach cramped up. She jumped in her car and sped off. It just goes to show you that every dog has his day. We never saw Doc again, but I’m sure for those several seconds he felt like he had taken back some form of his dignity.
With Doc out of the picture, business ran a bit smoother for me. I learned to stave off the competition from panhandlers by simply breaking them off some of my tips. Most were bad for business anyway because, like Doc, they scared away customers. Already, I was learning how to control the market.
Every hustler knows that to gain you have to lose. Anyone that isn’t willing to break bread won’t make bread. It’s a catch-22 but a necessary one. When I got the homeless cats on my side, the cashier even took notice and gave me certain privileges. He gave me an occasional free bag of potato chips or a soda, which I shared with Sticks and the other cats at the pump.
My favorite customer was Drop Top Mo. He was cold as ice. I had never seen someone so fly in the hood before. When he cruised down the strip, he transformed it into a movie set. Lights. Camera. Action. Few were flashier than Mo. He would speed through in a blue Mercedes with the titties poking out. That’s what we call it when you drop the top on a convertible. Mo had plenty. He would chop the top off every car he drove. Back then a red-candy-painted Chevy Corvette cruising through Liberty City drew a crowd. Mo had about four of them in different colors.
When he pulled up in the Bentley with Gucci interior, everyone rushed the car. It sat on twenty-two-inch rims that could blind a blind man. The chick sitting in his passenger seat was just as fly. The rims weren’t the only things that glittered. He wore a long gold-rope chain with a diamond-encrusted medallion. The diamond ring on his pinkie finger was just as huge as the rocks in his pendant.
Sticks and the panhandlers would rush the car as if Jesus himself had arrived. Actually, it was like Jesus had come to Fire Star. The cashier peered from behind the counter and shook his head. Other customers rolled their windows up and locked their doors while I soaked it in.
I asked Mo if I could touch the car’s leather interior. I bobbed my head to the bass rocking the trunk. Inside sat twin Pioneer speakers I had never before seen. I stared at my reflection in the chrome-colored spinning rims.
“She’s a stunna, ain’t she? Yeah, this my baby right here,” said Mo.
“Wow, how much one of these cost?” I asked.
He stared at me, then chuckled. “More than your life, young blood. Nah, just kidding. She cost me a pretty penny.”
Mo never noticed that I took extralong to pump his gas. My favorite part came at the end when he pulled out a wad of cash held together by a diamond-enrusted money clip. He counted hundreds, even thousands. I had never seen so much money. Mo would hand me a twenty, sometimes a fifty. He was always a generous dude to me and the other shorties in the hood.
He jumped in the Bentley and revved the engine. “Sounds like she’s singing, don’t she?” he boasted.
I nodded. I imagined it was me sitting next to that bodacious babe. She had a rack of melons on her that could make any man drool. As they sped off down the avenue, I stood transfixed in a daydream clutching that $50 bill. I liked how it felt. I wasn’t sure how Mo came into so much money, but I would soon find out. Folks in Miami were always talking about my half brother Hollywood. Word on the street was that he was the youngest dude in Miami with the same cheese as older cats like Mo. For now, Hollywood’s wealth was but an urban legend in my mind. Thus far, everyone around me was broke as hell. Of course I wanted to meet him, but I took the stories with a grain of salt.
Then the station manager snapped me out of my daydream. “You lost your damn mind!” he yelled. “Put the pump up! You’re wasting my gas!” He pointed to my soaked sneakers. I had got so lost in my dream of squeezing those melons I was still clutching the gas pump. Gasoline was everywhere. Habib looked at me. He shook his head, then motioned to my pants pockets.
“No, I just made this tip!” I insisted.
“It’s not my fault you lost focus with the pimp of the city.”
I dug deep into my pocket and handed over the fifty.
“It’s like they say, Maurice, easy come, easy go,” he said. “Everything that glitters isn’t gold, my young friend.” At the time I didn’t see what Habib was trying to tell me. It was a subtle warning that he hoped would register in my mind.
I was ten. He was just a dude with a fucked-up accent getting free labor out of me, Sticks, and all the other Liberty City cats hustling for a buck while he soaked up the AC inside. Now he had the nerve to take the biggest tip I ever got. Fuck Habib.