EVERY HOOD HAS AT LEAST ONE CAT LIKE BOONER or Junior. These are the cats who see little brothers on the corner drifting. In the absence of organized programs they scrounge something together to give the kids something better to do besides “shooting and robbing.” They see the potential in lost causes. They may have been that lifeline for a 50 Cent, Lebron James, Russell Simmons, or some other successful brother who could easily have gone the wrong way. It could be the dude that turns an abandoned warehouse into a boxing ring where the shorties can punch out their frustrations, the teacher who runs a basketball league on the weekends. Booner and Junior offered newspapers.
Those cats are never given a community service award at the swanky black-tie ceremonies. Those spectacles are usually reserved for the crooked politician who opens some rec center in the hood and slaps his name on it and never returns until election time. No, you’ll never read about Old Man Booner and Junior in the Miami Herald. When they picked me up at Fire Star, I was being a hard-ass like most boys who thought they could tough it out on their own.
I told Sticks to watch the pumps so I could use the bathroom. I didn’t need to use the bathroom at all. I went back there to count my tips. Counting money in public was like a death wish. You never know who’s watching. People in the Beans were struggling. Folks were getting shot over less than $10.
When I got back, Sticks was arguing with some old dude driving a white van. He made a gesture for the van to keep driving.
“What’s up, Sticks? Everything cool?” I asked.
“No, these two old geezers tying up the pump. They won’t drive off.”
I turned to Booner. Standing there, hands folded, he looked old enough to be my grandfather.
“Y’all heard the man. If you don’t need gas, please keep it moving,” I warned.
“Oh, you’re the boss out here?” Booner asked.
“Yeah, I guess you could call me that. But that really ain’t none of your damn business.” Up until that point I can’t say I backed down from anyone or anything. I didn’t take kindly to being pushed around by anyone. These dudes were going to respect me.
“Boy, you know what time it is? Your mama know you out here?” asked Booner.
“I’ll say it louder ’cause it seems you’re hard of hearing. My business is my damn business.”
“Young blood does have a point there, Boon,” said Junior.
Booner jumped back in the van and started the engine. “Yeah, his business is his business. I was just wondering if he wanted to make a couple extra dollars. Oh, well.”
Before the van could lurch forward, I blurted out, “How much are you talking about?”
“That depends on how hard you’re willing to work,” answered Junior.
I looked back at Sticks. He nodded. In a weird way I knew Sticks thought it wasn’t safe for me to be out there at Fire Star. He didn’t want me to fall into the traps that led him to be taking orders from a fresh ten-year-old. Yeah, me and Sticks were friends. I guess he liked the fact that I never judged him. I broke bread with him. When he nodded, it was his way of telling me, “Get the fuck outta here.” I jumped in the van and never saw Sticks again. My shift at Fire Star was over, for good.
“Boy, what you doing out here this late anyhow?” Booner dug into me.
“My mama told me never talk to strangers. You guys look like strangers.”
Booner chuckled. Folks in the hood knew I was fresh. I had a slick mouth. You could say I was witty.
“Ain’t your mama Pearl?” asked Junior.
“Yeah, he look just like Pearl, don’t he?” replied Booner.
“You got something to say about my mama!?” I snapped back.
“Nah, young blood, just seeing where you get it from.”
When they dropped me off, Booner gave me firm instructions.
“We’re picking you up at six a.m. sharp. If you’re not ready, you don’t make the cash.” He didn’t have to worry. I stayed up all night wondering what those two old cats had in mind, guessing on what the big moneymaking heist could be. Still a minor, I was sure they wanted me to boost some stereos out of someone’s car or drop off some kind of package to a customer. Older hustlers in the neighborhood were always looking for young shorties with heart to run errands. I fit the bill.
Whatever it was, I knew I would score big. I thought about the things I could buy with the pesos. It was time to retire our black-and-white television. The thing got pounded so much it had a dent the size of the Grand Canyon. An old wire hanger served as the antenna. Or maybe I could get the new Atari. A new TV and game system would make me the talk of the Beans. The grand idea Booner and Junior had to make me rich was newspapers.
“Y’all got to be kidding!” I yelled when Booner and Junior picked me up that morning. “Y’all think I’m about to go walking around in the hot sun selling newspapers!? Let me out!” I was on my way to becoming wealthy one newspaper at a time. My chariot to riches was equally disturbing. The van was moldy inside with no seats. It was hot as a skillet of fried chitlins and smelled just as bad. In the middle of the summer with no air-conditioning, that van most certainly was going to be where I died of a heatstroke.
That’s when I met O’Sean and Darryl. We would soon become connected at the hip. I used to bump into them on the basketball court in the Beans, but we never spoke. I had got into a fight with Darryl over a customer at Winn-Dixie before Jean saved him from a can of whup ass. Honestly, Darryl would have kicked my ass, but I would have given him a run for his money. Young cats like us were always scrapping to prove something to the older dudes. The hardest among us would get the attention of OGs.
Now we were stuck on the same team sitting side by side on the floor of Booner’s van. I made my case. If they wanted old Booner and Junior to bamboozle them into hustling newspapers in the hot sun, they would have to do so without me.
“I’m telling y’all these dudes are busters. They got us looking like clowns,” I told the crew.
“Look, they told us it’s honest money. Besides, I’m tired of pushing carts outside of Winn-Dixie,” fired back Darryl.
We were getting played by two hustlers and no one saw it but me. The nerve of these two old busters to hustle shorties that could have been their grandsons. I wasn’t about to drink the Kool-Aid.
“Pull over! If you guys don’t pull over, I’ll scream for help and tell the police I’m being held hostage,” I yelled.
“Seriously, young blood, look around. You’re gonna yell for the police in the Beans?” asked Junior.
He had a point. The last time I saw a cop in my neighborhood he was trying to pick up some schoolgirl on her way home.
“Why don’t you calm down and hear us out for a minute? Or would you rather we drop you off at the gas station so you can go back to breaking bread with the homeless dudes?” said Booner.
Well, I had no intention of going back there and putting up with Habib’s jokes. I didn’t want to listen to his speeches on the ills of the hood or his soon approaching jihad, so I decided to stick around. Besides, Booner and Junior seemed like the types who would have harassed me all summer. They didn’t need the money. They never made a profit from selling the newspapers. Picking us up in that rusty, squeaky van was their way of saving us from the penitentiary or, at least, slowing down our race to get there. They also hoped we could discover our history through the very product we were peddling.
Back then and even to this day folks in Miami’s inner city didn’t care too much for the Miami Herald. It didn’t cover our lives. The paper pretty much reported on the day-to-day of the parts of the city that we never saw. Liberty City, Overtown, Opalocka, and Ghouls would get an occasional headline when some kid got his head blown off. Our paper was the Miami Times. A Bahamian dude by the name of Henry Reeves started the paper to cover our issues. On its pages Miami’s black history was recorded daily. Junior and Booner took pride in relaying that history.
“You guys know why this paper was started, right?” Booner would say. We had heard it all our lives, but Booner sure gave us his abbreviated version. “The mainstream media took a liking to calling us coons, jigaboos, and whatever other insults they could muster,” he said, turning to Junior, who nodded his approval.
“Judging by the likes of how you kids are behaving these days, I can’t say I give them any wrong,” Junior chimed in.
“Can we get to how we’re gonna make this money?” I interrupted. Darryl and O’Sean nodded.
The old men were going to give a rebuttal, but the fact that they had gotten all three of us in van was a start. The civil rights lesson would have to wait.
We were like a street team. We marched throughout the city armed with newspapers, canvassing all of Twenty-seventh Avenue and Seventh Avenue. Business was especially good in Overtown and Liberty City of course. I ran up to drivers at traffic lights, “Get your Miami Times! . . . Get your Miami Times!” Most of the drivers were polite. But when we traveled farther south into some of the suburbs like Pinecrest, it was evident that Miami hadn’t gotten past its racial demons. King and Malcolm had already died to change things, but down in Miami it seemed folks didn’t get the memo. Booner and Junior always had to show officers a permit when we pulled up to an intersection. They let us continue, but they obviously wanted us to sell our papers then get the hell out of there.
Elderly white women were especially rude. I would run up to the window to show off the newspaper’s headline while they sat in their Volvos. I beamed a broad smile to show off my pearly whites, but they locked their doors and rolled up their windows. In case the power lock didn’t work, they jammed their elbow against the door. It was especially amusing to see when those with automatic windows felt their windows weren’t going up fast enough. It was as if they saw the grim reaper approaching.
It didn’t matter how many days they saw me out there. In their twisted minds, that day could have been the day I was going to maul them to death with a newspaper. Those demons would rise up in me with the fury of Africa and compel me to tomahawk them to death with the Miami Times. Picture a ten-year-old bludgeoning good old Martha Stewart to death with the Wall Street Journal. That would be a sight for sore eyes. The thing about bigotry that always confuses me is whether the bigot ever realizes how irrational his behavior is. Seriously, you despise a ten-year-old boy selling newspapers for the simple makeup of his DNA? And they say that black people have the real issues. Go figure.
Booner would always pull us aside and try to explain the behavior. He knew it offended us. “Guys, some people are always gonna be victims of their own hate. Just pray for them because they’re the ones who are really suffering,” he would say.
I nodded but he knew I wasn’t listening. Go save that politically correct speech for the Harlem Boys Choir. Me, Darryl, and O’Sean were kids from the Beans who caught hell upon leaving the womb. Those old ladies looked like they were doing just fine to me in their Volvos and mansions along the bay. I’m sure their kids all graduated from Ivy League schools and were living high on the hog. Hell, their sons and daughters were probably the prosecutors giving out life sentences to young brothers on their first offense. The world isn’t fair by any means. I knew Booner meant well, but I wasn’t buying it. Save your pie-in-the-sky ideals, old man. In the game of life the good guys finish last, especially in Miami.
The money was good, however. At $.15 a paper, we were guaranteed a $.10 tip. Most days we each sold a hundred papers. That added up to $10. For a ten- or eleven-year-old that was a lot of money. I could go to the flea market and buy a pair of cheap shoes. The Scotch tape I used to cover the holes in my sneakers had worn thin. In the South we had jigga worms. They bore dens in the soles of your feet. Besides, this gig was different from the others. I didn’t think of it as a hustle. Booner and Junior made us believe selling those papers was a service to society. We were in the information-exchange business. It was a respectable job. I was proud to be a newspaper courier.
When the day ended, they treated us to dinner. They took us over to Jumbo’s at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street. We laughed and talked about the day while gulping down those spicy morsels. I used to stare at the homeless stragglers who congregated inside. They looked like the world had chewed them up, spit them in an alley, and said go to hell. Nevertheless, the staff was always gracious to them. With our pockets fat and stomachs filled, we headed back to the Beans. My mother enjoyed when I came home and rattled off the crazy events that went on in my day. All that mattered was that I wasn’t out robbing and jacking. Also, the job helped us out tremendously. I used the money to buy school clothes for myself and my brothers and sisters.
But it wouldn’t be too long before selling the Miami Times would fare less profitable than the good green. The herb was making its way to Miami in boatloads and via the friendly skies. Everyone was getting high in the projects. I wanted to reap the benefits.