“BRUH, LET ME HOLD THE WHITE.”
The car screeched to a stop. Wood nearly blew a fuse. He was so mad I thought he was going to hit me.
“You out your fucking mind!” he yelled. “I been telling you about this rap shit and you wanna handle the work? Nah, bruh. Leave this shit alone. We’re not out here doing this to look fly.”
Wood’s term to always “keep it one hundred” rang a bell. So many dope boys break down in those interrogation rooms on The First 48 television show because that brother took on a life and wasn’t ready to keep it one hundred. He knew the risk when he put his hands on that white girl. He knew it came with certain liabilities. If the decision ushered in the dark instead of the light, the code required the hustler to deal with it. Life was so hard in Miami it caused people to take on such risks.
Choirboys who started slinging dope for the hell of it, because of greed or the thrill factor, are the first to start giving up names. For every choice one makes in this world a consequence follows. I was ready to live within those parameters.
Wood gazed at me. I shook my head. He knew me by now. Those close to me began to understand that Maurice was going to do what he wanted to do. I was virtually on my own since I could walk. It was damn near pointless for anyone to tell me what to do now.
“It’s grown-man business, bruh. There’s certain rules to this shit. It ain’t like when you were out there in the Beans flipping dollar joints,” warned Wood. He tried; however, he knew I would find some way of getting to the powder. If it meant I had to jack some known hustler to do so, I was going to get to her. Wood shook his head.
Like I said before, the Miami River cops flooded the city with the stuff. Anyone could get their hands on bricks. Slinging coke was a profitable side business for a school-crossing guard. Pies use to go for between $40,000 to $50,000 in the days of Mundey and Roberts. Now anyone could get a pie for between $15,000 and $18,000 depending on who they knew. Cocaine suppliers were rogue dealers. Grocery-store managers and even the cop patrolling a neighborhood served packages. A random person sometimes drove by the strip and displayed bricks on his or her backseat. Those suppliers were like ghosts. No one knew who the hell they were connected to. He could have been the supplier himself. It was strategic on the part of someone’s supplier to keep their customer in the dark on the whereabouts of the supply chain and price ranges and such. That’s how they got rich while their middlemen did the dirty work. We were slaves to the supplier. Liberty City was a plantation ripe with cocaine as opposed to cotton. We were just some teenage niggas from the projects making them rich. These slave masters were some scary motherfuckers.
It was usually a Haitian or Cuban dude with no regard or respect for American life or its laws. A tourist wouldn’t want to get lost in these cats’ hoods while visiting the Caribbean. They were on a whole other level of carnage. As far as they saw it, American foreign policy had been bending their impoverished countries over without Vaseline for years. Making little Tommy a freebasing dope fiend was of no concern of theirs. Their plan was to make money in America and head back home with newfound wealth. Most were supporting families back in the islands with the proceeds. If black folks in America weren’t wise enough to use the powder as a means to an end as opposed to getting fucked up on it, that was on us. They tried to school us along the way. As I mentioned earlier, they didn’t take too kindly to taking crap from white folks. The chains of slavery had left the Caribbean way before they fell from our wrists.
Every time the cops would cruise by, those Jamaican hustlers would holler, “Bloodclot slavery ah finish, partna! I’ll put two in a buoy, bloodclot head!”
I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I knew they weren’t taking any shit. The Jamaican crew Shower Posse was one of the most insane crews to ever take up residence on U.S. soil. A Caribbean hustler’s dope money was usually tied to a political cause so their motivation to sling was far more intense. They even displayed their wealth differently. They weren’t flashy. Even with millions in foreign bank accounts, a beaten-down Land Cruiser was sufficient transportation. We spent our money on decked-out Cadillacs. There was a minor rivalry between us and the Caribbean and Latin gangsters, but we got past the language and cultural barriers when it was time to share the white girl. I guess we were stricken with jungle fever.
That night Wood studied me. He knew his younger brother was boarding a sinking ship. He hoped I’d jump overboard before it sank. People may say that Wood should have fought tooth and nail to keep me away from those streets. How could he? Hustling was in our DNA. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. It landed squarely at the root.
“I can’t come behind you and clean up the milk you spill, bruh,” Wood warned me. For all the love we shared, hustling was an individual trade. Any slick deals or shady business on my part might come back to literally kill him. In the streets, cosigning someone meant you bet your life on him. Another hustler would kill the snake as well as the person that put it in his midst. Wood knew he never had to worry about me snitching or the like. He feared my temper most.
“Bruh, you gotta pick your battles out here,” he told me. “This ain’t like the playground where a dude knocks you down and you heal. Ain’t no coming back from a bullet to the head.”
“These niggas can’t see me bruh,” was my foolhardy response.
He tried to warn me against it, but I went to Santana Red’s warehouse. Santana was the man to see if any aspiring drug dealer wanted a piece of the white. I called up one of the older hustlers I knew was connected to him and we headed out.