INTERVIEW ANY SMOKER IN MIAMI WHO COPPED MY drugs back in the day. The consensus will be that I had the good white. Maurice’s stuff got smokers to that high they were looking for all week. It wasn’t just because I cared. I was using my product. I broke the first rule from the dope boy’s handbook and was getting high as a kite on my own supply. Pills, coke, crack, and all sorts of other drugs were helping me race through the madness that was my life. I valued the product I sold.
When cats that never used dope started slinging, they had no appreciation for the product. They didn’t understand just how much a good high meant when you hit rock bottom, so they added all kinds of chemicals to the drugs. They started remixing it. I could relate to my customers. I was their number one dope boy. We were all sleeping with the same bitch. No one got jealous. It was an open relationship of sorts.
My favorite was boonk.
I’d get 7 Cents weed from the Jamaicans and pack it in a blunt. I separated the seeds. You don’t want to burn those. Then I sprinkled some coke over it. I sealed that sucker and puffed. In that one toke all my problems went away. I was numb to the fact that I was permanently thrown out of the public school system. My resentment toward my father subsided. The projects didn’t seem so hopeless anymore. The piss scent that permeated from the curb was masked. All my worries went up in smoke. But the habit also made me more reckless than ever.
Word spread fast that my crew was on some Rambo shit. Every hood has its wildest pack of wolves. We were that crew. Folks started calling us the Get High Boys because of the bomb dope we sold. Rivals couldn’t even drive by us with a cold stare. We opened fire without thinking. After all, I was Trick. That’s what my friends started calling me. Coming up in the hood, everyone had a nickname. The label was usually something that made you stand out. In our opinion the government name your parents gave you was just some title to get by in society’s good graces. Maurice sounded good on a résumé. Trick embraced the street life. I added Daddy at the end because my friends said even though I was young, I acted like an OG.
The reputation came with a price. We were some young cats so the notion that we were really that hard-core rubbed some older dudes the wrong way. Then, some crews our age thought they were just as hard. In the hood it’s never good to front like you’re the hardest. Someone will always be lurking, ready to bring out the sweetness in you. That challenger decided to rob Wood’s mother. He went further than robbing her though. He outright disrespected her. “If I had time, I would fuck you, with your fine ass,” he told her. Since most boys in the hood grow up with single mothers, disrespecting someone’s old girl is off-limits. It’s like making a death wish.
The situation is ironic to say the least, given the way the terms bitch and ho are tossed around the hood so freely. Ghetto politics can be warped and twisted I guess. That’s how the mama jokes in the hood started. Someone would say, “Your mama is so fat, she looks like her pants are on steroids,” or, “Your mama smells so bad the Pine-Sol dude follows her around.” Insulting someone’s mother was the easiest way to get that person riled up. It was also the easiest way to get killed.
A week later at a house party we saw the same guy who robbed Wood’s mother. He was posted on the wall talking to a shone. Wood sent his friend Bobby over there.
“Hey, bruh!”
“Come here for a second!”
The guy jetted.
He ran out the back, then broke through the gate at the entrance to Rainbow City projects. Just like that his happy evening turned into the run of his life. We jumped in Wood’s Chevy convertible and sped after him. The car screamed down the avenue. He ran like a man possessed.
“Run, nigga, run! Run for your life, bruh!”
Shouts came from people spilling out the projects. Parents grabbed their kids from getting caught in the melee. We were now only several yards away. The guy turned to catch a glimpse of the car bearing down on him. The Chevy slowed to a creep. Wood reached for his rifle and aimed, then let the birds fly.
As we sped off, the guy was slumped on the curb in a pool of blood. As we saw it, he had no business disrespecting Wood’s mother. Back then, the consequences of taking a life never really weighed heavy on our psyches. People in my neighborhood acted before they thought. No one contemplated the what-ifs. When tomorrow repeats like the same sorry yesterday, people end up existing only within the moment. Right now this nigga crossed the line, so he gotta die. No ifs, buts, or maybes. Fuck him and the life of his sorry-ass family. I didn’t stop to think that a simple apology could have rectified the situation. Lives got thrown away over words and angry glances. We died silly in the hood. But he lived.
When he left the hospital weeks later, the bullets hadn’t slowed him down. A couple of shots to his chest and legs didn’t convince him it was time to reform his bad-guy habits. This dude was determined to keep on keeping on. The day he left the hospital he went to Wood’s mother’s house looking for Bobby. The neighborhood was throwing a block party. Those parties are where people got crunk.
The resident deejay spun the latest Disco Rick, Prince Rahiem, Crazy Legs, and Luke. Our deejays back then weren’t like the ones spinning today. They weren’t driving expensive cars and living like celebrities. He was usually some brother hustling in the street and spinning records as a hobby, as a way out. The deejay was an icon in the hood, an integral part of our culture. Uncle Al was one of the many neighborhood favorites.
Guys like Al were musical pioneers before rappers. They freestyled over someone’s record. They introduced storytelling and rhyming over other people’s beats before there was such a thing as a mixtape. The story was usually about an everyday experience. Then the deejay took the record and added extra bass to it.
Outside Wood’s mother’s house that weekend the scene mirrored a typical block party. Two giant Lazy Boy speakers were posted outside on the corner. The music could be heard five blocks away. The mood was gravy and everyone was jumping, until the guy Wood shot caught sight of Bobby.
He rushed Bobby and pistol-whipped him. He pounced on Bobby like a priest on the devil on Judgment Day. The party turned to mayhem. People were jumping over chairs to get to their cars. The deejay pulled the plug on the tunes and joined the stampede. A fight like this was inevitable at one of the parties Wood’s mother threw. There were just too many people and too much liquor for a peaceful evening. Liquor and niggas don’t mix like a hog’s ass and perfume. Sure enough somebody gets angry and decides to shoot the place up. And that’s exactly what the guy who Wood shot did.
That’s why I knew we should have made sure that dude was dead that day. Wood knew when we fired on that dude repercussions would follow. Pride and manhood are jewels, stolen from black boys at birth. The best way we know how to regain that self-esteem is by destroying the first thing that challenges it. I’ve seen kids die over stepping on another man’s sneakers. After Bobby recovered from his pistol-whipping, fate dealt him a worse hand. Some cops shot him more than thirty times over a drug deal gone bad. I told you those Miami cops were ruthless.
The number of incidents with crews testing me escalated. If a rival didn’t like me, he found a way to create drama with me. There is no such thing as avoiding beef in the hood. If I turned the other cheek, my challenger would definitely have smacked it. Then I would forever be getting my ass kicked. Something as simple as a rival saying he didn’t like me staring at him could lead to a shoot-out. Even if my neck was in a brace and I was forced to look his way, he would have used that as the spark. Imagine playing basketball and an opponent says you fouled him too hard and smacks you in the mouth when you simply tried to block his shot. Soon enough you’d either have to learn to fight or pick up and move to Pinecrest or some other ritzy suburb. I couldn’t afford to move to Pinecrest so I was stuck staring down his sorry ass.
The confrontations should have slowed me down. There’s no pension fund or 401(k) for a dope slinger. There are only two possible endings to look forward to: a patch in the graveyard next to an enemy or a life sentence in a cage contemplating. I’ve visited the cemetery and seen a friend’s tombstone resting a yard away from one of his adversary’s. Life is ironic indeed. He couldn’t stand the brother in this world. Now their bones wrestled it out in the dirt for eternity. Their souls will forever haunt the cemetery with their bickering.
I couldn’t see that dead end up ahead though. I was racing down a lonely one-way strip, liquored up, high on cocaine, and out of my mind. First, I started speeding through yellow lights. Now I was racing through red ones. The flashing lights in my rearview signaling for me to slow down were only minor distractions. There were signs that the streets were devouring us whole.
No one on the block had seen Big Black or Shrimp in months. Then word finally got around: Black and Shrimp had caught a charge, murder. Word on the street was that they both got 137 years with a life sentence. At 15, my friend’s life had already ended before it began. I kept on hustling, praying fate would deal me a better hand.