Unruly (4 page)

You see, robbing houses just wasn't my thing. I would rather work for my money. If you get caught robbing houses you'd get hit serving time and all you really got out of it was some trinkets such as watches or maybe if you're lucky, a gold chain. It was
bullshit
for all that trouble. I would rather sell drugs any day and get a hard $300 in cash and know exactly what I was getting into. Robbing houses involved too many guessing games. I didn't want to
hope
I would get something out of a deal. I wanted to know for sure. To me, hustling was a better bet.

When he and I got back down the fire escape, I let him out of the front door of my crib and went back to working on the rhyme that I had started. All I had was the chorus and the title: “Race Against Time.”

In my race against time I—can't stop

Runnin through the red light—livin my life

Even if I'm gettin too high

I'mma keep runnin through the red light—livin my life

 

I WAS ALWAYS HIGH
as a kite. Moms knew it. She smelled it. She saw my bloodshot, watery eyes. She hadn't asked me much about it since those nights she would find me in the hall with my homies, when I first came back to live with her. Whenever Moms was at work, I was smoking in the house with my friends, all the time. I used a fan to blow the smoke out of the window, but Moms could still detect it. Finally, she decided to ask me about it one day.

“Jeffrey, are you smoking weed?” I was fourteen years old. What was I going to say? She saw all of the chips and cookie bags strewn all over the house. She could also never wake me up in the morning for school. Whenever she would come home from work, my homie Aaron and I were sprawled out on the floor with the TV watching us. I couldn't deny it.

“Yes, Ma, I been smoking, please don't trip,” I confessed.

“If you're going to smoke, I guess I can't stop you. You need to stay away from the police. I don't trust 'em. They don't care about boys like you. They'll shoot you for no reason. And, they laugh when they get away with it.”

Too bad my father left eight years before. He might have handled that shit differently. Even though he was struggling with addiction himself, maybe just the sound of his voice would have scared me a little more than Moms' feminine voice did. Maybe his tone would have inspired me to do the right thing when I was going down the wrong path. I sometimes imagined what it would be like to just have him around. But mostly, during that period I felt having him around would do more harm than good. That made me think,
Fuck him, I don't need him.

Moms shook her head. “I can't keep going to the police station with you over this stuff.” She stood there for a minute, not knowing what her next move should be. Finally, she said, “Okay. You can smoke in the house. Just stay off the streets and out of the hallways.”

You give young men an inch and they take a yard. I
pushed
. “You know, Ma, smoking is a social thing. It's not fun to smoke alone.”

She sighed. “You can have one or two friends here to smoke with you. No more than two. If I catch you with more than two boys in here, that'll be it. I'll stop it all! I mean it, Jeff!”

It was worth going to school the next day because at three p.m., I would be able to say, “Well, niggas, I'm going to catch a smoke.”

“Where at?” Mike would ask.

“Home, nigga, where you think?”

“Your Moms knows you smoke in the crib?” Aaron would wonder.

“My Moms is mad cool, yo,” I'd say, nonchalantly. My mom was smarter than that—she was concerned with keeping me out of jail, out of trouble and off the streets.

You have to have something to brag about when shit is all fucked-up.

There's no way I would have tried this if a man like Grandpa Cherry was in the picture.

 

I WAS STILL CURIOUS
about the drug thing. Nothing much had changed except I was not doing well in high school because I was smoking weed and cutting classes. When we were still staying with my mom's friend in RV, I could see how much paper there was to get. And, we still needed money. I knew hustling may be the ticket.

My man Mike put me on by introducing me to Little B, who hit me off with my first pack. A pack consisted of twenty rocks valued at about $100. I didn't know what to do with that shit but I knew that when I figured it out, I would get money and be able to get us out of a bad situation. I was the man of the house now.

My first time on the block, I was terrible out there. When I started hustling, I saw that everyone out there already had regular customers. I had to work hard to get my own. And, nobody tried to help me, either. It took me a whole week to move that one pack.

I wasn't being hooked up with any customers. I had to go out and get the stragglers who were unestablished customers and were as new to the game as I was. I had to be aggressive to get them, which was risky, too. It's not cool to go out there trying to sell to muthafuckas you don't know. They could be police.

Standing on the corner on those cold blistery days, I learned to observe people in new ways. I would be all bundled up with my hat pulled close over my head, so that my ears would not burn with the cold. Only my eyes were visible and I was using them to detect who was real and who could be a trap. Regular customers had longer conversations. They would spend time asking for discounts, cutting deals and setting up payment arrangements. The cops, on the other hand, always tried to act like real customers, so they were stiff and brief, which was a dead giveaway. I was watching as hard as I could and slowly catching on.

When someone would approach me, I would say to them, “Let's go around this corner and let me see you smoke that shit right here.” If they were real, they would do whatever I asked them to do to get a smoke. It always worked.

Once I figured out how to get customers, the game was relatively simple from what I could see. There were nickels, dimes and twenties. Nickels cost five dollars. Dimes, ten dollars, and twenties, twenty dollars. One rock would get the fiends high for a very short time. Crack is a short high, that's why it was such a big hustle. Our job was to get them high so they would want more . . . within the hour.

I first tried to work for a guy named BG. He was a little flashy dude, but he was getting money, though. Then, there was Black, who was one of my first lieutenants in the game and still one of my best friends.

School was becoming a problem. It was getting harder and harder to get real money and go to school at the same time. I couldn't get regular customers if I wasn't standing on my corner. It was as simple as that.

The school started calling my house in the afternoon. Moms was already gone to work and I was on the block, hustling. They couldn't catch up with her or me. To me, school was the place to go to further yourself in order to make money. Since I was making money already, I figured, what did I need with school? I had found my route to the money and I needed to focus on that.

Moms could see that something was up with me. When homies would come to my crib, we were always up, laughing and roughhousing late into the night, long after Moms got home. She was especially suspicious when Aaron, a kid from John Adams High School, was over so much. My man Aaron was a year older than me, always on time, always at school and got good grades. Everyone thought that Aaron was a good kid. Until he met me.

Aaron liked being down with me on those late nights in my crib when we were getting high.

When he got a settlement from a car accident, he got his own car, a Nissan Maxima. After that, it was a no-brainer. He was
the
one to hang with. When Aaron and I started hanging out more than before, he kept his grades up, until he could no longer be a good guy and a cool guy at the same time.

 

THROUGH THE DENSE
cloud of weed smoke, the fire of hip-hop and learning to hustle, my worlds somehow collided. I got arrested on my first gun charge with my homies and Aaron.

My man E-Funk from around Cherry's house came to get us in the morning at my crib in his pop's old Buick. It was morning and I was starving. We decided to go to IHOP for breakfast before we started hustling. I suggested that we load the car with all of the shit so we didn't have to make two trips. Aaron didn't agree with me but they all went along with what I said, anyway. We loaded up the car with our two guns and the drugs.

The funny shit is we never even got to IHOP. On the way there, we turned down a side street to park the car. The cops were on that street, arresting someone else. My homie O had pulled onto the block and then he reversed out of it suddenly, jerking the car. We started going the other way.

“Shit!” O said. We all froze.

“Why did you do that?” I said. “That was stupid! You think they didn't see that shit?”

“Yeah, man, you should have just kept going!” Aaron moaned.

Within a few seconds, we could see the cops' lights in the rearview mirror.

O pulled over. I knew that the cops would find the weed and the guns. I could feel my heart beating fast in my chest. My homie Dirt threw one of the guns into an empty lot before the cops got to us. Everyone had started sprinkling drugs all over the car. I was the only person who kept my drugs on my person. The cops searched the car. They were homicide police so they didn't really care about the drugs or the fact that the car was stolen. Guns was what they were looking for.

“Get out of the car,” a policeman said to us.

Me, Dirt, Aaron and O slowly pulled ourselves out of the car. As we were positioning ourselves in a line so they could search us, Dirt just shot off like a bullet, running as fast as he could into the street and around the corner. Dirt was a chunky dude. It was funny to see him moving fast, carrying the extra weight. I smiled to myself just knowing that Dirt had taken the one gun that was left in the car. But I was wrong. Dirt was scared as shit, and had forgotten about the gun. It was still in the car to be found by the cops. The cops found the crack on me, too.

Dirt ran, in the snow, and hid under a car for four hours.

As we were taken down to the station to be booked, Black went over to Moms' house. We didn't have a home phone then. Moms had to get in touch with Aaron's moms, who couldn't believe it.

It worked out for most of us. Aaron didn't get anything except for an earful from his moms. Since it was his first time getting in trouble, his moms was freaking the fuck out. All she could do was cry and repeat, “How did
you
get involved with
these
boys?”

My Moms was getting heated at his moms. “What are you trying to say? Your son is no better than mine.”

Aaron's moms turned to him but spoke for us all to hear, “Aaron, I can't believe it, I can't believe it. This is not like
you
!”

Aaron and O got off with no probation.

My case went before the judge. I was ROR'd, released on my own recognizance, as a person with no priors. I was given five years' probation and one hundred hours of community service. I got probation because I was a youthful offender.

But someone still had to take the weight for the remaining gun that was found. E-Funk had drug priors, he was eighteen years old
and
he had stolen his parents' car that night. The thing that's not fair about the system is that if one person didn't claim the gun, we would have all been charged for it. Since E-Funk could not make bail, he took it. His parents refused to come down to the station to pay the bail. E-Funk ended up serving one year, which was time served, for the gun charge.

I was assigned to janitorial work at a fine arts center on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. The lady who was in charge of the center didn't really want offenders on the premises, even though she signed up for the program and enjoyed the tax breaks it offered. She thought the art patrons would be afraid to come to the center if they saw a bunch of criminals in there. The couple of times that I reported to work, Linda, the blond fat lady, signed me in and signed me out at the same time. She would say, “Mr. Jeffrey, you are free to go!”

After “working” there, my community service detail was switched to cleaning parks and collecting trash from the side of the highway. I met some cool guys there. One of them was so wild that he started bringing weed. We smoked it while we picked up the garbage and the COs waited just a few feet away. But I should have realized that this whole thing was just the beginning. It was a warning, but just not strong enough.

 

*

June 28, 2011

Today is Lil Rules Birthday, and I'm SICK that I'm not there to share it with him. These times will no doubt be the hardest—birthdays, holidays. I still can't believe I'm in Fucking Prison! I'm sad, hurt, angry all in one, but I can't let my emotions get the best of me. I gotta stay calm, cool, collected so that everyone else does the same. I need to be strong and Ish been holding up well minus some occasional tears, but that's to be understood given the circumstances.

Rule turns 11 today, and as I sit in my cell writing this I can't help noticing my state greens with my inmate number staring at me 11R2024. The 11R sticks out like a fuckin omen or something, as if it's screaming you fuckin asshole. I've been having a lot of dreams lately, all of which have been family oriented, some a lil weird. LOL. But all of them darkened by the reality of when I awake. I'm still here locked in a cell and even my breath of fresh air is guarded by barbed wire fences. I feel trapped. But my dreams set me free for a moment. They feel so real I don't wanna wake up. I just wanna be home with my sons and my daughter and my wife and my mother. But I'm 19 months short of that dream. I keep a picture of me and my wife taped to my locker right above my head. It's a newspaper clipping of the day I turned myself in. My mother and Ish's mom and Gutta are also in the background. I keep it as a constant reminder of the mistakes I've made and as I sit here on my son's birthday I can't help but to think about the next newspaper clipping I'll keep. The one when I'm walking out.