“Oh, Auntie, you know I like to smoke sometimes,” I told her. I didn’t miss a beat.
“Smoke?! You mean to tell me all of this is for you to smoke?!”
I can’t imagine my auntie really believed that, but Suge and I managed to convince her not to flush it down the toilet. We eventually pinned it on my other cousin Trey, who agreed to take responsibility for it if I broke him off a little something later.
The stash was saved but not without consequence. My auntie knew what I was doing, which meant the rest of my aunties knew, which meant my uncles knew, which meant my momma knew. I’d once been the baby of the family. Now I was the black sheep. I started feeling like everyone dreaded my presence when I’d come to Alabama. My aunties blamed me for what their kids were getting into. At the same time I had my cousins—all of whom were older—calling my phone when I’m in Atlanta, telling me it’s dry down there and their pockets were hurting and I needed to come back and give them some work. It was a fucked-up dynamic.
My reputation in the family only got worse after Suge got arrested while he was runnin’ with me. Just the night before Red and I had gotten into town. We caught up with Suge and his homeboy at this little trap house they had going in Jonesboro, on the side of Bessemer opposite from where Suge stayed at. There was a lot of action at this spot, but it was also a risky move because this was not Suge’s neighborhood. The guys who claimed the area weren’t keen on us out-of-towners showing up with better product at better prices. But I didn’t give a fuck what they were or weren’t keen on. So we trapped out of that house all night, making plays and smoking blunts until business dwindled down and we called it a night.
Hours later I awoke to the smell of smoke. The roof of the small shotgun house was in flames. Someone had thrown a firebomb. Our presence wasn’t appreciated. I ran outside to find Red holding a hose, trying to extinguish the fire. But the hose couldn’t reach the roof. I ran inside to grab the stash while Suge scrambled together our munition. We ran outside to load up the truck, knowing we had to split. Red kept at it with the hose. For a minute it seemed he was actually going to put it out, but once it spread to the insulation it was over with. We heard sirens and it was time to go. We took off, passing the fire trucks, and headed back to Suge’s side of town, where we got a room at a motel to hide out and debrief.
Red wanted to return to Atlanta immediately and he had the right idea. This was a tiny community. Word traveled fast; people were going to hear about this. But I told him to head back solo because I didn’t want to hang Suge and his buddy out to dry. After all, none of this would’ve happened if it wasn’t for us showing up, and if I’d gotten my cousin into some sort of trouble, I needed to be there to get him out of it.
I stayed in Alabama for a few more days to see how everything played out. In the meantime I worked the remainder of the pack out of the motel. At some point I left to get something to eat. When I got back the stash was gone. I immediately suspected foul play. My instincts told me it was an inside job and that one of the housekeepers had robbed me. I called Suge and he showed up and got into it with the motel staff, demanding to see the security tapes. The motel called the law. Before I knew it the police were on the scene and Suge was in handcuffs. I made a run for it, hopping into Suge’s car, fleeing for safety.
Damn.
I’d gotten my cousin arrested and his buddy’s house burned down. And my family heard all about it. Even my brother was turned off by the trouble I was bringing around. He told my cousins they shouldn’t mess with me anymore.
It hurt to see my family turn their backs on me but not enough to change anything. I was relentless. I had a girl in Birmingham and I started to operate out of her spot. She stayed in the middle of the projects and was popular there, so she set me up with many of my customers. One of them was her best friend, Amy. Amy sold weed, and whenever I’d come into town I’d serve her a QP (quarter pound). Amy had a boyfriend named Bunny. And Bunny was the first person to introduce me to lean.
For the uninitiated, lean is a drink made from mixing prescription cough syrup and soda. It was made popular in the nineties by DJ Screw, the Houston DJ who created Chopped and Screwed music. It’s best known for being made with Sprite, but you can use anything for the soda. Mountain Dew. Kool-Aid. Crush. Some people add Jolly Ranchers or Skittles. Whatever. The part that matters is the pharmaceutical ingredient. Codeine and promethazine. That’s the shit that puts you in another zone.
Bunny was a hustler too, and for a nigga from the sticks he moved a lot of weight. He didn’t sell weed, which was why I would serve Amy, but he had them bricks. The four of us would hang when I was in town, on some double-date shit. Bunny didn’t smoke but he did drink lean. And one night he offered me some.
“Gucci, I got some grit if you want it.”
That’s what they call it in Alabama. Grit. They don’t call it lean. They call it grit because it’s thick like grits and they drink it straight, like a shot. They don’t put it in soda like how they do in Houston.
I didn’t know the first thing about grit or lean or whatever this was, but I took Bunny up on his offer. Up to this point weed was the heaviest drug I’d used. But since I started running with the Zone 6 Clique, I’d been around them snorting powder, popping X pills, and lacing their weed with all types of junk. I figured this grit stuff couldn’t hurt.
Amy poured the red syrup into a spoon and spread it inside the blunt she was rolling. Me and the two girls smoked the blunt while Bunny sipped his grit, and then we passed around the bottle, each of us taking a couple of swigs.
Everything was cool and after a while at Bunny’s we decided to go to the Waffle House to get something to eat. That’s where things get fuzzy. All I remember is that by the time we got up to leave, I was so out of it that I couldn’t stand up out of my chair. I was stuck to it. I couldn’t tell you how I made it out of there.
The lean had messed me up, but it wasn’t until a few days later that I fully felt the effects of the drug. Out of nowhere, it seemed, I was totally out of my mind. It was like I couldn’t control my thoughts. I found myself doing irrational shit I would never do normally, like giving people stupid deals on dope. I was thrown off, but I didn’t yet make the connection to the lean.
Maybe I’ve been smoking too much.
Maybe someone put something in my drink at the Waffle House and tried to poison me.