You could feel it when Gucci came into some money. He’d stroll into the apartment and it would be like a breath of fresh air came in. He was generous and would share the wealth, bringing us gold chains, watches, and rings. All kinds of different jewelry he’d tricked off somebody or won in a dice game.
But when he was broke, and that was more often than not, things were tense. He came home from the Kentucky Derby one year—an annual pilgrimage he made—and he had like twenty thousand dollars he’d made tricking folks and betting on the horses. It was a celebration. A few days later that money was gone.
His other vice was the sauce. My father got drunk every day. Morning, noon, night. Before he’d even leave the house he’d put down a pint of cheap gin. He’d chase it with a sip of water, swish it around in his mouth, and spit into the sink. I remember the sound. The bottles would get thrown away but he would keep the caps. He used those for the pea game. Then he’d head out, taking the MARTA bus downtown to find people to con. He’d be drunk as hell by the time he got home at night, reeking of alcohol.
All of that was a reality check. I learned young that if I ain’t got shit, then I just ain’t got shit. If I wanted something in life, I would have to find a way to get it myself. Constantly worrying about money the way that I did messed me up. I would tell myself when I got grown I’d never live with those feelings. Twenty-five years and millions of dollars later I still remember that anxiety.
My first enterprise was picking up aluminum cans in the neighborhood and taking them down to the store for a few cents each. That’s how I met my friend OJ, who would become the rapper OJ da Juiceman. OJ was a few years younger than me and he lived in Mountain Park too. Together we’d canvass the hood for cans. Sometimes we’d save time by stealing bags of cans that had already been collected by the older guys in the neighborhood. We’d hop their fences, grab the bags from the yard, and take off running.
But the real way I started to make money was selling drugs. I was in the seventh grade. At the time Duke was rolling with some of the hustlers in the neighborhood. These were the niggas driving fixed-up cars, who had the sickest gear, and were known for carrying weapons. I never had no positive male role models growing up so to me, these were the coolest guys I knew. My brother would never go full-on in the streets like me, but back then he was selling a little bit of weed.
Duke selling weed was his way of keeping up with the niggas he was running with. Duke was never really a hustler. His passion was football. Plus he had a job at the Winn-Dixie grocery store, so he really didn’t have much time to be hustling. So he eventually put me onto his package. I would serve his boys who would want weed for themselves or somebody else they knew. From the jump, the shit was fun to me.
Duke’s friends used to call me “worker,” as in my brother’s little worker. I hated being called that, but I couldn’t fight these dudes because they were six years older than me. It made me resent my brother because I felt like he was playing me to his buddies. I wanted to find a way to pull one over on him and be my own man.
Here was the deal. Duke would give me thirty dollars on every hundred I brought in. What he didn’t know was that of the ten ten-dollar dime sacks he gave me, I was pinching out of each one to make an extra sack. I’d sell his ten sacks and make thirty dollars, then sell the extra one and make ten dollars more. When the time came for me to turn over four hundred dollars, Duke was thinking I’d made $120 when really I’d made $160. That was my father in me. Always looking for the angle. Always thinking about what move I could pull to my advantage, however small that move might be.
?
It wasn’t long after I began selling weed for Duke that I endeavored to start my own operation. That came about during the Christmas break from school of my eighth-grade year.
Coming back after break was like the first day of school. Everybody would show up with their new toys, clothes, sneakers—whatever stuff they’d gotten from Santa. That year I had my eyes on some jeans, some Jordans, and a Starter jacket. But as Christmas neared my momma told me she wouldn’t be able to get me any of it.
“Bills are really tight right now, Radric,” she told me. “I’m sorry I can’t get you this stuff. I promise I’ll get it for you later.”
I couldn’t go back to school with the same old shit on while everybody else was fresh as hell. I just couldn’t. I tried to explain but my momma cut me off.
“Look, here’s fifty dollars,” she told me. “Get whatever you want.”
What the hell was I supposed to do with fifty dollars? I couldn’t buy that Starter for fifty dollars. I couldn’t get a pair of Jordans for fifty dollars. I couldn’t get any of the things I wanted.
Frustrated, I took the money and left the apartment, walking toward the other side of Mountain Park. I knew that’s where the dope man stayed. I handed him the money and he handed me two tightly wrapped fifty-dollar slabs of crack cocaine.
“Now you owe me fifty dollars, get it?” he said.
I sure did.
That was all she wrote.
The dope game was on and poppin’ from that moment on. There would never be any other sort of extracurricular activities for me again.
IV
* * *
DOPE GAME HARD
Even though I brought the fifty dollars to the dope man like I’d done a thousand times before, I had no idea what I was getting into. It wasn’t like with the weed, where I was getting dime bags already packaged and serving my brother’s friends. I was on my own with this dope shit. This was a totally different kind of product with a totally different type of clientele.
I had a buddy who knew more about dope than I did and he helped me cut up those slabs the first few times I picked up.
A fifty-dollar bag of crack was roughly 1.5 grams. That got broken down into twenty-dollar bags, ten-dollar dime bags, and five-dollar nickel bags. You could make a little more or a little less depending on how you played it, but most of the time there was a hundred-dollar return on a fifty-dollar slab. Then you go get you a hundred-dollar slab. Profit.
My buddy also knew a place where I could get a few of these sacks off. He brought me to a run-down house on Custer where we were greeted by an old lady with salt-and-pepper hair who introduced herself as Miss K. She was a nasty-looking woman, gangly thin with sores all over her face and body.