Her home was even more disgusting than she was. This spot was a smoking house for junkies and truck drivers, but she also had ladies in there selling pussy. All sorts of foul shit going down. There were little kids running around and rotting food littered everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it.
The deal with Miss K was that she’d give me the green light to serve her people, but I had to hook her up with a sack free of charge. A finder’s fee. That was a fair enough deal, except I was so shook by the scene that I fumbled a few sacks on my way out. This happened on more than one occasion, to the point that Miss K told my buddy that I needed to tighten up and get my shit together. She could see how rattled I was, that I didn’t want to touch anything in there. But it wasn’t long before I grew numb to that environment. I went on to serve Miss K and her folks for years. I didn’t give a fuck about her sores or that house of horrors anymore. I was making money.
I took to the dope game quickly. I got creative with it. Innovative. When other niggas went from selling dimes to selling nicks, I started selling three-dollar sacks. My margins were slimmer but I was selling out quicker. The junkies were buying them and then selling to each other for five dollars. I saw those three-dollar sacks as an investment. I was building my reputation along with my business.
Hiding my activities from my momma was easy. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, and I wouldn’t call her naive either. I would just say she worked a lot and I wasn’t giving her any reason to question my whereabouts. Besides the occasional fistfight, I was never a troublemaker at school and I’d stayed bringing home good grades. I was now a freshman at Ronald E. McNair High School on Bouldercrest and I was popular. It was never hard to get someone to let me copy their homework.
When my momma did get suspicious I was always a step ahead of her. I’d picked up a thing or two watching my father bullshit so many people.
I remember when she first noticed I had come into some money. I came home one day with a seven-hundred-dollar leather 8-ball jacket. I told her I won some money in a tunk game with my father. That wasn’t that far-fetched, because he did let me shoot dice and get in on the card games with his crew.
Eventually my momma caught me red-handed, finding sacks of dope in my jeans when she was doing the laundry.
“Momma, you know that guy who be washing your car, cutting the grass, and taking out the trash for us?”
“Black?”
“Yeah, well Black don’t be doing all that for free,” I said. “And he said he wants this stuff. He don’t want no money.”
My momma knew Black was a J and she knew dope was everywhere in Mountain Park. The idea that someone had given this to me and I was passing it on to Black wasn’t that hard to believe. Even if it was, I knew my momma liked Black. Junkie or not, he was a part of the community. And she definitely liked having her car washed and the trash taken out, so I was off the hook. No further questions. With my momma off my back and my father out doing whatever it was he was up to, I was free to make plays.
By fifteen I’d been selling weed and dope for a few years but I still hadn’t used myself. My early experiences with Miss K and the neighborhood crackheads had been a deterrent. I’d interacted with countless fiends and they were so fucked-up and broke it turned me off to the idea of getting high. My buddies had been pressing me to smoke weed for years but I’d resisted. As a hustler I felt above using. It seemed lame to me. Plus I wasn’t about to let my friends peer-pressure me.
But one day I was walking up to the gas station when I saw this girl who had moved into the apartments. She was a couple of years older than me at McNair. She was the talk of the hood. Fine as hell. She had on tight black spandex shorts, standing outside of her apartment and was talking on a cordless phone.
I was eying her when a car drove up and flagged me down. I served them and took my time doing so. I wanted her to know I was a hustler.
After they pulled off I approached her and asked if I could use her phone. I called my trap back and was talking about all the moves I’d made that day. I was showing out. When I hung up she was standing there looking at me.
“You smoke?” she asked.
“Of course I smoke,” I lied. “Let me go get a blunt.”
I ran up to the gas station. When I got back I placed the Swisher and a bag of weed on the coffee table.
“So . . . are you gonna roll it?” she asked.
Not only had I never smoked, I’d never rolled a blunt either and I’d only picked up one. There was no room for error. Luckily I rolled that shit like a pro and fired it up, taking a deep pull like I’d seen folks do.
I’ve heard people say you don’t get high the first time you smoke, but it hit me instantly. I was high as hell. This was some powerful shit and I was trippin’, overwhelmed, paranoid, all that. But the girl got me something cold to drink and we sat down; after a couple of minutes I calmed down. Hell, I was actually feeling pretty good. I liked being high.
That girl became my smoking buddy. I still didn’t want my buddies to know I smoked, so she was the only person I did it with. She’d hit me on my beeper and I’d walk to her spot and we’d burn one down. After a few weeks of that we started fucking too, so it became a good little arrangement. We never ended up having a relationship or anything, but she was cool.
?
Trapping had been nothing but fun for me since day one. I felt cool, I was making money, and I’d never had problems with the law. But the dope game stopped being a game the day I got robbed.
I’d seen him earlier. I had reupped with my plug, and as I was leaving his trap house this older nigga pulled up on me. I recognized him from the neighborhood. Nobody liked this guy. He was a bully and a known robber.
“Hey, little buddy. What you be buying? Fifty slabs?” he asked me. “Fuck with me, I’ll front you one extra if you buy from me.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather deal with my own people,” I said, walking away.
Hours later I was by the car wash on Custer. I was on my bike and had just served some niggas. As I turned to peddle away I glimpsed something out of the corner of my eye. It was a .45 Desert Eagle handgun pointed at my head. It was the dude from earlier.
“Give me everything.”
I had four hundred dollars’ worth of dope tucked in my ass crack, but even with that big pistol in my face, my only thought was the consequences of giving up my stash.
If I give him my bomb, I’m not going to have anything.
I emptied my pockets and handed over the contents: a bag of weed, forty dollars cash, and a few sacks of dope. But I kept that slab clenched tight between my ass cheeks.
He’d been watching me all day. He saw me catch a trap and leave the house of a drug dealer. That’s why he targeted me. He could have easily blown my ass off right then and there for lying, but for some reason he didn’t. He just left.
I biked back to my plug’s spot and told him what happened. Well, not exactly what happened.
“I just got robbed,” I said. “He took everything, the whole bomb I just got from you.”