Fats’ face suddenly frowned up. He knew what he did, but he wasn’t going to admit it. He got real angry and ignorant with Squirrel.
“Motherfucker, I don’t know what ya talkin’ bout and I ain’t got nothing for you. I wouldn’t give you all the shit you could eat!” Fats spat. “Nigga, what you callin’ me a cheater?”
To accuse a man of cheating in a dice or card game in the ghetto was an automatic death sentence for the accused or the accuser. Fats let it be known, in so many words.
Preparing for a confrontation, he gently pushed Black away from him to keep him out of danger. Then he slid his hand into his back pocket and whipped out a large knife. He was ready for war. Squirrel stood his ground defiantly. He would not be run away so easily. He wanted what he came for and he had no plans on coming up short. Squirrel had no choice, it was do or die, kill or be killed. The ultimate ultimatum.
In a flash, Squirrel reacted by pulling out a small .25 automatic. The toy-ish looking pistol didn’t scare Fats one bit. He kept advancing on Squirrel like a cornered rat and Squirrel attacked. He leveled his gun and squeezed off one shot, stopping Fats dead in his tracks. The bullet stuck Fats square in the chest, piercing his heart. He dropped his knife, stumbling as he clutched his chest. Collapsing to the pavement, he was gasping for air. His chest cavity expanded a few times, then it stopped. Shell-shocked, Black watched in horror as Squirrel went through his father’s pockets, removing the large wad of cash. He stood motionless against a storefront window unable to help his father because Squirrel had his eyes and gun trained on him. After Squirrel finished robbing his father, he turned and ran.
As soon as he left, Black ran to his father’s side. Bending down he tried desperately to talk to him.
“Daddy! Daddy! Don’t die,” he cried.
It was a lost cause. His words fell on deaf ears. His father was dead. Bystanders tried to pull Black away from his father’s body, but he wouldn’t budge. He bent down lower and kissed his father’s cold cheek as he cried over the lifeless body.
“I promise I’ll get him, Dad. I promise I’ll get him,” he whispered in his father’s ear. In his mind, this was far from over. It was never a question whether Black would kill Squirrel. It was only a question of when.
Chapter 10
The repercussions of Fat’s death were felt immediately by his young girlfriend, Cynthia Harris. With the family breadwinner dead, she had to carry the burden of caring for their two sons alone. As a high school dropout and unskilled worker, there wasn’t much she could do to earn a living. So, the family was forced to apply for public assistance. Their odds of survival were slim.
One good thing that Fats did before he passed was buying his family a measly row home with the proceeds from his gambling. The house was located in East Baltimore on Ashland Avenue and Madira Street, which was as ghetto as you could get. The area was high crime and low income. Here, it was survival of the fittest. This poverty-stricken neighborhood was where Black spent his formative years.
It’s not easy for a woman to raise a man and Lord knows Cynthia had her hands full trying to raise a man-child like Black. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t compete with the streets for her son’s attention. Unable to guide him right, she sat back and watched helplessly as he went wrong. She watched him become a product of his environment, the ghetto.
His family was a perfect example of poverty, with no father, and at times, no gas, heat or electricity. They lived welfare check to welfare check. Black grew tired of watching his mother struggle to feed and clothe him and his little brother. By the time he was thirteen, he took to the streets in an attempt to help make ends meet.
Cynthia gave her sons all that she had. She poured out her heart and pocketbook to give them the best of everything she could afford, but it never came close to matching what their father had provided for them. Her welfare check never seemed to stretch far enough. To her youngest son, Stink, it didn’t matter what he was given. He was too young to understand things, but for Black, it did matter. He was ridiculed at school for the clothes his mother bought for him. He understood it was the best that she could do, and he never complained to her, but he fought every day to keep the other kids from teasing him. Over time, Black became a very good fighter. Unfortunately, by the time he was fourteen, he stopped going to school altogether.
There was only so much his mother could do to protect her firstborn from the dangers of the streets. Black had a void in his life, a void that could only be filled by a male father figure. He needed that type of guidance that only a man could demand of him.
Black dabbled in all kinds of petty crimes, from stealing cars to snatching pocketbooks. Later, experience taught him to leave the petty crimes alone. They were high risk and low reward. Black was at the stage of his life, where he was easily influenced by what he saw. Black’s thoughts and opinions about life were shaped entirely by his environment. Hustlers in nice clothes, with beautiful woman, driving expensive cars all excited him.
In the ghetto, as well as the outside world, money made things happen. Money decided who lived or died, because of it or the lack of it. Black soon realized if he acquired enough money, he could buy anything. Friends, happiness, even a little time. His every waking moment was spent thinking about making big money. Slowly, he allowed himself to be corrupted by older hustlers. As time passed and he grew a little older, his mother realized Black couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be saved by anyone from the streets.
On the inside, Black was motivated by desperation. Young and ambitious, he was anxious to come up. With his determination, he was destined to exceed past his wildest dreams.
A major turning point in Black’s young life came one day while he was looking out his bedroom window. He observed an older hustler running back and forth to his stash spot. He patiently waited for the right time to steal his package. He crept out his back door and took the stash. It was a large Ziploc bag filled with tall, clear glass vials of powder cocaine and what appeared to be Tylenol capsules. Inside his bathroom, he quietly examined what he had taken. He counted a hundred red-topped vials of coke and a hundred pills. Something told him to grab one of the pills and open it up, so he did. The contents spilled on his fingers and he tasted it, then quickly spat it out. This ain’t Tylenol, he thought. Despite the fact that it was white, he reasoned it must be dope and it was.
He gathered up the drugs and placed them back into the Ziploc bag. He went back to his room and waited for late night to come. The coast would be clear, and all the regulars would have gone in by then. He would be ready to peddle his stolen drugs.
At 1:00 a.m., Black snuck out of his house to the corner and began to sell drugs. He found out from a dope fiend that the coke was worth ten dollars a vial and the dope was worth five dollars a pill. While Black was making sales, a white Mercedes Benz S500 with an AMG kit slowly drove by sittin’ on twenties. The car was so sick, Black felt nauseous. Ten minutes later, it came back and pulled up right next to him. He thought he was going to vomit, that’s how slick the whip was. For all he knew, it was the dude whose stash he had stolen.
Something told him to hold his horses, though, and wait and see. Looking inside the car was impossible. The tinted glass was too dark. Slowly, the driver’s side window began to come down.
“What you doing out here this time of night, yo? You slinging?” a voice asked from inside the car.
Black still couldn’t quite see in the car. He bent down to get a better look at the driver. Instantly, he recognized him. It was Nard, one of the biggest dope dealers in East Baltimore. Black idolized him. On plenty of days he wished he was Nard, even if only for a day. Now, here he was talking face-to-face with the man. Fate was smiling on him.
“Yea, yo! I’m tryin’ ta do my thing,” Black responded, with his coke and a smile.
“Oh yeah, Shorty?” Nard asked, returning the smile.
He had seen Black before plenty of times, but he never acknowledged him because he was running around committing juve
nile crimes making the strip hot. Nard didn’t know he was hustling or that he wanted to.
“Who got you out here this time of night? Don’t you know ain’t nuttin’ out here but stickup kids and the knockers, yo?” Nard said.
“Ain’t nobody got me out here. I’m doing my own thing, yo! And I don’t care about no knockers or stickup boys. I gotta do what I gotta do,” Black said honestly.
That’s the spirit, dog, thought Nard. Even though your shit is a little reckless.
The kid had heart, no doubt about that and that’s what mattered. Plus, he had potential. Nard immediately saw the value of having this young gun on his team. If Black got locked up, he wouldn’t do serious time since he was a juvenile, and by him being so young, Nard figured he could easily control and shape Black into whatever he wanted him to be. With his brains and Black’s heart, they would be unstoppable.
“Shorty, you better start carin’, yo, before ya young ass be locked down in Boys Village or found dead in one of these alleys,” Nard stated as Black stood there taking the criticism. “You dirty, yo?”
“Yeah,” Black said truthfully.
“Go stash that shit then come back. I want you to go for a ride with me,” Nard instructed.
Black did as he was told, then jumped in Nard’s whip. They went cruising the streets of Baltimore, and as they rode, they rapped. Nard got to know Black a little better. He found out they had a lot in common, like the absence of a father in their lives. They both were made orphans by the streets. Nard’s father was murdered in the streets of East B-More too, and single mothers raised both of them. The more they talked, the more he began to see that there was a method to Black’s madness. The kid was doing what he had to do to survive. From that night on, they were extremely close.
Leaving his house and staying away for days became Black’s M.O. He wasn’t running away; rather he was running to something, the streets. He felt his calling was the drug game. Life had never given him anything, so he hustled for the bare necessities.
For other cats on the strip, hustling was an option, something that they did part-time. To Black, it was how he fed his family. This was serious business and he treated it as such. His mother and little brother literally ate with the money he bought home. Knowing his family depended on him made him hustle like there was no tomorrow. He hustled all day, every day.
Black started out as a lookout in Nard’s drug organization. Nard wanted Black to start slowly from the bottom up because he wanted Black to experience every facet of the game. That way, Black would appreciate everything Nard was about to do for him and be forever in his debt.
On the front line, Black was exposed to every kind of scheme and scam that a dope fiend could think up. A quick learner, he learned all their tricks and con games the first time around. To him, a junkie was the worst type of leech there was, as well as the most dangerous. A junkie was never to be trusted. He realized something else about dope. If you were the average Joe, dope could tempt you, but if you were a dope fiend, dope could kill you.
Day after day, he dealt with dope fiends. Seeing these zombies line up to buy their early shot of dope, then hurrying back to cop more before shop closed was mind boggling. What a life, Black thought. Dope was a friend to those too grimy to keep a friend and an enemy to those too kind to have enemies. Black was dealing with some powerful stuff and he knew it.
In his quest for success, he became merciless, showing no compassion for his fellow man. Black had something to prove and he wasn’t to be fucked with. He beat dope fiends with baseball bats when he felt they disrespected him. Even though he was a kid, talking down to Black like he was a child was a real big no-no. That shit got plenty of motherfuckers hurt.
Before long, Black was promoted to serving customers. He enjoyed the power his new position gave to him. Being able to serve or deny a junkie dope was a beautiful thing to him. He knew he held their immediate future in the palm of his hands and he was hard on them. Black didn’t take no shorts either. If a junkie had nine dollars for a ten-dollar bag, they couldn’t get it from Black.
“McDonald’s don’t take shorts and neither do I. Do McDonald’s give you that Big Mac if your dough not right?” he would stand there, seriously asking them questions and demanding an answer.
The customers soon began to complain. When Nard got wind of his young protégé’s moves, he pulled him to the side about it. They took another ride in the S500.
“What’s this I hear about you turning away customers ‘cause they a little short?” he asked.
“Yo, the same motherfuckers keep comin’ wit’ shorts. They know how much a blast cost,” Black said, defending himself before Nard cut him off.
“Yo, that’s the worst mistake you can ever make. Hope you know you playing wit’ ya life, yo. Don’t ever deny a junkie a bag of dope when they ill. The monkey’s on their back and they’ll kill something for a fix. I don’t want it to be you. Takin’ shorts and giving a bag away from time to time is part of the game. You gotta stop being so petty, yo, and show some love. It don’t make you soft; it makes you smart and junkies will respect you.”
“So, it’s cool to take shorts every now and then?” Black asked.
“Yeah, it’s alright, yo. Use ya own judgment. Keep ya customers happy, especially the ones puttin’ money in your pocket. Believe me, if I couldn’t stand a loss, I wouldn’t be in this game,” Nard said, assuring him. “Word to the wise, Black, take my advice. I’ve seen a lot of good men get killed for much less. As thorough as you are, you can’t take on the world and win. We need them customers as much as they need us. Why you think we give away testers? To attract new customers and keep the clientele we got. It’s just an investment. They’ll give that money back, plus a hundred times more. Remember, it takes money to make money and if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”
School was always in session when Nard talked to Black. He tapped into his reservoir of knowledge to give Black a taste. Like an eager student, Black absorbed it all. He realized he was wrong, and Nard was right. He wasn’t supposed to carry it like that. Whether or not he knew it, Nard has just saved his life. In the following weeks and months, he applied what he was taught. When he began looking out for them, the junkies called it playing fair. The feedback he received from the streets was positive. He started getting respect, instead of being despised.
Though Black was still a young buck, he made some unusual observations for someone his age. He noticed the one common thread that bonded each heroin addict together. They absolutely had to have some dope every day or they would become violently ill. He couldn’t understand the physical chains heroin had on them. He didn’t understand that their bodies had tricked their minds into believing that dope was as vital as food, water and air.
On his dope lines, Black would see his peers, his brothers and his sisters, aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers waiting to cop dope. They were slaves, begging, borrowing, stealing and selling their bodies for some get high. Daily, he could see the misery in their eyes. It dawned on him that those who had the least to lose always lost the most and people didn’t just use drugs, they abused them.
Ignorance was the only excuse for Cynthia and her lack of knowledge of her son’s illegal activities. How could she not know? Everyone in the neighborhood was telling her about her son selling drugs. She would often warn him about the ills of street life and try to remind him of his father’s untimely demise. This example was not enough to scare him or change his ways. Her message went in one ear and out the other. Black was deep in the game. He wouldn’t listen to anybody except Nard. Cynthia started out trying to save her son from the streets. She never thought of who would save the streets from her son.
Black was steadily bringing home large sums of money and giving it to his mother. At first, she wouldn’t accept it, but eventually she did. She found it harder and harder to say no to those hundred-dollar bills that he flashed her way. Over time, her mentality changed from that of a concerned parent to that
of a co-defendant. By accepting his dirty money, she only encouraged him. She became his silent partner. Though she wasn’t out there slinging dope, her hands touched blood money just the same. She was as guilty as her son was, if not more. But, what other choice did she have? They needed that money. She needed that money. The grocer or Baltimore Gas and Electric Company didn’t care where that money came from, as long as the bills were paid.
Being the sole provider for the family, Black took great pride in taking care of his mother and little brother, Darnell, nicknamed Stink. Eight years his senior, Black spoiled him rotten. He treated him more like a son than a little brother. He affectionately nicknamed his brother Stink because of the way he smelled when his diaper was being changed, hence the name. His life was pampered compared to Black’s. He didn’t want for nothing, as Black made sure of that. His closet was filled with designer clothes. Any new toy or video game that came out, Black made sure he had it. Stink would never have to eat government cheese again. He’d never have to eat the butter and syrup sandwiches Black called “wish sandwiches,” because he wished he had something else to put on the bread. Stink would never know the embarrassment of paying for Top Ramen from the corner store with food stamps. There would be no more hard times or bad times, not if Black could help it.
The money Black was accumulating easily surpassed any amount his father ever brought home. He knew the value of money and he was obsessed with saving it. His mother held his stash, just as she’d done for his father. She never spent a penny unless it was absolutely necessary. Black had to encourage her to spend some money on household things. He had her buy new mattresses to replace the old pissy ones. Black bought a new living room and dining room set to replace the old raggedy ones. Cynthia bought pots and pans, and everything else needed for a kitchen. Now the house began to look and feel more livable. It no longer reflected the gloom and despair that lay just outside the door.
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