The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  I played linebacker and defensive end. I hated the offense. I didn’t want to get hit. I liked to do the hitting. At the youth level I was very successful. We didn’t keep stats or anything like that, but I knocked the shit out of everybody I played. The only stat I probably kept was how many times I got thrown out of games. I played with a chip on my shoulder, an attitude. I’d get thrown out for fighting, cussing the ref, all kinds of things. I got thrown out this one time on the ninety-five-pound team, playing at Suniland, one of the suburban teams we used to play. This guy hit me in the back, speared me. I told the ref, “Hey, this guy just hit me in the back, and you’re standing right there. You didn’t see?”

  Ref didn’t make a call. Then, I guess I was just having a bad day. This same guy, my finger got stuck in his helmet and got dislocated. I went to the sidelines, sat there a minute, and I said, “Fuck it.” I pulled my finger back into its socket. Coach looked at me like I was crazy. I went back out, got on the field, guy speared me again. Ref didn’t say nothing, again. I cussed the ref out, told him bout his ass. He threw me out of the game. I sat on the bench for a minute, started thinking about it, said, “Fuck this. This referee is an asshole.” I went after the ref with a bottle—a Gatorade bottle. This was a glass bottle. I ran after the ref and threw it at him, right at his head. I didn’t hit him. I missed, but I still got suspended for a couple games.

  I was probably about twelve when that happened. The next year I moved up to the next weight division, and I got with Coach Medina. Alex Medina. He was a tough coach. He would’ve killed me for throwing Gatorade. He’d have cussed me out all the way across the field. He was a tough guy, but it was this real tough-love kind of thing. He’d cuss our asses out because he wanted us to be better, to not settle for less in anything in life, whether it was school, education, football, whatever. A lot of kids couldn’t play for him. They’d wash out. I was a hard-ass. For the most part we were cool because I was one of his toughest players on the field. We’d butt heads a lot since he knew I was one of those asshole players. The way we’d go at it, him cussing me out, he was really breaking me down.

  He was very disciplined, but he loved us at the same time. He’d cuss my ass out and then drive me home and I’d be cool with him the next day. Coach Medina and his wife were some of the best people in the world. They loved us like their own kids. There was this little amusement park, Funland. After football practice sometimes they’d take us down there and we’d ride the rides and play games. If there was a late practice, or a team member couldn’t make it home, he would sleep over at his house. Medina was a good guy. And our team was good. We won championships. There wasn’t a Pop Warner Super Bowl in Orlando or anything like that back then. That came later, when Pop Warner really took off nationwide. But back then they had regional bowl games, the Coconut Bowl and stuff like that. We won all of em. And the perks you got for playing on the Beach? If you were a black kid from Liberty City, it was like being in the NFL. If you came over here to play ball, you’d be taken care of. There was this one sporting-goods store. They’d tell us, “Go over there and you can pick up any cleats, socks, whatever you want. For free.” The store owners, they knew all the black kids who played on the team. “You’re playing for the Optimist,” they’d say, and they’d hook us up.

  Whatever we wanted to have during the week while we were playing ball, they’d take care of us. There was a grocery store across from the park. Whatever we could fit in our football helmets, we could take. That was the deal, they told us. So we’d go in there and we’d grab baloney and turkey and steaks and shit, piling it up in our helmet. Then we’d take it home and we’d eat.

  It was a racket. They knew the black kids from Liberty City didn’t have much, couldn’t afford all the gear or even the food we needed to get through all those practices and games. They weren’t doing anything substantial to help the black community in Liberty City, but if they picked us out and could use our talent playing ball, they’d give us a pass, bring us along, invite us into the club—or at least make us feel that way.

  In the summer, once school was out, we had jobs waiting for us, too. If we played ball, we made money. I worked at the golf course one year as a caddie. Another I worked cleaning the tennis courts at Flamingo Park; they were clay courts, so I had to pull up the lines, smooth everything down. One summer I worked on a sanitation truck, riding around picking up trash. That was the job where I really got to see everything on Miami Beach, driving through all those back alleys, seeing all those convalescent homes, all those old people just sitting there. I also worked at the convention center. Got that through playing football, too. Whenever an event was coming up, they’d say, “Hey, we need some kids to work.” Okay. No problem. I’m there. When they had wrestling, Ringling Brothers, the Harlem Globetrotters, I was out there, selling hot dogs, making a little extra money.

  I’d do anything for work when I was little. I worked my ass off. I was a hustler. During the week, I’d work on the Beach, after school and in between practice. On the weekends, I’d go and work at the barbershop in the neighborhood, sweeping up hair. One summer I was a paperboy, throwing newspapers. I’d take our crappy old push mower and I’d stalk the streets looking for lawns that needed clipping. I put together a kit and washed windows till my arms practically fell off. I did everything. I was a workaholic. My old man was all about that. He never gave us an allowance. If we didn’t work, we didn’t have money to spend. So all of us worked.

  I didn’t just have jobs. I didn’t just sit around, filling out applications and waiting for people to call. I was an entrepreneur before I even knew what that word was. I started in high school when my mom got us a stereo. She hit the jai alai combination using some numbers that came to her in a dream—that was the start of Luke Records and the Miami hip-hop scene right there. With the money she won, she got the family a component system with a turntable, cassette deck, and speakers. In the summer, when she was still at work, I’d turn those speakers out on our front yard to make it into the cool spot for all the neighborhood kids. We’d play music and sell lemonade and ice cream and frozen cups out of the kitchen. When Pac-Man first came out, I went to a video-game distributor and convinced him to rent me a Pac-Man game. Pac-Man was the shit in those days. I hooked it up in the utility shed in the backyard. All the kids from the neighborhood came to hang out in our yard and drink lemonade and play Pac-Man. The distributor told me that Pac-Man game was the single most profitable machine he had in all of Miami.

  That stereo was also how I got started selling weed. I met the guys who lived across the street from us. They were Jamaican Rastas. Like, real Rastas. They’d give me their reggae LPs, and I’d make tapes for them, eight-track tapes, putting all the good shit in a row. In exchange, they’d give me a bag of weed. I’d take the bag of weed, roll me up some dollar joints, take em to school, and sell em. That was my little money I was making. I’d be at the back door of the school. Kids would knock on the door a couple times. They’d slide the dollar out and I’d slide them the joint up under there and they were good to go.

  I didn’t smoke much myself. I couldn’t. I was getting in too many fights. What made me stop was one time I’d smoked some of that shit, and some guys were getting ready to come and fight me and my friend. Because I was high, those motherfuckers were moving in slow motion. I was trying to hit them and all my timing was off because it felt like they were moving so slow. I said, “Man, I’ll never smoke no weed again in my life. Fuck that.” I didn’t have time to slow down like that. I’d just sell a little here and there. I’d make my money, go down to the dice game, and shoot some dice. Make some more money and keep it moving.

  I was a businessman and I was a football player, but I was not a good student. I should have been. Looking back, I wish I had been, but even with all the talks I got from my father and my mother and my uncle about education and knowing politics and history, it just didn’t stick with me. I didn’t have the patience to sit in a classroom; that was never me. I
was selling weed out the back of the high school, skipping class. I always had to be moving. By high school, I had skipping down to a science. I knew I could miss up to nine days in any class and not fail. I would use nine days up in every class, strategically, here and there. I’d skip first period one day, then class after lunch another day. A morning here, an afternoon there. My Jewish friends, they all had houses on the Beach, on Star Island. Their families had boats and Jet Skis and shit. We’d go out on the water and ride around. We’d skip school, go to their houses while their parents were at work, and hang out. We’d go to the park, shoot dice. We’d go down to the beach and it was topless girls in thongs, going for a swim. Stuff like that.

  Back then it was mostly Orthodox Jews around here, and those guys were pretty cool with black folks. I didn’t have no problems with them, with the everyday people. But what we did have was the police, who were racist motherfuckers. Black kids walking around on the Beach were regularly stopped and hassled by the cops. The little white kids I hung out with, they all had cars. We’d get in their car and go and as long as I was with them, at their houses or out on their boats, the cops never bothered me.

  A couple times I got harassed, just like any other black kid in the city. If some black kid did ever go and do something, if there was any crime committed by any black person anywhere on Miami Beach—rob a purse, anything—they’d shut that motherfucker down. They’d close up all the bridges, block the causeway, and pull the Venetian bridge up. Then they’d come pull our bus over and search the bus. But that was only every now and then. For the most part, during my football days, I was living the life on Miami Beach, and I thought I had it made.

  My whole world at that time was one thing: football. I wasn’t thinking about school. My whole world was just: “I’m a bad motherfucker, and I’m going to the NFL. Football is what I do.” In eleventh grade we got a new coach, I think his name was Coach Norton. He’d been in the NFL for maybe a season and he’d blown his knee out and now he was back coaching high school. He started telling us all these horror stories. Guys getting cut. Guys going broke. He told us, “Look, one percent of y’all might make it to the NFL. And even if you make it, you ain’t gonna last but two or three years.”

  When he came straight out of the league and told us all that? It gave me a reality check. I just quit football completely. I was coming off JV, and they were expecting me to come up and be the man on varsity, but I just said, “Fuck it. I’m gonna stop. I gotta do something with my life.” I didn’t want to be one of those washed-up shade-tree athletes in Liberty City, reliving the old games and passing the joint out on the corner.

  At that point I changed my whole attitude. I quit football and I started focusing on “Where am I at, education-wise?” At that moment I realized how much I’d fucked up. I was in the eleventh grade, and I was probably reading on a fifth-grade level. My writing was horrible. My math was horrible. Once I really started to look at my academics and my grades, I started thinking about what was going on around me. I realized, These people are just passing me in this place. I’m just over here to play ball for em. They’re not educating me.

  I started thinking about the classes I was in. My classes were filled with all black guys. Everybody in the class looked like me. I remember I walked down the hallway one time, thinking, Something ain’t right about this shit. I looked through the door’s window into this one class and saw nothing but white kids. I went to another door, nothing but white kids. After all this talk about “integration,” the only time we were integrated was when the bell rang and we were all in the hallway at the same time. The white, Jewish, and Cuban friends I did have were all through the youth football program, never the classroom.

  Our teachers were different, too. Our teachers were bullshit. They were joke teachers. They’d take some burned-out motherfucker who didn’t give a damn, put him over with the blacks. I had this one teacher, he would leave class and go to the horse track. “Hey, y’all chill out. I have an appointment I have to go to. Just don’t go in the hall.” He’d go and haul ass to the horse track in Hialeah. The white kids, they got the real teachers. I asked my counselors about that, about all the black kids being off in one room. They had no explanation. They’d just say, “Well, that’s how it is. There are different classes for students at different levels.”

  That’s when the talks with my dad and my uncle Ricky really started to click for me. I’m painting houses on the weekends, listening to him preach all this pro-black stuff about those invisible chains they’re going to put on my ass, and I’m looking at this situation over at Beach High and I’m like, Oh, fuck. This is a fucking setup. All of us are dummies. Nobody’s worried about our education. They’ve just got us over here to play football. I’m over here with all these black kids and all they’re doing is clowning up in here and the white kids are the ones getting all the information.

  Without the NFL, my next option was going to college. I started hitting the books. I got with this lady named Ms. Burke, a tutor, to help me with my grades. But by the time twelfth grade started, I had to admit to myself that I just wasn’t college material. I didn’t have the grades. I’d waited too long. I didn’t know what I was going to do; I just knew I wasn’t smart enough to get into any kind of decent school. I just knew I was going to have to go and get a job and start working.

  As soon as I finished school, I started as a cook at Mount Sinai hospital on the Beach. But even as I took the job, I was like, “What the fuck is my life gonna be about if I’m making seven bucks an hour? What’s seven times eight? Fifty-six dollars. That ain’t gonna cut it. If that’s all I can make in a day, I need to go put some cement on my feet and jump in the water right now. How I’m gonna live a life on that? I’ve got to do something better with my life.” So I said, “Okay, I’ll hold my little job at the hospital and I’ll make my money on the weekends, go hustle and make me some more.”

  Being on Miami Beach, even though the school was using us and just passing us along, I still got an education in how the world works outside the ghetto. Most of the guys from my experience, the guys who never left Liberty City, they didn’t learn the same things I did. Those guys are off working for seven dollars an hour somewhere, because they didn’t learn anything. They didn’t see how to transform themselves into something more than that. I did. I credit my parents for that. My brothers, all of us are entrepreneurs. All of us are self-made. It was always instilled in us to get our own. Our parents taught us to have common sense and think for ourselves.

  Going to Beach High also helped me realize that all white people aren’t bad. The system is bad, the game is rigged, but not all people are bad. By going there and playing with white friends, Jewish friends, Cuban friends, it just broadened my horizons. There are good and bad people in every walk of life. There are racist white people and prejudiced black people, and every individual is his own person.

  I was exposed to the bigger picture. I saw glimpses of how the system really works, what the rules of the game really are. What I saw, when I really boiled it all down, was money. I saw that it’s money, not necessarily a college degree, that’s important for getting ahead. I’m not talking about money in terms of being materialistic; I wasn’t about getting money to have more stuff, flashy cars and jewelry and all that shit. I never gave a damn about any of that. I’m talking about money as leverage, as power. Who owns what? Who controls who?

  Without money, the blacks in Overtown, they didn’t own their own land, and so they were powerless to stop the interstate from coming through and destroying their community. Without money, I knew I’d spend my life dodging bullets in Liberty City, on the corner, going nowhere. For kids from the neighborhood, the only way they felt they could get any real money was selling dope, but even when I was doing a little of that, I could already see that it was a dead end. Drug money don’t stick to nothing but a good time. I didn’t want to just sell dope, and I knew I couldn’t make any real money working for someone else. To get rich I had t
o have people working for me, even when I was asleep.

  So I took a whole different direction from my brothers. I aspired to do different things and be my own man. I felt I could start my own thing. I had no idea what that was going to be, but I felt like I could. I got a lot of that attitude from my uncle Ricky. He owned his own business because he felt like, as many black men do, that he couldn’t get a good job because he was a black man. “It’s about owning your own shit,” he’d say, “not waiting around for nobody to give you a job.” He used to preach that all the time. “You don’t gotta work for nobody—you can own your own self.”

  GHETTO STYLE

  When I got out of high school, I had all these ideas about what I was going to do, this great success I was going to be. But I quickly learned that nothing in Liberty City is easy. I had to go a ways down the wrong path before I found my way to the right one.

  Once I gave up on the NFL, what I decided was that I wanted to be a DJ. It was my new dream, to be the best DJ in Miami. I loved to throw parties. I’d have those house parties after school while my mom was still at work. We’d shake the walls of the neighbors’ houses up and down the street, then have the whole house put back together by the time either of my parents got home from work. I always knew how to throw the best parties, how to get everyone having a good time. It was something that came natural to me. I just hadn’t figured out how to make a living off it.

  Back then, DJ groups were hot. There were a bunch of groups all over south Florida, maybe eight major ones between here and Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. There was the South Miami DJs, the Soul Survivor DJs, the International DJs. The Jammers were real hotshots. Those were the big crews. Those guys were my idols. I’d hear them on the radio, see them playing in the park on the weekends, at high school dances, girls all over them. The Ghetto Style DJs was one of these groups. They were small-time. They were the little guys aspiring to be like some of the better-known groups. I ended up hooking up with them. I used to go to the park, hang out, and listen to them spin. They ended up inviting me to join because I had a van and I could drive all the equipment around. It wasn’t the most professional operation at that time. All they had was a couple of shitty speakers. They’d play in the park for free, mostly to have fun and meet girls. They might do a high school dance here or there, pick up a little money, but they didn’t treat it like a real business.