Memoirs of an Accidental Hustler

by J. M. Benjamin

  “Yeah, Mu,” was our only response.

  I was really speechless because I had no idea Mu even had that on his mind. Here I was trying to figure out how I was going to find some type of job to save up some money for my gear, but Mu made sure I’d be able to enjoy my summer after all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  623 West Eighth Street was the address we were looking for. We pulled onto the sidewalk one by one in front of the house. Other kids were walking up in their bathing suits and swimming trunks, slowing down to see whose faces would appear from under the helmets. Somebody must’ve told Lisa about the three of us pulling up out front, because I saw her coming from the backyard with a black-and-white two-piece bathing suit on, fitting her perfectly. Her hair was pulled back. It made her look more mature then she already was, like a younger version of the model Naomi Campbell. Surprisingly, I could tell that she knew who we were, and which helmet I was under, because she walked right over to my bike just as I was pulling it off.

  “Nice bike,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Nice outfit, too. All three of you,” she complimented us, not wanting to leave Mal and Ant out.

  “This is my friend Ant.”

  She cut me off. “From the projects,” she said, making a joke that flew over both Mal’s and Ant’s heads.

  We both laughed. “I’ll explain later,” I told them.

  “Nice to meet you, Ant.”

  “The same,” he answered, trying to look and sound all hard, like Lisa said most guys from the west end did.

  Lisa just smiled. “We got food and stuff in the back. Follow me.” I watched as she sashayed up her driveway.

  We got off our bikes and started toward the backyard. “Ant, chill out, man,” I whispered to him as we walked to the backyard. “This ain’t that type of party, kid. We out the hood now.” Ant was my boy, and I loved him to death, but I didn’t want him to embarrass us and make people think that because we were from the projects we didn’t know how to act.

  “I got you, man,” he said, putting me at ease.

  “I know you do.” I put my hand on my boy’s shoulder to let him know I meant no harm.

  I must admit, when we stepped in the back, all eyes were on us. If a prize were being given out for best dressed, it would have been a three-way tie among me, Mal, and Ant. I had on the royal blue Hawaiian set, with the red and yellow print, Kamal had on the green one, with red and blue print, and Ant had on the red, with green and blue print on it; all similar, yet different.

  Shorties outnumbered the guys three to one, and they were definitely clocking us, but Lisa had my undivided attention. She made me a plate of food while we talked for a while. Although I didn’t get in the pool, Mal and Ant did. At first, the east end guys were standing off to the sides staring and whispering among themselves about us; but once they saw the girls were all in the pool with Mal and Ant, they all hopped in and joined in the water games that my brother and my boy had started up. Everyone looked like they were enjoying themselves.

  That day it wasn’t about east end or west end, who was smarter or who was tougher; it was about guys and girls having fun. I was glad that I had gone, and I was even more glad that I had made a new friend.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was the Fourth of July, and it was just as hot out as the fireworks that would be shooting off all day. Most parents took their kids to the parade downtown and then to Green Brook Park in town or Green Acres in North Plainfield later on that night to see the fireworks show. But not us. After the parade, we’d hang out and go back and forth from our projects to across the tracks in the field, while the whole hood would be cooking out. It was like one big family reunion. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, and friends, you name it, they’d be there. But if you weren’t from either side of the projects or knew somebody from around there, then it would be in your best interest not to come around because you’d be asking for trouble.

  When the sun went down, the hustlers put on their own fireworks show for all of us, with the works that they brought from either Canal Street in Manhattan or South of the Border, in the middle of North Carolina and South Carolina, for those guys who traveled. I invited Lisa, but her parents wouldn’t let her come because they said it was too dangerous for her around here. Since the pool party, we had been talking on the phone on a regular basis.

  It was almost time for the parade to start and the projects were definitely going to be out there deep. By now, all of us had mopeds, and everybody agreed to ride downtown together. Out of all of us, Mark and Shawn had the flyest ones because theirs were hooked up. They had gotten theirs from selling packages for an old head name Clyde, who was originally from the South but was an OG around the way, which was an old-school gangster.

  “Where these niggas at?” questioned Ant, referring to Trevor and the rest of them.

  As soon as he said it, Trevor and them came bucking under the bridge, rolling up in the field.

  “We was about to leave your punk asses, takin’ all long and shit,” Ant said to Trevor.

  “Man, shut the fuck up, you wasn’t about to leave nobody. That’s like Voltron forming without the head,” Trevor said, as we all started cracking up.

  “Mal, Mil, what up?”

  “Same stuff, different day,” Mal answered.

  “I hear that.”

  “What up, Trev?” I replied.

  “Yo, we can kick it later. Let’s get up outta here and bounce to this parade, and stop bullshittin’,” Ant hollered, before peeling off.

  We all looked at each other and laughed, as we followed suit.

  The parade was wack, like it always was every year, but toward the end it turned out to be kind of fly because everybody thought that we were a part of it when we were riding behind the firetrucks, which was usually the last thing you saw at the end of every parade. Little kids were waving and clapping, and wanting us to beep our horns. Some of them even wanted us to give them a ride. That was the only fun part of the day, but the real fun wouldn’t really start until we got back around the way and chilled in the field, watching the fireworks go off.

  Just as I figured, everybody and their mother was at the cookout in the field, and as night fell people began to thin out, because although it was supposed to be a celebration, some of the elderly people didn’t trust being outside in the projects after dark. It was just like that.

  Mal and I had to practically beg our moms to let us stay out, even though my grandmother disapproved of it. Monique and Jasmine couldn’t be in the field at night, though. They had to watch from the window. Being boys allowed us to get away with a lot more than the girls could, regardless of the fact that Monique was older than Kamal and me.

  Me, Mal, Ant, Trevor, and the rest of my boys were leaning up against the fence waiting for the show to kick off. The only two who weren’t there with us were Mark and Shawn. They were up at the handball court with all the other hustlers who were letting off the fireworks. I knew if I would’ve asked Mu he would’ve let Mal and me chill up there with him too, but I didn’t want to leave Ant and them hanging like that.

  Boom! Boom! Crack! Crack! Pop! Pop! The fireworks were sounding off.

  “Yo, that shit look dope!” Ant shouted.

  “Word! Them niggas went all out this year on that shit,” Trevor added.

  “One day I’m gonna cop me a whole bunch of shit like that and light the projects up with some shit that spell my name. Trev!” He illustrated this, waving his hand across the air as if his name was actually being spelled.

  Ba-Boom! Ba-Boom! Crack! Crr-ack!

  Bop! Bop! Bop! Pap! Pap!

  “Yo, you hear that?” I asked, thinking I had heard something other than fireworks.

  “Hear what?” Mal asked.

  No sooner had I asked the question than I could hear screaming coming from the handball court’s direction, and saw everyone beginning to scatter.

  “Oh, shit! Somebody shootin’!” yelled Ant,
as we all started ducking, running for cover along with the crowd.

  Bop! Bop! Bop! Buck! Buck! Buck!

  You could hear more shots being fired simultaneously. From where I was crouched down, I could see a blue station wagon driving slowly down the West Third Street side of the Bricks, with one masked man leaning out of the back window, another out of the front passenger’s side, and a third one through the sunroof, all dressed in black and armed with weapons in their hands pointed in the direction of the handball court. The next thing I heard was screeching tires and then the station wagon was gone.

  We all made it to safety out of the field and broke to our cribs. This time Mal and I went over the tracks rather than around. As Mal and I got to the door of our building, I could see both my mom and my grandmother in their nightgowns, with tearful eyes and worried looks on their faces as we walked in the building. Although we had gotten used to the shootouts and hearing gunfire, this was one Fourth of July that Mal and I would never forget.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Last night’s entertainment turned into an unforgettable tragedy. The front page of the Courier News, which was a local newspaper that covered the surrounding area, caught my attention. It read, FOURTH OF JULY MASSACRE, 3 DEAD 4 WOUNDED. When I opened the newspaper to see the article on what happened, it read the following:

  Last night, July 4, 1986, witnesses say that two unidentified gunmen opened fire on a crowd of spectators at a Fourth of July fireworks gathering at a local park on the 400 block of West End Avenue located in the Liberty Elm Garden.

  The death total of this incident is three and the total injuries sustained were four. Three are stable and one is in critical condition.

  The deceased victims have been identified as nineteen-year-old Terrance Smalls, eighteen-year-old Trina Smith, and a fifteen-year-old boy whose name was not released to the press due to his being a minor. Among the victims wounded is another minor, a fourteen-year-old who is in critical condition. Sources say that the boy may be paralyzed from the waist down.

  Eighteen-year-old Michael Harvey was treated and released for a gunshot wound in the leg. Twenty-year-old William Thomas was also treated and released for a graze by a 9 mm bullet to the arm. Twenty-one-year-old Mustafa Ali received treatment for a graze to the arm.

  Although only two gunmen were reported, police say that they’ve found at least four different calibers of shell casings, and sources say this was most likely a drug-related incident.

  I couldn’t believe what my eyes had just read. I wanted to believe that the newspaper had made some type of mistake or I was reading a misprint of the event, but my gut told me that there was no mistake about what I read and my eyes were not deceiving me.

  The only names I recognized were Mustafa’s and Terrance’s. I couldn’t believe Terrance got killed. I knew Mal and I needed to go check on Ant and his moms, because I knew they were going crazy right about now. The paper also said that two minors got hit, one dead and the other in critical condition. I hoped that it wasn’t our boys, ’cause I knew that Mark and Shawn were up there last night too, but I didn’t think they’d be a part of all that.

  “Mal, read this.” I handed the newspaper to my brother as he came out of the bathroom.

  As Kamal read what I had just finished reading, he blurted out what I had already thought. “Yo, I think them two minors might be Mark and Shawn, bro. Damn! We gots to shoot over to Ant’s crib and check on him and Ms. Smalls.” We wasted no time throwing something on and we bolted out the door.

  By the time we had walked from our crib to Ant’s all had been confirmed. According to the word on the street, Mark had caught a bullet in the back of the head and one in the neck as he was running, trying to get away. He died instantly. Shawn got shot in the groin and in the chest and was in critical condition. Terrance was hit twice in the face and three times in the stomach. The shorty, Tina, was Terrance’s girlfriend. She caught a bullet to the heart and one in the stomach, killing both her and the baby she was carrying. She was seven months pregnant.

  Ant was flipping out when Ms. Smalls opened the door for us. “Oh, thank God. Kamal and Kamil, I’m glad you’re here,” Ms. Smalls cried out when she saw that it was us. “They took one of my babies last night; please don’t let them take my other one from me. Anthony is talking crazy. I don’t want him going out there killing nobody or getting himself killed. My heart couldn’t take it,” she said, exhausted, as she fell into my arms.

  “Don’t worry about it, ma, we not gonna let Ant do anything to get himself hurt or in trouble,” I tried to assure her, wondering myself if I could be calmed down if it were Mal who had gotten killed.

  “Fuck that! I’m gonna get them muthafuckas,” Ant screamed, punching the wall and knocking things over. Kamal tried to grab him, but Ant was so out of control that he punched him in the mouth. Mal knew he didn’t mean it, so he just backed up and waited for Ant to tire himself out and cool off.

  “Why, man?” Ant kept asking over and over, with uncontrollable tears running down his face. He stopped fighting and let Kamal wrap his arms around him.

  “I know it hurts, man. Let it out, bro, let it out,” Mal said to him. “I’m here for you, kid.”

  I could see in Kamal’s face that he felt Ant’s pain, and the tears began to fall from his own eyes. Knowing my brother, I knew Ant’s loss made him think about if it had been me, just as I did when I was holding Ms. Smalls in my arms.

  I fought back my tears, but I was hurting inside. Although they may have been hurting the most, it wasn’t just Ant and Ms. Smalls’s loss. It was a loss for all of us. Ant was like a brother to us and we were family. Not only had we lost Terrance, we had also lost one of our boys, Mark.

  “Let’s take him outside to get some air,” I suggested to Mal, seeing that Ant was beginning to calm down.

  “I wanna go on the other side,” Ant requested. We didn’t question Ant. Instead, we followed as he ran up the tracks headed for the field.

  When we got to the other side, I looked across the field where everything had jumped off the previous night. There was no one in sight. The only thing that you could see was the yellow police tape and the blue wooden horses blocking off the area. You could see the cops had chalked an outline of the dead bodies where they had lain, and chalked circles around the places where they had found bullet shells, so we took Ant to the back so he didn’t have to see any of that.

  By then, Trev, Black, Reef, and Quadir had rolled up on the mopeds. No one said a word. They all just took turns hugging Ant. It was a real emotional and sentimental moment among us, for this was the first time tragedy had actually struck so close to home and brought all of us together like this to show just how close we really were.

  Quadir broke the silence. “This is for the niggas who can’t be here,” he said as he cracked open a forty ounce of Olde English 800, took a sip, passed it, and then began cracking open another one. Trevor pulled out a fat joint and lit it up. The smell of weed clogged the air, as he took a few pulls and inhaled, and then passed it to Ant.

  “Here, baby boy, this’ll help ease the pain,” Trevor said to him.

  Ant grabbed the spliff and took a long and hard pull, and began to choke from the smoke. I was surprised to see Ant take the joint because he didn’t smoke, but I understood it was about anything that could help to escape the reality of what had happened last night.

  “Mal, hit this,” Black said, passing my brother the forty of Olde E.

  Without hesitation, Mal took the forty ounce and began gulping the alcohol, just as I had seen Quadir do. I couldn’t believe Mal was drinking, because we had made a pact that we would never drink or do any type of drugs, ever, but here was my brother drinking beer.

  “Mil, take this,” Mal said, putting the bottle in my face.

  I stared at it as if it were the plague.

  “Man, I said take this shit!” my brother based at me. “Two of our boys just got smoked and another one is lyin’ up in the hospital fucked up and mig
ht not make it either, and you bullshittin’ like you can’t pay them no respect,” he yelled.

  I never heard my brother talk like that, let alone to me, but I knew what had happened last night was the cause of both his and Ant’s behavior. I took the bottle of beer and started to drink. I held my breath to avoid the stale smell. The taste was kind of bitter and I didn’t like it, but I continued drinking because it wasn’t about whether I liked it. It was about paying my respects.

  That day was a sad day. I took a drink for the first time that day; and I knew I had allowed peer pressure to persuade me to do something I knew I had no business doing.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was ten days until school started back up, and I hadn’t seen Mustafa since the Fourth of July incident. Shawn was out of the hospital, but he didn’t want any visitors. I heard he had taken Mark’s death real hard and felt somewhat to blame. He said he was the one who encouraged Mark to drop out of school so they both could hustle full time.

  They were both in high school so I didn’t know they had dropped out. Mark was in the tenth grade and Shawn was in the ninth grade when they quit.

  Everything was back to normal around the projects. Over a month had gone by and it was business as usual with the addicts and the dealers. Word on the street was that the project guys retaliated on the block that the shooters were supposed to have been from, which was another known drug block on Arlington Avenue, not too far from the high school. It was rumored that the beef started over one of the guys from the projects trying to talk to a girl who was supposed to be dating a guy from Arlington Avenue.

  I had been trying to find out about Mu, but nobody seemed to know his whereabouts, so I left it alone, hoping he was okay.