RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  You’d sign up, and then you’d go to P.S. 57 and they’d read the list of everybody who got jobs. But everybody who wanted a job didn’t always get one. There was only a certain number of jobs, so everyone who signed up couldn’t get ’em. I don’t know how my mother finagled that shit, but I always got a job every summer. I guess it was ’cause I was a responsible kid. When I worked as a counselor for the YMCA, I was always there on time every morning, putting my work in every day, and I guess that was a reason why I kept getting jobs.

  One summer I had the YMCA job. Another summer I worked for the park department pruning trees and cutting them down and all that. We cleaned up things, we went around the neighborhood, I babysat kids. I did all that and more, and I got my little two hundred dollars every two weeks, which was really good money back then.

  The Summer Youth program also refined my work ethic. Whether it’s bagging groceries or Summer Youth jobs or slingin’ packages or layin’ down tracks, whenever I knew there was money to be made somewhere, I was always on it, and I always put all my work in, every time.

  But once we had that cash, it was gonna get spent. So that day we were at the Albee Square Mall, and I noticed in the window reflection that some Brooklyn thugs were behind us, trying to scheme on us.

  Now, if you were around NYC in the eighties, you knew about the crazy robberies that happened in Albee Square Mall, on the corner of DeKalb and Fulton. Brooklyn dudes always had that reputation for taking shit from whoever the fuck they wanted. It was heightened around the mall, though, because people from all over were shopping there. Because of that traffic you also had stickup kids from all over Brooklyn.

  We walked out the sneaker spot, and some dudes tried to snatch our bags. We fought back and held our bags so they weren’t able to get them from us. We remembered their faces, though.

  Sure enough, that same motherfucking night, Rae was in Brooklyn with one of our peoples, Jaime, and met the kids who tried to rob us. Jaime straightened them out. “Yo, man, this my peoples. This my man. They good, they my peoples.”

  “Yo, Jaime, that’s your peoples, son? Pardon me for that, man. We didn’t know.”

  They all exchanged handshakes and laughed it off. No harm done. Rae came back and told me what happened, and I couldn’t believe what a small fucking world it was.

  After that, we had no problems in downtown Brooklyn anymore. But we would still see those same kids snatching bags and robbing people, but they always ran right past us now that they knew we were cool with Jaime. They were always at it. You’d see them posted up looking up and down the avenue for victims and come-ups. They were like predators scoping out a watering hole. That was their office, on DeKalb and Fulton, Atlantic Terminal, Fort Greene. Some Gods would be building, some civilians would be shopping, some kids would be hanging out, and the jack boys would be catching juxes.

  Brooklyn, yo, you gotta love it.

  6.

  CRACK HITS THE HILL

  When crack first hit Staten Island, Park Hill was still a community, albeit a dysfunctional one. At first there was more than enough money to go around, and the fiends weren’t completely desperate yet. Heroin and base had done some ravaging in the community, but my hood was still relatively unified.

  Then the hood went straight to hell.

  For those who don’t know, freebase and crack are the exact same thing. It’s simply cocaine that’s free of the hydrochloric acid added to powder cocaine (cocaine hydrochloride). This purified version is much more potent and addictive.

  Crack is street slang for freebase. It got that name because the cooking process breaks it down into its purest form, turning it into a solid form that looks like little chips of paint that cracked off a wall. Hence, crack. The fastest, most powerful way to get high on crack is to smoke it. Powder cocaine is smokable, but people prefer to snort it rather than smoke it.

  Keep in mind there is no difference in the chemical makeup of powder cocaine and crack—it’s the same drug, just one is more pure than the other. However, penalties for crack offenses are more severe because our government decided to create what is known as the War on Drugs. So all the thousands, maybe millions of people (such as myself) convicted and sentenced for a crack offense got an enhanced prison sentence because of drug terminology, not facts. The federal statute penalizes cocaine hydrochloride and cocaine base the same, and this hasn’t changed since 1914, when cocaine became illegal to possess, no matter what chemical form it was in. The government introduced mandatory sentencing for crack offenses simply because crack was more popular among poor people.

  *

  The whole drug game just seemed to come into the hood outta nowhere. In the early seventies, it was all about cocaine. Coke was for rich people. When freebase—a purified, smokable form of cocaine—came around, it was still a plaything for the elite in the late seventies. By the time the eighties rolled around, regular working-class people were smoking freebase.

  In the early eighties, there was a huge glut of powder cocaine from South America, which drove the price of coke way down. To maximize their profits, the dealers flooded the inner-city neighborhoods with crack, which was simple to produce, cheap, and could be sold in smaller quantities to more people. And when it hit in force, the neighborhood went straight to hell.

  Before the epidemic, as a kid, my day was always planned out. I’d wake up, head over to the grocery store, and bag some groceries. A good bagger could clear five or six dollars in a couple hours. After that, I might hit the corner store, maybe hit the arcade, then head to the pond out back and make some mud cakes. From dawn till dusk, we were always moving, always active. By the time we’d come home, our clothes would be a dirt farm—we’d be covered in it; our tongues would be red from candy; our hair would be messed up—all signs that we’d had a good day.

  Next thing you knew, fucking dreads—Rastafarians, typically from Jamaica, but also some folks from Guyana—were comin’ out of nowhere. Illegal motherfuckers were poppin’ up everywhere, and drugs were every-fucking-where, too. What the fuck just happened?

  There was so much money floating around, the temptation would just suck you in, especially if you were poor. Crack took advantage of the community, of the fucking dirt poor who had no food in their refrigerator—I’m talking about having no refrigerator at all, having to put the fucking milk outside on the windowsill in the winter so it gets cold. Roaches, mice everywhere. Roaches in your cereal box. Welfare. Hard cheese. You-ain’t-got-shit poor. You’re-living-in-the-projects-and-your-mom’s-a-crackhead poor.

  The drug game is the last stand for survival, where you have nothing else on the streets. You don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing. You don’t have an education. You don’t have a job. How you gonna eat? Welfare pays three hundred dollars a month—what’s that? You can’t live off that. You need to do something to survive. That’s what hustling provided. It’s a subculture that regular people with jobs and who are middle class just don’t understand. They just don’t understand poverty on that level. That’s where I came from, that’s where motherfuckers in my neighborhood came from. We clawed our way up outta that shit.

  Think about it—if you can make thousands upon thousands of dollars in just one hour, would you turn that down? You put that shit in the hood, and I can make ten fucking thousand in thirty fucking minutes. What would you do?

  And it was everywhere.

  *

  I was about fourteen when I first really got into the game. By that time I was too old for playing in the back of the building, and my Summer Youth pay was long gone. I couldn’t ask my mother for change for ice cream anymore, or even for fresh school clothes. Material stuff is so enticing when you don’t have shit. It’s not that we were even materialistic like that, but when you’ve got old-ass clothes and last year’s boots on in winter, it’s hard to have a righteous attitude. My mom provided the bare minimum, but that was all she could afford. If I wanted to get fresh and have some money to eat, I had to come up with my own
plan. And since things I wanted were out of her budget, the fastest way to get them was to hustle.

  The dreads came to my hood wearing fly shit like Fila suits and gold chains and gold teeth, while we were dead broke. They were making money and driving flashy cars, and they would come up to a guy smiling, flashing those gold fronts.

  The very first dread I worked with, Dusty, had his gate at 55 Bowen. “Yo, red mon [because I was so yellow]! Yo, me wan’ see if you wan’ work in the gate.” When they said “work in the gate,” that meant working in the drug spot. Simply put, a drug spot was an illegal store that sold drugs. It could be set up anywhere on the street; in an alley, on a corner, or even in the lobby of a project.

  So I was like, “Okay.” I didn’t know a goddamn thing about selling drugs, all I knew was that I had to get me some of that money they were always flashing.

  The list of reasons why not to sell drugs is endless, but I ran through it in a few seconds and accepted the dread’s pack. Even with all these deadly factors, I decided to hop in the drug game.

  My first time in the gate, that shit was spooky. It was a little hole in the door, and people would shove their money through the slot and demand their drugs. This was at the top of the crack game, so these motherfuckers were pulling like a hundred thousand dollars in a matter of hours. There was so much traffic coming to this fucking spot. Every few seconds there’d be a knock at the door and some fiend asking for some shit. The constant knocking was making me nervous.

  To make things worse, I’d already started smoking woolies, so I was extra paranoid. Woolies are a mixture of weed with coke or crack rolled up into a blunt or joint. Before the dreads brought blunts into America, we were all just smoking joints. But the Jamaicans brought Fronto leaf (a dark, wrapper-grade tobacco leaf) with them, and rolled the weed in that, and when you couldn’t get the Fronto leaf anymore, you started cutting open Phillies. So Jamaicans were responsible for the blunt sensation.

  Anyway, I was too paranoid in the spot that night. I couldn’t relax. Everything about the situation had me on edge. Thing is, I’ve always had a little sixth sense, though. Dudes always used to say, “U-God can see the cops coming over the top of the Hill,” as they were on their way to raid us. This particular time, there was so much traffic coming through and so much money exchanging hands that I got really nervous. I could just feel it—I had to get the fuck up out of the spot. A part of me was trying to ignore the voice in my head telling me to get out; the hungry hustler part of me wanted to ignore that voice and keep right on clocking (working) out of the gate.

  Soon my inner voice got the better of me, and I knew I had to go. So I shut the spot down and locked it up. Me and my man Choice packed up the drugs and the money and we walked outside. I barely got around the corner, and here come the police with the battering ram, pushing me out of the way to raid the spot. I remember one cop yelled at me to get out of the way as they charged right past us. I watched them run right to the spot and smash in the door I’d just come out of.

  When I got back around the way, the dread I’d been working the gate for saw me and came over to get the scoop on the raid. “Red mon! I thought you was in the gate when the cops rushed!”

  “I had to get out! Shit was just too hot, dread. I could just feel it,” I told him.

  He asked me where the money was, and I gave him the mad stacks of cash we’d clocked that day. He broke me off a little bullshit three hundred dollars.

  After me saving all that cash and work for him, and he only gave me that little punk-ass three hundred, I was mad. This drug game was for chumps. Almost getting arrested and shit for that bum-ass three hundred dollars?

  Fuck the dope game! I thought.

  *

  There weren’t many other options out there at the time, though. So at fifteen, I decided to get a little nine-to-five job at the Statue of Liberty with Method Man. They hired Staten Island dudes because we were right by the ferry. We then had to take another ferry to Liberty Island, but I guess the bosses figured we didn’t mind the ride, since we were always taking a ferry everywhere anyway.

  Meth and I worked that job for almost two years. It saved my life in a lot of ways. It helped me get on my feet. During that time, Meth and me also got real close.

  When we did click and started hustling together, Method Man really started coming into his own. He wasn’t just talented at hustling, either. That boy had already produced a beat on a little Casio and rapped over that shit. He named the song “Panty Raider,” and it was a smash in our hood. He made another one called “My House, My House.” I had it on repeat in my tape deck even back then.

  We were both writin’ at that time, kicking around ideas together when we weren’t mopping the floors and hauling garbage and doing all this crazy shit for Mr. Hill, our boss. We used to write rhymes on the back of coasters, just sitting in the back of the shit on garbage detail and writin’. We’d pick up these little paper coasters to write on, and one day Meth said, “Yeah, C.R.E.A.M.: Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” He started tagging everything with that acronym—the project walls, Dumpsters, train cars, whatever he could find. I remember when I said that should be a fucking hook; we made that fucking shit up way back then. True fact: The title of Wu-Tang’s first hit single started with Meth and me sitting at the Liberty Island garbage detail.

  I wasn’t making enough money there, though. Even though we’d steal cases of soda, we’d steal camera film and resell it on the street and skim money here and there, I just wasn’t making enough money. Plus, we were stealing so much the owners started getting wise to us. Before they fired us, I quit. That was the last regular job I ever had.

  I’ve always wanted to go back and see Mr. Hill, ’cause we did a lot of shit we weren’t supposed to back in the day. Now that I’m older, I respect the business hustle and the business-minded way Mr. Hill was thinking. I do feel a little sorry for doing him dirty back then.

  *

  I was seventeen when I came back to the streets after the Statue of Liberty job. And I came back hard. I met up with my Puerto Rican man, Bright, who lived in either 185 or 225 Park Hill, I can’t remember which.

  It seems like a no-brainer now, but at the time not many black kids thought to have a Puerto Rican emissary when you went uptown to cop cocaine in weight. Bright spoke Spanish, and he took me uptown to meet the connects, the coke distributor who wholesaled base to the street dealers. That was how I first met my connects. They were pretty heavy. In the drug game, I learned there’s always somebody bigger and heavier out here. It’s best to not even try to be the biggest. That’s a setup for a lot of drama and disappointment.

  Supposedly, my connect was the one getting BMF (Black Mafia Family) their shit. He was supplying them for years, I think. I found that out years and years later, of course, but I definitely wasn’t surprised when I did find out. Simply put, they had access to a lot of coke.

  They sold me my first brick for seventeen thousand dollars. I had some money saved from my Statue of Liberty job, and I hustled up the rest on the block. I came up from an eight ball (one-eighth of an ounce) to seventeen stacks (one stack is one thousand dollars). Back in the day, you could get an eight ball for a hundred dollars. You chop that up, cook it, and you can sell that for two hundred dollars. Then you’d go buy more coke, chop that up, cook it, sell it, you make four hundred dollars. That’s how you flip. You flip from two to four to six to eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-four, and you make your motherfuckin’ way.

  I chopped that eight ball to three hundred dollars. The three hundred went to six hundred dollars. I kept flipping until I could cop the quarter key, also called a “big eighth.” Then I really started to flip, and got to half a man, then to a man (a full kilo). You kept flipping and flipping and flipping. The thing about it is, you could make that money in four or five hours easy. I went through my two hundred, boom, fast four hundred, boom, eight hundred, and so on. In two weeks I’d be up to seventeen stacks.

  The whole time,
for the two months or so I was out there hustling up the money for a brick, I wore the same pants every day. I’d be out all night, then up early in the morning. I’d change my socks and boxers and just throw the same shit on and go back to hustling. I scraped up every dollar I could in those days getting to that brick quota.

  The first rule of hustling is to stack your money, as in you don’t spend it. You don’t spend no bread. You eat, maybe cop a pair of Timberlands so you don’t get cold, get some T-shirts to be hustling in, and you save the rest, every last dime. Every day you hustle, but you keep saving that bread until you reach that quota.

  I reached that goal, and I was good. I took my seventeen thousand dollars right uptown with my man Bright to see my connects. Once I met them, I didn’t want for nothing after that. Once I got good with them, they just loved me. These dudes were taking care of me. Because of them, I always had it, and I didn’t have to worry about having it, either.

  I was also too smart to have to do all that sucker shit the rest of these fools were doing building up territory and all that. Like I said, I’m the ambassador, so I didn’t have to do horrific things for territory. I had three or four different territories rocking, and they made up one big territory.

  See, the whole thing about it is, you got the kingpins, you got the workers, and you got the enforcers. That’s how that shit works. The enforcers don’t do nothing but come in and clear the block of dumb fucking dudes. The workers come in and hustle. They get all the bread, they make sure the money’s rocking. The kingpins go back and forth with the heavy shit—they bring the bombs in, they take the money, they keep it moving.

  It was easy after that. I could just come back to Staten Island and mark up whatever I got. I’d have like half a brick just for selling weight. Without even leaving my house, I could make twenty-five hundred dollars in a night or two. Then I’d run back uptown and get back on the clock.