RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  As far as bribing cops, I got approached a couple of times—I can’t say the officer’s name, but I did get approached by one—but he didn’t know how to approach me. As I got older, I realized he wanted to come to me and ask because he liked the way I moved. Like I said, as soon as I saw him, I’m gone.

  Another police dude, he looked like Rocky from the movies. He used to lurk in the bushes all the time. Always be in the fucking bushes. I’m the only one out in the front of the building, and he’s in the bushes. He looking though the bushes and shit, and I don’t move. I was doing my thing, but he was in the wrong area if he wanted to find my shit. He’s always in the wrong area. He kept doing the same shit every day.

  One day, he dropped a brown paper bag on the ground with nothing in there. I didn’t pick up on it until I said, “Damn, this dude wants me to drop some money in the bag.” He wanted a couple grand. That’s what he wanted, but it didn’t go down like that. ’Cause once you feed the devil, he will never go away.

  *

  One day when I was fifteen years old, I was enjoying a day to myself and didn’t have any drugs on me. No gun, either; I didn’t like to carry unless I was working or if I was in a vehicle. All I had were some brass knuckles I kept around for emergency brawls. I was coming back from uptown, driving through the hood, and I got caught while trying to park my car.

  I remember that day clearly because I’d rented a Ford Taurus from the Africans at the cabstand around the corner. We were mobile from our early teens because there was this crew of Africans that used to rent us cars on their credit cards. I remember sideswiping a few parked cars while learning how to drive. By our mid-teens, though, we were whipping them shits all over NYC. Yeah, I took a few side-view mirrors with me once or twice, but by the time I took my road test, I was whipping that shit like a pro. Well, usually, anyway.

  Now, you never drove your car into the drug zone or parked it there. It was one of our rules, because there was so much surveillance going on. You parked on the outskirts, and then you walked into your projects. It’s all just part of the certain rules and regulations you moved by.

  I’m making a turn to park my shit, and the fuckin’ cop sees me and pulls me over. Now, I looked a lot younger than I should have looked behind the wheel, ’cause I thought I was the shit. I had no license. The car wasn’t in my name, and I later found out it was reported stolen, as well as being rented on a stolen credit card, and was the subject of a hit-and-run investigation. I had no idea of any of that, or that I wasn’t even supposed to be driving it because of its record.

  I wasn’t dirty, either. I wasn’t carrying any drugs or guns. I didn’t have anything but my bankroll and my brass knuckles. Two fucking things I always carried was the BB: bankroll and brass knuckles.

  I had on all red Polo gear, red pants, red Gucci sneakers, three gold fucking rope chains, heavy as a motherfucker, and about five thousand dollars in my pocket. I was comin’ back from uptown and chillin’ with my peoples, so I was dressed to a fuckin’ T that day.

  The cop walks up to the car. I didn’t have a license, so he gets me out and searches me. Finds the brass knuckles and the five K. He puts me up against the fucking car. I’m standing there, my hands on the fucking hood. He puts everything on the hood.

  “I’m going to have to take you in.”

  “Okay. Lead the way.”

  Soon as the cop took his eyes off me, I grabbed the money and jetted. I didn’t care about the car because it was rented from the Africans. I just took off runnin’. There was a straightaway that went all the way down to the ’jects. All I had to do was reach the buildings. If I could make it there, I would disappear like a fart in the wind.

  He took off right after me. He was right on my tail, but I knew if I could make it to the projects, I could disappear on his ass. So I cut through the basketball courts. I’m tearin’ across the courts with the police right on my ass. I’m running, running, running—almost got this motherfucker beat.

  I come around the corner with him right on my tail, there’s two behind me and two in front of me. I Allen Iversoned, crossed over on the two in front. In other words, I did the shaky leg on them, made them fall on the floor. You learn how to do these things playing tag as a kid, so you shake them. I faked out the cop so hard, I think he injured his knee. Later, I saw him with a scraped-up face and bloody knee.

  I laughed over my shoulder at them and kept bolting. Shouldn’t have gloated so much. Some Good Samaritan stuck his damn foot out and tripped me up while I ran past him. Boop! I crash to the ground and get smothered in police. The cops were on me in a second, hitting me with their walkie-talkies and kicking me. They tried to kick my teeth out, but I was able to protect myself. They still fucked me up pretty good, though.

  They took me to the precinct and booked me; I was all bloodied up. I got accused of grand larceny (basically driving a stolen vehicle); I got assault on a police officer (the pissed-off fallen cop with the bloody knee and face); all these charges are on my public arrest record. I would have gotten away completely if it hadn’t been for that Good Samaritan. I could’ve gotten away with it all if it was just no driver’s license.

  Back then, getting caught driving without a license just got you a fine. It’s a whole other story now. The funny part was that when I actually went in to get my real driver’s license, I had to pay off twenty-five hundred dollars in parking tickets and still had to wait two years for my suspended license to be granted, even after passing the test and everything! All because of the tickets I got while learning to drive those African whips as a teenager.

  Instead, they charged me with grand larceny, which fortunately was a misdemeanor back then. I’ve got all this shit on my fucking record to make me look more dangerous than what I really am. Lucky for me, I was a minor with no previous record. I pled out to the grand larceny charge, they dropped that bullshit assault charge, and I wound up with a weekend in the Manhattan Detention Complex, otherwise known as the Tombs, and 150 hours of community service. I had no lawyer representing me—if I had, I probably could have gotten the whole thing dismissed.

  So I get out of jail and I do my community service. Soon as I come home, I walk up the street, and the African dude named Bengali who rented me the car is out there in his little silk shirt and gold chains looking all slick.

  “Yo, dog, you rented me a stolen car!” I told him.

  “I didn’t know, man—”

  I broke his fucking jaw. I just punched him dead in his face with my brass knuckles and told him, “Man, don’t ever disrespect me like that again. Don’t you ever rent me a fucking stolen car! If you gonna rent me some shit, then rent me some shit that isn’t stolen! Now I got possession of stolen shit on my record!”

  Last I heard, he wound up doing fifteen years for heroin possession, then came home and died of AIDS.

  *

  I witnessed a lot of great escapes from cops on those streets. There were three types of runners in the hood. What I mean by runners, I’m talking about Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis–type runners. You had the slow, galloping steady mover—that’s how I move. I’m slow to accelerate, but once I get my stride, you aren’t catching me. Then you had the semifast pace. And you got them Carl Lewis-fast, gone like the wind types. What I mean by Carl Lewis is the ones that run like lightning the moment the pistol sounds off. They got that speed that when they take off, you just forget about it, you aren’t gonna catch them, period. Then you have runners like my man Kaze, who went zero to sixty like a fuckin’ Ferrari.

  Method Man had speed. Back in the day, he was a jack-in-the-fucking-box. I used to call Meth the “klutz genius” on the basketball court, because he would trip and do some shit and it would still go in the basket. Now, mind you, Method’s a tall motherfucker, about six foot three, but he was fast as fuck. He had the Carl Lewis speed, too.

  I’m Batman, he’s Robin. Just because I’m small, and he’s bigger than me, that don’t mean nothing. One day we were standing in front of the buildi
ng, as usual. We dealing with our usual one-two step, trying to get our money for the day, and it just was mad police flying up and down the block. It was just hot that day. We didn’t care. We didn’t believe in hot because when you’re a hustler, you don’t give a fuck because you know your customers. You had to practically have a photographic memory. You had hundreds, even thousands of different customers, and you had to recognize every single one of them. I knew every one of my customers on sight. To this day, I might recognize someone from back in the day. If you didn’t keep tabs on your clients, you were gonna get busted fast. Undercover agents would try to come up and buy shit from dudes all the time, but they’d tell ’em to get the fuck outta there.

  Now, one of the rules I had—this is another reason why certain police probably respected us dudes—when it was hot, when I saw certain po, we would shut it down. We left. I would just leave. I would give them they space and let them go. This day was a different day, for some reason.

  Anyway, Meth had this long deep-green Polo coat. Long one, down to his knees. We used to rock real long trench coats back in the day.

  One day we in front of the building. It was crowded out front. Dudes were hustling, fiends were running around, and Lounger Lo, the building’s practical joker, was there as well.

  Something you should know about Lounger Lo, aka Lounge. First, he’s Cappadonna’s brother. Second, this dude was the hands-down slang king motherfucker of Staten Island, and made up a lot of the terms the Wu kicked. Lounger had slang for every fucking thing under the sun, he was a walking slang dictionary. If you heard him talk, unless you were from Park Hill, you wouldn’t understand a word he said because he speaks in all slang.

  I rep him because I knew where he came from: Jelly, or jell-t, means to move in a sporadic motion; darts, that means rhymin’ with precision; and bungee means we’re about to get up outta here, we’re about to bungee out of here. Politicking means talking to someone else. All that is Lounger, that’s Cappa and Lounger and their family’s shit. Cappa’s notorious with slang, too, but that shit really comes from his brother.

  The “Ooh” Building and all that, that’s also Lounger. They called it the Ooh Building because dudes were coming out of there like, “Ooh,” or lit the fuck up. That’s the Ooh Building. Yeah, another one. Ooh, Ooh.

  You just had to sit down and listen to him talk. You’d start saying shit like, “I’m at the store. I’m about to jell-t. I’m a bungee over here and bing. Pop a little. Yeah. We gonna do that.” Ninety-nine percent of the slang that came out of New York City came from that dude’s mouth. Most people don’t even fucking know it. And he’s never stopped, either, he just keeps coming up with new words and new terminology every day.

  Anyway, Lounger would yell off the roof, “The cops is coming, the cops is coming,” and the cops wouldn’t be coming. He’d cry wolf all the time. We used to hate him for that.

  But that day, for some reason, he was doing the opposite. In other words, he’d say the cops coming, the cops ain’t coming. Then when he ain’t saying nothing, the cops’re fucking coming. Fucking asshole.

  Anyway, this was how connected me and Meth were. We were so in tune with each other back then that he could read my thoughts from across the street. I’m serious. All I had to do was just look at him, and he could tell by the look on my face what to do.

  So we in front of the building, and I used to get these, to this day I still get these little chills, like a whoosh! I get like a whoosh inside of me. I can’t tell you what it is. It’s almost like Spidey-sense. It’s like a spiritual feeling when trouble’s coming.

  All I knew was that things were happening. Weird shit was going on. So I stepped off the curb in front of the building. Something was just telling me to go. Soon as I’m stepping off the curb, both the cops and the TNT, the Tactical Narcotics Task Force, are pulling up. They only show up when an undercover agent makes a buy with marked money. And they brought the whole team out that day.

  Meth is dirty as a motherfucker. I turn around and look at him and give him the eyeball. I didn’t even have to say a word. Carl Lewis in motion. He was gone. He didn’t even waste time looking around, he just knew to book ’cause I gave him the eye. The moment I turned around and looked at him, he did the Darkman. You just saw his fucking green coat go flapping into the fucking building.

  By the time he got inside, the police were coming through the back and in the front. He made it past these motherfuckers and made it up in the staircase and got rid of the shit and came out the side of the building.

  He was like, “Woo!” He was like, “Yo, yo, dawg, I read your mind!”

  I just grinned and said, “I know you did, man. I know you did.”

  *

  The Africans renting us whips helped us out a lot. We were mobile now. We could get uptown easier to cop those drugs. We could get around the city more just in general. Now we were meeting dudes in different hoods and just conquering land. Every weekend we’d be out and about. The block would be a ghost town. This shit was like a real nine-to-five for hustlers. On the weekend, we didn’t really want to hear about junkies and all that shit. Of course, whoever stayed to hustle on the block on Saturdays and Sundays was gonna get all that paper. Because we were all off the clock out trying to bag numbers and ride around and smoke weed, the crackheads would be lining up to see whoever was out there in our place.

  During all this time, running back and forth uptown and going to different projects to drop packages, I still managed to keep going to school. I went to McKee Vocational High School. To attend I passed an entrance exam, like an aptitude test or whatever. It was a specialized school, and I did more than well enough to get in.

  As I got older and started hustling more, I still stayed in school. I realized I didn’t have to be in the streets to get money. I was giving dudes packages, and they could have my money moving while I was in class. I’d get up at eight in the morning and put those packages in the street. By three o’clock, when I’m home from school, they were finished. So I’d just collect my money after school and put more packs out.

  Then it was upstairs to do homework and be back either late that night or early in the morning on my way to school to collect my funds and replenish the packs. Same routine, day in and day out. I’d let the hard heads who just wanted to be home and uneducated get rid of those packages for me while I was in school. I knew those dudes weren’t ever gonna be shit anyway, because they just wanted to lay up and sell drugs all day. Never go to school, never leave the block. They were happy just doing what they were doing.

  We’d all hustle on the block, but I never liked being on the block all the fucking time. I didn’t want to be known like that, by the cops and the nosy neighbors and snitches, especially since I was doing mad dirt. Anyway, aside from school, I didn’t want to be out in front of the Hill all day. Not when there was so much of the city to explore.

  On weekends, we’d go uptown to cop more, or we’d drive out to Brooklyn to the weed gates and cop some good greenery. We’d go to an area of Bedford-Stuyvesant called Hancock. The whole block would be lit up with Rastafarians and Jamaicans. Or we’d go uptown to Edgecombe Avenue and get a chicken bag, which was like you’d pay twenty dollars, and get fifty to sixty dollars’ worth of weed. It was so competitive up there that the dealers had to sell that much product for cheap to make sure their customers came to them. It was so damn much weed over what you’d usually get, and you could bring that back to the Island, break it down, and flip it, too. We made good money for a couple of train rides. There were all types of ways to come up, and we tried damn near every last one of them.

  7.

  IT’S YOURZ

  A successful drug dealer knows how to invest the money he’s earned. You had to have money in the stash for bail and lawyer fees for your mans who got knocked. You needed extra re-up money in case you took a loss, so you still had dough for the next round. I just made sure my bills were paid, made sure my people were all right. But I always knew th
ere were rainy days right around the corner. My workers were getting knocked by the police here and there, and packs would get lost or confiscated, or your spot might get robbed. There was so much to learn, and learning by making mistakes usually involved spending money to fix them. Especially when you’re out there doing dirt. You had to protect yourself and your crew when you’re out there doing wrong.

  However, we were also a bunch of punk-ass teens with all this income. So, with the excess we had, we’d rock the flyest threads and dope jewelry, Polo rugbies, rope chains, Gucci kicks, Cazals—all that drug dealer chic was at its apex in the crack era. We set social and fashion trends back then that are still emulated today.

  Also, I was getting around more, making more moves around the city, and I had to look the part. I was rocking Gucci, Polo, and some butter-soft shit. Any ill concerts I could get tickets to (we could just bum-rush the show), I went, because I had money for it.

  And as soon as that brick flipped to forty thousand dollars again, I would put aside my expenditures money. I would splurge on some stupid shit, but most of my dough went right back to my connect to cop more coke and to keep the block flooded with no lapses during the re-up period. I was striving to perfect my hustle so it was a fine-tuned machine with no glitches, and I was able to stack up a good amount.