RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  I can remember the last time I smoked woolies. It was New Year’s Eve, and me and a few of my crew had a rental car for the night. We decided to go uptown to Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem to get some weed.

  We kind of like lightweight bum-rushed the spot. Not fully, but we just pushed our way in, and dude was only in there with his girl. He had all the coke and weed out on trays.

  There was too many of us, so we started getting sticky fingers. We wound up taking mad coke and mad weed. We were so hyped on getting fucked up for New Year’s that we drove over to the West Side Highway underneath some overpass. We rolled up all the windows and were smoking that shit up. I shit you not, we musta smoked about twenty or thirty motherfucking cocaine and weed blunts. It was real smoky in the car, and my throat was burning. I don’t remember much after that.

  The next morning, I woke up back at my place, and my throat felt super raw and closed up. I had a headache and felt mad sick. I thought I’d OD’d. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I couldn’t get out of the bed, and I couldn’t even talk. I looked over on the table, and there was still mad coke left. Just looking at it got me disgusted. I felt so sick from just having that shit around, I got up, grabbed it off the coffee table, and threw it out the window.

  After that, I made a commitment to never smoke that shit again. I was constantly smoking and getting high. I was addicted. I made the conscious decision to not do that anymore. I have supreme willpower with that. Right now, I have the willpower to say, “No, that shit is poison. That shit is no good.” Like I said, I chose money over that shit.

  Let me tell you one thing about me; I love money more than I love anything in this goddamned world, except for my family and my babies. I love money more than I love drugs, women, all of that. I’m addicted to money. I like to have it. I like to spoil the people I love. I will never touch no cocaine or none of that shit ever again. I am straight weed, alcohol, and that is it. Money, weed, that’s it. I’ve stuck by that shit for the rest of my life.

  Once I kicked the woolies, my health started comin’ back. Before, my face was all fucked up. I was sunk in. My belt was on its last hole. After I made my decision, my weight started coming back. My face started coming back. My pockets were bigger. I had more money. Got a car. I just started doing more and more better for myself.

  Some of my peoples didn’t have that willpower, though, they became addicted to smoking crack. They started smoking the pipe. They graduated from that to something else. They stayed on that plane and continued on that downward spiral. Life is harsh in the ghetto, and sometimes you get caught up trying to escape it. I bet there’s a lot of clinically depressed people in the hood, people with a lot of unresolved issues who can’t afford any type of therapy. That’s why the drug trade is a billion-dollar industry. Millions of folks looking to self-medicate. Even the dealers on the streets, who were supposed to be stronger than that, would succumb to coke. Just trying to maintain and hold shit down can have you wanting to get blackout high.

  Meth had some trouble kicking that shit. He was going through a lot of trials and tribulations, especially at a certain point in his life. We were all smoking woolies, and he was no different. At the time, Meth couldn’t kick it. He couldn’t stop. Even when the rest of us stopped, he couldn’t kick the habit. Dudes started looking at him funny, like he was a junkie.

  Eventually, he started rocking real heavy with me, and he got up off that shit. We weren’t angels after that, but he cleaned himself up. We were both still dirty street ninjas, but we were just trying to better ourselves and our situations and clean up our acts more.

  Woolies became the demise of a lot of hustlers. Like my man Choice. I used to always wonder why his paper always came up short when I hit him with consignment. Then I found out why—he was upstairs smoking woolies. We always broke even, he never turned a profit. He would be with his wife upstairs all day, smoking crack and fucking. Like that was the life for him, he couldn’t be happier. He had a little bullshit apartment, he was getting his dick sucked every day, and even made a few babies and all that. He just wasn’t thinking about his future. He was content with some woolies, a woman, and an apartment. That’s why I had to just stop fucking with him. I like dudes around me with some ambition.

  Because it’s easy to get caught up in the petty shit, the nickel-and-dime drug money, and feel like you’ve made it. Especially coming from where I did, where just making ends meet was an accomplishment. I made sure, no matter how clean my Gucci sneakers were and how much gold I wore, that the drug game was not the be-all and end-all. Not by fucking far.

  So I kept pushing for more.

  8.

  CASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME

  I made it through a short misadventure in Sacramento in 1988 when I was seventeen, and got rushed out by the Crips and the Bloods with just two thousand dollars left from my original six-thousand-dollar investment. Once I got back, I was jingling in no time. That was the extent of my out-of-town drug capers—I’d learned that if I was gonna make a fortune, it’d have to be right here in Gotham Fucking City.

  Sometimes it got to be too much for us young black men to handle. I remember once when we were going through some particularly hard times in Park Hill. Raekwon was suffering through his trials and tribulations. He was growing up and clashing with his strict mother. And then there was the issue of being a poor black kid in the city. He was so stressed over his situation and the hardships he was dealing with day in and day out that he stopped writing rhymes.

  We were all in the hallway at 160 selling. We called it One Six Eww, ’cause it was grisly, like “Eww.” Don’t remember why Rae wasn’t at the gate in 225 that day.

  There was a lapse in the crowd of customers, so we were kicking our rhymes to one another, passing the time like we usually did. We all spit new rhymes, as always. You couldn’t come out on the block with the same rhymes day after day. That was like only having one outfit to wear to the club every night—your peers would notice, and you might even get clowned (made fun of). So we all kicked fresh new rhymes daily.

  Rae, though, kicked a rhyme he’d already kicked the last two or three times. That meant he’d put the pen down. I didn’t say anything at the time, but later, when it was just him and me, we talked about it.

  “Uey, I’m over this rap shit,” he told me. “Kicking freestyles ain’t helping us get money. I might as well just secure this paper, nah mean? I’ll rap if I got time for that shit.”

  “You can’t stop though, Rae,” I said. “We gonna do this, bruh. This music is going to be our way out of all this drug shit.”

  “Nah, Uey. I’m just trying to keep my workers in order and keep these fiends coming. I’m not thinking about rhymes right now. That rap shit ain’t going nowhere. Look at RZA. He back in the hood, just like the rest of us now. Even if you get on, you still end up back in the projects.”

  When we rapped that “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” we meant that shit to the fullest. Rae wasn’t trying to put all his eggs in the rap basket. He had to make money to eat, and he’d rather never rhyme again than starve. Technically, he was right. But I wouldn’t let him quit. I kept telling him that this shit was going to materialize for us. I felt it, I just always felt it in my heart. I always knew somehow that we’d be running all over the world with this rap shit. I believed from the bottom of my heart that the Wu-Tang Clan was going to take us out of our hell.

  Because of that, I wouldn’t let Rae put his pen down. Not my brother. I was basically on top of him all the time. “Keep writing, keep writing,” I told him. “Keep writing, keep writing.” I’d yell out the window at him, “Hey, you write any new shit?” He’ll tell you himself that I pulled him back into rhyming when he got too caught up in surviving day-to-day.

  In the end, he kept writing. At the time, his rhyme heroes were Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, and Rakim. You can tell from Rae’s criminology style that he’s heavily influenced by G Rap. Rae was in the streets so much, he could take the d
etails of drug dealing and being in the streets to a new level of detail. G Rap and Melle Mel invented that type of rap, with the mobster references and drug dealing and all that fly shit. Rae took that style and added to it because he was seeing so much of it day to day. And because of that, he was ready when it came time to spit those rhymes with RZA.

  He wouldn’t have been in shape mentally to do “C.R.E.A.M.” if I hadn’t been a real friend to him and encouraged him to keep going with that rhyming shit. I don’t give a fuck what anyone says—I was the one who pushed Rae to keep rhyming. He might have still gotten on, but the thing is this rhyming shit is like boxing. You have to mentally stay in shape.

  I wrote every day. A paragraph, a rhyme, whatever. You have to exercise your mind. Even back then when we were on the block, if we would have succumbed to just keeping our thoughts on the day in and day out of the hustle, we would have never sharpened the part of our brain we use to be creative. But we did, and now look—Raekwon is credited for starting that crime rhyme genre of rap more than Kool G Rap is, at least the updated, modern version of it. All the Mafia references, the aliases, that was something Rae drew heavily on from Kool G Rap and from the time he spent in the game.

  Also, we grew up on Staten Island around Italians and hearing certain names. So when it came to time to write a rhyme, I guess that’s what Rae drew from. And it was successful. So much so that Rae pretty much birthed a genre of rap after Cuban Linx hit the streets. After that album, everyone had a mob-sounding alias.

  *

  Our dreams of success seemed so far away that we didn’t know if they were ever gonna come to fruition. We didn’t know the Wu was going to be so influential at the time. It was so easy to get disheartened when we were running around in the streets like animals, shooting it out with other crews over money. Stickup kids were everywhere. Gates were getting robbed. And sometimes you had to put your creativity and imagination and any other aptitudes you possessed on the back burner to ensure self-preservation. We were all dealing with this fucked-up reality. And it’s not just creativity. It’s book smarts, too, that eventually take a back burner to the hustle and the grind.

  I didn’t let it, though. I learned how to hustle drugs, but I was still in school. I didn’t want to be a drug dealer. I was happy with two bricks or three bricks. These other dudes, they wanted a hundred bricks and to be Pablo Escobar and shit. I didn’t want to be Escobar. The street will have you chasing something completely different than what you got in the game for. At first, things in the streets had us doing shit just to get some food in our bellies and clothes on our backs. We got that done, and even managed to pile a little bread.

  I was always looking for a way out of the streets. The block wasn’t going anywhere, I realized that early. Those dudes I had hustling for me and other dudes on the block, they had no education. They thought drug dealing was the life, and they weren’t looking toward their future. They weren’t thinking about going to school, education, or trying to better themselves, they were just trying to sell fucking drugs.

  When I picked up my money from them, I told them this wasn’t the life, it wasn’t anything to be glorifying. Their parents or whoever was raising them wasn’t implementing that need for education like my moms was. They didn’t listen, though; they were hardheaded little sons of bitches with no drive or ambition, they just wanted to sit on the block and sell drugs.

  You see, knowledge is infinite. And if you’re not open to obtaining new knowledge, then you’re only gonna go as far as what you currently know will take you. Am I open to acquiring new knowledge? Yes, I am. Is everybody? No, no, no. Sometimes ego gets in the way of trying to learn new shit, because you may think you already know something, that you know all there is to know about a topic. But if you’re a real 5 Percenter, a real Godbody, you’re a sponge, you’re always learning.

  If there’s one lesson I would tell the young’uns of today, it’s that the drug trade is not a permanent lifestyle. It’s not for you to sit there and make a living and think you’re gonna last ten years doin’ this shit. The drug game is not for you to live that life for the rest of your life. It’s for you to get in, and if you’re trying to buy some other kind of business, that’s what you dump your money into. Then you make the transition from the streets. Once you piled up enough bread to get out, you dump it into a legal business, and then you cut off all ties with the connect and walk away—that’s it, you’re done. It’s as simple as that.

  But these dudes get into the game and get sucked in deeper and deeper. Some of those dudes back in the day, the Escobar-emulating motherfuckers running ten keys, that was close to a million dollars they were making on the regular. The smart move would have been to take that million and do the Godfather II hustle, get into some kind of legit business and leave the street grind behind. Say, “I’m done with this shit,” and walk away.

  But the problem with a lot of motherfuckers was that they couldn’t get out of the game. They got caught up in the life, and they couldn’t stop—until they got busted or shot down.

  *

  Going to college made me realize like, “Yo, man, there’s more out there than just the projects.” I was in school from probably like twelve in the afternoon to six at night. That schedule exposed me to a different world; it allowed me to see other things. I was meeting new kinds of women, friends, etc. People from Queens and Brooklyn, and meeting other motherfuckers who weren’t drug dealers. They were kids. Just regular kids going to school, and it was beautiful. It was nonthreatening, and I liked it. I was at the Borough of Manhattan Community College working on my bachelor’s degree. I actually met AZ, who later joined the Firm, and a couple other dudes from around the area: PI, Blizz, Jamal (from Lafayette Gardens), Lil’ Kim, even Puffy.

  I used to love going to school, even though my focus was kind of fucked up because I was still street poisoned. Women were a distraction, too. But I still came out of there with about a dozen credits. If I had kept going, I’d probably have my degree now.

  I was transferring from BMCC to LaGuardia Community College to study mortuary science, but by then I caught my case and had to drop out to do my time. I went to school up until I got locked up, though.

  Believe it or not, I was gonna be an embalmer. That’s what I wanted to do. All that fucking carnage I saw and death and all that, all them fucking bullet wounds, that wasn’t shit for me to handle dead bodies. To this day it’s nothing for me; I can go in, see the corpse, the shit don’t even faze me. Certain things that’ll quease a motherfucker out just doesn’t bother me.

  I got the notion to be an embalmer when my cousin Jimmy died, which is a crazy fucking story. One day, my grandmother called me up. “Lamont, you gotta go to the Bronx.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Jimmy’s not calling me,” she said.

  “So what? What happened?”

  She said, “I don’t know. We gotta go, that’s all. We gotta go see what’s going on.”

  We get to the house. On the door there’s a letter from the ambulance. We were like, “Oh, shit!” But there’s nothing on it about which hospital he went to, just that the ambulance was there. We don’t know what the fuck is going on, where he’s at, nothing.

  We open the door to his house. Grandma’s got the keys. We smell piss on the bed. Look through the house trying to find out anything. Can’t find him. We asked the police where the nearest hospital was at. He gave a list of the five hospitals in the area that might have taken him in. Fine. We started driving around to all of’em.

  When we get to the first one, my grandmother said, “Yo, you gotta go downstairs in the morgue.” She tells me to go get him, go find Jimmy.

  “Don’t worry ’bout it, Grandma,” I said. “I’ll go down to the morgue.” They had babies, adults, everybody in this goddamn cold chamber, just rows and rows of square metal doors with bodies behind them.

  Once she knew why I was there, the attendant stood next to me and let me start looking for Jimmy. I start
ed pulling out racks—metal shelves on rails that you could pull out—checked the body, and slid it back in. Racks on racks of people. John Doe. Jane Doe. John Doe. Kids. Infants. I’m pulling one after the other. I’m pulling back babies. I’m pulling back medium-sized kids. I’m putting them back in. I can’t find him. We went to all five hospitals. I went through the whole day looking at dead bodies.

  Afterward, I’m just sitting there like, “Wow. Oh, shit! Now what?”

  “Okay. You know what? We gonna go back and check the first hospital we went to,” my grandmother said.

  The morgue lady had the white jacket on. I had a white coat on, too, ’cause it was freezing in this refrigerator. I’m pulling out rack after rack after rack. Literally, hundreds of unclaimed John Does. Finally, after about an hour, I pulled one rack in the back. All the way in the back back. Under three motherfucking bodies. Cousin Jimmy. I pushed the plastic down to his face and said, “Oh, there he is.”

  Turns out he had a heart attack in his house. Somehow he got to the phone. He got up in the ambulance. The ambulance people came and got him, but they didn’t take his ID. When he gets to the hospital, he didn’t have any ID, so he became a John Doe. He passed away in the hospital, and they had no idea who the fuck he was. That taught me to always have my identification on me, and to make sure my elders always carried their ID at all times.

  My grandmother was happy that Cousin Jimmy had been found. I was a bit traumatized—not from the adult bodies, but the babies. I talked to the coroner dude that’s handling it. He said, “Man, this happens every day.” Two-, three-year-olds that their mother dumped in the Dumpster. The Bronx was just chewing them up and spitting them out.