RAW
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I was blown away. I didn’t realize that every hospital has this. Every hospital has a fucking morgue underneath it where it has people in the refrigerator. They discard all the clothing. They got a box on the side, just full of all the dead people’s clothes. John Does and all that.
That shit might fuck somebody up. Once you see carnage and cadavers, the effect of life and death, somebody get shot in the face, all that shit, you change. Literally, you become a bone man. We’re all just bone men. We ain’t nobody. We’re so fragile. It’s crazy how people act so tough and hard and like they’re so invincible, when everything around us can kill us at any time.
*
By this time I was nineteen, the Rastafarians had faded out because they’d all gotten locked up or killed, so the Hill was ours. You have to understand, we felt like Park Hill was our land. We had a right to do whatever we wanted on our land. We’d grown up from little toddlers to grown men there, and taken the beatings and all kinds of shit, and we were still there standing and growing. Park Hill was ours because we all had made our claims to hold it down; we defended it, spilled blood there, and knew every inch of it. We didn’t own a single inch of it legally, but we still felt it was ours.
And I got my percentage out of that motherfucker, too, make no mistake. Even so, there was a whole bunch of other motherfuckers out there doing way more than what I was doing. You had dudes up the block, you had dudes down the block, you had us. The whole neighborhood was drug infested. When I wasn’t there, someone else was always keeping the traffic coming. That’s the reason why it was money in the streets. It was simple economics; without supply and demand, there would be no customers.
That was a regular thing. And occasionally, outsiders would come into our hood trying to get money. It would start with some Brooklyn dude coming through the projects to see some girl he knew. She’d let him in the house. Then he’d see us making all this money running up to cars pumping our cracks. He’d see us in the hallway counting our stacks of fucking cash, and then he and his crew’d want a piece.
He’d run back to his neighborhood, wherever he’s from. “Dudes’re getting money on the Island.”
“Oh, word, we gotta see about this.”
Eventually, we would run them out of town. Queens, Brooklyn, they came from everywhere. But we’d run them out. Sometimes, though, they’d hurt a couple of us in the gun battles before they left town.
Thing I learned about that was you have to stop outsiders as soon as they come in. If someone comes into your territory, you can’t let ’em linger. You have to act right away, get ’em out of there fast. We let a couple of motherfuckers just linger and a lot of dudes got hurt or killed because of that bullshit. We learned the hard way that you have to be proactive when repelling invaders.
One of the dudes I knew got shot in the eye with a MAC-10 by an outsider who wasn’t even supposed to be in our hood. The guy who got shot wasn’t my peoples, we had our little beefs and never really got along, but we were from the same hood, so I felt bad when he lost an eye over some Brooklyn dudes trying to invade our turf. We should have handled the intrusion off the rip.
Sometimes I can’t even believe I made it out alive. So many good dudes I know passed away on the same block in front of the same building that I was in front of daily.
I remember seeing this kid get hit right in front me. I was in the barbershop getting my hair cut. I was with my man Blue that day. There was another dude named Mike there, a real smooth-faced, dark-skinned dude. He wore gold-framed Cazals and was always really quiet. He was also a stone-cold killer, an enforcer for the Rastafarians pumping crack in my hood. He always showed me love, so I didn’t know this guy was a fucking maniac. At the time, I was very young, about fourteen or fifteen, and still wet behind the ears.
I’m in the barber’s chair, just minding my business. Suddenly we hear a MAC-10 spitting. We hit the floor just as the shop window burst. After a second it got quiet, so we ran outside the shop to see what happened. I still had the barbershop bib on.
The guy Mike shot was a notorious stickup kid, thief, robbin’-ass motherfucker. I didn’t know his name, but he went by the street name of Beatbox. He got hit, and within seconds, collapsed right in the street. A couple minutes later, his neck swelled up, his hands, his face, everything. He was just lying there swelling up like a balloon. He went from living and breathing to a swollen, bloated corpse in less than a minute.
By the time the police came and covered his body with a blanket, the whole hood—little kids to grandmothers—had already peeped the body. It was some scary shit.
*
I carried a gun from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, until I got locked up. It was necessary. Guns started popping off everywhere after crack came.
Greed came into play, and when the money would slow up or get low, wars would break out over territory and prices and connects and snitches. Shit just got crazy—people were trying to control their territory and would do whatever they had to do to keep it.
Our neighborhood became nothing but a meat factory—straight butchery. Maniacs running around, sticking up people, popping rounds off every day. Motherfuckers getting shot down in the street. At its worst, people were getting hurt or killed almost every day. A lot of people dying. Park Hill soon got the nickname “Killa Hill.”
That’s when I started carrying, which was illegal as hell, of course. When you’re young, you don’t even think about trying to get a registered firearm. Them motherfuckers would’ve looked at me like I was crazy if I said some sucker shit like that.
But it was always fucking drama on the streets. You know how many times I had to flash or pull my pistol out? Once I had to back a couple guys down who tried to rob me on the A train in Brooklyn.
“Shorty, whatchu got in your pocket? Let me see that hat.”
“Nah, man. Dead that.” Out would come the .32.
“Oh, a’ight. You got that, shorty, you got that.”
“I know I got that! Keep it moving, motherfucker!”
That happened more times than I can count. Dudes would just shrug it off and keep looking for another victim. Not gonna lie, there were a couple times I got caught without my getcha and had to take a few lumps, but overall I got out of most situations with my shit intact, gun or no gun.
There’s three stages to flashing a gun: showing the handle in your belt as a threat; pulling the gun out; and finally, cocking the hammer. It usually only took one of the first two steps, but there were times I had to pull the hammer back to tell someone I wasn’t fucking around—and I wasn’t. Every time I drew my pistol, I was ready to use it, and the next thing you were gonna hear was thunderclaps. The rule in the streets was if you carried a gun and you drew it, you best be ready to use it.
There was a saying back in the day: “I’d rather get caught with my gun than without it.” When you got caught with a gun back then, you only did six months in prison. That’s why so many people were running around with guns, they figured they could do six months easy. That was nothing. Nowadays, you get caught with a gat, you’re doing a three-year stretch.
Fortunately, I don’t have to do that anymore. I hire guys with a permit for that now. I know cops who would love to pull that kind of security work. My protection is legal now.
*
During that era, there were mostly two types of criminals: the hustlers that fed off drug fiends and customers, and the wolves that fed off the hustlers. Usually they robbed drug dealers or drug spots, and that’s how they made their money. They let you make it, then they’d come and take it. Pretty simple.
Another one of my peoples came to me with a plan. “Yo, man, I need to get some money. I need to borrow that hammer.” So I gave him my nickel-plated .357 with a wooden handle, and off he went to stand by the weed spot.
His plan was to stick up customers at the gate or in front of 160. Dude was holdin’ dudes up every day, catching multiple robberies. He was a robbing machine, and motherfuckers would come out of
the building on ambulance gurneys with bullet holes in them. Fiends wouldn’t give up the money, he’d pop ’em, simple as that.
Let me tell you, if a dude throws a gun in your face, just give him the shit. If somebody got the drop on you, you’re getting robbed, so you give them whatever the fuck they want. Simple, plain as that. Don’t be a superhero. This isn’t reality TV, this shit is real. It’s not worth your life, not worth your blood, not worth your hospital bill.
Of course, there was nothing we could really do about this guy, either. First of all, he was part of our growing up. He was a part of the hood. Second, the dreads in the building selling weed in the spot where he was robbing, they were doing illegal shit. Third, like I said, it was a drug-infested fucking area. It was a drug zone, where anything goes.
It just came with the territory. Who you gonna call—the cops? You can’t call the cops on motherfuckers, saying I got robbed at the weed spot. You’re not supposed to be in there copping weed in the first place. You’re not supposed to be coming in buying crack, either. You aren’t supposed to be there doing any of that shit. If you wind up getting shot in the course of that, you can’t even tell the police that shit happened, so at the end of the day, they can’t really do nothing.
*
As the drug game escalated, the regular little .25s, .22s, and .32s weren’t cutting it anymore. I guess crooks still carried them, but they were more used as backup guns or guns to sneak into clubs.
Once things got really violent on the block, fully automatic weapons became the norm. The occasional one-shotter or pistol got overtaken by the omnipresent spray of bullets echoing throughout Park Hill.
It was war. Like for real war, complete with casualties, sanctions, and collateral damage. Just like when countries are warring, we were in an arms race, trying to get our hands on better weaponry than our enemies. TEC-9s were popular at the time. So were Uzis. But the baddest gun out there in Staten Island at the time was this chromed-out MAC-10. I shit you not, this gun was so pretty, it was like the Mona Lisa of automatic weapons.
That gun was legendary. It was used in so many robberies and homicides and who the hell knows what else. Everyone who saw it fell in love with it. It was the prettiest gun you’d ever seen in your life. Imagine the shiniest chrome rims you ever saw, but instead of rims, it was a gun. It sounds weird that an instrument of death can be pretty, but that shit was beautiful, straight up. Something about the power and the gleam of it. This gun was so shiny, it was like looking into a mirror. You could see your reflection in it. Just holding it, feeling that weight in your hands, made you feel invincible. It also made it really hard to get rid of.
It was just too damn sexy to get rid of. People would shoot motherfuckers with it and try to get rid of it, but it would always wind up in somebody else’s hands. You’d hear about who had the MAC-10 through the street grapevine. So-and-so caught a robbery with it, or so-and-so shot at the cops with it, or so-and-so caught a body with it. It was crazy because no one wanted to get rid of the gun. Even though it was the dirtiest gun in the hood, people knew it had bodies on it and it was linked to mad robberies and shit, they would still take the gun and hold on to it.
Back in the day, usually if you committed a crime or popped off with a gun, you’d toss it. That way, whatever crimes you committed couldn’t be traced back to you. Not this fucking weapon. No one was tossing that pretty little bitch, no matter how much dirt was on it. I saw it with one dude in the hood, then I saw it with this other stick-up kid from the building behind mine. I held it once, and only once. I remember it being light as a feather. Then I wiped my prints off and gave it right back.
Every so often a new gun would come into town from Florida or Virginia, still in its original box, with the cleaning kit and all that shit, but the majority of guns were obtained from janky guys. Real sketchy dudes, so you had to take what you could get. Hell, a couple times I ended up carrying pistols that had been police guns. I had revolvers that had police serial numbers on ’em. That’s how grimy New York was.
And you didn’t know if the gun in your hand had been used in a murder or robbery, you didn’t know anything about that, and you didn’t really care. Plus, we were young—I sure didn’t know any fuckin’ better. Remember, we didn’t know anything about registering a firearm. Also, we were black, we weren’t gonna get any legal shit done that way anyway.
I didn’t care where the gun had been or what it was used for, because it was protection. If I wanted to go to Brooklyn, I needed a hammer to hold me down, ’cause sure as shit I was gonna be robbed in Brooklyn. If you had a coat, or sneakers, or a chain, there was a 90 percent chance you’d get boosted in Brooklyn—that’s just how the neighborhood was. It was the Wild West out there—in the dark days Brooklyn alone would post something like a thousand homicides a year.
This was the era of Bernhard Goetz, who was the epitome of what was going on. He knew what everybody knew—everybody was carrying. Dude had gotten robbed so many times that he just got tired of the shit, and ended up shooting four alleged muggers himself. You ride the subway late at night, you’re gonna get robbed, it was as simple as that. There were no cops on the subways.
All praise to Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg, ’cause they cleaned that shit up. They shut Forty-second Street down, they came down hard on guns, including pumping up the jail time.
And we recycled guns all the time. I remember after my man popped all those people by 160, he gave me my .357 back. I then loaned it to another dude. The gun was dirty as fuck, but he held that shit down anyway. He needed it because he was out there rocking for me, and dudes from my hood didn’t really know him like that. They viewed him as a foreigner. So they got at him while I went uptown to get some more of the raw.
A-Train was supposed to be holding him down, but that didn’t happen. The gun I loaned him didn’t do him any good, either. He got shot up in front of 160 and dropped my hammer. They shot him the fuck up and left him blamped up [shot] in the gutter, trying to hold his guts in.
Incredibly, someone else picked the gun up and gave it back to me when I got back on the scene. Can you believe that, like an asshole, I actually took the gun again? Thinking about it now, I can’t believe I was so stupid.
Eventually, my .357 saw its last days on the street when my man Shakia asked to borrow it. We were outside as always when the scooter cops rolled up on us. Everybody ran, except for him. I don’t know why he didn’t run. The cops patted him down, found my burner, and locked him up. That was the last time I saw my chrome .357 or Shakia. To this day, I don’t know what happened to him.
*
Then one day, shit got really weird.
Me and Method Man were chilling in front of the building, doing what we do. The dread that ran the weed spot in 160 came outside. He was pissed because that dude was bringing mad heat to his spot by sticking up and shooting people.
Now this Rastafarian, his name was Fire, was a for real voodoo witch doctor, with dreads down to his ankles. He came downstairs and started smashing bloody cow kidneys against the walls of the building. Just holding them in his hands and whipping them on the walls. It was my first time coming across that voodoo shit, so I didn’t know what to think.
“Yo, Fire, what the fuck you doing, dread?”
“Red mon, the fuckin’ buildin’ is cursed, mon. Too much blood! The buildin’ is cursed! Too much blood spilled!” He did his little prayer and said some other shit, I have no idea what he said. Then he went upstairs. When he came back down again, he had a bowl of candies in his hand.
“Red mon, take the candy and eat it. No demon spirits can touch you in front of this buildin’, mon. Nothin’. No one, not even police.”
I took the candy, a red Jolly Rancher. Not sure if it worked or not, but here I am still to this day. I made it out from those buildings, and I can think of more than a few situations when I was supposed to have been blamped up. I didn’t believe that shit until a couple things happened that made me think twice.
Anyway, it’s during the hours when nobody but the crazies are out and about. We’re still trying to get money, but we should have known better, because it’s dangerous at this time. So we have our burners stashed up and down the block.
There wasn’t a soul out on the streets. Me and Meth are in the hallway. We hear something. A whistle from below us.
“Ay yo, who dat?” we called out.
No answer. I decide to creep down a few stairs and look around to see if anyone’s in the dark down there. I did a silent ninja jump down to the landing. When I peeked around the corner real quick, there’s three dudes with masks and guns sitting there, waiting to rob us. When I peeked out a second time to get another look, one of them saw me. He ran at me and pulled out his gun. I jumped to the first landing, and as I was about to run the rest of the flight up, he pulled the trigger. It clicked, but didn’t fire. I laughed a crazy, triumphant laugh ’cause his gun jammed, then jetted up the stairs and took off with Meth.
Another situation was when we were at war with some dudes. I’d just come home from my first bid, and upon my return these outsiders from Queens were trying to act like we can’t sell in our own projects, outside of our building. We didn’t care, though, we still had to hustle.
So I was out there doing my thing when this dude who was known for busting his gun comes running up from across the street. He pulls the .45 out and tries to blamp me. Somehow, the clip falls out of the fucking gun. We both looked at the clip on the ground and before he could look up at me, I took off.