by Gucci Mane
The folks at city hall couldn’t accept that. Atlanta needed the Olympics. So as part of the efforts to downplay the city’s dark underbelly, the police department started underreporting crime. Violent crimes were downgraded to misdemeanors and other police reports were being thrown away altogether. This went on for years.
But enough playing dope-game historian. Because I didn’t know about any of that shit then. I was ten years old. All I knew was my new neighborhood was a fucking drug zone. Zone 6.
The Knights Inn was infested with dope as was the rest of the Eastside. Deals were being made in the middle of traffic in broad daylight. Prostitutes on every corner. The robbing crew always out looking for the next stickup. It was very, very rough.
There were also a lot of rumors going around about children being kidnapped, molested, and murdered. It had been ten years since the Atlanta Child Murders, where nearly thirty black boys and adults had been abducted and killed, but the story still loomed large over Atlanta families. A lot of folks seemed to think Wayne Williams wasn’t the only killer, if he was even the killer at all.
For a young boy from the country, all of this was frightening. Culture shock. My new surroundings were so aggressive. The people in it seemed vicious. Cruel.
After spending almost a year at the Knights Inn, the four of us moved to Mountain Park, an apartment complex on Custer Avenue made up of redbrick low-rises. A little nicer than the motel but essentially the same shit.
We were now living in East Atlanta, but Duke and I were still going to school by Ellenwood. I was at Cedar Grove Elementary and Duke was at Cedar Grove High. Cedar Grove had a good football program and like I said earlier my brother was a hell of a ball player. He mostly played linebacker but you could put him anywhere on the field. Hell, Duke could even punt. He later got a scholarship to play ball at Tennessee Wesleyan University. I imagine he was supposed to go to a different high school after we moved to East Atlanta, but somehow he got to stay at Cedar Grove to play ball, which meant that I got to stay at my school too.
•
Since kindergarten back in Alabama, school had been easy for me. Because my momma was a teacher, she’d taught me how to read young, and I took to it quickly. At Sunday school the teachers were in awe that I was able to read and recite scripture from the Bible. So when I did enroll in kindergarten at Jonesboro Elementary I was way ahead of my peers. I finished my work before anyone else. I was praised for being a good student but I knew it was because my momma had given me a head start. I carried over that early advantage as I continued my education in Atlanta.
Like my brother, I was naturally athletic, but I never had his drive and ambition when it came to sports. It didn’t interest me. I never wanted no letterman jacket. I envisioned myself as the guy at school with a nice car. The guy who dressed the best. The one with a bankroll in his pocket. As far back as I can remember, I really just wanted to get me some money.
•
The move to East Atlanta had instilled in me a deep financial fear. It seemed like every month my momma was saying we were behind on the rent, or we didn’t have money to pay the light bill. I’d eavesdrop on her calls and hear her telling my aunties in Bessemer that shit just wasn’t going right for us. I was seeing people in the neighborhood get evicted—something you didn’t see in Alabama—and I became convinced that would be our fate.
That I was still going to school in Ellenwood only made me feel poorer. The kids at Cedar Grove were by no means rich, but they came from working-class families and their houses were definitely nicer than our Mountain Park apartment or the Knights Inn motel.
I grew up thinking my father had money, but once we got up with him in Georgia I realized that wasn’t the case, at least not anymore. I discovered that back in the day, my father sold heroin and coke, but by the time he entered my life in Atlanta he was a full-fledged con artist. Every penny he made came by way of tricking somebody else out of theirs.
Not long after he left Alabama my father made friends with a guy named Tony from Philadelphia. He’d taught Tony the ins and outs of the dope game and in return Tony put him onto the con game. Three-card Molly, pigeon drop, shaking the pea—all sorts of trickery and bullshit.
To my father everyone was a potential mark. He couldn’t turn it off. He had to beat everybody. We might pull up to Hardee’s on Bouldercrest to get cheeseburgers and he’d hand the cashier a fifty-dollar bill. They’d give him his change, and with a quick sleight of hand he’d swap it out with some lesser amount he’d had ready to go for that exact moment.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
When my father got to talking all proper like that you knew somebody was about to get got.
“Ma’am, you must have miscounted my money. I gave you a fifty-dollar bill.”
It worked every time. He might only make a couple of dollars off something like that, but it worked every time.
I learned a lot being around my father. He taught me all his little tricks, but what he was really teaching me was how to size people up, how to read body language, and how to use that information for my benefit. Everything about the man was smooth. Even his hands, they were softer than my momma’s. And he had so many different sayings. I got so much slang from Gucci.
Empty wagon make the most noise.
If you keep lookin’ back, you gon’ trip going forward.
Buddy eat shit and bark at the moon.
Three things I never seen: a flying saucer, a pigeon in a tree, or a nigga or a bitch I need.
Most niggas cross the street, I cross the country. If I get enough cheese I will cross the continent. From Maine to Spain, I can play that thang, because I’m the original Gucci Mane.
As sick as he was, my father’s tricks weren’t paying the bills. When he’d first gotten to Atlanta in the early eighties he and his crew hit the city hard with the cons. People in Georgia weren’t familiar with Three-card Molly, so they tore the town up. But that hustle started to dry up. Folks weren’t falling for that shit anymore. The days of white Cadillacs were over.
Even when he did stumble into money, it was never long before he lost it gambling in the streets. Gambling was his vice. One of them.
You could feel it when Gucci came into some money. He’d stroll into the apartment and it would be like a breath of fresh air came in. He was generous and would share the wealth, bringing us gold chains, watches, and rings. All kinds of different jewelry he’d tricked off somebody or won in a dice game.
But when he was broke, and that was more often than not, things were tense. He came home from the Kentucky Derby one year—an annual pilgrimage he made—and he had like twenty thousand dollars he’d made tricking folks and betting on the horses. It was a celebration. A few days later that money was gone.
His other vice was the sauce. My father got drunk every day. Morning, noon, night. Before he’d even leave the house he’d put down a pint of cheap gin. He’d chase it with a sip of water, swish it around in his mouth, and spit into the sink. I remember the sound. The bottles would get thrown away but he would keep the caps. He used those for the pea game. Then he’d head out, taking the MARTA bus downtown to find people to con. He’d be drunk as hell by the time he got home at night, reeking of alcohol.
All of that was a reality check. I learned young that if I ain’t got shit, then I just ain’t got shit. If I wanted something in life, I would have to find a way to get it myself. Constantly worrying about money the way that I did messed me up. I would tell myself when I got grown I’d never live with those feelings. Twenty-five years and millions of dollars later I still remember that anxiety.
My first enterprise was picking up aluminum cans in the neighborhood and taking them down to the store for a few cents each. That’s how I met my friend OJ, who would become the rapper OJ da Juiceman. OJ was a few years younger than me and he lived in Mountain Park too. Together we’d canvass the hood for cans. Sometimes we’d save time by stealing bags of cans that had already been collected by the older guys in
the neighborhood. We’d hop their fences, grab the bags from the yard, and take off running.
But the real way I started to make money was selling drugs. I was in the seventh grade. At the time Duke was rolling with some of the hustlers in the neighborhood. These were the niggas driving fixed-up cars, who had the sickest gear, and were known for carrying weapons. I never had no positive male role models growing up so to me, these were the coolest guys I knew. My brother would never go full-on in the streets like me, but back then he was selling a little bit of weed.
Duke selling weed was his way of keeping up with the niggas he was running with. Duke was never really a hustler. His passion was football. Plus he had a job at the Winn-Dixie grocery store, so he really didn’t have much time to be hustling. So he eventually put me onto his package. I would serve his boys who would want weed for themselves or somebody else they knew. From the jump, the shit was fun to me.
Duke’s friends used to call me “worker,” as in my brother’s little worker. I hated being called that, but I couldn’t fight these dudes because they were six years older than me. It made me resent my brother because I felt like he was playing me to his buddies. I wanted to find a way to pull one over on him and be my own man.
Here was the deal. Duke would give me thirty dollars on every hundred I brought in. What he didn’t know was that of the ten ten-dollar dime sacks he gave me, I was pinching out of each one to make an extra sack. I’d sell his ten sacks and make thirty dollars, then sell the extra one and make ten dollars more. When the time came for me to turn over four hundred dollars, Duke was thinking I’d made $120 when really I’d made $160. That was my father in me. Always looking for the angle. Always thinking about what move I could pull to my advantage, however small that move might be.
•
It wasn’t long after I began selling weed for Duke that I endeavored to start my own operation. That came about during the Christmas break from school of my eighth-grade year.
Coming back after break was like the first day of school. Everybody would show up with their new toys, clothes, sneakers—whatever stuff they’d gotten from Santa. That year I had my eyes on some jeans, some Jordans, and a Starter jacket. But as Christmas neared my momma told me she wouldn’t be able to get me any of it.
“Bills are really tight right now, Radric,” she told me. “I’m sorry I can’t get you this stuff. I promise I’ll get it for you later.”
I couldn’t go back to school with the same old shit on while everybody else was fresh as hell. I just couldn’t. I tried to explain but my momma cut me off.
“Look, here’s fifty dollars,” she told me. “Get whatever you want.”
What the hell was I supposed to do with fifty dollars? I couldn’t buy that Starter for fifty dollars. I couldn’t get a pair of Jordans for fifty dollars. I couldn’t get any of the things I wanted.
Frustrated, I took the money and left the apartment, walking toward the other side of Mountain Park. I knew that’s where the dope man stayed. I handed him the money and he handed me two tightly wrapped fifty-dollar slabs of crack cocaine.
“Now you owe me fifty dollars, get it?” he said.
I sure did.
That was all she wrote.
The dope game was on and poppin’ from that moment on. There would never be any other sort of extracurricular activities for me again.
IV
* * *
DOPE GAME HARD
Even though I brought the fifty dollars to the dope man like I’d done a thousand times before, I had no idea what I was getting into. It wasn’t like with the weed, where I was getting dime bags already packaged and serving my brother’s friends. I was on my own with this dope shit. This was a totally different kind of product with a totally different type of clientele.
I had a buddy who knew more about dope than I did and he helped me cut up those slabs the first few times I picked up.
A fifty-dollar bag of crack was roughly 1.5 grams. That got broken down into twenty-dollar bags, ten-dollar dime bags, and five-dollar nickel bags. You could make a little more or a little less depending on how you played it, but most of the time there was a hundred-dollar return on a fifty-dollar slab. Then you go get you a hundred-dollar slab. Profit.
My buddy also knew a place where I could get a few of these sacks off. He brought me to a run-down house on Custer where we were greeted by an old lady with salt-and-pepper hair who introduced herself as Miss K. She was a nasty-looking woman, gangly thin with sores all over her face and body.
Her home was even more disgusting than she was. This spot was a smoking house for junkies and truck drivers, but she also had ladies in there selling pussy. All sorts of foul shit going down. There were little kids running around and rotting food littered everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it.
The deal with Miss K was that she’d give me the green light to serve her people, but I had to hook her up with a sack free of charge. A finder’s fee. That was a fair enough deal, except I was so shook by the scene that I fumbled a few sacks on my way out. This happened on more than one occasion, to the point that Miss K told my buddy that I needed to tighten up and get my shit together. She could see how rattled I was, that I didn’t want to touch anything in there. But it wasn’t long before I grew numb to that environment. I went on to serve Miss K and her folks for years. I didn’t give a fuck about her sores or that house of horrors anymore. I was making money.
I took to the dope game quickly. I got creative with it. Innovative. When other niggas went from selling dimes to selling nicks, I started selling three-dollar sacks. My margins were slimmer but I was selling out quicker. The junkies were buying them and then selling to each other for five dollars. I saw those three-dollar sacks as an investment. I was building my reputation along with my business.
Hiding my activities from my momma was easy. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, and I wouldn’t call her naive either. I would just say she worked a lot and I wasn’t giving her any reason to question my whereabouts. Besides the occasional fistfight, I was never a troublemaker at school and I’d stayed bringing home good grades. I was now a freshman at Ronald E. McNair High School on Bouldercrest and I was popular. It was never hard to get someone to let me copy their homework.
When my momma did get suspicious I was always a step ahead of her. I’d picked up a thing or two watching my father bullshit so many people.
I remember when she first noticed I had come into some money. I came home one day with a seven-hundred-dollar leather 8-ball jacket. I told her I won some money in a tunk game with my father. That wasn’t that far-fetched, because he did let me shoot dice and get in on the card games with his crew.
Eventually my momma caught me red-handed, finding sacks of dope in my jeans when she was doing the laundry.
“Momma, you know that guy who be washing your car, cutting the grass, and taking out the trash for us?”
“Black?”
“Yeah, well Black don’t be doing all that for free,” I said. “And he said he wants this stuff. He don’t want no money.”
My momma knew Black was a J and she knew dope was everywhere in Mountain Park. The idea that someone had given this to me and I was passing it on to Black wasn’t that hard to believe. Even if it was, I knew my momma liked Black. Junkie or not, he was a part of the community. And she definitely liked having her car washed and the trash taken out, so I was off the hook. No further questions. With my momma off my back and my father out doing whatever it was he was up to, I was free to make plays.
By fifteen I’d been selling weed and dope for a few years but I still hadn’t used myself. My early experiences with Miss K and the neighborhood crackheads had been a deterrent. I’d interacted with countless fiends and they were so fucked-up and broke it turned me off to the idea of getting high. My buddies had been pressing me to smoke weed for years but I’d resisted. As a hustler I felt above using. It seemed lame to me. Plus I wasn’t about to let my friends peer-pressure me.
But one day I was walking up to the gas station when I saw this girl who had moved into the apartments. She was a couple of years older than me at McNair. She was the talk of the hood. Fine as hell. She had on tight black spandex shorts, standing outside of her apartment and was talking on a cordless phone.
I was eying her when a car drove up and flagged me down. I served them and took my time doing so. I wanted her to know I was a hustler.
After they pulled off I approached her and asked if I could use her phone. I called my trap back and was talking about all the moves I’d made that day. I was showing out. When I hung up she was standing there looking at me.
“You smoke?” she asked.
“Of course I smoke,” I lied. “Let me go get a blunt.”
I ran up to the gas station. When I got back I placed the Swisher and a bag of weed on the coffee table.
“So . . . are you gonna roll it?” she asked.
Not only had I never smoked, I’d never rolled a blunt either and I’d only picked up one. There was no room for error. Luckily I rolled that shit like a pro and fired it up, taking a deep pull like I’d seen folks do.
I’ve heard people say you don’t get high the first time you smoke, but it hit me instantly. I was high as hell. This was some powerful shit and I was trippin’, overwhelmed, paranoid, all that. But the girl got me something cold to drink and we sat down; after a couple of minutes I calmed down. Hell, I was actually feeling pretty good. I liked being high.
That girl became my smoking buddy. I still didn’t want my buddies to know I smoked, so she was the only person I did it with. She’d hit me on my beeper and I’d walk to her spot and we’d burn one down. After a few weeks of that we started fucking too, so it became a good little arrangement. We never ended up having a relationship or anything, but she was cool.