by Gucci Mane
•
Trapping had been nothing but fun for me since day one. I felt cool, I was making money, and I’d never had problems with the law. But the dope game stopped being a game the day I got robbed.
I’d seen him earlier. I had reupped with my plug, and as I was leaving his trap house this older nigga pulled up on me. I recognized him from the neighborhood. Nobody liked this guy. He was a bully and a known robber.
“Hey, little buddy. What you be buying? Fifty slabs?” he asked me. “Fuck with me, I’ll front you one extra if you buy from me.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather deal with my own people,” I said, walking away.
Hours later I was by the car wash on Custer. I was on my bike and had just served some niggas. As I turned to peddle away I glimpsed something out of the corner of my eye. It was a .45 Desert Eagle handgun pointed at my head. It was the dude from earlier.
“Give me everything.”
I had four hundred dollars’ worth of dope tucked in my ass crack, but even with that big pistol in my face, my only thought was the consequences of giving up my stash.
If I give him my bomb, I’m not going to have anything.
I emptied my pockets and handed over the contents: a bag of weed, forty dollars cash, and a few sacks of dope. But I kept that slab clenched tight between my ass cheeks.
He’d been watching me all day. He saw me catch a trap and leave the house of a drug dealer. That’s why he targeted me. He could have easily blown my ass off right then and there for lying, but for some reason he didn’t. He just left.
I biked back to my plug’s spot and told him what happened. Well, not exactly what happened.
“I just got robbed,” I said. “He took everything, the whole bomb I just got from you.”
“It’s cool, man,” he told me. “Just don’t fuck with that guy. That’s the type of nigga who will actually kill you.”
He went on to give me another four hundred dollars’ worth of dope because he felt bad. So I turned that bad situation to my benefit. Now I was up four hundred dollars.
Still, I was far from happy about the episode. Getting robbed shook me up. Ever since I’d moved to East Atlanta I’d seen plenty of kids in the hood get jumped and have their shit snatched, but not once had that happened to me. I think a lot of those older stickup boys spared me because they were cool with my brother. But I knew then I couldn’t depend on that anymore. All bets were off.
When I came home that night I told Duke. He wasn’t keen on how deep I was getting in the streets, but we were in agreement that I needed to be able to protect myself. I needed to get me a strap. Duke didn’t sell dope but even he kept a pistol in his car. That was just a wise precautionary measure living in Zone 6.
A few days later Duke went to the pawn shop. You could be in and out of there with a weapon in no time. He got me a .380 and a box of bullets. This thing ended up being the most bullshit gun of all time. You could run up on someone and pull the trigger from point-blank range and still miss.
Of course I didn’t know that when my brother handed it to me. I had never fired a gun.
That night I took a walk to nearby Glen Emerald Park. I pointed my new pistol to the sky and pulled the trigger until the clip was empty.
Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!
Getting robbed was a turning point. Instead of making me retreat into my shell out of fear, it had the opposite effect. I became superaggressive. I knew when I shot my gun in the air that night that no one was going to take anything from me again. I would straighten out my business and everyone was going to know that if you fucked with me, there would be repercussions.
V
* * *
TEXACO
When I was fifteen, Duke moved out to start basic training for the US Army. Football hadn’t worked out. After he left, things got real bad at home.
My father had been deteriorating for years. It finally reached a breaking point. All he lived for was the bottle. He didn’t have any hustle left. He’d still go out to con folks, but he was so fucked up, no one was falling for his shit anymore. He got to be so delusional that he’d even try to con me. He’d drink until he got sick, go to the VA hospital, come home, and do it all over again.
“I can’t go square for nobody,” I remember him saying.
Soon after Duke left my parents got into a fight. Not verbal. Physical. That was uncommon, so the image remains clear in my head: my father hitting my momma across the face with the end of the vacuum cleaner, her falling to the ground as he stood over her and spit in her face. I tried to jump in but my father grabbed me by my throat, snatched the gold necklace he had given me clean off my neck, and threw me out of the way. The police came and my father was taken away on charges of domestic violence.
Gucci wasn’t a bad person. No one who knew him would say he was. Ask any of my cousins in Alabama and I bet you they’d all say he was their favorite uncle. He was fun to be around, always offering words of encouragement for anyone he came across. Underneath his demons was a kind spirit. A good heart.
I’ve heard my cousin Suge compare me and my father to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and his pops. Floyd Sr. was a boxer and every bit the showman his son is. He taught his son everything he knew. The defense. The shoulder roll. The stiff jab. With his daddy’s skills Floyd Mayweather Jr. did what his father hadn’t been able to: put all the pieces together and become the greatest boxer of his generation.
Suge likens that story to me and my daddy, but the truth is I’m still putting the pieces together. I just think my father was never cut out for the whole family thing. Gucci could be the life of the party but in a lot of ways the man was a loner. He may have just been better off in life by himself. I loved my father, as did my momma, but there was nothing we could do for him. He was too far gone. His addiction was stronger than he was and it was tearing apart our home.
My brother went AWOL from the AIT school and came back home after I told him about the incident. Duke and Gucci’s relationship had been strained for years. My brother did not want him coming back to the house.
Soon after my father’s arrest we moved to another set of apartments off Bouldercrest called Sun Valley. Like Mountain Park, Sun Valley was infested with drugs and our new apartment was perched at the top of Sun Valley, which just so happened to be the spot where niggas sold dope.
There was constant traffic, so the move accelerated my hustle.
The top of Sun Valley was a prime trap, but at first I found it hard to compete with the older hustlers who operated there. The only reason I managed to was that I lived where I did. I would wait for those guys to retire for the night, seizing my opportunity to get my sacks off.
OJ moved from Mountain Park to Sun Valley around the same time I did. OJ and I had been buddies since the days of picking up cans, but because he was three years younger than me we’d mostly ran with different crews since then. Despite our difference in age OJ had been out on the corner hustling as long as I’d been. And he was good at it. OJ was a small guy, but he was never afraid to fight when shit went down. I always respected that.
When OJ moved to Sun Valley he moved to the bottom end of the apartments, so he really wasn’t allowed to trap at the top. So he’d either be at the bottom, where they sold the weed, or he was up on Bouldercrest by the Texaco gas station. A lot of the time I was up there with him. Me and OJ have rapped about the damn Texaco so many times, so let me set the scene.
The Texaco is a place of trade, a spot where people can go to the store to buy a beer and some Swishers, then get some dope on their way out. A lot of folks preferred to go up there to shop—especially those who weren’t completely fucked-up Js. Functioning crackheads, if such a thing ever did exist. I’m talking about people with jobs and families, but they still smoked crack. They’d rather come to the Texaco than have their kids and neighbors see them buy dope in the apartments.
The gas station is positioned on a busy five-way intersection. Custer Avenue connects with Bouldercrest. Bo
uldercrest connects with Fayetteville and Flat Shoals. Flat Shoals connects with Brannen Road. There’s always traffic and there are two MARTA buses that stop there. The 32 Bouldercrest and the 34 Gresham. Years later OJ founded his rap label, 32 Entertainment, named after that bus stop.
We would post up, acting like we were waiting to catch the bus. When the 32 pulled up we’d tell the driver we were waiting for the 34, and when the 34 pulled up we’d say we were waiting for the 32. We’d be there for hours on end.
The Texaco was run by an Asian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kim. Mr. Kim knew what was going on and for a while he was on our ass. He’d come outside and tell us to get away from the store and threaten to call the police. We’d leave for a couple of hours and come back. Sometimes we’d just tell him to step off. Eventually he gave up on trying to keep us out of there. We weren’t going anywhere. I always wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Kim know how infamous their little gas station is.
On Bouldercrest I’m sellin’ dope at Texaco
And Mr. Kim keep sayin’ “Get ’way from sto!”
No, I can’t get ’way from sto, I got so much blow, it gotta go
—“I’m a Star” (2008)
It wasn’t some glamorous New Jack City type of shit. Countless nights I stood in the pouring rain, making plays, cold as hell, blowing into my hands to try to keep warm. It was the trenches.
A whole bunch of serious fights and shootouts went down at the Texaco too. It was the fall of 1997 when Javon got beat damn near to death outside the Texaco. Javon was OJ’s best friend and a homeboy of mine. He got stomped out—fucked up really, really bad.
I felt terrible when I found out what had happened to Javon at the gas station. And I was concerned. Because I knew those niggas hadn’t been out there looking for him. They’d come up looking for me.
Javon had been a casualty in an ongoing beef me and my boys had with a crew who called themselves the East Shoals Boys. The East Shoals Boys were from the other side of town, Decatur. Like the kids I’d gone to school with in Ellenwood, they weren’t exactly well off, but they came from more nurturing environments than the crime-ridden projects I’d come up in. But they lived in the same school zone and attended McNair, which is where the Sun Valley Boys and the East Shoals Boys first butted heads.
On the last day of school my junior year—the spring of ’97—a bunch of seniors had a huge food fight in the cafeteria. I’m sitting there and a whole bunch of shit got splattered all over me.
Immediately I stood up and walked over to the perpetrators. It was the baseball team. I slapped the shit out of one of them. Everyone, especially the one I slapped, was shocked. This was a senior and a jock and here was a junior slapping him silly in front of the whole cafeteria. He was so shook that he didn’t do a damn thing about it.
Days later me and my buddies ran into the baseball team at a girl’s graduation party in Decatur. There were maybe eight of us, but there were probably sixty of these dudes from that neighborhood. The minute they saw us, it was a problem.
Shit, we’re about to get crushed.
They started grabbing baseball bats and the steering-wheel clubs from their cars and things were looking bad. They surrounded us and punked us out, but somehow we were able to get into our cars and get out of there without punches thrown. All in all a light confrontation.
But these dudes were still pissed and now it wasn’t just the baseball team. After the confrontation at the party, that whole neighborhood took up those boys’ cause, feeling like we had come in and disrespected their turf.
The school year was over, but throughout the summer I was hearing these guys were after me. When I started my senior year that fall, there were niggas roaming the halls looking for me. These weren’t even guys who went to McNair. These were grown men from that hood.
After I heard what happened to Javon I knew I had to take action. Problem was I didn’t have a lot of friends who were still at McNair. Save for OJ, all my friends were older than me. All the Sun Valley Boys had either graduated or dropped out. I was on my own at school.
“You need to come to school with me tomorrow,” I told my buddy BP back at the apartments. “I can’t show up there alone.”
The next morning me and my crew boarded the school bus. Most of them had no business being on the bus, but the driver gave a nod of approval as we stepped on.
“Y’all better win,” she told us. Even the bus driver had heard about what happened to Javon. She knew what time it was.
BP was fired up that morning. There was only one reason this nigga was headed back to his alma mater and that was to whoop some ass.
“Hey!” he screamed to the rest of the kids on the school bus. “Y’all are gonna help us fight or else we’re gonna beat your fucking asses too when we get back to the apartments.”
We had rallied up a crew of fifteen by the time we got to the school and there were around the same number of East Shoals Boys there waiting for us. BP didn’t waste any time getting to it. He walked right up to one of them and knocked him out cold. It was on and poppin’ from there. We fought for a long-ass time, beating the shit out of these dudes with chairs and all sorts of stuff lying around.
Satisfied with the beating we’d put on them, we took off running up Bouldercrest back to the apartments. We cheered as the police and ambulances zoomed past. We hid out the rest of the day at my buddy Dontae’s and waited for things to die down.
VI
* * *
LAFLARE
I graduated from McNair in the spring of 1998 with a 3.0 GPA and a HOPE scholarship to Georgia Perimeter College. But I was doing pretty well for myself in the streets, so going back to school was the last thing on my mind. So I didn’t go. I think they call that a gap year.
After I sat out the first two semesters, my momma gave me three options: go to school, get a job, or move out of her house. Since school was never difficult for me, enrolling at Georgia Perimeter seemed like the easiest option to keep her off my back.
I was an outsider at Georgia Perimeter. Whenever I did show up it was for the sole purpose of showing out. I had me a box Chevy with rims at the time and I’d pull up and hang out in the parking lot and try to talk to the coeds. I’d see my old classmates from McNair and how they were going through the whole college transition, trying to get their lives together. And there I was, pulling up in a nice car, with jewelry on my neck and dope-man Nike Air Maxes on my feet. I was flashy as hell. I liked shining on people. I was above it all.
That was pretty much the extent of my college experience. I don’t have stories of frat parties or tailgating or whatever it is they do there. I was enrolled in some computer programming classes but I could count on both hands the number of times I showed up to class. When I first enrolled I worked the school out of like eighteen hundred dollars for textbooks. I took every dollar of that money and put it towards getting myself a bigger bomb. That’s how serious I was about my studies.
My schooling would officially come to an end after I got busted at the Texaco. It was April 2001, my second semester at Georgia Perimeter.
Apparently an undercover cop had been watching me for a few days, and he found the bushes where I was keeping my stash at, a stash of about ninety bags of crack. I was in the gas station when he walked up and flashed his badge.
“Let me see your ID.”
Knowing it would buy me time, I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it over. The moment he took his eyes off me to inspect it, I was out the door.
I bolted through the backyard of a house on Custer into the woods, ending up in Glen Emerald Park. I blew past the tennis courts, leaping from the top basketball court to the bottom one. When I landed my legs gave out, all wobbly; I was like a boxer who took a shot on the chin. My mind was responding but my body was not. I collapsed on the court, knowing the cops were on my tail.
“I’m down! I’m down!” I screamed out.
My surrender didn’t help my cause. Those cops beat the fucking shit out of me. I hadn’t
caught my breath from running when I was tossed in the back of the cruiser. I threw up all over the seats.
My face was swollen from the beating, so instead of taking me to the police station, where they’d have to take a mugshot, they took me to Grady Hospital. Afterward I was brought to DeKalb County Jail, where I was booked and told I was allowed one phone call. I called my momma.
“Momma, I’m locked up.”
“For what?”
“They’re saying ‘criminal possession of a controlled substance,’ ” I said, doing my best to play dumb. “I was just standing at the bus stop, waiting to go for a job interview.”
But the days of fooling my momma were up. Vicky Davis didn’t play around about no drug shit. After I posted bail, she took my key to the house and told me I was no longer welcome at home.
•
When I went in front of the judge a few months later, I took a plea deal as part of Georgia’s First Offenders Act. If I accepted the plea and completed a probation period, I could have this first felony struck from my record. But if I got caught “in any trouble” again, the deal was off the table, and the judge could resentence me.
“I’m giving you ninety days in county jail, Mr. Davis,” he told me. “But do you understand that if I see you here again, I can sentence you up to thirty years in prison behind this?”
I heard him loud and clear, but I couldn’t drop hustling cold turkey. I’d had nearly forty thousand dollars saved up at the time of my arrest, but I now had lawyer fees and had gotten my own apartment after my momma kicked me out the house. I needed to be making money.
Since I was still technically enrolled at Georgia Perimeter, my lawyer was able to convince the judge to suspend my ninety-day sentence until after the following school year, which was about to start up. So just like that I was out and it wasn’t long before I was back to dibbling and dabbling in Sun Valley and the Texaco.