I heard many tales from people whose chair Bob Marley had supposedly sat on, or whose cup he’d drunk from or whose yard he’d played football in. I thought they were being fanciful but, when I checked out their stories, they were true. That’s how it was – it was the thing to be seen with your people. Not like in the UK, where famous musicians would hide away in posh houses with the elite.
I was very aware I was English, though. First couple of days I’d have kids giggling at me in the street saying, ‘Why the man walk so fast?’ When I spoke to them they understood: ‘Ah, you from a Inglan.’ People found it highly amusing when they saw someone moving at what I thought was a normal pace, but seemed comedy-quick to a local.
Another thing people found curious was my bedtime routine. I’d make myself a little bed, put my alarm clock beside me, get a drink of water – things that seemed normal to me but which came across as incredibly mannered to the young men I was mixing with, who were more like Ivan from The Harder They Come than I’d ever be. If a Jamaican man wanted to sleep, he would fling himself any which way on a chair or sofa, or even a log, no covers or anything, and snooze away. ‘Jus sleep, man!’
The Rasta culture was huge in JA at that time. It had grown out of an increasing awareness of black history and black cultural identity that looked to Africa as the homeland. The Rasta experience was being broadcast via the lyrics of numerous reggae artists, and was reaching huge audiences. I was looking to Africa via JA, but they were just looking to Africa. I was thinking, If things are this basic here, what’s Africa going to be like? I realised at such times how English I was.
I didn’t have many possessions, money came and went, but the most expensive things I had back in Birmingham were my cars, the best of which was a Triumph GT6 – a great little sports car with amazing coupe styling, but it brought me too many problems. I hadn’t taken a test, so I had no licence and, besides, the red beast had been bought with money raised by ways and means that didn’t involve working nine to five.
The police stopped me – nothing new, as I was always being stopped – and this time I provided enough papers for them to let me go: an MOT certificate, an insurance note, and the car was taxed, but when one of the officers saw that the receipt stated I’d bought the car for cash, he wanted to know where I’d got the money from.
He walked around the car, looking at it admiringly, and then stood in front of me and said: ‘I’m a white man, this is my country, and I work hard to make a living in my country. I’ve worked all my adult life and I can’t afford a car like this. I couldn’t buy this with cash, so I want to know how you can.’
I thought it was ridiculous – they could have easily done me for not having a licence – but there was no law that said I had to show how I got the money to buy the car. I stood my ground, telling them it was none of their business, so they took my car away from me. I was furious but I walked home and the next day I bought another car, one that wasn’t so flashy.
I forgot about the GT6 but I mentioned it to Mum on one of the rare occasions I visited her, and she wouldn’t let it lie. She kept on at the police, demanding they return my car, and when they did it was a wreck. They’d destroyed the interior looking for drugs. Mum wouldn’t let that go either. She demanded they fix it and pay compensation. She battled with them, without any help from me, and to my amazement she won. I got a call from her one day, telling me she had some money for us. We split it fifty-fifty, then I sold the car and the police left me alone – for a while.
During this time, in my late teens, I was living in a suburb called Northfield. It was a nice, mainly white working-class area full of newly built maisonettes and high-rise flats. I had a girlfriend there named Yvonne. She was extra large, extra dark, extraordinary and always smiling. She loved cooking and reminded me of those women we used to see in books about Jamaica – the ones who have their heads wrapped, wear an apron and always carry a basket. She had a young son called Horace, with whom I got on really well. I would try to impress him with my record collection and kung fu moves, and he would try to impress me with his maths, and when we’d both had enough of that we’d gang up and give Yvonne grief. I could say I treated Horace like a son but in reality I treated him like a friend, and I taught him a lot of bad habits.
Yvonne thought she just had two bad kids, but she was amazingly tolerant. Sometimes I would disappear for days and then turn up at her flat and expect my dinner to be on the table. Incredibly, it was. The most she would do is jokingly tell me that it didn’t matter which girl’s bed I’d passed through as long as I came back to her for real food. That woman would do anything for me, and I could never work out why.
Living in Northfield was a lot different from living in Handsworth or Aston. If a crime was committed in north Birmingham, and I knew how the job was done, I could usually tell who’d done it and be able to find him or her within a few hours. To put it simply, Handsworth and Aston had a lot of outlaws; Northfield didn’t. When I told other outlaws that I lived in Northfield, they’d say: ‘Oh, you live uptown.’ It wasn’t really ‘uptown’; it just had a lower crime rate.
Yvonne’s home became a safe house where all my friends could go, any time of the day or night. At any one time I would have at least five girlfriends on the go, and if you’d have asked any of them, ‘Where does Benjamin live?’ they’d have all said, ‘With me.’
In reality I didn’t have a permanent base, but that didn’t seem to matter. I could rest up with one of my many girlfriends or, if I felt like a night off, I could stay at friends’ houses. Living under the radar meant a permanent address was unnecessary. The kind of people I was dealing with didn’t write letters. I never ordered things from catalogues and none of my girlfriends were Avon ladies.
16
HOW CRIME PAID
The painting and decorating work began to dry up and I didn’t want to go back on the frontline of crime, so I started my own ‘firm’ and took up a more managerial role. I had a gang of about ten young men – whom I called my boys – who would go out and nick car tools for me. I would then sell them on to mechanics or backstreet garages.
This is how it worked: most garages operated in one of two ways; either a garage boss would let his mechanics use his tools (which they’d clean and put back carefully after use) or, as was most often the case, a boss would employ mechanics to bring their own. Sometimes I’d talk to the boss, and sometimes the mechanics, and occasionally the boss would tip me off about mechanics that needed tools. And it’d be, ‘What’ve you got?’
Most of the time it would be screwdrivers and spanners, but it would be a very happy day indeed when I could say, ‘I got a hydraulic jack.’ A hydraulic jack was the big one – along with an engine lift. Occasionally you’d find one in a parked van or lorry, and they were worth thousands. In cars you’d mostly get bags of tools. In those days motors were always breaking down, especially in winter in the Midlands. People needed to keep a tool bag accessible for the inevitable snowy morning when their car wouldn’t start and it’d be ‘crunch crunch’ down the path with the bonnet up.
We tried to live by a Robin Hood principle, though. I never stole from Aston or Handsworth; I always went to the more affluent areas. And then I’d sell the tools to smaller garages. Certain places would only deal with me, no one else. I was their exclusive tool guy. Occasionally we’d find tools in their boxes with the price stickers still on them. If something was £5, I’d say, ‘Gimme three’, and everyone was happy.
My boys would bring their stuff exclusively to me. Sometimes I had to tell them where to go because if they worked too hard in one area the police would go out in plain clothes to wait for them. It also helped that I knew so many prostitutes. They would be exchanging favours with cops, and they were always overhearing things. For instance, they’d know if the law was going to have a blitz on an area and they’d pass that information onto me. I would then tell my boys to find new territories.
I’d moved higher up the food chain and it felt goo
d. I’d grown tired of being out on the street, stealing and dodging cops. I could have gone into a different line of crime and made much higher profits, enabling me to live a more lavish lifestyle and show off more, but after the trouble with the GT6 I wanted to blend in and adopt a low profile, so I bought a Ford Escort.
My ‘job’ wasn’t completely straightforward though. Sometimes my boys would come back with all kinds of stuff. They once turned up with a load of music gear – amplifiers, speaker boxes and the like. Being the creative type, this made me very angry. ‘What did you take that for? Some poor guy just wanted to play his guitar,’ I shouted. But I knew I could never find the owner, so I sold it anyway. Another time they returned with a load of bras – I mean hundreds and hundreds of bras, all shapes and sizes. I had no problem getting rid of them, they made me a good bit of money, but more importantly they made me a lot of female friends. I sent the lads back to get some knickers but they came back with boxes of bow ties. So quite a lot of clothing came my way and it was never difficult finding somebody to buy it. I had good contacts with working girls, taxi drivers and a newly emerging class of citizen: the Asian shopkeeper.
A typical day would start at 11pm with me briefing my boys, telling them where best to operate and what best to look out for. They would then bring me goods throughout the night, until about 5am. Then I’d need to sell them on. Sometimes buyers would come to me in the early hours of the morning, but usually I’d sleep and get up at lunchtime or during the afternoon. I might then visit a couple of mechanics to offload some tools, but apart from that nothing much really happened for the rest of the day. The cycle would then repeat itself day after day, night after night. It wasn’t very glamorous, it wasn’t even very dangerous, but it was very boring.
I wasn’t being creative, not artistically anyway. I was no longer performing poetry on the streets for my friends; I was no longer chatting on the sound systems. It was as if my poetry facility had been disconnected, just turned off. The only thing I was doing was hustling.
Nothing was really typical in terms of my income, but fortunately I wasn’t receiving tax demands. Occasionally I’d go a few nights without earning anything, but those times were few and far between. Cars didn’t have alarms then and my boys were well equipped with bunches of car keys. They were also happy taking the risks. They didn’t have the contacts to sell things on, and if they’d tried they’d have come undone: I had my spies. That’s why they brought things to me. I had people sitting waiting for goods, people who would give me money without asking questions. As soon as I got the stuff, I sold it. I’d give the boys some money and I’d take a share. It was my firm, but I didn’t want to turn into a version of the boss at the painting and decorating company I’d worked for, so I made sure the boys were well paid.
It was 1978 and we could make £300 some nights. On a really good night we might make £400 or more, but it had to be split many ways. If somebody came back with high-quality tools – branded stuff from a respected manufacturer – we’d all celebrate because we knew we would make a lot of money, but it wasn’t exactly the big time. No one was buying luxury homes in Spain.
I was once offered a very lucrative deal that would have involved stolen cars and international clients, but I wasn’t interested. If I’d accepted it and got caught I’d have gone straight back to prison, and I didn’t want that to happen. My operation was at a level that was just under the radar of the big-time cops. If I’d started to do more serious crimes, I’d’ve had the vice squad or serious crime squad after me. But still, gradually, things began to heat up. On one occasion a couple of guys went too far, and instead of stealing tools they actually stole the cars. They took the gear from the vehicles and brought that to me but then they sold the cars to a rival gang. This caused all sorts of trouble. Stealing cars was a more serious offence and I knew it would bring unwanted attention from the law.
I was once asked to take on a new recruit, so I took it upon myself to ‘train’ him. The first thing I had to do was to let him know that he was part of the team, and that we would do whatever we could to protect him, but if he crossed us, or worse still, double-crossed us, there would be trouble. He had stolen cars before, but he used the ‘roll then stole’ technique, which meant getting into the car, making sure the key worked in the ignition, and then quietly pushing it away, starting it up only when it was a good distance from its sleeping owner. What we did was to search, and if necessary strip, a car right where it stood.
I took him out to show him how it was done, found a Ford Cortina, and opened the boot. It was packed with boxes and random packages that made me think the car belonged to a shopkeeper. Cars could contain strange things, so I wasn’t surprised to find the leg of a mannequin – but it wasn’t a mannequin, it was a man. I shut the boot and we ran. And that was it. I told the new recruit to say nothing, and used it as an example of how he should expect the unexpected.
A few days later one of my boys got shot. He was only seventeen. A rival gang shot and killed him. I sent a threatening message to the people who did it and then one of my boys tried a revenge thing on them, but it went wrong. My guy tried to shoot one of their guys but he missed. That led to repercussions and the rival gang sent out a message that they wanted to hit back, and they wanted to hit back at me. The word went out that I was next in line. If the gang couldn’t get the guy who attempted the revenge shooting, they were going to shoot me. I had to buy a gun for protection. I slept with it under my pillow. I felt I had to protect Yvonne and Horace, and I also had to be seen to be willing to defend myself. But it was all getting too much and I wanted out.
People were dying, street wars were going on, gangs were marking out their territory and individuals were talking about killing me. In return my mindset was that if they were coming for me, I would have to take them out before they took me out. It was as simple as that. I couldn’t go to the police and say: ‘Look, I’ve got an illegal operation here and I need some protection.’ So I had to take care of myself. It didn’t make it any easier that I wasn’t the only one in the firing line. I knew two other guys who were killed around that time for things unconnected to me. There were even little wars going on over sound systems; people actually fought over who had the biggest and the best. And fights also erupted over women. There was lots of testosterone needing to be got out of the system.
One of my friends from Handsworth went to a dance in Balsall Heath on the south side of Birmingham, got into a fight with a youth who followed a rival sound system, and that youth cut off his ear. My friend retaliated, going back soon afterwards and stabbing to death the guy who did it. The court gave him a life sentence and it had a big effect on me because we were so close. It didn’t stop there. Somebody from Balsall Heath came over and killed a close friend of his, who was also a friend of mine. So in a short space of time I was close to three killings and also lost one of my friends to a life sentence.
My pistol was easy to get. It came from a friend who’d got it from his friend, who’d got it from another friend who’d indirectly got it from a bent copper. For a while I really did believe it would give me protection. I was no stranger to guns. Some people I knew had robbed post offices, and I’d handled their sawn-off shotguns once or twice, but I hated them. They were big and clumsy. I had never fired one in anger but a couple of times I did go out late at night to the Lickey Hills, on the outskirts of the city, and fire one among the trees. When you fired one of these things you didn’t just hit the person you were aiming at; you hit anyone and anything that was in the general area of your aim. I was into self-defence, not murder, and certainly not mass murder. Even though I had one, I always hated guns. I think they are one of the worst inventions ever, manufactured with the sole purpose of taking life.
Things were getting shaky in the world of hustling, but also closer to home. Although I wasn’t in regular contact with my mum, her own sense of continuity and companionship was about to come to an abrupt end. She had persuaded Pastor Burris that they s
hould be properly married. They had been together a long time and the traditional way of things felt like the right thing to do, as she was getting older. But it wasn’t to be. Just a few days before the wedding, Pastor fled to the US. Apart from the occasional visit to Birmingham, to see his family, he would stay there for the next three decades, until ill health forced his return to the UK. Trevor said he’d called round and found him in the process of loading suitcases into his car, saying ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I’m leaving.’ And that was it, he was gone.
Mum was devastated, of course. Nobody could understand why he left. I think he just chickened out. It was a real shock to everyone, not least his seven kids. The only, very small, saving grace was that he didn’t jilt Mum on the actual day.
17
LONDON CALLING
One summer night in 1978, I lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling, wondering what life was all about. The ceiling (with its adjoining walls) seemed to represent the limits of my ambitions, but these ambitions were related to the circumstances I found myself in, some of the bad choices I made, and some of the bad people I followed. It was time to really think for myself. I recalled the teacher at Broadway Comprehensive telling me I was a born failure, and that I would soon be dead or doing a life sentence in prison. I didn’t have to be a mastermind to see that if things carried on the way they were going the teacher would be proved right.
When I was eight, I told everyone, even the big moustache in the Boys’ Brigade, that I wanted to be a poet when I grew up, and there I was looking at a ceiling that belonged to Birmingham Council, with a gun under my pillow, thinking I was some kind of triad gang master don or ghetto godfather. Just as the eight-year-old me had done, I spoke the words out: ‘I want to be a poet. I want to prove that teacher wrong.’
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 10