by Jerrold Ladd
My mother was doing all she could to support me besides leaving heroin alone. She would cook my supper and wash my clothes. Even if she was out on a heroin adventure, there would be several pots on the stove when I got home from work. I had taken up the position as man of the house. And this was something she had done for every provider in the past.
I kept the job for a while but eventually was laid off again. It seemed to happen every time. Before I left, I begged the owner, who didn’t have the nerve to tell me in person but sent his assistant, not to lay me off. I told him I understood he was having hard times, that I would work for free until things got better. Although impressed, he couldn’t do that. At home, I couldn’t tell my mother I had lost my job, I was so ashamed.
She made everything easy when she came to me one day as I was pretending to leave for work. “Jerrold, I already know, don’t worry about it, baby. You’ve been trying real hard. Momma got some ideas to help us get on our feet,” she said.
Her idea was to rent her bedroom out, mostly to male tenants, who would hit on her. And even though I kept telling her getting involved with them was the wrong thing to do, she dated a few of them. I came close to fighting one of them, a heroin addict named Mark who stole car stereos. He told her some stupid story about his wife just passing away, and my mother wound up being compassionate toward him. In the end, he paid no rent.
My mom tried to work, too. She was hired at a temporary maid service, cleaning up after conventions. But the work was temporary and not enough. We were near being homeless again. With all the money and morale vanishing, she took her only alternative. She called a thrift store. And she called Big Mary. I don’t know who got there faster, this white man who knew he was about to make a killing off some poor desperate black, or Big Mary, who had the same ambition. My mother and Big Mary sold everything in the house for about two hundred dollars. She was going out with a big bang, a big heroin party.
Motivated by the new proceeds, Big Mary agreed to let my mother live with her—she knew having my mother around would generate more dope for her. But where was I going to stay? I certainly couldn’t go over there. Unknown to me, my mother already had worked out a deal. “Big Mary said you can come, too,” she said.
I had no intention of doing that. I told her not to worry about me; I would find somewhere to stay. Her worry lines popped in her forehead. “Baby, Momma thought you were gonna come with us,” she said. “I understand that you don’t want to be around her, but what are you gonna do? This may be our only choice for now.”
I would rather have been homeless than move in with Big Mary. I was afraid of what I could become being in the same house with her. I decided I was going to just stay right there in that empty house until I found another job.
My mother seemed saddened, seemed to have not figured I would reject the offer. But after I assured her I could make it on my own, she packed her clothes, gave me the address and twenty dollars. “In case you change your mind,” she said. We then exchanged our last good-byes.
The first week, I started off okay. The landlord didn’t know we had moved. I would get up each morning and go through the want ads. I would try to visit all the different spots on the city bus. Up until then, I had been able to find work on the first or second try. But I soon learned just how difficult it could be without basic resources. For example, the labor jobs for which I qualified usually were dispersed all across the wide city. In a day, I could expect to visit maybe two, which required impeccably correlating the bus schedule with the days and times the companies allowed interviews. Then the long bus ride there, which sometimes only came within a mile of the place and sometimes ran every two or three hours.
My fate usually was decided before I even interviewed. I could hardly help but be late for the appointment. Some required tests. I would be so hungry sometimes that I couldn’t read a sentence. And most of the jobs also required that the person have a car and phone. Each time I was rejected, my morale crumbled.
Back in the house, in the frigid, dull nights, I rationed my food to a snack or two a day. I slept curled up among the trashy mess—paper, boxes, clothes—left after the hasty move. Then the electricity service was cut off. Then I came home one evening and the doors were locked. So I slept in the back shed. But on the second night back there, I realized I was only delaying the inevitable: Big Mary and Dixon Circle.
The next morning I began the walk to Dixon Circle down busy Second Street. Before long, B-boy*, a person I had met around the neighborhood, drove up and offered a ride. Man, I was happy to get out of that two-mile walk. On the way, B-boy acted strange and paranoid, kept looking around the car. He suddenly shifted his attention to me and asked did I want a bump.
“What’s a bump, man?” I inquired quietly, hoping it was food.
As though he had been hoping I would give him a reason, he pulled onto a dark, vacant street and retrieved something from under the seat. He placed the glass object, which had a thin rod, a stem, to his mouth. While holding a lighter to the pipe, he drew long and hard on the stem. The pipe glowed, hissed, and turned dark red like old blood. Full of satisfaction, he relaxed, leaned back, and asked again: “Do you want a bump?”
I declined. I had seen weed smoked in pipes before. “Why do you call your weed a bump?” I asked.
“This ain’t no weed; it’s rocks,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“You’ve never heard of rocks, Jerrold? Yeah, fool, rock cocaine. It’s here now, man, everywhere.”
11
STAY ALIVE
On Dixon Circle, in the midst of the seated young men, Fat Travis slammed the domino onto the small table. “Three ladies went and got raped,” he said. Fifteen points.
I shouted, “That’s the way to hit their asses,” and reached for my can of malt liquor, on the dirt near the leg of the table. Working on my sixth can of beer, I felt good. The opposing team contemplated their next move, giving one another signals about what each player had in his hand. Fat Travis and I were ahead by fifty points. We weren’t worrying about winning. We were more concerned with blowing them away.
As usual, a crowd had gathered around us domino players, some older men, several girls, but mostly younger boys. Popey, a man in his early twenties, was the partner of a skinny Dixon Circle teenager, who was a usual. This was the normal ritual for us. After a day of getting up early in the morning and catching the bus downtown, if we had gathered enough bus fare, where we roamed separately all day, looking for work, we sat out and played Bones.
To try to find work, we would walk around depressed south Dallas, inquiring at the foreign-owned grocery stores, the small mechanic shops, the pawnshops, or the schools for any type of work—janitor, sweeper, standing in the heat or cold holding a sign all day, pumping gas, washing cars. We didn’t care if the pay was ten dollars a day or five, just so long as it was enough to buy food, energy, strength, bus fare, enough to try for something better tomorrow.
And after an exhausting day of this, or early in the morning if we had chosen not to battle the impossible task that day, we would sit down with our forty-ounce beers, sixteen-ounce beers, always hard malt liquor, the kind that really gave us an alcoholic buzz. Sometimes we sat out there and played dominoes from early morning until late evening, the winning team staying up, the losing team waiting until their time came again. Why not? The houses were smoking hot early in the morning, enough to melt a man. I can’t see how anyone stayed in them, how the smaller kids sweated in their shorts, skinny limbs tangled together on some mattress. They were suffering.
We huddled together out there, healing ourselves in a way known only to us and in a way that did not hide our disgrace. For we were well aware of what was happening to us, seemed to sense the silent effects, the molding of living in Prince Hall Apartments on Dixon Circle. Since there was no economic relief or opportunity, no morale, no way out except by selling dope, becoming a criminal, waiting on that long-shot miracle, some of us chose just to exist and not
sell dope, to just keep giving what we could to improvement, but not to push ourselves to the brink of death and insanity anymore. Our minds and bodies already had paid dear enough prices.
This wasn’t America. This was famined Ethiopia, desolate Somalia, or any of the other sub–third world countries. Dixon Circle, south Dallas, west Dallas, nothing but concentration camps where economic, food, transportation, health, and housing sanctions kept us, for the most part, confined and subdued.
Yet some of the boys were saying to hell with this suffering. They were grabbing the one and only commodity in existence, rock cocaine. They refused to sit and starve, to watch themselves, their families and mothers, go to waste. With the arrival of rock cocaine, however, which came into the neighborhoods so easily and swiftly, they said to hell with these impossible odds. We’ll sell dope until the shame of our naked hunger is covered, until the wicked are punished with sulfur and brimstone. We’ll dance, make love, sweat on each other, and eat crack until we are resting in the earth.
“Bolts and screws,” Fat Travis screamed out. Twenty points. That gave us more than enough for the victory. Our fourth game. We were on a roll, for most everybody was a skilled domino player. Rarely did one team win four consecutive games.
The young boys were watching us older teenagers in the busy Prince Hall Apartments; we were their role models. They saw how we quit school, played dominoes, stole car radios and lawn mowers, and sold dope. They were learning from us.
I told Travis I’d had enough for today. He complained, since I was his regular partner, but he let someone else substitute. Fat Travis was Big Mary’s oldest son. We had become good friends over the three months I had been here. Meanwhile our mothers had become con partners: they used their wit and duplicity to trick people out of their money.
Big Mary had a daughter, Tracy, who reminded me of my sister, in that she cleaned, cooked, and took care of her smaller brother and sister. Tracy was still trying to go to school at Lincoln—from where I think she did finally graduate. Tracy always got on Big Mary’s case about not taking care of the house and her two younger children. Big Mary would humbly agree and say she would improve. I was surprised by this. But that was the understanding between a depraved mother and her righteous daughter.
I was adjusting to the perils of Dixon Circle. No one had a choice; you either learned to survive or perished. I had become more skilled at fighting, as everyone ignorantly took their anger out on each other; a lot of the hotheads, troublemakers, stayed ready to fight. And with the dope had come the random shootings and murders; the strawberries, girls on rock cocaine; and the more desperate, more cunning men on rocks.
The dope dealers began appearing everywhere in south Dallas and Dixon Circle, one, two, and three to a corner, a hot spot, a rock house. But these weren’t the big shakers and rollers, nor were they the dope fiends who were paid dope instead of money. Instead they were somewhere in the middle, the boys from the poverty families, the few boys who made enough money to say, “Damn, man, we made it out of poverty, at least temporarily.” But a few of them were slipping through the cracks and making thousands of dollars: the fancy cars, the gold, the houses.
In the beginning the money was so fast, the business so lucrative, that there was plenty for anyone who wanted to sell, wanted to risk imprisonment and death. Some youngsters made three and four hundred dollars by just being lookouts, others five hundred dollars for selling the rocks. You could choose to sell alone or work with an organization. The ones who worked alone stayed small, maybe selling a few dozen rocks a day.
Along with the emergence of rock cocaine came the hard-core rap music—not the mellow rappers. They rapped often about selling dope, the glory of its success, how they had robbed, murdered, kicked, AK 47 sprayed down, Uzi’ed down, beat down, pimped girls, fucked up niggers, and slapped bitches. A lot of us, especially the upcoming dope dealers and the younger generation, were absorbing these messages, having them reinforced over and over again through the music we people loved so dearly, the rhythms and beats we enjoyed so much. Our minds were so raw. We did and acted just like the music programmed us to do.
The people who got on rock cocaine, the strawberries and rock stars, the Apple Jacks, became chaotic. We—the ones not selling and the ones selling—had to watch out constantly for these fiends, who were killing themselves over the dope. Heroin was a lunch snack compared to rocks. Once a person got on this dope—it usually took just one try—you could say good-bye to him. All day long the fiends would buy the ten- and twenty-dollar rocks, which only gave them quick squirts of relief, maybe lasting fifteen minutes. Then it was time for another ten- or twenty-dollar rock. These fiends were so desperate that they would boldly take or steal whatever they needed to get the rocks, putting their lives in constant danger.
But the young ladies and girls suffered the most. For they had one thing that could always bring them the next hit: their bodies. They would roam up and down the streets near rock houses and flag down men with rocks or men who would give them the money for one. They would roam for days at a time without sleep or food, like zombies fulfilling an ancient biblical prophecy or curse. They were easy to recognize. Their bodies usually had dried up to skin and bones. The dope dealers, and a lot of other men—preachers, husbands, boys—were taking advantage of them. “Give a strawberry a rock and she will give you what you want,” was one saying. The men had their pleasure, several men for a rock or maybe a bump. I even saw a young kid give a woman a rock to perform a sexual act with another woman behind an apartment in broad daylight, while a crowd of onlookers watched and laughed. It was a sad and perilous time for young black women in the extremely poor areas. It was an aphrodisiac nightmare.
What is more sad is that everyone was instinctively aware of what was taking place, of the destruction; of how a lot of us were going to jail, to the grave, or being irreparably damaged in some way. It was like being securely tied to the earth, wide-eyed and alert and watching a herd of ants slowly taking your body away, bit by bit. A few of us would talk about how bad things were getting or discuss who had begun selling dope.
“Shit, ain’t no other way, man; everybody else is making some money. So let me get mine.”
“You know how wrong that is, man. Look at what’s happening to everybody. I’m not going to do it.”
I, myself, thought long and hard about selling dope. I wanted to get involved, make enough money to go to school and to move away from Prince Hall. I was losing my respect for society and everyone. The white police officers constantly harassed and beat the crap out of us; the businesses wouldn’t hire us; we couldn’t get higher education. So my reasons for living, for caring, for resisting, were leaving, one at a time.
Lo and behold, though, as she had done many times before, my mother rescued me, came from out of her secrecy to preserve my life. She saw how I had stopped looking for work, how I was no longer concerned with anything, how my drinking had increased, and how I was spending more time with the worst crowd.
For example, she and Big Mary had swindled some man out of his money. He came to Big Mary’s house. Big Mary came to the back room, to where Fat Travis and I were, and told me he was waiting in the front to hurt my mother. I grabbed the big pipe from under the bed and charged into the living room, while Big Mary tried to keep my friend, Fat Travis, from joining. The man must have heard the commotion, because he scrambled out the door and disappeared. I’m certain that if I had reached him, I would have beat him to death, or he would have shot me, and one of us would have gone to prison, the other to the grave.
Each morning my mother began walking to a neighbor’s and making calls, trying to find a place for me to go. Before long she came up with something. Regardless, I wanted to stay there with her, but she told me to go ahead and leave and that she would be okay. She even had a driver whom she had paid waiting to take me.
After leaving Prince Hall, I moved in with an old man and his wife, two die-hard Christian friends whom my mother had known f
or years, the same man who had come in the church van and taken us to Sister Hill’s house that summer. He lived several streets from Dixon, so I still would go to see my mother and friends.
I stayed there only a week or two before we became intolerant of each other. But my mother made more calls, and I soon was living with my aunt Cheryl in Oak Cliff, the aunt who had kept my sister. Cheryl’s husband had a good city job. They lived in a three-bedroom house in a black version of a suburb. She had four children, two teenage girls and two younger boys.
I already had completely stopped drinking when I moved in with my mother’s friends and had regained my motivation. With Aunt Cheryl over the summer of 1987, I mowed yards in the neighborhood and used the money to look for work. I found a job at a convenience store in Pleasant Grove, just east of Oak Cliff.
Now, as I have stated, it was strange living with relatives, especially if they had the slightest impression that they were better and socially more advanced than you. They began to treat me like an outcast, a disgrace, a black sheep. I was required to do more chores than anyone else. I was constantly fussed at and threatened with eviction. Although I didn’t have bus fare to get back and forth to work, they refused to lend me any, even though I had found a job. After I began receiving paychecks, I was required to give at least 25 percent of my earnings, sometimes more. I sometimes ate, sometimes didn’t. They took glee in not saving or cooking enough food for the black sheep.