We set up shop in John’s house on Wilshire and quickly developed what would become the go-to business model for inner-city hustlers. We installed an Armor Guard door between the kitchen and the stairway leading to the basement, so that our customers could walk right in instead of clustering around the front door while they waited to be served. If a customer wanted to stay and smoke, John would charge them a couple of dollars or a piece of their rock. It worked to our benefit because some of the customers would end up staying down there all day, smoking up their entire paycheck in the basement.
John had a lot of friends who smoked, and most of them had steady incomes from jobs at the many factories throughout the area. Our spot was one of the first in that part of the neighborhood, a convenient spot for upscale clients like them. The only competition we had came from some guys who had a spot a couple of blocks over, but their rocks were small by comparison, so they didn’t pose any threat to us.
After a few days of working upstairs, I grew bored of sitting by myself and decided to venture down into the basement. That was my first time seeing anyone smoke crack. I sat behind the bar with the shotgun and took in the scene, which looked straight out of a movie. There were mirrors, razor blades, and pipes spread across the bar, next to a bottle of 150-proof Old Florida Rum, which the customers would use to make torches. I watched men and women smoke their pipes with such intimacy that it looked like they were making love. A look of ecstasy would come over them when they inhaled the thick, white smoke into their lungs, and I found it mesmerizing. I had never witnessed anything transform a person so quickly or dramatically.
What blew my mind was that the drug seemed to affect each of them in a different way. There were some who got so paranoid that they hid in the closet beneath the stairs or jumped behind the bar and sat curled up in a ball on the floor. The rest smoked and went into a trancelike state.
A week after my first trip to the basement, a lady who lived around the corner stripped all of her clothes off and ran out of the house naked. She said that someone was chasing her. John ran after her and eventually brought her back into the house, where she sat naked at the bar smoking. I tried not to stare at her breasts or the triangle of hair between her legs, but I couldn’t help myself. I was intrigued by the female anatomy, a fascination that was only just beginning.
Another day, I was down in the basement serving a customer when I noticed a man crawling across the floor, picking up every white speck he could find. The other customers told me that he was “ghosting,” meaning he had smoked all of his crack and was hallucinating that the floor was covered with rocks. This became a common occurrence in the basement. It was crazy, watching grown men and women on their knees, searching the basement floor for a crumb of crack. At the time, I was ignorant about their plight and the seriousness of addiction, so I laughed at them until my stomach felt like it was going to burst. I didn’t realize it then, but I was growing desensitized to the suffering of others and developing a warped view of adults and authority.
For our first month on Wilshire, the money flowed in a steady stream. Every personality type imaginable came through the door. Our clientele consisted of white people, Black people, men, women, and people from the suburbs all the way down to the ghetto. Some of the best boosters in Detroit would also come through the house. For just a few rocks, they would sell us leather coats and silk shirts that were worth hundreds of dollars. They sold me televisions, VCRs, and handguns for little to nothing. I wasn’t old enough to drive, but I could rent Cadillacs, Monte Carlos, and Regals for a couple of hours, all in exchange for a couple of rocks. These people ran errands for me, lied for me, and would have killed for me—or killed me. All for the love of crack.
Women would come over to clean up the house and wash our clothes for a rock. Things always started off innocent, but it wouldn’t be long before they were cleaning up naked. This was during the early days of the epidemic, when crack was still considered a glamorous drug, so the women coming through were still attractive and dressed with pride and dignity. Sex was there for the taking. Women who were married and had children older than me would offer to give blowjobs or fuck the entire crew in exchange for rocks. Within a few months, these same women would develop the visible signs of addiction—dirty clothes, bloodshot eyes, and muddled hair.
I was working one of our spots one day when a customer whom everyone called the “Head Doctor” came through. She was so proficient with her oral skills that she would offer you a money-back guarantee—and that day, she set her sights on me. There I was, fourteen years old, standing against the side of a crack house and getting a blowjob, an experience I had thought was reserved for grown men.
Like many women who came through the spot, the Head Doctor said all the right things, making me feel and think that it was okay to be having sex with a grown woman. I went along with it, unaware that beneath the excitement, she was a drug-addled pedophile who preyed on the raging hormones of young drug dealers.
Nevertheless, it felt empowering to be fourteen years old and have sexual command over grown women. They made me feel like my pleasure was the only thing that mattered, and before long, I couldn’t relate to girls my age anymore—they weren’t ready to do the things I was accustomed to doing. I had been raised to respect and honor women, but in this new world, those rules no longer applied. Looking back, I believe the crack epidemic is partly to blame for the misogyny in our community, and in hip-hop culture. When I was growing up, it was nearly unheard of for men to refer to women as hoes and bitches, but in the streets, these terms became the norm.
Day by day, we were all being stripped of our morals. It was hard to respect people who didn’t respect themselves, and disrespect grew in proportion to the deceit and manipulation that we experienced dealing with our customers. We learned through trial and error that no one was to be trusted.
The most important lesson I learned was that crack was nothing to be played with. It wreaked havoc in people’s lives and destroyed families. I witnessed people I had admired growing up fall prey to the pipe. Guys I once looked up to were now groveling at my feet, begging for rocks on credit. I saw women who were at one time beautiful teachers, homemakers, students, or store clerks reduced to strung-out crack whores.
Over the summer, Miko opened up a few more spots throughout our neighborhood. We operated like any other corporate structure, expanding into other areas at will and taking advantage of new clientele. At the time, I was making ten dollars off of every hundred dollars’ worth of rocks that I sold, plus an extra two dollars in tops—the street hustler’s built-in gratuity. Instead of selling five-dollar rocks, we were now selling bigger ones for twelve dollars. I went from making $350 a week to making $300 in profit from every thousand-dollar sack that I sold. On a good day, we could move three to four thousand dollars’ worth of rocks.
Miko was making a lot of money off of my hustling and dedication, but as I sat in his spots twenty-four hours a day, I never would have guessed that I was being exploited. All I knew was that I stayed fresh and my pockets were fat. I didn’t have long-term plans or an exit strategy. All I cared about were the shoes and clothes I wore and the things other people thought about me.
I was losing my focus, my respect for the community, and ultimately, my own identity. I began morphing into a callous, apathetic, coldhearted predator. Compared to the guys I ran with, I wasn’t as quick to get angry or resort to violence. But anger and violence were a necessary part of the dope game, and it wouldn’t be long before I would have to employ them if I wanted to survive.
6
WAYNE COUNTY JAIL
Detroit, Michigan
August 1991
I stood at the front door of our small ranch home on Blackstone Street, the familiar surroundings filling me with anticipation as I waited for Brenda to answer the door. My heart raced as I listened to her steps approaching from inside.
Brenda opened the door with an angelic smile on her face, and rushed into my arms.
<
br /> “I missed you so much,” she said, holding me tight and covering my face with feather-soft kisses.
“I told you I was coming home one way or another,” I said, wrapping my arms around her in a tight embrace.
—
SOMEONE TAPPED ON my cell door, and I woke up. Normally I would have been pissed if someone woke me from a dream like that, but this time, I was smiling. I knew I was about to turn my dream into reality, and it would only be a matter of time before I saw Brenda again.
It was two o’clock in the morning, and I knew that the shadowy figure standing on the other side of the door was likely to be Gigolo. He and I had developed a method for getting out of our cells whenever we felt like it, to smoke and use the phones. We would tie a knot in a sheet, slide the knot into the doorjamb, and shake it until the latch popped open. The deputies were never in the control center on our wing, and we had studied their rounds to the point where we knew when they were coming and going.
“I need to holla at you for a minute,” G said, sliding the knotted sheet beneath my door. We popped the door open, and I grabbed a couple of squares before walking with G to the dayroom.
“Wassup?” I asked as I fired up the square.
“I think Gigolo and Jabo want to roll with us,” he said.
“You talked to them?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t go into detail about what we were going to do.”
I was relieved that he hadn’t said anything about our plan, because I wanted to be present at all discussions regarding the escape. Even though G had sparked the idea, I became responsible for planning and execution when he recognized that his plan—bludgeoning an officer and taking his uniform—would never work. My plan, however, was foolproof!
“Let’s see if they’re woke,” I whispered, putting out my cigarette.
We crept over to Gigolo’s cell. When I peeked in, I could see him sitting at the desk, talking to his bunky. I tapped the window and he came to the door.
“Let me holla at you for a minute,” I said.
We popped the door, then went and got Jabo. I asked them what they thought about trying to escape from the county jail. Jabo hadn’t been to court yet, but knew he was facing a lot of time, and Gigolo was still waiting to go to trial. My sentencing date was only weeks away, so I felt like I had nothing to lose. But their situations were different, and I wanted to be sure that they would be down to rock with us before I told them what was up.
They said they were down to bust out as soon as we could put the plan in motion. I told them we would leave that Sunday, which gave us five days to plan.
I wanted to tell L about our escape, but I knew he would try to talk me out of it. L was a Christian, a real religious brother who often quoted from the Bible. We respected his wisdom, but at the time, I wasn’t willing to trust my freedom to a God I couldn’t see. For the four years I was on the streets, the only thing I believed in was the power of money and guns, so I wasn’t about to allow L to talk me out of our plan, nor did I want to hear a sermon about trusting the Lord. I wanted to be free so that I could be with Brenda and our unborn child.
Gigolo suggested we get as many sheets as we could from the guys on the rock and the deputy who passed them out. I hid the pipe in my mattress and we waited patiently for Sunday night to roll around. We did our best to conceal our excitement from the rest of the guys on the rock, but when we were alone in one of the cells kicking it, we couldn’t stop talking about what we would do when we got out. We talked about the food we would eat, the sex we would have, the alcohol we would consume, and the piles of money we would make.
During that week, I talked to Brenda nearly every day. She gave me updates on the growth of the baby in her womb, and we talked about all the things we missed about being together. We continued to plan a life together despite the fact that I was waiting to be sentenced. I kept telling her that I would be home soon, but she couldn’t have guessed how far I would go to make that promise a reality.
—
WHEN SUNDAY ROLLED around, we spent the day making our final preparations. We gathered the food we had collected from the commissary and made sure everyone had extra socks and a T-shirt to change into when we made it down to the streets. In the county jail, we weren’t allowed to have gym shoes, so we decided the best thing to do was pull a few pair of socks over our shower shoes to absorb the blow when we hit the ground.
All day, it felt like time was moving in slow motion, until finally the night arrived. After the deputy completed his 2 a.m. rounds, Gigolo popped his cell door and came down to my cell. He had his county shirt tied around his face like a ninja. I wrapped my face the same way and helped him pop my cell door. My bunky asked what was up, and I told him to go back to sleep. He and I never really spoke, so he went with the program. I had slid the pipe out of my mattress before lockdown that night, and I grabbed it now as I prepared to exit the cell. It was the first time Gigolo had a chance to hold it.
“Damn, homie, this a bad motherfucker,” he said, feeling the weight of the pipe as I helped G pop his cell door.
We went to get Jabo out of his cell, and with the four of us gathered, it was showtime. G was the biggest and strongest among us, so he was the first one to take a turn at breaking the thick Plexiglas window. The first blow sounded like a gunshot. My heart pounded in rhythm with G’s strikes to the window, one ferocious blast after another. My body was on fire with adrenaline.
After a minute, G stopped and handed me the pipe. It was hot to the touch. Someone was screaming from one of the cells for us to stop before we got everyone in trouble, but Gigolo went to the guy’s window and told him to shut the fuck up and go back to bed. I laughed a little before going to work on the window, beating it senselessly and adding to the damage that G had started.
Finally, the edge of the window gave way and we were able to push it open. I tried to squeeze between the two beams that were inside the frame, but I could only get part of my shoulder through it, so we went to work bending one of the beams. We wedged the pipe between the wall and the beam and rocked it back and forth.
After a few minutes, we had made enough progress to know that we were only minutes away from being able to climb down the tied-together sheets toward freedom. We didn’t give a damn that the guys on the rock were hollering at us to go back to our cells. The only thing that mattered to us was getting out.
We kept at it for about ten minutes before we stopped and took turns seeing if we could fit through the window. When we got around to me, I tried to fit my head through the beams. Just as I was working my way through to the fresh air outside, a female voice hollered up to the window from the street.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
I jumped back from the window and told G we had been spotted. One eyewitness could ruin our whole plan, but we decided we had come too far to turn back now, so we went back to work bending the beam. What we didn’t realize was that the woman outside was a deputy doing a perimeter check. Within two minutes, a squad car had pulled up and was flashing a light at the window.
“Damn, this is fucked up,” I said, turning toward the rest of the crew. My heart sank at the realization that our chances of escape had been ruined.
We looked around at one another, then agreed to go back to our cells. But just as I was walking through my cell door, I realized that we had left the pipe—the most incriminating piece of evidence—in the dayroom. I ran back, grabbed the pipe, and threw it out of the window before rushing back to my cell. I knew the deputies would be rushing the rock any minute now, so I did everything I could to remove any evidence that I had been gone. I removed the socks from my shower shoes, shook the glass out, took off my extra T-shirt, and jumped onto my bunk, pulling the scratchy, wool blanket over my head and doing my best to play sleep.
It took the deputies at least twenty minutes to figure out which rock the escape attempt had occurred on. It felt like the longest twenty minutes of my life. I could hear my heart beating, and I was sure that t
he deputies would hear it echoing through the dayroom when they opened the door. Finally, a bright light washed over the room as they burst in and turned on all of the lights.
A sergeant barked out orders as the deputies went from cell to cell, snatching each of us out. They slammed us up against the wall and forced us to strip naked in the middle of the dayroom. They threatened to beat our asses and bust our heads with flashlights if we didn’t come clean. I imagined that when I turned around, there would be several men standing with their fingers pointing at G, Gigolo, Jabo, and me. But when I turned around, I realized how well we had concealed our identities. Everyone looked confused. No one knew who or how many of us had tried to escape.
The fact that no one said anything seemed to infuriate the deputies, so they tore through our cells like human tornadoes. They threw our pictures, letters, and commissary onto the dayroom floor along with our mattresses. Lucky for our crew, this meant that every inmate present now had glass particles on his property. The crime scene had been contaminated, and when one of the captains realized their error, he ordered us back into our cells.
They told us that we would be on lockdown until they got to the bottom of what happened, and it was this threat that led to someone ratting us out. We never found out for sure who it was, but there was a fifth inmate who had originally planned to go with us, before deciding to back out at the last minute. He was the only other guy who knew of our plot, and we all suspected that he was the one who gave us up.
I lay back on the bunk and fought back tears of defeat. It was five o’clock in the morning. I had never wanted anything so bad in my life, and now the gravity of my situation hit me. I thought about Brenda having to go it alone with our child, and my heart sank. Up to that point, I hadn’t made any preparation for being locked away from my family and friends. I also hadn’t stopped for one minute to think about the victim of my crime or his family. I was wrapped up in a delusional state of selfishness and denial.
Writing My Wrongs Page 6