—
AFTER A FEW hours, the deputies returned to our rock and headed straight for Gigolo’s cell. They cuffed him and his bunky and escorted them away. I stood at my window, straining to hear what was going on. Initially, I thought they were doing something routine since they had also cuffed his bunky, but moments later, they came to my cell and told me to step out. They cuffed me, boxed up the rest of my belongings, and told me that I was being placed in the hole and charged with attempted escape.
In the hole, there were no large metal doors and no bunkies—just you alone in your cell with those ominous steel bars looking back at you. The days there crawled by. I spent most of the time lying on the floor, peering through the cracked window at a street where cars drove by all day with their music bumping. If I wasn’t doing that, I would watch the roaches crawl down the tier as the other inmates talked through the bars about different aspects of life. Sometimes we would sit back in our individual cells and recite the verses of rap songs that we loved.
Other times, we would kick it about our childhoods. It was through these stories that I learned about the years of abuse and neglect that we all had suffered. We were wounded boys, all of us, and our emotional scars ran deep. Most of us came from homes where ass whoppings were the norm and vile words were tossed out like candy to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. We weren’t bad people, but we had made some very bad decisions that were shaped by the bad things we had experienced. We were fathers, brothers, uncles, drug dealers, robbers, and killers. And we weren’t any one of those things by itself—what we were was a mixture of failure, neglect, promise, and purpose.
One week later, I was returned to court and sentenced to seventeen to forty years in prison.
7
WILSHIRE STREET
East Side Detroit, Michigan
1986
“The police are outside!” John warned. A loud banging started on the front door, and I rushed downstairs to see what was going on. John was known for being paranoid, but when I looked out of the front window, I saw two squad cars parked out front. I snapped into action. I had less than a minute to get rid of our stash before the cops kicked in the door.
I raced around the house, gathering all of the rocks and throwing them down the heat vent in the dining room. I wasn’t sure where they would end up, but I knew for certain that the police wouldn’t get them. Once the house was clean, John opened the door, and eight officers rushed in with guns raised. They didn’t have a search warrant, and I can’t recall whether they asked John for permission to enter. The officers told John that one of the neighbors had witnessed a shooting in the backyard, and they had come to investigate. No one had been shot or killed there that night, and John told the officers as much. But that didn’t stop them from rummaging through the house.
From the way our house was set up, it was clear that we were running a drug operation: the Armor Guard; the living room table strewn with leftover Coney Island and bottles of warm Olde English “800” Malt Liquor; piles of unwashed clothes in the corner next to a row of gym shoes. And then there was the basement full of dazed customers, clueless about what was going on.
A middle-aged Black officer and a young white officer ushered me, John, and an older homie, named Lee, into the dining room, as other officers went outside and entered the basement through the side door. I was calm at first because I knew I had gotten rid of all the dope; but then I heard a burst of commotion from downstairs, followed by piercing screams as the police went to work beating our customers. My hands began to shake. The addicts downstairs were screaming like they were on the edge of death, and I had no desire to experience whatever was happening to them.
We were ordered to place our hands on the wall, and the young white officer searched the living room and dining room before turning his attention to us. He patted Lee down and took all of the money he had in his pocket. Lee protested, showing him his check stub, and the officer returned Lee’s money. He then came over to me and patted me down, asking where the dope was stashed. He searched my pockets, then stuck his hand in my waistband and pulled it away from my body so that he could see if I had anything stashed in my underwear.
Then, without provocation, he punched me in my nuts. It felt like someone had sucked all of the air out of my body. I grabbed myself and slumped to the floor, where I lay still while he pulled my money from my pocket.
“Tell me where the dope at!” the Black officer said with a smirk on his face as they counted the money they had taken out of my pockets.
I was in too much pain to respond, and if I said what I wanted to say, it would cost me another beatdown. In that moment, I lost what little respect I had for the police. It didn’t matter that what I was doing was right or wrong—they had no right to beat a fourteen-year-old kid like that.
Switching tactics, the officers asked me where I had gotten my money. I told them it had come from my uncle. They told me that I was lying, then snatched me up from the floor and slammed my face into the wall. I braced my skinny body for the barrage of blows that I knew was coming, but instead of beating me more, they placed me in handcuffs and told me they were taking me in for loitering in a suspected drug house.
The department never brought charges related to that search, but they turned the confiscated money into evidence. I didn’t know the law at the time, but I knew enough about life to know that we would never see the officers or the money again. It was one of the many lessons I’ve learned over the years about the officers who police the ’hood. I’m not saying that all officers are crooked, but too many of the men and women in blue were no different from us. They were opportunists, and when they saw a chance to get over, they took it.
—
EVEN AFTER THE raid, the spot on Wilshire was banging. Everyone in the crew was making money. We would ride up to Royal Skateland in Miko’s Jeep Wrangler and his Pontiac Grand Am with the music blaring. We would all get out in our Fila suits with our pockets bulging, dancing and talking shit like we owned the ’hood. The girls flocked to us and the guys wanted to be us. I ate it up like it was Thanksgiving dinner.
We were addicted to the life, and as with any other addiction, we were always looking for ways to make it more exciting. Sometimes we would hit Belle Isle, a park on an island in the middle of the Detroit River, and stand around the cars with the music blaring as we sipped on Olde English and smoked weed. But that wasn’t enough, and in a matter of months, a few of the guys in our crew had decided to raise the stakes by getting high on fifty-ones—joints laced with crack. I resisted the temptation for a while. I had only just started drinking and smoking weed on a regular basis, and I wasn’t trying to take it any further than that.
But one day, Lee came over to the spot on Wilshire to hang out with me and Tee. We knew that Tee was smoking, so we never allowed him to keep the sack, but I didn’t know that Lee was also using until I caught him crushing up a rock and mixing it with a small pile of weed in the master bedroom. When he noticed me, he played like it wasn’t a big deal. He told me that fifty-ones weren’t like smoking from the pipe, because the weed absorbed the effects of the cocaine.
Lee was the epitome of the manipulative older homie—the kind that so many young men in the ’hood grow up admiring. When things aren’t going good at home, these guys have all of the answers. When you don’t have anywhere to live, they show you how to hustle and take care of yourself. They make you believe that they have your best interests at heart when, in reality, they are the worst kind of predators in our community. Anyone who encourages a child to sell or use drugs is sick in the head, a danger and a threat to those around him. Most of the guys I know serving long prison sentences were introduced to drugs and crime by one of the older guys in the ’hood.
I watched Lee as he lit up the fifty-one. The joint crackled, and I could see the oil from the cocaine burning through the paper. The thick plume of white smoke smelled sickly sweet, and the effect on Lee was instantaneous. He inhaled again deeply before passing me
the joint with a nod. I took it and held it in my hand for a minute before putting it to my lips and drawing on it.
The smoke felt like evil going down into my young lungs. My pulse began beating erratically, and my lips went numb. My whole body felt higher than it had ever felt, and I was sure my heart was going to burst out of my shirt. My conscience began to fuck with me. I got up to look out the window about ten times, checking for the police, and I was certain my mother would appear at the door any minute with a belt in her hand ready to whop my ass.
Lee assured me that what I was feeling was normal. After a while, Tee joined us, and we spent the rest of the night smoking up all of the profit from that sack. I called Miko to get a refill, and while I waited for him, I grew more paranoid. He had warned me to never smoke crack, and I worried that he could tell I was high just from our phone conversation. When he finally showed up, I was really tripping. I thought to myself, I’m never smoking that shit again in my life. But I knew even then that I was lying.
—
BY THE NEXT week, the smoking had become a regular thing. At first, we would pay for it out of our own pockets, but there was no way that our earnings could keep pace with the addictive pull of the laced joints. Between the three of us, we were smoking more than a thousand dollars’ worth of rocks a day. My fourteen-year-old world was spinning out of control, faster than I could make sense of it.
Around this time, I was also working a spot on Maiden Street. It was a duplex and we rolled out of the downstairs unit. Kevin, the nephew of the family who lived upstairs, was in his early twenties and used to sell crack himself. We clicked instantly and would stay up all night smoking and kicking it about life. One night, we were up getting high when we decided that, the next time Miko dropped off a thousand-dollar sack, we should run off and set up shop in another area of the city. In our impaired state, we had come to the conclusion that we would be better off without Miko.
The next day, Miko dropped off the sack we had planned to steal—and steal it we did. But instead of selling it and pocketing the money, we smoked it up with some people that Kevin knew. Once all of the rocks were gone and my high had subsided, I realized that I didn’t have anywhere to go but back to the ’hood. It was the biggest mistake of my young life.
I spent the day trying to duck Miko, but there was no getting away from him. When he caught up with me, he was in the car with two of his goons, and he ordered me to get in. Even though I was high and afraid, I was able to think quick on my feet, so when Miko asked me where I’d been and what happened to the dope, I lied and told him that the police had raided the spot and taken me to the youth home. I even told him that he could take me to my mother’s place and ask her, because she was the one who had gotten me out that morning. To my surprise, Miko took me up on the offer, putting the car in drive and speeding off toward my mother’s house.
I sat in the back of the car, terrified. My mother had no idea what was going on in my life. What would she think if I showed up with a drug kingpin and two of his goons? As we drove toward her house, I realized that I didn’t have the nerve to go through with my plan. I had no idea what they would do to my mother, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize my family because of my bullshit.
So I cracked. I came clean, telling Miko that I had smoked up the sack.
Miko was shocked. He had known for a while that the other guys had been fucking around with our stash, but he never suspected that I would join in. In so many ways, I was still a child, and it never occurred to him that I would try some bullshit like this. Miko’s goons, however, didn’t seem surprised. They didn’t care about me being a skinny fourteen-year-old who was just months removed from living with his mother—they were street-hardened veterans who no longer felt empathy, and they were all too eager to make an example out of me.
Miko had no choice but to let them do it. He was bound by the code of the streets, and he knew that the moment he made an exception to the code, word would get out that he had gone soft.
They took me to the house on Maiden, where one of Miko’s goons grabbed me by the back of my shirt and dragged me inside. I pleaded with Miko, promising that I would work off the money I had stolen. All of it, every dollar. But my promise meant nothing to him. He leaned down to look in my face and said, “How you gonna work off a sack when you a crackhead?”
Those words hit me harder than the beating I was about to take. They forced me to see the true face of the situation: that I had become the thing I despised—a consumer of the poison I had once taken pride in selling to others.
As soon as we reached the living room, Miko turned around and punched me in the face. I staggered backward, and before I could regain my composure, one of his goons joined in, punching me in the back of the head. I did my best to fight back, but my adolescent strength was no match for that of two grown men. Miko’s goons quickly overpowered me and administered a thorough beatdown. By the time Miko stopped them, I was lying in a pool of blood.
As I lay there, I thought I was going to die. My nose was pouring blood, and the entire left side of my face was swollen. It was hard for me to breathe. Miko told me to get up from the floor, clean myself up, and wait at the house for them to come back. I looked at his goons in a haze of confusion, thinking about the rifle in the back room. But I knew I didn’t have the heart to shoot anyone.
All of this was my fault. I was the one who smoked the sack—the one who thought I could pull one over on my boss. But, even though I knew Miko had held back on the beating, I felt betrayed. I had looked up to him as a big brother, but when it came down to it, I was nothing more than a laborer to him. A deep wound pressed itself into my psyche. The way I saw it, if Miko could turn on me, then anyone could turn on me. In that moment, I made a silent vow to kill the next person to put his or her hands on me.
I stumbled to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. My lips were swollen and cracked, and my eye had a lump the size of a plum beneath it. I felt lonely and vulnerable, but as much as I wanted to cry, I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn, and I was afraid that Miko and his goons would return at any minute and finish beating me until I died. But a few minutes after that thought crossed my mind, I heard them exit the house.
I slumped to the bathroom floor and curled into a tight ball. Thoughts of my mother and father tumbled through my mind. I thought about everything they had told me about God and how none of it made sense in that moment. I cursed their blond-haired, blue-eyed God. How could he allow this to happen to me? I wondered. Where were the caring, protective arms of Jesus when I needed him? Where were my mother and father while I was lying on the pissy bathroom floor of a crack house?
The sound of someone coming from upstairs made me pull myself up from the floor. My face was throbbing, and each time I took a breath, it felt like I had been stabbed in my side. I was standing at the sink, rinsing the blood from my mouth, when I heard a soft voice asking if I was all right.
I looked up to see a woman named Sharon who lived upstairs with her one-year-old son, and I nodded my head to indicate that I was okay. Sharon looked at me with pity. She grabbed a cloth to wash my face with cold water, and as she did so, she told me that I needed to get out of the game and leave Miko alone. A deep sense of shame and embarrassment overtook me, and I resented Sharon for it—but I knew she was right.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, I was knocking on the door of my sister Tamica’s house. When she opened the door and saw my face, she burst into tears. She said she wanted to find Miko and beat his ass. Tamica and I had grown up fighting side by side; no matter who she got into it with, I was right there with her, and she never hesitated to return the favor. I told her the details of what had happened (leaving out the part about me smoking laced joints), and she told me I could stay with her as long as I needed. It wasn’t home, but after months of fighting to survive on my own in the streets, here was a chance to start anew.
But already the pathological behavior of the drug trade
had seeped into my soul. I had been given a chance to change, but in a matter of days, I would go back to my old ways.
8
WAYNE COUNTY JAIL
Detroit, Michigan
September 1991
The day of my sentencing, I carried a picture of Brenda and me to the holding room outside of the courtroom. There were about fifteen of us there, and as I sat down, my attention was drawn to a light-skinned inmate with a long ponytail who had just come into the bullpen. I couldn’t place who he was, but I felt like I knew him. I watched him as he scanned the graffiti-filled steel and concrete holding cell.
Then he asked a question to the room. “What do y’all think the judge will do to a man serving a life sentence if he raped another inmate?” He looked around for an answer.
A few guys replied that there wasn’t much the judge could do if someone was already serving a life sentence. After considering their answers, the guy who had asked the question told them that he had asked it because that’s the situation he was in.
Immediately I knew he was Seven, the guy that my bunky had told me about. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d be capable of raping another man, or at least he didn’t fit my picture of Seven. I had imagined him as a bald-headed brute foaming at the mouth with scars covering his face, but he looked just like anyone else.
A few minutes passed, and I was called to stand before the county judge for sentencing.
I was nineteen years old.
—
WHEN I ENTERED the courtroom, I saw my parents, Brenda, and my ex-girlfriend Nycci from Ohio sitting in the second row. I gave them a smile, but my heart was as burdened as it had ever felt. I couldn’t take the pain of seeing the last people on earth who I knew loved me, so I turned back around to face the judge.
Writing My Wrongs Page 7