by Trick Daddy
“No-good suckers,” my mother called them. “All your daddies are a bunch of sorry bastards.”
Pearl wasn’t one to hold her tongue. I guess that’s why none of the men hung around long. If you wanted a war, my mother would give you the bullet, gunpowder, and rifle. She liked a good fight. Our apartment wasn’t large by any means, so you know when she and one of her boyfriends got into it. The whole Beans would know.
A typical scenario had her throwing one of those lousy dudes out with people peeking out their doors to witness the WWE Raw prime-time special Pearl vs. Sorry Baby Daddy, Part III. One guy in particular, Ralph, couldn’t get enough of the abuse. I mean, even I used to feel sorry for the guy. I still can’t tell you what Ralph’s occupation was. He had one of those “all of the above” résumés. A lot of folks around my way had that work history. Leaky faucet? I got you. Broken television? I got you. Concert tickets? You get the point.
“What’s cracking, young blood?” I hated when he called me that. I am the man of the house, dammit, even if you fools think I’m not past puberty. “Your mama, Pearl, around?” I always wanted to tell the bastard, “No, go bum food stamps from another single woman with kids! We’re in the projects. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of options.” But I knew my place, and besides, old Ralph had a sense of humor.
The truth is, I wanted a father figure. When you’re alone in the projects with your mom, you envy the kids whose father stuck around. In the ghetto pecking order—yes, there’s such a thing—kids whose father and mother live together always feel they have one up on the kids who don’t have that. Because most likely, they know your father may have been a shot caller who simply took advantage of your mother and kept it moving. He probably lived in a big house with his real kids married to the woman he really wanted. Yeah, it’s sad but it’s true. Even in the projects where everyone is at the bottom economically and sociologically, markers say who’s at the bottom of the bottom.
Pearl and her clan were the residue in the pan. So much so the social services people always came to check up on us. I hated that. Let’s be honest, those social services folk rarely give a damn. It’s a shitty job and the pay sucks. Do you really think some caseworker enjoys driving to the Pork-n-Beans once a month to see how poor Kiesha is making out with little Ray Ray and the flock? Hell no! In their opinion Kiesha should have kept her damn legs closed or used birth control, which they gave out in schools those days.
Our caseworker was Ms. Ridley. I had a crush on the lady. (Well, I had a crush on pretty much everything in a skirt and two legs, even in those days.) So when she came knocking on our door, I ran up all polite and shit and said, “Welcome to our humble abode.”
“Boy, move out the way!” my mother would yell. “That lady doesn’t have time for your foolishness!”
Pearl doesn’t fancy a lot of people, but she despised Ms. Ridley. It probably was because Pearl saw an image of what she could have become before she found herself stuck on welfare with us.
“How are you making out, Pearl?” Ms. Ridley would ask.
“I told you we’re just fine. I don’t know why you people have to always keep coming around here.”
“I keep coming because it’s my job and I care, Pearl. I know it must be hard being a young woman with all these children to take care of.”
“You don’t know a damn thing! You don’t know your ass from a can of beans!” yelled Pearl. “Coming around here like you really give a damn. Lady, spare me!”
Pearl has a fiery temper. You bring the artillery and she’ll start the war. “Pearl, maybe you just need some counseling. There’s a great program where you can even take classes while someone watches the kids.”
“Lady, what I need is for you to hurry up with your walk-through so you can kindly leave my house!”
Ms. Ridley shrugged.
I felt sorry for the lady. She seemed to have our best interests at heart, but Pearl just thought she was an up-North “patronizing bitch.” I believe Ms. Ridley was educated somewhere in New Jersey, and back then Southern folks didn’t take kindly to what people round my way called “uppity ways.” It’s funny how even back then and to this day behaving like you have some good sense and home training is frowned upon in the hood.
My favorite part came after my mother would give Ms. Ridley the third degree. Pearl would go to the kitchen, leaving Ms. Ridley all to myself. I guess you could call it my first rendezvous.
“Come here, Maurice. How’s the little man of the house doing?”
“I got everything under control,” I answered, nodding my head.
“That’s my boy. Your mother is under a lot of stress, so it’s up to you to take care of her, okay? Can you do that for me?”
“I think I can.”
Then Ms. Ridley gave me the biggest hug. I guess the crush I had on her wasn’t the boy-likes-girl type. Looking back, I think my affection toward that caseworker and several others that would float through my life came from the fact that someone actually gave a damn. It might sound clichéd, but stuck in that crummy apartment with my mother and brothers and sisters, I felt lost. You look outside and everyone around you is pretty much in the same rut. There was no love in the Pork-n-Beans. It was just people scraping by. So when someone from the outside visited, it was like I got to take a field trip to some faraway land.
Ms. Ridley didn’t live in the projects, or close to them for that matter. She was well-educated but she looked like us. She was black. Back then, we didn’t get to meet black folks who actually went to college. I know my mother felt Ms. Ridley was just doing her job. Maybe she was. Or maybe I was just a number on a pad she had to check off on her daily visits, but the hug was a gift. In those five fleeting seconds or so, it made me feel important. It made me feel like I wasn’t just some nappy-headed bastard child trapped in the hood.
Then she went home.
I don’t think my mother actually disliked Ms. Ridley. I believe every time she or any other social worker came around, it caused fear that my brothers and sisters and I were on the verge of being split up. At times when Ms. Ridley came, the water or electricity was off. Sometimes they were off at the same time. Sometimes she came by when Pearl and Ralph or some other boyfriend were arguing. Those factors didn’t bode well with the child services people always lurking. Of course, Pearl’s predicament could easily have been taken care if my father or one of my siblings’ fathers had assumed the man’s role, but they were all too busy being a statistic.
Only two of my siblings share the same father. What was the sum total of those ten guys’ financial and emotional contribution to our well-being? Zero. I hated those men. I know it’s a strong word, but feeling abandoned in that rat-infested apartment took its toll. There is a reason why black boys raised with single mothers are prone to killing other black boys. You don’t have to take my word for it. Do your research. Here’s my theory. If your first images of black men are of those who leave your mother stuck on skid row without a pot to piss in, then you’ll assume a hatred for your likeness. You grow up believing that brothers will tear you down, so you try to destroy them before they destroy you. It ain’t rocket science. I know it sounds like some twisted, fatalistic mumbo jumbo, but it’s real. Go to any prison in America and take a survey of what the inmates think of their fathers. That’s if they even knew the cat. If I could have killed one of those dudes, I would have. Now I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions to that rule. But a boy’s chances of becoming a success increase when he has a blueprint to follow.
Dating options for an unemployed woman with eleven kids are slim to nonnegotiable. It takes a special kind of man to even consider a woman with that kind of baggage. Only a man who was willing to look past what others see as damaged goods would take on such a challenge. His name was Lucious. He was my mother’s long-term boyfriend. He was in the military and what you could call a man’s man. Every time Lucious paid a visit from being away on his tour of duty, it was like Superman had entered the Beans. Well, to me at
least. In those days, a brother in the military meant he was doing something. Most cats from the hood didn’t have the financial means to go to college so they did the next best thing and bore arms. It was an honorable path to becoming all you can be, I guess. When Lucious arrived, my mother rolled out the red carpet. Inside, she laid out a dinner with candied yams, roast beef, peach cobbler. Like I said, it was really as if Superman had entered. I would run into the bathroom when he knocked on the door.
“Hey, baby.” He kissed Pearl on her cheek. “Where young blood at? Where my little man at? Where he hiding? I got something for him.”
“I told you stop spoiling that boy,” my mother answered.
All the while I listened behind the bathroom door. I got happy every time Lucious asked for me. I respected Lucious and knew I was his favorite. Yeah, I was special to Lucious.
“What’s happening?” I said sheepishly.
“What’s happening!?” he sarcastically replied. “Oh, all of a sudden you ain’t excited to see old Lucious?”
Of course I was. But I wanted to show him I was a man, and men don’t show emotion. He pulled out a toy German soldier as my mother went into the kitchen.
My eyes lit up.
“Yeah, I knew this would get you to smile,” he whispered. “Now go put it under the bed so your mother won’t see.”
I tucked it under the mattress, alongside the other trinkets Lucious had brought back from the places he had visited. Lucious knew I had never seen anything beyond Twelfth Parkway. The gifts were his way of expanding my view of the world.
After staying for however long his tour of duty gave him, he would give my mother some cash. She was always reluctant to take it. But he insisted. Lucious always tried to be the rock in our storm when he came around. Honestly, he was that eye in the hurricane. Sadly for us, he and my mother could never get it together. That left me with big shoes to fill as Pearl’s oldest son. It gave me a title too often held by shorties in the Beans and other projects across America—head of the household.
5
Count My Money
YOU LEARN EARLY IN THE HOOD THAT CASH FLOW IS the name of the game. You ain’t shit without dollars, pesos, gwap, dinero, or whatever else they call money these days. We’ve all seen the commercials and sappy movies touting money as the root of all evil and how it can’t make you happy and all that. But you ever notice that the guy featured in those behind-the-fame Hollywood stories always has the epiphany after crashing numerous Ferraris and boning tons of supermodels? It’s never the guy working at the counter in McDonald’s singing the whole “money can’t make you happy” song.
Exactly.
He wants to experience the hot cars, fine chicks, and whatever else the cash can afford so he can test that theory out on his own. I needed to get mine. So I figured it was time for me to get a hustle. Pierre’s Thrift Grocery became a cash cow.
My mother, Scoop, and aunts were always trying to sucker some kid into running to the store to get something for them. The laundry list included Newports, beer, and potato chips. Folks were always harassing us kids to run to the store. I especially hated the runs to get tampons. Pierre’s was just one block across the Twelfth Parkway, but if my mother and her friends were watching an episode of Good Times, I became their errand boy. So much so the cashier at the store found it humorous.
“Damn, are you the black Speedy Gonzales?”
I heard it all.
But I had an idea to turn my shuffling back and forth into a business. It dawned on me that most folks would forget to ask for their change until I brought it up. So, I decided to charge them $1 per run. It doesn’t sound like much, but like I said before, it all adds up. I even added on surcharges for what you might call extreme working conditions. Runs before sunset cost $1. Runs after sunset were $1.50 because that’s when most of the shootings in the hood went down. I charged $1.75 for a half hour before the store closed.
People’s priorities in the projects can be really warped. Folks wouldn’t save their money to get up out the hood, but they had $5 to give a seven-year-old to run across the street to buy cigarettes. I can’t tell you how many times Fat Boy Slim sent me to get a Snickers bar, Jujubes, or pork rinds. He would have done better to open a junk-food store in his own apartment, given the amount of calories he soaked up each night. But those calories amounted to cash in my pocket.
A true hustler has to have more than one gig, of course. No one told me that seven-year-olds couldn’t work in the stockroom at Winn-Dixie, so I settled for bagging groceries. After school I raced to aisle 13. For those of you who have never bagged groceries, there’s a science to it and a pecking order, if that’s what you want to call it. There isn’t any money to be made in the express lanes because obviously there aren’t a lot of bags to carry out in shopping carts. The store manager was this Haitian guy named Jean. He was a pretty cool dude when he wasn’t schooling all of us bag boys on the lack of “home training” American kids suffer from. I think he liked me from the beginning because I worked hard. But good old Jean had a more practical reason for making me his favorite. A large community of well-to-do Haitians lived in the suburbs in southwest Miami-Dade. Jean and the rest of the less fortunate ones were toughing it out up here with us several blocks around the way in “Little Haiti,” a reality I don’t think Jean was happy about. I was underage so he didn’t have to pay me as much as the other bag boys. Early on, I learned that in this world people will try to get over in any way they can. Some people exist within the rules of the system. Others bend and manipulate those rules to make the system suit their needs. The latter become the bosses in society. Do your research if you don’t agree. Alongside exploiting me, however, he did occasionally throw in some good advice. “Remember customer service,” he told me. “People tend to open their wallets when you make them smile.”
After that, I always beamed a big one at the end of the cashier line. I made sure those shoppers saw my pearly whites. You cashed in when an old lady came to the register. On the way out you usually had to endure a lecture on how “you kids today are getting screwed up,” but for the most part it was a pleasant exchange. Most shoppers gave me a $.50 tip. The really cheap ones flipped a quarter. Some bastards gave me nothing. Can you believe that? I bagged your groceries, quite neatly I should add, making sure the eggs are at the bottom so they don’t break, and you can’t scrounge up a nickel? Some folks just had no class. But the old ladies were always the most generous. On occasion I got a dollar.
I wasn’t doing too bad if I helped twenty customers. I used to laugh all the way to the shoebox I stashed my cash in. I kept it in the vents in the roof of our apartment. With people going in and out of there like it was the Beans Holiday Inn, I had to make sure my money was secure.
I was pretty proud of my store-errand franchise. I was surprised no other kid had come up with the idea. When I and the other bag boys at Winn-Dixie got into an occasional spat over whose turn it was, Jean usually quelled the situation before it turned to blows. It was easy, trouble-free moneymaking.
At the end of the night, sometimes Jean treated me to a soda or Snickers bar from the vending machine. But my hustle didn’t end there. After bagging groceries I rode my bike over to the Fire Star gas station at the corner of Sixty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue.
The scene at the gas pumps outside Fire Star wasn’t drama-free. The cashier inside could care less about the homeless panhandlers that harassed the drivers as they drove in to fill their tanks. He cared even less about some kid from the Beans getting roughed up by one of them.
Sticks and Doc were regulars. I don’t remember much about their personal lives, but I know for sure life had dealt them a bad hand. Sticks was a rail-thin, half-dead-looking dude that a lot of customers felt sorry for so they let him pump their gas and clean their windows. Seriously, Sticks always looked like he was just one breath away from the graveyard, always coughing and shit.
Doc was a problem. That dude was scary. He was always talking to hims
elf and shit. Word on the street was that he dropped out of medical school after his fiancée cheated on him. Who knows? I just made sure I didn’t cross him. The gas station lost a lot of business because of his antics. Doc didn’t take a liking to people telling him they didn’t want him pumping their gas. He gave one schoolteacher a treat I’m sure she will never forget. Hell, I’m sure that lady recounts this story to this very day.
She pulled up in her Toyota and got out singing one of those old gospel hymns. You know, the one where you’re told to lay your burdens down at the cross. Well, Doc came over and was polite at first.
“Ma’am, let me get that for you,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to get your clothes smelling like gasoline.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she replied.
Doc was accustomed to some reluctance. There could have been any number of reasons why people said no. Like I said, the dude just wasn’t right. So folks normally got scared, rolled their windows up, and waited for him to finish so they could speed off.
He leaned in. “Come on, lady, I’m just out here trying to earn a decent living. Let me get that for you.” He reached for the pump.
“Oh, I’ve heard that before!” she snapped back. “This is what you call a decent living? You’re nothing but a lazy lowlife trying to score an easy buck!”
“You don’t know me, lady!” Doc fired back.
“Yes, I do! People can’t go to the store much less the gas station without you bums harassing them!” she yelled.
“I got your bum, bitch!”
What happened next lives on in infamy. That lady picked the wrong homeless guy to insult that day. I’m sure she still wishes she had let good old Doc pump her gas. All she had to do was get in her car and put the radio on to her favorite gospel station, then drive off. Doc backed away. The lady turned away from him and continued singing. Then it happened. It was as if those lady’s insults had dug up some deep-rooted resentment Doc had harbored all these years. That schoolteacher should have known it’s never good to point the finger at someone’s circumstances, especially when you have no clues as to how they arrived there. She didn’t get the memo. The next thing we knew that lady was getting a yellow shower. Yes, Doc pissed on her. He hauled out his ding-a-ling and soaked her. I don’t even think that lady realized what was happening until a good ten seconds into the drenching. She screamed until the cashier ran out with a baseball bat and chased Doc away from the station.