by Trick Daddy
Standing there, soaked from waist down in Doc’s piss, that lady was a sight. She cried and cried. Myself, Sticks, and the cashier did what any other upstanding gas station attendants would have done. We laughed and laughed and laughed some more. I was laughing so hard, my stomach cramped up. She jumped in her car and sped off. It just goes to show you that every dog has his day. We never saw Doc again, but I’m sure for those several seconds he felt like he had taken back some form of his dignity.
With Doc out of the picture, business ran a bit smoother for me. I learned to stave off the competition from panhandlers by simply breaking them off some of my tips. Most were bad for business anyway because, like Doc, they scared away customers. Already, I was learning how to control the market.
Every hustler knows that to gain you have to lose. Anyone that isn’t willing to break bread won’t make bread. It’s a catch-22 but a necessary one. When I got the homeless cats on my side, the cashier even took notice and gave me certain privileges. He gave me an occasional free bag of potato chips or a soda, which I shared with Sticks and the other cats at the pump.
My favorite customer was Drop Top Mo. He was cold as ice. I had never seen someone so fly in the hood before. When he cruised down the strip, he transformed it into a movie set. Lights. Camera. Action. Few were flashier than Mo. He would speed through in a blue Mercedes with the titties poking out. That’s what we call it when you drop the top on a convertible. Mo had plenty. He would chop the top off every car he drove. Back then a red-candy-painted Chevy Corvette cruising through Liberty City drew a crowd. Mo had about four of them in different colors.
When he pulled up in the Bentley with Gucci interior, everyone rushed the car. It sat on twenty-two-inch rims that could blind a blind man. The chick sitting in his passenger seat was just as fly. The rims weren’t the only things that glittered. He wore a long gold-rope chain with a diamond-encrusted medallion. The diamond ring on his pinkie finger was just as huge as the rocks in his pendant.
Sticks and the panhandlers would rush the car as if Jesus himself had arrived. Actually, it was like Jesus had come to Fire Star. The cashier peered from behind the counter and shook his head. Other customers rolled their windows up and locked their doors while I soaked it in.
I asked Mo if I could touch the car’s leather interior. I bobbed my head to the bass rocking the trunk. Inside sat twin Pioneer speakers I had never before seen. I stared at my reflection in the chrome-colored spinning rims.
“She’s a stunna, ain’t she? Yeah, this my baby right here,” said Mo.
“Wow, how much one of these cost?” I asked.
He stared at me, then chuckled. “More than your life, young blood. Nah, just kidding. She cost me a pretty penny.”
Mo never noticed that I took extralong to pump his gas. My favorite part came at the end when he pulled out a wad of cash held together by a diamond-enrusted money clip. He counted hundreds, even thousands. I had never seen so much money. Mo would hand me a twenty, sometimes a fifty. He was always a generous dude to me and the other shorties in the hood.
He jumped in the Bentley and revved the engine. “Sounds like she’s singing, don’t she?” he boasted.
I nodded. I imagined it was me sitting next to that bodacious babe. She had a rack of melons on her that could make any man drool. As they sped off down the avenue, I stood transfixed in a daydream clutching that $50 bill. I liked how it felt. I wasn’t sure how Mo came into so much money, but I would soon find out. Folks in Miami were always talking about my half brother Hollywood. Word on the street was that he was the youngest dude in Miami with the same cheese as older cats like Mo. For now, Hollywood’s wealth was but an urban legend in my mind. Thus far, everyone around me was broke as hell. Of course I wanted to meet him, but I took the stories with a grain of salt.
Then the station manager snapped me out of my daydream. “You lost your damn mind!” he yelled. “Put the pump up! You’re wasting my gas!” He pointed to my soaked sneakers. I had got so lost in my dream of squeezing those melons I was still clutching the gas pump. Gasoline was everywhere. Habib looked at me. He shook his head, then motioned to my pants pockets.
“No, I just made this tip!” I insisted.
“It’s not my fault you lost focus with the pimp of the city.”
I dug deep into my pocket and handed over the fifty.
“It’s like they say, Maurice, easy come, easy go,” he said. “Everything that glitters isn’t gold, my young friend.” At the time I didn’t see what Habib was trying to tell me. It was a subtle warning that he hoped would register in my mind.
I was ten. He was just a dude with a fucked-up accent getting free labor out of me, Sticks, and all the other Liberty City cats hustling for a buck while he soaked up the AC inside. Now he had the nerve to take the biggest tip I ever got. Fuck Habib.
6
I Got Plans
I JUMPED ON MY BIKE AND PEDALED HOME. I USUALLY got home around eleven. Although the station closed at ten o’clock, I hung out in the neighborhood until I knew everyone in my house had gone to bed. The fighting between my mother and whoever she was dating after Lucious left made home a war zone. Lucious brought stability in a world that was already unraveling around me.
If you see a kid hanging on the corner while you’re driving through the hood on your way to the suburbs, he’s not necessarily up to no good. His home probably isn’t a happy place. He’s not trying to rob you. He’s just out there trying to soak up some peace of mind. I know it sounds crazy that out in those gritty streets, amid those you learn to sidestep in the daylight, a kid might actually be trying to find temporary respite from the bullshit at home.
You’d be surprised. It’s where I learned a lot about life. I would sit on that rusty bench in the middle of the courtyard. Most projects have one. It’s mostly reserved for the HNIC, the head nigger in charge, that pimp or drug dealer who perches out there with his crew so he can survey his domain.
At night the throne was left vacant for little old me. The things you see after sunset in the projects can be downright scary. I used to think, if there is a God, why did He stick my family here? It’s like He didn’t like us.
I watched television, so I had an idea of what life could be like. The truth is most kids in the Beans sat glued to the television because it was like taking a field trip. For that half hour or so when Leave It to Beaver came on, you pretended to be Beaver. It drowned out the gunshots as well as your mother and her boyfriend’s screaming. But you never actually thought you could get there. No, those people on the tube were just characters that lived in some fantasy world you were never going to visit. That’s why I liked Lucious. He had actually visited some of those places in la-la land.
At times I resented Pearl for not maintaining a healthy relationship with him. Nevertheless, I chalked it up for what it was. When I left the courtyard and got home, Pearl was sometimes still awake. I saw the uncertainty in her eyes while she looked over my brothers and sisters as they slept. She sat wondering how she would take care of us all. It made me enjoy giving her some of the cash I earned in my burgeoning enterprises. She was never good with expressing her emotions unless she was hollering, but I knew she was proud of me. “You’re becoming a responsible man around here,” she would say. “At least you’re not turning out like those other sorry niggas.”
As many issues as I’ve had with my father and those of my siblings, I always felt my mother did us a disservice when she talked bad about them. Looking back, I soaked it in like any other kid would do. But the habit of making kids pawns, traded back and forth when the chess game of love goes bad between adults, is a tragedy. Kids should be excluded from the bitter feuding. Unfortunately, the drama plays out on daytime television throughout the week. Ratings go up when those talk shows show a teenage girl calling some dude sorry for not stepping up to take responsibility for the child he may or may not have fathered.
If the first thing that a kid witnesses is his mama and daddy fighting, do yo
u think he’ll learn to have healthy relationships with the opposite sex? I’m sure you can answer that question. But since I was indeed the man of the house as a ten-year-old, I enjoyed filling in where those guys didn’t. When my mother gave them a tongue-lashing, it showed me just how much more needed I was.
King Kong didn’t have shit on me.
Pearl even gave me the idea for my next venture—raking grass. In the hood folks take their lawn seriously. It isn’t like there were any manicured lawns in the Beans, but there was a patch of grass outside the front door in front the garbage bin. Remember when I talked about different markers of hood status earlier?
That patch of grass was one such marker. In Anyhood, USA, you don’t violate a man’s patch of grass. In much the same way you “never touch a black man’s radio,” you sure as hell don’t mess up his lawn. Seriously, people have got shot over letting their pooch crap on someone’s lawn. People could be living in a crummy project apartment, but their lawn would be litter-free and bright green. Some folks even got fined in the Beans for overusing the water to nourish their lawns.
“That’s where the money’s at, son,” Pearl would tell me. “And always make sure you tend very well to the old folk.” My mother always talked about taking care of women and the elderly. She drilled that into my skull.
I grabbed my rake and knocked on doors. I even employed a couple of the other shorties in the neighborhood. It was a simple pitch: “Your grass could be the greenest and cleanest in the hood” for an unbeatable price from $.50 to $2 depending on how long it took me to complete the job. The elderly got a discount. Mrs. Lowery was one of my most loyal clients. She sat in her wheelchair and watched me scurry back and forth. I made sure every candy wrapper, soda can, and newspaper was thrown away. She beamed a broad smile at how fast I worked.
“Ma’am, is there anything else I can do for you?” I asked her when I was done.
“No, it looks just fine. I’m so happy for the help.” She usually brought me a tall glass of water when I was finished. Honestly, I think old Mrs. Lowery just liked the company. Sometimes her grass didn’t need raking at all. Her husband had died, and folks said her son had gotten a football scholarship, went off to college, and never came back. I don’t blame him. He probably saw the cookie-cutter homes and manicured lawns on that lily-white campus and screamed hallelujah! The suburban air must have smelled pretty damn good.
With my pockets getting fatter I gained a strut to my step. I was feeling like a million bucks even if my pants pockets were only jingling with coins when I walked. But as the summer loomed, my real hustle was right around the corner.
7
Ghetto Superstar
EVERY HOOD HAS AT LEAST ONE CAT LIKE BOONER or Junior. These are the cats who see little brothers on the corner drifting. In the absence of organized programs they scrounge something together to give the kids something better to do besides “shooting and robbing.” They see the potential in lost causes. They may have been that lifeline for a 50 Cent, Lebron James, Russell Simmons, or some other successful brother who could easily have gone the wrong way. It could be the dude that turns an abandoned warehouse into a boxing ring where the shorties can punch out their frustrations, the teacher who runs a basketball league on the weekends. Booner and Junior offered newspapers.
Those cats are never given a community service award at the swanky black-tie ceremonies. Those spectacles are usually reserved for the crooked politician who opens some rec center in the hood and slaps his name on it and never returns until election time. No, you’ll never read about Old Man Booner and Junior in the Miami Herald. When they picked me up at Fire Star, I was being a hard-ass like most boys who thought they could tough it out on their own.
I told Sticks to watch the pumps so I could use the bathroom. I didn’t need to use the bathroom at all. I went back there to count my tips. Counting money in public was like a death wish. You never know who’s watching. People in the Beans were struggling. Folks were getting shot over less than $10.
When I got back, Sticks was arguing with some old dude driving a white van. He made a gesture for the van to keep driving.
“What’s up, Sticks? Everything cool?” I asked.
“No, these two old geezers tying up the pump. They won’t drive off.”
I turned to Booner. Standing there, hands folded, he looked old enough to be my grandfather.
“Y’all heard the man. If you don’t need gas, please keep it moving,” I warned.
“Oh, you’re the boss out here?” Booner asked.
“Yeah, I guess you could call me that. But that really ain’t none of your damn business.” Up until that point I can’t say I backed down from anyone or anything. I didn’t take kindly to being pushed around by anyone. These dudes were going to respect me.
“Boy, you know what time it is? Your mama know you out here?” asked Booner.
“I’ll say it louder ’cause it seems you’re hard of hearing. My business is my damn business.”
“Young blood does have a point there, Boon,” said Junior.
Booner jumped back in the van and started the engine. “Yeah, his business is his business. I was just wondering if he wanted to make a couple extra dollars. Oh, well.”
Before the van could lurch forward, I blurted out, “How much are you talking about?”
“That depends on how hard you’re willing to work,” answered Junior.
I looked back at Sticks. He nodded. In a weird way I knew Sticks thought it wasn’t safe for me to be out there at Fire Star. He didn’t want me to fall into the traps that led him to be taking orders from a fresh ten-year-old. Yeah, me and Sticks were friends. I guess he liked the fact that I never judged him. I broke bread with him. When he nodded, it was his way of telling me, “Get the fuck outta here.” I jumped in the van and never saw Sticks again. My shift at Fire Star was over, for good.
“Boy, what you doing out here this late anyhow?” Booner dug into me.
“My mama told me never talk to strangers. You guys look like strangers.”
Booner chuckled. Folks in the hood knew I was fresh. I had a slick mouth. You could say I was witty.
“Ain’t your mama Pearl?” asked Junior.
“Yeah, he look just like Pearl, don’t he?” replied Booner.
“You got something to say about my mama!?” I snapped back.
“Nah, young blood, just seeing where you get it from.”
When they dropped me off, Booner gave me firm instructions.
“We’re picking you up at six a.m. sharp. If you’re not ready, you don’t make the cash.” He didn’t have to worry. I stayed up all night wondering what those two old cats had in mind, guessing on what the big moneymaking heist could be. Still a minor, I was sure they wanted me to boost some stereos out of someone’s car or drop off some kind of package to a customer. Older hustlers in the neighborhood were always looking for young shorties with heart to run errands. I fit the bill.
Whatever it was, I knew I would score big. I thought about the things I could buy with the pesos. It was time to retire our black-and-white television. The thing got pounded so much it had a dent the size of the Grand Canyon. An old wire hanger served as the antenna. Or maybe I could get the new Atari. A new TV and game system would make me the talk of the Beans. The grand idea Booner and Junior had to make me rich was newspapers.
“Y’all got to be kidding!” I yelled when Booner and Junior picked me up that morning. “Y’all think I’m about to go walking around in the hot sun selling newspapers!? Let me out!” I was on my way to becoming wealthy one newspaper at a time. My chariot to riches was equally disturbing. The van was moldy inside with no seats. It was hot as a skillet of fried chitlins and smelled just as bad. In the middle of the summer with no air-conditioning, that van most certainly was going to be where I died of a heatstroke.
That’s when I met O’Sean and Darryl. We would soon become connected at the hip. I used to bump into them on the basketball court in the Beans, but we n
ever spoke. I had got into a fight with Darryl over a customer at Winn-Dixie before Jean saved him from a can of whup ass. Honestly, Darryl would have kicked my ass, but I would have given him a run for his money. Young cats like us were always scrapping to prove something to the older dudes. The hardest among us would get the attention of OGs.
Now we were stuck on the same team sitting side by side on the floor of Booner’s van. I made my case. If they wanted old Booner and Junior to bamboozle them into hustling newspapers in the hot sun, they would have to do so without me.
“I’m telling y’all these dudes are busters. They got us looking like clowns,” I told the crew.
“Look, they told us it’s honest money. Besides, I’m tired of pushing carts outside of Winn-Dixie,” fired back Darryl.
We were getting played by two hustlers and no one saw it but me. The nerve of these two old busters to hustle shorties that could have been their grandsons. I wasn’t about to drink the Kool-Aid.
“Pull over! If you guys don’t pull over, I’ll scream for help and tell the police I’m being held hostage,” I yelled.
“Seriously, young blood, look around. You’re gonna yell for the police in the Beans?” asked Junior.
He had a point. The last time I saw a cop in my neighborhood he was trying to pick up some schoolgirl on her way home.