Magic City

by Trick Daddy

  My crew looked at me. I knew they depended on me. When I said ride, we rode. So I did what any other young hustler on the come-up would do. I got a gun.

  9

  Ninety-nine Problems

  MOST FOLKS IN THE HOOD IN MIAMI CARRIED FIRE. I just hadn’t been in a situation yet to need a pistol myself. Even Pearl kept a .22. I’ll never forget the day I came home and she had it pointed at some old dude who was loitering around our apartment trying to flirt with my sister. Teenage girls in the suburbs have slumber parties and talk about their first crush. Jewish families throw bat mitzvahs to usher in their daughters’ approaching womanhood. Wealthy Hispanic girls have quinceañera. In the Beans, burgeoning curves meant you became prey for old, perverted bastards that raped chicks under the bleachers adjacent to the basketball court. Pearl wasn’t having it.

  “I swear, if you come at my girls again, you won’t have a johnson to wave at them!” she yelled. “I’ll shoot it off!”

  That pervert ran dizzy through the courtyard. Having been taken advantage of by men her entire life, Pearl refused to see her daughters fall victim to the same abuse. I asked her where she got the fire from.

  “None of your damn business! You think you’re grown now? Don’t ever let me see you with a gun in my house.”

  But news traveled fast in the Beans. Folks knew if you needed a pistol, Jo Jo over in the Blueberries was the person to go see. His father was locked up in federal prison for gun smuggling. Jo Jo was carrying on the family business. The dude’s apartment was stocked like the National Guard armory. Jo Jo wasn’t older than fifteen, but he lived alone with his two younger sisters. He gave his neighbor some money to pretend to be his mom when the child services people came snooping around. Like I said earlier, everyone had a side hustle. When I knocked on his door later that week, he wasn’t particularly inviting.

  “What they do?” asked Jo Jo.

  I peeked into the peephole. “Your cousin Ray told me to come see you about that fire.”

  “Bruh, I don’t have no cousin named Ray, and the only fire I know is the one burning in the Everglades. So if you ain’t with the Miami-Dade fire department come to inspect my apartment, you need to keep it moving!”

  I pulled out a $100 bill and slid it under the door.

  The door cracked. Jo Jo looked me up and down and shook his head. “Damn, you ain’t nothing but a little nigga.”

  I stepped in. His sisters were playing with a dollhouse on the floor. Jo Jo waved me into his bedroom closet. The kid’s closet looked like Iwo Jima. He had assault rifles, semiautomatics, silencers, even a grenade.

  “Damn, bruh, how you got all—”

  “Hold up, my nigga,” replied Jo Jo. “First and foremost, you don’t ask no questions in relations to another nigga’s trade. You should know that. I know your old boy’s an OG. He’s locked up with my pops in the Feds.”

  I gazed at the floor. I would inevitably have to have that conversation, but right now I wanted a hand cannon. I wanted a pistol that could fire a bullet the size of Texas into Tank’s chest.

  Jo Jo brought out a chrome .38 with a black handle. It glittered all over when the closet light shone on it. It now belonged to me. Jo Jo tucked the $100 in a shoebox. “If your young ass gets arrested, they don’t know where you got the fire from,” he said sternly.

  I nodded, then hit the courtyard. It was on. I rounded up my crew, who were on the basketball court shooting hoops. I showed off the chrome beauty tucked in my shorts. I was becoming a man. I couldn’t wait to find Tank.

  I got your little fuck nigga.

  My blood boiled over. The adrenaline rush of the streets is addictive. You can’t get enough of the drama while you’re spiraling down a dead end.

  At that moment all I could think about was firing a full clip into Tank so folks would know not to mess with me. If you began it, I would sure as hell finish it. My crew looked at me as if they knew something I didn’t. O’Sean finally blurted it out.

  “Tank got shot.”

  “Yeah, somebody capped his ass,” said Darryl.

  This wasn’t a game after all. In the Beans, lives evaporated like mud puddles on a hot summer’s day. I felt a twinge of sorrow for Tank. Just minutes ago I was sure I wanted to be the one to end his life. That’s the messed-up thing about being raised in a jungle. You start acting like an animal. Did I really want Tank’s life to end? Of course not. A ten-year-old doesn’t know the true consequences of death.

  Tank was gone.

  There could be no saying I’m sorry to his parents or maybe the girl and child he left behind. In the hood things happen in a blur. You race through life in a fog of anger and resentment. Most murders aren’t thought out or planned. Sometimes someone just gets scared or angry and a body is left cold and crumpled on the concrete. The coroner’s office marks your sorry ass off as John Doe.

  I’m sure Tank had it coming. He had put many dudes to sleep in his mere eighteen years on the planet. But no one wins when someone gets killed. One brother is trapped below six feet of dirt and worms, and the other’s in a six-by-nine-foot cell.

  They say Tank ran up on some dudes who had just moved to the Beans from Scott Carver projects. A lot of violence occurs when people are displaced from one project to another. The new crew is usually trying to move in on drug turf, forcing the resident crew to defend it. Tank lost that fight.

  “Shit, he had it coming,” I boasted, concealing my inner anguish over his death. “He’s lucky they got to him first.”

  My crew looked at one another. They understood that Maurice was going to be a force to be reckoned with. We weren’t taking any shit from anyone. When I walked through the hood, something was different. The means by which you earn stripes in the hood is so warped it’s downright insane.

  I got props for not begging for my life when Tank put his pistol to my head. It made Maurice a “stone-cold motherfucker.” I had balls . . . big ones. My clientele increased. It was known throughout the Beans, Blueberries, and Green Machine that my crew had the weed to get you to that special place. You know, the place where you forgot your rent is overdue and they’re about to turn off the lights. Hell, I was the go-to guy to get high. News surely does travel fast in the hood.

  10

  Boy

  TO SAY I DIDN’T LIKE SCHOOL WOULD BE AN UNDERSTATEMENT. I hated the place. I didn’t see the sense. No one in the Beans or anyone I knew for that matter had used school to gain any respectability in life. As far as I saw it, the teachers drove Pintos. Why go to college to earn a degree if it landed you square back in the hood teaching my sorry ass?

  Honestly, I and the other kids at Charles Drew Middle appeared to be lost causes. Most of us would either get locked up or die in the Beans. The school itself was as much as part of our neighborhood as the crummy apartments. Folks raised in Liberty Square went to Charles Drew. It was your typical middle school in any inner-city neighborhood. It was the kind of school where a majority of the teachers showed up to get a check, the folks who at the last minute figured their grades weren’t good enough to get them into law school or medical school. Now, there were and still always are some educators in inner-city public schools who fight tooth and nail for kids society has given up on. The sad truth is such teachers get lost in the shuffle amid the mayhem . . . usually caused by students such as yours truly.

  I went to Drew to sell weed. During lunch and PE, I had the kids coming in and out of the boys’ bathroom while my crew kept guard. Even a teacher or two were getting blown on my supply. Don’t act surprised. You guys really think your English teacher didn’t puff on the good green on his or her lunch break? Of course they did. However, all good things do come to an end.

  Kids like me were conveniently served detention when the superintendent arrived for his routine walk-through. One knucklehead hall monitor was onto me. Every school always has one. He has to be the exception. That student is the kid the principal puts in charge of campus tours. At Drew his name was Timothy.

&
nbsp; Timothy was a buster. If not for his bifocals, I would have sucker punched him in the face months before. But knocking out some herb wouldn’t have been good for my street cred. He got me good though. The dude never spoke to me, so I should have known something was up when he came running up to me at lunchtime one Friday.

  Fridays were when I usually tried to stack as much cheese as I could. Our crew went to the skating rink on the weekends. I had to get the freshest kicks. I was down to my last dollar joint when he ran up to me.

  “Hey, I heard you got that head buster,” I remember him saying, or something to that effect.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, bruh,” I replied.

  Good old Timmy was persistent. He pulled out $20. My better judgment should have seen the trap miles away, but I was a sucker for lady green. I motioned him to the bathroom, then opened the toilet dispenser where I stashed my supply.

  Timmy’s eyes lit up. I smirked. I’m sure he was impressed with my resourcefulness. He may have been making straight A’s in the classroom, but I was a young Einstein on the street. I wasn’t that bright. I gave the school janitor a few bucks to keep it a secret.

  In seconds, those school police officers descended on me like a pack of wolves.

  It wasn’t even the weed I got booked for. When I opened the dispenser, it wasn’t there. I guess someone treated himself to a free high. The look on those cops’ faces was worth its weight in gold. I laughed until one yanked me up against the wall. If he could have clubbed me with the baton, I’m sure he would have. They searched my backpack. Inside, they found my gun wrapped in my gym shorts.

  Busted. My first arrest. I was hauled down to the Miami-Dade Juvenile Detention Center, but they couldn’t book me because I was too young.

  Your first time in handcuffs is the most painful to grasp. The look on your mother’s face fills you with regret for causing her such pain. After some scolding, you promise to do better but the damage is done. You’ve begun your lifelong love affair with shackles and bars. It’s a matrimony whose vows are literally etched in “till death do us part.” You’re trapped.

  I’ll say this to every prosecutor, district attorney, public defender, and judge in America: Your juvenile justice system is bullshit. It’s designed to send thousands of black and Hispanic kids down an unforgiving path to a life of revolving prison doors. Most of these officials wouldn’t have jobs if they implemented measures to address the root of the problem. In no way can they justify putting an eleven-year-old in handcuffs.

  The harsh truth is that, in the eyes of the powers that be, a life in the Beans isn’t worth as much as one from Coral Gables. Kids in those posh private schools are up to the same mayhem. The only difference is that, instead of getting sent to juvie, they’re sent to therapists and counselors. Why pay to figure out the cause of little Maurice’s demons?

  Shit, let’s lock this little nigger up before he grows into a real problem. If we cage him up early, he won’t be able to kill us all.

  In Miami-Dade public schools alone there’s an average of two thousand arrests annually. About half of those arrested are black students. The Miami-Dade Juvenile Detention Center holds on average twelve thousand kids. Imagine all that money going to high-priced security and correctional officers’ pockets instead of going toward a rec center of some sort in the Beans. Some of it could go to extra lighting on the basketball court or maybe a security guard so the little brothers could shoot hoops without the hookers turning tricks under the bleachers. They’d rather spend that cheese on more police. I never understood why officials think punishment as opposed to prevention will decrease the crime rate. I wasn’t selling weed or toting a pistol because I liked the fancier things. Yeah, maybe I bought a sneaker here and there, but that cash kept the lights on in my mother’s crib. She didn’t know it of course. Pearl wouldn’t have stood for her kids’ school clothes being bought with dope money.

  When she picked me up that Friday, Pearl’s stare burned right through me. It beamed with a sense of hopelessness. She was fighting a losing battle. The stacks were piled against her. The streets were stealing her firstborn son. The silence on the bus ride home was deafening. Sometimes the unspoken message in silence booms louder than a drum. That day it busted my eardrum.

  You’re gonna be a fuckup like every other sorry nigger in these projects.

  Sadly enough, I was going into the fire eyes wide-open. No one gave a damn anyway. When we reached the door, Pearl snapped. The blow to the back of my head knocked me down cold on the doorstep. Darryl and O’Sean, who were chilling in the courtyard, saw the whole thing.

  “Damn, Maurice just got smacked!” Darryl yelled.

  “If y’all don’t want to catch some of what he’s about to get, I’d advise y’all to go home,” my mother yelled.

  All I saw was the dust kicked up from Darryl’s and O’Sean’s sneakers. They ran faster than the devil caught outside a Baptist church on Palm Sunday.

  “What the hell you doing with a gun in the schoolhouse?” my mother snapped. “Lord, sweet Jesus, I’m about to catch a case on this boy.”

  I had two options. I could tell the truth, that I really wasn’t working extra hours with Booner and Junior. The money I used to buy my new PE shorts really came from the bags of weed I’d been stashing in the vent above the sink in the bathroom. I would have been justified. I got tired of the food-stamp jokes. I got tired of being teased at school and having the teachers call me and my siblings nappy-headed welfare cases. Somebody had to take up where none of Pearl’s baby fathers did. How could you expect an eleven-year-old to play man of the house and make the best decisions? Pearl we got dealt a fucked-up hand and I got a pistol because the life I’m about to embark on calls for it. I went with option number two.

  “I don’t know. I forgot my backpack in the classroom all day. Someone must have stashed it in my bag when I wasn’t looking.”

  The “it wasn’t me” worked in the movies. So why shouldn’t it work for me?

  “Boy, you got one more chance to tell me the truth. I really think you want the devil to rise up out of me. I’m trying real hard, Maurice.”

  “I told you I don’t know how it got there.”

  It was time for an ass-whupping. I knew the drill. I went outside to the ficus tree in the courtyard and broke off the skinniest branch. My mother shredded the branches’ smaller limbs as she continued her interrogation. I didn’t budge. Hell, a sound whupping was better than the beating I would have got if I told her the truth. Pearl liked Booner and Junior. Everyone in the hood did. They were well respected. When my mother thought I was out with them selling newspapers, I was selling weed. I got tired of those white ladies jamming their car doors on me. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  My screams rang out through the neighborhood. It always seemed like everyone was home when you got a whipping. Kids peeked outside their windows. Some of the older folks cheered her on.

  “That’s right, sister! Spare the rod, spoil the child!” the chants began. “You got to beat the devil out the young-uns these days!”

  I don’t know about elsewhere, but in the South black folks take whippings seriously. It’s a time-honored tradition. You would think it’s Mardi Gras when black folks spank their kids. They get real into it, as if they are possessed. Don’t think about not crying either. If I played tough guy, my mother spanked me even harder.

  “Maurice, you know I got better things to do than come down to that schoolhouse and deal with your foolishness!” Pearl yelled as she slammed that branch against my rear end. Black spankings must look like child abuse to the civilized world I’m sure, but kids in the hood know that the pain their parents are trying to save them from bruises far more severely. It’s why black folks spank their kids. A mistake in the hood could cost you your life. Black parents whip their kids out of fear. It’s the horror that comes with seeing other kids carried off to prison or draped in white sheets. The consequences are too great in Anyhood, USA. Time out d
oesn’t send a clear enough message.

  Pearl’s anger subsided into tears. She dropped the branch and grabbed me. She squeezed me close to her chest. I felt the tears falling onto me.

  “Mommy, please don’t cry. I won’t do it again. I promise,” I said, trying to console her.

  “I can’t lose you, Maurice. Please, I can’t lose you, baby,” she sobbed. “Next they’ll call me to identify your body.”

  I wiped my mother’s tears. The only thing that had kept the streets from devouring me whole thus far was the fear of disappointing her. We were dealt a shitty hand indeed, starring in a bad episode of This is Your Life. The harsh reality was that her tears were wasted. The only thing I regretted was getting caught. Most burgeoning crooks can relate. The guys breaking down in those interrogation rooms on the show The First 48 aren’t sobbing because they feel remorse. They’re mad they were dumb enough to get caught.

  If only I had dumped the body in the river instead of the lake.

  It’s scary, but it’s been proven that people have to be reached on a personal level to save them from becoming heartless. Scared straight doesn’t work. If one of those steroid-pumping enforcers had screamed at me as a troubled kid on Maury, I would have sucker punched him. I would have reacted that way because I felt disrespected. Those scare tactics don’t work on kids who have been yelled and screamed at all their lives. The counselor becomes just another bully trying to humiliate them.

  11

  Gangsta

  I WAS EXPELLED FROM CHARLES DREW THE FOLLOWING week. My numerous absences and alleged dope dealing was reason enough to get me up out of there. I was looking forward to attending another school and starting off fresh. For the time being, I adhered to the wishes of my mother and school counselor. They sent me to Brownsville Middle; in weeks, trouble struck again.

  Some people enjoy getting a rise out of the person in the group who sticks out. People target the individual who seems up for a good challenge. I was always an aggressive dude. Like Pearl, if you wanted a war, I would bring the grenade, rocket launcher, and cannon. Come on with it. As hard as I tried to keep that internal ticking bomb from going off, someone had to force the explosion.