by Trick Daddy
I wiped my tears as soon as I saw Black running up toward me, his pistol in hand.
“Bruh, you good? Somebody messing with you? I’ll handle it right now.” Black would.
“Nah, bruh, just been arguing with my stepsister.”
“Damn, she still giving you drama, hunh? You know that girl is her mama daughter. Well, you know I always got your back.”
Black was always looking out for me. I’m sure Hollywood played a part, but Wood was the type to let me fight my own battles. He knew that at times he wouldn’t be there to chase away the demons. Black respected Wood, but Black was just a good dude. He fit into the category of folks who kept it “one hundred.” Instead of preying on the weak, Black protected the kid he felt had a good heart but a weak punch.
He did raise a serious concern though. My stepsister and I weren’t getting along. Our issues stemmed from exactly why women shouldn’t have kids from different men. Do what the Bible says. Get married and raise your kids with one mother and one father. If people followed what the good Lord commands, our lives would be a whole lot easier.
Soon enough I found myself spending less time at home after getting into a huge fight with my stepsister. We fought daily. Being an outsider was becoming second nature to me. By now I had already spent most of my early life drifting with nowhere to go.
I slept at Dante’s house some nights to make it easier on Lynn. He lived right next door with his grandmother. So I hung out all day, then Dante snuck me in when his grandmother went to bed.
All those factors just increased my anger. I was spiraling out of control, but my behavior earned street credibility. People started fearing me. I wasn’t the hardest because my punch was like Mayweather’s but because I had the biggest heart. That in itself is misleading. I cared less for my own well-being than anybody else did for his in my neighborhood. I felt I had nothing to lose. Fighting a person who doesn’t care about his own preservation is suicide. You won’t win. Fear is the only thing that keeps people in check. Some among us are truly goodwilled, but the majority would do most anything if they could get away with it.
Back then, I couldn’t think of someone who’d miss me if I died so I didn’t give a damn. I was headed off a cliff with my eyes wide-open. Death would be a bonus. It would have taken me away from all this bullshit.
Still, Fudge’s lessons followed me to that first day of school. I wanted to see if I could be that “prince” he always called me and the other boys at Project Lee. Why not try to live out the legacy of my royal ancestry and act accordingly?
I looked fresh the weekend after the fight at Ghoul’s Park. Hollywood lent me his nugget, diamond-encrusted bracelet after I bugged him all week to let me wear it. He even dropped me off in his Mercedes. Southridge Senior’s entrance was like any other high school’s. It’s where the popular kids congregated to be seen. The school entrance was like a catwalk. Everyone showcased their stuff. Girls gathered to see whose hot ride their friends were being dropped off in. The boys dropped off by the hustlers gained automatic notoriety. So my cruising in Wood’s Mercedes-Benz made the girls stare. My gear was tight. I was the freshest kid at Southridge. The girls showed their appreciation. “Hey, sexy!” they hollered from the courtyard.
This was around the time when sisters weren’t showing dark-skinned brothers love. They were more infatuated with Al B. Sure and Chico DeBarge. A dark-skinned brother like me rocking a shaved bald head and getting love from the ladies made me hot stuff. I was a rebel of sorts.
Kim came running up to me. “Are we gonna hook up for lunch?” she whined.
Only if you let me tap that fat ass beyond the bleachers by the baseball field.
“I gotta see what my partners are up to first, lil mama,” I answered.
The ladies dug me. I caught Kiesha out of the corner of my eye yapping with the evening-news crew. Every high school has that group of girls, gossiping about everybody. They know who the quarterback is giving it to as well as who came down with crabs. I didn’t feel like being bothered.
“Maurice! We over here!” I heard someone yelling.
My crew was posted up by the water fountain near the courtyard. Construction crews were adding another classroom to the east wing of campus adjacent to the football field. The construction confined all the students to the courtyard and main hallway before classes started. This forced different crews who didn’t particularly like one other to mingle in close quarters. That was an oversight on the part of school officials. Sure enough, I managed to bump into the boys I beefed with from Ghoul’s Park. Lady Drama had a major crush on me. “What’s up now, chump?!” the dude yelled. Folks called him T.
This guy couldn’t be serious. His left eye was still swollen shut from the beating I gave him. The knot the Heineken bottle left on his forehead looked like a ripe tomato. I had to give it to this dude; he wasn’t letting me off the hook that easy.
I shook my head. “You wanna die this time? Bruh, you lucky my partners pulled me off of you the first go-around. Don’t let your pride get you killed.” I meant it.
He pushed me. Our crews started throwing punches, and the school erupted in mayhem. Now I was pissed. It wasn’t enough for this guy to pick a fight with me without provocation on a cool weekend in the park. He had the nerve to ruin my first week of high school and the audacity to interrupt me while I was about to get my mack down! I gazed at the stack of plywood laid out where construction was taking place.
“What are you doing? Hey, are you crazy?” yelled one of the workers running behind me. Before he could grab me, T was laid out unconscious in the courtyard. I hit him so hard with that block of wood it cracked.
“Oh, shit!”
In minutes I was in a paddy wagon.
21
Money and Drugs
IT WAS OVER. THE MIAMI-DADE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM tried. They washed their hands free of me. I was a degenerate, mindless, uncontrollable street thug. T’s family didn’t press charges, and no students would admit to seeing me hit him. I was let go but permanently expelled from school. In fact, if I was within one hundred yards of Southridge I could be arrested.
I was relieved. I didn’t fit in anyway. If the schools don’t take a young brother, the streets sure will. The dope boys will embrace a wayward kid with open arms. In that warped moment in my life the streets seemed like the better option.
“Damn, bruh, they say you brought out the National Guard at Southridge,” joked Wood when he saw me later that week.
I wanted to ask a favor of Wood. I’d been burning to ask him since the first day I moved down here.
“Well, bruh, let me take you out to get your mind off of shit,” Wood said.
The favor had to wait. Wood was going to take me to Strawberry’s. After Biggs went down so did Heart of the City. Strawberry’s was the new spot. All the shot callers went there. Professional athletes from out of town frequented the place. It was the grown-up nightclub. Pac-Jam over on Twenty-seventh Avenue was for teenagers, but Wood carried weight in the city. No bouncer in Miami was crazy enough to tell Wood where he couldn’t go. That evening he took out a stack of thousands and we hit the town. When we pulled up to Strawberry’s, the crowd was gracious, to say the least.
“Looking good, baby boy,” said one bouncer. He gave Wood daps.
I was a duck out of water, but I followed suit. Inside, the deejay spun the latest records. Hip-hop had just started to rock in the club. Our resident hip-hop ambassador, Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell, was putting our flavor to the music. Strawberry’s was his club. Our women liked to get loose, so to speak. Folks in Miami like to get freaky, period. No one stood by the walls looking like statues. In our clubs people got down like a bunch of horny bastards. Luke threw a bunch of parties in Miami. He was the most well-known promoter. That’s how he got his start in the music game. He brought all the big acts to Miami to get it popping. He was the first hip-hop mogul, but never gets his due credit. Before Memorial Day weekend’s urban beach week, thousands
of people flocked to Overtown Come Alive. Miami Bass music got started in clubs like Miami Nights, Studio 183, and Strawberry’s. Miami Bass got the booties shaking, and clubs around America followed suit. Alongside Luke, other pioneers were rocking out clubs. Uncle Al, Sugar Hill DJs, Prince Rahiem, Disco Rick and the Dogs, Le Juan Love, Crazy Legs 59, Clay D, and Half Pint had also set the tone of the Miami music scene. JT Money and the Poison Clan were the first group in Miami in which each member rapped. All of the previous acts added to Miami’s unique sound.
That night I saw Wood talk with the owner and converse with the deejay. Like I said earlier, dope slinging was temporary. Hollywood didn’t plan on being a dope boy all his life. He was stacking his bread, hoping to open a club and get into the music business. Every hustler knew the life expectancy of the coke life was short. Hustlers don’t live too long. Don’t be fooled by the Steven Seagal flicks. You will get touched in those streets.
I observed Wood when he was making those moves. He wanted out bad. Hanging at Strawberry’s and all the other nightclubs was as much business for Wood as pleasure. That night while we cruised home, he turned up NWA. Those brothers Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, DJ Yella, MC Ren, and Eazy-E were from a city far away in California that we had never visited, but when they spit those raps, we felt it all the same. Their music got to our very souls. Luke’s booty-shaking hits got the club crunk. We loved it of course. Luke was our hip-hop godfather. Who could get mad at a guy who had the ladies turning tricks and “popping coochie” in the club?
Luke was also one of the few people back then outside of the drug dealers who tried giving back to the community. Luke’s peewee football league saved a lot of young lives. Luke was definitely one of the heroes in Miami’s inner city. However, his music catered to the raunchy side of things. He was catching hell from the U.S. government, who thought his songs were too vulgar and risqué for the American public.
Outside the club in Miami’s streets we were really feeling that “fuck the police” type of music. Straight Outta Compton spoke to every black man in America. West Coast and Southern brothers had a lot in common. The music we generate is more laid-back and party-friendly than the music emanating from the concrete jungle where our brothers up North reside. However, I loved Kool G Rap. His music was believable. Miami’s inner city was the grittiest in America, so we wanted that gutter music.
Wood used to ride around bumping the hard-core shit all day. It was the sound track to the lives we were living. But Wood’s favorite emcee wasn’t on the radio. I rapped for fun. “Bruh, I’m telling you that you can spit. You can rap, bruh,” said Wood. “I can hear you on one of these records.”
“Nah, bruh. Those boys are the truth. I just kid around,” I fired back.
Word had spread throughout the projects that Wood’s wild young brother was also the best with the pen and pad. Rapping was the only other thing I did well besides busting heads. Crews gathered in Richmond Park and threw their best lyrical jabs at each other. It usually started with jokes about the opponent’s mother. My competition had way more material to throw at me than I did. That’s actually how I learned to become extremely witty with my rhymes. I used the food-stamp and welfare insults and turned them into jokes about myself. Neutralizing the competition’s ability to tear me down left them with no ammunition. After emptying my opponents own lyrical clip, I ripped them to shreds. I enjoyed it. So did my crew. They were even getting paid off my rap battles in the park by placing bets.
My rhymes were always ahead of my time. I was rapping from the perspective of the older G’s I idolized, and it made the competition fear me. They were rapping about girls and fly kicks. Meanwhile, I’d hit them with:
Nigga know me from way back in the days / before rapping nigga I was selling crack in the day / before trapping nigga I was still packing that AK.
People were coming from far and wide throughout Miami to battle me. It was too easy. They started off with the usual “your mama broke and on welfare in the projects” jargon. Unknown to me, Wood was lining up emcees for me to devour.
He planned to take his record-label ambitions to a Gordy level. Our father had used his hustling money to start Suntown Records, the first label of its kind in Miami. But prison brought an abrupt end to it. Hollywood was betting on larger success with Ted “Touche” Lucas. My father had taken Ted under his wing so to speak. He showed him the ropes in the music business. Ted looked up to Hollywood, so when he came up with the idea to start pushing their own acts, Ted followed suit. The first group they signed was an R&B group called Nu Vibes. I believed Wood saw me as the true face of the fledgling label because on the ride home that night he was trying to convince me to become an emcee.
“Bruh, ain’t nann nigga cold as you with this rap shit,” he said. “All we gotta do is get you exposure. We gotta get you up there onstage.”
I was never a shy kid but I thought those musical types were soft. All the money in the world couldn’t get me on a stage, glistening like Snow White and doing dances. Strutting and posing wasn’t part of my routine. I was too damn thugged out for that. Trading freestyles under the ficus tree in Richmond Park was one thing. Getting up onstage in front of thousands of people was an event I wasn’t ready for. I always wanted to rap, but I didn’t have the confidence to think anyone would take me serious.
“I’m just saying, bruh. You have something a lot of homeys out here don’t have,” Wood said. “You got options, bruh.”
The only option I saw was the one that had made Wood such a superstar in the hood. I blurted out the favor I’d been burning to ask.
22
Bricks and Marijuana
“BRUH, LET ME HOLD THE WHITE.”
The car screeched to a stop. Wood nearly blew a fuse. He was so mad I thought he was going to hit me.
“You out your fucking mind!” he yelled. “I been telling you about this rap shit and you wanna handle the work? Nah, bruh. Leave this shit alone. We’re not out here doing this to look fly.”
Wood’s term to always “keep it one hundred” rang a bell. So many dope boys break down in those interrogation rooms on The First 48 television show because that brother took on a life and wasn’t ready to keep it one hundred. He knew the risk when he put his hands on that white girl. He knew it came with certain liabilities. If the decision ushered in the dark instead of the light, the code required the hustler to deal with it. Life was so hard in Miami it caused people to take on such risks.
Choirboys who started slinging dope for the hell of it, because of greed or the thrill factor, are the first to start giving up names. For every choice one makes in this world a consequence follows. I was ready to live within those parameters.
Wood gazed at me. I shook my head. He knew me by now. Those close to me began to understand that Maurice was going to do what he wanted to do. I was virtually on my own since I could walk. It was damn near pointless for anyone to tell me what to do now.
“It’s grown-man business, bruh. There’s certain rules to this shit. It ain’t like when you were out there in the Beans flipping dollar joints,” warned Wood. He tried; however, he knew I would find some way of getting to the powder. If it meant I had to jack some known hustler to do so, I was going to get to her. Wood shook his head.
Like I said before, the Miami River cops flooded the city with the stuff. Anyone could get their hands on bricks. Slinging coke was a profitable side business for a school-crossing guard. Pies use to go for between $40,000 to $50,000 in the days of Mundey and Roberts. Now anyone could get a pie for between $15,000 and $18,000 depending on who they knew. Cocaine suppliers were rogue dealers. Grocery-store managers and even the cop patrolling a neighborhood served packages. A random person sometimes drove by the strip and displayed bricks on his or her backseat. Those suppliers were like ghosts. No one knew who the hell they were connected to. He could have been the supplier himself. It was strategic on the part of someone’s supplier to keep their customer in the dark on the whereabouts of the supply chain and p
rice ranges and such. That’s how they got rich while their middlemen did the dirty work. We were slaves to the supplier. Liberty City was a plantation ripe with cocaine as opposed to cotton. We were just some teenage niggas from the projects making them rich. These slave masters were some scary motherfuckers.
It was usually a Haitian or Cuban dude with no regard or respect for American life or its laws. A tourist wouldn’t want to get lost in these cats’ hoods while visiting the Caribbean. They were on a whole other level of carnage. As far as they saw it, American foreign policy had been bending their impoverished countries over without Vaseline for years. Making little Tommy a freebasing dope fiend was of no concern of theirs. Their plan was to make money in America and head back home with newfound wealth. Most were supporting families back in the islands with the proceeds. If black folks in America weren’t wise enough to use the powder as a means to an end as opposed to getting fucked up on it, that was on us. They tried to school us along the way. As I mentioned earlier, they didn’t take too kindly to taking crap from white folks. The chains of slavery had left the Caribbean way before they fell from our wrists.
Every time the cops would cruise by, those Jamaican hustlers would holler, “Bloodclot slavery ah finish, partna! I’ll put two in a buoy, bloodclot head!”
I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I knew they weren’t taking any shit. The Jamaican crew Shower Posse was one of the most insane crews to ever take up residence on U.S. soil. A Caribbean hustler’s dope money was usually tied to a political cause so their motivation to sling was far more intense. They even displayed their wealth differently. They weren’t flashy. Even with millions in foreign bank accounts, a beaten-down Land Cruiser was sufficient transportation. We spent our money on decked-out Cadillacs. There was a minor rivalry between us and the Caribbean and Latin gangsters, but we got past the language and cultural barriers when it was time to share the white girl. I guess we were stricken with jungle fever.