Magic City

by Trick Daddy

  That crew was and still is one of the coldest crews in Miami-Dade. Soon enough it became the season of the Zoes in Miami. They pushed the powder out of a dope hole called the White House. Some of the realest cats I know are Haitian. Visitors to Little Haiti can’t peruse certain spots without a pass from the Pound. They did their thing over there while we did ours in the Beans. Black Zoe was at the helm. He was taken aback that the dope boys sometimes went to Santana Red for their dope instead of him when Zoe was short on supply.

  “We are all African brothers,” he used to say.

  I know that pitch sounds crazy, but that was the crazy world I existed in. It was all about moving the coke. Everyone was desperate for money.

  My crew set up shop and began serving smokers. At first no one beefed because every hustler was getting paid. This conglomerate had codes of conduct. Customers couldn’t talk in the dope hole. Get your rocks and keep moving. The smokers knew which drug they wanted that day and sought it out, so there was minimum drama on their part. In the downtime, dope boys passed time playing craps. It was all gravy.

  Tubbs cruised by now and again to see what was hot on the block. He was always scheming. He extorted his fair share of dope boys in his time. It’s probably how he paid for his kids’ college education.

  My crew toiled day in and day out. We were making anywhere from $4,000 to $5,000 a night. It didn’t come close to what Hollywood was making, but it felt good nonetheless. The more we stacked, the harder we hustled. That’s the thing about coke money. I wanted more of it because it was coming in so easy. I also spent it as fast as I made it.

  We stayed fresh. Ironically, a dope boy spends so much time trying to make more money that he doesn’t make time to enjoy spending it. All the while I stacked my bread, others were waiting to take it from me. The same way we were preying on the weak, serving them their street medicine, someone was eager to prey on us.

  In the criminal world, some prey on fellow criminals. Every industry has its share of opportunists.

  Enter the jack boys.

  25

  Kill-a-Head

  YOU HAVE TO BE ONE COLD OR DOWNRIGHT CRAZY dude to make a living robbing hustlers. It’s not like stealing from the guy working the register at 7-Eleven. Nevertheless, some had a twisted enough mental disposition to become stickup kids, like the boys from Lincoln Fields.

  It’s safe to say we spent summers trying to kill one another. Lincoln Fields was the projects across the parkway, a mere three blocks away from the Beans, but judging from the amount of gunfire we exchanged, those cats might as well have been Al Qaeda. PSU projects were also around the way, but for the most part they got along with crews in the Beans.

  I’m sure all of us shared common roots, but the coke tore us apart. Some days folks stayed in for fear of catching a stray bullet when we shot at one another. Shell casings littered the block. Bullet holes were everywhere. People huddled in their bathtubs with their kids when they heard the sound of gunfire. They laid on the floor and waited until the AK spent its magazine.

  Being the new kids on the block made us targets, and in time the Lincoln Fields crew made a move on us.

  “Y’all seen that black Impala coming round all the time?” said this one kid we paid as a lookout.

  “Ain’t nothing we can’t handle, bruh,” I would say.

  We kept our rifles in an old Chevy we drove around. We hadn’t graduated to the candy-painted dunks the more successful dope boys drove. A dunk is what we called a Chevy Impala or similar car. Their dunk had spinning rims with a cocaine-white interior. If a hustler was riding in a ’71, ’72, or ’73 dunk, he was doing big things. We kept our car parked on the curb in front of the dope hole with someone lounging in it in case anything went down. If so, we were ready to lock and load.

  I have to give it to those Lincoln Field dudes. The first time they rolled up on us, they caught us totally off guard. I was lounging in the car bumping the radio while some dope boys were being entertained by Mr. Jingles, a smoker who had a fondness for Sammy Davis Jr. and danced like it was showtime at the Apollo. From the way he moved, Jingles could have performed on Broadway, instead of tapping his heels on Fifteenth Avenue. As Jingles moved into a new routine, a smoker started giving our lookout a hard time. I sat back and observed. I had seen the addict before. He was a regular so I didn’t pay him any mind.

  “I told you don’t come around trying to sell T-shirts!” the lookout yelled. “You’re making the spot hot.”

  The smoker had wheeled a shopping cart filled with old VCRs, stereos, and other junk right up onto the curb. We didn’t mind the guy getting his hustle on, but he needed to sell his junk and move on. The stuff was probably stolen, so the police were sure to come snooping around.

  “Keep it moving, partna,” said Tronne, getting up from his chair under the tall ficus tree.

  “Y’all ain’t the only ones trying to earn a living out here,” said the smoker. “I’ll give you this VCR for a dime hard.”

  Everyone looked him up and down as if he was crazy. This dude wanted a whole dime for some rusted VCR. Crack really messes with the brain. I continued bumping my tunes. Then the smoker freaked, flipped his cart over, and started stomping up and down like a lunatic.

  Our spotter reached for his pistol. “I said back up before I light your bitch ass up!” the kid screamed.

  Still, I wasn’t moved. Some dealers had started stretching the dope with all kinds of chemicals so they could turn higher profits. Sherm, cush, premo, and the other drugs that resulted really had smokers bent out of shape at times. I kept bumping to Le Juan Love. Then I caught a glimpse of the shooter bearing down on us. He was running up from the alley behind Sixty-fourth Street where the vacant field separated Lincoln Fields from Fifteenth Avenue. I reached for my AK on the backseat, cocked it, then opened fire.

  The first time you see death bearing down on you, time freezes. Imagine a movie stopping on a single frame, music reduced to the loud thumping of your own heart. In that pause, all of the various scenes in your life explode into an awkward twilight of pure reaction.

  You do or you don’t.

  Bullets ripped through the avenue. The corner-store windows shattered. People ran screaming. If that dude was going to kill me, I wanted at least one of my bullets to hit him. My life wasn’t worth shit, but he couldn’t send me to sleep untouched.

  “Those niggas shooting! Someone call the police!”

  I ducked on the ground beside the car as I fired. Our lookout had already sped off on his bicycle. The shooter returned fire from behind a lamppost at the intersection. The black Impala banked the corner. The shooter jumped in. My crew piled in our Chevy and gave chase up Twelfth Parkway. I leaned out the passenger-side window shooting.

  They had underestimated my crew and were now just trying to get away. Dante was leaning out the back window firing as well. Tronne was busy loading his clip with one hand on the steering wheel. We chased them all the way to Seventh Avenue before we heard police sirens and bailed.

  I wanted to kill them. I wanted them stuck in the ground. I wanted to inflict on them the pain I suffered on the inside. I guess that’s what psychiatrists call projection. We project onto others the issues we’re dealing with. But I had another way of coping with my demons.

  26

  So High

  INTERVIEW ANY SMOKER IN MIAMI WHO COPPED MY drugs back in the day. The consensus will be that I had the good white. Maurice’s stuff got smokers to that high they were looking for all week. It wasn’t just because I cared. I was using my product. I broke the first rule from the dope boy’s handbook and was getting high as a kite on my own supply. Pills, coke, crack, and all sorts of other drugs were helping me race through the madness that was my life. I valued the product I sold.

  When cats that never used dope started slinging, they had no appreciation for the product. They didn’t understand just how much a good high meant when you hit rock bottom, so they added all kinds of chemicals to the drugs. They started
remixing it. I could relate to my customers. I was their number one dope boy. We were all sleeping with the same bitch. No one got jealous. It was an open relationship of sorts.

  My favorite was boonk.

  I’d get 7 Cents weed from the Jamaicans and pack it in a blunt. I separated the seeds. You don’t want to burn those. Then I sprinkled some coke over it. I sealed that sucker and puffed. In that one toke all my problems went away. I was numb to the fact that I was permanently thrown out of the public school system. My resentment toward my father subsided. The projects didn’t seem so hopeless anymore. The piss scent that permeated from the curb was masked. All my worries went up in smoke. But the habit also made me more reckless than ever.

  Word spread fast that my crew was on some Rambo shit. Every hood has its wildest pack of wolves. We were that crew. Folks started calling us the Get High Boys because of the bomb dope we sold. Rivals couldn’t even drive by us with a cold stare. We opened fire without thinking. After all, I was Trick. That’s what my friends started calling me. Coming up in the hood, everyone had a nickname. The label was usually something that made you stand out. In our opinion the government name your parents gave you was just some title to get by in society’s good graces. Maurice sounded good on a résumé. Trick embraced the street life. I added Daddy at the end because my friends said even though I was young, I acted like an OG.

  The reputation came with a price. We were some young cats so the notion that we were really that hard-core rubbed some older dudes the wrong way. Then, some crews our age thought they were just as hard. In the hood it’s never good to front like you’re the hardest. Someone will always be lurking, ready to bring out the sweetness in you. That challenger decided to rob Wood’s mother. He went further than robbing her though. He outright disrespected her. “If I had time, I would fuck you, with your fine ass,” he told her. Since most boys in the hood grow up with single mothers, disrespecting someone’s old girl is off-limits. It’s like making a death wish.

  The situation is ironic to say the least, given the way the terms bitch and ho are tossed around the hood so freely. Ghetto politics can be warped and twisted I guess. That’s how the mama jokes in the hood started. Someone would say, “Your mama is so fat, she looks like her pants are on steroids,” or, “Your mama smells so bad the Pine-Sol dude follows her around.” Insulting someone’s mother was the easiest way to get that person riled up. It was also the easiest way to get killed.

  A week later at a house party we saw the same guy who robbed Wood’s mother. He was posted on the wall talking to a shone. Wood sent his friend Bobby over there.

  “Hey, bruh!”

  “Come here for a second!”

  The guy jetted.

  He ran out the back, then broke through the gate at the entrance to Rainbow City projects. Just like that his happy evening turned into the run of his life. We jumped in Wood’s Chevy convertible and sped after him. The car screamed down the avenue. He ran like a man possessed.

  “Run, nigga, run! Run for your life, bruh!”

  Shouts came from people spilling out the projects. Parents grabbed their kids from getting caught in the melee. We were now only several yards away. The guy turned to catch a glimpse of the car bearing down on him. The Chevy slowed to a creep. Wood reached for his rifle and aimed, then let the birds fly.

  As we sped off, the guy was slumped on the curb in a pool of blood. As we saw it, he had no business disrespecting Wood’s mother. Back then, the consequences of taking a life never really weighed heavy on our psyches. People in my neighborhood acted before they thought. No one contemplated the what-ifs. When tomorrow repeats like the same sorry yesterday, people end up existing only within the moment. Right now this nigga crossed the line, so he gotta die. No ifs, buts, or maybes. Fuck him and the life of his sorry-ass family. I didn’t stop to think that a simple apology could have rectified the situation. Lives got thrown away over words and angry glances. We died silly in the hood. But he lived.

  When he left the hospital weeks later, the bullets hadn’t slowed him down. A couple of shots to his chest and legs didn’t convince him it was time to reform his bad-guy habits. This dude was determined to keep on keeping on. The day he left the hospital he went to Wood’s mother’s house looking for Bobby. The neighborhood was throwing a block party. Those parties are where people got crunk.

  The resident deejay spun the latest Disco Rick, Prince Rahiem, Crazy Legs, and Luke. Our deejays back then weren’t like the ones spinning today. They weren’t driving expensive cars and living like celebrities. He was usually some brother hustling in the street and spinning records as a hobby, as a way out. The deejay was an icon in the hood, an integral part of our culture. Uncle Al was one of the many neighborhood favorites.

  Guys like Al were musical pioneers before rappers. They freestyled over someone’s record. They introduced storytelling and rhyming over other people’s beats before there was such a thing as a mixtape. The story was usually about an everyday experience. Then the deejay took the record and added extra bass to it.

  Outside Wood’s mother’s house that weekend the scene mirrored a typical block party. Two giant Lazy Boy speakers were posted outside on the corner. The music could be heard five blocks away. The mood was gravy and everyone was jumping, until the guy Wood shot caught sight of Bobby.

  He rushed Bobby and pistol-whipped him. He pounced on Bobby like a priest on the devil on Judgment Day. The party turned to mayhem. People were jumping over chairs to get to their cars. The deejay pulled the plug on the tunes and joined the stampede. A fight like this was inevitable at one of the parties Wood’s mother threw. There were just too many people and too much liquor for a peaceful evening. Liquor and niggas don’t mix like a hog’s ass and perfume. Sure enough somebody gets angry and decides to shoot the place up. And that’s exactly what the guy who Wood shot did.

  That’s why I knew we should have made sure that dude was dead that day. Wood knew when we fired on that dude repercussions would follow. Pride and manhood are jewels, stolen from black boys at birth. The best way we know how to regain that self-esteem is by destroying the first thing that challenges it. I’ve seen kids die over stepping on another man’s sneakers. After Bobby recovered from his pistol-whipping, fate dealt him a worse hand. Some cops shot him more than thirty times over a drug deal gone bad. I told you those Miami cops were ruthless.

  The number of incidents with crews testing me escalated. If a rival didn’t like me, he found a way to create drama with me. There is no such thing as avoiding beef in the hood. If I turned the other cheek, my challenger would definitely have smacked it. Then I would forever be getting my ass kicked. Something as simple as a rival saying he didn’t like me staring at him could lead to a shoot-out. Even if my neck was in a brace and I was forced to look his way, he would have used that as the spark. Imagine playing basketball and an opponent says you fouled him too hard and smacks you in the mouth when you simply tried to block his shot. Soon enough you’d either have to learn to fight or pick up and move to Pinecrest or some other ritzy suburb. I couldn’t afford to move to Pinecrest so I was stuck staring down his sorry ass.

  The confrontations should have slowed me down. There’s no pension fund or 401(k) for a dope slinger. There are only two possible endings to look forward to: a patch in the graveyard next to an enemy or a life sentence in a cage contemplating. I’ve visited the cemetery and seen a friend’s tombstone resting a yard away from one of his adversary’s. Life is ironic indeed. He couldn’t stand the brother in this world. Now their bones wrestled it out in the dirt for eternity. Their souls will forever haunt the cemetery with their bickering.

  I couldn’t see that dead end up ahead though. I was racing down a lonely one-way strip, liquored up, high on cocaine, and out of my mind. First, I started speeding through yellow lights. Now I was racing through red ones. The flashing lights in my rearview signaling for me to slow down were only minor distractions. There were signs that the streets were devouring us whole.r />
  No one on the block had seen Big Black or Shrimp in months. Then word finally got around: Black and Shrimp had caught a charge, murder. Word on the street was that they both got 137 years with a life sentence. At 15, my friend’s life had already ended before it began. I kept on hustling, praying fate would deal me a better hand.

  27

  You Never Know

  AT 8 A.M. ON APRIL 3, 1991, THE FRONT GATE OUTSIDE Richmond Heights Middle School was packed with kids in green and yellow on their way to first period. Teachers rounded up stragglers under the sprawling ficus trees that lined the courtyard. I always daydreamed when I pulled up to that gate. Those kids looked so free, as if they were living in some kind of real-life fairy tale. Their days weren’t scripted by police chases and shoot-outs. They were doing kid things. I watched them exchange little love notes, the kind with two boxes sketched at the bottom that comes after the most life-changing inquiry for any adolescent: Do you like me? It’s the question that makes childhood special. I’d gotten butterflies in my stomach after the girl whose pigtails I’d been pulling all year finally checked yes. That’s the boy-meets-girl, coming-of-age, growing-pains tale most people tell their grandkids. Those kids in the courtyard talked about who’s taking who to the skate party. At lunchtime I’m sure they shot marbles behind the gym. The only mischief before heading to football practice was probably spitball fights in class. What if? I wondered.

  “Can you put that out!”

  Hollywood’s sister Keba was yelling at me. She always hated the smoke. The scent that comes from mixing cocaine with weed is atrocious. It’s a pungent, musty aroma that I learned to breathe in. The high, I felt, was necessary. At her age, she didn’t understand that if I didn’t smoke, I might lose the last screw holding my brain together. Keba needed to be protected from all the madness. Her world needed to be sketched in images of Barbie dolls and slumber parties.