The Cook Up

by D. Watkins

  Dog Boy had got a big forty-thousand-dollar check from eating paint chips—he fucked every penny up on the hood. Everybody got new dirt bikes, Polo, and Hilfiger.

  Many think Dog Boy got his name from his appearance—he looks like a bald adult shih tzu with clipped ears attached to an adolescent body—but that’s just a coincidence. We call him Dog Boy because before he was our lookout, he used to walk dogs for some big-time dealers that got snatched by the feds. I didn’t know his name so I just started calling him Dog Boy and it stuck. Sometimes he calls me Pops. Years of lead paint poison made him answer questions with delayed responses, but he was on point when the cops rushed.

  “Yerooooooo,” was our signal for cops. “One time yeroooo!” Dog Boy would bark when the knockers struck. That signal sparked our runner.

  Young Block: AA Male, sixteen years old.

  Occupation: Runner, the guy who moves the cash from the block to our stash.

  Salary: $750 a week.

  Young Block was the runner. He’d grab the cash and get it back to our house a few blocks away. Didn’t matter if cops were coming or not, he always made sure we didn’t have too much cash lying around. Block ran like he had four thighs; he was the fastest kid in east Baltimore.

  Block never spoke. His name was TayQuan but one day Li’l Bo said that he was young and stuck on the block so we started calling him Young Block. His mom is Lena and she’s stuck too. She used to be pretty and employed but drug addiction had swallowed her face. She’d come by the corner once or twice a day when Block wasn’t around. She’d fake like she was looking for him but she wasn’t.

  “Deeeeeeeeee,” she’d whine to me. “Where my son? Can you help me out till my check come?” Her check never came. Not to me, anyway, but I had to help her. She was going to get high regardless and I couldn’t have Block’s mom out sucking dick for crack money or stealing, so I’d have Fat Tay toss her two or three pills. And I’d do the same for his mom.

  The last, maybe most important, member of our operation was Miss Angie. She was like everybody’s aunt.

  Miss Angie: AA female, fifty-something.

  Occpation: Cook.

  Pay: Grocery, cigarette, lotto, favors, and church money.

  Miss Angie wasn’t really a part of our crew but she was. She’d been living on Madeira Street for a thousand years and was basically just a helpless resident. She’d seen crews before us and would probably see crews after us.

  I took a liking to her because she was a hustler too, just like us. She’d tell us all about her church and Jesus and then try to sell us chicken dinners. Selling drugs all day definitely builds up an appetite and her dinners actually were delicious. Her house smelled like old people, ass, and mothballs. She had a big picture of white Jesus on her wall. I kept telling her Jesus was black but she didn’t listen.

  “If Jesus was black, then why he white on all these pictures, Dee! Riddle me that!”

  “Cuz white people want you to associate them with God. That nigga was black, I’m tellin’ you! Hair like wool! That’s a Jheri Curl!”

  Eventually I ignored the painting because her cooking was better than eating chicken boxes and pizza every day, plus she always made a vegetable. And even though her vegetables were always smothered in pig parts, we weren’t getting them from anywhere else. I can’t remember the last time I ate vegetables before her.

  The best part about Miss Angie was her hours. As long as I kept food in her fridge, I could get a hot meal at any time of the day. It could be three or four a.m. after the after-hours and all I had to do was knock. She’d hop up and start frying, baking, and microwaving shit. I’d kick back and light a blunt. By time I was finished smoking, I’d have a five-star hood meal waiting.

  I kept the drugs a few blocks away on Port Street. We called it 2020—that wasn’t the address, it was just a name I gave it. The house used to belong to Nick’s grandma but it has been boarded up for years. Rats ran in, out, and then back in again just like they did when she lived there. I had a junkie rig the power and we were on. The kitchen cabinets were full of vials and cooking supplies. I put a TV with some bootleg cable in there so we could watch games when we capped up, and his grandma’s old furniture was good enough for us to use so we used it.

  CASHLAND AND MADEIRA

  Money rained from the clouds and spilled in every direction. You’d be hard pressed not to see a loudmouth fiend in bent-up Air Force 1’s hollering about “Rockafella, Rockafella, Rockafella! Rockfella—the best rock in the city and it’s six dollars a pill! You heard it right baby, six dollars a pill!”

  Yeah, I dropped those pretty purple-tops, sixes of Rockafella, and set the hood on fire. Everyone affiliated with me was making money, even the non-workers. I couldn’t whip the batches up fast enough. Cases of gel-cap vials stacked in the kitchen, and if we weren’t trapping, we were packaging. It got so crazy that I didn’t have to promote my rocks. The crackheads became walking commercials. My smokers used to sing about it all day and we never ran a cheesy gimmicks like buy one, get one free—my cook game went up three levels to the point where the drugs were so good they sold themselves.

  Other hoods started calling their crack Rockafella just to get some of our overflow. Hurk wanted to kill over dope names. He’d fill his clips up to the tip and chant the same thing over and over: “These niggas dead, man, I’m icing these niggas, man, for real, man.”

  I’d pat his back with a wad of cash like, “Calm down, boy, we gettin’ money, our shit fold. They money jingle!” And I’d repeat that over and over again, making it into a song until he was forced to laugh too. And why wouldn’t he? He never saw that kind of money, or thought he would see that type of money. I remember when his ass showed because he had holes in jeans and boxers. I tried to control Hurk to the best of my ability, but I couldn’t babysit him 24/7. One day a fiend stopped Hurk on the block, complaining about how Rockafella was the shit, and now it’s some shit.

  He showed Hurk the counterfeit rocks that were passed off as Rockafella. Hurk whipped out his gun and demanded to be taken to the salesperson, who ended up being a kid named Skinny from Belnord with four huge gold teeth that poked out of the front of his mouth, like his jaws were a hot nightclub and they were on the guest list waiting to get in. The fiend directed Hurk to Skinny and Hurk directed his pistol to Skinny’s mouth. He used the butt of his gun to slap all of his gold teeth out. I heard he held him down by his neck and beat the side of his head with the gun until pus squirted out. Skinny came to me a day or so later with a mouth full of chipped-up loose teeth, dangling gold fronts, a lopsided swollen head, and an apology.

  And then there was the deaf crack fiends that screamed on us, and the angry white junkies who demanded a substantial refund because they considered themselves to be loyal Rockafella users, and a bunch of other sales ranting and complaining about being burned.

  “Hurk, we can’t fuck everybody up!” I said.

  “Yo! Nigga, we worked too hard for this! We just ain’t going let no bitch nigga run off with our dope name! Fuck outta here!” Hurk yelled at me, waving his pistol like a baton, spit diving away from his mouth and running down his face in every direction. I laughed.

  “Hurk, we really didn’t work that hard for it. I inherited this shit, remember? And then put you on. Remember?” I responded with a shrug.

  I guess he bought into the illusion of our new wealth. He thought we truly earned the money that basically fell into our lap. We weren’t really anything but some hood trust-fund babies.

  “For the tenth time, Hurk, you can’t beef and get money. The two don’t mix!”

  I didn’t care if another crew ate of my innovation because I was moving what I had. Plus, I wasn’t going to beef. I told myself every day that I wasn’t going to be that petty guy who had to suck up every dollar. I’d never murder over money. I didn’t even care if you were making money, as long as I was getting mine. As long as I could stack a few hundred grand without shooting anyone while I figured my life out, m
et some girls, and had some fun. And all of the above was happening.

  Girls came by to see us as much as the junkies did. Tall ones, short ones, pretty and chocolate and thick and stick-bony and good and bad, light skinned, brown skinned, and from the county and from York Road and Loch Raven and Essex and Whitlock and Chapel and Douglass and Up-Top and Down Bottom. They were employed, jobless, beautiful, smart, silly, funny looking, ran credit card scams; urban models, rappers, church members, club queens, and hustlers. I loved them all. They were all so different but really the same. They all wanted the same thing. They wanted to be affiliated with us. They wanted to say that they were fucking with the hottest niggas, who stand up on dirt bikes in the middle of traffic, ignore authority, and risk their lives every day.

  The niggas who tote pistols, never ask for change, own the night-clubs. Them niggas was us. The niggas with clout. We were the niggas who probably wouldn’t live to see twenty, and if we did, then our names will be all wrapped around 250-page federal indictments and we’d probably spend the remainder in a federal prison. They’d come see us on visiting day with Gucci handbags, babies on their hips, and spend the rest of their lives saying, “My man locked but he was the shit when he ran these streets.”

  Jail was the bottom of my concern list, primarily because I had cash—the kind of cash that would allow you to beat a charge or two. The amount caught me off guard because it came so quick. Turning dope into dollars wasn’t easy, but it was way easier than I thought. I put in so many hours that I really didn’t have time to spend it. So many hours that my days ran together—Tuesday through Thursday felt the same, really only the first stuck out.

  I didn’t feel like going into the safe every day so I had a Hefty bag of cash in my padlocked closet and it was filling. Shit looked like one of those beanbag chairs—except it was stuffed with Jacksons. Loads of cash carry a delicious stink. My whole room smelled like composition book paper and pocket funk. Eventually the money started burning right through the door. Its stench seeped into my thoughts and nested. It consumed me. I looked at it over and over again. I couldn’t stop stacking it and then reorganizing my stacks. It needed to be spent.

  It begged me to spend it.

  And why not? I was really comfortable. Selling crack felt legal.

  But I knew it wasn’t legal so I started buying good karma before I spoiled myself. Looking out for the kids in the neighborhood felt better than new clothes and sneakers. I liked to rent a couple of those big white family vans from Enterprise and fill them up with young people from the neighborhood. “Don’t be like me; never sell dope” was the speech I always kicked our days off with. From there I’d take them miniature golfing and go-cart riding on Pulaski Highway. I gave some of the kids money to golf while the others raced me multiple laps around the track, and why not? I was eighteen, so I was kind of a kid too. From there we’d go to McDonald’s, then Friendly’s for ice cream, and then I’d give them all a twenty before dropping them off and returning the van.

  I’m not crazy. I knew my brother wouldn’t want me to be doing the drug thing, but he’d love my Robin Hood days. Plus, you can’t treat every kid in the neighborhood to burgers and amusement parks with a nine-to-five—it’s impossible.

  IKE GUY

  Troy parked his new Nissan Maxima by the curb and jumped out on me, his eyes brighter than the car. “Check my wheels, Dee! She clean, only sixty thousand miles on that thing!”

  Troy’s my homie from Down Da Hill. He never a sold a drug in his life and didn’t even think about it. Selling cane wasn’t him and he knew it. Troy was like my only friend who didn’t sell drugs. We are the same age and similar in most ways, into the same things—even making money. Troy kept a legal job, had a t-shirt line that faded, and tried all of those stupid direct marketing pyramid schemes. His latest gig is at a dialysis unit.

  “Oh, yeah, she nice, bro, I see you doin’ you, I gotta test drive her,” I said, crushing weed and placing it evenly into a cracked cigarillo.

  Selling crack was not legal, my homie Troy told me every day. He kept saying we should buy a store or get a car lot but I didn’t know anything about that and neither did he.

  “One time yeroooooo! One time yerooooooo!” shouted Dog Boy from across the middle of the street. Young Block had enough time to slide into Angie’s house. Sirens erupted and flooded from both ways. Ike Guy, with some narcs and their pistols, crowded us like, “Get down! Get down!” Ike Guy was a real piece of shit. He was this dickhead cop who hated black people, Mexicans, all minorities in general, and probably even white people with tans.

  Troy, I, and the rest of us had lain on the concrete, facedown. Some plainclothes cops scanned the corner, looking for the ground stash. Grandmas who lived on the block stared at us out of their windows in shame, shaking their heads. And even though we broke their hearts by selling crack, I’m sure they still felt bad about the police dehumanizing us. Block walked out of Angie’s, scooped a bag of pills from the downspout, and slid right past us.

  “You a ugly little fucking nigger!” Ike yelled to Dog Boy, massaging his boot on his temple.

  “You are ugly, right? Tell me how ugly you are!” Ike walked around Dog Boy’s body and kicked him between his ribs until “Ugggggggggggggg” came out.

  Dog Boy tried to keep a stone face—his lips trembled, he held his tears back by trying to keep his eyes wide open. I kept my eye on Ike’s partner, Jones. He was black and let Ike say nigger. What a pussy and a disgrace to blacks, even more than us, I thought. I hated him just as much as I hated Ike, if not more.

  “Booker, throw him in the car. I saw him make a sale!” Ike yelled, referring to Li’l Bo.

  Block made it to the backstreet and smoothly bent the corner. Gone. Fire should’ve sparked out of his Nikes the way he jetted down the alley. Block’s a housing project acrobat—jumping over gates, cars, people, hang-dropping from windows, sliding under cars, and he’s the best at climbing trees, fences, walls, you name it and he can scale it. “That skinny kid is running, he must have it!” yelled a plainclothes cop, pointing to the alley.

  “Fuck! Let’s move out!” yelled Ike. “Let’s move out!” The squad cars pulled off and we all hopped up and brushed the dirt off.

  Cops like to come through Madeira Street and shake shit up like snow globes, but they never really locked us up. Well, I was never booked. Normally they just wanted a gun, because we weren’t really making any noise. Sure, the lines were long and traffic was steady; however, our spot was new and getting caught with thirty pieces of crack, which warrants a kingpin charge, wasn’t a big deal for us.

  Guns were “get out of jail free” cards. Give the arresting officer a gun, and you walk away free with no questions asked. It didn’t even have to be a nice gun—most of the weapons we had were old and rusty Civil War–looking pistols that probably didn’t work. Some had jammed chambers and broken hinges and others were clipless and missing screws. The nice cops would even let you keep your drugs. Ike wasn’t one of those guys.

  Ike was a terrorist. A gun wasn’t enough. He’d take a gun, and then he’d take your drugs and go for your self-respect. Ike liked pressing his pistol to your dome as he made you lie on the ground while he dug in your pockets, clearing them of everything including cash, cigs, your lighter, chewing gum, matches, and even the lint. You better not be broke—being broke when he was thirsty for money could warrant a beating. Fifty percent of my scars came from Ike, which is funny because he can’t even throw hands. I saw him get whipped three or four times by young boys half his size. Ike was five-foot-ten with a thin nose. His complexion is pale milk. He’s medium built but male-titty sloppy and weak—weak physically and mentally. Weak physically because I never saw him on the winning side of a brawl or tussle; he always ended up on the bottom. Weak mentally, because he was more of a crook than us. And yeah, I get it, I get it, we were the bad guys, and he was responsible for chasing us, but I never felt like that was his main concern. He didn’t give a fuck about the communi
ty he worked in.

  You’d think hustlers like us hurt the community but at least we shared money and employed people, while Ike cursed out old ladies as he cracked the shit out of their grandsons. We legitimately had a great product and sold it to customers who wanted it. He wanted a piece of our proceeds, if not all of it. Every time they rushed I understood that. But I’ll never understand the way he treated non-dealers. Every black kid in east Baltimore is not a drug dealer. Most of those cops knew who hustled and who didn’t. Ike Guy would just see a crowd, pull his Chevy up on the curb, and club whoever, like he really didn’t know the members of the community he patrolled.

  My younger cousin Tatter Man, who never broke a law in his life, came through the block to get some money from me for his prom one night. I hit him with the cash and we walked down to the Chinese spot to get some shrimp fried rice and gravy. Tatter walked out the door in time for one of Guy’s sweeps.

  “What the—is that your dinner?” yelled Guy to a confused Tatter.

  “Yeah, I got some rice, what?”

  “Boy, you being smart!” Guy responded as he knocked Tatter’s food to the ground. I watched from the window as Guy used his boot to smash the rice into the concrete.

  There was no negotiating or deal cutting with him, so I committed to his rules. I set money aside for buying guns. We had a box of pistols, but not for war—they were all for the cops. Dickhead cops like Ike existed all over the city; he was one of a thousand. I just wanted to sell rocks, and not worrying about jail made it easy. As soon as the cops cleared, it was business as usual. The line reforms and the money starts coming in.