The Cook Up

by D. Watkins

I remember back in the day when this dude Kavon knocked me down in front of everybody. The whole hood laughed, even the girls I crushed on. He dug in my pockets and took my Lemonheads and Now and Laters, ate my snacks, kicked my ribs, called me a bitch and told me to go and get whoever I wanted because he’d do the same to them too. I ran home crying and told Bip. He loaded his gun with bullets and put extra ammo in his pockets, but I screamed, “No!”

  Madeira Street taught me how to fight my own battles. That block showed me that the city made sidewalks because everybody didn’t belong in the street.

  I stayed away and heard that Kavon and those girls laughed for a week or so, but I knew I had to do something. I missed being out there and I knew I had to fight to get my name back.

  I put a Master lock in a long Nike sock and came back around. Kavon was out like always with his head buried deep in a dice game. He screamed his point and snatched a couple dollars off of the curb; our eyes met and he laughed again. Everyone laughed—those same girls, even some of my homeboys joined in too.

  He turned back around to gamble and I cracked him in the back of his head. Everybody jumped back. Crack! Hit his ass again, one to knock his fat ass out and another to wake fat ass up. Crack! One more to let his fat ass know that even though I don’t look for trouble, I’ll never turn it down.

  We all got a little bloody that day and he definitely whipped my ass a few more times in the future but I didn’t run anymore and he never went in my pockets again. Madeira Street challenged me to fight back and showed me the rewards of self-respect. I can hold my head up because of Madeira Street, which hurts because I can’t really chill around there anymore.

  I know that everybody’s time on that block or any block eventually expires and my expiration date was right around the corner. Definitely too many murders around there and way too many incarcerations, all because dudes don’t know when to leave the block alone. You gotta know when to let it go, and all of these signs were telling me that our time was done. I can’t jug on blocks anymore. Selling drugs is about being mobile and switching up spots now.

  I’ll always be thankful for the valuable lessons, the sleepless nights, the bags of money, the ass whippings, the family I never knew I had, the family I will never forget, and everything else I gained and lost from that block.

  Madeira Street made me a man. I can get through anything because of my time there.

  TYLER REUNION

  Nick needed a few weeks to cool off. The extra money he started making when I left Madeira Street made him forget about my presence in general—we even lost touch completely for a few days until he told me that he bumped into Tyler, the cool white boy I played ball with in college, at a gas station and gave him my number. Tyler buzzed my phone like crazy so I told him to meet me over Bethel Court, right at the tip of Douglass Housing Projects—pretty close to the basketball court where my cousin Damon was murdered back in the day. I posted up in the courtyard with Troy and Dog Boy while I waited. My .40-cal kept making my jeans sag so I grabbed a bigger jacket out of the car, the Burberry parka with the inside pocket.

  About a half hour later, Tyler rolled up on us with Brad Pitt swag—he had on ripped-up jeans and a fitted leather.

  “’Sup, fellas?” he said, taking a long drag of his Camel and plucking the butt as we all dapped him up.

  “Why white people smoke Camels and black people smoke Newports, dug?” asked Dog Boy.

  “It’s racism, I tell you, racism!” I answered, looking at a chuckling Dog Boy. All fifty-six of his teeth showed every time he laughed. Tyler lit another. “Take a ride with me, white boy,” I said, attempting to fix a stale blunt, trying to mend its cracked edges with saliva, nursing it back to health. My spit turned it into a noodle. I stuffed it behind my ear and I figured I could smoke it once it dried a little.

  We pulled off in my car.

  “So are you ever coming back to school? It’s been like two fuckin’ years!” he asked.

  “Naw, man, fuck that school. Wanna grab a drink?”

  “Always.”

  We weren’t twenty-one; our bright eyes, tight skin, and naked faces gave us that preteen look. Our scraggly nonconnecting beards made it worse but my homie Fat Ivan from around the way was a bouncer a little strip club on Baltimore Street so I drove there. A forty-dollar tip with a pound to Ivan, and Tyler and I slid through the front door to a mob of smoke, old heads, young dudes, and ass. Ass was everywhere. Big ass, tight ass, round asses with stretch marks or markless or muscle butts and those annoying triangle-shaped assess. They had flavors too, like high yellow, light skinned, brown skinned, dark skinned, and extra dark skinned, making up a rainbow coalition of equal-opportunity ass.

  I spotted a chair at the end of the bar. “Can I smoke in here?” Tyler asked.

  “Everybody else is, man! But look, you want to date a black girl? I can get you a date tonight! You ever been with a black girl?” I said, waving at the barmaid, Tonya. She looked at me and rolled her eyes.

  “Not tonight, man, I wanted to talk to you about something else.”

  “Okay, Mr. Serious. Ah, gimme a Belvedere double with a li’l ice, what you want, Tyler?”

  “I’ll take a Corona.” He chuckled. “Don’t clown me, man!”

  “Sixteen dollars, Mr. Too-Young-to-Drink, anything else?” said Tonya.

  “Yeah, Mrs. Mind-Ya-Fuckin’-Business, get my man a Corona.”

  She laughed and rolled her eyes again.

  Tonya used to live in my old building—drove niggas nuts back in the day. She’s pudgy but you can still tell that she used to be built like one of those video chicks—all perfectly perky with a slim waist and a bubble butt. Now she has a three-baby-daddies gut, her edges are gone, and her face is all puffy from alcohol and stress. She was still kind of cute, though.

  “Running to the rest room, bro!” said Tyler.

  I nodded at him as I knocked my first drink back. Some other dudes from different parts of east Baltimore approached me as Tyler faded into the crowd like, “Who the fuck the white boy is? Fuck is up with you?”

  I removed the blunt from my ear, lit it, and then hit it. Then I turned around, tilted my head, raised my eyebrow, and blew smoke at them before spinning back around on my barstool. My life, my family, and my street credentials were too intact for me to explain myself about anything to anyone ever. I been in the dope game and hailed from vets who never made statements and kept enough murderers around me for them to know not to ask me some stupid shit.

  My second shot didn’t stand a chance.

  “Tonya, baby, gimmie another but make it a single!”

  The bar was pitch dark and you couldn’t really make out faces unless they were in kissing range. The girls were always different, well, the strippers at least, because Tonya was in there every time I was in there. Shit, she might’ve lived there. It also had upstairs that I never saw anyone use and cheesy Roman columns all over the place. About 90 percent of the women who worked there were down to fuck. Blowjobs were sixty-five dollars, protected sex was a hundred, and raw was one fifty.

  Tyler came back. “Dee, so I came to talk to you about business, man. I want in. I can move that shit on campus,” said Tyler.

  I laughed. “One more and close me out!”

  I wasn’t laughing at Tyler’s abilities and I’m sure that he was more than capable, but why? Why the fuck would he want to play this game?

  “Dee, I’m telling you, I can make you a ton of fucking money!”

  “This ain’t the place. We’ll rap.”

  DEE VERSUS TYLER

  Tyler was born in an elite neighborhood full of homeowners, college graduates, and grass. His parks had benches and fountains and joggers and recycle bins. His doghouse had a doghouse and everyone had good credit. I’m from miles and miles and miles of concrete where everyone has fucked-up credit. Our credit is so fucked up, they won’t take our cash. Our parks are concrete too—concrete open-air drug markets run by this crew or that crew—most of us have lead
and some of us are crack babies and we all hoop, everyone hoops, even the grandmas.

  Tyler played Little League baseball and his parents came to every game. They’d go out for pizza when he’d do well. They’d go out for pizza when he lost or for ice cream or his mom would make his favorite—casserole. He probably ate vegetables every day—ten-plus servings and went to bed by eight p.m. on school nights.

  My hood didn’t sleep, neither did I, and I never had vegetables as a kid—candy or carbs only, or noodles or cereal and I don’t know what the fuck casserole is; I don’t think black people eat it. My mom rarley attended any of my basketball games and I hated home-cooked meals before Angie’s. My favorite dish as a kid was a chicken box with salt, pepper, and ketchup or a pack of Now and Laters or sixty-cent rice and gravy from Bo Bo’s kitchen. That restaurant was a death trap; it stayed wrapped up in caution tape—a lot of good dudes were murdered coming out of Bo Bo’s.

  In middle school Tyler came in second place in a science fair, he said. Supposedly he made a volcano that really erupted but lost to a kid who constructed some sort of remote control robot. He also said that he didn’t give a shit about losing because he had baseball fame—enough fame to help him land his first kiss from a chick at a school dance.

  I thought science fairs for were for the sitcoms I’d see it on TV. We’d always cut that shit off because the only experiment that mattered to us was transforming powder cocaine to hard crack rock. Well, not me, because I ain’t hustle then, but the bulk of my friends did. I just rode dirt bikes up Ashland Avenue and past McElderey Street and on Jefferson Street, where I witnessed my cousin DI’s murder and a few more bodies dropped after that. I lost my virginity in between those funerals. Being horny kept me indoors when them shots rang out and probably saved my life.

  Tyler went to one of those elite boarding schools. It sat in the middle of green acres under clear skies. He lived on a campus that was equipped with horse stables and tennis courts and where the girls were separated from the boys. They had lunch options and a salad bar and bottled water way back in the nineties before people started drinking bottled water. They read the classics like Shakespeare and Hemingway and had rich discussions centered around art, history, and modern culture. Tyler said his schools were 99.9 percent nonviolent and I replied, “Ninety-nine point nine percent?” He then told me that one time a kid had brought a knife to his school, showed it, was snitched on by everyone who saw it, and then was quickly apprehended. No one was hurt.

  Sometimes I’d forget my jacket or my science book, but I never left my pistol—that .22 fit right in the inside pocket of my Pelle. By sixteen I lost a bunch of good friends to murder, and I didn’t want to join the club. We used to bump our old school classics like NWA, Black Moon, and Smith and Wesson on portable CD players and no one I knew read shit ever. The girls mixed with the boys way too much. Everybody fucked everybody raw. First period smelled like STDs. Other than daily fistfights and a few stabbings, my school wasn’t the most violent inside but we were surrounded by five rival housing projects. I had family in them all and still got banked once or twice.

  Tyler was successfully finishing semester after semester of college. I dropped out. Tyler has never been to prison and is 100 percent employable. I never been to prison and felt 100 percent unemployable. Tyler’s dad has a business that he could work for even though his mom told him that he didn’t have to work unless he wanted to. I gotta work, no one will give me shit. Tyler got some job offers from some family friends as well but respectfully declined. I put in a bunch of applications and didn’t get a callback. We both smoke and drink. Tyler’s room, board, and car are all prepaid by family so him not making any money today really didn’t matter. I have a hungry crew to feed, rent and a Nike addiction so I’m happy as shit that Troy and I have weight and a nice clientele. I wasn’t sure if Tyler wanted to make his own money or was just infatuated with the life like everyone else, but I told him I’d think on it.

  TYLER’S BLOCK

  I decided to let Tyler get down. The rich white money looked good to me. Plus he was smart, a quick learner, and I could just tax him enough so I could make the same amount of money while lightening my workload.

  I had been away from Madeira Street for like two months and I didn’t really miss it. Not even a little. Soni and I were joined at the hip now. If you saw her, then you saw me. I even talked her into moving into the Green House with me by basically promising her that I wouldn’t be in the streets anymore and I wasn’t—because I hustled weight out of my car now.

  Soni and I were creating an amazing life—like made-for-TV. She decorated the hell out of our apartment with white couches, futuristic glass tables, and African artwork. We went to the farmers market and bought fresh vegetables that tasted delicious. She introduced me to organic markets where everything cost a hundred dollars, even the 99-cent bottled waters, but most important, I started reading some of her African American history books.

  I already knew about our history as revolutionaries from the stuff my brother taught me, but her books opened me up to all types of black history on a level deeper than my original understanding. The stuff my grade school teachers left out. I never knew that African Americans accomplished so many amazing things in science, art, and literature. I began to develop a greater understanding that stretched far beyond drugs, junkies, and the bubble I was in.

  Part of me knew that Soni knew I was hustling because only drug dealers and the top 1 percent of Americans can afford to push a cart through Whole Foods like we did—we filled it up with organic everything from our eggs to our trash bags made out of environmentally friendly plastic. Drugs paid our expensive bills, and my taste for luxury was starting to rub off on her a little. She also got used to the idea of what I was doing. It didn’t bother her because I didn’t talk about it, plus I was so smooth, seamless even, it was almost like I didn’t hustle.

  Most of my days were free. I’d see Old Head like twice for simple conversations that mainly consisted of him giving me game on life and my health. He loved that I lived downtown, stayed away from the block and what I told him about Soni and me. “Have kids! Life is about having kids!” he’d tell me every time, right before I left. Troy and I picked up drugs from his workers biweekly and from there we’d bust the bricks down into ounces and grams and then distribute.

  I had clients all over the city who were always ready. Great clients who I’d front if their money was funny or if they had faced some sort of loss. There was never any hassle or beef because there was no block for me to fight over. My dope was great. I was always on time and I stayed under the radar. Soni and I talked about me going back to college every day and I started looking at schools and some different programs. I knew I didn’t want to go back to Loyola, but I did want to stay in Baltimore. I also wanted to start a business like Old Head said.

  Troy and I had previously been talking about buying a liquor store but now he just sold dope and fucked—all day every day. I couldn’t even get him on the phone anymore unless it was business related—but the game does that.

  BIRTHDAY BRAWL

  Yo, Dee, you can’t say no! We goin’ out tonight! And you can’t say no! We need to celebrate!” screamed Nick, leaping his whale of a self on my back. It was his birthday and he had been popping Perks and drinking since I came by to drop his gift off, a stainless steel Rolex with the date—just identical to the one Hurk had bought me way back when he started hustling. Nick tore it out the pack and put it on his right arm.

  “Yo, Breitling on my left and Rollie on my right, we goin’ out tonight!” he said, dancing like Puff Daddy all around the kitchen.

  “You a fat clown!” Long Tooth yelled from the steps.

  Everybody was over at Angie’s. She made a huge down-south type of breakfast with fried eggs, fried bacon, fried catfish, fried pancakes, and fried everything else—I think she tried to fry the orange juice.

  “Yo, you don’t pop pills no more! You don’t come out no more! What’s
up!” yelled Nick. His eyes were redder than strawberries. I couldn’t even see his pupils. His teeth looked rotten and fragile too. The more I hung with Soni, the less I drank, but seeing him made want to quit that too. I probably used to look like him.

  “Fuck you, Nick, because you ugly, I’m gonna go out! I know you won’t get no girls if I’m not there so I’m gonna go out for you, fat boy!” I said.

  Angie made me a big plate. Two bites and I wanted to toss it. I looked around and saw everyone else swallowing whole plates. Dog Boy didn’t even stop to breathe, Nick had seconds and thirds, Long Tooth flossed with a pig spine, and some of the new kids ate like they never had a plate before.

  “You need a mug fuckin’ restaurant Miss Angie!” some girl yelled while tonguing a catfish tail, making sure no meat was left. That food tasted like grease with diabetes sprinkled on top. I can’t believe I used to eat that every day. Angie used to feed me and before her I ate nothing but fried crab cake dinners or cups of noodles. I would’ve probably been dead if I didn’t hoop so much.

  “I feel sick, somebody want my plate?” The whole entire house leaped over me, gold teeth hit me from every direction—my food disappeared in seconds. My plate was licked clean, shined with saliva and placed back in front of me.

  “You too good for my cookin’ now! You gotta cute li’l girlfriend and now y’all eat fancy!” said Miss Angie, wrapping her huge fluffy arms around me.

  “Yes, Miss Angie, I am too good,” I replied with a straight face. Then she tickled me until I couldn’t hold my laugh anymore. I promised to take her shopping at a healthy market; I couldn’t have Miss Angie OD’ing on salt, fat, and processed crap.

  “Yo, I’ll see the rest of y’all bums at the club!” I said, trading handshakes with everyone and a big hug with Angie.

  Later that day I was getting dressed for Nick’s party. Gucci sweater, Gucci belt, and Prada sneakers—basically my wholesaler uniform. Soni snuck up and wrapped her arms around me while I checked myself out in the mirror.