Life

by Sullivan, Leo

  “Dig Shouty, you can stay wit a nigga as long as you like, but you got to keep it real, promise me you’ll stay off that shit. And once you have the baby you’ll get back in school and try to do something constructive with your life.” Black Pearl nodded her head. She was not much for words.

  “I’ma be aiight. I only started smokin’ when one of my mother’s boyfriends raped me and forced me to get high with him,” Black Pearl said confidently as she innocently curled her finger around a lock of hair. “I tried a few times, back there with Nina, I just wanted to fit in, needed a place to chill for the night.”

  “What’s your real name?” I asked.

  “Annie Bell,” she replied.

  Annie Bell, I thought. She’s a country girl in this redneck-ass town.

  “I want you to meet my girlfriend.”

  Black Pearl jerked her neck like she had been hit with a stun gun. “Girrrrrl friend!” she screeched like one of Grandma’s old 45 records.

  *****

  Black Pearl and I entered the room, shopping bags in tow. The soft murmur of feminine voices filled the room, and suddenly stopped, replaced with the evil glares you give a peasant or some unwanted person. To my surprise, Trina, Tomica and Evette were in the room. The air was tainted with the sweet redolence of perfumes and Juicy Fruit gum. Shoes and wine cooler bottles cluttered the floor.

  “I see you finally met the ‘if it ain’t nailed down they can steal it crew’,” I said, sarcastically talking to Trina. Evette was sitting on the floor between her lover’s legs, getting her hair braided. For some reason, Tomica had this satisfied smirk on her face.

  “L, why you give me that girl’s bracelet?” Trina asked, getting out of bed. She was talking about the bracelet from the heist that I had to knock the cop over the head for. I gave it to her before I left yesterday in front of Tomica to piss her off. From the looks of things my little ploy backfired. Trina got out of bed wearing my T-shirt. I could still see the sleep in her eyes, or perhaps it was a hangover. I noticed the bracelet on Tomica’s wrist. She shots me a knowing glance, like she just scored points for the shit she had started with the bracelet.

  “And where is my damn money at?” Tomica questioned, raising her voice for the sake of an audience. Those Brooklyn bitches. Tomica was talking about the money that I took from Evette to rent the place for Blazack and the crew. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought they conspired against me in my absence.

  “Don’t get used to wearing that bracelet,” I said to Tomica, hoping something slick would come out of her mouth. Trina hopped her ass out of bed, pink panties cutting in that ass. I saw Tomica’s greedy eyes watching as she walked up to me and rolled her eyes at Black Pearl, with all the makings of a cat fight.

  “L, I need to speak with you in private,” Trina said with her jaws clinched together like her teeth were super glued. On her left cheek, I could see a small scar from where I slapped her in the parking lot. Before I could answer, she pulled my arm and led me into the bathroom.

  “What the fuck you doin’ bringin’ that young-ass girl here?” Before I could open my mouth to answer Trina made a face and continued. “In case you haven’t noticed she’s pregnant.” In the small bathroom, her voice carried like we were in an underground tunnel. Trina was standing close, real close. She was my boo, but that morning breath smelled like pig feet. I took a step back, crinkled my nose.

  “Listen, the girl doesn’t have a place to stay, she’s 16 years old. What was I s’ppose to do?”

  “You was s’ppose to bring yo ass home last night! That’s what you was s’ppose to do.” Trina sassed, shaking her neck one way, her hip another, with her hand on it, lips pouting, nostrils flaring. “Instead, you come in here with this pregnant heffa smelling like …” Trina was lost for words. She pulled at my shirt, using two fingers like I might be contaminated, she sniffed.

  “… Smelling like you’ve been up all night smoking crack,” she finally said, her voice laced with the heavy accent of broken English. A curly lock of unruly hair fell over her forehead. I could see the outline of large nipples waving at me every time she moved. She was not wearing a bra. Something about her began to excite me, perhaps it was her animus, that rough and rugged feminine part of a woman. I began to dig into my pockets and throw money on the bathroom floor, and then I took the money out my drawers and socks. Trina’s whole demeanor changed. I saw a glimmer of a smile in her eyes as I stood. This, for me, was a hustler’s proudest moment, this is what I did best. Some people scored touchdowns, others had their degrees for their personal satisfaction. I had the glory of the game. To be truthful, the reason why a lot of niggas couldn’t do this shit was because they didn’t have the balls nor the heart to keep it gangsta. I walked up to Trina, eased my hand up under her T-shirt and pulled down her panties with the other hand. She did not say a word as her eyes stared at me defiantly, like when a woman is daring you, and at the same time, I could see the surprise written on her face as I unzipped my fly and pulled out my joint. She looked down and watched it. I was on full blast and feeling freaky, the way a brotha be feeling in the mornings. I turned her around and bent her over.

  “Go slow,” she whispered in the echo of the bathroom.

  I spit on my hands lubricating my joint and to wet the rest of her hairy bush but to my surprise, she was already wet. We got busy in the bathroom. Some of the best sex I ever had.

  When I walked out of the bathroom, Tomica and Evette were gone and Black Pearl was standing in the same exact spot I left her.

  “Where did they go?” I asked. I was thinking about the bracelet. Black Pearl shrugged her shoulders as if to say, I don’t know. As I looked at her I realized that she did not want to be there. What Black Pearl didn’t know was I didn’t want to be there either.

  *****

  Three days later, me and my crew were encroached in a fierce struggle. Like all confrontations over drug turf there were casualties. However, when you execute a proper turf take over, niggas normally catch on fast. Get shot, or get the fuck out the way–that was Blazack’s motif. After all, a nigga wasn’t new to this, we were true to this. Frenchtown was a hustler’s paradise. After a few days of Blazack’s mayhem of pistol-whipping and kidnapping niggas, we were presented with the keys to the city, so to speak. Niggas got real friendly and even started betraying their homeboys, which is normally the case. Especially with the women, when niggas come from out of town stacking paper.

  Finally it happened. T-Bone and Jackie Boy caught Dirty in the projects flaunting, trying to holla at a chickenhead. They split his wig and robbed him for about three grand. He ended up needing forty stitches in the back of his head. Blazack went on a rampage. His understanding was zero. That night, we rode back through the projects, abducted an innocent bystander and beat the breaks off his ass. Shot up the place, tried to air that bitch out. Made that AK and street sweeper sing a song of the promise of death. In the end, seven people were shot, two critically wounded. I advised Blazack to tone it down, but he seemed to be possessed with finding T-Bone and Jackie Boy, the niggas that had touched Dirty on the jack tip. I just hoped that they had enough sense to get out of town.

  *****

  Chapter Twelve

  “Crooked Cops”

  – Life –

  Blazack began to act strange, doing things that were not in his character. One of the things that caught my attention was a phrase that he would repeat over and over again. He thought it was the funniest shit in the world. “If you got a problem, ax Blazack. If your homeboy is missing, ax Blazack.” For all of us it was weird, and at times, he was starting to spook the hell out of us. As a true lieutenant he handled his business. In fact, we all owed it to him for putting the fear of God in them niggas. “You got a problem ax Blazack.” It took us a while to catch on to what the fuck he was talking about. By the time we did it was too late. But the mystery of how he was making people disappear was revealed.

  *****

  Soon I received a mess
age from Stevey D. One of his guys was missing. He wanted to know if we had anything to do with it. He was real humble, like he was concerned for a friend. But I know that he was really checking to see if we were beefing, too. I don’t know if it was out of fear, or the coke that I promised to cop for him, probably both. When he told me that one of my homies was shaking down niggas, making them pay protection fees, I knew that he was talking about Blazack. That was the same shit he used to do in Miami. Extort niggas. It dawned on me that one of the reasons Stevey D was calling was to see if he was on Blazack’s “must do list.” After I hung the phone up, I was pissed the fuck off. Blazack was a walking time bomb. The shit he was doing was for his personal gain, not for our benefit. I knew that I was going to have to check his ass. The confrontation could not be avoided, I had no choice.

  Tomica and Evette formed a clique with Trina and her sorority sisters, the Deltas. I found out that one of the worst things you can do is put a bunch of women together that are from New York, mainly Brooklyn. They will turn a town full of rednecks and country Black folks out. They called themselves “Thug Misses.” I called them some ruddy-ass bitches. Tomica and Evette were still mad boosting, but with the recruitment of the rest of the girls, they graduated from simply stealing jewelry and clothes to stealing expensive cars. The other day I saw them pull up in the parking lot, in not one, but two brand new Benzes with the paper tags still on them. I was riding dirty. They were making so much raucous I had to distance myself. I tried to talk with Trina about it, but Brooklyn broads will run circles around the average nigga if he ain’t used to the “Rotten Apple.” I could understand why it took her seven years to complete a four-year degree in business. She was scheduled to graduate in a couple of weeks, the same day as Black Pearl’s seventeenth birthday. I took that as a good omen, especially since the two of them had started speaking. Trina couldn’t help but like Black Pearl. She was a real trooper. She enrolled in school to learn fashion design. After school she would come back to the hotel, tired, and cook a big ass meal. Sometimes there would be as many as ten or more people eating her food. Black Pearl was a country girl at heart. I was so proud of her. I think we were all a little worried about the baby, wondering if the coke she smoked was going to have an effect on the child.

  *****

  Two weeks, two keys and three hundred dollars later, I was out of coke and anxious to fly back to New York to meet the infamous Willie Falcon at a five star hotel called the Trump Tower. He was major. It was like the dope god had shined on a nigga. To this day, I still don’t know how my name came up in the echelons of such esteemed drug lords. I do recall when Trina and I went back to her cousin to re-up on dope, she introduced him to me. He drilled me with the one thousand question routine. Mainly he was interested in knowing how in the hell Trina and I flipped two birds and made over three hundred G’s and were back wanting twenty more. I wanted to tell him to ask Trina. She was the one that knew how to stretch the coke, whipping it and then breaking it down into dime rocks, but I took the credit and wore it like all thugs do. Now word spread, young nigga on the come up, and I had their attention. I was in the minor league, and Willie Falcon wanted to draft me into the pros. Willie was a Colombian. He was also into “Boy”–heroin. He had the best heroin known to mankind, China White. A key went for four hundred G’s. You could step on it thirty times, meaning, you could cut the dope and make thirty keys off of it. I did not know what the fuck I was into. You really had to know what you were doing when cutting up the dope, or you could run the risk of fucking up the product, or worse, killing niggas like roaches.

  The morning I came back to the hotel it was thundering and lightning in a tempestuous storm. The canvas of the sky was black like smoke billowing. That day it rained so hard, I wondered if God was mad at the world and he was crying, pounding his mighty fist. The day before, I bought an antique ‘73 convertible Caddy, black with red interior. The car was in good condition. I hadn’t had a chance to buy any shoes for it yet, because the roof leaked, the air conditioner was broke and some mo’ shit. I pulled up in the parking lot, sweating like a nigga sitting in the electric chair. The windows were fogged. I had a shopping bag full of money lying on the passenger seat. This was perfect weather for touching a nigga, so after I surveyed the scene, the only thing I noticed out of place were a few cars. A real hustler is always going to know his surroundings. That is if he’s on point. In the shopping bag I had eighty grand.

  Once I entered my room, Trina’s clothes were cluttered everywhere. She refused to cook or clean. She told me that’s what maids were for. She and Black Pearl attended school in the mornings, and the two kleptomaniacs, Tomica and Evette, were still going about their business of five-finger discounting. For me, that morning was my quiet time, a time for me to be alone and ruminate on past events.

  I took off my wet clothes, along with my gun, and placed them on the dresser. Walking over to the table, I fixed myself a strong drink and lit cigarette. I sat on the bed in only my boxer shorts and began to count money. In the back of my mind certain things about Trina were starting to gnaw me raw. Things that a man cannot escape. I was following her meticulous plan to the letter. In a sense, she was the real mastermind, and we both knew it. My male ego was killing me. Once again I thought about what she said when we first met, to keep the federalizes off your ass, they’re only looking for weight. Ain’t no longevity in the dope game. Stick and move, get out within a year.

  So far what she was saying was true, with her whip game plus breaking the coke down to its lowest terms, we were making a killing. I was scheduled to meet with Willie. He was going to front me a key of Boy thanks to Trina’s persuasion. I did not have a clue as to how to cut up heroin but Trina did. This was around the time she seriously started nagging me about retiring. Hell, I just got started. I hadn’t been in the game a hot month yet, but I knew what she was talking about. Willie would escalate profits so much; he was the kind of man who, if you made a few nice moves with him, you could retire. A year before, they found a shitload of coke in Tampa. It was estimated to be over one hundred million dollars. Everyone knew whose dope it was, including the feds. I think that’s what Trina was most worried about. I propped my feet up on a chair, went a little deeper into my thoughts and inhaled nicotine like I was a fiend. I thought about the calls that Trina had asked me if she could she push “five” for. Calls from a federal prison. Her ex-boyfriend, Mike, was doing life in the joint in Atlanta. In hushed tones they would talk. With every fiber in my body, I tried not to listen to their conversations, but out of respect, she always talked to him in front of me. She told me she had no secrets, had nothing to hide. Honesty was the best policy and all that bull crap. I made the mistake of asking her if she still loved him. She shrugged her shoulders and told me she did not know. In a woman’s language, that meant, “Yes, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings.” Damn, I hated to admit, but I was jealous. I wondered if he asked her for phone sex. Tell her to play in her pussy and moan in his ear. I was powerless. I had to respect the game, that is, if I was real. Hustlers are abnormally superstitious people. That’s where a nigga’s blessings come from–honor amongst playas. I knew that it could have been me on the other end of the phone. As I sat there thinking, raking my mind, I detected some movement in my peripheral version. Something caught my eye. I was not alone in the hotel room. Then I heard the all too familiar sound of a bullet being engaged into a semi automatic. For some strange reason, I held my breath and waited for the inevitable, my brains to be spattered across the wall. The sound of thunder resonated outside and in the dark crevice of my mind, Blazack’s face flashed like some evil troll, he was here to do me. My gun was out of reach on the dresser. I got caught slipping.

  “Place your hands were I can see ‘em!” a hoarse voice commanded. I raised my hands fully prepared to accept the consequences of my blunder as I thought about all the cars in the parking lot that I should have paid more attention to.

  “So we finally meet, boy,” a voice
said, dripping with all the Southern hospitality of a Klan redneck. From the corner of my eye, I watched as the white man stepped from the shadows of the closet. His complexion was a sickly pale white. He had a long beak nose that pointed downward like a hook. His beady eyes were set far in the back of his head, and appeared to sit too close together. His hair was dirty blond.

  I could feel my heart racing in my chest as something stirred in the pit of my gut–fear. I knew his face from somewhere, then it hit me, Spitler! The crooked cop that Nina tried to warn me about. Damn, how could I have been so fuckin’ blind? It suddenly occurred to me that I saw his face in different places, just never took the time to focus on him. He always blended in perfectly with all the white folks. The police always get credit for being clever whenever they capture a criminal, but nine times out of ten, it’s a hustler’s fault for thinking too slow and moving too fast.

  “Life Thugstin.” He called my name. Like in all the cops and robbers games, he was letting me know that he did his homework on me. He probably got my prints off the car and ran them through NCIC, the National Crime Information Center.

  “In my eighteen years on the force, I have never seen one boy cause so much havoc in this town as you son,” he said and walked so that he was standing in front of me. His Southern drawl made the hair on my neck stand up. Florida crackas are the most evil, treacherous men the United States had ever bred. In fact, that’s where the name “cracka” came from. The hot Florida sun bakes their white skin making it look like old cracked leather. When I was a little boy, my stepmother told me stories about how the slave masters used to hang pregnant women upside down and took a knife and butchered the baby out of their stomachs and when it hit the ground, they would stomp it. She told me this was done to implant fear in all the slaves. And even after Lincoln had so called freed the slaves, Florida crackas would rather kill theirs than let them be free.