“Awright, check it. We roll around the city and listen for high-speed chases that involve GTA suspects and—”
“I’m gon’, you done flipped yo’ fuckin’ wig,” said Lapeace, licking his fingers and standing to leave.
“Naw, hold up, homie, check this out.”
“Hurry up, Sekou,” said Lapeace impatiently.
“Awright, what do niggas do when one time on ’em? Huh?”
“Run, shit.”
“What if they in a G and got D or straps?”
“Toss that shit and bone out.”
“Right!” said Sekou sharply, slapping his palms and startling the couple next to them.
“You talkin’ ’bout helpin’ them and they kick us down?”
“Nigga whaaat? Help, fool, I’m talkin’ ’bout gettin’ anything they throw and lockin’ on that shit.”
“Where you get this idea at, Sekou?” Lapeace asked, more interested now that he’d heard the plan.
“I dreamed it, homie,” he responded, expecting Lapeace to ridicule him about dreaming. But he didn’t. After they got off work that afternoon, they bought a Motorola scanner and listened for three days. On the fourth day, they rolled around the hood listening to dispatches, trying to catch the numerical codes and word codes for alphabets that the police used for license plates. After a month of dry runs, they came across what began as a routine traffic stop and escalated into a low-speed pursuit with the “suspect discarding what appears to be narcotics from the vehicle,” an agitated voice cracked over the scanner.
“That’s us, that’s our shit!” Sekou said excitedly as Lapeace bore down on the accelerator, trying to reach 62nd and Van Ness Avenue. Sure enough, the chase had begun there because people were lined up getting bags and bundles out of the street. Some had burst on impact and cocaine was all over the street.
“Awright, phase two,” said Lapeace, slamming on the brakes and skidding to a stop. The people looked up startled and Sekou and Lapeace jumped out with authority. “Freeze, you mother-fuckers, you are under arrest. Get over here, Now! ”
The people, arms full of kilos of cocaine and pounds of weed, stood wide-eyed for a moment, not sure of themselves, or Sekou and Lapeace, until the scanner cracked off a litany of codes aloud. At that, the people—mostly young brothas and sistas—dropped everything and ran for their lives. “One time!” they hollered as they ran for safety. Sekou and Lapeace quickly gathered up the unbusted kilos and pounds and burned rubber out of there. Neither held a tax-paying job from that point forward.
Lapeace was awakened by the agitated barking of Ramona as she stood in the attack-defense position facing the front door. Groggy and half-conscious, Lapeace struggled to his feet. Ramona barked on, looked back once as if to say “Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” and kept on barking.
“Shhh,” he said, fully aware now that someone was working the key, the knob moving from right to left. “Easy, girl, easy.” The music had stopped for goodness knows how long and the only noise now was the squeaking knob and the tumblers in the lock missing their connections. He crept to the door and flipped on the light switch next to it, but instead of a light coming on a small inlaid panel opened just below the switch. He reached in it and grabbed the handle of a nickel-plated .380 automatic. By then, the door was slowly opening. The next few seconds were a blur. Swift motion, wrestling, tumbling, and then subduing. Lapeace was on top, gun down in the face of the intruder. Heavy breathing permeated the room and Ramona stood ready, teeth bared.
“Lapi, it’s me, baby. It’s me,” pleaded a feminine voice. Lapeace released his grip on the dog’s collar and let his body sag with relief.
“Aunt Pearl, what are you doing here?”
“Well, I needed to get indoors, ’cause it seemed someone was following me,” she said, brushing off her clothes as if she’d been tumbling on the ground outdoors. Lapeace commanded Ramona to her room, replaced the heat in its stash, and turned on the lights. Aunt Pearl looked a mess. Her hair was disheveled and her overcoat was dirty and soiled. The heavy wool dress she wore, which peeked slightly from under her sullen topcoat, used to be pink; now it was a brownish color with light spots. She wore no stockings and her legs, from her knees down to her ankles, were the same size. It looked as if her feet were painfully stuffed into her shoes, which were ran over and neglected.
“Aunt Pearl, why didn’t you ring the buzzer downstairs?”
“Oh, that old buzzer gives me the runaround. Besides, it has so many complicated numbers and stuff,” she said dismissively, looking around the room.
“Yeah, but you could have been hurt, Aunt Pearl.”
“Lapi,” she said, ignoring his spiel altogether and walking aimlessly toward the kitchen, “do you have anything to drink? I’m awfully thirsty.”
“Yeah, um, it’s . . .”
“I’ve got it baby,” she responded, grabbing the neck of the Christian Brothers and pouring herself a healthy shot. He told her to make herself at home and went into his room. Once inside, he leaned against the door and sighed heavily. His room, like the rest of the apartment, reflected his lifestyle. Lapeace was a thug and he lived a thug life. He wasn’t a criminal, as he’d once been, because he took nothing from anyone, except, when the opportunity presented itself, a federally insured Bank of Brinks truck. He sold no dope and hustled no women. His hustle: venture capital and the stock market. And even at that he played the field through a designated hitter: his CPA. He’d begun, of course, like most rich people—the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Rothchilds—as a criminal and then legitimized his money through investments. He was ghetto rich, which, compared to the bourgeois rich, was but a drop in the bucket. Lapeace had never moved out of his hood, for he’d seen, in too many instances, where cats had grown wealthy and egotistical, left the safety net, and got jacked quick. In most cases, they’d been killed. He wasn’t going out like that. And for his loyalty, his homies, old and young, loved and protected him. He’d been thugging for a lifetime. And even before Tupac and his group Thug Life articulated the lifestyle to the world, Lapeace was living it. By circumstances, stemming from destitution and desperation, Lapeace thugged as a way to survive. And now that he’d gotten a grip on economics and survival, he thugged as a custom, as a way of life. It was all he knew. Lapeace’s science, which he’d proudly developed around the acronym T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., was this:The Homies Undergo Generational Life in Five Episodes.
1. They develop a sense of consciousness for their neighborhood friends and feel a need to join in on their protection.
2. They pool their human resources into a familial clique or group.
3. They take full responsibility for individual and collective awareness through signs, propaganda, and group identification.
4. They peak in their activity in this regard and look out over the horizon, and either overstand that their time is now and catch the wave to the next episode or die there on the peak.
5. The Fifth Episode is one’s descent from criminality and its hazardous lifestyle to a leveled living of peace.
To Lapeace, Thug Life meant an altogether different thing from what Webster said it was, or what elders used to call him as a child. His apartment reflected his various episodes, indeed his generational development. He threw nothing away, ever. He still had his first pair of karate sticks made from a broom handle and a six-inch piece of chain he’d bought from Holland’s Hardware on Normandie. He had them, along with his first pair of brownies, hung on his bedroom wall. The first group picture of the homies, when everyone was still alive, out of jail and sane, he’d had blown up into a huge poster and framed nicely in black ebony on the wall in the hallway. Around it were smaller photos of various stages of his growth and development. His first Schwinn Apple Crate show bike, complete with knee action, disc brakes, and five speeds. His first real girlfriend stood with him in front of Hamburger Henry’s on Normandie and 79th, where he’d gotten his first job. And his favorite photo, which he’d gotten blown up, displayed his most
notorious G’s in their prime—full-blown killers at large: Crazy De, Legs Diamons, Tray Stone, Mad Bone, Monster Kody, Tray Ball, Joker, Sidewinder, and Lil’ Spike. It was, above all, a collector’s item. Homies had offered to buy it on several occasions but Lapeace would not sell it, nor would he make a copy. On the photo they stood erect, proud, and a beaming testament to the indomitable thug spirit. Outlaw immortals. There were photos of him and Scarface; him and Spice 1; he and Gangsta Nip; and others.
Just as he had G’s he’d looked up to, he was, in his rite, a G with youngsters looking up to him. It never stopped. “Too black,” Aunt Pearl had once said about his apartment. “You need some other colors in here, Lapi.” But he’d shined her on. He loved low-built, highly glossed black furniture. He’d gone to Ikea and went black crazy. He had the old beige carpet, which came with the apartment, pulled up and in went some triple-padded Dacron high-low shag in midnight black. When you stepped on it you sunk and felt like you were walking on pillows. He had artifacts of authenticity as well. A Masai spear, an Ibo mask, and a Zulu mallet (which he called a head knocker) hung on a living room wall between an Asiatic fan and a painting of Queen Nzinga. Two beautiful pictures he’d gotten from Aunt Pearl, which had already been made into poster form, showed a collage of faces: Geronimo ji Jaga, Mutulu Shakur, Jalil Muntaqim, Sekou Odinga, Sundiata Acoli, Herman Bell, Nuh Washington, Jihad Mumit, and Richard Mafundi Lake. Its title was FREE ALL NEW AFRIKAN PRISONERS OF WAR. The other was of a woman that Aunt Pearl described as “the matriarch of the Shakur tribe.” Her face was smooth and her skin was cocoa brown. She wore an infectious smile with a gap in the center of her sparkling white teeth. Afrikan symbols hung from each ear and her hair was in small dreads. “She’s a warrior queen, the living soul of our sistahood,” Aunt Pearl had said when she’d given him the photo, “Overstand that your blood flows through this source, Lapi.” Her name was boldly imprinted diagonally across the bottom: ASSATA SHAKUR. He never left home without looking at her picture. She was a beautiful woman, who in some ways reminded him of the way his relatives said his mother looked. His apartment was sparse—three bedrooms and cozy. His office contained his means of electronic communication with the world. A fax, computer, copier, printer, and two phones.
Lapeace stood in front of the double-mirrored closet doors and began to shed his Kani gear. He needed to hurry in order to make his three o’clock meeting—a face to face with his attorney. The message was clear. He regretted having to go. Once stripped to his heavy cotton Stafford boxers, he stood for a moment and studied his long frame. He needed to start back weight training, he reasoned. And for good measure he did one hundred push-ups, one hundred crunches, and one hundred jumping jacks. To shield his sound, he programmed a disc from the front room, by satellite remote—Mystikal’s “I Ain’t the Nigga to Fuck Wit” flooded the room densely. He opened up his closet and chose his gear. Fresh Stackhouse threes, blue Ben Davis jeans, and a Tommy Hilfiger long-sleeve T-shirt. He discarded the Herrinbone and donned an OG fourteen karat S-chain with a north star emblem on it. North Star Car Club was a lowrider club that he and his homies began on the north side of their neighborhood. Every hood had a car club. He greased his head with Three Flowers, sprayed on some Cool Water, snapped on his Rollie, and looked at his image in the mirror. I need some rest, he said to himself, noticing the bags being formed underneath his eyes. “But still,” he said aloud, “I ain’t the nigga to fuck with.” He cut the music and went into the bathroom. He flossed, brushed his teeth, and rinsed his mouth out with Plax. Popped in some ginseng gum and headed up the hall.
Aunt Pearl had drunk herself into an alcohol coma and lay wide-legged in the puffy recliner. He signaled for Ramona, who came quickly. He wanted to let her know he was leaving Aunt Pearl here. Ramona looked as if to say, “My sense of smell is one hundred times keener than yours.” At the top of the stairs he started Lucky and went to retrieve his mail—nothing but junk. He took Florence Avenue to the Harbor Freeway and then changed over to the Santa Monica. Pat Metheny was bangin’ on the system as he drove westbound smoothly. At La Brea he exited north and took it to Melrose Avenue. The area was Jewish—West Los Angeles. Jewish people, perhaps Hasids, he wasn’t sure, walked easily up and down the streets in their black gear, hats to match. Stores, synagogues, and businesses announced their legends in Hebrew, not English. People looked oddly at him as Lucky rolled by subbing the bass line from “California Love,” setting off car alarms. At Melrose Avenue Lapeace turned left and parked on the corner of Mansfield Street. Used his bar-coded meter key and set the time for two hours. He entered the law office from the rear. Inside, at a heavily polished oakwood reception desk sat Erma—Safi’s receptionist for twenty-two years—broad and alert.When she saw Lapeace stepping through the double glass doors, her face radiated a genuine smile and she played with straightening her desk.
“Hello Erma,” greeted Lapeace, bending over the desk to hug her affectionately. “How’ve you been?”
“Well it’s been going all right, I’d say. How’ve you been Lapeace? Seriously?”
“I’ve been okay,” he said, indicating that today may be an end to that, “but we’ll see how things develop.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine, brotha,” she answered with assurance. “You’ll be just fine.”
“Right on,” said Lapeace, feeling no real comfort in her words. Safi didn’t tell her too much and he certainly didn’t talk over phones. So her well wishes were founded in maternalism toward Lapeace, not facts. Act like you know, he told himself and smiled along with her. “Is he in?”
“Yep, and he’s waiting for you,” she added waving her dark firm arm toward the door leading to Safi’s office. Lapeace walked to the door, knocked softly, and opened it. Safi Baraka, an orthodox Muslim in the thick of Jewish West L.A., stood in front of a humongous shelf of law books bound in calfskin leather, reading a brief.
“Assalaam Alaikum, Lapeace,” greeted Safi with a smile and an extended hand.
“Walaikum Assalaam, Safi,” he responded and took the soft, well-manicured hand.
“Sit, my brotha, sit. I’ll only be a minute here, just going over some things. How was your drive here?”
“Cool, it was awright.”
“Good, good,” said Safi and continued to read on quietly. His office had that Muslim smell, that incense sort of aroma that gave off a clean smell. The room was awash in Arabic script framed in wood and glass. Over the top of his chair, behind his massive desk, was an awesome aerial photo of the Hajj, which looked to involve over a million people moving across the desert toward Mecca. On his desk was an Islamic flag. “Lapeace,” Safi quipped, startling Lapeace out of his concentration, “we’ve got a potential problem. Of course, I’ll need more time to evaluate the situation and assess the damage, but it doesn’t seem good for us. This character, Anyhow, how long have you known him?”
“Since the seventies. About eighteen years,” answered Lapeace, hands gripping the chair arms tightly. Lapeace’s jaw had begun to quiver and tighten, his bushy eyebrows connecting in a pensive bridge of contemplation. He needed a blunt. The dreaded numbers came up on his mental screen: 29-915-20-187-83: Anyhow is telling about some murders involving the Eight Trays.
“Let’s talk about some things, brother,” Safi said, coming around the desk and sitting down.
4
Lapeace sat hunched over, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. He was trying to recollect with clarity when all this had begun. It went back further than what Anyhow was supposedly telling the police. The beginning was somewhere on the school yard, for sure. It was a contentious antagonism from the outset, no doubt. The repetitive competition, the thin line between peace and war, love and hate . . . Damn the shit had gotten thick. From the gunfight and the court case, which landed them both on probation, there began the brief show bike competition, which Lapeace felt he’d won because his music was louder, his truck lights were designed better—with them all working and he had knee action. Next they went on
to lowriders. This was crucial because they’d also sworn their allegiance to their respective hoods and they were lowriding not as a sport or hobby but as a means to promote their neighborhood.
Lapeace had the advantage because he and Sekou had gotten their break on the dope. They sold it pound for pound, key for key. They rationalized that to sell it this way would yield less of a profit but ultimately would be much safer. Because they really didn’t know whose dope it was or who it was connected to. They’d gotten five kilos of cocaine and four pounds of stress marijuana. They dumped each key for thirteen-five and each pound for seven-fifty. They came up almost overnight. Lapeace found himself cruising the streets of Granada Hills, Tujunga Canyon, Palmdale, Glendale, and other Amerikan enclaves looking for an elder Amerikan with an intact late-model Chevrolet. It took three weeks to find what he wanted and then another week of phone calls and personal visits to convince the couple that he’d take care of “Ethyl.” He gave them $3,500 for the sky-blue 1962 Chevrolet. It was original and had 87,000 miles on it. He couldn’t believe his luck. He took it from the Hoffmeisters’ house straight to the hydraulic shop and got it cut with a C-frame step down so it would lay bumper to bumper. He had them install eight-inch strokes in the front and tens in the back. He picked it up the next day equipped with sixteen switches and a remote. From there he drove it to the sound shop and had them install beat-monster sounds. He paid extra for a stash spot to be cut under the seat for his weapon. While he waited for his sounds to be installed, he walked across the street and bought a pair of chrome Zenith rims on five twenty-inch tires, including a spare. He put them in the backseat and drove to Noble’s Paint Shop on Florence and Hoover. Got his upholstery done in charcoal gray with black pinstripes. The car he had painted jet black with gray microsecrums covered with twenty coats of lacquer. Had all the chrome redipped, including the emblems, and in two weeks from the day he’d bought Ethyl he had her on the ’Shaw with her ass in the air flossing. Couldn’t no one fade him. He was hitting thirty-six inches on his second crank. The duce was hot. To ensure his safety against carjackers, he’d begun the North Star Car Club—all Eight Trays. Anyhow, of course, got the word on Lapeace’s duce and at first couldn’t believe it.
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