Rabbit

by Patricia Williams

  I jumped into Stephanie’s car. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. It was the third time that week that I’d had to leave before I’d made any money.

  Stephanie drove out of Techwood and started heading toward her mama’s house. Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times” was playing on the radio. She turned up the volume and sang along.

  “In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name. By chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same . . .”

  We drove along Griffin Street and past the duplex where Mama cooked on a grill in the yard so everybody could see; we passed Booker T. Washington High School, where I would have been in tenth grade if my life had gone a different way; and past Catfish’s apartment, where Derrick and I had done it on the dirty floor. These streets were my whole world, I realized. Anything else I knew I’d learned from TV.

  Stephanie stopped singing and turned to me. “You think Prince is gay?” she asked. “Shine says for sure he’s gay, but I don’t know. That little dude looks hella acrobatic, though. I bet he gets real freaky. What you think?”

  I couldn’t believe Stephanie was asking me this bullshit. I guess having a money-making drug-dealing boyfriend like Shine gave her all kinds of free time to think about nothing. I didn’t have that kind of life; I had real problems. Like how was I gonna make rent money and feed my kids without getting shot?

  Driving through the neighborhood that night, my mind flashed back to a time, years earlier, when I had a regular job, with regular-ass people who didn’t show up for work armed like they were going to war.

  Before I had my babies, when I lived with Mama on Baldwin Street, our neighbor, Miss June, had taken me with her to work at a big warehouse across town, where she had a gig as a day laborer filling cardboard boxes with Care Free Curl Activator. I made thirty dollars a day, minus the ten dollars I paid Miss June for driving me to the warehouse and lying to the foreman about my age, telling him I was sixteen—old enough to work—when really I was just thirteen and pregnant. I only worked a few weeks before Mama moved us to Vine City. But I remember the job wasn’t all that bad. At least it was safe.

  Stephanie wasn’t far from her mama’s house when I asked her to turn the car around. “I want to stop by Miss June’s real quick,” I said. She pulled a U-turn and stopped at the big white house with the wide front porch that Miss June and her husband had lived in for as long as I could remember. Miss June was like the kind of mother I would see on TV. She cooked and cleaned and went to church every Sunday. She always had a kind word and a cool drink for me whenever I came by. I liked Miss June, but I hadn’t been by to see her in years.

  “My goodness!” she exclaimed, when she opened her front door and saw me standing there. “Girl, it’s been too long.” Miss June waved me to the kitchen and I followed her down the long hallway to the back of the house. She had an apron tied around her waist, and walked with a limp because part of her left leg was missing. Her husband, who was ex-military, had shot it off years before. Miss June said it was an accident. But that’s what everybody said when they got shot by the same person they share a bed with.

  “How’s that sweet little baby of yours doing?” she asked, pouring me a glass of sweet tea.

  “Actually, I got two babies now,” I said. “A girl and a boy.”

  “Lord have mercy! Rabbit, two?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Both of them by that same boy you was going with?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She shook her head. “Never much cared for him. Not one bit. But I’m gonna send up a prayer for you and your precious babies.”

  Miss June had seven children, six of them boys. I used to come by her place all time to hangout with Petey, her youngest. Sitting in her kitchen, it struck me that the last time I’d seen Miss June was right after Petey’s funeral. He’d been shot dead, at fifteen, by a police officer who said Petey fit the description of somebody they’d been looking for. All those hours Miss June had spent on her feet packing boxes of Care Free Curl Activator, what good had it done her? She’d still come home to find the police on her front steps telling her they’d made a mistake and killed her baby boy. Suddenly, it felt like nothing was safe, not hustling at Techwood, not having a regular job. If Miss June, in all her goodness, wasn’t able to keep Petey safe, what chance did I have? The thought of it made me want to lay my head down on Miss June’s kitchen table and cry.

  “Rabbit?” Miss June said, interrupting my misery. She was standing by the window, looking into her back yard. “You mind doing me a favor? Go out back and tell Duck to come inside and get something to eat. I don’t know what he’s out there doing.”

  Duck was Miss June’s oldest boy. His real name was Tony, but I never heard anybody call him that. When I pushed open the back screen door and stepped onto the porch, I could see him standing on the far side of the yard, by the fence. He had his hands in his pockets and he was staring onto Baldwin Street, which ran behind Miss June’s house.

  “Hey, Duck,” I said, walking over to see what he was looking at.

  “Hey, Rabbit,” he answered, quickly glancing my way, before turning back to the street. I couldn’t imagine what had grabbed his attention. Nothing ever happened on Baldwin except folks sitting on their porches to catch the night breeze. All I could think of was maybe a dog had gotten hit by a car, or a couple was having a fight in the middle of the road. But as I stepped up beside Duck and peered through the fence, I froze.

  The block looked like a scene from a zombie movie: there were halfway-dead-looking junkies roaming up and down the street, itching and scratching, stooped over and scanning the ground. I knew they were searching for a stray piece of rock they hoped they might find. At Techwood I’d once seen a crackhead on all fours crawling on the sidewalk, feeling around the pavement for some imaginary crumbs. That’s what the comedown from a crack high did, it brought folks to their knees.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Duck.

  “These crackheads all looking for a hit,” he said.

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “Around here, I guess. Probably some of them walked over from Harris Homes.”

  Duck was ten years older than me, and he looked just like somebody’s daddy. He was dressed in a bright Hawaiian shirt tucked into his carefully ironed jeans. But the crackheads must have been so blinded by their hunger, because they didn’t seem to notice that this was not drug-dealer attire. As we stood by the fence, they kept coming over, asking Duck if he was holding.

  “Yo, you got anything?” asked a guy in a torn Falcons jersey.

  “Nah, man,” said Duck.

  “Got a dime?” asked a woman shuffling down the street in bedroom slippers.

  “Unh-uh.”

  A middle age man approached us, holding the hand of a boy who couldn’t have been more than three years old. “Y’all got any of that butter?” the man asked Duck.

  Duck smiled at the child, then said to his father, “Man, I ain’t got shit.”

  When they were gone, Duck turned to me: “You see this shit? All these crackheads and nobody out here selling nothin’. If a brother had some dope, he’d be getting paid tonight.”

  I reached into my pocketbook for my Ziploc bag. “Duck,” I said. “I got some right here.”

  Chapter 15

  Partners in Crime

  Duck and I sold those fifty rocks on Baldwin in a smooth fifteen minutes. It would have taken me days to sell that much at Techwood. Spending all that time running from shootouts was obviously keeping me from living up to my full dope-dealing potential.

  “Man, that was crazy,” Duck said, shaking his head. “They was like kids at a candy store.”

  “That’s how they do,” I told him. “The minute they finish smoking that shit, they ready for more.”

  Duck didn’t say anything for a while. He just looked out onto the street with his arms crossed in front of his chest, shaking his head “no” to the steady stream of
crackheads who kept coming by looking for a hit.

  Duck turned to me: “How much that package cost you?”

  “Two fifty.”

  “And how much you reckon we just made?”

  “Five hundred.”

  Duck let out a long whistle. “You got any more?” he asked.

  “Not on me.”

  “But can you get some?”

  “Yeah.”

  Duck looked back onto the street, nodding his head slowly and rocking back on his heels. I could tell he was thinking something over, but I was still surprised by what he said next. “How about you bring me another package tomorrow and I’ll sell it for you?” he offered. “What would you pay for something like that?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Duck, the oldest and corniest of Miss June’s seven sons, was asking to be a corner boy. Right away I realized if he was serious it meant I wouldn’t have to go back to Techwood.

  “Twenty off a hundred,” I said, offering him the standard corner-boy cut: for every hundred dollars he sold, I’d pay him twenty.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m in.”

  The next morning, Stephanie drove me to Markee’s. I bought another quarter, took it home, chopped and bagged it up. Then I went over to Miss June’s house to hand it off to Duck, just like we’d arranged.

  He was leaning up against the fence in a pale green short-sleeve button-down shirt and sensible sneakers. The minute I saw him, I began to wonder if this was going to work. He looked like a school principal, not a drug dealer. The night before he’d served in the dark, and you couldn’t really see him. But in broad daylight it was obvious Duck didn’t look the part. I handed him the package then hung back for a while to see how things would go. That’s when I discovered there was another problem, Duck was using all kinds of manners.

  “Thank you,” he said with a polite smile, every time a crackhead slid him some money. At Techwood, corner boys would blast their music, talk shit, and fuck with their customers. I once saw a dealer throw a rock into the bushes and yell to some crackheads nearby, “Go find that shit!” just for laughs. By comparison, Duck sounded like he was working the customer service counter at the Kmart. I wasn’t sure junkies would go for his corny-ass look and all this hospitality. But it turns out they loved it! Duck quickly got himself customers, repeat customers, and word-of-mouth customers.

  “Crackheads is people too,” Duck said with a shrug, when I asked him why he treated junkies so nice. “Treat them how you want to be treated. Besides,” he added, “good customer service is how you beat out the competition.”

  With Duck killing it in customer relations, I turned my attention to quality control. Crackheads are very particular. A lot of them were complaining about some dope in circulation that had been smuggled into Atlanta in the gas tanks of cars. They said it tasted like fumes and made them feel sick when they smoked it. None of them wanted to buy the shit. But the only way to know for sure if dope was any good was to sample it first. I needed a tester. Butterfly was perfect for the job.

  Butterfly was about my age and looked like she might have been pretty before the crack got her. By the time I met her on Baldwin, she wore a ratty blond wig and, as far as I could tell, didn’t own a bra. But she was a good worker. Whenever I went to make a buy, I took her with me to test the product. If she gave my dope her crackhead stamp of approval, she’d spread the word faster than if I’d put it on CNN. “Rabbit got that good shit!” she’d tell everybody on the block. Pretty soon, Duck and I were moving half an ounce a night.

  It was Duck’s idea for us to expand the business. He thought we should serve twenty-four hours a day. “I’ll take nights, you can take days,” he said. He put up some money so we could buy more product and we became partners. “We gonna make some real money,” Duck said.

  At first I was skeptical about selling around the clock. I couldn’t imagine folks wanting to get high first thing in the morning. But I enrolled my babies in day care and hit the block a few days later, bright and early, at 8 a.m.

  It turns out all kinds of people like to start off the day by hittin’ the pipe. And not all of them were extra-grimy crackhead zombies who’d been up all night, twitching and fidgeting, with paranoid eyeballs darting every which way. Some of my customers were high-functioning users who’d buy a dime bag from me, showered and dressed and on their way to work. I served janitors, construction workers and a nurse’s aid I recognized from Grady Hospital. I even had a mailman for a customer. Mr. Joe would hit me up dressed in his dark blue United States Postal Service uniform. I couldn’t figure out how he passed the drug test at his government job. Then one morning, he came by wearing regular clothes.

  “You don’t deliver mail no more?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “That shit wasn’t for me. But lemme get a dime.”

  At the liquor house, Granddaddy used to point at the drunks passed out in the living room and tell me, “Baby girl, you see these fucked-up muthafuckas? Don’t you never drink this shit. Y’hear me? Never.” He put the fear of God in me, making me think one sip was going to send me straight to hell. The way he talked, I got the idea that being an addict was a choice. But serving customers everyday on Baldwin, I began to wonder if he was right.

  Crack seemed to have a different hold on folks than liquor did. Drunks would sober up and come to their senses in the morning. But once a crackhead got hooked all they did was chase that high. Even if it meant selling everything they owned for a hit: wedding rings, household appliances, their kids’ clothes. Anything that had been important didn’t matter anymore.

  Sometimes I’d feel bad, like when I saw Mr. Joe, who used to look so neat and tidy in his mailman uniform, shuffling down the sidewalk with his TV in his arms, trying to sell his set for a couple of dime sacks of crack.

  But other times, like when it was cold and rainy and I was standing on the corner for hours freezing my ass off, I didn’t feel bad for anybody but myself. When a crackhead came offering their prized possessions at bargain basement prices, I’d make a deal. I got myself a gold-plated Guess watch with a leather strap, a Samsung VCR player, and an entire set of dinner plates that featured the logo from one of my favorite TV shows. When Duck saw my new dishes he raised his eyebrows. “What the fuck you buy this for?”

  “It’s from Dukes of Hazzard!”

  “This ain’t from the TV show,” he said. “This is a picture of the gotdamn Confederate flag.”

  Duck and I started serving on Baldwin in August of 1988. By that winter, we were easily making five or six thousand dollars in profit a day. I had so much cash, I asked Duck to hold most of it for safekeeping. He hid it in the back of his closet, at the bottom of his laundry hamper, in the bedroom of the apartment he lived in over in Macon with his girlfriend and their two kids. I guess he figured if someone was desperate enough to dig through his dirty drawers they could keep the money.

  But even with everything I gave Duck, I still had more money then I knew what to do with. I dropped a lot of cash on Derrick, buying him dozens of pairs of sneakers and thick herringbone chains. And I spent it on clothes for myself and the kids, filling my apartment with piles of Nautica, Polo, and Tommy Hilfiger gear.

  After a while, I couldn’t take the clutter, so I moved to a bigger place, a three-bedroom apartment in a complex on Cleveland Avenue. I bought all brand-new furniture from Wolfman Furniture Warehouse, including a white-on-white living room set, a sound system with six-disc CD player, and bedroom suites for the kids. I did Ashley’s room in pink and gray and Nikia’s in navy blue, red, and white. I did all that and still had money to spare. That’s when I decided to buy a car.

  “But you don’t even have a license,” Derrick said when I asked him to go with me to the car auction to pick out a ride.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. All I really wanted was a place to sit when the weather was bad. I settled for an ’83 Chevette hatchback. I handed Derrick six hundred dollars in a wad of small bills. The car sold for
four-fifty; Derrick kept the change.

  The minute I bought that car, I was itching to drive. I was fifteen, old enough for a learner’s permit, but I didn’t have a mama or a daddy to teach me. I couldn’t call my brothers because Andre and Jeffro were in jail and Dre was busy running his own business, breaking into houses. So instead, I asked Freddy Jack. One of my high-functioning customers, he was the most clean cut and professional looking. By day he worked in a car dealership. At night, he gave me driving lessons. All I had to do was keep him high.

  We practiced for hours, circling the block over and over. “Girl, you handling that car like a getaway driver,” Freddy Jack said, taking a hit off his pipe and blowing the smoke out his open window. A few nights later, he coached me onto the expressway. “You doing good,” he said. “Now eeeeeeease into the lane.”

  In the backseat Ashley bounced up and down. “Mama driving!” she yelled, clapping her hands. “Mama driving!” I gripped the steering wheel with one hand and flicked on the radio with the other. Bobby Brown was singing “My Prerogative,” but I had to turn it down when Freddy Jack got too excited doing choreography in his seat.

  By two o’clock in the morning, the kids were sound asleep and the roads were clear. Freddy Jack was high as a kite beside me, but I was the one who felt like I was flying.

  Chapter 16

  Mama on the Block

  “Hey, baby . . . Heeeey!” I could hear Mama calling me from halfway up Baldwin Street. She was rolling toward me in her wheelchair, holding a big black umbrella against the blazing sun. From far away, she looked like a handicapped Mary Poppins.

  The wheelchair was a new addition to Mama’s life, but her health had been sliding downhill for years. She drank morning, noon, and night, and smoked a pack of Winstons and a nickel bag of weed every day. The only thing she had going for her is she wasn’t fat. But somehow she got the diabetes anyway. What put her in a wheelchair was that one day, drunk as a skunk, she tripped on the front walk and punched a hole in her foot. When that foot hole got infected and started oozing pus, Mama tried all her home remedies to heal the wound: hydrogen peroxide, Mercurochrome, Vaseline. She even put Vicks in it, which burned like a muthafucka. But nothing helped. Eventually the infection got so bad the doctors had to chop off her right leg, just above her knee.