Chapter 17
The Breakup
Duck didn’t know it, but I loved him like a brother. Not like one of my real brothers, who were a bunch of petty criminals. I loved Duck like the kind of brother I could look up to, like a role model. Duck had a way of doing things that I’d never seen before. Every time we had to make a business decision—like how much product to buy, or where to get it, or who to buy it from—he’d ask around, gather information, weigh his options, and only then decide what to do. He called it “being strategic.” In my family I don’t remember anybody having any strategy for anything, ever. Unless you call stealing baby formula from the corner store a strategy. Mostly we just went with our instinct. Like when Miss Betty disrespected Granddaddy in front of his customers, his instinct said, “shoot the bitch in the ass.”
Watching the way Duck handled himself, and seeing all the money it was making us, I began to think maybe there was a different way to go through life than what I’d been taught. Everything about Duck—his calm spirit, his business strategizing, the way he could have money in his pocket and not spend it all at once—was completely new to me. Duck was my inspiration. I never said it to his face, but secretly I dreamed of being more like Duck. So even though I was the one who introduced him to selling drugs, when it came to running our business, I fell back, watched, listened, and followed his lead.
Like most dealers on the west side, Duck and I bought our dope from a dude named Mello, whose specialty was a product called “breakdown.” A couple of times a week, Duck and I would drive to Mello’s trap, buy five or six thousand dollars’ worth of breakdown, take the dope back to Duck’s sister-in-law’s house, lay it out on her kitchen table, break down the rocks into smaller pieces, and bag it up in dime sacks we’d sell for ten dollars a pop. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. Mello’s dope sold on the street for three times what we paid.
Mello ran a strictly wholesale business, only selling to other dealers. But breakdown was so popular, sometimes when Duck and I pulled up to Mello’s trap, he’d be all sold out.
“This is some bullshit,” Duck said one afternoon as we drove away from Mello’s empty-handed. “Can’t make money without inventory. We gotta find a new connect.”
Duck asked around, got some recommendations, and set up a meeting with a big-time supplier at the construction site of a strip mall off Old National Highway. The next thing I knew, the two of us were driving down I-285 in Duck’s cherry-red double-wide pickup truck, with fifteen thousand dollars in cash, on our way to meet some dude called “The Mexican.”
Duck pulled into an empty parking lot, turned off his ignition, and reached into his glove compartment. He pulled out a roll of bills held together with a rubber band and his .38 pistol.
He turned to me: “You good?”
I had Derrick’s loaded .38 in the zippered inside pocket of my black leather MCM pocketbook. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do this.” Neither one of us had ever shot a gun before. But everybody knew you didn’t show up for a drug deal without protection.
Inside the empty strip mall, planks of wood and dusty cardboard boxes were piled in the corners. Leaning up against a wall smoking a cigarette was the Mexican, dressed in a black-and-white Raiders starter jacket, with a matching cap pulled low over his eyes.
“You Duck?” he asked when he saw us.
“Yeah,” said Duck in a voice several octaves lower than usual. I felt like I was doing a drug deal with Barry White.
The Mexican nodded in my direction. “Who the fuck is she?”
Duck answered: “She’s with me.”
The Mexican looked me up and down with a sneer. Right away I knew I had to show him I wasn’t a punk. If we were gonna do business together I needed The Mexican to take me seriously.
“Look here, muthafucka,” I said, puffing out my chest and stepping toward him. “You better not be trying to sell us none of that gasoline-tasting bullshit.”
The Mexican took a step toward me so the two of us were standing a foot apart, staring deep into each other’s eyes. If I’d wanted to, I could have leaned in and kissed him on the mouth.
“Yo, bish,” he said, “you better shut your fuckin’ mouth before I smoke your ass.” He pulled open his jacket to flash the biggest gun I’d ever seen, stuck in the waistband of his jeans. It looked like a sawed-off grenade launcher. I felt the blood rush from my face.
I’d been scared before—like the time I was playing craps in a trap house with a couple of dealers; one dude thought his friend was cheating, so he pulled out his pistol and shot him in the stomach, right in front of me—but nothing like this. I didn’t know what the hell got The Mexican so mad. But anger was radiating off him like fumes. He reached for his weapon and I froze. I guess this is it, I thought. I’m either gonna get my head blown off or I’m gonna pee myself.
That’s when Duck stepped in. He held up his hands like “be cool,” and said to The Mexican in his smooth Barry White baritone, “It’s all good. She won’t say shit else. I promise.”
He whispered to me: “I mean it, keep your damn mouth shut.”
Duck didn’t say a single word the whole way driving back to Baldwin. He just gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. When we got to the block, he pulled up to the curb and turned to me. “You can’t be acting like that,” he said. “Talking to people all reckless.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Ain’t no ‘buts’ about this,” he said sharply, cutting me off. “Straight up, I thought we was gonna have to shoot our way out of some shit you stirred up. You keep running your mouth, you gonna get us killed.”
I hated when Duck got mad at me. It gave me a feeling in my stomach that matched the look on Beaver Cleaver’s face the time he broke his dad’s car window playing baseball in the street. It didn’t help that Duck was lecturing me like he was my daddy. “What you need to do,” he continued, getting out of his truck and slamming the door behind him, “is calm your ass all the way down.”
I tried to do better. For weeks I kept my head down, sold my rock, and made my money. I didn’t get into a single argument with anybody. Except Derrick, the day he came by Baldwin asking me for cash. I knew damn well he was spending it on some girl named Tinkerbell, because Stephanie had seen the two of them together. Derrick and I got into it, yelling and screaming in the middle of the road, until he clocked me with a closed fist. A little old lady sweeping her porch saw us and called the cops. But other than fighting with Derrick, I kept a real low profile.
I even kept my music down. I had a banging sound system in my Cadillac, and my instinct told me to blast 2 Live Crew loud enough to rattle the windows of every house on the block. But instead I kept it low key with a little Janet Jackson.
“Oh you nasty boys . . .” I sang along under my breath one afternoon, leaning up against the side of my car. The kids were in the backseat. Nikia had a bottle and Ashley was eating the fries from her Happy Meal. I’d just picked them up from day care and was thinking maybe I would call it an early night. I could go by Derrick’s place and the two of us could take the kids to the movies. Nikia was too young to appreciate a good story, but Ashley was three years old. If I covered her face during the scary part, we could see A Nightmare on Elm Street 5.
“Y’all want to catch a movie?” I asked the kids, leaning into the back window.
Before they could answer, I heard someone call my name. “Rabbit!”
One of my regulars, Theotris, dressed in a filthy T-shirt and scuffed tennis shoes, was coming down the block, headed my way. Damn, I thought. Theotris was always a problem. I didn’t know exactly what was wrong with him, but when he was high, sometimes I’d catch him standing in the middle of the block having a heated argument with the mailbox.
“What you looking for?” I asked as he approached me.
Instead of telling me he wanted a dime sack, like I’d been expecting, Theotris walked around to the back of my Cadillac, cleared his throat, and spat on my ride.
/> It wasn’t a regular spit, either; it was like he pulled it from deep down in his navel. Like he’d been saving it up just for me. The ball of grayish-brown mucus hit my back fender with a thud. I watched, stunned, as Theotris, apparently satisfied with the way he’d redecorated my car, hopped up and planted his ass on my trunk, reclining onto the back window like he was chillin’ at the beach.
In all the months I’d had been driving my car, nobody—and I mean NOBODY—had so much as laid a pinkie finger on it without my permission. Everybody knew that a ride as flashy as mine was strictly for standing back and admiring. That was the whole damn point.
“The fuck you doing, muthafucka?” I yelled, storming around to face him.
“Just maxin’ and relaxin’.”
“Hell to the muthafuckin’ no you ain’t ‘maxin’ and relaxin’ on my muthafuckin’ car!”
I ran back to the front passenger side, stuck my hand inside the window, reached into Nikia’s baby-blue diaper bag sitting on the front seat, moved the Pampers and the crack to the side, and pulled out Derrick’s .38. Then I marched back to Theotris sitting on my trunk. I pointed the pistol right between his legs. “You don’t get the fuck off my car,” I growled, “I’ma turn your dick into a blooming onion.”
Theotris jumped up with a start and I watched with satisfaction as he ran back up the street. “That’s right, take your crazy ass on home!” I called after him. “You stupid muthafucka!”
Halfway up the block, he turned and held out his arms like Jesus on the cross. “You better watch out, Rabbit. When I come back you ’bout to get your head blowed off! With the power vested in me, I’ma kill you dead.”
Yeah, whatever, man, I thought, rolling my eyes.
When Granddaddy and I used to watch Georgia Championship Wrestling at the liquor house, it wasn’t just the fighting I liked, it was also the way those wrestlers would put on a show. Seeing grown men growling and barking at each other like angry dogs was my kind of entertainment. But once I started working on Baldwin, I didn’t need a TV to see folks acting the fool. The block served every flavor of crazy, and Theotris, with his spitting and threats, was just the special of the day. I don’t need to take the kids to the movies, I thought to myself, with a laugh. With this shit, all I need is some popcorn.
That’s when I felt the bullet fly past my left ear.
Theotris was running down the street, a pistol in his hand, shooting right at me. “I’ma kill you!”
Another bullet zipped past me on the right. I took off running as fast as I could toward the only place that looked safe, Miss June’s house. I bolted past the fence, through the yard, and up the steps of her back porch. As I ran, I felt a sharp pain across my chest, but I kept on going. All I wanted was to get inside, away from the bullets that were whipping through the air like firecrackers. As I reached my hand out for Miss June’s back door, I could hear folks on the block hollering at each other, “Get down!”
I burst into the kitchen, the door slamming behind me. Duck was already inside. He took one look at me and, for the first time ever, I saw panic in his eyes.
“Rabbit,” he said, stepping toward me and pointing at my chest. “You been hit!”
I reached for my chest; the front of my shirt was covered in blood.
“Call 911!” Duck yelled to his mother.
“No!” I cried, suddenly going cold with a realization that struck me harder than a bullet. I could hardly get the words out as I stumbled back toward the door: “My babies . . . they still in the car!”
I grabbed for the doorknob but Duck threw his arms around me, pulling me back. “You can’t go out there. You been hit!”
Duck had a good grip on me, but he was no match for the superhuman mama strength I had in that moment. I raised my arm and knocked him to the ground. “I gotta get my muthafuckin’ babies!” I yelled, flinging open the back door.
“Hold up!” Duck called after me. “The kids are okay! They’re safe.”
Butterfly, who’d been on Baldwin when the shooting started, had snatched my children out of the car and run with them to the front of the house. When I turned around and saw her standing in Miss June’s kitchen, holding Nikia in her arms and Ashley by the hand, I started to bawl.
I reached out for Ashley; my hands were covered in blood. “Baby, come here,” I said. But she wouldn’t move. She just stared at me with her eyes as big as dinner plates and her little hands squeezing her cheeks, like she was trying to hold herself together.
The ambulance came and took me to Grady Hospital. In the ER, an old white doctor examined me. “She’s very lucky,” he said, turning to face the three student doctors who were hovering behind him with clipboards in their hands. The doctor moved my hospital gown and pointed to the side of my chest, under my right arm. “The bullet entered here, mid-axilla”—he touched me gently with his index finger—“and exited the areola, here.” He lifted my gown all the way up, so my full chest was on display.
I wanted to tell the student doctors if they kept staring at my titties, I was gonna start charging. But I could tell by the way none of them looked me in the eye that they weren’t interested in anything I had to say.
“Had the bullet entered on the left,” the doctor continued, with his back to me, “it likely would have severed her superior vena cava.” His students nodded, solemnly. I hated the way the doctor was talking like I wasn’t even there. Like I was invisible.
“Hey!” I called out, interrupting his lecture. “What’s that mean? Vena cava what?”
This doctor barely turned around to answer me. “It means if the bullet had gone in your left side, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said.
One of the young doctors, a sister with glasses and her hair in twists, glanced up from her clipboard. She must have seen the look of confusion on my face, because she said to me: “He means we wouldn’t be here talking about you, because you’d be dead.”
Considering I almost died, I guess I got off easy. All I had was a shot-up nipple. And who needs two good nipples anyway?
The real damage was in my head. For weeks, I kept waking up in the middle of the night hearing the crack of gunfire ringing in my ears. I wanted to talk it over it with Duck, tell him how scared I’d been, but I didn’t get a chance. Duck was tired of my bullshit. He’d had enough.
He broke up with me while the two of us were sitting on his mama’s porch one evening, watching the night roll in. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming. The way he laid it out, it was obvious he had a long-ass list of things he was fed up with: me fighting with Derrick in the middle of the street and bringing the cops to the block; me being a smart-ass with The Mexican and almost getting us killed; and now me getting my nipple blown off and bringing damn near a fleet of paramedics and police officers right inside his mama’s house, when I knew good and gotdamn well she was holding our dope in her top dresser drawer. All of it together—plus my loud music and flashy car, my hot head and fast mouth—he was done. “You’re bringing too much attention,” he said. “You’re bringing heat to the block.”
He tried to be nice about it. “It’s not you . . .” he added. “You and me will always be cool. It’s just I think it’s time we did our own thing. You know, separate. You go your way, I go mine. You understand?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I lied. “We cool.”
Sitting beside Duck as the sky grew dark, I realized I’d never told him how much he meant to me, or that I looked up to him. I’d never told him he was the only person in the whole world I trusted or how much I appreciated that he’d never done me wrong.
I wanted to say something to him that night. But I didn’t know how.
When we split up, Duck gave me fifty thousand dollars in cash, my half of the profit he’d been holding in the paper bag in the bottom of his dirty clothes hamper. He nodded his head in the direction of Ashby Grove, a few blocks away from Baldwin. “Nobody’s holding it down over there,” he said. “You could set up your own trap. I bet
you’d make yourself some real good money, too.”
Chapter 18
Aim Higher
You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a safe place to hide a Ziploc baggie full of crack. Before Duck broke up with me, this wasn’t a problem. I’d pay Miss June a hundred dollars a day and she’d stash a package in her top dresser drawer, right beside her King James Bible. When I was serving on Baldwin and needed to re-up, all I had to do was run inside real quick and grab a few rocks. I didn’t realize how good I had it until I went into business for myself, hustling over on Ashby Grove.
At first I tried hiding my packages in bushes, downspouts, or underneath a rock. But with landlords, little kids, and stray dogs, it seemed like there was always somebody sniffing around. Then I started stashing my dope in the mailbox on the corner. I’d tape it to the top of the mail slot. Or, if I saw a police car easing down the block, I’d just toss my dope down the chute. When the mailman came to open up the box at the start of his shift, he’d hand me my package and I’d pay him fifty dollars.
Sometimes I’d pay him with electronics my customers had traded me for dope. Once I gave him a practically brand-new stolen Panasonic VCR; another time I gave him a four-slice toaster, still in the box. He was pretty happy, for a postal worker.
After I’d been on Ashby for a couple of months, we got a new mailman. This guy was not with the program. The first time he opened up the bottom of the mailbox and found my dope, he looked at me with an expression of disapproval I hadn’t seen since Principal Dixon whooped my ass for stealing Mercedes’s ham and cheese sandwich back in third grade. “Look,” he said, scowling at me. “This is federal government property. You can’t be throwing your shit in here. You understand what I’m saying?”
Then I was back to square one, trying to find a safe and convenient place to hide my supply. I didn’t have a whole lot of options. In fact, as far as I could tell, I didn’t have any. That’s how I ended up getting the girls involved. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I didn’t have a choice.
Rabbit Page 12