by Mike Epps
Still, I didn’t judge them then and I still don’t today. They may not have worked a day in their lives, but I still say those muhfuckas deserved that money.
Ronald Reagan was in office back then, so we were hearing a lot about Reaganomics. We didn’t know quite what it meant, but we were getting money from the U.S. Treasury at the time, so we began to think of welfare as Reaganomics. And we started to think of Reaganomics as reparations for slavery.
Maybe that sounds crazy, but I think there was something to it. The deck was stacked against us. We were pissed off and we were hopeless. That we got a check now and then seemed like the very least white people in power could do. We had to deal with the legacy of slavery, with getting pulled over all the time by the cops, with the lack of opportunity. Are we going to take that $200 in food stamps? Yes, we are.
I wasn’t so good in school, but I remembered one thing from history class: In 1865, General Sherman had a plan to give freed slaves forty acres and a mule so they could have a fresh start.
Welfare, to us, was like our forty acres and a mule. Those checks began to seem like compensation for how hard it was for black people in America.
Of course, President Andrew Johnson eventually overturned the forty acres and a mule program. Welfare hasn’t exactly revolutionized the plight of black people today, either. It helped us not die back when we were kids, but I can see now that the system wasn’t necessarily good for the black community long term.
You could even say it helped to systematically destroy us.
Welfare provided just enough money to survive but not enough to ever save anything or better yourself. It took away a lot of people’s drive to become or do anything, and it never provided a way out of the cycle of poverty. Plenty of people I grew up around were wrecked by growing up in that system.
Being black at that time in Indianapolis felt, start to finish, like a pretty shitty deal. At the white school, I ate a good lunch. But I had to put up with being called the worst names and treated like shit. We wanted the food stamps but we had to deal with the welfare officers who acted like it was all my mom’s fault she found herself in this place, raising seven kids alone. Like that was her plan all along, to have all these kids and nobody to help her raise them.
Like it was her fault we got evicted from our house.
Like it was her fault Reggie left.
Like it was her fault her kids were hungry and in trouble all the time.
All she ever wanted was a pretty house with a picket fence around it, a man who loved her, and for her kids to be happy. It just seemed like the world made it so hard for her to have any of those things.
Everything just kept getting worse after Reggie left. We started to wonder how bad it could get and for us to still live. Because if there was no way to make ends meet with Reggie there, you can imagine how it got worse and worse every month he was gone. No food. No heat. We all slept in the same room with a space heater because we couldn’t afford to heat the rest of the house.
Not to mention, as mad as we were, we missed Reggie and our little brother Aaron. It sucked to think about the two of them across town in a big house eating well while we went to bed without dinner.
The only good thing about the house the way it was after Reggie left was that, since there was no furniture or heat in the bottom half of the place, we could go down there anytime and breakdance in our winter clothes in the middle of the floor. All our friends would come over and dance around, too, in that cold, empty living room.
We always could make something from nothing.
But step outside the house, and that neighborhood was bad, man. People talk about how great it was back in the old days, because kids had freedom? Or because they played with real toys or outside and not with video games?
To me, it feels just crazy that people are nostalgic about games kids played before video games came along and took over. I’d rather have my kids playing Grand Theft Auto in their rooms than doing what we did. As thirteen-year-olds, sure, we’d do Pac-Man and Centipede when we had the quarters, but we used our freedom to play some seriously fucked-up games, too.
Most of them involved guns.
One of them was Russian roulette. We’d get my guy Ramon’s dad’s .22 pistol, take it to the garage, put one bullet in it, and pass it back and forth, firing it into our heads. We weren’t great at math, but we did know enough to invite less than six people to play. And, incredibly, none of us ever blew our brains out.
But it was pure dumb luck. One day Ryan Bembry opened up his back door and fired the gun right out into the yard: Boom!
“Huh, I guess it is real,” Ryan said.
As highs go, the feeling that you might be about to shoot yourself in the head isn’t bad. Not quite as good as cocaine, though.
I know because it was around this time that I also found drugs. Found is not exactly the right term, though. In my neighborhood, drugs were just there, and after looking at them for a few years I picked them up.
The first time I snorted cocaine was over at the house of a buddy I’ll call Jimmy. I was about fourteen. Jimmy was an advanced kid, because his mom was advanced. She had been to prison, and she was a real street woman, but she was fly, you know what I mean? Her house was tore-up but her bedroom was nice.
Jimmy lived in a druggie part of town, so no one was surprised when someone showed up there high as fuck, even kids. We’d tease them a little but not mess with them too bad.
“Man, he’s live!” we’d say.
Until that one day when Jimmy handed me the coke and I put it to my nose and sniffed. And now the live one was me.
The world changed. Suddenly I felt invincible. We no longer lived in a slum; it was a magical playground. I wasn’t a kid with no future; I was the king of the world. I felt free. I felt happy.
Immediately, I took off all my clothes save my underwear. I ran outside on the porch and then I ran down the middle of the street. That was a neighborhood that was so depressed that no one even looked up to see a skinny boy in his underwear running through the streets. It was normal there.
I wanted that high again, right away, and I took every chance I could to find it. Then I hit a spell with it where it didn’t do what it did the first time, so I mixed it with other stuff: I would sprinkle coke into my marijuana.
Back then, cocaine was the only way I could make life feel okay. From the moment Reggie left, I’ve had an anger in me. Mad at the scammers who sent that sweepstakes letter. Mad at the bank for taking our house. Mad at Reggie for taking the furniture. Mad at the welfare ladies for not giving my mom more help. Mad at those assholes at my school for calling me names and trying to make me feel bad when they had so much more than I did and I already felt like shit.
I hated feeling like I was stuck, like the whole system was set up to keep me—to keep all of us—from ever getting anything nice.
I started to realize that some things in this world are automatic. The sun comes up in the morning. Automatic. Black people—born and raised in America—are set up to fail. Automatic. For generations we’ve all had to deal with the same shit from white people: mistrust, fear, anger.
As a result of what I saw happen to my mother and what I felt in school, I had a rage. And after that, all white people seemed like authority figures to me. You think white people are nervous to be around us? I guarantee that it ain’t nothing to how nervous I am to be around white people. Even if they’re not the police, they can get the police pretty damn fast.
It was something I’d learn real soon.
5
To Grandmother’s House We Go
Sure enough we got evicted again, so we moved in with my grandmother at Carrollton and Twenty-First, like we always did when shit got hard.
My grandmother, Ms. Anna C. Walker, was a church lady, a Jehovah’s Witness, tough as nails. She worked as a cook at a school for the deaf for forty-something years. It was exhausting work and she worked hard. For years she walked to and from work every day to save
money for her family, too. She was no-nonsense.
Anna C. Walker had ten kids of her own, but she also took care of a lot of other people’s kids. If you ran into trouble in our family, that was the doorstep you showed up on. She was the matriarch not just of my family but of the whole neighborhood, and what felt like the whole city. Again and again during my childhood, she was our savior.
My grandmother made a good case for religion. She would always show up when we needed food, and she opened her house to us when otherwise we’d have been on the streets.
But she wasn’t just a church person and a very strong-willed older black woman—she was also very talented. She was a baker—she made wedding cakes for a lot of people around the neighborhood—and she also made wine from scratch in the tub. The guys in the hood loved my grandmother’s homemade wine.
My grandmother does not suffer fools, either. Maybe it’s no coincidence that she is also the one person in our family who has never, ever found me funny.
“Mike just don’t seem funny to me,” she’ll say, even now.
“Oh yeah?” I’ll say. “Well, your potato salad ain’t that good to me.”
Don’t tell my grandmother, though, but her potato salad is pretty good. All her dishes are good. She went to Purdue’s culinary arts school, so she could cook. When you’re hungry, anything tastes good, so just imagine gourmet dinners being put down in front of you when you’re in that state. Eating was like a religious experience.
My grandmother also fought for us. She was on our fathers’ asses on behalf of my mother. My mother was nice and wanted everyone to get along, so sometimes she wouldn’t stand up for herself enough. That’s where my grandmother would come in.
“We’re taking them down to the welfare office!” my grandmother would roar. “We’re going to make them pay their child support!”
And she would, too. Getting our fathers to pay up wasn’t easy. They were good people, but a case could be made that they were also both straight-up drunks. It was a miracle that my grandmother somehow got that money out of them. They even sometimes gave us presents, like new bikes at Christmas.
From as early as I can remember, I wished I had money so I could help my mom out.
I wanted a job at age eleven. No one would hire me, so I’d make my own work. I’d shovel snow, or I’d go to the grocery store and ask old women if I could take their groceries to the car. They might only give me a dollar or two, but at least I made something. I noticed a pattern: I had a natural gift for talking, and the more I worked on my speeches, the more money I got.
My first real taste of money and success was selling candy through what was called the American Youth Program. If you live in a city, you may see kids running variations on this game: They approach you with a box of candy that they’ve got at cost and try to sell it to you for a little bit more.
Well, this guy Chuck would take me and some other kids in this raggedy-ass truck to the white neighborhoods to sell candy. (I love black people, but they weren’t the best candy customers in the world. They would let you say the whole speech and then not buy shit. White people would feel bad for you and actually spend money, so we went to where they were.)
When we rolled up on a nice-looking house, I would knock on the door and the second it opened I would say my speech, which over time I perfected for maximum impact. This was the final version:
“I’m sorry to disturb you at this time, ma’am. My name is Mike Epps. I’m with the American Youth Program. The American Youth Program is a program that keeps little niggers like myself from stealing hubcaps and breaking into your house while you’re at work.”
White people loved it. White women would call into the house, “Honey, come here and listen to this boy’s sales pitch!” Then they’d say to me, “Say all that again for my husband!”
At these houses, I’d peek into the door past the smiling white people and I’d see all that luxury. Plush couches! Spotless carpeting! Marble countertops! Chandeliers! I would think: This is what I want to have one day. I wouldn’t even have known some of those things existed if not for that job. You have to be able to see it and touch it to know it’s what you want.
Some of my friends weren’t hustlers and they’d return at the end of the day with a box full of melted chocolates, but every time I went out, I’d come back having sold out and carrying a wad of cash.
Still, it wasn’t enough to keep me from being so fucking hungry all the time. I was so hungry that I started to steal from the grocery store. I tried to be real clever about it, though. No running and snatching. I did it real slow. I’d get a shopping cart and put stuff in it like I was shopping but I’d be eating as I went. I could make a sandwich while I was pushing the cart, or eat a whole bag of chips. All the time I’d be looking at the side of canned goods like I’m carefully checking the ingredients. Then I’d put it back, like, Nope, too many calories. Not enough calcium. When I was done, I would just put the cart back and walk out of the store. I think it taught me how to become an actor: You had to be a convincing shopper to get away with it.
A couple times I got caught, though. A 7-Eleven manager caught me stealing cookies. I’d gotten away with it a bunch of times, but not this time.
“What’s in your pocket?” he said.
“Ain’t nothing in my pocket,” I said.
He reached in my pockets and pulled out two rolls of baked cookies.
“Well,” he said, “you’re going to learn your lesson tonight.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re going to jail.”
I cried so hard.
I was too young for jail, but when the cops showed up, they took me to the juvenile court on Hillside to wait for someone to pick me up. Hillside was actually on a hill, so that was the nickname for the juvie court. If you were bad, people would say: “You’re gonna end up on the Hill.” I sat there in a room on the Hill, terrified, for hours. I didn’t go to jail that night. I left with a warning and was released into my grandmother’s custody. I think they knew her wrath was scarier than anything the judge might do to me.
Over time, I tried to be sneakier when I stole, and I learned to keep an eye out for the cops. Especially Charles Martin, who was about six foot eight. He looked like Rob from What’s Happening!!
The guys in our neighborhood kept the cops busy for sure. There were lots of gangs in Mapleton back then, especially near my grandmother’s house. The 25th Street Cobras. Hoodlumville. Brightwood. 16th Street Cruel Lives. Haughville. Crewlife. 30th Street. Post Road Cross Town. The Ghetto Boys.
The 24th Street Mad Dogs—they called them 2–4—were from the low-income apartments, the projects in a part of the city near downtown we called Dodge City. That was the most notorious gang in Naptown, dating back to the ’70s. They had the most legendary street motherfuckers.
They were supposed to be our enemies, but I’d gone to school with some of the Mad Dogs crew and I didn’t want to fight them. My strategy for a while was that I would try to stay friends with everyone. We’d lived all over the whole city, so I knew a lot of people, and I made them like me. I would just not stick around when shit went down. When they all got into it, I’d split, just slide out of there.
“I thought you were with us!” they’d say as they started loading guns and I suddenly remembered something I had to do at home.
“I am! I am!” I’d say, backing out the door. “I’m totally with you! But I got to go! I got someplace to be!”
Where I had to be was always the same place: wherever people weren’t shooting each other.
Eventually, though, I learned that even if you didn’t want to be a part of it, it would pull you in. One time when we were teenagers, my sister, Julie, and I were in the car and we got followed by these guys who were after me. They chased us a few blocks until I busted a fast right into an alley and pulled up into a backyard and got my sister to run. She was crying, saying, “You gotta get your life together! This is crazy!”
And I had
to stand up and fight sometimes. What happens is you can hold out for only so long and then you realize that if you’re not part of a gang and committed to fighting with and for them, you’re a sitting duck. I didn’t want to, but sometimes you don’t have a choice except to defend yourself and your buddies.
The war between the gangs would quiet down and then get bad again. Usually if we were involved, it wasn’t about drug turf or any of that, but over a girl, or it was about revenge. One time, the Mad Dogs thought we’d done something and so they shot Robert, my brother John’s father, while he and my grandmother were on their way back from the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
That’s how gangs work in Naptown: You stand up for your friends and sometimes that means going after the friends of the people you’re fighting. In the bigger cities, like Chicago, New York, L.A., normally the neighborhoods you’re in, that’s your affiliation. But in Naptown the gang thing is looser. You don’t have to be in a gang there, nowhere near as much as you do in a big city. In Naptown it was a little easier to stay away from somebody who doesn’t like you. There wasn’t as much going out looking for trouble. But you still had to be on your guard all the time. You wanted your crew to stay together so people wouldn’t mess with you.
For a while, I was in a gang called the 33rd, which was like a junior varsity version of the 24th Street Mad Dogs. My grandmother lived on Twenty-First, so my friends and I were 21. We called ourselves Jump Street, after the show and the Indianapolis club. Or we were the Slaughters, because some folks in that part of the hood had the last name Slaughter. But we were mainly 2–1. We had love for our neighborhood, and we were trying to get money and, more than anything, to be popular with the ladies.
Our colors were red, because we had a hookup in California with the Piru Bloods (if you know gangs, that’ll mean something to you), so we could get anything we needed from them. (The big brother of the rapper The Game, Big Fase 100, was a leader of the Piru gang.)
It turned out my brothers and I were pretty good at gang shit. For one thing, we had a lot of practice fighting around the house. We were always beating each other up, wrestling, knocking shit over. It would start with one little thing—like “You wore my sweater!”—and an hour later you’re still throwing fists until you were exhausted. I had a special skill to make my brothers laugh right in the middle of the fight.