by Mike Epps
“What’s up, nephew?” he’d say to me.
“What you gonna get when you get your money?”
“Oh, nephew. What I gonna get with my check? I’m gonna get a brand-new Park Avenue. Crushed-velvet seats. It’s gonna smell like vanilla incense. You gonna ask for a ride and you know what I’m gonna say?”
“No?” I guessed.
“That’s right. No.”
I loved Duke.
Then he’d say: “You think you can get me a coffee, Mike?” And I’d go get him a coffee.
There was a wino in our neighborhood named Scotty, and he used to get drunk, but he was always happy. He used to always call me superstar: “Superstar! There’s little Superstar.” Even on his bad days, when he saw me he’d be all “Who the superstar?”
There was another character, Smitty, who you’d always see walking around. Wake up in the morning: There he is. Go to bed at night: There he is. Walking, walking, walking. Smitty used to walk real fast. He walked the whole city.
You’d say, “Smitty! Hey, Smitty!”
He’d shout back, “Hey! You know me? Where you know me from?”
“Yeah!” I’d shout. “You’re from the East Side.”
He’d wave, but he’d keep walking. He’d walk all over the city. Goddamn, that motherfucker walked everywhere.
“Why you walk so much, Smitty?” I’d ask.
“Because that’s what Jesus did,” he’d say. And he’d keep walking.
My favorite character of all was Shu-Pu, a local thief and drug addict. He broke into everyone’s houses, stole shit, sold it for drug money, got high, got caught, got out, did it again. Over and over, week after week, year after year. Still, he always just seemed like a small-time guy—not scary. No one thought much about him; he was a nuisance, mostly.
Then one day there was a big fire in the neighborhood.
“There are kids in there!” a woman screamed to the big crowd gathered in front of the house.
Another woman, the kids’ mother, had gotten out of the house with some of the kids, but there were still three in the house. The mother was hysterical, but her friends were keeping her from running in after the other kids.
Finally, the fire truck rolls up. They get the hose out, start spraying the house off and pulling pieces of the roof off, tearing it up, getting the water in.
“There are three kids in there!” everyone’s screaming at the firemen. “Why aren’t you going in?”
“Fire’s still too strong,” one said.
“That’s your fucking job!” someone screamed.
“You go in that fucking house right now and get those kids or I’ll shoot you in the head!” yelled another.
“If y’all don’t go in the house, we going to kill your ass anyway!” said another.
Those firemen were stuck—between a house in flames that would kill them if they ran in and a mob that was about to kill them if they didn’t. They were going to die one way or the other, you feel me? You could tell they were pretty sure the kids in there were dead, but they must have thought they should run in for show. Meanwhile, they kept hosing the house off, trying to get the fire under control, and getting screamed at while they did it. And all the time, the mother is wailing.
Along comes Shu-Pu.
“What’s going on?” he says.
Someone fills him in.
Shu-Pu just starts barging through the crowd, boom, knocks everybody down in his way. He just pulls his shirt up over his mouth to block the smoke and runs into the building.
“Well, he dead now,” one lady says.
But a couple minutes go by, and then, out of the smoke, here comes Shu-Pu! He’s carrying all three kids on his back. He rolls those kids off his back onto the sidewalk. They’re covered in soot, coughing, but they’re alive.
Their mother’s hugging them. The whole neighborhood is screaming Shu-Pu’s name: “Shu-Pu! Shu-Pu! Shu-Pu!” They’re patting Shu-Pu on the back, calling him a hero.
“That’s a real man!” everyone’s yelling at the firemen. “Not like you!”
Everyone’s about to get Shu-Pu the key to the city, hand him money, get him drunk. But then he says, “I heard more people in there!” He starts running back to the house.
People tried to grab him, but he ran into the house anyway.
“Well, he’s really dead now,” the same lady says.
Shu-Pu came out a few minutes later, carrying some stuff in his arms. Not people—electronics.
People are complicated. He’s a great man, and he saved those kids, but he’s still a thief, too. Back then I knew plenty about being two things at once: I was a nice kid, a sweet kid, someone everyone liked. But I was also real bad.
And as I got older, I was getting worse.
7
Crime Doesn’t Pay—Unless It’s Paying You
“I just saw you on the TV news,” my mom said one day when I got home.
“Uh, for what?” I asked. I wasn’t hardly going to school anymore. I was probably about sixteen. By then I was mostly hanging out on the streets. So there were a few things I could have been on the TV news for, but none of them were good. Still, I held out some hope that maybe I’d won the lottery or something.
It turns out that the news had done a segment on the city wanting to clean up our part of town, and illustrating the story was video of me standing on a corner. That was me: star of juvenile delinquency B-roll.
Chaney and I had left Stephen Decatur early in high school. I don’t think they were too sad to see us go. After Decatur, we moved to a school closer to home, Arsenal Technical High School. We were kind of relieved to be out of Stephen Decatur, but we missed the good food. And it was rough at Tech.
Chaney and I both played on the Tech basketball team. One day, we got to practice and the coach started yelling at Chaney. Chaney was such a good kid, he was just completely confused.
“I’m so disappointed in you,” the coach said to Chaney.
Chaney was just looking at him, trying to think of what he did.
“Man, I just don’t know what the hell to do with you,” the coach said.
“Sir,” Chaney said, “what did I do?”
“You flunked off the team,” the coach said.
“Oh, no, I don’t think that’s right,” Chaney said. “I’m on the honor roll. If there’s an Epps flunking off the team, it’s probably Mike.”
Guilty as charged. I got straight Fs. But I did not want to get thrown off the basketball team, so I tried to get that fixed—not by studying, mind you, but by getting one of my girlfriends (I always had girlfriends) who worked in the office to change my Fs to Ds. A little Wite-Out and typing, and wham, back on the team!
Or so I thought. Unfortunately, my girlfriend-accomplice worked her magic with the individual grades but she didn’t change the grade point average. So while I had a lot of Ds, I still had, suspiciously, something close to a 0.0 average.
I was so bad at school, and the rest of it, that I got put in the special-ed class. When I was little, I’d been the goofy one, the laid-back kid in the back who makes everyone laugh, but now it didn’t seem as cute to everyone how naughty I was. It seemed like it was starting to be a really big problem.
Man, that special-ed class was so boring and frustrating. It was like being in day care. Do you know how embarrassing it was not getting to change classes like my friends? The bell would ring and we’d hear movement in the hallways, and I’d start to get up.
“Michael, why are you getting up?” the teacher would say.
“The bell rang,” I’d say, pointing at it.
“That’s not your bell, Michael,” she would say.
Not my bell became a metaphor for everything that wasn’t going right for me. School, I thought, isn’t my bell. All this bullshit around me isn’t my bell. When is my bell gonna ring?
I got madder and madder, and more and more restless.
Then one day I’m in sophomore year. Chaney’s a freshman and it’s lunchtime. I
walk up to him, grab his coat, and say, “Chane, come on, come on.”
Chaney being Chaney says, “Oh, okay.”
I take him over to where I’ve been sitting and we sit down. I’m waiting. There’s one guy at the lunch table who had it coming to him—I forget why, but the second this guy opens his mouth, I punch him in the face. With that, the whole table jumped up, and now we’re in a food fight.
Chaney looked sad to be involved, to be honest. He loves food. And like I’ve said, oftentimes lunch at school was the only time we were able to eat that day. The last thing he wanted was to be throwing around perfectly good french fries.
Next thing you know, we’re off to the dean’s office, where we get expelled.
Chaney was a bright kid, though, and he piped up and said to the dean, “Well, sir, actually we don’t really live in your district. We’ve been lying this whole time. We’re supposed to go to Emmerich Manual High School. So maybe, instead of expelling us, you could just transfer us over there?”
The dean looked at us and probably realized there was less paperwork in a transfer, so off we went to Emmerich Manual High School. Well, Chaney went; I basically dropped out. Besides, I figured I was learning a lot more useful shit from the streets. Our neighborhood was full of people who were making a lot of money, and I wanted to be like them.
My dad saw what was happening—that I was heading toward becoming a regular street thug—so he signed me up for the Jobs Corps in Detroit, Michigan. He thought it would help me to get out of town and away from my gang friends.
“Your ass gonna get a trade, man,” he said as he put me on the Detroit-bound bus. “I don’t care what trade you pick, just pick one. Learn something.”
The trade school always accepted dropouts, and it was a place where you could go become an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber. I signed up for something—I can’t even remember what. I did want to make my father proud, and becoming a tradesman seemed as good a way as any I could come up with. And I knew if I stayed in Naptown, nothing good was likely to happen.
When I got to Michigan, I was so excited. Detroit was beautiful to me. I was seventeen and it was almost the first time I’d ever been out of town. Life was looking good. I liked the place, and I had an older girlfriend from back home who had a car. Nicky was twenty-one and I was in love with her; she used to drive her little red Stanza from Indianapolis to Detroit, pick me up, hang out there, or bring me back to Indianapolis for visits.
The only problem Nicky and I had was the age thing. When we were out in public she used to tell people I was her little brother. I’d be looking at her like Little brother? Tell ’em what we did last night. I sure as hell hope you don’t do that with your little brother.
Man, I would have so many kids right now with Nicky if it weren’t for Queen Williams, her mother. She would not let her have a kid by me. If it took every condom in America and a million abortions, Queen Williams would keep her daughter from getting linked with me for the rest of her life.
Finally, Nicky broke up with me. I had it coming, I’m sure. I just wasn’t equipped to be a boyfriend at the time, you know? But it broke my heart.
Then Michigan Job Corps broke up with me, too. My career doing a trade was sunk by one main problem: I found out that every trade required me to learn math. I couldn’t be an electrician because you had to know math. Couldn’t be a plumber ’cause you had to know math. Couldn’t be a carpenter ’cause you really had to know math. You can’t build a house if you don’t know measurements. And I couldn’t tell a meter from a yard from a whatever the fuck. There was just no way.
Finally I was, like, Okay, I can’t get a trade, so I went back home after about six months. My parents were not happy to see me back, especially with no skills—me, a high school dropout and basically unemployable.
All I’d picked up from Detroit was a sense of style. And I remember coming back home, I seen all these guys from Detroit, they were wearing finger waves and carrying briefcases. So I got finger waves in my hair and started carrying a briefcase.
My mother took one look at me and this new getup and she said, “Nah-uh. You ain’t goin’ back up there.”
That was like some pimp shit, you know. I thought I was a pimp because I looked the part, never mind I had no ladies and no money. But I did have a briefcase. There was nothing in the briefcase, but I still carried it everywhere.
Of course my dad was real mad that I came home without knowing how to do anything that could get me a job. I remember him cussing me, saying, “Man, you’s a fucked-up dude for that shit. You know I took all my time trying to help you, get yourself right!”
So eventually I found a job unpacking boxes, stocking shelves, and cleaning up at a 7-Eleven where my uncle Eric was the manager. It was tiring work, but I did my best in my stupid uniform. I didn’t love it, but at least my dad was off my back. For all that hard work all I made was $116 a week. This was no kind of long-term plan, that was for sure.
And it wasn’t winning me any friends. One night I’ll never forget, a guy I grew up around showed up in the store.
His mother was a madam who ran this big house, famous for its gambling and prostitution. She was no joke. My friend’s whole childhood, every time we were over there, a million times a day she would holler, “Quick, get that motherfucking door shut. You all get that goddamn door.”
Her whole house was a hustle. She had different beds in the basement and she would get different checks from the guys she let sleep there every month. She would get their checks and then just give ’em their money that they needed, keeping the rest.
My friend’s father was a hustler, too—numbers runner.
That family just stuck out like a sore thumb in their neighborhood. My friend was bad as hell, and me and him used to fight all the time. He was also the first truly successful kid drug dealer that I ever knew. He was sixteen.
Anyway, one night I’m working at 7-Eleven and this old friend of mine and some of our other buddies come in. I was sacking groceries, and they started laughing at me in my 7-Eleven uniform.
“What the fuck you all laughing at?” I said.
They had jewelry on, new sneakers.
I was, like, “Damn, where the fuck you all get the money at?”
“Yeah, we got money right now,” my old friend said, and he pointed to the parking lot where he’d parked his brand-new car.
I’m, like, Damn, this dude’s making money, man. Why the fuck am I working at 7-Eleven?
It was hard to sack groceries and watch them little dudes come in there, brand-new Jordans on, driving a new Bonneville. I felt like I was made for something better, and I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going to get there at 7-Eleven. I decided to give crime a real shot.
It’s like they say, “Crime doesn’t pay—unless it’s paying you.” So I took one of those little 7-Eleven paychecks and I went and bought an eight ball so that I could flip it.
An eight ball back then cost $150 to $200. That’s three and a half grams from which you could make $300. And then you take the $300 and you buy a quarter ounce. A quarter ounce, you could flip that and make a half ounce. A half ounce you flip that, turn it into an ounce. An ounce could turn it into two. Two could turn it into four. Four, turn it into more. Then you got nine ounces as a quarter kilo. Nine ounces turn into eighteen ounces. Eighteen ounces turn into thirty-six ounces, which is a kilo of cocaine.
Huh, I guess I could do some math after all. I’d never been able to even really add well before, but now all those equations started to make sense. Because the solution to every math problem now was that I had more money in my pocket.
I was good at hustling drugs, just like I’d been good at selling candy. I could talk people into getting more than they wanted. And I had a good work ethic. I showed up on time. I put in the hours. I made the connections.
I also wasn’t afraid of anything. I’d go anywhere if I thought it would result in a sale. For instance, they had some of the most notorious projects in I
ndianapolis on Twenty-Fourth and New Jersey. So many people had died in those buildings, they felt haunted. I mean, this corner was so tough, the devil wouldn’t stand on it, you feel me? There were prostitutes, there was drug dealing, there was killing. I went down there, you know, to earn my rank on this corner, and I walked on there like I owned it. I learned a lot, like that you shouldn’t hide cocaine in your underwear. You should hide the bags in your mouth, so you can swallow them if the cops show up. I learned that even if you’re not using cocaine, it can show up in your system if you’re handling it without wearing gloves and a mask.
Everyone thought about killing me, I’m sure, but I was a nice guy and I was funny and young, still just about seventeen. I knew I’d make motherfuckers laugh. I knew how to manipulate people. This was a corner they didn’t let nobody come on, not that neighborhood; that was their neighborhood. But they let me. I’d been a real funny kid and now I was a real funny guy. I was popular. And I was making so much cash.
For a while I had real good luck, too. One time, a friend and I went and bought half a key from these guys in this rough part of town. We were driving around with a half a key and we got pulled over by the cops. They knew where we’d been and what we must have in that car. We knew this was going to be bad for us.
“I’ll take this,” my friend said to me. “You get out and run.”
I was going to bolt, leave my friend to sort it all out there. But I froze up, couldn’t move.
“Sir, please put your license out the window,” the cop said as he came up to the driver’s side.
My friend put his license out the window.
The guy turned his flashlight on.
“How many people are in the vehicle?” the cop said.
“It’s a two-seater, Officer,” my guy said.
“Well,” he said, “get your black ass home now.”
There was still a huge bag of coke sitting on my guy’s lap.
We thought surely the cop would have seen it, but apparently not.
We thought it was a trick. We looked at each other confused. But, nope, he was just letting us go.