Unsuccessful Thug

by Mike Epps

We rolled out and went home, shell-shocked.

  “Well, we made it through that song, yes!” my friend said.

  We laughed the whole way home.

  Things were going okay for a while. I had money for the first time in my life. But the thing is, when you’re dealing, you have to do a lot of rough shit to keep control of your territory, and to make sure no one takes advantage of you. As I got older, from necessity I started to do some seriously bad shit. And I knew every guy I came down on had a whole gang full of guys who were then going to be after me.

  I never quite fit in, because the one thing you can’t have when you’re a drug dealer is a heart. Even though I was bad in a lot of ways, I was too sensitive to want to hurt people. I wasn’t cut out for that life, either by skills or personality. And so even as my friends went on to careers in drug dealing, mugging, and armed robbery, I was a failure. Once when I got in trouble, a presentence investigator (that’s the guy who talks to you and then tells the judge what kind of guy you are) said to me, “You have a calling. You don’t belong in the Department of Corrections.”

  I’ll never forget that. He was right, but I wasn’t ready to listen yet.

  While my friends got better and better at crime, robbing shit out of cars was about the limit of my skill as a crook. It was like if you can’t quite do long division and then suddenly everyone around you is writing complex shit on the chalkboard. I was still trying to figure out the best way to quietly steal a hubcap, and everyone on my block is staging Ocean’s Eleven–type heists. They’d try to get me to help them. I’d do my best. I really would. But I always seemed to fuck it up.

  This one time my friend and I broke into a big house and got all the stuff ready to go. The people whose house it was had this big-ass Doberman pinscher. While we were getting all the stuff laid out to take, we were petting him and everything. We couldn’t believe our luck. Then, when it was time for us to go, the dog got mad. It’s like he suddenly remembered he was a vicious guard dog. Or maybe he just had grown to like us and didn’t want the petting party to end. Well, he wouldn’t let us out of the house. So my buddy and I did the only thing we could think to do: We called the police on ourselves. That call went about like you might imagine:

  “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

  “Guess what?” said my friend.

  “What?” the dispatcher said.

  “We broke into this house and this dog won’t let us go,” my friend said. “We’d rather go to jail then get ate up by a dog.”

  And so, for the next few minutes, we sat there surrounded by silver and jewelry, petting the giant dog, listening for the sound of sirens. The cops may have caught us that night, but at least we didn’t get eaten.

  Out on the streets, cocaine was really taking hold of Naptown, and things started getting more violent. Nowadays the kids, they go do shit off of lean (which my editor is making me explain to you is codeine-laced cough syrup, mixed with soda and Jolly Ranchers) or Percocets or heroin. They damn near gotta be high to go do some crazy shit. That’s where they get their courage at. Back in the day, we kids didn’t have any of that. Where we got our courage was from drinking Wild Irish Rose red wine. Bum wine. And from being desperate.

  One night, Fatso and Ramon and some other guys and I are just all out chilling in an alley right there on Thirty-Third, right on Dirty-Third, drinking Wild Irish Rose.

  “Man, let’s go hit this lick,” Ramon says.

  I’m, like, “What you talking about, a lick? What you mean, go get a lick?”

  He says, “You want to get this money?”

  I did want money.

  “Come on,” Ramon said. “Let’s go.”

  And off we go, Ramon and I. We’re joking and drunk until we pull up in the parking lot of a pizza place called Noble Roman’s. We get out of the car and Ramon pulls out latex gloves.

  Oh shit, I thought. Latex gloves is professional. Latex gloves is bad news.

  Ramon hands me a pair of latex gloves and a gun, and I’m, like, “Damn!”

  “Go in first,” Ramon says.

  I pulled my shirt up over my face. That’s how amateur and shit I was.

  “Shit!” I say. “Where you gonna be at when I walk in this motherfucking door?”

  “I’m gonna be right behind you,” he says.

  I’m, like, “Shit, man. I ain’t never did this. You go.”

  By this point I’m scared, but I don’t know what else to do.

  Then I freeze.

  I’m so unprofessional at robbing, I go in the door and don’t say nothing. I just start waving the gun.

  The cash register girl’s just ducking and looking at me, more confused than scared.

  Then Ramon came in the door, all “Grrr! This is what you do!” He starts moving fast, ordering everyone around, looking like a whole different person. He looked really fucking scary, even to me—he didn’t look like my friend anymore, he was just a robber. It was so crazy, when we was robbing the place, it looked like the nigga wanted to rob me, like he wanted to say, “You got some motherfucking money in your pocket, too?”

  We got $85. And a pizza, too. We’re leaving and we’re going to get away. But then something happened—to this day I don’t know what. For some reason Ramon goes and hits the girl behind the counter in the head with his gun.

  “Why’d you hit the lady?” I yelled. “You didn’t have to hit the lady!”

  I started crying.

  “You’re gonna ask me that here?” Ramon yelled. “Get it together!”

  I followed Ramon out to the car, crying the whole way.

  It was quiet in the car on the way back to Dirty-Third. “I’m done,” I said. “You gotta be a vicious motherfucker to do this. This ain’t my sport. My mother raised me better than that.”

  Yes, I caught feelings at the robbery.

  Still, I didn’t know how to make a living honestly. So I just kept fucking up again and again.

  Around this time, my buddy Ray Bob came around one day and asked if I wanted to do a robbery with him out in Haughville. Haughville was a poor, almost all-black Indianapolis neighborhood west of downtown. Check out the stats sometime: Back in the ’90s, Haughville had thirty homicides a year, which made it one of the worst crime zones in the whole country. One year was so bad, one in every 2.5 people was the victim of a violent crime. And I knew a lot of the guys who got the place that title.

  Me and my buddy Ray Bob, we riding, and we just circling the projects, because we trying to catch one of the dealers out there. We riding, and we see this one dealer sitting on the ground, counting his money. We went and parked the car by the railroads, put masks on, and ran up, snuck up on him with a gun.

  While we were robbing him, I kept saying, “Push him over there, Ray Bob!” “Hand me that rope, Ray Bob!”

  I might as well have been, like, “Give me the rope, Ray Bob who lives in Mapleton on Ruckle and who is five feet eleven inches and who will be on Central Avenue after four p.m. on Friday if anyone needs to drive by and shoot his ass!”

  Ray Bob hissed at me through his mask. “If you call my name one more motherfucking time while we’re robbing this guy, I’m gonna fuck you up, too.”

  When we got back in the truck, Ray Bob ripped his mask off. Right away, he started yelling at me: “You said my name five motherfucking times!”

  What can I say? I was an unsuccessful thug.

  I was at my grandmother’s house one day at the height of my dealing, sitting at the kitchen table, and in front of me was a big bag of cocaine. I got up for a second and when I came back, it was gone. There was only one person who could have taken it: a female relative of mine who was staying at the house and who was addicted to crack. After that, I wouldn’t give her any dope, I was so mad at her, and when I wouldn’t give her any drugs, she got her revenge: She called the cops’ drug tip line and ratted me out.

  But I only found that out later. I’d heard from my buddies that the heat was on, but a few days after I’d cut my
relative off, I needed to check one of my stashes, which was by my grandmother’s garage. Well, just my luck: A rookie cop, first week on the job, was sitting across the street, hot on the tip, just waiting in case I was dumb enough to go back to get the drugs.

  I was dumb enough. I got to the garage, pulled out the dope, and then I hear behind me “Freeze!”

  The cop was so proud to have a bust like that on his first week, he seemed surprised by his luck when he put the cuffs on. So happy, like I’d made his year. You’re welcome, rookie cop.

  You know, at the time, I was pretty upset at the relative who turned me in. That seemed like not how family should be. But today I’m glad she called the police.

  I think she saved my life.

  8

  Jail, Prison, and Work Release

  The Marion County Jail—man, what a crazy place. It was a really old jail, though they’d just renovated it and added a new wing. Even so, the place was so crowded, I stayed in my cell for the first three weeks with the same clothes on. My Chicago Bulls starter jacket should have been burned by the end, it smelled so bad. We had a $45 commissary that you could order from, so eventually I got these small boxes of Tide detergent that let me stay clean until they gave me a prison uniform.

  There were two tiers to the jail, upstairs and downstairs. The downstairs tier had two bunks in a cell. When I first arrived I had to share a cell with a guy on the downstairs tier. After about three, four months I got the penthouse cell upstairs, and that’s the one I made my own.

  When you’re in jail, everybody’s making shit, so you learn a bunch of tricks to make your time more bearable. I braided three towels together to make a carpet; I took some toilet paper and some soap and made it real sudsy, then let it dry (once you lit it, it gave off a nice aroma, like a scented candle); I put some pink medical cards on my lights so it made the room dimmer. We also would tear pictures out of this black magazine, Right On!, and use toothpaste to paste them onto the concrete wall.

  One of my guys in there ended up getting sentenced to the death penalty. They said he killed some white people, while robbing them or something. He had been in the county jail for, like, two and a half years, and when they were shipping him off to death row at Pendleton Correctional Facility, he gave me all his stuff. There were big bags of popcorn and chips, all this great stuff. People couldn’t believe I had all this shit. If anyone wanted anything, they had to come to me. I was rich, in jail terms. I even ended up with the honor of running the poker game. I was living large.

  We also watched a ton of TV. Video Soul on BET with Donnie Simpson; Yo! MTV Raps; Comicview; Showtime at the Apollo. Sometimes Steve Harvey would be on there and we’d get excited to see him.

  “I’m gonna be on that show one day,” I said. “Everyone thinks I’m real funny.”

  “Like hell you are,” my guys would say.

  All my dreams of comedy felt very far away, though. In fact, being in jail felt more like being back on Central Avenue watching the hustlers, only now the characters were doing other stuff, like finding religion, or getting their GEDs, or fighting with one another. For me, it was more characters to study.

  My favorite bit players were what we called the jailhouse lawyers—inmates who spent all their time in the library poring over lawbooks and case files. These guys had so many books and so many theories and they had a million ways they were going to help you get out of prison.

  “You need to go get a mistrial declared!” they’d say, or some shit. We didn’t think much of them. They were always trying to help everybody else get out, but they couldn’t do shit for themselves.

  “You so smart, motherfucker,” I’d say, “why you in here and not out free?”

  I also loved the Nation of Islam guys. I tried to be Muslim once. I really did. But I couldn’t handle Ramadan. I Rama-didn’t. I was too damn hungry.

  “You are strong!” I was told once while we prayed, and the fact was, I did have a lot more energy than everyone else.

  “Must be the spirit,” I said, knowing full well that it was actually the peanut butter-and-jelly I’d snuck when no one was looking.

  Three days in, I got caught with a ham sandwich.

  “Sorry, I can’t do it,” I said. “I get what you’re trying to do here and I respect it. I just can’t give up bacon.”

  THEN I GOT sentenced and had to go from the jail to the prison to serve my term. Those two words, jail and prison, get used interchangeably, but not by people who’ve been in both. Jail is where you go when you get arrested. If you did something small, you might just stay there for a few months or whatever, or even if you did something really bad you might be there until you have your trial or before you get sentenced.

  Jail I was basically okay with. Prison was a whole different ball game. The prison bus came every Saturday. And one day I was on the list for transfer. I remember them chaining me up, putting me on the bus, taking me to the RDC—Reception Diagnostic Center. Sounds kind of nice, right? Like a health clinic or some shit.

  Well, it’s not. RDC is where they send you to find out if you’ve got AIDS and to check your mental health, all that shit. And once you’ve had your tests, they put you in thirty days of what is basically solitary confinement. That’s the roughest part of your time. Fuck, it’s probably the roughest time in your life. If you weren’t crazy going in, you’re sure as shit crazy coming out.

  To make it legal, they let you out for an hour a day, and that’s it. The other twenty-three hours, you’re just in this little room alone, with nothing to do except think.

  My whole first fucking week I just cried. All day, every day. I was so desperate for anyone to talk to, to see another face or to hear another voice. I dreamed about fresh air, grass, flowers, trees, clouds. I’ll never forget I used to get down on the ground and put my face at the bottom of the door so I could see a little down the hallway. It made me feel like I wasn’t in jail. It was, like, I’m in the hallway! But I wasn’t. Just my eyes and my nose and my lips could get close to it a little bit. But that’s how desperate I was for that whole month. If I could smell the hallway, it was like freedom to me.

  Smelling the fucking hallway.

  The results of my RDC tests were mixed: I didn’t have any bad diseases, but I wasn’t that smart, either, so they sent me to the worst gladiator school of the prisons I could have ended up at: Westville Correctional Facility, up by Chicago. If your health is bad, they put you in a place where there’s a medical center. If you’re really smart, they send you to some cushy, nice place. But the tests said I wasn’t special, so I went to the worst place of all.

  Another bus ride, this one as loud as fuck. Everybody was talking shit at the top of their lungs, cursing, telling stories, right until we got in front of that prison—then dead silence. We were trying to take it all in, I think, to memorize every blade of grass, every inch of sky, until we vanished into that building for however many years we had to do.

  I wished the sun was out, so I could see it one more time before I went in, but that morning was rainy. Every prison bus I ever took was in the rain. And the last song I remember on the prison bus radio was “Save the Best for Last” by Vanessa Williams.

  Westville was definitely not the best anything. It used to be an insane asylum and I believed people when they said it was haunted. I remember one time laying in my cell and seeing something weird zip past. It gave me the creeps, I’ll tell you what.

  That place was so tough that I quickly realized that I really wasn’t the street guy I thought I was. I was surrounded by real criminals, guys in gangs like the Black Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords, the Black Kings. And I’m, like, Man, I’m a nice kid compared to these guys.

  You’d think the experience would have scared me straight, but whenever I got out, as much as I wanted to do something else, I couldn’t stay away from drugs for long. As a result, for a few years there I was regularly in and out of both jail and prison.

  One time, a friend and I were partying in Bl
oomington. On our way back, we got pulled over. My guy was out on bond on a case, so as we’re getting pulled over, he’s, like, “Please, Mike, take this pistol case for me. Say it’s your gun.”

  So the cop comes up to the driver’s side and takes our licenses and asks if we have anything in the car and I say, “Yeah, it’s my gun.”

  It wasn’t registered, obviously, so I took the rap on that. My guy bailed me out and everything, but when it went to court, the judge was talking crazy. He didn’t care about our fancy lawyers. He wanted me to do some real time. The good news was that I got put in the jail down there where I’d gotten picked up, which was near a college. It was a white jail, full of white guys with DUIs, and it was immaculate. It had carpet! That’s the only time I ever got locked up anywhere with carpet. I spent a year there, and it was the nicest time I ever did. I learned so much about white music, like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. I got to like it.

  A year later, a similar thing happened. The police pulled right up into the same friend’s yard, searched our car, and found my beautiful Colt .45. They thought it was his and we didn’t say anything, so that time he got charged with having the illegal gun.

  “I guess we even now,” he said as they took him away.

  I’d get out of jail and then I’d get caught and I’d go back in. Over and over.

  The last time, a judge named Webster Brewer sentenced me to do my backup time, because I violated my probation. I got sentenced to ten months back at the good old Marion County Jail. This was in the early 1990s, and I was in my early twenties.

  One condition of them finally letting me go was that I went to a work-release place for thirty days called Riverside Residential Center, on Pennsylvania Street in the middle of Naptown. While you were there you had to go find a job—but there was nothing out there. I tried places like Hardee’s, White Castle—but no one wanted me.

  The truth is I didn’t want them, either. I didn’t want to work fast food, period. I needed money, though. So I did the only job I knew how to do: I got a pager and a quarter ounce of cocaine powder. But it just wasn’t selling. It just wasn’t there for me anymore. I’d lost all my hustle.