“Yeah, I got this,” I lied. I slid my razor blade and chopped my first rock.
It took me almost an hour to cut up that quarter. Nikia finished his bottle and fell asleep while Ashley stayed busy pushing her little plastic shopping cart around the apartment and filling it with the fake fruits and vegetables that were all over the floor. She rolled her buggy into the kitchen and tried to hand me a plastic apple from her cart, but I told her, “Mama’s working,” and shooed her away.
“Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four . . .” I counted when I was done, pushing each rock to the side of the plate with the razor. There were only forty-eight rocks in all; I was two short.
“I knew you was gonna do that!” Stephanie called from the other room. “That just cost you twenty dollars.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I called back. “I wasn’t about to spend it on you.”
I bagged up the rocks, put them in a sandwich bag, and shoved them in my purse, and we all got back into Stephanie’s car. We dropped the kids off at her mama’s place. Then Stephanie and I headed to Techwood Homes to try and make some money.
We found a spot not far from a chili-dog truck that hadn’t already been claimed by a dealer. Stephanie pulled up to the curb and started fiddling with her sound system. She was listening to her favorite, Salt-N-Pepa, on repeat. Everybody said Stephanie looked just like Salt, with her stacked bob pinned back on one side, long on the other. I guess she felt it was her duty to memorize all the lyrics.
I got out of the car while Stephanie danced in her seat, rapping along, “Ooh baby baby. Bay bay bay baby, get up on this!”
It felt like a long time that I was leaning up against the hood of her ride waiting for something to happen. Finally I saw a scrawny dude walking quickly toward me, his T-shirt tucked tightly into the waist of his high-water jeans. “You looking for something?” I asked.
“Yeah, lemme get a twenty,” he said.
“I only got dimes.”
“That it?”
“Yeah, man. It’s real good, though.”
“Aiight, lemme get two.” He slid a couple of crumpled ten-dollar bills into the palm of my hand. I reached into my pocket, pulled out two dime bags and passed them back. It was that simple.
It took me three nights at Techwood to get rid of that first quarter. With the cash I made, I paid Stephanie back her fifteen, got my hair done, and took the kids to eat. I was about to take care of the rent when I had a thought: Why spend all this money when I can double it instead? So Stephanie and I put the kids back in the car and took another ride out to Markee’s mama’s place. I scored another quarter, bagged it up at my kitchen table, and headed back out to Techwood. When that dope was gone, I did it again.
Making my own money felt good. For the first time I didn’t have to depend on Mama, Derrick, or welfare. Buying, chopping, bagging, and selling, it was all on me. I was in charge. A month after I started serving at Techwood, Markee bailed Derrick out of jail. I could have gone back to the way things used to be, with Derrick making all the money and me taking care of the kids. But it was too late for that. Once I got a taste of doing for myself, there was no way I was ever going back.
Chapter 14
Night Crawlers
The first dealer I heard about getting killed at Techwood was Silky. He was popped execution style with a bullet through his head. The next week another dealer went down, shot twelve times, his body dumped in the woods. Then a dope boy at Harris Homes was shot working his corner. Pretty soon all anybody talked about were the drive-bys and gunfights and corners getting shot up like the Wild West.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just Atlanta dealers firing at each other with handguns. But all that crack money brought gangbangers to town. The Miami Boys invaded Atlanta in the late 1980s like rats on a garbage pile. At first it looked like there were only a few of them, then suddenly they were everywhere, armed with semiautomatics and submachine guns that could tear up a whole block in seconds.
We could spot the Miami Boys a mile away. They wore Timberland boots even in the summertime, and tan-colored coveralls—like what a car mechanic would wear—that everybody called “trap suits,” because in Atlanta, anyplace where you can buy drugs is a “trap.” Plus, they all rocked gold teeth, top and bottom, sometimes decorated with diamond studs that spelled out miami. Atlanta dealers might sport a single gold tooth. But a diamond-encrusted grill? We’d never seen anything like that before.
The Miami Boys were trying to take over all the projects: Capital Homes, University Homes, Harris Homes, and Techwood. I knew they didn’t care about a small-time nobody like me. But still, they brought so much murder and mayhem to Techwood, I was scared from the second Stephanie and I pulled up to my spot in front of the chili-dog truck until the minute we left to go home.
We hadn’t been out by the chili-dog truck for more than an hour when we heard shots firing in the distance, Pop! Pop! Pop! And then more gunfire, this time rat-a-tat-tat-tat like a jackhammer.
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?