“Yeah.”
Duck looked back onto the street, nodding his head slowly and rocking back on his heels. I could tell he was thinking something over, but I was still surprised by what he said next. “How about you bring me another package tomorrow and I’ll sell it for you?” he offered. “What would you pay for something like that?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Duck, the oldest and corniest of Miss June’s seven sons, was asking to be a corner boy. Right away I realized if he was serious it meant I wouldn’t have to go back to Techwood.
“Twenty off a hundred,” I said, offering him the standard corner-boy cut: for every hundred dollars he sold, I’d pay him twenty.
“All right,” he said. “I’m in.”
The next morning, Stephanie drove me to Markee’s. I bought another quarter, took it home, chopped and bagged it up. Then I went over to Miss June’s house to hand it off to Duck, just like we’d arranged.
He was leaning up against the fence in a pale green short-sleeve button-down shirt and sensible sneakers. The minute I saw him, I began to wonder if this was going to work. He looked like a school principal, not a drug dealer. The night before he’d served in the dark, and you couldn’t really see him. But in broad daylight it was obvious Duck didn’t look the part. I handed him the package then hung back for a while to see how things would go. That’s when I discovered there was another problem, Duck was using all kinds of manners.
“Thank you,” he said with a polite smile, every time a crackhead slid him some money. At Techwood, corner boys would blast their music, talk shit, and fuck with their customers. I once saw a dealer throw a rock into the bushes and yell to some crackheads nearby, “Go find that shit!” just for laughs. By comparison, Duck sounded like he was working the customer service counter at the Kmart. I wasn’t sure junkies would go for his corny-ass look and all this hospitality. But it turns out they loved it! Duck quickly got himself customers, repeat customers, and word-of-mouth customers.
“Crackheads is people too,” Duck said with a shrug, when I asked him why he treated junkies so nice. “Treat them how you want to be treated. Besides,” he added, “good customer service is how you beat out the competition.”
With Duck killing it in customer relations, I turned my attention to quality control. Crackheads are very particular. A lot of them were complaining about some dope in circulation that had been smuggled into Atlanta in the gas tanks of cars. They said it tasted like fumes and made them feel sick when they smoked it. None of them wanted to buy the shit. But the only way to know for sure if dope was any good was to sample it first. I needed a tester. Butterfly was perfect for the job.
Butterfly was about my age and looked like she might have been pretty before the crack got her. By the time I met her on Baldwin, she wore a ratty blond wig and, as far as I could tell, didn’t own a bra. But she was a good worker. Whenever I went to make a buy, I took her with me to test the product. If she gave my dope her crackhead stamp of approval, she’d spread the word faster than if I’d put it on CNN. “Rabbit got that good shit!” she’d tell everybody on the block. Pretty soon, Duck and I were moving half an ounce a night.
It was Duck’s idea for us to expand the business. He thought we should serve twenty-four hours a day. “I’ll take nights, you can take days,” he said. He put up some money so we could buy more product and we became partners. “We gonna make some real money,” Duck said.
At first I was skeptical about selling around the clock. I couldn’t imagine folks wanting to get high first thing in the morning. But I enrolled my babies in day care and hit the block a few days later, bright and early, at 8 a.m.
It turns out all kinds of people like to start off the day by hittin’ the pipe. And not all of them were extra-grimy crackhead zombies who’d been up all night, twitching and fidgeting, with paranoid eyeballs darting every which way. Some of my customers were high-functioning users who’d buy a dime bag from me, showered and dressed and on their way to work. I served janitors, construction workers and a nurse’s aid I recognized from Grady Hospital. I even had a mailman for a customer. Mr. Joe would hit me up dressed in his dark blue United States Postal Service uniform. I couldn’t figure out how he passed the drug test at his government job. Then one morning, he came by wearing regular clothes.
“You don’t deliver mail no more?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said. “That shit wasn’t for me. But lemme get a dime.”
At the liquor house, Granddaddy used to point at the drunks passed out in the living room and tell me, “Baby girl, you see these fucked-up muthafuckas? Don’t you never drink this shit. Y’hear me? Never.” He put the fear of God in me, making me think one sip was going to send me straight to hell. The way he talked, I got the idea that being an addict was a choice. But serving customers everyday on Baldwin, I began to wonder if he was right.
Crack seemed to have a different hold on folks than liquor did. Drunks would sober up and come to their senses in the morning. But once a crackhead got hooked all they did was chase that high. Even if it meant selling everything they owned for a hit: wedding rings, household appliances, their kids’ clothes. Anything that had been important didn’t matter anymore.
Sometimes I’d feel bad, like when I saw Mr. Joe, who used to look so neat and tidy in his mailman uniform, shuffling down the sidewalk with his TV in his arms, trying to sell his set for a couple of dime sacks of crack.
But other times, like when it was cold and rainy and I was standing on the corner for hours freezing my ass off, I didn’t feel bad for anybody but myself. When a crackhead came offering their prized possessions at bargain basement prices, I’d make a deal. I got myself a gold-plated Guess watch with a leather strap, a Samsung VCR player, and an entire set of dinner plates that featured the logo from one of my favorite TV shows. When Duck saw my new dishes he raised his eyebrows. “What the fuck you buy this for?”
“It’s from Dukes of Hazzard!”
“This ain’t from the TV show,” he said. “This is a picture of the gotdamn Confederate flag.”