The ambulance came and took me to Grady Hospital. In the ER, an old white doctor examined me. “She’s very lucky,” he said, turning to face the three student doctors who were hovering behind him with clipboards in their hands. The doctor moved my hospital gown and pointed to the side of my chest, under my right arm. “The bullet entered here, mid-axilla”—he touched me gently with his index finger—“and exited the areola, here.” He lifted my gown all the way up, so my full chest was on display.
I wanted to tell the student doctors if they kept staring at my titties, I was gonna start charging. But I could tell by the way none of them looked me in the eye that they weren’t interested in anything I had to say.
“Had the bullet entered on the left,” the doctor continued, with his back to me, “it likely would have severed her superior vena cava.” His students nodded, solemnly. I hated the way the doctor was talking like I wasn’t even there. Like I was invisible.
“Hey!” I called out, interrupting his lecture. “What’s that mean? Vena cava what?”
This doctor barely turned around to answer me. “It means if the bullet had gone in your left side, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said.
One of the young doctors, a sister with glasses and her hair in twists, glanced up from her clipboard. She must have seen the look of confusion on my face, because she said to me: “He means we wouldn’t be here talking about you, because you’d be dead.”
Considering I almost died, I guess I got off easy. All I had was a shot-up nipple. And who needs two good nipples anyway?
The real damage was in my head. For weeks, I kept waking up in the middle of the night hearing the crack of gunfire ringing in my ears. I wanted to talk it over it with Duck, tell him how scared I’d been, but I didn’t get a chance. Duck was tired of my bullshit. He’d had enough.
He broke up with me while the two of us were sitting on his mama’s porch one evening, watching the night roll in. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming. The way he laid it out, it was obvious he had a long-ass list of things he was fed up with: me fighting with Derrick in the middle of the street and bringing the cops to the block; me being a smart-ass with The Mexican and almost getting us killed; and now me getting my nipple blown off and bringing damn near a fleet of paramedics and police officers right inside his mama’s house, when I knew good and gotdamn well she was holding our dope in her top dresser drawer. All of it together—plus my loud music and flashy car, my hot head and fast mouth—he was done. “You’re bringing too much attention,” he said. “You’re bringing heat to the block.”
He tried to be nice about it. “It’s not you . . .” he added. “You and me will always be cool. It’s just I think it’s time we did our own thing. You know, separate. You go your way, I go mine. You understand?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I lied. “We cool.”
Sitting beside Duck as the sky grew dark, I realized I’d never told him how much he meant to me, or that I looked up to him. I’d never told him he was the only person in the whole world I trusted or how much I appreciated that he’d never done me wrong.
I wanted to say something to him that night. But I didn’t know how.
When we split up, Duck gave me fifty thousand dollars in cash, my half of the profit he’d been holding in the paper bag in the bottom of his dirty clothes hamper. He nodded his head in the direction of Ashby Grove, a few blocks away from Baldwin. “Nobody’s holding it down over there,” he said. “You could set up your own trap. I bet you’d make yourself some real good money, too.”
Chapter 18
Aim Higher
You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a safe place to hide a Ziploc baggie full of crack. Before Duck broke up with me, this wasn’t a problem. I’d pay Miss June a hundred dollars a day and she’d stash a package in her top dresser drawer, right beside her King James Bible. When I was serving on Baldwin and needed to re-up, all I had to do was run inside real quick and grab a few rocks. I didn’t realize how good I had it until I went into business for myself, hustling over on Ashby Grove.
At first I tried hiding my packages in bushes, downspouts, or underneath a rock. But with landlords, little kids, and stray dogs, it seemed like there was always somebody sniffing around. Then I started stashing my dope in the mailbox on the corner. I’d tape it to the top of the mail slot. Or, if I saw a police car easing down the block, I’d just toss my dope down the chute. When the mailman came to open up the box at the start of his shift, he’d hand me my package and I’d pay him fifty dollars.
Sometimes I’d pay him with electronics my customers had traded me for dope. Once I gave him a practically brand-new stolen Panasonic VCR; another time I gave him a four-slice toaster, still in the box. He was pretty happy, for a postal worker.
After I’d been on Ashby for a couple of months, we got a new mailman. This guy was not with the program. The first time he opened up the bottom of the mailbox and found my dope, he looked at me with an expression of disapproval I hadn’t seen since Principal Dixon whooped my ass for stealing Mercedes’s ham and cheese sandwich back in third grade. “Look,” he said, scowling at me. “This is federal government property. You can’t be throwing your shit in here. You understand what I’m saying?”
Then I was back to square one, trying to find a safe and convenient place to hide my supply. I didn’t have a whole lot of options. In fact, as far as I could tell, I didn’t have any. That’s how I ended up getting the girls involved. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I didn’t have a choice.
The girls—Tata, Tomeeka, Cece, and Little Cee—had all come to live with me a few months before Duck and I split up. My cousin Tata was the first to move in. She was Aunt Vanessa’s thirteen-year-old daughter. I’d stopped by their house one day and found Tata sitting on the floor, braiding her little sister’s hair. I didn’t know Tata could do hair. But she was doing a real nice job. Her little sister had a head full of braids and beads, looking like a tiny Rick James.
“Y’all want to come spend the night?” I asked my cousin. I figured we could watch TV while Tata braided Ashley’s hair and saved me a trip to the salon. “Family Matters is on.”
Of course Tata said yes. Not just because I had a big-screen TV but also because Aunt Vanessa’s place was like all seven circles of hell. There were more than a dozen people staying in her little shit box of a house, including Aunt Vanessa’s eight kids and four grandkids, her boyfriend Louie, and my uncle Peewee. The place stank like stale cigarette smoke, spilled Schlitz Malt Liquor, and weed.