We would post up, acting like we were waiting to catch the bus. When the 32 pulled up we’d tell the driver we were waiting for the 34, and when the 34 pulled up we’d say we were waiting for the 32. We’d be there for hours on end.
The Texaco was run by an Asian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kim. Mr. Kim knew what was going on and for a while he was on our ass. He’d come outside and tell us to get away from the store and threaten to call the police. We’d leave for a couple of hours and come back. Sometimes we’d just tell him to step off. Eventually he gave up on trying to keep us out of there. We weren’t going anywhere. I always wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Kim know how infamous their little gas station is.
On Bouldercrest I’m sellin’ dope at Texaco
And Mr. Kim keep sayin’ “Get ’way from sto!”
No, I can’t get ’way from sto, I got so much blow, it gotta go
—“I’m a Star” (2008)
It wasn’t some glamorous New Jack City type of shit. Countless nights I stood in the pouring rain, making plays, cold as hell, blowing into my hands to try to keep warm. It was the trenches.
A whole bunch of serious fights and shootouts went down at the Texaco too. It was the fall of 1997 when Javon got beat damn near to death outside the Texaco. Javon was OJ’s best friend and a homeboy of mine. He got stomped out—fucked up really, really bad.
I felt terrible when I found out what had happened to Javon at the gas station. And I was concerned. Because I knew those niggas hadn’t been out there looking for him. They’d come up looking for me.
Javon had been a casualty in an ongoing beef me and my boys had with a crew who called themselves the East Shoals Boys. The East Shoals Boys were from the other side of town, Decatur. Like the kids I’d gone to school with in Ellenwood, they weren’t exactly well off, but they came from more nurturing environments than the crime-ridden projects I’d come up in. But they lived in the same school zone and attended McNair, which is where the Sun Valley Boys and the East Shoals Boys first butted heads.
On the last day of school my junior year—the spring of ’97—a bunch of seniors had a huge food fight in the cafeteria. I’m sitting there and a whole bunch of shit got splattered all over me.
Immediately I stood up and walked over to the perpetrators. It was the baseball team. I slapped the shit out of one of them. Everyone, especially the one I slapped, was shocked. This was a senior and a jock and here was a junior slapping him silly in front of the whole cafeteria. He was so shook that he didn’t do a damn thing about it.
Days later me and my buddies ran into the baseball team at a girl’s graduation party in Decatur. There were maybe eight of us, but there were probably sixty of these dudes from that neighborhood. The minute they saw us, it was a problem.
Shit, we’re about to get crushed.
They started grabbing baseball bats and the steering-wheel clubs from their cars and things were looking bad. They surrounded us and punked us out, but somehow we were able to get into our cars and get out of there without punches thrown. All in all a light confrontation.
But these dudes were still pissed and now it wasn’t just the baseball team. After the confrontation at the party, that whole neighborhood took up those boys’ cause, feeling like we had come in and disrespected their turf.
The school year was over, but throughout the summer I was hearing these guys were after me. When I started my senior year that fall, there were niggas roaming the halls looking for me. These weren’t even guys who went to McNair. These were grown men from that hood.
After I heard what happened to Javon I knew I had to take action. Problem was I didn’t have a lot of friends who were still at McNair. Save for OJ, all my friends were older than me. All the Sun Valley Boys had either graduated or dropped out. I was on my own at school.
“You need to come to school with me tomorrow,” I told my buddy BP back at the apartments. “I can’t show up there alone.”
The next morning me and my crew boarded the school bus. Most of them had no business being on the bus, but the driver gave a nod of approval as we stepped on.
“Y’all better win,” she told us. Even the bus driver had heard about what happened to Javon. She knew what time it was.
BP was fired up that morning. There was only one reason this nigga was headed back to his alma mater and that was to whoop some ass.
“Hey!” he screamed to the rest of the kids on the school bus. “Y’all are gonna help us fight or else we’re gonna beat your fucking asses too when we get back to the apartments.”
We had rallied up a crew of fifteen by the time we got to the school and there were around the same number of East Shoals Boys there waiting for us. BP didn’t waste any time getting to it. He walked right up to one of them and knocked him out cold. It was on and poppin’ from there. We fought for a long-ass time, beating the shit out of these dudes with chairs and all sorts of stuff lying around.
Satisfied with the beating we’d put on them, we took off running up Bouldercrest back to the apartments. We cheered as the police and ambulances zoomed past. We hid out the rest of the day at my buddy Dontae’s and waited for things to die down.
VI
* * *
LAFLARE
I graduated from McNair in the spring of 1998 with a 3.0 GPA and a HOPE scholarship to Georgia Perimeter College. But I was doing pretty well for myself in the streets, so going back to school was the last thing on my mind. So I didn’t go. I think they call that a gap year.
After I sat out the first two semesters, my momma gave me three options: go to school, get a job, or move out of her house. Since school was never difficult for me, enrolling at Georgia Perimeter seemed like the easiest option to keep her off my back.
I was an outsider at Georgia Perimeter. Whenever I did show up it was for the sole purpose of showing out. I had me a box Chevy with rims at the time and I’d pull up and hang out in the parking lot and try to talk to the coeds. I’d see my old classmates from McNair and how they were going through the whole college transition, trying to get their lives together. And there I was, pulling up in a nice car, with jewelry on my neck and dope-man Nike Air Maxes on my feet. I was flashy as hell. I liked shining on people. I was above it all.
That was pretty much the extent of my college experience. I don’t have stories of frat parties or tailgating or whatever it is they do there. I was enrolled in some computer programming classes but I could count on both hands the number of times I showed up to class. When I first enrolled I worked the school out of like eighteen hundred dollars for textbooks. I took every dollar of that money and put it towards getting myself a bigger bomb. That’s how serious I was about my studies.
My schooling would officially come to an end after I got busted at the Texaco. It was April 2001, my second semester at Georgia Perimeter.
Apparently an undercover cop had been watching me for a few days, and he found the bushes where I was keeping my stash at, a stash of about ninety bags of crack. I was in the gas station when he walked up and flashed his badge.