“It’s cool, man,” he told me. “Just don’t fuck with that guy. That’s the type of nigga who will actually kill you.”
He went on to give me another four hundred dollars’ worth of dope because he felt bad. So I turned that bad situation to my benefit. Now I was up four hundred dollars.
Still, I was far from happy about the episode. Getting robbed shook me up. Ever since I’d moved to East Atlanta I’d seen plenty of kids in the hood get jumped and have their shit snatched, but not once had that happened to me. I think a lot of those older stickup boys spared me because they were cool with my brother. But I knew then I couldn’t depend on that anymore. All bets were off.
When I came home that night I told Duke. He wasn’t keen on how deep I was getting in the streets, but we were in agreement that I needed to be able to protect myself. I needed to get me a strap. Duke didn’t sell dope but even he kept a pistol in his car. That was just a wise precautionary measure living in Zone 6.
A few days later Duke went to the pawn shop. You could be in and out of there with a weapon in no time. He got me a .380 and a box of bullets. This thing ended up being the most bullshit gun of all time. You could run up on someone and pull the trigger from point-blank range and still miss.
Of course I didn’t know that when my brother handed it to me. I had never fired a gun.
That night I took a walk to nearby Glen Emerald Park. I pointed my new pistol to the sky and pulled the trigger until the clip was empty.
Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!
Getting robbed was a turning point. Instead of making me retreat into my shell out of fear, it had the opposite effect. I became superaggressive. I knew when I shot my gun in the air that night that no one was going to take anything from me again. I would straighten out my business and everyone was going to know that if you fucked with me, there would be repercussions.
V
* * *
TEXACO
When I was fifteen, Duke moved out to start basic training for the US Army. Football hadn’t worked out. After he left, things got real bad at home.
My father had been deteriorating for years. It finally reached a breaking point. All he lived for was the bottle. He didn’t have any hustle left. He’d still go out to con folks, but he was so fucked up, no one was falling for his shit anymore. He got to be so delusional that he’d even try to con me. He’d drink until he got sick, go to the VA hospital, come home, and do it all over again.
“I can’t go square for nobody,” I remember him saying.
Soon after Duke left my parents got into a fight. Not verbal. Physical. That was uncommon, so the image remains clear in my head: my father hitting my momma across the face with the end of the vacuum cleaner, her falling to the ground as he stood over her and spit in her face. I tried to jump in but my father grabbed me by my throat, snatched the gold necklace he had given me clean off my neck, and threw me out of the way. The police came and my father was taken away on charges of domestic violence.
Gucci wasn’t a bad person. No one who knew him would say he was. Ask any of my cousins in Alabama and I bet you they’d all say he was their favorite uncle. He was fun to be around, always offering words of encouragement for anyone he came across. Underneath his demons was a kind spirit. A good heart.
I’ve heard my cousin Suge compare me and my father to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and his pops. Floyd Sr. was a boxer and every bit the showman his son is. He taught his son everything he knew. The defense. The shoulder roll. The stiff jab. With his daddy’s skills Floyd Mayweather Jr. did what his father hadn’t been able to: put all the pieces together and become the greatest boxer of his generation.
Suge likens that story to me and my daddy, but the truth is I’m still putting the pieces together. I just think my father was never cut out for the whole family thing. Gucci could be the life of the party but in a lot of ways the man was a loner. He may have just been better off in life by himself. I loved my father, as did my momma, but there was nothing we could do for him. He was too far gone. His addiction was stronger than he was and it was tearing apart our home.
My brother went AWOL from the AIT school and came back home after I told him about the incident. Duke and Gucci’s relationship had been strained for years. My brother did not want him coming back to the house.
Soon after my father’s arrest we moved to another set of apartments off Bouldercrest called Sun Valley. Like Mountain Park, Sun Valley was infested with drugs and our new apartment was perched at the top of Sun Valley, which just so happened to be the spot where niggas sold dope.
There was constant traffic, so the move accelerated my hustle.
The top of Sun Valley was a prime trap, but at first I found it hard to compete with the older hustlers who operated there. The only reason I managed to was that I lived where I did. I would wait for those guys to retire for the night, seizing my opportunity to get my sacks off.
OJ moved from Mountain Park to Sun Valley around the same time I did. OJ and I had been buddies since the days of picking up cans, but because he was three years younger than me we’d mostly ran with different crews since then. Despite our difference in age OJ had been out on the corner hustling as long as I’d been. And he was good at it. OJ was a small guy, but he was never afraid to fight when shit went down. I always respected that.
When OJ moved to Sun Valley he moved to the bottom end of the apartments, so he really wasn’t allowed to trap at the top. So he’d either be at the bottom, where they sold the weed, or he was up on Bouldercrest by the Texaco gas station. A lot of the time I was up there with him. Me and OJ have rapped about the damn Texaco so many times, so let me set the scene.
The Texaco is a place of trade, a spot where people can go to the store to buy a beer and some Swishers, then get some dope on their way out. A lot of folks preferred to go up there to shop—especially those who weren’t completely fucked-up Js. Functioning crackheads, if such a thing ever did exist. I’m talking about people with jobs and families, but they still smoked crack. They’d rather come to the Texaco than have their kids and neighbors see them buy dope in the apartments.
The gas station is positioned on a busy five-way intersection. Custer Avenue connects with Bouldercrest. Bouldercrest connects with Fayetteville and Flat Shoals. Flat Shoals connects with Brannen Road. There’s always traffic and there are two MARTA buses that stop there. The 32 Bouldercrest and the 34 Gresham. Years later OJ founded his rap label, 32 Entertainment, named after that bus stop.