Run (7 page)

A nice plan. A sweet plan.

But a little too much of a plan for something that’s supposed to be a milk run.

We’re almost to the door when Jules says: I’ll see you at the wedding.

That one’s so far out of left field that I don’t have a word for him. So I just say: Wedding?

Sunday? he tells me.

Then I remember. The invitation. To the wedding. His daughter, his only daughter, Meredith, the one in the photo he keeps on the Famous Desk. She’s getting married on Sunday, and Jules has hit the big time: She’s marrying a senator’s son.

I’ll be there, I tell him. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.

As Jules shows me the door, he draws me into an awkward hug and says:

Burdon Lane. You’re my coonhound, son. You never bark up the wrong tree, do you?

I get the feeling I’m the kid being sent off to his first day of school.

He says: Don’t go changing that now.

So now we got niggers.

This is the kind of thing that comes along and makes you wonder, late at night, covers to the chin, when maybe all the world but you is sleeping, whether you can walk this walk forever. The kind of thing that tickles you with how you’re going to be fifty years old, and soon. How you really might be needing Social Security after all. The kind of thing that worms around inside you and then starts to dig and dig deep and, sooner or later, makes you crazy.

U Street’s been walking their walk for five years, maybe more, boiling up out of the days when the gangbangers were a bunch of punk nobodies, loudmouthed kids who carried scrap iron and ponied white daddy for the mob. Until the day came when the mob was gone and mobbing took over. There was a shakeout, there was a body count, and then there was the U Street Crew.

Fact of life: There are the guys you elect and then there are the guys who really run things. Sometimes, not that often but sometimes, they just happen to be the same guys. Happens a lot over there in Dirty City.

But nobody elected Doctor D, the man behind U Street. Born Deacon Bailey. Fifteen-year-old mother, father unknown, raised by an aunt when his mother sucked too much cock and crack and died at the ripe old age of twenty. Started as a lowlife turf bandit in a jumbled graffiti-marred
wasteland they call Montana Terrace and worked his way up, pimping, moving drugs, moving guns, moving money, and pretty soon he’s got his posse. These guys are predators, and it’s not about the block, not about the hood, it’s about lebensraum. They move upstream, getting out of retail and into wholesale. One day the good doctor gets indicted for four homicides, assault, reckless endangerment, use of a firearm in a crime of violence, obstructing justice, everything but a parking ticket. Nobody would talk, so nothing would stick. Newspapers call him the “Teflon Con.” He orders killings like they’re pizza, mostly rival cocaine lords, gets cuffed, and rides out a couple months in D.C. jail before the prosecutors no-paper him, let him walk. First day out, he puts down the Low Four Crew, personally blows the balls off a renegade dealer in front of about a hundred people, none of them available to testify at trial. Not guilty. Now he’s King of the Streets, probably employs as many people as Washington Gas and keeps half the city, the Mayor included, supplied with crack and smack.

Another American Dream come true.

But it does make life a bitch for us businessmen. Dirty City was a major market for us, and this kind of action cuts into the profit margin. Hard to say whether life’s better with these guys or without them. I mean, consider what the gangbangers did to the straw-man game.

Round about midnight on the third of April, 1991, somebody took some target practice on the corner of 14th and H Streets North West. That’s about—what? Two blocks from the White House. It was a classic drive-by. A pimp by the name of Maurice Overby did a swan dive into the gutter with a new zipper cut into his chest and throat. Near his body they found eleven spent casings and an Intratec DC-9 assault pistol.

Decent weapon, the TEC-9. Converted to full auto, it spits twenty rounds in the blink of an eye. Couple years later, some wacko walked one into D.C. Police Headquarters and, can you believe it, took out a cop and two FBI agents. And he still had a round for himself.

The TEC-9 that did Maurice Overby was purchased at the Richmond Police Equipment Company. Bill of sale read Otis Campbell. ATF Form 4473 read Otis Campbell. But this Otis Campbell guy owned the gun for maybe twenty, thirty minutes.

It’s called the straw-purchase scam, and here’s how it worked. We would camp out in Richmond or Roanoke and recruit the usual suspects—homeless, drug addicts, welfare types—and send them off to the gun shops with a shopping list and a fistful of dollars. One old lady, Aunt Becka they called her, eighty years old if she was a day, bought about sixty handguns for us in three months. She did work, and she got paid: Twenty-five bucks a gun. Probably paid the rent and bought her grandkids some toys and clothes, which is a lot more than George Bush ever did for them.

The straw-purchase scam couldn’t last. Especially when the Stanton Terrace Crew and the 1-5 Mob started going at each other. And then along comes U Street. Too much competition.

But once it’s over, the Feds, as always, finally wake up and it’s an election year, so they come down hard. On who? The gun stores. Plugged Richmond Police Equipment for filing false sales reports. Lennie Skittings owned that store. Nice guy. Single father, couple kids, trying to pay off the mortgage like the rest of us. People come by, show the right kind of ID, fill out the right forms, pay with the right bills, what’s he supposed to do? So Lennie Skittings pleads guilty, closes down his store, and then one fine Saturday he takes a long ride into the country and blows his mind out with a .38.

Gangbangers started simple. Back in the days, they would break into houses, usually one of the neighbors, to steal their guns. Then they got on to the straw-man game. Now they got the drugs, so they got the money, and they get volume discounts. They get deals. They get all-expense-paid trips to New York City.

Like CK says, as if it needed saying: You got to remember one thing. You can’t trust these guys. They’ll kill their brother; shit, they’ll kill their mother if she gets in the way. They kill each other all the time. And if they kill each other, where do you think a white guy stands when he comes round the neighborhood?

So: You can eat with these guys, you can drink with these guys, and, if Jules Berenger says it, you can goddamn work with these guys.

But you cannot trust them.

A couple black guys used to run with me. One of them, guy named
Abednego Jones, was smart. I’m not talking street-smart, though he had all that stuff too. AJ was
smart
.

Tell you how smart this Abednego Jones guy was: He retired. AJ was putting his money aside, or maybe he skimmed some here and there, and one day he just said: Thanks, but no thanks. Bought himself a little house in Sarasota and moved his wife down there and sits in the sun all day long, feeds the birds, goes fishing when he wants. I wonder if he gets a tan.

Now I wouldn’t have called Abednego Jones a nigger, and I might have killed anybody who did. Unless AJ killed the guy first, because AJ sure did have a temper. But these guys, these gangbanging pieces of shit? They like the name. I mean, you listen to that rap crap, these guys are calling each other nigger all the time. It’s like any other name when you find yourself at the ass end of life: You get it, then you wear it the best you can.

And speak of the devil, there are the U Street guys when I get back to the warehouse floor. I see CK shaking hands with the little one, Juan E, who’s all lit up like it’s New Year’s Eve, and I realize then that the other one, the Yellow Nigger, isn’t paying one bit of attention to his buddy or to CK.

Instead he’s staring at the guy at the bottom of the steps. At me.

Sunup on a lazy morning, with one day to go. So it’s Thursday. There’s a Pontiac in a parking lot and a sky that looks like puke. Two Hand and I are backseat to CK and Mackie, laying bets on the Orioles-Mariners game. I’m in for $500, and that dimwit Mackie gave me the Mariners and 3. The Pontiac’s outside the Dollar Bill Motel on Route 1, just south of Alexandria on the road to Mount Vernon, where, after we lay those bets, we lock and load. Time to eyeball the troops.

When it’s time for crime, you need to know who’s running with you. Inside this dump are the six guys who can get us arrested, maybe even get us killed. Our African American brothers.

The place is no flophouse but it makes your average Quality Inn look like the Four Seasons. Two little one-story rectangles. All the rooms—all twenty-five, thirty of them—face in, which means they face each other. A scenic view. We stroll across the parking lot and into this open-air corridor of twenty-bucks-a-night splendor, and Renny counts down the row of rooms to our right: 17, 16, 15, pow. He leans into the black wrought-iron column outside Room 14; and he’s got the oowop, an Uzi, beneath his raincoat. I stand away from the window, right at the door to 15 and make like I’m taking a smoke. CK nods to Mackie, and Mackie nods back, slips a Smith & Wesson .40 from his belt. He keeps
the pistol nose down, reaches his left hand across, and knock-knocks the door to 14.

Open sesame.

Mackie’s inside, then CK, and I wink at Renny Two Hand and take the plunge. Renny follows, pulls the door closed behind him, and hail, hail, the gang’s all here.

It’s a tiny room and the double bed doesn’t leave much room for company. The bed’s got Juan E with a blunt, a bottle of brew, and a huddle of his homeys.

I look around and back and what we’ve got is a six-man chunk of the U Street Crew and each one of them is wearing $300 sneakers and droopy pants and a surly smile and the one thing I think is that these guys are kids. Juan E’s eighteen if he’s a day; none of the others can be older than twenty-one, twenty-five tops. Except the Yellow Nigger. And he’s way over in the corner, alone, hidden behind the same old pair of shades, wearing them inside, at 6:00 a.m., lost in some waking dream and watching TV, it’s on ESPN if he can see it. He’s an old-timer in this crew. Ancient. Maybe even thirty-five. Too many of these guys die, by the trigger or consecutive sentences. These guys have been banging, and once you go banging, you don’t ever come back. Come eighteen years, they’ve shot, been shot at, been to juvenile hall six or seven times, been locked up and locked down; they’ve seen it all, maybe more than me. Maybe.

Yo, cuz, says the closest kid, the one with the headband. White meat in the house.

Fuck you, says Mackie, ever the diplomat. But he pockets his pistol.

Then we’ve got the handshakes and jive bullshit all around. The bald one, gangly and grins, is Django, and that’s Lil Ace in the USC sweatshirt, and then there’s Malik, one of those flash-frozen guys who’s most definitely got a body count, and finally the one with the headband, that’s … Headband.

Hey. Hi. Hey there. How ya doin? I mean, just what do you say to a roomful of gangbangers? Well, leave it to Mackie the Lackey:

Who you guys down with? The Bloods? Crips?

So now we’ve got silence.

Juan E gives Mackie the Wile E. Coyote stare, but Mackie keeps going.

C’mon, says fucking Henry Kissinger. What colors are you running with?

Juan E elbows this Django guy next to him, and this Django guy makes some kind of funny sign with the fingers of his right hand. The homeys, all but the Yellow Nigger, who looks maybe stoned or asleep in front of that TV, nod and laugh, nod and laugh, and finally Juan E curls his lip and says:

You don’t know nothin, man. Bloods, Crips, colors … fuck that shit. USC beyond all that, you know what I’m sayin? We ain’t just a set, we the whole damn ball of wax. D.C. is ours, mothafucka. Chocolate City, you know what I’m sayin? We own the street. And the war’s over, baby, ain’t you heard? It’s over. Nigga runnin for the White House now. Pretty soon we gonna call it the Black House.

Another elbow. Hands slapping. Laugh, laugh, laugh.

But Mackie says, Wait a minute. You talking about this guy who wants to be Vice President? Shit, man, he’s no nigger. He’s a Republican.

That gets a good enough laugh, but then out of the chatter comes a low voice, like some deep Hennessy and five-packs-a-day shit, and it’s this iceman Malik and he’s saying:

It’s over, baby. Niggas ain’t killin niggas no more. We gots bigger fish to fry. Like cod and cat. You know what I’m talkin bout? White fish.

Yeah, right. It’s CK and you can tell he’s had enough. You got drugs and you got guns, CK says. Let the revolution begin.

Juan E turns on him. You ain’t listenin, mothafucka. These are righteous soldiers, you know what I’m sayin? New Afrika.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, CK tells him. Well, I’m an old-timer, see. Traditionalist. Believe in family values, school prayer, knowing your place. Guess I kind of like Old Africa better.

Hey, cuz, Headband says to Juan E. I ain’t down with this jainky shit. And I sure ain’t gonna go with no Mzungu.

Mackie leans toward Headband, says: What is that, fuckface, some kind of Zulu bullshit? Muslim talk?

Headband looks at Mackie like he’s seeing him for the first time. You on this planet or you just too busy bein white? Ain’t no Muslim
language
,
man. Ain’t no such thing. Ever heard of Arabic? Kiswahili? That’s you I’m talkin bout, white boy. You the Mzungu, devil.

Cool, Two Hand whispers to me, and before Mackie can squat and drop another stinking turd on this get-together I step up and say:

Hey. Whoa. Time out. Maybe I walked into the wrong room, but I thought this little chat was about something we could do for you, and that you just might do for us. And if we did this thing together, then all of us would make money. Lots of money. It’s a nice thing, money. It’s got nothing to do with colors. Except green. So why don’t we skip the shit-kicking this time and just get the fuck along?

I wave in CK’s direction. This here’s Mr. Kruikshank. He’s running this show. And—

And I’ve got a little something for you, CK says, right on cue. Mackie? You want to get the bag?