What's Really Hood!: A Collection of Tales From the Streets (7 page)

Her mother’s words echoed in Crystal’s soul, even though they had been spoken over a month ago. She just couldn’t get them
out of her head, and even though she knew her mother was right, she couldn’t get crack out of her system. It was slowly consuming
her, becoming the god she worshipped and the religion she devoutly practiced. Every step she took toward the crack house made
her heart race faster and her self-respect drop lower.

Crystal had questioned herself many times about how she had reached this point in her life. She had good parents, a good home
and two years put in at Rutgers University, but she had let it all go at a club party on Chancellor six months ago.

Flashing lights… movin’ to the beat

The blue light blazed and sweaty black hormones grinded to the sounds of Secret Weapon, and Crystal was having the time of
her life. She loved to dance, to be in a crowd of dancing people, passing joints and drinking Pink Champale. Her head was
buzzing and her man of choice was fine enough to really make her express her rhythm. So when her girl Tricia showed her the
slim glass cylinder, eyes glazed and shaky-handed, she didn’t skip a beat.

“What’s this?” Crystal yelled over the groove, as she took the pipe in her hand.

“Th-th-that’s that shit,” Tricia replied through her numbed senses. “And these nigguhs got plenty of it!” She gestured toward
the cat whose party it was. A face Crystal didn’t know, but you would know as belonging to Wiz.

Crystal looked at the rocklike substance stuffed in one end of the pipe, curiously, as the party continued around her.

Is it all over my face? Hell yeah! Cause

I’m in love dancin’!

She had sniffed coke before, and it really didn’t faze her, so what she had in her hands didn’t send off any warning signals
about what she was doing. She put the pipe to her lips and the lighter to the opposite tip, illumining her blue-lighted skin
with an ominous orange hue. The rock sizzled and snapped its way into smoke, curling and filling the pipe, tumbling toward
her inhalation, and when it reached her… it spoke.
Crystal… welcome home, baby, welcome home… feel that? Yeah, you feel that… you know what that is?… me… don’t I tingle?… tingle
like a thousand kisses… let me in, Crystal, I promise
(it snickered)
I’ll be gooood to you. Because I know… know. What you need, Crystal. I know your secrets. About the abortion no one else knows
about. That you’re afraid to be ridiculed for, shamed for. I don’t judge you, I agree. You don’t need a baby… all you need…
is me.

I’m caught up! In a one-night love affair…

Crystal’s downfall was her sense of motivation. When she wanted something, she didn’t rest until she got it.
When she wanted to run track, she didn’t rest until she brought home all-city. When she wanted to go to college, she didn’t
rest until her SATs stood out. So now that she wanted to get high, she couldn’t rest until she stayed that way.

Crystal had basically been homeless since her mother put her out. She slept in crack dens or crackhead’s apartments on the
rare occasion that she did rest. Her days were filled with chasing the pipe, boosting clothes and selling her body if all
else failed. Nothing and no one would stop her from that blast. Not the streets, not her momma and definitely not the fool
ganking at her in a gold-kitted Jetta.

She wasn’t what Wiz’s standards considered a fly girl. She was cute, no doubt, real cute. Her caramel complexion and doe-shaped
eyes gave her face a sensual innocence that Wiz admired. Her shape wasn’t ghetto thick but her firm breasts stood out against
her T-shirt, tantalizing his gaze. It wasn’t her gear either, because she was dressed average: T-shirt, windbreaker and sweatpants,
along with a pair of electric blue 54.11 aerobic Reeboks. It was her style, the way she carried herself, head up, like a woman
with a purpose, a direction. He had no idea which direction she was headed in.

He turned the corner and drove down Goldsmith to his crack spot. On this side of town the feens were less conspicuous, but
no less plentiful. He watched his team of little nigguhs, Lil Mike, Nu-Nu and Pills, handle the customers one after the other.
He ran Goldsmith differently from Chadwick. Here the house only served as a
stash spot, while his team played the block. Pills held the money, Nu-Nu held the work and Lil Mike held the heat.

Wiz parked his car in the middle of the street, because Goldsmith was divided by a concrete partition that doubled as a parking
lane. When he got out, his young team gathered around him.

“What up, homeslice?” Pills, the youngest at fourteen, greeted him while lighting a cigarette. “When you gonna let me push
the whip?”

Wiz chuckled. “Mutherfucka, when you buy it.”

Pills pulled out four large stacks of money, rubber-banded together. “Shit, I got the money right here.”

Wiz took the money and put it in his glove compartment. “Yeah, you got
my
money right here.” Wiz checked his watch. “And didn’t I tell y’all to watch for truancy during school hours? They see y’all
and come runnin’ up in my shit. Y’all wanna drop out in kindergarten, so what, just don’t get me fucked up too.”

“Man, I’m in the eighth grade,” Nu-Nu, fifteen, stated factually.

“
S’posed
to be in the tenth grade. Y’all don’t never go to school,” Lil Mike, fifteen, scolded them. He was the only one who did attend
occasionally, even if it was only to show off his money, gear and jewelry.

Nu-Nu pulled out a modest knot of his own. “Man,
this
my school right here, and I’m at the top of my grade!” Nu-Nu and Lil Mike dapped each other and Wiz smiled proudly.

Of course they should be in school, but so should he,
so what could he really say? At least they weren’t running around hungry and dirty, or worse, high.

“Yo, yo, Pills. Here she go!” Lil Mike whispered excitedly. They all turned their attention to the corner and watched Crystal
turn the corner and head straight for them.

“Yo, yo, if she ain’t got enough, tell her to see me. If she let me fuck her,
I’ll
put up her high,” Mike said lustfully. He and his crew had already learned the power crack gave them over women two and three
times their age and what they would do for the drug. They all wanted Crystal, but none had managed to hit.

“Y’all some young freaks,” Wiz accused, eyes still on Crystal. For some reason he didn’t understand, he was disappointed that
she was a smoker.

“Yo, Nu-Nu, come here,” Crystal called. She stopped a few houses away with her hands in her windbreaker pockets, doing the
crackhead shuffle.

“Yo, money, she smokin’ that?” Wiz asked Lil Mike and Pills as Nu-Nu went to serve her.

“A hundred miles an hour,” Pills confirmed, still fantasizing about the day she’d fall into his power. They always did.

Wiz shook his head, analyzing her up and down. He could see she couldn’t be much older than him, pretty, and she had business
about herself.
How the hell did she get caught up?
He wondered what made seemingly sensible people smoke after seeing the damage it could do.

As she turned to walk away, her profile sparked a vague familiarity in his mind, and before he knew it, he called out, “Ay
yo, shorty! Hold up!”

Wiz bopped over to her, hearing Pills remark, “I git seconds, Wiz.” He ignored the comment as he approached her. Crystal’s
mind was too preoccupied with the plastic in her palm for her to notice anything about Wiz, except for the fact he was holding
her up, and only natural curiosity made her want to know why.

“Excuse me, but… where do I know you from?” Wiz asked sincerely, but to Crystal’s ears it sounded like a hoochie “can I kick
it” line, and a weak one at that.

She quickly dismissed him like,
no
, and walked away, leaving Wiz like a piece of brushed-off lint.

He started to say something slick, but he didn’t want his young boys to think some feen had dissed him. He walked back over
to the car, reached under the passenger seat and produced another Ziploc bag full of clips. He handed them to Nu-Nu, who quickly
took the pack in the house.

“So what up, Wiz? What time we goin’ to the LL concert tonight at Sensations?” Pills asked him.

“Don’t know what time you goin’, but I’m goin’ at ten,” Wiz replied, sliding in the driver’s seat and closing the door.

Lil Mike leaned in the open window. “Come on, homeboy, let us roll wit’ you. These feens can wait a few hours.”

“See, that’s the attitude that keep nigguhs broke. You think they gonna not get high? Hell no, they gonna go spend they money
on Bergen. We ain’t in business to miss money, nigguhs,” Wiz schooled him, then started the engine.

“Shit, you ain’t stayin’,” Pills remarked.

Wiz smirked. “ ’Cause, lil’ nigguh, I got you to handle all that, huh. Beep me.” He turned up the system to let them know…

The pussy is freeee, but the crack cost moneeey!

W
iz! Wiz! Boy, you hear that damn phone! You know it’s for you!”

Wiz heard his mother yell, bringing him out of a well-deserved sleep. Twenty-four/seven he stayed on the grind, so when he
crashed, he crashed. He truly hadn’t heard the phone because the ringer was off. Wiz reached over and picked up the receiver.
“What!”

“What? Oh, it’s what now? I been beepin’ you all day. You can’t call nobody?” the female voice belonging to Michelle hissed
through the receiver.

Wiz rubbed his eyes, then checked his black Movado: eight-thirty p.m.

“Yo, I been busy. I ain’t got the luxury of waitin’ on a nigguh all day, aiight,” he replied sharply.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

He sighed, because the conversation was irrelevant. “You call to argue or you got something to say?”

Michelle sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes with the tone of her voice. “Anyway, is we still going to the LL concert?”

Wiz sat up like,
we
? “Why everybody think I’m a fuckin’ taxi? Look, I told you I might take you.
Might.
But right now, I really don’t feel like being bothered wit’ you, so—”

Michelle cut him off. “Bothered! Oh, so it ain’t no bother when you come to my house two in the mornin’ to lay up with me!
It ain’t no bother when I’m suckin’—”

Click!

Wiz cut her tirade off in mid-stride and immediately turned his thoughts to what he would wear. He heard the phone ring up
front, but he didn’t bother to answer until he heard, “Wiz! Wizard, get in here, boy!” He sighed deeply, then made his way
down their apartment corridor to the kitchen. His mother was sitting in the kitchen, still wearing her nursing outfit, smoking
a cigarette. “Boy, what did you do to that chile?” she questioned.

“Nothin’.”

“Nothin’? Well, why is she callin’ my house screamin’ ‘I hate you’ like she done lost her damn mind?”

Wiz leaned against the door frame. “Man, I don’t know, ask her.”

“I’m askin’ you. I done told you about these females and emotions. If you don’t want to deal with them, don’t. But don’t keep
treatin’ them like shit, because what goes around comes around, you hear me?”

“Yeah, Ma,” he answered, like he’d heard it all before. “I gotta get dressed.”

“Dressed? For what?” she asked, putting out her cigarette.

“Just out, man,” he whined in annoyance, because he could see where she was going. She did it all the time.

“Well, before you go out, I need you to let me get a little somethin’. Shit, Momma wanna party too.” She smiled, trying to
take the sting out of her request.

Wiz sucked his teeth. “Ma. I just gave you some yesterday. What you do with that?” She got up from the table to take her meal
out of the microwave.

“What the hell you think I did wit’ it? What I ’posed to do wit’ it?” she quipped, snatching her hand back from the burning
edge of the Tupperware bowl.

“I wish you would just leave that stuff alone,” Wiz mumbled under his breath.

“And I wish you would too,” she shot back.

“Why? I ain’t smokin’ it,” he fired back.

“No, you just sell it to people who do. Somebody’s daddy, somebody’s son and somebody’s momma. So if it ain’t good enough
to get high on, it damn sure ain’t right to get by on,” his mother said, looking him dead in the eyes. “You wanna be grown,
fine, so am I. You sell it; I smoke it, so fair exchange ain’t no robbery.” She scraped the leftover shrimp fried rice from
the bowl onto her plate. “Now, you gonna look out for me, or do I have to pay for it too?”

Wiz looked at his mother. She was young, only thirty-five, and her pecan complexion still glowed with a
girlish quality. But he could see how the drugs were beginning to take a toll on her beauty. “Yeah, man,” he reluctantly
agreed, heading to his room to get it. He dug in his wall stash, retrieved a ten-bottle clip, and returned to the kitchen.
He sat the clip on the table without looking at his mother, then turned and walked out.

She wanted to call him back, tell him she loved him and that she was sorry things were the way they were, but what could she
say that could make him understand her addiction, and her dependency on him for a steady supply of drugs that kept her from
becoming another crack feen in the street? There was nothing to say, so she simply closed the kitchen door and got her pipe
out of her purse.

Every hood has a club… not just any club, but
the
club. Sensations was it in Newark. Only the liveliest nigguhs hung at Sensations, and the hood legends rarely missed an attendance.
So when LL Cool J came to Newark that spring of ’86, nigguhs really showed out. Ask LL, he remembers.

Branford Place was lined with slick whips. No-top Wranglers with Louis Vuitton seat covers, Benz AMGs, with Ferrari kits,
and, of course, various flavors of Suzuki bikes and Sidekicks.

Wiz pulled up and parked his Jetta on Halsey Street, then rounded the corner. He came alone because he didn’t do the crew,
and he didn’t bring a girl, because that was like taking sand to the beach. But his presence
was felt because his name was on the rise and he had legends in his bloodline.