From staircase to stage, p.4
From Staircase to Stage, page 4
Cap inspired us. When we hung out, we started more serious cyphers, sharing a few bars that we’d memorized before passing it off to the next man, like a baton in a relay race. And while I was doing that shit at school between classes one day, I met U-God. He was a beatboxer and he was nice at it too. This was when hip-hop was growing fast, when Beat Street and Krush Groove were out, when Doug E. Fresh and Biz Markie were making their debuts. U-God knew how to do all the sounds that Doug E. Fresh did with his voice, so he was fly as hell. All of us were hip-hop heads. We devoted ourselves to every single thing we saw in those movies and heard on those albums. U-God was able to make that shit come alive for us in some kind of way, right there in our school lunchroom.
All of that changed everything for me. I was fourteen and I wasn’t thinking about school, I wasn’t thinking about a job. I was thinking about the culture rising up all around me, all of it getting bigger and better every day. I was in it but that wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I didn’t want to watch this shit in the movies, because I didn’t need to. What I saw on the screen already looked a hell of a lot like what I saw in my neighborhood each and every day. It wasn’t a musical fantasyland like the one I saw in The Wiz, somewhere over the rainbow where I didn’t belong. This was an Oz right here where I already lived.
CHAPTER 3 NO HALF-STEPPIN’
I remember when things really changed in my neighborhood, because clear as day there was life before and after the Jamaicans moved in. Some came straight from the Caribbean, others moved in from the established Jamaican community out in Brooklyn, and they started selling weed—a lot of weed—plus coke and heroin too, because that’s all people wanted before crack jumped off. The Jamaicans brought a hustle system that was smarter and more bulletproof than any operation anybody had ever seen. They let it be known what apartment in what building was the spot, and when you’d roll up there and knock on the door, thinking they’d open it up to do the deal, they didn’t do nothing like that. They’d busted the lock out of the door and replaced it with a latch they’d swing open from the inside, uncovering a little hole for you to stick money through. You’d do that, the latch would snap shut, and then a minute later it would open and your bag of weed or whatever you were there for would slide out. The door was dead-bolted from the inside, so nobody doing the deal saw each other or touched hands. It was a clean, efficient transaction, and some real clever shit to us. The Jamaicans were cool with me and my friends, so we were up there buying five-dollar bags whenever we needed them. They also had rented this storefront on the ground floor of a building nearby that was just that—a front—that they filled with music posters, which was the sign to us that something was going on because we knew they weren’t selling records. It was around 1985 and they had a Michael Jackson Thriller poster in the window, so we started calling it the Michael Jackson spot. We’d be like, “Yo, I’m stopping by Michael Jackson house, you good?”
I was fifteen and I was at the point in my home life where I felt like a man even though I wasn’t, because my mom was through trying to force me to come upstairs for dinner or come home at a decent hour. She was involved in her own life, her own relationship, and remember, I’m five years older than my oldest sibling, so she was too busy with all of them to chase after me. So long as I made it to school in the morning, I was able to get away with a lot of shit.
It was around this time that I started hanging out with my cousin Unique, Brenda and Dorinda’s older brother. He is someone that I truly love and respect and who was a father figure not only to me but to my extended family in general. He was the one everyone turned to when they needed help because he was a street dude with a big heart who, at seventeen, was wise beyond his years. Unique had a motorcycle, and one day he invited me to take a ride. “Yo, I’m about to go uptown and shit,” he said. “Let’s roll.” Unique was hustling, and I had enough of an idea of what that meant to know what he was about to go do.
It was my first time on a motorcycle, and next thing I knew, we were flying over the Verrazzano Bridge, heading up the BQE all the way through Brooklyn and Queens, over Randall’s Island, straight up to the Bronx. That’s a long fucking ride when you’ve never been on a bike before. At the time I had no idea why we were going so far, but as I soon learned from Unique, you got the best product if you went the extra mile, all the way uptown to buy the quality shit from the Spanish motherfuckers who dealt it. I never saw what he bought that day because he made me wait outside, but my guess is that it was heroin. And he was using me as a cover, so the family and the other dealers and everyone in the ’hood never really knew what he was up to or where he got his shit. They just saw us going for a ride.
It was summer, but by the time we got back to Staten Island, I was cold as hell, and afterward we went up to Unique’s apartment. All I’d really known about Unique until that day was that he was getting money, but I soon realized just how fly the nigga was when I saw that he had two girlfriends, both living with him at the same time. He had one that was working for him, helping him hustle and move the drugs, and another, a real pretty chick, that he kept around to run the household. Unique had it all figured out. One day when I was up there, he sent me out to the store for whatever, and don’t you know when I came back this nigga was buck naked fucking with both of them? That’s how Unique got down. He was in love with both of them because each one had different qualities that enabled him to be who he was. Unique was a lover boy, the type of guy that listened to all the hip-hop love song records. He was both a lover boy and a soldier, and he chose his two women to reflect both sides of his character. I do think he was more in love with the hustler than the lover because that girl represented his bright future and really cared about him. She wanted him to make millions and was going to do what she could to get him there, and she was smart enough not to worry about his lustful ways with other girls. I was just fifteen, but watching their relationship taught me a lot about the value of a woman’s inner beauty. I saw how she looked out for Unique and realized that without a strong backbone like that at home, a man will never succeed. Because of them, when I was ready for a relationship, I knew that I should look for a partner who really cared for me and not worry so much about superficial things. Of course, looks are important because you have to be attracted, but I didn’t make them the priority. I looked first and foremost for someone who could comfort me and educate me and school me. There were so many women out there who were pretty and into themselves, but empowered women of quality were much harder to find.
The more I hung around Unique, the more comfortable he got with me, and soon I was allowed around when he and the girls bagged up the drugs. Then he was sniffing drugs in front of me, off the top of this mountain he kept on a table, but he never, ever let me get involved any further. He was looking after me even as he exposed me to the life, letting me be around it but never in it. Of course, being that close to someone I looked up to, who was doing everything I wanted to do, just made me want it more. To other people Unique might seem like he was a bad influence, but he had a heart of gold. As I grew up, I tried to live the same way. He was selling drugs—and drugs are illegal and addictive—but within his enterprise he looked out for his people and he looked out for his family. He helped the people close to him, took care of them, and he sorted out the fake ones quick and kept them far away. Just by watching Unique live, I got hands-on knowledge that I’ve taken with me into adulthood. It has kept me on the right path, even when the lure of the hustle had me drifting toward the wrong one.
Unique was my hero, but even heroes have bad days. Like the day Unique got so high that he fell asleep in his big pile of dope. He just nodded out. One girlfriend was so high that she didn’t notice and wandered off to the bedroom, and the other had gotten so mad over something that she’d gotten dressed and left. So there I was with this nigga, all doped up, lying facedown on Drug Mountain. I sat him back in his chair, brushed him off, and made sure he was breathing. I didn’t know what the fuck else to do, so I laid him down on the couch and took a seat next to him until I could tell he was just sleeping it off.
Back then, getting high on your own supply was a badge of honor for hustlers, even though that didn’t work out too well for Tony Montana. That idea came from Scarface, and before that movies like Superfly, which is where Unique was taking his lifestyle cues from. He knew how to hustle, he did it well, and he always had money. He sniffed coke, dope, and smoked weed. He had a shag haircut that was part fade, part afro—like a mullet for black hair. Dude used to run around like he was Tony Montana too, with a soldier by his side most days, always with guns on them. Unique was well liked, but he had no problem busting his gun out, so nobody in the ’hood ever fucked with him.
Being the poor kid I was, he’d always ask me if I had money and then pull out a stack and lay forty or sixty on me, all in twenties. He was trying to do right, but the side effect was that he showed me the spoils of drug life, and I wanted all of them. My generation of dudes, all of us for the most part fatherless, paid attention to older guys in the neighborhood like Unique and the Jamaicans. They were independent hustlers, all of them with money and looking fly as hell. That is what we wanted for ourselves: respect, freedom to do what we wanted, and the money that could make that happen. We wanted motorcycles, cars, and everything those guys had. I remember for a while Unique had a BMW 325, which was the coolest ride I’d ever seen. All I wanted was to drive it, just for a minute, but I never could because it was a stick. He promised to teach me, but there’s no days off in the hustle, so he never got around to it.
I’ve got to hand it to Unique. Of all the dudes of his generation who got into the game, so many ended up strung out or in jail for life, but he was one of the few who made it. Like I said, he was well respected, but it also didn’t hurt that he had a big-ass gun. He was a skinny nigga but dude carried a .357 Magnum, just this huge piece that he showed me one day when we were riding his motorcycle up to the Bronx. “Anyone ever mess with you, you tell me about it and I’ll take care of that shit,” Unique said. I fell in love with that big-ass gun, though he wouldn’t let me hold it, no matter how many times I asked.
Not long after that, this older guy who was one of a bunch of drunks that hung around outside the building every day started messing with me. I wasn’t looking for trouble, but these were the kind of guys who liked to roughhouse all of us younger dudes. They’d be drunk, and you’d walk by and they’d kick you in the ass or chase you into the elevator and put you in a headlock until you were about ready to pass out. They thought it was funny, but when there was a pack of them beating on you, it wasn’t at all. This one guy was in a mood and was really trying to bring it to me to the point that I got scared and went and found Unique, who immediately went inside his closet, got his gun locked and loaded, and said, “They downstairs now? Let’s see what the fuck this is.”
We went down and the guy I was beefing with wasn’t there, but he must have heard about Unique coming out because he left me alone after that. All I could think about was how cool Unique was and how nice that gun was. Since he wouldn’t let me hold it, what I’d need to do is get myself one just like it. Unique wouldn’t have even needed his gun to settle the situation, because he had that type of stature. Everybody in the community knew him as Uncle Unique, not Cousin Unique—because he was already a man by the age of seventeen.
How many other seventeen-year-olds have you met whose mothers let them get away with calling them by their first names? That’s how this dude rolled; he called his mom Joyce like it was natural. I never understood it back then, but now I think it’s because she never approved of what he was doing with his life, so he didn’t recognize her maternal connection. After all, Joyce had her hands full with Brenda and Dorinda. All three of her kids were pretty bad, so I bet she got sick of trying to keep up with him. However Unique was living, he was the guy people went to when they needed something, whether it was money, drugs, or a favor, and he liked that. He liked feeling in control of people with everybody kissing his ass or relying on him in some way.
Cousin Unique let me witness his lifestyle, but he never let me sell drugs for him. He felt I wasn’t built for it, and though he never said it to me, I think he saw me doing something else with my life. He also knew that his aunt, my mother, would fuck him up if she ever found out that he had let me hustle. My mom used to take care of Unique when he was a kid, and she and her sisters fought more than a few battles for him as he grew into a young adult. In his mind he owed her, so he was never going to let me into that life.
I wanted to sell drugs because I wanted to stop asking him for money. I wanted to earn it for him for real, but it wasn’t going to happen. I accepted that, until Unique brought one of my homeboys into his operation. I became so jealous of the situation, especially when my boy started coming around sporting two-finger gold rings and all the jewelry the rest of us wanted. The tension between us built up until we had a fight and a falling-out that ended our friendship. I don’t remember how it started, but we both put our hands up and threw fists. My boy landed one right in my mouth and then I started acting crazy. I grabbed a bottle or something and connected with his face. Then he caught me with a jab and we were both bleeding. Shit was real.
We never spoke again, and I haven’t seen him since. I realized that day that I never wanted to be jealous of another man’s situation. It was time for me to figure out my own. I couldn’t expect my cousin or anybody else to hand me my future. It was up to me to get out there and find it.
* * *
I started branching out, hanging out with dudes from up the block. I was getting involved with groups from around the ’hood, not just the people who lived in my building. Once I started making my own moves and making new friends, it felt like I’d stepped into a new world. Physically I wasn’t far from home, but in every other way, I had taken a giant step toward claiming my destiny. I was under my mom’s roof, but she had no control of me, and she had no idea what I was getting into. I had a crew of guys that I knew from school who were like brothers to me, which included the friends I mentioned earlier, plus a few new guys, and a few that eventually became Wu-Tang with me. All of us started being out there, doing our thing in the world together.
Our biggest musical influence by this time was Run-D.M.C. We wanted to emulate them in every way, just like we tried to copy all the older dudes in the ’hood who looked good and acted cool. But we didn’t just look to the hustlers, because there were plenty of everyday guys who worked in transit or as messengers who were as taken with hip-hop as we were. They were the ones who taught us the most about the culture that was starting to thrive. They told us about this club in the city, Broadway International, that they went to on the weekends to dance to hip-hop. We’d hang around any dude who had a good radio, because big radios were king. My man Kishaun was the only one of us with a proper blaster, a Conion, which was one of the best. We would put our Run-D.M.C. tape in his radio and just walk up and down the block. Then, later on, since my man Terelle’s brother was a DJ, we’d cut school and end up at their house, listening to music and watching him spin. His favorite record at the time was Run-D.M.C.’s “Sucker M.C.’s,” which is still, to me, one of the dopest records in hip-hop history. We would listen to that shit all day long, every single day. It was the best: they diss a sucker M.C. while rhyming to show how superior they are in every way. That song kills it.
Fashion was changing quickly then. People were still wearing Lees, but they had also started copping Bill Blass pants and Devil Jeans, which were these French-cut denims that had patches of cartoon devils on the pockets. Sergio Valente was happening, terry-cloth Kangol hats were it, and so were bomber jackets with Chinese letters on the side. People started writing cool shit on the legs of their jeans, usually in the same style they’d paint their graffiti tags. The way you looked became more important than ever to guys my age. If you didn’t have the correct clothes, you weren’t shit. Best piece of advice my mom ever gave me was that a man who stayed sharp looked respectable. If I only had three pairs of pants, that was fine, she said, so long as I paired them with a clean white pressed T-shirt, clean shoes, and a haircut. If you presented yourself well, people would want to give you their time and energy. One of the reasons my friends and I spent so much time walking up and down the block was that we watched every move the older dudes made. We were figuring out how to duplicate their style to the best of our abilities. There were a lot of guys to respect. Some dudes were good at basketball, some had a solid job which enabled them to buy the fly shit, and some were pretty-boy niggas who always had a cute girl with them.
Gold nameplates were the shit, even just one letter. My homie’s older brother Bobby just had a big “B” in the middle of a square on a thick rope chain that we called a cable. He would wear it over a burgundy nylon shirt from this brand that came with matching nylon drawers, a pair of Lees, black-and-white Adidas, and a Kangol hat. Bobby always looked nice.
The gold teeth era came in when Slick Rick made his debut with Doug E. Fresh in 1985. He had an English accent and that one gold tooth at the time, and he was wearing suits or sheepskins, with all those rings and the eye patch and fur hats. He had style like we’d never seen. He was the one who elevated hip-hop from just jeans and Adidas. We saw him in concert one summer, and all of a sudden we started wearing dress slacks and Bally sneakers. When Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick dropped “The Show,” all of us wanted to look like them and to go out and do the latest dances.
