“Well, we were thinking more like what you were going to do, nigger,” Price said.
“Listen, big black,” Johnny said, cigarette dancing in his lips, “you can take that mouth outside if you can’t say something useful.”
J.T. told Price to go back to the car, leaving just me, J.T., and Johnny.
“You’re paying us, Johnny,” J.T. said, “and now you’re charging us. You trying to make your money back? Is that it?”
Johnny replied in a calm monotone. “You niggers charge me two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that shit has to stop,” he said. “A man can’t run a business if he has to pay that kind of money.
And your boys keep coming in here demanding free shit. I told Moochie and the rest of them that if they come in here anymore, this.22 is going to find their back.” He gestured to a rifle hanging behind him on the wall.
“See now, that’s the kind of talk we don’t need,” J.T. said. “I mean, we need to cooperate.”
“Cooperate, my ass!” said Johnny. “You can cooperate with my fist.”
“Whoa, whoa!” I yelled, trying to be useful. “Let’s calm down now, boys. What I think we need is a little-”
“Is this Arab going to sit here all day with us?” Johnny said.
“Leave that boy alone,” J.T. said. “I’ll explain later.” He shot me a glance, a Shut the fuck up glance. “Listen, you pay me two hundred dollars a month and you’ll get the same shit from us.” He was talking about the protection the gang afforded. “And I’ll talk to Moochie and everyone else, tell them they can’t steal shit. Okay?”
“Bitch, you better tell him not to bring his girlfriends up in here.”
“What?”
“You heard me. He brings them bitches in here when I’m not around, showing off and taking shit off the shelves, eating candy and drinking soda like he owns the place. When my man tried to do something about it, he pulled a gun on him. Let him bring that shit on me. Try it once, I’ll kill the little bitch.”
“All right,” J.T. said, putting his hand in front of Johnny’s face to shut him up. “I told you I’ll deal with the nigger.”
“I pay you two hundred dollars and your boys get to come in here, but they have to promise to spend at least two hundred dollars a month on shit,” Johnny said.
“And you’re not going to jack up prices, right?” I said.
“Goddamn, Arab, you still here?” Johnny said. “Yeah, that’s right, they pay what everyone else pays.”
“Okay, then,” I said, “we got ourselves a deal, boys!” I stood up to go.
“Boy, sit your ass down,” J.T. said. “Johnny, we’ll get back with you.”
“Yeah, we’ll get back with you,” I said. “We need to deliberate.”
Johnny and J.T. started laughing.
“Goddamn!” Johnny shouted. “You bring this Arab with you wherever you go?”
“One day,” J.T. muttered, clearly frustrated that I was taking my role a little too seriously. “One day, that’s it.”
We got back in the Malibu. Price drove, J.T. rode shotgun, and I sat in the back. My next duty, J.T. explained, was to settle a dispute between two gang members, Billy and Otis. Billy was the director of a six-man drug-selling crew. Otis, one of his six dealers, was claiming that Billy had underpaid him for a day’s work. Billy, meanwhile, said that Otis lied about how much crack he sold and kept the extra money. My dilemma would be compounded by the fact that I already knew both Billy and Otis.
As we drove, Price explained my goal: to adjudicate the case and determine a fair punishment. “If Billy didn’t pay Otis, then you have to punish Billy,” he said. “The punishment for not paying one of your members would be two mouthshots, and Billy can’t work for a week. And if you want, you get to make Otis the director for that week. But if Otis stole something, then we have a bigger problem. You have to beat the shit out of that nigger, not just hit him twice. And he has to work free for a month.”
The thought of hitting someone in the face-delivering a “mouthshot”-made me nauseous. Growing up, I used to get picked on all the time. I was tall and athletic, but I was also a nerd, completewith pocket protector, bad haircut, and an armful of math and science books. I was a perfect target for the average football player or any other jock, especially since I played the less “manly” sports of tennis and soccer. I never even learned to throw a punch. In school most of the fights culminated with someone-most often a girl I was with-pleading for the bully to reconsider, or with me rolling up in a fetal ball, which I actually found to be quite a good strategy, since most bullies didn’t want to fight someone who wouldn’t fight back.
“Now, I don’t mean to be picky,” I said, “but isn’t this why we have you here, Price? I mean, you’re the security guy, no? You beat their ass-I mean, isn’t that what you get paid for? And if I’m the leader, I can delegate, no?”
“Sudhir,” J.T. said, “you have to realize that if you do that, then you lose respect. They need to see that you are the boss, which means that you hand out the beating.”
“What if I make them do twenty pushups or fifty squat thrusts? Or maybe they have to clean my car.”
“You don’t own a car,” J.T. said.
“That’s right-so they have to clean your car for a month!”
“Listen, these guys already clean my car, wipe my ass, whatever I want, so that ain’t happening,” J.T. said calmly, as if wanting to make sure I understood the breadth of his power. “And if they can steal money or not pay somebody for working and they only have to clean a car, then think how much these guys will steal. You have to make sure they understand that they can’t be stealing! Nigger, they need to fear you.”
“So that’s your leadership style? Fear?” I was trying to give the impression that I had my own style. Mostly, I was stalling out of worry that I’d have to throw a punch. “Fear, huh? Very interesting, very interesting.”
We pulled up to the street corner where Billy and Otis had been told to meet us. It was cold, not quite noon, but the sun had broken through a bit. Aside from a nearby gas station, the corner was surrounded mostly by empty lots and abandoned buildings.
I watched Billy and Otis saunter over. Billy was about six foot six. He had been a star basketball player at Dunbar High School and won a scholarship to Southern Illinois at Carbondale, a small downstate school. He began using his connections with the Black Kings to deal marijuana and cocaine to students in his dorm. He eventually decided to quit the basketball team to sell drugs full-time. He once told me that the lure of cash “made my mouth water, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Dumbest move I ever made.” Now he was working in the gang to save money in hopes of returning to college.
I always liked Billy. He was one of thousands of people in this neighborhood who, by the time they turned eighteen, had made all sorts of important decisions by themselves. Fewer than 40 percent of the adults in the neighborhood had even graduated from high school, much less college, so Billy didn’t have a lot of places to go for counsel. Even so, he was the first one to accept responsibility for the bad decisions he’d made. I’ll never forget what he said when he moved back to the projects after dropping out of college: “I just needed someone to talk to. My mind was racing out of control, and I had no one to talk to.”
I didn’t want to think about hitting Billy today, because I really liked him-and because, at that height, his jaw was nearly out of reach.
Otis was a different story. He always wore dark sunglasses-even indoors, even in winter-and he kept a large knife underneath a long black jacket that he always wore, even in hot weather. He loved to cut people up and give them a scar. And he didn’t like me at all.
This acrimony stemmed from a basketball game several months earlier. I regularly attended the gang’s midnight games at the Boys & Girls Club. If Autry came up one referee short, he sometimes pressed me into service. I had played basketball growing up, but not how it was played in the ghetto. In my neighborhood we set picks, passed the ball-and, perhaps most important, called fouls, even in pickup games. In the gang games, if you called even half the fouls that were actually committed, you’d run out of players by halftime. But during one game I refereed when Otis was playing, I called five quick fouls on him because… well, because he fouled somebody five times. He had to leave the game.
From the bench, with a cheap bottle of liquor in his hand, Otis shouted at me, “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker! I’m going to cut your balls off!” It was pretty hard to concentrate for the rest of the game.
I left the gym immediately afterward, but Otis chased me down in the parking lot. He was still in his uniform, so he didn’t have his machete with him. He picked up a bottle from the asphalt, smashed it, and pressed the
