He said he could show us how to chef, could hip us on how to sell it too. Uncle Henry answered and let us in and asked us what was up, and we told him. Brother A and me hopped out my hooptie and scrambled up to Uncle Jesse’s crib. We found him at his brother Jesse’s apartment, which was just a block or so from Jefferson High. (No pseudonym for my uncle, and trust me when I tell you, he prefers it that way.) Uncle Henry, who had long ago fallen from the glories of his “Stateside Hank” days, had a legend that remained aloft in our impressionable minds. Uncle Henry, our ex-pimp, ex–drug-kingpin of an elder. We resolved our safest bet was to recruit one of our kith, and who better, or so we believed, than Uncle Henry. Because we needed somebody who wasn’t an outright competitor, who we believed we could trust, who was down for a tutorial, and who wouldn’t tax our light pockets too tough for the tutelage. Because, directory or not, we couldn’t just call up any dude. We needed a tutor, needed a tutor quick, fast, with the hurry-up, but our options were hella finite because both of us were sans a Rolodex of dudes who knew how to chef. Neither of us knew how to cook it either, which was no low hurdle. What we gonna do? The most attractive answer was make some loot, make some major loot if we could, and with that goal in mind we’d gotten our hands on a few ounces of powder, or what we hoped was powder cocaine since as neophytes neither of us could be sure it was. What the fuck we gon’ do now? That was the question top of mind that summer of ’93, a summer we-the “we” being me and the brother who out of love I’m calling Brother A-were the newest alumni of Jefferson High School, known as the School of Champions and, so it seemed at that time, a school of fledgling dope dealers.
Jackson is an associate professor of writing at New York University and the author of The Residue Years. From Survival Math, which will be published in March by Scribner.
0 kommentar(er)
