White Lines (16 page)

“I want to talk to you about something. Sit down,” Leo instructed. Born did as he was told. “I see you getting real caught up in them streets. I see you. But you’re too smart to be out there in the streets like me.”

Born laughed, snidely. “Why? You don’t think you’re a good example?”

Leo ignored his son’s sarcasm. “What are you hustling for? Your mother gets you whatever you want. I get you whatever you want. What are your hustling
for!
”

Born shrugged. True, Ingrid took him to shop at Macy’s. He had Guess jeans. But she couldn’t afford to buy him five pairs of Guess jeans like she once did. She could only get him two or three pairs. Born wanted a pair for each day of the week. And his mother was already working too hard in order to provide for his expensive tastes. He did what he did so that he wouldn’t ever have to do without. He did it for status.

Leo knew that. And he pressed the issue further. “You ain’t making no real money out there, Marquis. Get your act together and fly straight.” Born agreed with him. He wasn’t making no real money out there at the time. But he swore to himself that when he came home he would do the shit right and stop hustling backward. He didn’t heed his father’s warnings, figuring that Leo was just tired of seeing Born hustle the right way, unlike Leo had done.

Leo could tell that Born wasn’t going to change. “Well, if you insist on being hardheaded, the least you can do is keep some bail money handy. Always have bail money, so you ain’t gotta depend on nobody else.”

Born nodded. But on the inside he winced. That was the advice a father gave his youngest son about being a hustler. Always have bail money ready. When Born came home he got right back on his grind.

Born had a steady girlfriend during this time. Her name was Simone, and they had met at a party thrown by one of his friends. Simone was a pretty girl with a Coke bottle figure. She was the first girl to get Born to let his guard down completely. She had his nose wide open. They were teenage sweethearts, and Born had shared all of himself with her. During the days when Born was in and out of group homes and in and out of trouble, Simone had been a breath of fresh air. She lived in Park Hill, and she was fly as hell. Whenever she stepped on the scene, niggas took notice, and Born was proud to have her as his girl. He had opened up to her about the pain of his childhood, and he shared his money with her. Born took her shopping, bought her jewelry, kept her laced in all the hottest clothes. Simone had been given every luxury imaginable, and Born had given her his heart.

It wasn’t until he came back home to Staten Island for good that he found out that, in his absence, Simone had been fucking everybody in the projects. She and her friend Tanya were bosom buddies, and from what he heard, the two of them were both being scandalous. Not long after he came home for good, Born vowed revenge. And he got that revenge when he fucked Simone’s friend Tanya, and then told her all about it. Simone was devastated and hurt, and her friendship with Tanya immediately ended. The two girls never spoke to each other again, and Simone was so distraught that she came to his mother’s house in tears. Ingrid talked to the girl, and told her that she had gotten what her hand called for. When Born was hurt, he tended to hurt people back. But when Simone was gone, Born’s mother had scolded him, and she told him that he was dead wrong for playing two friends against each other. Born didn’t listen, though. He vowed to never give a bitch his heart again.

The money started piling up. Born began helping his moms with the bills, paying the rent, buying clothes and jewelry for himself, and feeling important for the first time. He began to have the acclaim that he had always thirsted for, and it felt pretty good.

The part that bothered him was that he couldn’t help wondering if his father was proud of him. Part of him was angry with himself for
even caring about Leo Graham and whether or not he had managed to make him proud. The man was a failure himself, as far as Born was concerned. But strangely, Born still longed for his father’s approval, his attention. He wanted his father to be proud. But he would never admit that.

Born started trying to make bigger moves. He wanted more than just a little bit of money. He wanted tons of it, and he wasn’t afraid to make moves without his crew behind him. When he found out that niggas had dough, he found a way to get dough with them, or he would take it from them instead. Jamari was with him all the way; Born’s novice, watching and learning. For Born, it was nice being a role model to somebody. He knew he had more going for him than the average hustler in the hood. He was his father’s child, and that had given him a front-row seat to the mechanics of the drug game. Being the son of a man like Leo—an Original Gangsta whose name rang bells—had clearly prepared Born for his turn on the throne. And now that Leo had fallen, it was almost as if Born had picked up the torch and was determined to run with it. He would not lose. And Jamari seemed to recognize that as well. He seemed to look up to Born. And Born took that seriously, knowing that having power meant having followers who would do anything you needed. He figured that someone like Jamari might come in handy someday.

Born was the man. He had big rings, jewelry, chains, the whole nine. He was on top of the world. Shopping sprees every weekend, sneakers for every outfit, and jewelry galore. He was caked up. When he went shopping he often took Jamari with him, just to have company going to the mall. He would buy Jamari sneakers, too, and Born put him on. He gave Jamari an identity and taught him all the bylaws of the hustler’s manual. Soon Jamari had all kinds of cute girls on his arm, and he was beginning to forge an identity of his own in the streets. Through Born, Jamari gained access to all the components necessary for success in the game: the drugs, the guns, the jewelry, the women. Jamari was learning from the best.

Born’s mother wasn’t happy about the direction her son’s life was headed in. She felt helpless and angry that her husband’s lifestyle had influenced
Born and his career choice. Many times she argued with Leo. She told him that it was his fault that Marquis was hustling, that Leo was to blame for the path her son had taken in life. Some nights Ingrid looked at her husband, and somewhere deep within her, she felt contempt toward him. She was disgusted, because he had influenced her only child to follow the same path as the father he adored.

But there had also been many nights when she’d questioned
herself
‘for not taking a bigger stand against Marquis selling drugs. She had watched him slowly find his way into the game, and couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t known from the beginning that Marquis was in the game. Born had always had a unique relationship with his mother. Their lines of communication were wide open. Sure, she had told him not to do it. She reminded him that she was working hard to give him all of the things he had—all of the Bally’s footwear, Coogi sweaters, and the goose-down leathers. She even tried harder to give him
everything
he wanted, as a deterrent to the streets. Whatever Marquis asked for, he got. Whatever he wanted, she made sure she found a way to get it for him. But the harder she had to work to provide all of these things for Born, the more determined he became to get so much money that his moms never had to work that hard again.

Born already had twice the amount of nice things his friends had. In fact, Jamari used to wear his coats, his clothes, even his sneakers. And Born didn’t worry about the clothes his friend borrowed, since he had plenty more where that had come from. The problem with Born was that he was accustomed to having all the finery that Leo had introduced him to. And now that Leo was unable to provide these things as readily, Born was sick of watching his mother work her fingers to the bone to try and keep it all going. He used to notice that Ingrid fell asleep still wearing her uniform when she got home from work. How she could barely keep her eyes open at the dinner table. On the weekends, Ingrid would be so tired from working all week that she would sleep well into the afternoon. She was exhausting herself in a futile attempt to change the direction in which her son’s life was headed. Despite her pleas, he immersed himself deeper in the drug game.

Whenever she canvassed the house in search of dirty clothes to wash, she would find small baggies in Marquis’s room. She knew that these baggies were used for packaging drugs. Suddenly there was an awful lot of money in the pockets of his jeans and coats. She saw the signs, knew the truth. Eventually his activities were no longer something he could hide.

She heard all the stories about his fights, his run-ins with rival crews. And in her heart she knew that he was rebelling against the addiction his father was battling. His fury in the streets was synonymous with his fury toward his father. Ingrid felt helpless to stop him, and was terrified that he would wind up dead in the cold-hearted streets where he was holding court. Then, when he was fifteen years old, Born was arrested in the lobby of her building. They caught him with five bags of weed in his pocket. Lucky for him, his cracks were upstairs at the time, so that’s all they found. They arrested him for the weed, and they took his jewelry as evidence. When he got out, Born went and bought two more chains to replace the ones they had taken from him. It seemed impossible to stop him, and Ingrid feared she would lose her only child to the streets he couldn’t leave alone.

Leo was on a mission half the time, as Born started coming home with larger and larger amounts of money. Born began offering it to his mother to help with the rent, the bills, to buy food. At first Ingrid refused to take it. She didn’t want his drug money, because she didn’t condone his drug dealing. But it got harder and harder for her to turn the money down. Ingrid honestly needed the help that Born was offering to her. It got to the point where she couldn’t turn it down anymore. But she made it clear to him that she wasn’t happy about it. She told him that she didn’t want him hustling, but she knew that there was nothing she could do to stop him. Instead she told him to be careful. To watch his back, and to stay on point. But now, as Marquis went from the wide-eyed young man she’d had the pleasure of raising to a full-blown hustler determined to pick up where his father had left off, Ingrid wished she had somehow forced him to stop altogether. For the sake of her own conscience.

1988

At sixteen years old, Born didn’t give a fuck anymore. He and his boys were a team, still hustling crack in Arlington, and also in the Harbor projects, for A.J. and his crew. To Born, the money was good, and the streets were a familiar venue, and he was on the come up. He was seeing less of his lather these days. Leo was a shell of the man he once was, and Born was ashamed of what he’d become. Despite his feelings of disappointment in his father, Born never told Leo how he felt. At the end of the day, Born still had some respect for him. He was still his father, regardless of his shortcomings. Born, and his father’s other children, had been left to fend for themselves now. All of his older siblings had reached adulthood, and they’d given up their hopes that Leo would get his act together. In fact, some were just as strung out as Leo. They’d accepted that their father was no longer the respected and powerful man he once was. And now Born was beginning to accept it as well. He had dropped out of high school, and was hustling harder than ever.

It was a cold, early Sunday morning in January. Born was once again the only hustler outside, cloaked in layers of clothes to shield him from the freezing temperatures. A pair of long Johns, a sweatshirt, and a hoodie were all tucked inside of his Carhart jacket. His hands were snug inside his gloves as he scanned the block for fiends on the prowl. He
didn’t have to wait long. A scrawny, half-dressed white woman with stringy brown hair made her way up Holland Avenue. Priscilla. He recognized her, and remembered the last time he had seen her—in a crack house with her four-year-old daughter. She had no shame, and Born’s heart went out to her child. He felt bad for all the kids of crack addicts, who are forced to watch in silence as their parents commit suicide with every hit of the pipe. Born watched her as she emerged from one of several smoke houses sprinkled throughout the surrounding blocks. She walked swiftly toward Born, and smiled in anticipation as she bought twenty dollars’ worth from him. “There’s money in there,” she said, nodding toward the crack house she’d just left. “You should go up in there and see who wants something.” Born had been to the spot on a few occasions, and was familiar with it. He knew that the fiends smoked their shit there, zoned out, and commiserated.

Making his way to the rundown house, Born saw a little boy sitting outside of the house on the steps. The boy looked young—no older than seven—and he shivered in his dirty, cheap jacket as he sat on the steps in the cold morning air. Born noticed the expression on the youngster’s face, and he shook his head. The kid looked dirty, his clothes were dingy, and his skin ashy. He looked bored and lost, as he sat there on the steps of the crack house. Probably not his first visit to such an establishment, Born guessed. But he wasn’t there to play social worker. He stepped past the youngster and inside the house, where he was greeted by the sight of junkies in various stages of euphoria. A few came right over, recognizing their pusher, and bought from Born.

He didn’t notice right away the older man in the back of the room, with a flimsy black wool coat pulled carelessly around his tall, lanky frame. After serving the last of the users who had crowded around him when he entered the spot, Born scanned the room for any other customers before he left. He saw the man standing idly in the back, and gazing apprehensively at Born. It was then that Born realized the crackhead staring back at him was his own father.

A rage burned deep within Born, as he stood looking at his father, the light of the early morning peeking through the house’s dingy windows.
Leo turned to walk away before his son could confirm his recognition. But Born called after him, “Don’t walk away, Pop.” Leo stopped in his tracks. “I got that,” Born said. “You can get it from me.”