By Malice Intended
This will be the final installment of ‘There and Back Again’ to be published on Planet Ill. Future installments can be found at Scottscope.
One to da two da three da four
Dem dirty Red Dogs done hit the door
And they got everybody on they hands and knees
And they ain’t gonna leave until they find them keys
-The Intro to “Dirty South,” from Goodie Mob’s debut album Soul Food
About seven years ago, when I first heard a New Yorker use the term “Dopeboy,” I laughed quietly to myself. It took me back to my upbringing in Lithonia. Georgians had been using it since at least the late 1980’s. It’s a derivative of the term *”Dopeman,” and was used to describe young brothers that sold dope in the rougher parts of Atlanta and its surrounding areas. I knew some of those guys, or at least a few of the wannabes. I was never around when they conducted business, and I never had any firsthand experiences in their world. That’s been my lifelong relationship with drugs and the drug trade: an observer on the periphery.
The first time I’d heard of crack was 1985. It was making headlines on all the New York City newspapers and newscasts. I was in third grade at Our Savior Lutheran School in the Bronx. Every Monday we had current events, where each student was required to bring in a newspaper article and give a short oral report on it. A girl brought in one about how crack was taking the city by storm. To my young mind, it sounded like the plague to end all plagues.
Though NYC might have been in the throes of the crack era, you couldn’t tell by looking at my North Bronx neighborhood. It was a peaceful West Indian enclave. There were signs that things were changing, though. When I was seven, there were some teenagers that used to hang out at the house next door to mine. One day I tried to join them. They found me amusing at first, but eventually chased me away so they could “smoke some roaches.” “Why would anyone want to smoke bugs,” I thought. Just then, they began passing around a shoebox lid with what looked like smashed cigarettes on it. Before I could ask “What’s that?” One of them pulled out a pocket knife and playfully chased me back home. That was about as bad as it got on my block.
When we moved to Lithonia, all people learned about NYC came from movies and television. Back in the mid-1980’s, New York was seen as a place where crack rocks perpetually fell from the sky like manna, and New Yorkers were drug-zombies. Some teens in my Lithonia neighborhood started making such jokes upon meeting me. They thought I was a cocky little bastard, and I guess that was their way of cutting me down to size.
In my preteen years, I noticed that my boy Deezy’s older brother “T” started dressing different. He began rocking two fingered gold rings and rope chains to accentuate his Air Jordan Flight track suit. He also tricked out his family’s dusty pick up with a new paint job and dropping it low to the ground with a spoiler kit and some rims. Once, Deezy told me a story about how his brother got some friends together and shot up some guy’s car. He never told me why they did it.
One day, when we were trekking up the main street of our subdivision, an older kid asked Deezy if his brother was still in jail. It was then that I realized it had been a good long while since I saw T pulling out of the driveway. Deezy, who never told me that T had gotten locked up, looked mortified. “Yeah, he still in jail” Deezy said reluctantly. As it turns out, T was busted during a drug sale by the Atlanta PD’s infamous Red Dog Squad. These guys came to speak at my elementary school in full tactical gear. They were no joke.
About a year later, Deezy started dressing differently too. He started wearing the standard Dopeboy uniform for the late eighties and early 1990’s: Crispy Jordache jeans with no hem, Nike Cortez running shoes (better known back then as “Dopeman” Nikes), and a Starter bomber jacket. He accentuated it with a texturized afro and a couple of chunky gold rings. None of us had a job at that young age, so I asked him where he was getting this money from. He admitted that he once played lookout for some Dopeboys in his old hood. They blessed him with a few G’s for his trouble. He told me as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Meanwhile, at my elementary school, the drug trade was becoming more known. In 7th grade, a new kid in class claimed that his dad was a “Miami Boy.” The Miami Boys were a fearsome drug cartel that laid siege to Atlanta in the late 1980’s. Legend has it that they changed the drug of choice from heroin to cocaine in a short amount of time. A couple of months after his arrival, he and some other students nearly got expelled for bringing a single tiny rock of crack cocaine to school. I guess he was telling the truth.
A few years later, when I was in the 9th grade, I noticed that there was palpable tension between NY transplants and Georgians at my school. However, it wasn’t just regional differences that fueled this rivalry. Native Georgians seemed to have a particular disdain for NY transplants of Jamaican descent. I never knew why this was. I got to know some of those guys fairly well (most of them hailed from Queens), and they didn’t seem loud nor offensive. A few years after returning to NY, I found out just where the prejudice against Jamaicans came from. The Miami Boys, as it turned out, were rumored to have been Jamaican. I guess that explains the animosity.
A few years ago, I got a desk security job at a halfway house in the Bronx. Most of the residents were welfare recipients diagnosed with HIV. The place was an insane asylum, filled with burnouts, transsexuals, and the like. They would sometimes trade their HIV medication for narcotics. Often, they would get swindled with fake crack and heroin. Many of them got kicked out for various infractions, including drug use. My coworker would always talk about walking past someone’s room and catching the pungent odor of crack being smoked. I was never able to point it out, nor did I ever get to actually see it.
A few years later, during my brief stint as a NY State and Westchester County corrections officer, I still managed to never see this elusive substance that made some men rich and others into addicts. One day, they had a shakedown in the block I had been assigned to everyday for two weeks. The “turtles” found crack cocaine hidden in an inmate’s mattress. He was taken away in cuffs and charged with possession. Unfortunately, I was off that day. I had to hear about the whole thing second hand from an academy classmate. Again, my attempts to see these magical rocks had been thwarted. I guess, in his own way, God was protecting me from them my whole life. I’m guessing now that many people would’ve loved to have had such protection in the 80’s and 90’s.
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