One day my friend Curtis and I were robbing a house. The people who lived there were from the Caribbean and so was Curtis. I was in this pitch-black house and I heard “Who’s that? Is that you, honey?” I thought it was Curtis playing around, trying to scare me. So I said, “I’m trying to find a gun and the money. Look for the safe, all right?” “What, baby?” I realized then that it wasn’t Curtis talking. It was the guy who lived there who was lying on the couch. I rushed to the door. “Curtis, this shit don’t look right. Let’s get out of here, somebody is in here,” I said. But Curtis was a perfectionist. Curtis wanted to lock the door instead of just running away. I ran the fuck out. The owner opened the door and smashed Curtis in the head and knocked him out cold. I thought he was dead. It wasn’t until a year later that I saw him again. He was alive, but his face was all shattered, he got hit that hard. Yup, it was the hard-knock life for us.
When we stole silverware or jewelry, we’d go to Sal’s, a store on Utica and Sterling.
I was a baby, but they knew me from coming in with older guys. The guys at the store knew I was coming in with stolen stuff, but I knew they couldn’t beat me because I knew what shit cost back then. I knew what I wanted.
Sometimes we’d be in the streets and if it was noon and we saw a school, we’d just go into the school, go to the cafeteria, grab a tray, get in line, and start eating. We might see someone we’d want to rob, someone who had their school ring around their neck. So we’d finish the food, put the tray back, get by the door, grab the ring, and run out.
We always wanted to look nice on the streets because normally if you’re a little black kid out in the city looking bummy and dirty, people harass you. So we looked nice and nonthreatening. We had the school backpacks and little happy glasses and the Catholic school look with nice pants and white shirts, the whole school outfit.
After about a year, I started doing burglaries by myself. It was pretty lucrative, but hanging in the street and jostling was more exciting than robbing houses. You’d grab some ladies’ jewelry and cops would chase you, or what we called heroes would try to come in and rescue the day. It was more risk-taking for less money but we loved the thrill. You normally had to have a partner to be a successful jostler. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be planned, but you’d see someone you knew, so you teamed up.
Sometimes you’d find that you had competition for jostling. You’d get on a bus and there might be someone already on the bus waiting to pickpocket some people. But you might be more obvious. That was called “waking the bus.” The bus was quiet before you got on, but now that you’ve come aboard, the bus driver makes an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, there are some young men who just got on the bus. Watch your pockets. They will attempt to steal from you.” So you get off at the next stop, but the quiet jostler gets off and comes after you.
“Motherfucker, you woke the bus up!” he’ll scream. And if he’s an older guy, he might start beating on your ass and taking your money or the jewelry that you stole.
People didn’t like to go pickpocketing with me because I wasn’t as patient or as good as they were. I was never smooth, like, “I’m going to play this nigga, I’m going to do this, right up and close in person.” I was much better at blindsiding people.
Any strong guy could blindside someone. But the trick was to be cunning and outsmart them. Most people would think, They’re onto me, I’m going to walk away. But not me. A lady might have her hand on her wallet all day, and we’d be watching, watching, and she never takes her hand out of her pocket. And we’d follow her and then move away but we’d have one little kid still watching her. And she’d let down her defenses for a few seconds and go do something and he’d get it. Then he’d be gone. And before we got out, we’d hear a gut-wrenching scream, “Aaaaahh, my money, my money!” It was crazy. We didn’t give a fuck.
The most primitive move was to snatch somebody’s gold chain. I used to do that on the subway. I’d sit by the window. That was when you could open the windows on subway cars. I’d pull a few windows down, and then the car would stop and new people would come on and sit by the window. I would get out and as soon as the train slowly started moving, I’d reach in and snatch their chains. They’d scream and look at me, but they couldn’t get off the train. I’d fix the clasp, hold the chain for a couple of days, look good and sport it, and then I’d sell it before the older guys took it from me.
Even though I was starting to look the role, I never could get on with the girls back then. I liked girls, but I didn’t know how to tell them I liked them at that age. One time, I was watching these girls jump rope, and I liked them and I wanted to jump rope with them, so I started teasing them and, out of nowhere, these girls in the fifth grade started beating the shit out of me. I was playing with them, but they were serious and I was just taken by surprise. I got serious about fighting back too late. By then, somebody came and broke it up and they’d gotten the best of me. I didn’t want to fight them.
It was no surprise to my mother and my sister that I was robbing and doing antisocial things to bring money in. They saw my nice clothes, and I’d bring them food – pizza and Burger King and McDonald’s. My mother knew I was up to no good, but by that time she knew it was too late. The streets had me. She thought that I was a criminal and I would die or never turn out to be shit. She’d probably seen it before, kids like me being like that. I would steal anything from anybody. I didn’t have any boundaries.
My mother would prefer to beg. She embarrassed me a bit, because she was too honest. She was always asking for money; that’s just the way she was. I gave my sister a lot of money for the house to help my mom out. Sometimes I’d give my mother a hundred bucks and she wouldn’t pay me back. She didn’t respect me like that. I’d say, “You owe me some money, Ma.” And she’d just say, “You owe me your life, boy. I’m not paying you back.”
The big kids in the neighborhood knew I was stealing, so they would take my money and my jewelry and my shoes, and I would be afraid to tell my mother. I didn’t know what to do. They’d beat me up and steal my birds, and they knew that they could get away with bullying me. Barkim didn’t teach me how to fight. He just taught me how to dress in nice clothes and wash my ass. Normally when someone was screaming at me in the street or chasing me, I would just drop my stuff and run. So now I was getting bullied again but I was more of a mark.
Growing up, I always wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted to be the guy talking shit: “I’m the baddest motherfucker out here,” “I got the best birds.” I wanted to be that street guy, the fly slick-talking guy, but I was just too shy and awkward. When I tried to talk that way, somebody would hit me in the head and say, “Shut the fuck up, nigga.” But I got a taste of what it was like to bask in the adulation of an audience when I got into my first street fight.
One day I went into this neighborhood in Crown Heights and I robbed a house with this older guy. We found $2,200 in cash and he cut me in for $600. So I went to a pet store and bought a hundred bucks’ worth of birds. They put them in a crate for me, and the owner helped me get them on the subway. When I got off, I had somebody from my neighborhood help me drag the crate to the condemned building where I was hiding my pigeons. But this guy went and told some kids in the neighborhood that I had all these birds. So a guy named Gary Flowers and some friends of his came and started to rob me. My mother saw them messing with the birds and told me, and I ran out into the street and confronted them. They saw me coming and stopped grabbing the birds, but this guy Gary still had one of them under his coat. By then, a large crowd gathered around us.
“Give me my bird back,” I protested.
Gary pulled the bird out from under his coat.
“You want the bird? You want the fucking bird?” he said. Then he just twisted the bird’s head off and threw it at me, smearing the blood all over my face and shirt.
“Fight him, Mike,” one of my friends urged. “Don’t be afraid, just fight him.”
I had always been too scared to fight anyone before. But there used to be an older guy in the neighborhood