Chapter 2

Carl sat in the living room with the television turned down low, and the thought of his deceased grandmother weighed heavy on his conscious. She passed away nearly two months earlier, but the hurt of losing her remained fresh in his mind. Every time he ate his repast, it left him with feelings of sorrow because he missed his grandmother's creamy mashed potatoes with garlic flavored gravy. She had a knack for different types of gravy, but he liked her garlic gravy the best. He didn't know how long the pain of losing her would last, but it was hard to take. The only time he felt a little relief from the pains of losing his beloved grandmother was when he was at work; otherwise, he often cried himself asleep. Unfortunately, he started to hang around a group of unsavory characters hell-bent on wrecking the city, but he often overlooked their pettiness. He knew the crowd of miscreants in his mist were a bunch of bad guys, but they gave him the respect he wanted. The Rivals-a local gang-became his new family, and they gave him the comfort he needed in order to work through his grandmother's untimely death. But unlike the Rivals, Carl didn't have the propensity to do bad things like robbing, maiming, and killing folks. He had that nagging voice in his head that constantly told him to go right instead of left, up instead of down, and so on. He needed the gang in order to lift up his spirits about his deceased grandmother, but he didn't want to hurt people in the process.

Like many newbies to the gang scene, Carl used his skills of persuasion to sell drugs on the busy city streets of inner-city New York City. Young men from the upper East Side of New York City always wanted a bag of high-quality weed or two for their little sex parties. Carl knew exactly where to stand in order to attract some of the better-paying customers from the Upper East Side. He sold drugs to young men and women driving some of the nicest cars in the city, and the police monitored all the activity without saying a word. At least one black and white sat adjacent to where he stood and watched closely every move he made. As long as the cops received their cut of the illicit money, they didn't care about the rest. They didn't care about the heroin that the more established drug dealers sold or the enormous amount of drug overdoses. Every day a meat wagon hauled another drug-related death out of the neighborhood, and nobody questioned the dismal situation. Unfortunately, he couldn't escape his conscience constantly telling him to extricate himself from the gangs and the drugs. It was the voice of his beloved grandmother playing repeatedly in his mind every time he made a sale.

One of the ways he stayed out of trouble during the day was to hold a minimum wage job working at one of the local fast-food eateries. He didn't find much pride flipping burgers over a hot, unforgiving grill or frying french fries while hovering over a vat of hot, boiling death, but it helped mask the wads of cash he made selling illicit drugs. Every outlawed activity in the city was a money generator on the black market, and the crime bosses loved that. It was the major criminals in the city behind making cigarettes illegal. Once the government decided to outlaw cigarettes, it became a multi-billion dollar business in the underbelly. The majority of the members of his gang worked a menial job like sweeping floors or fast-food or something that didn't require much brain power. They needed the jobs as a way to take suspicion off their drug dealing ways and other illicit activities like stripping parts off of cars. After he spent a little time roaming the halls of his school, he went to the fast food restaurant for a few hours and then sold drugs for a few hours. Sometimes he sold drugs in the back of the restaurant, but he had to be cautious about doing that. HIs customers would send him a text message that read, "See ya," and he knew within five minutes he'll have a buyer in back of the building to make a quick purchase. It was the easiest money he ever made, but he still couldn't escape the guilt that came with it.

A slavish job like flipping burgers and frying fries wasn't something that made Carl proud; but since he was only fifteen-years-old, it wasn't a bad deal. He tried not to waste his money on a bunch of gewgaw like some of the other petty dealers did. He felt sorry for guys like Jerome who were in their thirties, wives, and kids, but couldn't do anything else but flip burgers. Jerome worked mainly in the back and had the sole responsibility of ensuring the grease traps stayed clean and dumping the french fry oil at least once a week. His dark arms had discoloration because of a grease accident that happened to him a few years earlier. No insurance, no money, no nothing left him indigent after the burns. He fed his family with the leftovers from the restaurant every night, and his kids looked like elephants. Nobody wanted to hire an ex-felon except for the low-end food service industry, and Jerome often voiced his opinion of society in a loud, negative manner. "These fuckers won't give a brutha a chance!"

Every day Carl thought about life in the big city but didn't have a clue what he planned on doing after high school. Some of his classmates talked about joining the Airforce, but Carl didn't have any plans to enter into that graveling lifestyle. Ever since the wars, the soldiers often complained about their quality of life, and he knew the only honorable life for a soldier was in death. He wiped down the tables, took out the trash, washed his hands repeatedly, and then he watched Jerome brooding over the grill. He was a pitiable man, Carl thought, but somehow he mustered up enough courage to smile at the customers. Carl couldn't stand to look at the smiling Jerome any longer and took a fifteen-minute break resting in the back of the store. He watched a couple of blackbirds tear at a piece of discarded meat, and he wondered if birds ended up with heart disease too.

Willis Stryker, approximately sixteen-years-old, walked into the restaurant, and Carl nodded to the young man, and they both met in the rear of the building. Carl gave him a small bag of burgers, and Willis ate them rather quickly. He barely took time to chew the junk food, and Carl didn't seem to pay too much attention to the way his friend ate.

"So, what's happening later?" Carl asked.

"Finding somewhere to hang," Willis said, "Thinking about hooking up with the old girl."

"Who? Reva?"

"Yeah. How you know?" Willis asked. He stuffed the last piece of the hamburger in his mouth and appeared to have a little trouble swallowing it. He jumped up and down for a second, and then bent over as if he was going to throw up.

"Everybody knows you like that girl." Carl looked over at Willis for a second. "You okay?" Carl asked with a worried look on his face.

Willis shook his head as if everything was okay, and then said, "Damn! That last piece went down rough."

"Told you before not to eat so fast," Carl said.

Everybody that knew Willis knew he liked Reva more than any sixteen-year-old should like a girl. Even Carl had a special girl that he liked more than he should, but he never thought he should pursue Cindy Lee, an Asian girl from China. He didn't know what he liked about her, but she was one of the smartest girls in school. The mere fact that her brains attracted him more than her beauty made him some kind of sapiosexual, but he didn't mind. It didn't matter because he didn't have any desire to disrupt her innocent life with his erratic behavior. And any drug dealer in any town lived a life in disarray and utter chaos because he was always looking over his shoulder. Even though the money flowed like water, the cops were notorious for arresting at least one drug dealer a night just to let the people of the city know they were making inroads in the drug community. If the community knew what the cops were doing, they'd call it a travesty. Cops, drugs, and dealers, regardless of how it looked, it was all a sham, a facade because the real criminals resided on Wall Street.

Later that evening, approximately around ten-thirty, Carl sat on the curb in front of his house with a small baggie of drugs in his right pocket. The white fence that surrounded his grandmother's house had a layer of bricks as the base. They were white bricks that Carl kept spit-shined in order to give his house the same appearance it had when his grandmother lived there. He kept a backup supply of drugs underneath a few of the loose bricks in case the cops decided to bust him. As long as he kept one small baggy on his body, he didn't have to worry about a long stay in the juvenile system. Willis, on the other hand, liked to take unnecessary risk, and six months ago the cops caught him with two baggies of drugs. He ended up spending four months in the system, and cost him a lot of sway with Sonny Caputo.

Sonny ran the drug business in Harlem, and he wasn't the kind of guy who appreciated a stupid drug dealer. Some of the guys called Sonny by his nickname, "The Hammer," but those were the guys closest to him. If he didn't like a person, then his name was Mister Caputo. The majority of his foot soldiers referred to him as Sonny, but the guys that stood by his side referred to him as "The Hammer." Willis tried his best over the last few months to move into Sonny's inner circle, but he hadn't earned enough sales to be on that level. That was the reason Willis kept more than one bag of drugs on his person because he wanted to be the best salesman.

Carl sat on the steps leading up to his house when a scrawny, pallid looking woman limped over to him. Her sallow appearance made him not want to sell her anything because she looked ill, and he knew her. Her name was Shelly Caputo, the daughter of the notorious Sonny Caputo, but he disowned her after she married the son of his most hated foe. Unfortunately, her husband died in a violent altercation nearly three years earlier, and she fell into a state of chronic drug use. She wore a tattered, white dress with dirt stains on the backside. Her rotten front teeth looked irreparable; and when she approached Carl, he automatically said, "Don't sell the hard stuff, Shelly. I'm a gateway supplier."

With a scratchy sounding voice and a dribble of slobber falling off her bottom lip, she asked, "Whatcha got?"

"Weed." He dug the baggy out of his right pocket. "You really need to go back to your father."

She gave him a downcast look, and then said, "Sonny ain't my daddy."

As soon as he showed her the baggy, the cop car from across the street lit up like a Christmas tree. Within seconds, he was in the backseat of the car, and on his way to the center.