Читать книгу Days of the Trap - Johnny Mitchell - Страница 5

I’ll never forget the day I fell in love with the Trap. How could I? It was also the day I got my first piece of cunt. Well, sort of.

It’s the summer of ’04, and me and CJ are at the dope man’s door, asking for his blessing.

Only eighteen, but already I want out. Life — in all of its horror — is not something I want to participate in. To be true, horror to most people means genocide or starvation or a gaping hole in the ozone layer — for me, it means getting a job. Far as I can see it, the only reason for a sane man to take up a job is because he has to, and whenever a man is forced to do anything he does not want to do, then he is not free. Freedom is my highest ideal, and as I look around, I see the majority of man does not have it.

“Maybe it’s just you, ya know? You’re the laziest person I ever met,” CJ said, as we passed the grape swisher back and forth that day on the bleachers by the baseball field, waiting for the world to end.

CJ is my better half. A moonfaced quadroon, his skin is mostly white but his full name is Charles Jerome —“on account of my Granddaddy, who was blacker than a motherfucker.” We met sophomore year at Grant High School and instantly formed like Voltron. One of the greatest men I’ll ever know, he’s unlike me in almost every way, except for the devil he’s got inside of him.

“You’re missing the point,” I said, choking on dope smoke like I’d been caught in a house fire. “There’s two kinds of people in this world, CJ — cats who do what they wanna, and cats who do what they gotta.”

He started laughing so hard he nearly fell off the bleachers. Some prick alright.

“That’s a DMX quote, you idiot,” he gasped between giggles, stoned tears flooding his face.

“You get my point, cocksucker,” I said. “Money — THAT is the way to be free. We’re out here getting high every day, meanwhile we’re letting this money pass us by.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Everyone is getting high — always.”

“We should be getting our taste,” I said.

It was the irrefutable allure of street logic — when there’s quick money on the line, you’d be a fool to pass it up.

He let the smoke trickle slowly out of his nostrils, scratching pensively at his peach fuzz.

“So, you really think you’re a hustler?” he asked.

I grinned. “Don’t doubt it.”

I knock again on the iron bars fortifying the doorframe like a jail cell. Lucky to even be here, really. In the days of the Trap, low-level pushers didn’t have access to middlemen the way they do now. It was a clandestine racket, and finding a distributor at wholesale wasn’t as easy as an online search. The closer one came to the source, the more connected he had to be.

“What do you want?”

The Barry White-looking figure standing in the doorway grunts in a silky, baritone octave. A towering black man with a jerry curl permed past his shoulders – he’s got on house slippers, a bathrobe, and cheetah-print underwear. In his right hand, adorned with gold rings, he dangles a nickel-plated .357 Magnum.

“We’re friends with Antoine,” CJ says. “He told us to come by, said you could help us out?”

He frowns suspiciously, his face scrunched up like a basset hound.

“Yeah, alright,” he finally says. “Come on in.”

He sets down his heat and unlocks the screen door.

“I’m Sweet Tea.”

Sweet Tea is our friend Antoine’s father. I’ve known Antoine since the ’90s and Beaumont Middle School. He was one of those cats that became an O.G. by the time he was fourteen years old — motherfucker even let me hold his .22 pistol with the duct tape handle outside of gym class one day. Antoine’s family are all original rockers, first-generation black immigrants who exported the crack trade from southern California to Portland in the mid-1980s. I still remember that sack of yellow stones he showed me one day after school.

“Eight hundred bucks, Johnny — all from these little pebbles,” he smiled with pride. He still had braces on his teeth.

Now those pebbles have Antoine sitting in the Feds for a nickel, but before he got shipped out, he agreed to put in a word for us.

“Y’all had me scared, knocking on the door like you the goddamn po-lice,” Sweet Tea mumbles as we enter the house. No matter how gingerly you do it, black people always think you knock like the cops.

Like all the old-timers, Sweet Tea has a diverse portfolio of hustles, not the least being high-grade indoor chronic. For years we’d also heard rumors that he was a pimp, about how he had a stable of hoes selling snatch for him even though he was still married to Antoine’s mother. No one believed it though, not really — shit that cool never happens in Portland.

His pad is dimly lit and smells like a concoction of Caribbean oils and Nag Champa. The Isley Brothers echo softly from a record player spinning in the corner, and above the fireplace — surrounded by framed photos of his kids — he’s got a Samurai sword on display. In the living room, right next to a big-screen TV, he’s got a colorful fish tank bubbling with exotic fish. This is an old-school cat indeed.

“Have a seat,” he beckons to a black leather couch. “What do you need?”

“A half,” CJ says.

“Alright, I can do it for fifteen hundred.”

“Fifteen hundred for a half-ounce?!” it comes shooting out of me.

“Oh man,” Sweet Tea sighs, running his hand through his perm. The frustration of dealing with these two amateur gray boys is visibly agonizing.

“That’s the ticket for half a POUND. If I’d known y’all was gonna interrupt my fuck session for a lousy half-ounce, I woulda never answered the door.”

“That’s our bad,” CJ says, all cool-like. “This is the first sack we ever copped, and we wanted to test the market first.”

“Alright, alright,” Sweet Tea says. “You cats seem solid, and you know my son, so I’ll hook you up today. But if you wanna keep fucking with me down the line, you’re gonna need to get your order up, dig?”

“We can dig it,” I say. “Don’t expect anything less.”

“Good,” he nods, satisfied. “Aye yo Tracy! Monique!” he yells down the hall toward the bedroom. Then comes the sound of two purring kittens.

“Yes, Daddy?”

“Bring yo asses.”

I hear the pattering of footsteps on the carpet, and then I see them — two Black Beauties, selected to win. Built like prized Arabian mares, these bitches are rap video fare. Wearing nothing but see-through silk panties, they let their perky D-cups bounce freely like Amazonian foragers.

So, the rumors are true! Sweet Tea is a pimp alright, and a damn good one at that — what with animals like these in his stable — and in Portland, of all places!

“Take care of our guests,” Sweet Tea commands. “I’ll be right back,” before disappearing down the hall.

The girls have a seat on the couch between me and CJ. I’ve got a heat going something fierce, and I feel blood filling up my prick like a hypodermic needle.

“Whatever business y’all have sure must be important,” one of them says, “cause Sweet Tea don’t like to be interrupted while he’s screwin’.”

“Shit, neither do I,” the other one says. “Y’all left us horny as hell.”

“Girl!”

They giggle in that way whores do even though nothing funny’s been said.

“So is he,” CJ says, pointing at me. “He’s never even been laid.”

The bastard — he knows I’m self-conscious about that. I must be the last virgin left at Grant High School, and maybe in the entire state of Oregon. No way people will buy weed from a guy who’s never had no pussy.

Of course, as soon as CJ said this the whores start clawing at me like vultures on a carcass. Now, I’m engulfed by brown flesh reeking wonderfully of cocoa butter while I suckle at their teats like a baby piglet.

Suddenly, one of the whores pulls out my swollen unit, mounting me like a gaucho on her trusty steed. I feel the lips of her cunt gripping my sword through her panties. She begins gyrating back and forth, groaning with pleasure. No way this’ll last long. I fight as hard as I can, but it’s useless — she’s a powerful buck indeed. I unleash the goo, and it projectiles onto my chest and neck and a few drops splatter onto my cheek.

“That’s it?” she says.

CJ falls to the floor, laughing so hard he has to clutch his sides.

“Congrats, Johnny!” he wails between hyena cackles.

“That’ll be three hundred bucks,” she says.

“Wait, what?”

“Oh, you thought this pussy was free?” she snaps, waiving an acrylic nail in my face.

“But, I didn’t even put it in!” I protest.

“Run my motherfucking money, nigga!” she yells at the top her lungs.

Soon, all of us are shouting — CJ, the two naked whores, and me with my pants down, drenched in my own cum.

“Enough,” the baritone-deep voice brings the room to a screeching silence. Standing there is Sweet Tea, holding the biggest bag of weed I’ve ever seen.

“They were trying to shake me down, Sweet Tea.”

“Course they were. That’s what I trained ’em to do.” He snaps his fingers and the whores retire to the other room, cold mugging me as they leave.

“Get that bed warm for me,” he says, cupping a handful of ass-cheek with his massive palm as they walk by.

“You’ll have to excuse my bitches,” he says, plopping down on a chair in front of CJ and I. “In the jungle, it’s always the female lion that’s more ferocious than the male one, you feel what I’m saying?”

He takes out a digital scale and reaches into the black garbage bag filled to the brim with smelly buds.

“Let that be lesson number one,” he continues, filling up two sandwich bags and licking them shut. “All these distractions in life, but the only thing you need to keep your mind on is paper.”

He pulls out a wad of hundred-dollar bills as thick as a baseball and tosses it onto the table.

“Where I’m from, we call it ‘Go,’— G-O — and do you know why? Cause when you got it, it’s a green light. You ain’t got it? Shit, you’re stuck at the red, Jack.”

And so it went.

I’d been reluctant coming here today. After all, what chance did I really have of making a living in this fickle business? Sweet Tea just erased any doubt. He’s got it all: money, a mean pad, and bad hoes. But most important is what he doesn’t have – a job or a boss. If he can do it, then with any luck, I can too. Feels like my whole life has been a preview to this — the feature presentation. Hustler, drug dealer — who knows how far it’ll take me.

Sweet Tea lights up a Marley spliff and passes it around.

“I’m giving you twenty-eight grams, a half an ounce each. You pay for one and I’ll front you the other.”

I pick up my half, clutching it in my palm like it’s Hercules’ globe. Fourteen grams to freedom.

“Gimme a call when you’re ready to re-up,” he says, walking us out the door. “And remember, show love to this game and it’ll show it right back.”

“Will do,” I say, shaking his hand.

“And go wash that nut off your face.”