March 08, 2004 @ 2:03 pm

Excerpt: Unbelievable - The Life, Death, and Afterlife of The Notorious B.I.G.

Cheo H. Coker

Excerpt from CHAPTER 2
THINGS DONE CHANGED

‘‘If I wasn’t in the rap game
I’d probably have a key knee deep in the crack game
Because the streets is a short stop
Either you slanging crack rock
or you got a wicked jump shot’’

“You know what to get me, Mommy? Buy me the Timberlands.”

Voletta Wallace looked at the price tag on the boots her son wanted. They were well over $100—enough to buy two or three pairs of normal shoes.

“What am I, crazy?” she said.

''If I wasn't in the rap game I'd probably have a key knee deep in the crack game Because the streets is a short stop Either you slanging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot'' "You know what to get me, Mommy? Buy me the Timberlands." Voletta Wallace looked at the price tag on the boots her son wanted. They were well over $100-enough to buy two or three pairs of normal shoes. "What am I, crazy?" she said. "Ma, if you buy me this one pair, then you won't have to buy me no more shoes for the rest of the year," Christopher pleaded. At last, she agreed. But it didn't matter how many trips she made to Mano a Mano, it was never enough. "When I bought him the Timberlands, he'd go, 'Ma, get me a Tommy Hilfiger,'" she recalled with exasperation. "He didn't like it if his friends weren't wearing it," she said. No matter if they were the nicest quality, his clothes had to have the right label. She once made the mistake of buying him some Polo shirts before kids his age knew about Polo; the shirts went unworn at the bottom of his dresser. Ms. Wallace could never fully understand why her son was so hard to satisfy. Growing up in Jamaica, nothing was taken for granted. She was grateful to have food on the table, a clean place to sleep, and a good education. She liked fashionable clothes too, but she didn't expect to dress like that all the time. As the family's only breadwinner, Voletta Wallace sometimes worked two jobs in addition to studying for her master's degree at night. She made sure she maintained a perfect credit rating and tried to save some money so her son could go to the best schools. Education had been her passport to self-reliance, and she was convinced it would be the key to her son's future as well. He was growing into a sensitive, intelligent, extremely curious little boy with an artist's eye. He could look at a picture in a magazine and draw an exact replica freehand, without tracing. The streets weren't going to claim her son. Not her Christopher. "I made sure my son had an education, a good mattress, clean sheets, good-quality clothes, and I gave him quality time," she said. "My son wasn't the pauperized kid he made himself out to be." No matter how much jerk pork Christopher's mother served him, his attitude was American. Christopher was a boy growing up in America. And in America, just getting by meant you were poor. Having more than you needed was considered just breaking even. No matter how much you had, the important thing was to make it look like more than it was. Fresh wasn't just the cornerstone of an emerging hip hop culture. It was also a way of life. "At an early age, you learn that everything gotta be fresh," Wallace's friend Hubert Sams explained. "You can't have scuffed up Adidas. You gotta get your toothbrush, keep them fresh. That's the thing, fresh. Personality is secondary. It's about what you have on. You walk around Brooklyn in certain circles, even to this day, people look at your feet first." No longer the runt of the Hawks crew, Wallace had bulked up considerably since the fifth grade. He'd always been a somewhat husky kid, but at age ten he fell off a city bus and broke his right leg in three places. His mother was advised to sue the City of New York, which settled the matter for a five-figure sum. After paying legal fees, she put a nice little chunk in the bank to save for his college education. His leg was in a cast for six months. Laid up in the house with nothing better to do, he ate, putting on pounds that stuck around long after his leg healed. By the time he turned 13, he was nearly six feet tall. Though he still had a baby face, with the extra weight he was beginning to look like a man. But Wallace didn't feel all that manly. A man wouldn't have to negotiate with his moms to stay fresh. A man went out and handled his biz. He was sick of being under his mother's thumb. He wanted to get out there and test the waters beyond the stoop. Wallace had bagged groceries at Met Foods around the corner, but from his view, that was a dead end. Earning minimum wage, he'd have to save all his checks for a month or more to get the clothes he needed. And there was no point getting a $200 Adidas sweat suit without the proper shoes-if people saw you with the same kicks and gear all the time, they'd know you were broke. Forget about respect from the fellas-the girls really weren't gonna give a broke-ass nigga the time of day. Wallace's childhood was behind him. He was about to start high school, and his mother kept reminding him how the next four years would affect the rest of his life. His first act of rebellion was to tell her that he no longer wanted to go to Queen of All Saints School. No more uniforms, no special treatment-he just wanted to be a regular kid. When he transferred to Westinghouse High School he found the public school environment quite different from Catholic school. There was, essentially, no discipline. The student body-which included Trevor "Busta Rhymes" Smith and Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter-seemed to have the upper hand, while the teachers' chief goal was simply to maintain some semblance of order. For a kid as clever as Wallace, the curriculum just wasn't stimulating. Whenever he felt that one of the teachers had insulted his intelligence, he didn't hesitate to speak his mind. "Christopher did very well in high school; it's just that he talked back a lot," his mother said. "He was a smart-ass." "One day," she recalled, "he comes home and asks me, 'Mom, how much does a garbage collector make?' " She just happened to know; she'd seen a magazine article that compared teachers' salaries with other professions. The next day, Christopher went to school with the article in hand. After class, Ms. Wallace got a call from Christopher's guidance counselor. "The guidance counselor told me how Christopher walked into class and said, 'Do you know how much a garbage collector makes, sir?' " "No," the teacher replied. "A teacher makes a starting salary of $22,500," Wallace informed him. "A garbage collector starts at $29,000." "Do you have a point, Mr. Wallace?" "Yes, sir. You said some of us inside here are gonna be garbage collectors. But we're gonna be making more money than you, so that's cool." The longer Christopher attended Westinghouse, the more restless he became. At over 200 pounds, he had the build for football, but he didn't want to play. Career day came and went at school. Nothing really appealed to him. Growing up in this section of Brooklyn, Wallace saw both sides of life, the legal and the illegal. Every day the men and women would walk to the C train on the corner of Fulton in search of their daily wage. And then there were the teenagers who stood outside the train station, shooting dice, holding 40-ounce bottles in brown bags, and turning their heads back and forth so they could check out the occupants of every passing car. "Don't be a bum," his mother warned him, her regal Jamaican accent giving the words extra impact. "You're nothing if you don't have an education." Yet it seemed to Wallace that the corner kids, the ones who had no place to be, had every advantage over those "respectable" people who looked so tired when they got on the train in the morning, and even more worn down when they emerged from the subway station at night. The guys on the corner did what they wanted. And they stayed forever fresh. It didn't matter how much his mother browbeat him, there was no way for him not notice those kids. They were always out there, rain or shine, 24-7-365, selling a product that sold itself, a lethal substance that would transform the neighborhood, changing his life and that of everyone else it touched: crack. Named for its rocklike texture, this smokable form of cocaine was cooked up on countless kitchen stoves with a little water and baking soda. The tiny gray chips could deliver a rush unlike anything anybody had ever experienced. The high was immediate, potent, and kept users coming back for more. It was the worst thing to happen to the black community since the first slave vessel pulled into Jamestown in 1619. Cocaine had been around for centuries. The Incas were cultivating coca leaves for their magical properties as early as the 1400s. By the dawn of the 20th century, everyone from Sigmund Freud to Coca-Cola was singing its praises. The all-American soda contained traces of the drug until the recreational use of cocaine was outlawed in the U.S. by the Harrison Act of 1914. That law was championed by southern sheriffs who used a campaign of yellow journalism to claim that it caused black men to rape white women. Nonetheless, cocaine became a fashionable drug among rich and famous people, many of whom believed it to be harmless. Until the early '70s, it was hard for most people to get cocaine if they weren't hanging out with rock stars or Hollywood actors. Movies like Gordon Parks Jr.'s Superfly glamorized it. Woody Allen made fun of it. In the most memorable scene of Annie Hall, Allen sneezed, sending thousands of dollars' worth of blow flying around the room. Sniffing cocaine said something about you-like having Cuban cigars, the smallest cell phones, black American Express cards, and Bentleys-only "true players" had access. Cocaine had become so chic that Republican senator Tennyson Guyer convened a Congressional Cocaine Task Force in July 1979. To his surprise, most doctors called before the committee testified that the drug didn't pose nearly the same health risks to the American people as alcohol. "Tell me the last alcoholic you saw with cirrhosis of the liver caused by Dom Pérignon," said Yale University's Dr. Robert Byck. So few people could even afford the drug, it was doubtful that sniffing cocaine would reach epidemic proportions. But a graduate student of Byck's had alerted the doctor to an alarming trend that was sweeping South America. Normally upstanding people were walking the streets like zombies from smoking something called base (pronounced "bah-say"). "If this shit ever hits the United States," Byck's student warned, "we're in deep trouble." Byck urged Guyer's committee to help counteract this menace. "We need our best minds to figure out how to do this without advertising the drug," Byck said. Unfortunately one of America's great comic minds was about to make it a household word. Richard Pryor put "freebase" on the map in 1980 by setting himself on fire following a 72-hour smoking binge. But the high cost of making base kept that form of cocaine from being popular beyond the jet set-until Los Angeles street entrepreneurs like "Freeway" Ricky Ross started moving so much cocaine in the early '80s that the prices dropped. "When I started getting involved in cocaine, no blacks were involved with it," Ross said. "It was still the white echelon drug. One of the things that I felt I did was I made it affordable for minorities-blacks, mostly-in my neighborhood." The former Dorsey high school tennis star didn't invent "crack," just as McDonald's founder Ray Kroc didn't invent the hamburger. But like Kroc, Ross quickly learned that if he could move his product fast and sell it cheaply, the sheer volume would make him rich. Ross introduced "ready rock"-a precut, ready-to-smoke form of cocaine for fiends who didn't have the patience to prepare it themselves. And they came back so quick, again and again, it was worth the extra time spent processing the dope and rocking it up. From the dealer's perspective, crack was a wonder drug. It was easy to make, and the drug's smokable form drove customers nuts, hitting the brain's dopamine and endorphin centers instantly. Best of all, a crack high lasted less than half an hour. Users kept coming back again and again until their money was gone. Two thousand dollars' worth of powder could make you as much as $20,000 worth of crack. If you were ruthless and ambitious, it could be a gold mine. The rock epidemic that was taking over Los Angeles was largely ignored on the East Coast. But after Len Bias, the Maryland Terrapins basketball star and Boston Celtics number-one draft pick, died of a crack-induced heart attack, the drug officially entered the national consciousness. Time and Newsweek ran cover stories. President Bush held up a bag of crack during a televised address in which he announced a new war on drugs. Dan Rather did a two-hour program called 48 Hours on Crack Street that was watched by 15 million people. The show was broadcast on September 2, 1986. Christopher Wallace was 13 years old. "I heard about crack on the news and I was like, 'That's what niggas must be doing,'" Wallace recalled. "I knew they were fly as hell-they had $150 Ballys and bubblegoose jackets and sheepskins. I was like, 'Oh shit. These niggas are doing it.' " Wallace didn't know any of the specifics, but he knew he wanted in. Chico Delvec was the bridge. It was one thing seeing kids he didn't know blow up. But seeing Chico succeed convinced him to stop sitting on the fence. "This nigga's coming through with the butter Fila velour shit, the big cables, four finger rings," Wallace recalled. "I'm like, 'Yo, we the same age. I'm sitting here fucked up, asking my moms to throw me down money for some ice cream. And this nigga is getting cash!' " "Come on the Ave with me," Chico told him one day, in one of those simple conversations that can change one's life forever. "Just come see what it's like and meet some of my old-timers." Wallace's heart was racing as he walked around the corner to Fulton Street. He met some of the hustlers like Cheese and Tony Rome-but the scene was too fast for him. Cars were zooming by, and you had to look in every one to make sure it wasn't a rival dealer or an undercover cop. Wallace had the added worry that his mother might find out what he was up to. "I ain't with that man," he told Chico, all stressed out. "The police. My moms . . ." "Just chill, Chris," Chico said. "You ain't got to do nothing. Just chill." Wallace settled down, learning the game, and realized how much money he could make. Fear quickly turned into boldness. "I feel like I was the bad influence," Chico said. "Because when I introduced him to the game, he just like got addicted to it." He started off small, "hauling work" for others. "They'd give me a little bit of paper," Wallace said. "The next thing I know, they was trying to make big moves. And they wanted me to be down. And I had my little cousin with me, my cousin Gutter. And we just got into it." It was the speed that appealed to Wallace. The returns were quick, and the only limit seemed to be his own ambition. "Within no time-boom!" Wallace recalled. "That's what made the shit so fascinating. It wasn't a situation where a nigga was struggling for four or five months like, 'Damn, when we gonna come up?' Within three weeks niggas was having six or seven hundred in they pocket. Niggas giving other niggas a hundred dollars to go get sneakers for them-'And get a pair for yourself.' Sweet shit like that." Why even aspire to college? If the point was to get a job, he didn't need a degree for that. When he was a boy at St. Peter Claver, they would advise students to build on their talents and think about what they could do with it in the future. Wallace was a talented artist. There were times when he thought about becoming a commercial artist. The Pratt Institute was within walking distance of his apartment, and there were artists that lived in Clinton Hill. But a few afternoons standing on Fulton Street changed all that. "After I got introduced to crack-commercial art? Nigga, please." Wallace explained with a chuckle. "I can go out here for twenty minutes and get some real paper. There's your art, man. I didn't want no job. I couldn't see myself getting on no train for shit. I didn't want to work in no barber shop, I didn't want to do no restaurant. I wanted to sell drugs! I wanted to chop up keys, bag up work, and get paid. That's the only thing I thought I was ever gonna do." He wouldn't be the last kid with such notorious aspirations-and he was hardly the first. Excerpted from Unbelievable by Vibe Book by Cheo Hodari Coker Copyright© 2004 by Vibe Book by Cheo Hodari Coker. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Click Here To Buy The Book Now!

Article tags: Excerpt, Unbelievable, Life, Death, And, Afterlife, Notorious, B.I.G 

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