When crack hit the strip in the middle of 1987 it was crazy, the cars sat like bumper to bumper traffic waiting to get served, there were lines of people 50-60 deep on both sides of the street all times of day. They used to do the deals in the alleys but it got so busy they started slinging right in the street just to keep traffic moving, they had the crews working in 8 hour shifts.
Once I started bringing home money my mom started spending a lot of time away from home, she would go to her sisters house in Baltimore for days, sometimes weeks, because of this when I wasn't in school I was hanging outside, running to the cars and listening to the older guys talk and just processing everything I saw going on out there.
One of the things that made crack so popular was how available it was, the smallest bag of coke you could get was a 50 pack, with crack you could get a 5 rock and half of that would get you high but the crack high is real quick, like 5 minutes and it leaves you desperate for more.
By the time I turned 12 in 1988 I was a dealer. The way it was set up was the block had a lieutenant that would oversee the shift, there were four dealers, each dealer had three runners, one runner for the cars, one for the foot traffic and one to take the money to the lieutenant and get the re up when you ran out.
There was two options, you could be a user or a seller.
My teachers would come by the strip after school, the community leaders were coming by at night after the cameras were gone, I even did a drop one time for the Mayor at the time, Marion Barry, he was at our school giving a just say no rally and I was in the parking lot putting an ounce of rock in his car. My first sexual experience was oral sex from one of my teachers for $20 worth of rock. These were our positive role models, our heros, the ones we were supposed to look to for guidance.
The only success I saw was the major hustlers, they had the whole neighborhood working, they drove around in Mercedes and Jags with fine women, wore custom tailored Italian clothes, the man who ran our strip grew up in our neighborhood, he was 22 years old and would walk down the street and hand out hundred dollar bills to the kids and feed the homeless, everyone who worked for him and in his crew wore t-shirts that said "Top Of The Line".
The way I looked at it was I wouldn't live to be 20. It wasn't a matter of when or how I would die but how long could I dodge the bullet.
When they started fighting over territory there was 5-10 people getting gunned down a day, that is when DC got dubbed the "Murder Capitol of America", most of them were only a couple years older than me. It got so bad, one time a guy from the Trinidad St. neighborhood tried to do a hit on one of our lieutenants in uptown, he missed and dude ran after him and shot him in the head right in front of a cop car.
Eventually a truce was called because the shootings were hurting the business, customers from Maryland and Virginia were scared to come into DC. When the drugs and killings were contained to the east side of the city it wasn't a problem, to this day NE and SE DC are dirt poor and 95% black, once it started affecting the more affluent neighborhoods in NW, SW and the suburbs in Maryland and Virginia the police had to start doing something about the murders and drugs.
In 1989 The police raided our strip and closed it down, they had been doing undercover buys for a year, gather the evidence and intel they needed. They barricaded our neighborhood from all sides in the middle of the night, there were two operations going on at the same time, hundreds of police and federal agents came onto the block cleared the streets and the buildings and arrested more than 400 people. My mother got sent to Lorton for 12 years for distributing, trafficking and participating in a criminal enterprise. Most of the dealers and runners, including myself, got sentenced to less than 3 years, except the ones that also caught murder charges. I got sent to the juvi jail for 18 months.
I was almost 15 when I got released, because my mother was incarcerated I got sent to live with my aunt in Baltimore. My aunt was a dope fiend that lived in a part of west Baltimore called Pigtown, the racial and economic demographic was very similar to the east side of DC except the big thing in Baltimore wasn't crack it was heroin. The other thing that was different about Baltimore was there was a third option if you didn't want to be a seller or a user, you could be a stick up boy. Stick up boys rob dealers, they watch the block for a couple weeks, figure out where the lieutenant was, where the stash is, who works what shifts, who's holding the cash and the flow of the street. After all that was figured out they walk up on the block, pull out the guns and take their stash.
That probably doesn't seem like it makes a whole lot of sense but think about it like this, these two or three people just walked up to a drug dealer, on his own corner, in broad daylight with guns out, stick up boys have a reputation for shooting quick if they don't get what they ask for. I took the third option.
Out of respect for 