RAGE
With a blunt pinched between my lips, I bobbed my head to the rap song blasting from the speakers in my shop. When it was time to create, I found myself in a zone. The sketch pad in front of me had all my attention. My shop wasn’t upscale or fancy, but it was mine. It was my way out. One day, I was going to be bigger than Jacob The Jeweler. The guy that used to sell all kinds of jewelry to rappers and famous people. He even got indicted by the Feds for working with a huge, organized crime family. They not only copped jewelry from him, but allegedly, he cleaned money for them.
Fame was never my thing. I didn’t care to be known. I damn sure didn’t want any indictments, however, I absolutely wanted to be rich. At the moment, I was doing okay. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, drove a four-year-old Equinox, and had around $7,000 in my savings account. A nigga was far from rich, but I wasn’t down bad.
Never once when I was growing up did it ever cross my mind to become a jeweler. From the moment I realized I could draw, I thought of everything from creating comics and cartoons to doing tattoos. Designing and making jewelry wasn’t something that I ever contemplated until I was twenty-three and designeda set of grills for myself. Everyone that saw them complimented me and wanted to know where I got them from. When I told people that I designed them, I got more than ten requests to design them for others.
When a local dope boy offered to pay me to make a charm for him, I decided to get serious about not only designing jewelry but making it as well. After I graduated from high school, I would have been willing to bet money that I would never step foot into another classroom. But I did. I took a vocational course to become a silversmith, and that wasn’t an easy course to find. I had to learn how to set stones and do metal casting. Over the last few years, I’d earned a few different certifications. The entire process took me about two and a half years to complete. If I was going to do it, I didn’t want to do it half ass. There were many times I wondered,what the fuck am I doing?A jeweler? What nigga from the hood became a jeweler?
I cleaned jewelry, engraved, sized, and repaired it. I also bought jewelry that people wanted to sell. People could come to me and pawn pieces. I had created a lane for myself that I was proud of. There was a long way to go, but I was down for the ride. I wasn’t as successful as I wanted to be, but a nigga was paying his bills on time, and I never went to bed without a full belly. That was all I could ask for.
However, I discovered that being from the hood had its’ advantages because no regular person was going to trust a 6’2, tatted up nigga with thick wicks to take their money and design jewelry for them. The people that gave me a chance were from around my way. The hood put so much money in my pockets that I would rock with them forever. Diamond Cove, North Carolina was home, and it would always have my heart. The shop was funded with drug money, but it had been over a year since I’d sold drugs. It would have been a waste of time to grind to get the shop then have to leave it because I went to prison.
From my peripheral vision, I saw my phone screen light up. Glancing over at it, I noticed there was an alert from my security system. The shop wasn’t open to the public which was why I was smoking weed and blasting music. Sucking weed smoke into my lungs, I tapped the screen, so I could see the live camera footage. My chest tightened when I saw two niggas with masks on their faces dressed in all black standing behind my brother, Jabar. I could tell that one of the men had a gun in his hand and was holding it at my brothers’ side. Using my phone to turn the music down, I hit the silent alarm and grabbed the Glock that was beside me resting on the glass counter.
I had no way of knowing if they would come in shooting, or if they’d simply use their weapons to make me give them what was inside the store. There were only a few grills, less than $10,000 worth of jewelry, and around $2,000 in the cash register. The jewelry was insured. Not wanting to do anything to risk my brother’s life, I had to decide if I was going to just let them rob my ass and possibly kill me after, or if I was going to risk dying anyway in a shootout. With the music being off, I could hear knocking on the door.
With the gun gripped tightly in hand, I unlocked the door with my heart galloping in my chest. Pretending I didn’t know the robbers were there, I pushed the door open for Jabar. He was from the trenches just like me, but Jabar was only nineteen. I could see the fear in his eyes. It was heartbreakingly apparent that he wasn’t ready to die and if I could help it, he wouldn’t. Niggas came for me and what I had. Jabar was an innocent bystander.
“I’m sorry,” he mouthed as the door was yanked open wider and the first masked man stormed in and aimed his gun at me.
“Open those cases, homie,” he demanded.
My survival instincts kicked in, and I fired my gun hitting him in the stomach. Jabar moved fast, and he pulled his gunimmediately after I fired mine. That didn’t stop the second assailant from firing his weapon, and I literally felt a bullet whiz past my ear. Jabar and I both hit robber number two but before his body dropped to the floor, he let off another shot that penetrated my chest. A searing pain ripped through my upper body taking my breath away. I’d never felt pain like that before in my life. Jabar rushed over to me as my knees buckled. I could hear sirens in the distance, but I couldn’t be sure help was going to make it in time.
It felt as if an elephant was standing on my chest. Jabar wasn’t aware that I’d hit the alarm, so he gently eased me onto the floor while dialing 9-1-1. “I got you bro, just hold on.” His voice was shaky, the fear evident. Seeing me take my last breath would haunt him forever. Jabar was a good kid.
More than likely, he was coming to the shop just to shoot the shit with me like he usually did and got ambushed. We were born and raised in the projects located less than five miles from my shop. The same hood that I walked every day even after I moved away. The niggas laid out on the floor might not have been from my side of town, but none of that mattered in the moment.
Being flat on my back, made me feel as if I was suffocating, so I used every ounce of strength I still possessed and rolled over onto my side. I had no clue if that would provide any relief, but I had to try something. The discomfort was brutal. The loud wailing of sirens had never sounded so good. Even if I couldn’t be for sure that they could save me, I couldn’t keep enduring the pain. I needed them to give me something strong, or I just wanted to pass the fuck out.
Voices that were in the same room as I was began to sound muffled. My body felt heavy while the noise around me sounded like I was under water. Was this what dying felt like? If so, my life didn’t flash before my eyes. But I did see her face. Leighton.The only woman I’d ever loved. The woman who broke up with me because she said I loved the hood more than I loved her. She said the streets didn’t love me back, and she wasn’t wrong.
All I could possibly think about was dying and her saying, I told you so.
Twenty-four hours after I’d been shot, I wanted to kill a muhfucka with my bare hands. If there wasn’t strong pain medication flowing through my vein making me drowsy and disoriented, I was in excruciating pain. The kind that had me mad at the world and praying the niggas that came to rob me were no longer among the living. One of the advantages of being under the influence of morphine was that I barely remembered my interaction with the police. I was still coherent enough to know they weren’t supposed to be questioning me while I wasn’t of sound mind, but they came by more than once.
I cooperated, however, and told them they could have the camera footage from the robbery. I didn’t give a damn about a street code. Despite all the bullshit I’d done in life, I didn’t have a record. I didn’t need this incident to cause the police to have eyes on me. The objective was to come across as a legit businessman. Which I was. But in the event some shit popped off later, despite my appearance, I didn’t need the police thinking I was involved in ‘that life.’ Even the gun I’d used was legally registered and in my name. The older I got, I was seeing the benefit in doing things the politically correct way. One thing I didn’t do right, however, was getting a shop far away from the trenches.
The new breed of niggas terrorizing the streets didn’t have a code. They used any and every drug they could get their hands on and tweaked the fuck out. The saying I was raised under,‘death before dishonor,’ didn’t mean a thing to these fuck niggas. It was all good though. I’d done some things in my past, and I was smart enough to know, karma would come back for me. She always did.
I was forcing myself to eat a dry ass chicken sandwich, when my mother rolled into the room being pushed by my sister, Wanda. Jabar was behind them. When I was thirteen, my mother lost her right leg due to complications from diabetes. At the time, Wanda was eight, and Jabar was six. All I ever remembered about my parents being together was them arguing. My mother never worked and though my father did, he didn’t make enough for a family of five to be living in the lap of luxury. From the moment I was old enough to understand, there were arguments between my parents and whispers among family members about my father cheating on my mother. She knew, but what I gathered from all the conversations that didn’t have shit to do with me was that she stayed because she had three kids by the nigga and needed him to support us.
Once she lost her leg, it was a wrap, however. My father became bolder with his infidelities. Despite his actions, my mom still didn’t leave him, but she didn’t have to. When I was fifteen, he left her. Shit, he left us. He still came by every Friday and gave her a few hundred dollars. That along with her social security check and government assistance kept a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. It took a good lil’ minute, but my mother eventually learned to be good without my pops. She even started dating again. She also found a way to make a few extra dollars under the table by babysitting her neighbors’ kids. Then, when I graduated from high school and started doing illegal shit, I contributed to the household. She didn’t like what I was doing, but she couldn’t stop me.
And for once, we were okay. We got decent furniture and not cheap shit from bargain outlet stores that was falling apart aftersix months. Wanda and Jabar were able to wear nicer clothes and shoes. Things began looking up for us. Despite the extra income in the house, my mother was afraid to leave her comfort zone. The rent in our apartment included utilities, and she knew that she could comfortably afford it. When I moved out, Jabar was able to have a room to himself. I didn’t live in an upscale luxury apartment, but it was in a decent area, nice, clean, and didn’t have loud, rowdy neighbors and nights filled with the sounds of gunfire.
“I brought you something,” Jabar held up a bag from a burger spot not too far from my mom’s apartment. “I didn’t get fries because I knew they’d be cold by the time we got here. I got you a double burger with bacon and two apple pies.”
“Good looking,” I let the sandwich drop onto the plate and winced from the soreness in my body as I reached for the bag.
“Are they saying when you can come home?” my mom implored.
“It won’t be today and probably not tomorrow,” I grumbled.
I hadn’t even seen the scar going down the center of my chest from the surgery I had to get, but if it looked like it felt, it was hideous. The doctors had to make sure the incision didn’t get infected, I didn’t get blood clots, or endure any other complications that could occur after surgery. I wanted to smoke bad as hell, but I couldn’t imagine having to cough or sneeze with the pain that I was in. Most times when I smoked, I had at least one coughing fit.
“You coming to stay with me when you’re discharged? There won’t be anybody to take care of you at your place.”
