I watched as my mom took her hands, sweeping my long hair forward, so that it was able to drape over both my shoulders. This way, you were able to see the length, and the fullness of it. As I was sitting, the hair was long enough to nearly graze my waist.
Instead of keeping my eyes on myself, I looked up, so that I could look at my mom, who was standing behind me in the mirror, looking at me with a gloss in her eyes, making it obvious that she was proud of her handiwork, and of the daughter that she had produced. I might not have been the daughter that shethought she would have, but I’m sure that she was proud of me, nonetheless.
“You’re a beautiful girl, Riot. I love you so much. I need you to know that you’re not the easiest to love because you make it so hard, and you do a damn good job at pushing love away, but girl, I love you. You’re the only child that I have left. I’m not going to stand here and question you about your plan because I’m smart enough to know what it is. I won’t stand here and try to tell you how to live your life. I did that already. I did it until I was blue in the face, and I’ve finally gotten to a point where I gotta let you spread your wings, fly, and live life as you see fit. When I come at you aggressive, it tarnishes the relationship that we have, and I don’t want that for us,” she started, and I knew that this wasn’t the end, so I kept quiet, allowing her to finish.
“Just know that your brother and your daddy are no longer here. The same life that you feel compelled to live, and like it’s the only option for you, just know that that life is the same thing that took them away from us. All I ask is that you be careful. I can’t lose the only child that I have left,” her voice cracked a little bit when she said that.
“I got you ma,” I responded, leaving it at that.
There was nothing else that needed to be said. She knew the life that I was prepared to live. She wasn’t in support of it, but she’s come to terms to just accepting it.
I was home, and I was ready to get the ball rolling. I was ready to hustle.
Chapter 3
Dominique ‘Dolo’ Shaw
“And you don’t have to ever worry about me asking you to bring weed for me no more, nigga. If I knew that you were going to take this fuckin long, I would have gone and gotten the shit myself!” my big cousin Loco snapped on me, as I walked into the kitchen area where he was.
I put a quarter pound of weed in his hands, that had originally been stuffed in my pockets because I knew he had my little cousins in the house, and I didn’t want them to see it.
“Man, you hit me at the last minute, and when I answered the phone for you, I had already told you that I was getting ready to head to a party, so you was going to have to give me a minute. Crab ass nigga, you be ready to start bitching,” I fucked with him, walking away, and I took a seat down at one of the high-top chairs that was facing the island.
I watched him as he opened one of the cabinets that was above the stove, and that’s where he stuffed the quarter pound of weed that I just handed to him. When he reached up, you could see the Glock that he had stored, tucked in the back of the sweats that he was wearing. This nigga was standing over the stove, cooking dinner in his own home, but even with that,you weren’t going to catch his ass slipping because he was still walking around this bitch strapped.
He turned his back on the stove, and he took a few steps my way. I watched him as he went into his pocket, pulled out a small bank roll, and when it looked as if he was getting ready to try and pay me back for the weed that I dropped off for him, I shook my head.
“Your face good with me. You don’t gotta pay me back,” I let him know, and as if he didn’t hear me, he still dropped five one-hundred-dollar bills on the counter, and he slid it my way.
“That’s some goofy ass shit to say. Quickest way for a young nigga to go broke too. Don’t ever feel like a nigga ain’t gotta pay you back. Get your shit back every time. I don’t care if it’s a dollar. Every dollar add up,” he spat, as he put the roll of money back into his pockets.
Loco wasn’t the kind of nigga to go back and forth with, so I just took the money that he handed me, and I stuffed it inside the jeans that I was wearing.
Loco was my big cousin. My mom’s name was Raquel, and she was sisters with his mom, who was my auntie Gabby. Our moms are originally from Spain. My auntie Gabby was the oldest out of the two of them, so she came down to the United States before my mom did. I want to say that she came down about five years before my mom did. My mom didn’t move to the states until she was eighteen. Fresh out of high school, my mom moved here, in search of a better life. Back in Spain, there was more of an economic struggle there, plus limited opportunities for her. Speaking with my auntie Gabby often and learning from her how well she was doing in the U.S., it motivated my mom to come down next, and that’s what she did.
My mom came down, and she enrolled in school because it was her dream to become an educator. Her ass went to school for a year, and then she met my pops, and all that shit she talkedabout being a teacher, owning her own school one day had gone out of the window.
My pops name was Delano. He was a bad man. I had a black father, and a mother from Spain, so my bloodline was split right down the middle. My pops was a year older than my mom. Heavy in these Miami streets back then, and he came along, sweeping my mama off her feet. Life for them went by fast. Everything happened between them within the blink of an eye. He got my mama quick because by the time she turned nineteen, she was already pregnant and had given birth to me.
Their relationship wasn’t one of those fairytale love stories. Hell nah. My pops put my mama through all kinds of shit. He was a young nigga back then, that was heavy in the streets, making money, doing his thing, so with that, he wasn’t always faithful. The two of them were toxic than a motha fucka because whenever my mama would find out about a new bitch, she’ll do some wild shit like fuck up all his cars, ruin his clothes, and then she would dip to Spain, hide out there with me, keeping me away from him, and when the nigga would finally get through to her, talk his ass out of the trouble that he was in with her, she would come back to the states.
They did that shit for years. Four years later, she got pregnant again with my little brother Diego. That was my right-hand man right there. My ace. He may get on my fuckin nerves from time to time because the nigga was hardheaded, and he didn’t like to listen to nobody, but if my brother was rocking, then I was rolling.
The same toxic shit went on between my parents for years. I feel like things between them started getting worse once Diego arrived in the picture. It’s like the heavier my pops got in the streets, the more money he would make, the more he would cheat on my mama. With that, my brother and I didn’t have a lot of stability growing up. Our stability were on the sole groundsof if my mama caught my daddy fuckin around, and if she did, she would do the one thing to try and hurt that nigga, which was taking his kids away from him, and going back to Spain.
That went on for years, which is why I was never close with my cousins that I had in Miami. My auntie Gabby had three children. It was my big cousin Loco, his sister Micaiah, and their little sister Miracle. It had gotten to the point that my mom ended up leaving my pops for good at one point, and she decided to make Spain our home, which was crazy because it was the same country that she left when she was a teenager, feeling like the U.S would have better opportunities for her. The only time that I would see my auntie Gabby’s kids was when they would come down for the summer, and that’s how we started getting closer with them.
My parents didn’t get their shit together until I was about fourteen. My pops ended up getting shot. This nigga beat death just by a bullet missing his heart by less than an inch. When a woman loves, she loves hard because when she found out that my dad had been shot, she packed up all our shit, and we flew back to the states, so that she could be there with him. It took this man beating death for the two of them to finally get that shit right. You could tell that something in my pops life changed the night he was shot because he got his ass out of the streets, which was the main thing that my mom had been wanting him to do for years. She got one nigga out the streets, but me and my little brother had been soaking that shit up for years, and my life ain’t been the same ever since I got a brick in my hands at seventeen years old.
You couldn’t show a young nigga like me at a young age what moving dope could get you. Back when I was a little boy, my pops used to take me with him, have me in the back seat, thinking that I was too young to fully understand what he wasdoing, but I used to sit back, soaking all that shit up, thinking how I couldn’t wait to be in his position one day.
I remember this man driving by his traps, and he would have niggas come out to the car, handing him large amounts of cash, that he would stuff up under the driver’s seat. He used to take my little brother and I on shopping sprees, letting us go inside Footlocker, and pick up any shoe that we wanted. As a little nigga, I had all the chains, the clothes, and he would often put large amounts of money in my hands, telling me to keep it, and save it.
You show me what that drug money can get you, and that was all that I needed to hear. I had to sneak and sell dope because after my pops got shot, he would often get on me and Diego, telling us not to be shit like him, and how he wanted us to go off to college, and get careers and shit. Little did he know that we wanted to be just like his ass. We just didn’t want to fuck around and get shot.
I’ve always been a smart dude. I knew how to let a lot of things slip through the cracks, and I wasn’t sloppy, so if it was up to me, my parents would have never found out that me, and Diego was moving weight. My goofy ass brother slipped up, left some shit in his room that our mama found, and after she beat the shit out of both of us, she told our daddy, who beat us too, and tried to damn near kill us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my pops that angry before in my life.
That happened when I was seventeen. I was months away from graduating high school and turning eighteen. The second I walked across that motha fuckin stage, and I earned my diploma, I transitioned into a nigga that my pops could no longer keep his foot on my neck and fear his threats of killing me if he found out that I was in the streets. I moved out of my parents crib the same day that I graduated high school.
