Chapter 6

After a couple weeks of mail-room work, I again checked in on Reggie at the restaurant. Reggie worked the grill. Bianca greeted the customers and showed them to their tables. They hired a couple of Mexican illegals to work the dishes, clean up, and bus the tables. Reggie never knew it, but he was now included in the American dream. I never thought that business would be so good to him. Wealth arrived quickly.

Interestingly enough, he wanted to expand his business and perhaps open another restaurant on the whiter side of town. He had dreams that stuck to the road, not these outlandish attempts to establish his own intellect amidst the sea of professors who already had their routines down pat. I never pegged him to be a professor for very long anyway.

He and Bianca ran the restaurant, and they added items to the menu to attract the college crowds that drank a lot and smoked weed a lot. Under Reggie and Bianca’s leadership, they made more money than his father ever did, and he guessed that this was how it was supposed to be – that the son does better than the father. He discovered the magic of such a trend, but let it be known that both Reggie and Bianca did make a lot of money despite their naivete. But with more money came more problems. Their fistfuls of cash nearly killed them.

Reggie and I walked around the block after my third visit, and he explained everything to me, because after a long period of several months, things went drastically wrong. By the time we walked around the block, I felt sorry for him. The restaurant began hemorrhaging money, mostly due to the crack that haunted their daily lives. Only crack could make things possible and also miserable for them both.

I did get to meet Bianca again. She looked good serving all of the customers. When Reggie said that she was hot, I had no idea. I doubted him. She looked and acted like the ultimate party-girl and Hollywood starlet. I was impressed. If it weren’t for Reggie’s parents, Reggie would be heading nowhere quickly. He would have pushed himself harder, but without understanding that making a family of his own would put him in a better territory of having more fulfilling security. In other words, he would finally be an adult instead of his Peter Pan method of reducing himself.

Together the couple made a lot, but their physical and mental health had been on an inevitable decline.

With each visit to them, the restaurant looked dirtier than before, and the food had way too much fat and oil in it. I tried to communicate this to Reggie, but he was already at a place where only the give and take of crack could reach him. Their addiction ruled whatever healthy and blissful oblivion they aimed for.

Very slowly, crack dealing became a mainstay of the restaurant. Instead of well-off patrons, the addict- ridden from the streets showed up to buy crack a number of times each day. With this supplementary income, the restaurant thrived. It put even more money into their pockets. Reggie even bought his parents a brand new

Mercedes convertible. His mother was thrilled, but his father saw it as a slight to his many years of making just enough to get by for his family. That was the full effect of working honestly and lawfully. That was his father’s way.

Reggie realized that, crack or not, with an honest job and honest work, people had no choice but to remain within their places. They would never take risks.

They usually survived living from paycheck to paycheck.

Reggie even brought in a sturdy vault that kept the cash and many more small pouches of freshly chiseled crack inside. Bianca became a valuable coach. The restaurant outperformed his father’s lifetime earnings in a very short time.

Soon the restaurant caught the attention of the police. Not only did they bribe the police but also the corrupt assemblyman from their district. Hell, the assemblyman was hooked too. He left his crack pipes on the floor of the State Senate. His aids watched and protected him like Terminators sent back through time.

It turned out to be quite sick – the money rolling in, everyone keeping their mouths shut, the restaurant fully funded, the crack dealers visiting them once a week. It was heaven for them both, but fairy soon the cops would come again and want even more money to turn a blind eye to their dealings.

Reggie and Bianca felt a bit paranoid around them.

With every visit the cops demanded more. They were never satisfied. Reggie and Bianca paid them top dollar, and with Bianca being as good looking as she was, she even traded favors by giving them complimentary blow jobs in their squad cars every once in a while. She kept this hidden from Reggie.

Because this is what money does. There’s never enough of it, and wherever one goes to buy things, the sky is the only limit. One can buy a piece of shit mattress, or one can buy a top of the line mattress.

They could buy outrageous meals, pay for the biggest and costliest gold and diamond jewelry, purchase clothes that even these Hollywood types couldn’t pay for, and had to rent clothes for their red carpet work.

Reggie and Bianca paid cash for new property without taking a mortgage. They bought vacant city land outright and made the restaurant poised for expansion into a full-fledged franchise. But as far as drugs were concerned, they limited themselves to selling only in the ‘hood. They suspected that law enforcement watched their every move.

They tried to keep everyone hushed up about it, and for a while it worked. The problem? Getting high on their own supply. Every half-an-hour Reggie and Bianca went into the back room of the restaurant and smoked until they felt better. The goal of feeling better found them smoking crack around the clock and buying a lot of top-of-the-line shit. Fairly soon they needed more deliveries of crack to satisfy their habit.

The more they smoked rock, the more they couldn’t manage their business. They kept money in their vault, and because of the overflowing vault, they then made huge deposits at the local bank that had a branch in the ‘hood. No one would bust them there. They rinsed their money every week, and the bank made sure no one knew. The bank kept their clients’ deposits quiet and invisible. They also charged a lot, and paying the bank for the cleaning of their bills permitted them to take their quiet lies to the IRS and other agencies that never knew so much money could be had in the ‘hood.

The whites who managed the banks thought the area too poor for even doing business there. They never could find clients as wealthy and carefree about their money as Reggie and Bianca.

They smoked, they bought, and they bribed.

Considering how the governor of the state wanted to put a dent into state corruption, bribing police officers and politicians was a fundamental part of the status quo. The longer they bribed, the better the chance that they’d come upon a more powerful state agency and spend even more money on keeping them quiet. Luckily, though, their bribes never went beyond the local cops and their elected assemblyman. The magic couple soon realized that everyone around them could be bought.

Everyone in their schemes had earned their pay by keeping watchful and silent.

After a busy lunch rush, there was finally time for both Bianca and Reggie to smoke again in the back room.

Bianca stored their crack pipe in the vault with the overflow of plastic pouches of rock. She heated up the pipe with a small torch after squeezing nuggets of crack into its metal bowl. They smoked until they were good and high. Reggie, however, was still tense after smoking it. He had ‘his mind on his money, and his money on his mind.’ A crazy, risky business to be in.

He smoked a little more to get rid of the feeling.

Bianca noticed Reggie’s agitation, unbuckled his pants, and gave him a blow-job until he was relieved. Yes, crack and sex fit together in the small back room. He loved how Bianca swallowed, because it indicated that she would continue to love him just so long as the crack and the money came in. Without these two items, they would be addicts without a home.

“There’s a lot in here,” said Bianca before locking the vault. “Maybe we should go to our country house and take a break from all of this. Or maybe we should buy ourselves a couple of new Audi Quattros. How does that sound?”

“We can’t do that. They’ll sniff us out. We have to act poor. These streets have their own eyes and ears. Anything fancy brings us closer to state prison.

We have to keep our money under wraps.”

“But what’s the point of doing all this without buying things – a car, maybe another house, a vacation to Jamaica, or even the West Indies?”

“We can’t. It’s way too risky.”

“There’s something I’m missing here, Reg. With that much money and rock we should live a little of the good life.”

“We will, sweetie. We just have to be patient.

I’m worried about the cops.”

“Me too, but that shouldn’t stop us.”

“No. Not yet. That’s my final answer.”

Bianca looked disappointed. They would have to work at the restaurant and pretend being poor.

“How about we sell this shitty restaurant?” asked Bianca. “We’d get a good price for it.”

“My father would kill me,” said Reggie. “I don’t think you realize that my father started with nothing.

The restaurant is the symbol of how hard he worked over a lifetime.”

“It’s our life,” said Bianca. “Your father doesn’t own this place anymore. He already had his life. We should start living ours.”

“No, Bianca. Not yet.”

Bianca made sure not to bring it up again. Reggie thought himself smooth for dealing with a woman who wanted every luxury material item on the face of the earth. Bianca still wanted it all – one of these young woman socialites who could afford anything she wanted and had other rich socialite friends to spend it with.

And somehow through all of this, Reggie wanted to stay poor, even though the money was coming in so fast that they couldn’t even count it all.

He made it a point of dismissing her from the restaurant early and calling for a long-stretch limousine to take her to the bars and the clubs.

Reggie didn’t have to monitor her anymore. He trusted her and was confident enough to release her from the night shift. He trusted her not to fool around with other men at those hedonistic places she went to. My- brother-from-another-mother, Reggie, loosened up and smoked crack in the back room through the night. When he locked up the restaurant, he went to his family’s place to visit, smoked more crack, and couldn’t sleep until three in the morning.

On the next morning before Bianca and the Mexican immigrants straggled in, he quickly checked in the vault. He just wanted to make sure it was locked.

Having a vault full of money and rock drove him to check on it as though he were obsessed by it, kind of like not remembering whether or not he locked the front door to his family’s house that morning. The vault remained open during the day, considering the number of times they needed to smoke. He also bribed the people he needed to bribe, and he often and gave them a free sampling of the best rock in the city, especially if they were new clients.

He was in disbelief, though, when on one rainy afternoon, at least half of the crack pouches and their many new, banded, one-hundred dollar bills were missing from the vault. He knew Bianca took them in order to spend some of the cash on the high-ticket items that she craved. She broke Reggie’s orders not to touch it, but when Reggie simmered down by taking deep breaths, he figured that maybe he was too strict with Bianca.

She must have taken the money out of desperation.

No one else in the ‘hood wanted out more than Bianca. She at least wanted a taste of the good life instead of having to see blocks of vacated townhouses, graffiti on buildings and long white trucks, and young black kids who refused to pull up their pants like the rest of us. She wanted more than just Korean beauty salons, and meals at greasy spoons other than the family restaurant for a change. Reggie questioned whether or not he had administered the right policy.

Maybe it was time he spend on some luxury clothes, cars, and a few more roomy condominiums for investment.

Bianca sorely missed the clubs and the bars, but she knew that she wouldn’t be able to return to the golden years of her youth ever again, a time when her life was carefree and fun.

Of course Bianca fooled around with a couple of men in the club. Of course she started slinging bags of dope to her acquaintances. She regained her status and reputation – street credit, as they say - but it wasn’t the same. Smoking crack and fucking people in the club stalls didn’t amount to the same high degree of pleasure as it did before. She smoked more of it to pull her back to those happy times, but nothing did the trick. She was older now, as her duties at the restaurant forced her to grow into a somewhat sophisticated working girl. She went out for a week straight – fucking, sucking, and smoking. She never wanted it to end so quickly, and she no longer wanted to work at the restaurant.

Reggie knew none of this, and she kept it that way.

If Reggie found out, she’d be thrown out. She wouldn’t be able to score any more of the crack from the vault.

After a few days had passed, she realized that she was into Reggie only because of the crack he sold through the restaurant. The restaurant became a front for the real money that came through crack. Reggie knew that he couldn’t bribe the cops and the assemblyman for much longer. They always wanted more, and if Reggie didn’t give them what they required, they’d arrest him and book him for an empty cell at the state penitentiary.

For the first time since opening for business, Reggie and Bianca were beginning to lose their wealth. They used up their supply of crack instead of the pain in the ass it took to sell it to the highest bidder.

Bianca missed work for a few days. No call, no show. Reggie and his Mexican crew had to work around her. She had taken about half of the money and the crack saved in the vault. While making a cheeseburger at the grill – the only food he really knew how to cook right – he saw a police squad car pull up right near the entrance of the restaurant. Reggie anticipated the conversation. It involved money, sex, and politics.

“Hi there, Reginald.”

“Hello, officer Smalls. Would you like something to eat – perhaps a hamburger or a hot-dog? I have some already made.”

“No thanks,” said the officer. “I’m only in here for a short time. It’s very busy on the streets today.”

“Then I guess we should get down to business,” said Reggie.

In the register, underneath the plastic rack that organized all of the restaurant’s daily profit, Reggie took out a white envelope and handed it to Officer Smalls. The officer felt its thickness and then looked inside.

“Aren’t we a little light this month?” he asked.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. Bianca took most of the money to buy a few high-priced things.”

“Well, this won’t do. It’s getting tougher and tougher to protect you. If this is all there is, we may have to arrest you.”

“And what about Bianca?”

“Everyone on the force loves her. She’s all set.

You, on the other hand, will be arrested if you don’t pad this envelope a little more. You’re light this month, but I tell you what – we’ll give you a week more.

You should have the right amount in a week, or else we’re gonna have to haul you in. Sorry about that.

You have an impeccable history with us. This is the first time I’ve seen one of the envelopes light. You have to get this money to us. If you can, it would help if you included a few crack hits too.”

“I should have it by next week, Officer Smalls, sir.

It won’t happen again. Sorry about that.”

“Remember – it could mean substantial prison time for you.”

“I know. I’ll get you the money by next week.”

“Good. Have a great day.”

Officer Smalls then left, leaving Reggie so angry and insecure about his future that he wanted to smack Bianca for taking all of the supply and half the money from the vault. He had no idea how he would be able to pay Officer Smalls next week. It all came down to Bianca – the party-goer, the great dame of the night, the thief who took half of all their money and pouches of crack. God only knew how she spent this money, because when she showed up to the restaurant a few days later, she said she had spent all of it.

“You what?!”

“There’s nothing left, Reggie. I spent it all.”

“On what?”

“Well, my best friend from high school needed a new car. Hers was too old.”

“You telling me you bought a friend a fucking car?

What about the rock?”

“I kind of gave it to my friends at the club and the bars. It’s important for them to know that I’m a wealthy and important person – the elite of the elite.”

“Are you fucking nuts?! The money we had to use to pay people off people just to operate the restaurant is no longer there?”

“No,” she said in a child’s voice, as he knew Reggie now galloped on the warpath.

“Did you even think about this before you took all of it? Do you need me to explain to you that we don’t have enough for Officer Smalls this month – that we need enough rock and money to survive here?”

“I’m sorry, Reg,” she said while cozying up to him.

“I’m really sorry, boo.”

“Stop behaving like a fucking child. We need that money and those bags of rock. Otherwise, they’ll send me to state prison, and I’ll be there for a very long time. That can’t happen. You have to get that money back, or else I’m screwed.”

“We can always try to sell more. We can branch out.

We’ll give some of the rock to our two Mexicans to spread it around their neighborhoods. That’s possible.”

“No, it isn’t. Think, Bianca, think. Think about it! They sling a bag to the wrong person, and all of our crack, along with our two best workers, will be deported to Mexico. And you know what? I may join them there. If we don’t have that cash, I have to leave. I can’t stay here. We would forfeit everything.

Even our marriage plans.”

“I’m sorry, boo. Sounds like you’re really stressed out. Maybe you need some stress relief.”

She opened his zipper and fit her soft hand inside.

“It doesn’t work anymore, Bianca.”

“What? You can’t get hard again?”

“I have no desire, no want of sex right now while my ass is on the line. We have to get that money.”

“I guess you want me to walk the streets, then?”

“Of course not. The cops may love you for it. But you should save your work for when we recover the money.

You must have made enough of it already. I hate the idea of you doing your tricks with officers. Not just officers but with average-ass street folk too. Now tell me honestly, okay?”

“Tell you what?”

“What happened to half of our cash and half of our rock?”

Bianca sat in silence at first, because she didn’t know how to explain it. She didn’t want Reggie to get mad at her anymore, because his shouting and yelling scared the shit out of her. Better to be upfront about it.

“I bought a car.”

“Excuse me? You did that for your friend, I know.

But you bought another one?”

“I said I bought a car. It’s locked in a garage near the campus.”

“Didn’t I specifically say that we shouldn’t buy anything right now? Didn’t I explain that we can’t take any financial risks until it’s safe to buy nice things? What kind of car did you buy anyway?”

“I bought a Jaguar.”

“Well, that’s just fucking great. All we need are those officers to find out. They’ll haul me in. You bought a Jaguar, and I’m getting closer to spending twenty years in the State Pen. That’s just great. You really did it this time, and it’s too bad that you can’t drive the thing yet. Disconnect the battery and leave it in storage. I’m not going down because of the Jaguar.”

“How do we get the money back?”

“Depends where you spent it.”

“I bought the car. That was the major expense. As far as the rock, I repaid people with it. I owned them money, but they were nice enough to accept the crack.”

“The car has to go back. You know that, don’t you?”

“I’m not taking the car back,” said Bianca. “It’s the only thing in this world that makes me happy.”

“That car has to go.”

“Fuck you, Reggie. You can’t make me take it back.

I love that car.”

A winced expression on Reggie’s face suggested that he was thinking about what to do.

“Where’s this garage where the car is?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Then what do we do about Officer Smalls visit?”

“We’ll raise the price on all of our clients.”

“That’s not such a bad idea, although our clients would go crazy. Our supply is already overpriced.

They’ll be some pissed off people in town tomorrow and the next day.”

“So what?”

“So what, what?”

“We don’t have to care so much about who’s buying our product. We’re in control. You’re the Head Niggah On the Street around here. We have to serve ourselves every once in a while. Who cares if our clients get pissed. They’re already hooked. They’d pay any price for it.”

“True. Well, let’s start selling some of it. We need to pay for that stupid car you bought. We have to sling enough rock to make up for it. We have to get it done by next month. Otherwise, we already know what’ll happen. I’ll tell my labs down south to speed up the process. Maybe there’s some hope for us after all.”

“You never see the lighter side, Reggie. You are dark, moody, and confrontational.”

“I apologize, sweetheart. I just get scared.”

“That’s because you think too seriously for your own good. You always think that what we got going here will never work and end in catastrophe. It’s not fair to me. You have to stop thinking, planning, and worrying so much. Have a little faith.”

Bianca avoided the new Jaguar dilemma from that point on. She wanted to keep the car more than anything. She fell in love with it, and due to this, she didn’t even drive it. She saved it for when the warm summer months swept through the area again. It would be safe then to start spending their cash on some really valuable shit. At least for posterity.

“And I want a baby,” she said to Reggie when they woke up the next day in one of their vacant condos. A baby became some attempt to legitimize their lives.

Bianca felt that her clock was about to strike. Reggie, though, was having none of it.

“Our society is too cruel to bring another baby into this world. Our baby would never survive.

They’ll turn into alcoholics and drug addicts who then head straight to rehab, not once, but many times over.

There’s no way I’m gonna pass on that hardship. Our family will suffer. The kid would suffer, not to mention that the two of us would suffer. It’s just not a good idea.”

“You say no to everything. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I do it for our own security and well-being, sweetheart. We don’t need to have kids. We don’t need a new house. We don’t need to sell this dirty restaurant. We don’t need any of the new property we bought. It’s all just a pipe dream. The American dream is found in that crack pipe we smoke – to feel good about things, to be the best versions of ourselves.

We don’t need any of this American dream bullshit. We have to let God wield his own power over us. Fuck the American dream. It stays alive by sticking the white- owned media machines on our backs like wild monkeys, like the advertisements that the once-serious channels have become. It’s just survival, and we’re slowly but surely surviving here.”

“I thought there’d be so much more.”

“We’re drug dealers, okay Bianca?”

“But I want a child, Reggie.”

“You can’t have one. Our goal is to survive any way we can. Children don’t need to grow up in this shit.”

Bianca put on her street clothes and said she would meet him at the restaurant in a couple of hours for the morning shift. Tearing herself away from the comforts of their bed didn’t suit her well. Nevertheless, Reggie’s Queen dressed skimpily and took to the streets, selling her body for pouches of crack. She gave away too much crack at the bars and the clubs the night before. Yes, they all loved her for it, but she knew she had to take it all back. When she asked those same people later in the day to loan her the money, they said they didn’t have any crack or the money she lent them. All of the stuff she took from the vault was gone, all except for the Jaguar. It was high time that she raise the prices on the crack again and work her routine as a sex worker. Reggie couldn’t have felt worse about it. Apparently, Bianca had a large and wealthy clientele.

But with strenuous work in the restaurant, Bianca’s street money, raising the price on their product, and making the local police trust them, fairly soon the crack and the money grew five times as greater and faster than before. The office vault couldn’t handle the sheer size of cash they had earned, and interestingly enough, Bianca took plenty of her jewelry given to her by her mother and stuffed it in a safe deposit box at the local bank. After all of that arguing and hard negotiating, they finally agreed that their lives were back on track. They would be able to pay off Officer Smalls and collect from the other lost and papery thin addicts who seemed to follow them wherever they went, an entourage in seas of doubt.

They waited a week and worked hard at the restaurant. Officer Smalls came in like clockwork, his envelope heavy with cash. They had escaped for next month’s payment. As long as everyone got their money, they had very little to worry about. They could remember that they had to get married. The week proved to be plenty stressful, and Bianca knew that she had to de-stress him in the back room. Once again, he loved how she swallowed. She was so good at it that it only took five minutes of her time, and then she demanded sixty-bucks for it.

Reggie was shocked. She must have been playing with him. She acted like his girlfriend but treated him like a John. He couldn’t tell how much he should cough up at every de-stressing session, but giving her more and more money, more clothes and shoes, more entertainment, more of everything, suited her just fine.

By being a real con-artist, Bianca took most of his weekly money. While he slept, she went through his pockets, found his wallet and credit cards, and hit the town on one of her many shopping sprees. Reggie knew she must have been spending on her friends. She must have sold the crack to the highest bidder and then pocketed the money for herself, probably for more crack and a dress or two at the local boutique no women in their right minds could afford.

Back in the restaurant, Reggie cursed the Jaguar.

He wanted it returned, even though returning it would mean some loss on an investment. He would have to tell Bianca to sell it back to the original car dealer.

“I don’t want to return it. It is my car. It is my life, not yours.”

“Would you rather we sleep on the streets?”

“That Jaguar didn’t go over our budget at all. We have more cash now than we ever had before. The Jaguar is a drop in the bucket compared to how well stocked we are, both here and in our social lives. We have money.

We have clients. And now we have a Jaguar. Get used to it.”

He hated the way she talked down to him. She had little reason to do so. It was still his money, his car, and his restaurant that furnished every item for Bianca’s personal use. She gave herself an expensive gift for doing nothing but waiting on tables and giving her fiancé and police officers blow-jobs when they tensed up. And she kept on asking for more money on top of all that.

Bianca looked through his jacket pockets and found his wallet. She checked it after Reggie went up to bed.

Reggie had five dollars and a bunch of new high- interest credit cards waiting to be used. Even though she said she’d never do it again, she took all of the credit cards and went to the mall to use them. It turned out, even with all of that money, she promised to buy crack from different people entirely to make it more affordable. All of a sudden, the crack that they had cooked up made little difference, if not for the overwhelming passion for the business and the energy he retained.

They were addicts. Both realized they had to change. Once again, the money soon dried up. They had no money to pay off Smalls or the assemblyman. It took two more weeks for the restaurant to run out of business. All they could do is go to NA meetings and try to use his credit cards or even report them stolen.

Bianca spent five-hundred dollars of Reggie’s money every weekend. Reggie noticed this, but he had little idea how he would talk to her about money-matters. He made an on-side’s kick, and there was no telling who’d win the battle over crack.

They also inhaled on that crack pipe harder than ever. I think they hit it every fifteen minutes at their high point. They loved the high. Both of them wanted out, though. Bianca had a long rap sheet, and Reggie was a two-time convicted felon with thousands of dollars in fines to pay. They couldn’t escape - not enough of the idiot-crack money to pay for a trip to sunny Mexico. Reggie fell in love with the Mexico idea.