Older, wiser, I didn't look back on those days fondly. I didn't look at the things I had to do to hold my power for as long as I had with a smile. It was cold, brutal, and lonely at the top. I understood why Darius was so paranoid, why Terrell turned to the drugs. You lived your life under the weight of the constant realization that you were always one backstabber or one police raid away from a coffin or a cell.
So I became hard.
I ran shit with an iron fist and a loaded gun. My women were kept clean and safe. I traded in crack for heroin when the time came and the demand switched. I got contacts from South America. I brought the operation to a whole other level. My men were smart, discreet, and ruthless. No one stepped in on our turf. All things considered, it was one of the bloodiest reigns the Third Street gang had since the early nineties. The power struggle in Navesink Bank was a delicate balance of respecting the right organizations: The Henchmen, The Grassi family, The Mallicks, and Richard Lyon. Later, Hailstorm, V, and Lex Keith; but also knowing who needed to be tamped down before they got too powerful. The Mexicans, the small time MCs, the Irish. They weren't full blown wars, but only because I got wind of something I didn't like the smell of, I attacked hard and early. No one got the chance to dig in their roots and threaten our control of the streets.
Ten years. Ten years I called the shots. Ten years I spent lining my pockets, tagging women, growing my empire, listening to my mother and aunts and sisters and grandmother lecture me about not wanting to bury me or visit me at the penn.
Eventually, they all moved in together, pooling their money, and refusing one cent of my 'bloody money'.
Just shy of our twenty-ninth birthdays, an old shadow darkened my door. I wasn't sure how long it had been since I'd seen Enzo. Annie had died of cancer three years before and I had covered the cost of the arrangements and been present at the funeral. He had too, but I didn't pay him any attention, too wrapped up in myself at the time.
The last time I got a good look at him must have been a good five years before.
If his eyes and face weren't the same as what I saw in the mirror, I wouldn't have recognized him. He'd dropped a good fifty pounds he didn't need to lose, making him look sickly.
"Fuck don't tell me you're on rock or ice," I said, shaking my head as D let him in my office which wasn't an office at all but a ostentatious living room inside a housing project that was our headquarters. I could have afforded a nice place in a decent part of town, but when you ran the streets, you had to live in them too.
"Call off your boy," he said, jerking his head toward D.
"Take a walk," I agreed and D excused himself.
"I want in," he said, taking a couple steps into the room, not even bothering to look around at the TV that took up most of the wall or the sound system that cost the down payment on a mid-size car.
"In on what?"
"This. What you got. I want in. I'm fucking over slaving away to make pennies. I'm sick of swallowing the shit men feed to me just because they have a salaried position. I'm done. It's over."
"Annie wouldn't want..."
"Mom's dead. Mom has been dead a long time. I respected her wishes when she was around to care. She's in the ground and all I got is myself. And I want better."
"She ain't all you got. You got me too."
From that day on, he did.
He worked his way up.
He got his own reputation. If possible, somehow meaner, bloodier, and crueler than mine. He had, after all, ten years of feeling under-appreciated, overlooked, poor, and weak to draw anger from. Not to mention the loss of what looked like a promising career in basketball. He threw every bit of disappointment and rage into earning and keeping the respect of the men. He put in hours that made everyone else in the organization look like they were slacking; he made it possible to rise up in the ranks in under a year. He put on sixty solid pounds of muscle. He protected the girls. He watched over the new blood on the streets. He helped balance the books. He went with me to meetings.
Then one night, we got word of one of our girls getting roughed up and raped by one of our own. First, it was against the rules for any of the guys to get anything from any of the girls whether they gave it away for free or they paid for it. It wasn't done. Second, there was no fucking way you put your hands on them at all, let alone force yourself on them.