As you guys can expect, Michael’s bribe of twelve cases of Arizona teas meant I had twelve days of him asking me to do shit for him. He would occasionally throw in a few dollars for gas, which was actually pretty nice. But some of the people he dealt with were weird as hell. Bro told me one time that a girl tried to suck him off for five grams of weed. I laughed my ass off when he told me that.
But the craziest thing happened on the weekend of the eleventh favor. It was the day after my birthday, which also happened to be my day off. I’d just finished dropping Michael off at one of his usual spots, and he climbed back into the passenger seat, sighing.
“Bro, I love how my business is booming,” Michael said, rubbing his eyes. “But all of these orders are getting annoying. Especially the ones halfway across town.”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna lie, gang,” I said, turning the wheel. “I appreciate the money you’ve been throwing me, and the teas are cool. But I can’t hold you, this shit is putting hella mileage on my car. You need to make these people meet you closer to the crib, because I’m already on my third oil change.”
He sat there in the passenger seat and thought for a second. Suddenly, he looked at me like a massive lightbulb had just gone off in his head.
I hated that look the second I saw it.
“I know,” Michael said. “How about you move some product?”
“Fuck no.”
“Hold on, man. Just hear me—”
“FUCK NO, nigga,” I snapped. “I’m not a drug dealer. I’m already putting myself at a whole bunch of risk just driving your ass around. I’ve only been off parole for about a year. I am not trying to lose my right to own firearms or get a felony on my record. I like you, bro, but you’re asking for too much.”
“Look, I know that,” Michael said. “I’m not trying to put you in a situation where you’re at risk of getting locked up again.”
“Dog, you already are,” I said. “You’re trying to take me from a comfort zone where I can easily talk my way out of trouble to a situation where I can’t talk my way out of shit.”
“Of course I’m going to reimburse you for your troubles,” Michael said. “I actually had you in mind when I was planning this. Can you just hear me out? I promise you won’t get in any trouble. At worst, you’ll just have to find another job.”
Oh, great. Fan-fucking-tastic. A plan where I stay out of jail but end up jobless. Sounds like a very fair trade-off. A real lose-lose situation.
“Alright,” I sighed. “I’ll humor you. But just know my mind is firmly set on no. I’ll at least let you plead your case.”
“All right,” Michael said, leaning in. “So, you know your boss Jacob, right? I’ve actually been talking to him on the sidelines.”
I stared at him. “You did what, nigga? You’ve been talking to my manager behind my back? When the hell did this happen?”
“I told him about my little business arrangement,” Michael said, “and he was actually cool with it.”
“Bullshit,” I scoffed. “Jacob is cool and all, but he’s the biggest square I know. There is no way in hell you got him down with some shit like this.”
“On the contrary, my dear friend, you forget how much of a golden tongue I have. He’s going to move you to a shift where the other workers are cool, keeping your school schedule mostly intact. And since KFC/Taco Bell is the farthest spot from our dorms, you can take over the orders I usually don’t want to drive out to.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And how is that supposed to work?”
“The codeword is the
Wyald Special
,” Michael said, pulling a tiny plastic baggie from his pocket. “I have these pre-packaged bags with at least a gram in each one. You just slip it into their bag of food, sell them the cheapest item on the menu, and they’ll pay for the food plus twenty bucks for the gram.”
I nodded slowly. “Alright. Seems like you’re following the K.I.S.S. method.”
Michael blinked. “The kiss method?”
“It means Keep It Simple, Stupid, nigga. So how big of a cut are we talking?”
“It’s a forty-forty-twenty split,” Michael said. “Everybody gets a good share. Jacob needs the money, and since you’ve been taking good care of me, I wanted to give you some extra cash for your trouble.”
“Okay,” I said, starting to sound a little more reasonable. “A forty-forty-twenty split doesn’t sound bad.”
“Oh, but here’s the thing that’s going to change your mind,” Michael smirked. “You’re actually getting the forty.”
“Huh?! What the fuck am I getting forty for? I don’t need that much money. It’s not like I’m broke.”
“Well, you kind of are compared to me.”
“Compared?! Compared?!” I turned in my seat, raising my voice. “Bro, I make more legal money than you, Michael! You still live off food stamps, my nigga. You won’t even eat anywhere unless they accept EBT. You can’t even make big-ass purchases because the government is gonna wonder where the fuck you’re getting all this cash without paying Uncle Sam his cut.”
“Man, whatever, bruh,” Michael muttered. “Do you want the extra cash or not?”
This was a hard choice, to be honest.
At my regular job, I make $9.50 an hour. I work forty hours a week, and since most of my Master’s coursework is online, I can actually manage a full-time schedule. Since we get paid bi-weekly, my net monthly income averages about $1,466.21. Over a full year, that’s exactly $17,594.52 of clean, legal money.
But let me stop right there, because my brain almost did some real retard math. In my head, I originally added my
yearly
legal salary of $17,594.52 directly to his
monthly
trapping total of $21,666.67 and came up with $39,261.19. That’s why you stay in school, kids. You can’t add yearly apples to monthly oranges.
Let’s break down the real numbers.
Michael is pulling in $10,000 every two weeks from trapping. On a monthly basis, that’s $21,666.67.
If I take my forty percent cut of that monthly trapping revenue, my share is exactly $8,666.67 a month.
Add my legal paycheck of $1,466.21 to my forty percent cut of the weed money, and I’m looking at a grand total of $10,132.88 a month. Over a full year, that’s $121,594.52.
Meanwhile, this nigga Michael who grew up in a safe, wealthy suburb doesn’t even need to sell drugs. But he’s doing it anyway, pulling in $260,000 a year, and handing me forty percent of his monthly revenue just to drop off baggies at the drive-thru.
If I combined both incomes correctly, I’d be making over ten thousand dollars a month. That was a stupid amount of money.
“Alright, I’ll do some selling for you,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “But Mick, I swear to God—strike me down if I’m lying—if you get me locked up, bro, I am never talking to you again in my life. Deadass. And if I ever see you on the street after this, I’m smacking the shit out of you every single time. For the rest of my life.”
“Chill! Damn, okay,” Michael said, putting his hands up. “No need to go that far. You’ll be alright. I already know you got hella savings anyway. You’re going for your Master’s, so I know you’ve got enough funds to get you through until you find another job. Just trust me, all right?”
“Yeah, I will,” I muttered. “Shit, I’m giving you more trust than I do most people in this world. Just don’t fuck me over, bro.”
And just like that... I became a common drug dealer.
But just to make sure Michael wasn’t lying to me, I called up Jacob the second I got back to my room.
Prrr-prrr. Prrr-prrr. Click.
“What’s up, Rico?”
“Jacob, did you talk to a guy named Michael?”
“Your roommate? Yeah, he told me about the setup.”
“What the fuck are you thinking?!” I hissed.
Jacob sighed on the other end. “Look, man, I’ve been going through some tough times at my house right now. I made a bad investment in crypto, and I need to make my money back.”
“Crypto?” I asked, sitting on the edge of my bed. “What did you invest in?”
“It wasn’t even the coins themselves,” Jacob said, his voice sounding tired. “It was the exchange. I had a wallet on this website called QuadrigaCX. They just announced the founder died in India and took the password to his grave. I have fifty thousand dollars locked up in my account, Rico. That’s a lot of fucking money. And it’s not just me. Thousands of people lost everything. They froze the site, and now over a hundred and ninety million dollars of user funds are completely inaccessible.”
“So you let some suburban weed-head convince you to sell drugs out of the store?” I asked. “The same store we worked so hard to get Tisha out of? And if we get caught, I’m the one who’s gonna be out of a job, right? That’s just how it’s gonna be?”
“Nah, don’t even look at it like that,” Jacob said quickly. “I’m not going to fire you. If I fire you, you won’t even be able to get your unemployment. All you have to do is just quit if things get hot. I’ll make sure as long as I’m here, you got free food all on me, son. You know we’re cool, Rico. If it wasn’t for what you did to get Tisha out of here, I wouldn’t even have this job. You’re a good dude. You should know I wouldn’t fuck you over.”
I didn’t say anything for a second.
Honestly, you can’t really blame me for being paranoid. My biological mother used to beat the absolute shit of me and tell me I was a mistake just for existing. When I finally got into a decent foster home, my foster mom turned her back on me the second I started getting into legal trouble that wasn’t even my fault. Putting my fate into other people’s hands is hard. It’s hard, y’all. But at the same time, you can’t keep that wall up twenty-four-seven.
So I let it go. I decided to trust him, because I’d helped him out when it mattered.
“Yeah, sure, bruh,” I said, letting out a breath. “As long as you know. I was really hoping Michael didn’t lie to me about you being down with this.”
“It’s all good, bro,” Jacob said. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”
I hung up.
I must have a good heart, because deep down, I knew what I was doing was wrong. But at the same time, I was just trying to get by like everyone else in this world. I knew Mr. Walker wouldn’t approve of this shit, but I was on my own now.
I turned off my light and went to bed, hoping to God that nothing crazy would happen.