Four Feet Tall and Rising (7 page)

I had no interest in becoming a permanent part of the drug trade, and I considered myself on the outside of the nasty work. I knew how to cook crack, but I wouldn’t do it. I knew how to sell, but I wouldn’t do it. I saw a way to make a shitload of money without having to get into the real mess of dealing. So I took it. It wasn’t my life goal.

The law firm was inside the Crocker Center, which is now the Wells Fargo Towers in downtown L.A. We were on the fortieth-something floor, and at night, me and my homies would go there and have meetings in the boardroom. We’d discuss where to get drunk and who to shoot. I’d started carrying a pistol in ninth grade when all my friends started carrying, and I was like, ooh-la-la, I need one, too. I had a .22 I got from my homies, but with all of Uncle D.’s money under my bed, I decided I needed something more. I graduated to a .25. I couldn’t get too big a gun ’cause my fat, chubby dwarf fingers wouldn’t fit through the trigger hole.

I liked feeling like a corporate boss. It was the closest I’d ever come to living out my childhood Halloween dream of being an executive cowboy. Only now, I wore red jeans and do-rags when I was off the clock. No one never said nothing about us meeting there. Of course, this was before the days of video surveillance in offices and high security. We’d leave the office and head to the bar at the top of the Bonaventure Hotel. The more we drank, the more we talked about who to shoot. We were intelligent and stupid at the same time. We looked good. We were making money, and yet, we all assumed, someday we would end up in jail. It seemed inevitable. All around us, our friends were either dying or being arrested. If it was a choice between death by drive-by or five-to-ten, jail was the better option. It wasn’t something we were trying to avoid. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. The headlights of an oncoming train.

It took about a year for that train to catch up to Uncle D.

He got busted for possession, and not long after he was locked up, I was arrested myself. Not for counting his money. Or crossing the border with drugs in a trunk. Or for sneaking my homies into the law office most nights. No, the train that came barreling down the tracks at me had big-ass lights. I was arrested for attempted murder.

was hanging with a bunch of idiots, four
guys named Dante, Lewis, T.J., and Bernard. These were friends of mine. At least, I thought they were. We were all young, not out of our teens. I was eighteen, Bernard and T.J. were seventeen, and Lewis and Dante were nineteen. Dante and Lewis had the ugly habit of robbing people. That was their thing. Not mine. I had saved enough money working for Uncle D. that I didn’t need to rob anyone, and even if I’d needed the money, I wouldn’t have robbed someone for it.

The only reason I ran with Dante and Lewis was ’cause they had a truck. I had a 1978 Monte Carlo that was a piece of shit. It used a broomstick as the stick shift, and I had to crawl out the passenger-side window ’cause neither door would open, and the window on the driver’s side wouldn’t roll down. The car looked like it had survived a demolition derby. It wasn’t street legal, so having access to wheels via Dante and Lewis was a plus.

One night, the guys picked me up at the law firm. We had our usual boardroom meeting to discuss the night’s party, but I didn’t know that Dante and Lewis had been on a robbing spree for the past couple of days. I got in the car with them, and we started our usual shit, hanging out, chasing women. It was a typical night until Dante and Lewis decided to drive to an area called Southgate.

Dante and Lewis had attitude problems. They’d gangbang on anyone they saw, without thinking of the consequences. There was a guy there, from a Southside gang, the East Coast Crips. I didn’t know him, but Dante did. He started an argument with the guy. After the gangbanger walked off, Dante turned around and robbed an innocent bystander just for the hell of it. I was in the truck, looking at Dante, thinking, “What an idiot. We’re in the middle of the fucking street. Why would he rob someone in the wide open like that?” Next thing I knew, the gangbanger had come back with his crew. Ten of them. Dante was so busy beating the bystander, he didn’t even notice.

There were five of us: me, Dante, Lewis, Bernard, and T.J. We were outnumbered two to one. We got into it. Right there, in the middle of the street. Dante drove a green, old-style Chevy truck with a mattress in the bed, and it was loaded full of guns. That was how we always rolled. Next thing you know, one of the Crips pulls out his gun. They did not realize our firepower. I was standing on the bumper and when they started shooting, I jumped and hit that mattress and grabbed my guns. We shot back. It was just
bang-bang-bang-bang-bang
.
I don’t know how many shots were fired. I had three guns. I was shooting a .25, a .32, and a .22. It seemed like an eternity passed.

The Highway Patrol just happened to be driving down the street when they heard the shots fired. They hadn’t been called. What the hell the Highway Patrol was doing on a side street, I don’t know, but here they came. Bernard and Dante took off on foot, but T.J. and Lewis jumped in the truck and we took off in a high-speed chase. They clocked us at 110 miles per hour. I was being bounced around the back of the pickup truck like a fucking Ping-Pong ball. The Highway Patrol called in reinforcements, and then we were being chased by the LAPD and the County Sheriff’s Department. I couldn’t see nothing at all. I couldn’t get a grip on nothing. I was being tossed back and forth, but nobody was shooting at us, so I thought we might have a chance. Until we crashed.

We hit something so hard, I went into a daze. Lewis and T.J. took off on foot, but I just laid there on that mattress trying to recover. Since I was lying down, the cops didn’t see me. They took off after T.J. and Lewis. They just left me there in the back of the truck. When I realized I was all alone, I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Oh shit, really?” I climbed out of the truck and started calmly walking away. That’s when I heard, “Hey, you! Stop!” I ran. The Highway Patrol started chasing me on foot. I was able to run around the corner and there was a three-foot-high wall in front of me. I jumped over it and fell into some hedges. I heard the police run toward me, and then stop. They couldn’t figure out where I went. I heard them call in on their
radios. They reported that they were on foot chasing a Little black male, dressed in all red. I waited until they had run off, then I climbed out from the hedges. I started walking calmly across the street. Here comes the sheriff. They flashed a light in my eyes. “Hey you, what are you doing?” I said, “I’m on my way home.” They looked me over. I was dressed in all red and I was a Little Person, but I was white, not black. They let me go.

I went into a Mexican restaurant. The helicopters were circling, and I’ll never forget the lady there at the register. She took one look at me and saw something was wrong. She was so kind. “You okay?” she spoke in broken English. I said, “Yeah, I just need to rest.” She pointed to the video game room, so I gave her five dollars, and she gave me a whole bunch of quarters. I hid in the back room of that restaurant, playing video games. Cops were running everywhere, looking for me. Finally, everything cooled down, and the cops left the area. I thanked the lady and left the restaurant. There was a bus coming, so I jumped on. I didn’t know where I was going but I knew I was in a shitload of trouble.

I rode the bus downtown, then transferred to another bus that took me to Dante’s house. I needed to think, to find out if anyone knew anything. I was too afraid to go back to Mama Myrt’s. I thought the cops might be looking for me there. Dante hadn’t made it home. Everyone got caught but me. Dante called from jail. His sister told him I was there, and he told her to put me on the phone. He said, “Shorty, you gotta do something. They’re talking about giving us the death chamber.” Apparently, three guys had been hit during our
shootout, and one of them was the innocent bystander Dante had robbed. He was in the hospital, in critical condition, and the cops were saying all kinds of shit to scare the crap out of Dante. I got off the phone and Dante’s sick mom let me spend the night in his room. After I left the next day, she had a heart attack.

I called Mama Myrt and she told me to come home. She said, “We’ll take you up to Uncle D.’s house in Atascadero. You need to get outta town until we find out what’s happening.” I walked out of Dante’s house and got about a block from the school on the corner. The kids were on recess, spilling out onto the sidewalks, when all of a sudden, five or six cop cars came out of nowhere. Screeching wheels, sirens, guns drawn, screaming into a megaphone. Kids running. Cops everywhere. It was chaos. They treated me like I was the biggest, baddest motherfucker. Like I was six-foot-nine and carrying an arsenal of weapons. They slammed me into the ground. I yelled, “I’m not armed!” It didn’t help. Officer Martinez—I can still see his face—cuffed me and threw me in the back of his squad car. He smirked. “Enjoy your last breath of fresh air, you little piece of shit.”

They took me
to the Southgate substation. When I walked in, all the cops were laughing at the guys who’d been part of the chase the night before. “You let this little fuck get away from you?” It embarrassed them so badly they got pissed off. One of the cops kicked me as hard as he could in retaliation.
They put me in the holding tank. It was freezing in there, with no toilet. Finally, they pulled me out and said, “Tell us your story.”

I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The cop interrogating me said, “Your friends told us everything. You were with these guys all day yesterday.” Turns out Dante and Lewis had been robbing people for hours before they picked me up at Wells Fargo. Thank God, I had proof I’d been at work at the law firm until six o’clock. Swipe cards don’t lie. The cops didn’t believe me. They kept questioning me and threatening me with the death penalty. They’d recovered all the pistols: Lewis told them I’d thrown the guns from the back of the truck and he took them on a tour, showed them where they could find all the tossed evidence. The cops told me they had my fingerprints all over the weapons. I knew they were right. My fingerprints were all over those guns, but they hadn’t even fingerprinted me at the station yet, so I also knew they had no proof. They were lying. I told them, “I don’t have nothing else to say.” I didn’t ask for a lawyer. I didn’t know I could.

I asked to call my sister Janet. I told her, “I’m in jail.” She couldn’t believe it, and she started crying. Of course, I lied about everything. I didn’t wanna tell her the truth. I wanted to keep her out of it and I didn’t want her to tell my parents, but I knew, eventually, they would find out. Janet drove in from Palmdale to check on me. When they found out she was my sister, the cops started messing with her mind. They told her I was gonna get the death penalty and made her cry. One of the cops pulled her aside and acted concerned. “Take a good
look at your brother. This is the last time you’ll see him alive.” They were upsetting her to try to get information out of me. It was a mind game, those four days at the substation. They were working on me and I just kept saying, “I don’t know nothing.”

Mama Myrt came down and tried to post bail, but they hadn’t set the bail yet, so they wouldn’t let me go. I was more worried about Coco than I was about myself. Mama Myrt promised me Coco would be taken care of. Little Al was watching him, but if things dragged on, they’d take Coco to Uncle D.’s house in Atascadero. They held me over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. The reality of my situation began to sink in. It’d been six months since I broke off my wedding to Liz. I wondered: If I had married her, would I have been arrested? There was no way to know.

I started having the same dream every night. In the dream, I’d wake up in my own bed, at Mama Myrt’s house, look around, and see everyone there. I’d have this happy feeling and be so relieved. Then I’d really wake up, and be in the prison cell. Son of a bitch! Oh, I was so mad to wake up like that. The dream continued every night for the entire time I was in holding. It was a miserable way to sleep.