dallaspenn.com

^ Don’t be fooled by the baby face. This nigga will robberize you.

‘AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted’

Isn’t the never ending lament from people that if they knew what they know now when they were 10 or 20 years younger they would be millionaires now or whatever? That my friends is the longest line of bullshit tho’. What we know at this moment is the product of past successes and especially past failures, really most of it is past failures that we have been fortunate enough to escape with our skin still on our ass. This is how man has evolved. Not from winning, but from surviving horrible losses. The dude y’all have come to fux with called Dallas Penn stays losing.

As the Whypticons grew older we grew out of the simple shit of stick-ups and smash and grab capers. The city was changing under the mayor and more cops were being hired. This is before Giuliani mind you, even before Dinkins inglorious term in office. Koch was still the mayor and this was the latter part of the 1980s. Money off the street was drying up. The crack game was str8 up ruthless and you needed a wild amount of guns to compete in that arena. The only “safe” street game was in being a courier. Safe meaning you had the largest return for touching that bullshit.

Couriers got merc’ked just like everybody else did and most times you didn’t even learn your folks was dead until they body turned up in dumpster behind a 7-11 in Towson. But the money you were going to make negated the reality of the drug game in which there are NO happy endings. That shit is just the fictional Hollywood movie. This chamber I am going to be giving you is the reality. There won’t be any heroes or rappers, just villains and other folks on their way to Hell.

‘Endangered Species (Tales From The Darkside)’

If anyone ever tells you they took the Peter Pan bus from Port Authority with some work on them they are lying through their piehole. The Peter Pan bus had to be run by the D.E.A. because there is no way you could get to V.A. for that cheap and not end up getting bagged at the changeover in D.C. You had to get down south way smarter than that. You had to go through Philadelphia. Take the NJ Transit to Trenton and then the SEPTA to 30th Street Station. The bus from Philly would go str8 to Richmond without a D.C. stop. You needed to avoid D.C. during these years. The homicide rate was out of control because of the influx of NYC cats coming down there and getting wild paper. Like I said earlier, the crack game was fueling an arms race in the center cities and no one was safe. The crack trade is what ultimately brought the west coast gangs into the east. You needed a large organization with a dedicated infrastructure pipeline if you wanted to move heavy weight. You also had to respect the branding that the Bloods and Crips had in place.

I was on some small time shit tho’. The dudes from my high school that put me in the clubs with their work offered me a stack to make a run O.T. That shit sounded exciting and profitable. Keep in mind that I had driven down to D.C. and B’More to party at the homecoming celebrations while in stolen cars so I wasn’t afraid of the trip or being arrested. My immature mind didn’t calculate any other options. I took the offer and I made the jump to Richmond. It worked so easily and pretty much stress free. I met up with an OG who put me up in his crib while he put in the work. By the end of the night he had all of the money accounted for so I could make the bus to Philadelphia leaving in the morning. This was what I thought would be the easiest thousand I ever made. At this rate I was definitely going to be a millionaire by the time I turned 30. I visited the OG several more times. One time I even flew down to Richmond putting the work into the luggage check. This is the height of my ignorance. The OG stopped getting it in when his partner was found slain in his whip. I still had a fever for that paper because I wasn’t saving my stacks. I was living super extra. Copping Gucci sweatshirts, hell’a kicks and mint condition comic books. Two(2) copies each of Hulk #181 and X-Men #94.

Without the OG in V.A. to fux with anymore I needed someone to give me a reason to go O.T. I had some folks in B’More going to Morgan State University. One of my homeys was from East Elmhurst and he was starting to dabble into beatmaking and record producing. He ended up getting a plaque from Roc-A-Fella Records several years later for a joint he produced. Anyhoo, I asked my dude if he knew any go-getters around the area that he might could patch me up with because I could help them with what they were doing. He knew a cat because this dude was trying to get into the rap game as a party promoter and artist manager. A locally bred B’More dude with mad respect on the streets. I traveled down to B’More to meet up with the dude. He met me at the bus station and drove me to this strip club up in the sticks. I wasn’t too interested in the chicks that night because I wanted to see if this cat was gonna be my next connect. We talked shit for hours on all kinds of platitudes. I don’t know what it is about the business of drugs that makes everyone a fucking philosopher, but that is what we tried to do to each other that night. We were gonna save the Black man by selling drugs to the community. Somehow we weren’t selfish, sadistic cowards, but we were enlightened renaissance men. The one thing that bothered me about this dude was that he was only a year or so older than I was. In this game you really only want to fux with OGs. I’d soon learn why.

‘Dopeman’

My next trip to B’More to meet up with this cat was during a nasty storm. I had on my Girbaud denim jacket with my Morgan State hoody, some camo pants and a pair of grilchy Rod Lavers. This was my “college kid” outfit and I felt like it made me appear to be an innocent underclassmen returning back to school. I arrived in Baltimore and took a cab to my people’s rest off the MSU campus and paged dude with the code that I was in town. When he called my homey’s crib he asked me if I had traveled alone. I told him that I did. When he arrived to pick me up bring me to the stash crib he asked me if I didn’t mind him frisking me and I said I didn’t. I thought our convo the previous week was enough to determine that I was legit but I suppose he wanted an extra level of comfort since we were going to his crib. In retrospect, the OG never once searched me nor did we even broach the notion of shady business transactions. The OG kept it 1000. These young niggas in the game is on some type of funnystyle shit. The drive to his stash spot was long as fux. I didn’t know what county I was in now or even if I was still in Maryland. We parked on a nice, quiet street. This wasn’t downtown Baltimore at all. Maybe this was Prince Georges County? As I followed this dude to the house the rain remained the only sound you could hear.

Several feet from the house several dudes came out from every direction, cursing at us with guns drawn. Oh shit. I was about to get my wig pushed back and left in a dumpster behind the 7-11 in Towson. I was totally resigned to my fate at this point so when one of the gunboys told me to get on my knees I did it without thinking. I put my hands behind my head and another gunman pulled the Eastpack off my back while two of the gunboys kept their pistols trained on me and the host. After wresting my backpack from me the dude behind me gunbutted my forehead. The crunching sound made me think my skull was cracked and the blood rushed out of head as hard as the rain was falling. I knew it was blood too because that shit was hot while the rain was cold. I picked myself up off the ground, muddied and bloodied. The host hustler brought me into the house and the chick that was in there was mortified when she saw me. The dude asked me if I wanted to stay there but I declined. I wanted to go back to the bus station and get my ass back to New York. I would be traveling into Philly and then through Jersey and I just wanted to get out of there. I had to clear my mind real quick and refocus. Even though I wasn’t murdered here in Baltimore there was no telling what was gonna be the verdict when I got back home and I had nothing to show for my consignment. I was on an after midnight bus to Philly and an early morning train to Penn Station with no solution to my problem.

Back in Corona I called up my high school peeps as soon as I got back to my apartment. I wanted them to see the condition I was in and how haggard I looked. My busted forehead and bloody clothing weren’t enough to sell these dudes that I wasn’t in on the loss. And especially since I had politicked with the dude from B’More I was somewhat complicit in the loss of this money. I told my peeps the story of how it went down and they felt like I could have avoided the loss if I had recognized the tells that my B’More host wasn’t correct. To make amends I had to travel back to B’More to have a meeting with the host and my peeps. They let me shower and change my clothes then we got on the road and drove to Maryland. At first my B’More host wasn’t returning my pages but late that night he finally called me back. I told him I was in town with the people that I was working for and they wanted to have a meeting. We met up an hour later at that same stripclub where he politicked with me the first time. Dude apologized to my peeps and promised to work with them to get some of that money back. That was satisfactory to my peeps who took his contact from him and decided to make him come to NYC if he wanted to get any work.

As far as my situation was concerned I was still in the hole with several thousand dollars of debt on that lost work. Either I make some trips to pay it off or I come up on five stacks that week. I decided then that I wasn’t built for this bullshit so I went to pay off my peeps. I had three stacks and some change in the shoebox back home which I gave up. My peeps explained to me that the game didn’t work on near misses and almost promises and I needed to put up more paper to cover my losses. The only equity I had at that time was my comic book collection which was deep with over fifteen hundred books at that point. I asked my peeps to drive me and my collection to this store in Bayside, Queens called Mike’s Comic Hut. I had been buying books at that store for over ten years so I was sure that I could liquidate my collection there for good money. I was in for another rude surprise. Mike offered me $400 for the entire collection. All my X-Men, Batman, Byrne, Adams. Miller, Perez, you name it titles including some of the rarest books that I had paid top dollar for and never even cracked so that they would remain in pristine mint condition. At the end of the line this was all I could have for my collection and I was so desperate I took the money which I literally handed over to the people I was in debt to. It was a solemn moment and I think they realized then that asking me for anymore was pointless. I was broken in half like as if I had been stomped out by the A-team while standing in front of the Pink houses.

When I got back to my apartment and I saw the space where all my books had been I started to cry. Not some bawl out your face shit, but some emo shit for realizing how I got played. I got played for collecting those comics for years and thinking that they were valuable to anyone other than myself. I got played by thinking I could fux with those drugs and retain my humanity. I had seen people even more heroic than I succumb to the underside of drugs and the addiction be it getting high or getting that paper. I was mad at myself for being gullible and greedy. I knew I had to change my life right then and I vowed not to be caught out there again, but as I have told y’all a thousand times on this site, I stay losing.

And sometimes with those losses I achieve a win.