My new piece is part of a series that I call “Tales From the Hood”. On occasion, I will write articles that share my experiences growing up in New York City and Spanish/East Harlem. The first in this series is entitled “Hustling”. I hope you enjoy it.
In East Harlem, El Barrio, the word hustling has several meanings. Sometimes it means working your asses off having several jobs. My best friend, whom I love and admire, must have had three or four jobs at one time, and I used to call him the “Hardest Working Man in Show Business” apologies to James Brown. Hustling can also mean selling drugs, pimping women, or making money through other illicit means. Then there is the hustling that involves conning someone out of their money, but I’m going to talk about the type of hustling that many of you probably don’t know.
During the 60s, for young Black and Puerto Rican boys, hustling meant waking up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning, borrowing your mother’s shopping cart, and heading out to the local supermarket to help women cart their groceries home. Saturdays used to be the day most women would do their family shopping. If the grocery list were especially large, women would employ us to pack up our carts and carry their groceries home for them. At the end of the trip, they would pay you what they thought the service was worth. Payment could range from pocket change to several dollars. Amazingly, an informal meter left the client and the service provider content most of the time. If I felt someone underpaid me, I would just mumble and grumble my way back to the supermarket for the next job.
I was a regular starting at 11 years old. I would grab my mother’s cart and head off to Key Food to do an eight to six shift nearly every Saturday. In retrospect, I think about how similar it was to the environment at an adult workplace. It was very competitive, and you formed alliances with others. There was envy, backbiting, and informal performance evaluations. Small things like being courteous, attentive, and having a smile went a long way. It also didn’t hurt that I was what they called “big for my age.” On a good day, you could make between $10 to $15. My Holy Grail was $20. Twenty dollars in 1967 would be equal to $143 today, not bad, huh. My Moms had a great rule. You work for it; it’s your money, but you must put half of it in a savings account. I’ll hold on to the other half and give it to you when you want to buy something. My mother understood having that much money could burn a hole in your pocket.
There was one Saturday that was especially memorable. This Saturday, I was lining up all the pins and knocking them all down. I was getting very close to attaining the $20 mark. It was wintertime, so it used to get dark earlier, so your last trip was usually between 5:00 PM and 6:00 PM. I just needed one big score. This was my lucky day. A woman showed up at the cash register with a cart so full it looked like a Jenga tower. The lady pointed my way to enlist my help, but I Could tell that the load was too much for my cart, so I asked if my friend Anthony could help. Even if she chose to be economical and split the fee between the two of us, it would be practical, and I’d be closing out the day on a high note. She agreed and reloaded up our carts.
The customer was a middle-aged woman that told us she appreciated our help before we left the store. Both Anthony and I looked on with anticipation as she reached into her purse and pulled out two fresh mint green $5 bills, and handed one to each of us. Man, what a way to end a long hard day of hustling. She gave us the address to her apartment and said she would meet us there because she still had to go to the drug store and pick up some additional things. Her building was located on 118th St between First and Second Avenues, and we told her no problem. As the two of us made our way to her building, we couldn’t stop talking about the bounty accumulated during the day. All we could talk about were the things that we would do with the money that we made. We made it to her building in about 15 minutes. Usually, once it was dark, it was our preference to have customers that lived in the projects, but for $5 each, we would have fought off vampires to carry this customer’s groceries.
Anthony and I followed the woman’s directions to a tee and waited for her on the first floor of the building. Fortunately, she lived on the 1st floor, and we wouldn’t have to lug any of her groceries up any steps. Approximately 10 minutes after arriving, we started to get a bit impatient, and we wondered what was taking our client so long to get there. Both of us sighed in relief as we heard the front door creak open in anticipation of closing this deal and the prospect of ending hour long day. We saw a shadow approaching us, but it didn’t seem to be the shadow of the woman we were waiting for. It was taller, it was thinner, and there was an eerie silence that accompanied the shadow.
Emerging from the shadows was a person who looked like he was assembled from pipe cleaners, thin and frail. Although both of us felt anxious about the intruder, his frail appearance gave us false confidence about the threat he posed. So much so that when the intruder started asking questions and Anthony started to answer them. “What are you guys doing out this late at night?”. Anthony replied, “oh, we’re hustling groceries.” Then the intruder asked how much money we made, and I blurted out, we just started. He turned to me and called me “a little lying ass motherfucker”. That’s when I knew things were about to change dramatically. Anthony continued to answer questions like the kid in class that looks like he’ll pee on himself if he can’t answer. I tried to signal to Anthony Ix-Nay on the Alk-Tay but to no avail. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference because before I could manufacture another lie, this dude pulled out a switchblade that made a distinct clicking sound and, seemingly in one motion, had it pressed against Anthony’s neck.
He looked down at Anthony and then glanced at me and said, “give me every damn penny you’ll made today.” Anthony dutifully reached down into his winter coat, pulled out what seemed like a wad of dollars along with some change, and handed it over to the thief. The thief then looked over at me and barked, “you next motherfucker!” I looked around as if there was somebody else there and asked, “you talking to me?” That just pissed him off, and he asked me if I thought he was bullshitting. “I’ll make your boy bleed.” Anthony started to sweat profusely, beads of sweat running down his face. Time froze for me, and I could faintly hear Anthony pleading that I give up my money. This was undoubtedly one of the most shameful moments in my life, and I probably should be inducted into The Assholes Hall of Fame for it. Still, I was temporarily fixated on how hard it was to make this money, lugging carts up six flights of stairs and braving the harsh NYC weather. The little thought bubble about what I would buy that accompanied me throughout the day just burst.
Once I recovered from my selfish stupor, I knew I shouldn’t hold out any longer. I walked over to the thief and handed him everything I made that day. He pulled the blade away from Anthony’s neck and began to count the money I just handed over. He counted it and proclaimed, “21 fucking dollars, damn you a hustler too.” The irony of his statement was apparent, even for my 11-year-old mind. Adding insult to injury, the thief snatched up a six-pack of Schaeffer Beer from the woman’s groceries. He said, “you’ll don’t need this.” His exit was as stealthy as his entrance. He and his partner in crime that was the lookout disappeared into the cold, grey night.
Neither of us could believe what just happened, and we tried to piece together what just transpired. The woman still hadn’t arrived, and we wondered if she had set us up, but we ditched that conspiracy theory because why would a woman that purchased a buttload of groceries set us up for what amounted to about $30. The thief also stole something from her. Nah, we concluded that we were just victims out doing the right thing at the wrong place and the wrong time. The woman showed up about 15 minutes after the robbery with more bags and expressed genuine shock as we shared our story with her. As much as we appreciated her sympathy, that wouldn’t replace the earnings or diminish the trauma we experienced at night. Despite this, we still had a duty to fulfill. We finished the delivery of her groceries and started our trip back to Key Food.
There are many things about our childhood that I treasure. Two of those things were our resiliency and our ability to find and create humor about almost anything. By the time we were halfway back to the supermarket, our solemnity had transformed into youthful bravado (we should have kicked his butt) and stomach cramping laughter about how we were pumping pitchers of Kool-Aid during the event (scared). When we got to Key Food, the store was closed up, and almost everyone had gone home. We stood in front of the store silent, pausing to sigh and reflect one more time about what we experienced, and then Anthony turned to me and asked, “see you next week?” and I responded, “Yep, see you next week.”
Epilogue
About five years later, when I was 16, I was walking past public school 155 on 117th St, and there’s this homeless dude that asked me for a couple of dollars for food. This kind of encounter isn’t unusual, it happens regularly, but when I stopped to address the brother, there was something eerily familiar about him. Yep, this was the same guy that had the knife to Anthony’s neck several years ago. I would have thought the first thing to come to mind would have been revenge, but it wasn’t. I have seen my mother countless times respond to requests for money by offering to buy the person something to eat. These unspoken lessons in life were pretty powerful. I told my man, hold on a second, I’ll be back. I went into a bodega to order a ham and cheese hero and a grape Mission Soda to carry back to him. As I handed over the food to him, he took the package and asked, “Do you know me? With a bit of a sheepish grin, I responded, “Nah, man, but you know how the hood is; we cross paths here all the time.
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