Gun Guys (33 page)

The phone buzzed again. “Yeah, man, I
said
. I’m doin’ the interview
now
, and I’ll get wit’ you later.” He took a moment to remember his place in the story. The speed with which it was tumbling out of him told me it was a tale he’d told many times before. It was the rap he carried around the country with him, spreading it like the Gospel to any young man who’d listen.

Anybody living on the West Side in those days was presumed to be a member of the Vice Lords gang, but that was like being a member of the AFL-CIO. What mattered was one’s clique. “Ours we called KO. One day you start wearing the hats, wearing the colors. And now you got power and respect. Hats was important. We wore ours to the left. Disciples wore theirs to the right. Colors was black and gold, but we weren’t really tripping about the colors. The Latinos, they’re way into colors. And graffiti. They love that shit. Us, we’d tag our territory, but then people knew our territory and we didn’t bother no more.”

Being a Vice Lord, though, involved more than just wearing a hat
the right way. It was work. “What it is, when we were coming up, everybody took a path. Some dudes became pickpockets. Some were shoplifters. Some became stickup men. Everybody tried to choose their paths; we knew all them facets of life.

“I was never a
robber
robber. I didn’t get off on that. Some dudes, they like to see fear in people, they’d come back and be all ‘I liked to put them in their place.’ I didn’t say nothing; it wasn’t my thing. Seemed they always went after people weaker than them, littler than them, people who didn’t have no gun. I’d be like, ‘I don’t like seeing you take from niggers you can beat. I see the punk in you. If you’re so tough, why don’t you take from
him.’
” He gestured at an imaginary bruiser.

He stopped and looked at the woman at the next table, who was leaning on her elbow and listening to us talk. She nervously turned back to her laptop.

“That’s all right, listen up,” he told her with a gentle laugh. “What I got to say, I want everybody to hear.” He was being genuine, but from the way she studiously ignored him, gazing into her laptop, she seemed to think he was being sarcastic. He smiled at the side of her head a moment longer, then turned back to me with a shrug.

“What I was, I was a hustler. I had a niche for it,” he continued. “Buy. Sell. People trusted me. I
served
them.”

But what about the guns?
I asked.
When did you start carrying a gun?
His first, he said, he came by the old-fashioned way. He stole it.

“One day, we were cleaning out the backyard of a neighbor across the street, and when my friend went in to use the bathroom, the little girl who lived there showed him a shotgun up in a closet. He went back in later and took it. I said, ‘It’s too long,’ so we cut it off. You could get it up under your clothes then.”

Chicago made it harder to get a gun legally than almost anywhere else in the country, but Tim never had trouble getting guns, even as a young teenager. “You had these guys go to Memphis, where it’s easy to get, and bring them back here, where it’s hard. Maybe it’s a white guy addicted to narcotics. A businessman. He starts partying a little too much, comes into the ghetto, and gets hooked. So he brings a proposition: ‘You guys buy guns?’ And we’d be like, ‘Can you get guns? Go get them and bring them back here.’ That guy, he’s straight. He got no record. He can buy a gun any damned place. Guys would come back from down south and sell them out the trunk of their car. Get whatever you liked.

“I liked a revolver. I had a lot of them, but my favorite was a .41 Magnum. The big guns were
famous
. Magnums. Forty-fives. Nine-millimeters. The bigger the gun you got, the more powerful you were. Cost you anywhere from one to five hundred dollars, depending on what it was and how it looked. Big guns were the thing. I’d use a girl to carry mine. The man-police at the door of the club can’t search her, so she has the gun, and when we’re inside it’s like, ‘Go in the bathroom and get it out and bring me my gun.’ ”

“So how much of what you were doing was about the gun?” I asked.

“For me, the gun was exciting at first, but I grew out of it. I don’t know when or how; just having so many of them, I guess. It was a tool. If you needed it, you needed it. But it wasn’t like I was all
about
the guns, like some dudes. You could tell who was way into the guns and who wasn’t. Some dudes, they was
addicted
. Always asking, ‘Lemme see the gun, lemme see it.’ And I’d be like, ‘What are you always asking to see the motherfucking
gun
?’ ”

Even in Tim’s criminal world, then, some people liked them, while others could take or leave them.

“There’d be guys you wouldn’t give the gun,” he went on. “Like there’d be guys you wouldn’t let drive the car or hold the money. Some guys you can trust with shit like that; some you can’t. After trial and error, you learn who not to give a gun to. We’d be somewhere and something would happen that you could settle with fists, and out of fucking nowhere it’s
Boom! Boom! Boom!
And I’d be like, ‘What the fuck you do
that
for? Gimme that fucking gun.’ ”

I’d had dealings years earlier with a reformed drug dealer from Washington, D.C., who’d told me that he and his friend shot their guns all the time in the course of doing business but that most of the time they hadn’t really tried to hit anybody. Gunfire for them—in 1990s Washington—had mostly been language. They’d blast a few rounds in the general direction of a rival to send a message. If they hit him, that was fine. But mostly they used gunfire simply to make a point. When I ran this past Tim, he looked at me like I was nuts.

“That’s not how we did,” he said. “If we shot at someone, we was sure as hell trying to kill the motherfucker.”

The woman at the next table banged shut the lid of her laptop, slid it into her shoulder bag, and walked off without a glance at either of us. Tim watched her go. He seemed to be wondering how he’d ever connect with
people like her, so that he could spread his message that much further. When he turned back to me, he quit the bouncy raconteur act he’d been using and dropped his voice to a deeper, slower, more serious register.

“That Curt, who snatched the chain off the lady? Later on, he tried to rob a guy’s radio—also on a bus. Shot the guy and killed him. I saw him in jail and asked him, ‘What the fuck?’ He said, ‘The guy grabbed the gun.’ It was the guy’s birthday, he’d just gotten the radio and wouldn’t give up. Curt said, ‘I’m not playing; give me the radio,’ and the guy grabbed the gun. ‘But why you shoot him?’ I asked, and all Curt said was, ‘The guy was a little bit bigger than me. He grabbed the gun.’ Curt, man, he’s still doing thirty years.

“There’s a lot of
isms
in our neighborhood,” Tim said quietly. “Some people are mentally disturbed but aren’t diagnosed. Never
been
to a doctor. Guy starts shooting when he doesn’t need to be doing no shooting, you know he’s crazy in the head. Guy who’d shoot at a cop: crazy. He’s not a person you can violate physically, but you can
manipulate
him. ‘You fucked that up; now you owe me.’ ‘You like shooting? Okay, then; you do him over there.’ Everybody else know he’s crazy, too. So a guy doesn’t pay, all you got to say is, ‘I’m going to get Crazy Larry.’ Everybody knows Crazy Larry likes to shoot.”

He stopped for a moment, looking sad. Then, he shuddered visibly, willing himself back to his story.

“I was straightforward,” he announced with renewed vigor. “My word was my
bond
. I was a trusted man on the street, someone people looked up to. I had a good heart because of my mother and father. Really, I shouldn’t have been in the street life, but since I was, I had that preacher upbringing to draw on, and people knew they could trust me. Some people run the street with fear, some people run the street with love.”

“Love,” I said, “and a .41 Magnum.”

“People weren’t afraid of me. They knew that if I was coming, I was coming. But not if I didn’t have no reason. I had a large following. I took the Vice Lords to another level in my neighborhood, financially and organizationally. Everything happened fast. Millions of dollars passed through my hands. Forty thousand dollars a day. Paid for an apartment six months in advance and put my money in there. Parked a car in a garage with the trunk full of money. Or I’d take the car in to get painted, and then tell them, ‘I changed my mind; paint it again,’ just to leave it there because it’s all stuffed with money and I got no place else to put.”

He sat back, chuckled, and slapped his belly contentedly with both
hands. “It’s funny that my dad being a preacher and all helped me in the life,” he said.

Then a shadow crossed his face, as though his little hurricane of braggadocio had blown itself out. His voice pinched down again; we seemed to be coming to a place he didn’t want to go but knew he must.

“Some guys, though, they don’t want to work their way up,” he continued. “They wait until you do all the work and get up there, and then they stick you up. Guys come home all buff from prison. They have tattoos, they’re talking about taking over. But I’m like, ‘You don’t have the finance and you don’t have the
guns.’

“The guy I’d started out hustling with was a dude called Shank. We was close. I’d sleep at his house, eat with him and his mama. We was hustling well together. Shank, though, he didn’t understand what they meant when they said, ‘Don’t get high on your own supply.’ He fell into the hype of being somebody. And he was living above his means. I was like, ‘Man, you spent
how
much last night?’ I chose to walk away, and he messed up with his connect because he couldn’t pay his bills.

“Then he focused on me. He was like, ‘I know who got some money; I’m going to
get
that nigger.’ He told someone he knew where my safe house was, and he wanted to pop me off.

“So this one night, I’m in my Mercedes and pull up at Augusta and Keeler and he’s right there with a gun and told me to get out the car. He upped with his gun and busted me upside the head. He was going to take me in the house, where the money at.

“I told him, ‘Hold up, let me get my keys,” and I upped with
my
gun. He shot. I shot. I knew right off I’d been hit. I jumped back in the car and tore it up getting out of there. I could see blood coming out my chest, and I thought I was dying. That’s the thing about getting shot: It hurts, yeah, but you’re more scared than the pain—that unknown, are you going to make it? I was telling my friend in the backseat, ‘If I die, make sure that nigger die, too.’

“Turned out, the bullet hit the sleeve of my big coat, went in the side of my chest, hit that rib, and bounced back out. Hurt like a motherfucker. Doctors thought it was two bullets, and turned me over, looking for where they went. I heard them yell, ‘Didn’t exit!’ They were about to cut me open when they figured it out.

“My dad came in while they were working on me and whispered, ‘That boy died. Be quiet. Don’t talk.’

“Shank shot me with a .380. I shot him with a .22. Mine went in
and bounced around inside him. He’d parked a couple blocks away so I wouldn’t see his car, and when he ran to it, he pumped out all his blood.

“At the preliminary hearing, the judge said to the prosecutor, ‘You said this was premeditated, but this look more like self-defense.’ Gave me a year for UUW—unlawful use of a weapon, firearm in the city limits, all that.”

After all my time in concealed-carry classes and talking to gun guys about defensive gun use, this was my first encounter with someone who’d actually used one to save his own life—and he was a crook, shooting another crook. I’m not sure why, but until this moment it hadn’t occurred to me that one drug dealer shooting another could make the claim of self-defense.

I figured it was getting shot in the chest and having to kill a friend that had woken Tim up to the error of his ways and driven him into the arms of Jesus. Nope.

“They sent me to Sheridan Correctional Facility, minimum security. I knew a lot of people there. Now I had status: I’m a killer. That validated me as being authentic. I do what I say I do. If you do me, you’re set to leave this world in a coffin. When I got out, I was an even bigger man on the street.”

His ten-year sentence in federal prison, for conspiracy, came later. It was eighteen months into that when he realized how tired of the life he’d become and accepted Christ as his personal savior—“went crazy for Jesus” is how he put it. Upon his release in 2006, he came home and preached a sermon in his father’s church. Then he started working for CeaseFire.

His phone buzzed, but this time he let it go. He was sorry about Shank, he told me, but given the circumstances they were both living at the time, it couldn’t have played out any other way.

“You live by the sword and you get what you get. ‘You came to hurt me; you got hurt. Them are the rules. You came to stick me up and fumbled the ball.’ Shank had friends, yeah. But: ‘You got a problem with it, you can join him. You violated my space, I ought to get you, too.’

“Poor Shank was broke and starving. He went to my house to stick me up and got killed. End of story. Two months later, I called his mother and apologized. We were tight; I’d eaten her food. I told her the truth, that this wasn’t my intention. She said, ‘I know you didn’t want it. I’m a Christian woman and I have to find it in my heart to forgive you.’

“Shank, he was on a death wish. His mother and me, we’re close now.”