MOVIN’ ON UP

I remember my first stabbing. I remember the first time I got stabbed. I been stabbed lots of times. I got one in the head with a hunting knife, one in my shoulder, three around my heart, got my right hand opened up, my legs, my elbow, I got shot in the head in the joint with a shotgun, I got cracked too.

Back in the early 70s it was knives and chains, bats and crowbars, all that good stuff. I wasn’t really much of a fighter so whatever I had within arm’s reach I was going to use. It didn’t matter whether it was hedge clippers, a knife, a screwdriver or even a pencil, I was going to use it.

GETTIN’ ON DOWN

They started looking for me for robberies and assaults when I was a teenager. Mostly we were robbing Taco Bells, liquor stores and Jack In The Boxes. If you look at my record it’ll show everything from Assault with a Deadly Weapon to Kidnapping, Robbery, Grand Theft Auto, Battery — different things like that. I did Youth Authority time for two years, went back on a violation, beat up a cop in there and got sent to the joint. They threw me out of YA and sent me to men’s prison.

I ended up doing two years on a six-month violation. I was out in 49 days doing every form of drug you could think of. Every day I was beating somebody up or robbing or doing both. I was at a party once and I ended up fighting with everyone at the party, probably about twenty dudes. I was going off. I was stabbing people in the middle of the day on main streets. Wasn’t long before I was back in a cell.

I got out of Quentin in 87 and what ends up happening is I start slinging a little cocaine to make ends meet. I end up getting over my head. A friend of mine kept jamming me about robbing banks and I’d tell him I wasn’t into it. This went on for about two or three months until finally I told him, "Why don’t you just go? You don’t need me." He told me, "You know there’s only one dude I trust enough, only one dude I know who’ll be there."

So one day I seen him and he asked me again and I looked and I said aight cuz I needed to pay my coke debts. Our trip was to do it away from where we lived, so we went far away, still in LA but not around my neighborhood. It’s funny because we were jittery.

It’s considered a step up from stealing cars or those little things to robbing banks. We were lucky if we got two hundred dollars from a Taco Bell. With banks, you could come out with up to eight thousand apiece without tripping on takeovers or the safe or anything. Not bad for two minutes work.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON

The first one, it’s almost like they knew we were rookies. They gave us a piece of wood. We got what looked like a stack about three inches thick of one hundreds, but it turned out all to be ones with a hundred on top and bottom. They just handed us any old thing. Homeboy was so mad he wanted to go back and shoot everybody for not taking us seriously. I just looked at him and said, "The place got to be crawling with cops by now." "Fuck that, we’re going to kill ‘em." Eventually he cooled out but that first job’s really what got us going.

Usually one would go in while the other guy would be out in the car and we’d take turns. Basically we’d just approach a teller and say, "This is a robbery, start with your twenties and your hundreds, if you hand me a dye-pack I’m coming over the counter." You estimate in your head how much time you got, you never want to be in there more than two or three minutes, and you go through as many tellers as you can, just down the line until you feel it’s time and then bam, you split.

We only had one rule and my homeboy’s the one who told me this, he said, "If you don’t feel good about it, if it feels funny, we’re not going to do it." So before every bank, we’d pull up: "How you feel? Feel funny? Does it feel like something’s wrong?" If it felt wrong, we wouldn’t hit that bank, we’d go to another one. After two or three places if it still felt like that, you know what, we wouldn’t rob a bank that day. As a result, nobody ever got caught coming out or in a bank.

A WORLD OF CHOICE

I can’t even think how many we did in six months. To tell you the truth, it was all just fun. It becomes a habit. The thing that did us in was these homeboys who would wake up and not want to go out somewhere, they started hitting banks right in the neighborhood. And that was the downfall, because after that the cops started staking out a certain pad where everybody was hanging out.

They ended up pulling some homeboys over and me with them cuz I was in the car. The other two were wanted for bank robberies, but the cops looked at me kind of funny cuz the way I looked. Here I am coming from this house with these guys and yet they had no warrant out for me. Once the cops knew who I was and recognized me they started taking pictures around, trying to nail me for nine robberies. Finally two tellers recognized me and I got sent up on hard time.

It was just a world of choice so we chose it and we did it. There were some of us who were heavier and some of us who weren’t. I mean, one of my homeboys turned out to be a fucking serial rapist. He was raping and killing women and we had no idea about it. Who knows what turned him into that.

I went in at 28 and got out when I was 38. When I got out this last time, I was ready. I don’t ever want to go back. I’m worried because there’s times, little things throughout the days… but as long as I’m in self-defense and I don’t go out and stab a motherfucker a hundred times or start cutting off heads and shit, I think I’ll be all right. I think I can control that.