But one day me and Jimmy and Grandmother watched from our window as G beat a man down on a street corner. The man was bleeding and begging for his life, and G held him down and bent his fingers back one at a time. All ten of them. I could feel his bones crack. A cop car drove up and when the patrolmen inside saw that it was G administering the ass-whipping they pulled away and kept right on going. When I asked Grandmother what the man could have done that was so bad, she told me he was G’s cousin, and that he’d cheated G out of twenty dollars on a bet. I couldn’t understand it because G was so rich. He owned all the drug dealers in Harlem. He owned the number spots and restaurants and clubs. Twenty dollars was nothing to a man like him.
But Grandmother said it was the betrayal and not the money that almost got the man killed. She said G had killed other people for less than that and the only reason G didn’t kill this man because they were family and had grown up together and G loved him. I saw the man not too long after that on Malcolm X Boulevard and both of his hands were in a cast. One of his eyeballs was gone out the socket and he had no front teeth. Grandmother said G let his cousin live as a lesson to everybody walking the streets of Harlem: Nobody betrayed G and got away with it.
“Girl, you sure the dranky dranks are free?” Brittany picked up her glass and guzzled her drink down. She sniffed a line from the table and then offered me some. I shook my head. My mother had been a junkie ho so I never used drugs.