CHAPTER SEVEN

HUSTLER

I can't remember all the hustles I had during the next two years in Harlem, after the abrupt end of
my riding the trains and peddling reefers to the touring bands.
Negro railroad men waited for their trains in their big locker room on the lower level of Grand
Central Station. Big blackjack and poker games went on in there around the clock. Sometimes
five hundred dollars would be on the table. One day, in a blackjack game, an old cook who was
dealing the cards tried to be slick, and I had to drop my pistol in his face.
The next time I went into one of those games, intuition told me to stick my gun under my belt right
down the middle of my back. Sure enough, someone had squealed. Two big, beefy-faced Irish
cops came in. They frisked me-and they missed my gun where they hadn't expected one.
The cops told me never again to be caught in Grand Central Station unless I had a ticket to ride
somewhere. And I knew that by the next day, every railroad's personnel office would have a
blackball on me, so I never tried to get another railroad job.
There I was back in Harlem's streets among all the rest of the hustlers. I couldn't sell reefers; the
dope squad detectives were too familiar with me. I was a true hustler-uneducated, unskilled at
anything honorable, and I considered myself nervy and cunning enough to live by my wits,
exploiting any prey that presented itself. I would risk just about anything.
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts
are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.
And they inevitably move into more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality. Fulltime
hustlers never can relax to appraise what they are doing and where they are bound. As is
the case in any jungle, the hustler's every waking hour is lived with both the practical and the
subconscious knowledge that if he ever relaxes, if he ever slows down, the other hungry, restless
foxes, ferrets, wolves, and vultures out there with him won't hesitate to make him their prey.
During the next six to eight months, I pulled my first robberies and stick-ups. Only small ones.
Always in other, nearby cities. And I got away. As the pros did, I too would key myself to pull these
jobs by my first use of hard dope. I began with Sammy's recommendation-sniffing cocaine.
Normally now, for street wear, I might call it, I carried a hardly noticeable little flat, blue-steel .25
automatic. But for working, I carried a .32, a .38 or a .45. I saw how when the eyes stared at the
big black hole, the faces fell slack and the mouths sagged open. And when I spoke, the people
seemed to hear as though they were far away, and they would do whatever I asked.
Between jobs, staying high on narcotics kept me from getting nervous. Still, upon sudden
impulses, just to play safe, I would abruptly move from one toanother fifteen-to twenty-dollar-aweek
room, always in my favorite 147th-150th Street area, just flanking Sugar Hill.
Once on a job with Sammy, we had a pretty close call. Someone must have seen us. We were
making our getaway, running, when we heard the sirens. Instantly, we slowed to walking. As a
police car screeched to a stop, we stepped out into the street, meeting it, hailing it to ask for
directions. They must have thought we were about to give them some information. They just