PRL Serials

Journey back to an unexpected time and delve deep into what you think you know…

Phase I – The Children of A-space

Drug Wave

– Issue 2 –

I called the new drug dealer friend that I met in Baltimore Maryland a few months later for a follow up. By that time, he was still working the same alley and I got him to talk about a recent incident of violence that had happened to him. 

“I guess the confession is good,” he said. “It ain’t like I can talk to nobody else.”

He explained that a couple weeks after we met, one of his customers tried to rob him with a knife. The young dealer seemed very unassuming when I met him, like he didn’t expect violence from his job, and I’d assumed that he was unarmed, though I didn’t think to ask him because of my assumption. Apparently he always carried a gun and he explained, “It’s always loaded and in the back of my pants, but I ain’t never had to use it.”

He told me that he was finishing up Native Son, he had just closed the book and was putting it into his backpack, when the fiend approached with his blade out, and the young man reached subtly for his gun and unloaded multiple shots that presumably killed the man, though he did not wait around to see. 

“I ain’t dumb, I know I risk my life every time I sit out there. That’s why I read, you know? Distract myself, and these fiends out here usually just want they shit and they move on. But I been lucky, I know that, and when that nigga flashed that knife, I didn’t want to give him no chance to hurt me. It was instinct.”

I asked him if it was his first kill and I was surprised when he said no.

“I killed somebody to protect my cousin. It’s crazy, I ain’t never worried about serving time for it either. If I had to, I was ready, but it was self defense. I did some counseling. That’s why nobody ever mess with me in my neighborhood, everybody know that story by now. This fiend musta been from somewhere else.”

I asked him if he ever lost sleep knowing that he had taken lives. 

“Never really lost no sleep, no. I can’t forget them. I can remember their faces, but I don’t really have regrets over it.”

He seemed unburdened by the end of the conversation. I told him sincerely that I hope he stayed safe.

“I appreciate it. Know I’m one of the lucky ones, you really shouldn’t worry about me. Niggas got it much harder than me out here.”

Drug Life

– Issue 1 – 

Before he used the name Fire, he was known as Tyrone. It was the late seventies and Fire lived in a small town where people had so little that they felt no need to lock it up. Tyrone didn’t live with his parents, his father did whatever dirt he did wherever he did it, and his mother lived with her sister and her family for all of her life. It seemed that there was never any room for Tyrone and he mostly lived with his grandmother who often bad mouthed her daughter for being such a bad mother to Tyrone. 

When he wasn’t with his grandmother, Tyrone was in the streets. He was a drug dealer before he was a teenager and those who knew him say he was destined for a notable life.

“That nigga wasn’t scared of nothing,” one of his childhood acquaintances rememberded. “He used to do flips off his grandma house for money. Daredevel, that’s what you call him. I remember he saw something or heard about it on the radio or whatever, and he get it in his mind that he gone jump a bike over some other kids. Now, man ain’t have no bike, so he had to steal one, then he hyped up the jump, got some volunteers to lay out in the street, and I’ll be damned if that nigga didn’t jump three kids on that bike. Clear over them.”

Tyrone was a teenager in the early eighties and by then, he was completely immersed in the drug life.

“I was dippin’ and dabbin’ still. I wanted that life, but it was dangerous. You mess around and get shot up over something stupid. But the money was better than any job we could get. I remember I was done when they asked us to kill our friend. We used to run in a little gang, me Tyrone and two other boys. One of them boys wasn’t into drugs, the other one was stupid. Started stealing and they wanted me and Tyrone to take him out. I couldn’t do that, not to my friend, and I haven’t really talked to Tyrone since. I ain’t mad at him, he did what he felt he had to, and I wasn’t gone say nothing then ’cause I didn’t wanna be next. But I bet it weighed on him. And that’s why he went so hard. That game made him sacrifice his friend, he made sure he milked it for all he could. I heard he did good for himself.”

Before he was shot by his nephew, Yuri James, Fire was worth almost fifty million dollars and he stood to make a lot more if he had managed to survive his rival Darker.