The 50th Law - 50 Cent [60]
Hood Economics
I KNEW THAT THE GHETTO PEOPLE KNEW THAT I NEVER LEFT THE GHETTO IN SPIRIT, AND I NEVER LEFT IT PHYSICALLY ANY MORE THAN I HAD TO. I HAD A GHETTO INSTINCT; FOR INSTANCE, I COULD FEEL IF TENSION WAS BEYOND NORMAL IN A GHETTO AUDIENCE. AND I COULD SPEAK AND UNDERSTAND THE GHETTO’S LANGUAGE.
—Malcolm X
Starting out as a drug dealer at the age of twelve, Curtis Jackson faced an unfamiliar world that contained all kinds of dangers. The business side of hustling was relatively easy to figure out. It was the people, the various actors in the game—the rival hustlers, the big-time dealers, the police—who could be tricky. But strangest and most impenetrable of all was the world of the drug users themselves, the clientele upon which his business depended. Their behavior could be erratic and even downright frightening.
With rival hustlers and the police, Curtis could get inside their way of thinking because they all operated with a degree of rationality. But the drug fiends seemed to be dominated by their needs, and they could turn unfriendly or violent at any moment. Many dealers developed a kind of phobia of the fiends. They saw in them the weaknesses and dependence that could befall anyone who succumbed to addiction. The hustler relies on his razor-sharp mind; to even flirt with drug use could destroy such power and lead him down the slippery slope towards dependence. If he was around the fiends too much he could become a user himself. Curtis understood this and kept his distance from them, but this aspect of hustling bothered him.
On one particular occasion, the fiends were suddenly avoiding him and he could not figure out why. All he knew was that he could not sell a batch of drugs that he had on consignment. Under such an arrangement, a higher-up source, or connect, had given him the drugs for free; once he sold the entire lot, he would return a specified amount of the earnings to the connect and keep the rest as profit. But in this instance it looked like he would not make nearly enough to pay back the connect. That could prove damaging to his reputation and lead to all kinds of trouble; he might have to steal to get the money.
Feeling somewhat desperate, he went into full hustling mode, working night and day, offering all kinds of discounts, whatever it took to unload the drugs. He managed to make back just enough, but it was a close call. Perhaps the quality of the batch he was selling was inferior, but how could he tell beforehand and how could he prevent this from happening again and again?
One day he sought the advice of a man named Dre, an older hustler who had lasted an unusually long time dealing drugs on the streets. He was considered a sharp businessman (in prison, he had studied economics on his own), and he seemed to have an especially good rapport with the fiends. Dre explained to Curtis that in his experience there are two kinds of hustlers in this world—those who stay on the outside, and those who move to the inside. The outside types never bother to learn anything about their customers. It’s just about money and numbers. They have no concept of psychology or the nuances of people’s needs and demands. They’re afraid of getting too close to the customer—that might force them to reassess their ideas and methods. The superior hustler moves to the inside. He’s not afraid of the fiends; he wants to find out what’s going on in their heads. Drug users are no different from anyone else. They have phobias and bouts of boredom and a whole inner life. Because you remain on the outside, he told Curtis, you don’t see any of this and your hustling is purely mechanical and dead.
To raise your game, he explained, you have to first put into practice one of the oldest hustling tricks in the book—the “tester.” What this means is the following: whenever you get a batch of drugs, you separate a portion of it to give out for free to certain fiends. They tell you right there on the spot whether the stuff is good or bad. If their feedback is positive,