The Fence - Dick Lehr [17]
Clowning around in class was one thing. On the street, the stakes were higher. Mattie tried to steer Smut straight. “I was always talking to him and he was listening and respectful and then behind my back he’d do something different with his friends.”
When Smut was fourteen he was arrested for the first time—charged with stealing a car in March 1986. “I had a habit of hanging out with older kids, eighteen and nineteen.” He watched them steal cars left running by owners warming them up for work. But when Smut tried copying them, he got caught. His mother came to the rescue; she helped convince the juvenile court to give her son a break; the case was dropped.
Smut then had a few other run-ins in “juvie,” including one involving Indira’s mother. Indira was a repeat runaway from home, staying with Smut in the Browns’ unfinished basement bedroom. “She’d come looking for Indira,” Smut said. Trying to keep them apart, she complained to police that Smut was contributing to the delinquency of Indira, a minor. “She didn’t approve of our relationship,” Smut said. But that case also was eventually dropped. His chief defender—always—was his mother.
Smut straddled two worlds—kidhood and adulthood. The little kid in him was crazy about his comic book collection. “I had like sixty thousand comics.” His favorites were Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man and the team of superheroes known as the X-Men. He wrapped covers in plastic and hung them on his basement bedroom wall. Then there was the first taste of drugs and drinking. His early steps on the wild side included the missteps that come with being a novice. The first time he inhaled marijuana when he was fifteen, he gagged. “I thought I was going to die.” He was alone in his basement room when he lit the joint. He choked and completely freaked out. He ran upstairs. “He was all paranoid, all hot and spitting,” Mattie said. Smut wanted his mother to drive him to the hospital. “Robert was begging me.” Mattie refused. “I told him to call an ambulance. I said, ‘I told you not to smoke.’” In a panic, Smut dialed 911 but hung up before the dispatcher understood the nature of the emergency. Instead of an ambulance, a police cruiser pulled up in front of the house. “They were asking, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’” said Mattie. “I told them Robert smoked some weed and he’s hallucinating, like he’s gonna die.” The officers studied Smut. More amused than anything, they told Smut to take a shower.
The clumsy start aside, Smut was soon getting high regularly, inhaling without a hitch. He complemented the weed with chocolate-flavored liqueurs and wine coolers, while never taking to hard liquor. He was no longer going to school and hardly saw the Wellesley family he’d met through the METCO program. He was barely seventeen, but he fashioned himself as an up-and-coming small businessman with an entrepreneurial streak. When he tried cocaine, for example, he didn’t much like it, but he did like the drug’s earning potential. “So I started selling,” he said. To get started, he and a friend each chipped in $75 to buy an “8-ball” from a supplier. They cut the coke on a plate into thirty chips, or “jumbos.” They wrapped the jumbos in tinfoil and sold them for $10 apiece—doubling their investment when they were done. The two set up in a crack house about a ten-minute walk from Smut’s house on West Selden Street.
When he suspected his partner was keeping more than his share, Smut decided to split. He began dealing by himself on the street. He picked a spot along Blue Hill Avenue near a skating rink, right across from the neighborhood police station known as B–3. He quickly learned he had to pay to play—meaning pay off a police officer who was notorious for hitting on the street dealers working in Mattapan and Roxbury. Smut saw the fee as a business expense in the stream of illegal commerce that made him good money. “Got me better clothes, better