When we were last with him, young Gerald’s friend Gregory had just shown him how they could steal the things their families couldn’t afford to buy them.
Gregory say, “Boy, we be getting jewelry. All kindsa shit now. Sunshades. You know? Nylon t-shirts, silk t-shirts, you know?”
I’m like, “Damn, I though y’all was paying for this stuff.”
He let out a Tshhhh. “Man, you know, girls–when we go out and stuff, they think we payin’. We be hustlin’, we be stealin’.”
I say, “Shit, you can put me on the crew now.”
So a few months later, in the neighborhood, a lot of us guys, we hang out, we meet up. We have brass knuckles, nunchucks, stuff in our bags. One day I say to Gregory, “man, I know what we need to call this crew.”
He say, “What?”
I say, “The Rat Pack Crew.”
He say, “What?! The Rat Pack? What that mean?”
I say, “Yeah, man, the Rat Pack mean we hustlers, we just take anything from anybody.”
We’d built a clubhouse in the woods where we met at. That’s where we would talk about what we gonna do, how we gonna do, what car we gonna steal, what motorbike we gonna steal. If you come in the clubhouse, you had to have a canned good, Kool-Aid, some kinda chips, cookies or something. So we would plot out what we was gonna get to bring to the clubhouse.
One day we went in the K&B — Katz and Besthoff, which was a drug store in New Orleans. I went into the store and they tell me what to get, but I was new, I wasn’t a good thief yet.
I put a can of tuna in my coat pocket. My friends were in different aisles.
And just then, the security guard grabbed me, stopped me.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
He say, “Hey, excuse me. Can you step in the back with me for a second?”
I say, “Nah. What make you want to take me to the back?”
He say, “I wanna see something.”
“You ain’t gotta come, but I prefer you to come. I just want to search you, make sure you’re not taking nothing.”
I was going to walk out of the store, but when I looked behind me I seen another security guard.
I say to myself, “Oh shit. What the hell?”
So I say to him, “No problem, I’ll walk with you.”
When we walk in the back, he say, “Can I search you?”
When he say that right there, my heart fell to my stomach.
Boom.
This new series chronicles Gerald Anderson’s time running the streets and going in and out of prison. It will eventually become his sophomore and autobiographical book. You can purchase the first book, “Still Standing: how an ex-con found salvation in the floodwaters of Katrina,” from Gerald directly or find it on Amazon.com.
