The Grind: Tales from the Turf

By Armand Sands

Grind (V) to reduce to fine particles:

To sharpen; polish or shape by friction;

To press or rub together:

To work or study hard

- Websters Dictionary

Armand Sands, Roc Byrd, Mike Hinks, and Jay Wilson are African-American college students in Oakland CA, who want everything at any cost. And when the question, Do you want be rich?, is posed to Armand Sands the Grind is set into motion.

As the four young men wander down the path of their twisted American dream, they encounter a few seasoned street veterans who at times serve up wise advice and on other occasions push, the four young men even further into the teeth of the Grind.

It isnt until one of the four young men is almost killed, that it is realized that seeds of deeds past have matured and all the circumstances set in front of them are self made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465320223

Armand Sands

Armand Sands was raised by his mother along with two younger brothers, in the northern California city of Richmond. Armand's mother worked two jobs to avoid the stigma of welfare and most importantly to provide a comfortable life for her children. And with with out fail she would always say "Go to school, so you don't have to work so hard...Baby! It was about the mid eighties when a very ambitious Armand began to notice th destructive wake he was leaving and loosely chronicled it from a different prospective. And even though Armand attempted many avenues for sucess, his absolute need to write seemed to be the most fulfilling.Armand lays it out flat in the first installment of "Tales from the Turf"

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Copyright © 2001 by Armand Sands.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

ARMAND SANDS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

This book is dedicated to anyone and everyone who lost a

Father; or Mother; Son or Daughter; Brother or Sister; Lover or Loved One;

to The Grind.

For the love of money is the root of all evil. Which while some coveted after they have erred from the faith and pieced themselves through with many sorrows.

1 Timothy 6:10

ARMAND SANDS

LIFE IS . . . SHORT, as sweet as you make it and nothing to play with, but most of all it is about discovery, change and some sort of evolution.

Some of us have endured a lifetime of pain and have boldly seceded from the chaos that we either created or lived in. Especially when you think during it can’t get any worse and the realization hits . . .Why not change!

And some of us were fortunate enough to be born at the right place, at the right time with the privilege of having both parents around. Parents who kept young eyes, ears and busy little hands away from the worries of the world.

That is until we get old enough to want to see what we are being shelter from, and at that point it is declared that my life is boring and all the benefits of being sheltered are overlooked. And that’s where the trouble begins.

I was raised along with my two younger brothers, by my mother, in a middle class, black neighborhood in Richmond CA. My Mom worked two jobs and most of the time we wouldn’t see her until late at night or early in the morning. On the real, I hated to see her looking tired, but she would tell us to go to school and get good grades, so you don’t have work this damn hard!

She did all that to keep things like normal. You know keeping the lights on, food on the table, and entertaining us with little league baseball, movies, pocket money, and the general activities that kids take for granted.

I followed her advice, got pretty good grades and played four years of high school baseball with the intent of getting a scholarship, so my Mom wouldn’t have to pay for college.

Our team finished in fourth place and I felt like I deserved at least a partial scholarship somewhere!

I ended up at San Francisco State University.

Now, I was a year from graduating from that fine institution with a degree in marketing. And that’s when I started having second thoughts about life after school. The concept of working for thirty or forty years, at the same job, looking out the same window, day in and day out really didn’t set well with me.

I wanted to leave school but, I didn’t want to be the average cat, but I was!

Everything around me led me to believe it! . . . Let me explain. First of all, since nursery school I had the same three friends, Jay, Mike and Roc,. We lived in the same boring neighborhood and played on the same baseball teams.

The only change came when Mike and Roc went to a high school in walking distance to home. Jay and I went to a school a few miles away, in hopes that one of us would get a car, and that didn’t happen until my senior year.

The car was a Datsun B210, with faded dull murky brown paint, bald tires, a cracked front windshield, and a bent rusty, wire antenna, But back then I was just glad to be driving . . . something . . . aaiiighht, ANYTHING!

Mike used to always clown, "Damn nigga ridin’ the bus can’t be all that bad!

Roc clowned too, Mondo that car used to be horse in its last life!

Roc was a highly recruited, running back in high school: he rushed for thirteen or fourteen hundred yards. The last game of the season he blew out his knee and doctors were telling him to be thankful to be walking. There would be no UCLA, Arizona, or any other PAC-10 schools. I think Roc had a nervous breakdown, not because he couldn’t play football. Roc wanted to get away from his father.

See, Roc’s father was the local boy that made it. He was a high school football star, an almost Heisman winner, and he managed to play a few downs of pro ball. Roc wanted to be like his father, only larger. The injury seemed to take away the interest he had for football, in fact he didn’t even like talking about it. Roc had good grades, but he decided to SF state. His major was electrical engineering.

Mike was the most highly recruited shortstop in the area, in high school.

I remember his numbers a .575 batting average, 17 homeruns, and 22 stolen bases. Major leagues . . . Automatic . . . That’s what we thought.

A year before Mike put up those numbers, his father died. Mike’s mom didn’t do to well after that, emotionally or financially . Mike played minor league ball, but he wasn’t that far from his mother, in case of emergency. Mike attended SF state and played ball there. Mike said he was going to be a lawyer after playing in the pros.

Jay was the smartest person I have ever known. He was taking classes at UC Berkeley for half the day, in high school. He wanted to be a doctor. Jay’s theory was without doctors, scientist, and engineers the world would cease to function. Jay’s down fall was Dana, his girlfriend since the seventh grade. Once she started giving him the pussy and he was like a dog around a fire hydrant. Dana decided that Mike was going to SF state because she didn’t get in to Cal.

I didn’t have a steady girl, however I did my fair share of fuckin’. And the only place that I couldn’t do my share, was at My Moms house. She deemed her house, A no fuck zone.

Some how that made her house shrunk, on top of that my younger brothers would screen my calls and Moms’ was staying up telling me about something called a curfew. I had to move.

Mike’s mom had remarried and although the new dude Bert was cool, Mike said he could hear them doing the nasty. And that was well . . . nasty!

Roc got tired of hearing about his father’s glory days and his two sisters had a permanent hold on both bathrooms.

And Jay was finally realizing that there were other women beside Dana. He told her that he wanted to marry her but he needed to live on his own first. She agreed.

The fall of 1986, the four of us moved into a penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland CA. It was only a few Bart stations away from where we used to live, but it was the first time away from home.

The rent was sixteen hundred a month, which wasn’t a problem. It came out to four hundred a month. We had jobs and financial aid, but as luck would have it we had more parties than school had classes and there were many occasions when we were too tired to go to class or work. Everything seemed cool. We had a wide selection of honeys to choose from, and we were well dressed thanks to the Somma Collection, which consisted of about ten pairs of pants, shirts, and sweaters that we all wore during the week to school, parties or where ever. Community property clothing at it’s best.

But, the shit hit the fan in the spring of 1987. We returned from the Greek Show down at UCLA, there was an eviction notice taped to the door, the phone and the lights were turned off. The only food, was a big sack of potatoes.

We threw a couple of rent parties, paid the PG&E and the phone bill. We worked a deal with the property manager to pay a little extra a month to catch up and we decided that June would be our last month.

Jay announced he was finally going to move in with Dana.

Roc said he was going to live by himself, and Mike was moving back home.

And I knew I would be back at home at least for the summer.

It was a sweltering, June day. I drove to the store for a brew,(

I hate beer, but that day, I had to have one) so I’m coming out the store when, I see Mike and Roc. Roc was standing next to the pay phone holding two pagers, scanning the area like the Fruit of Islam . And Mike was talking on the phone and as I got closer, he hung up and motioned for me to come over.

Mike starts in, by telling me how he’s tired of being broke all the time and expressed doubts about his basesball ability. He asked what if some crazy shit happened where he could never play again, then what? Roc grinned at me slyly and asked "Hey joy boy, you wanna be rich?

It was the last day in August . . .

It was the first day of the fall semester . . .

And the farthest thing from my mind . . .

CHAPTER 1

It was the day before Crack . . .

We called them Hubbas.

AND THE NEXT DAY would be Mother’s Day in the Ghetto, September 1st 1987.

Roc surveyed both sides of the street like a big game hunter as he drove down the lower end of Adeline St. in west Oakland. Mike was riding shotgun, holding a boom box, attempting to change a tape. I was sitting behind Mike, scratching my head and thinking what the fuck am I doing? And Jay was sitting next to me looking out the window, like a church mouse in a room full of stray cats.

It was my first time. It was the second time around for Jay and Mike. And Roc had been selling rock cocaine for a few months, he was the veteran of our group.

As we pulled in front of a old Victorian house Roc barked Aye Mike . . . Mike . . . ,turn that shit down man! The car stopped and Roc turned facing Jay and myself, with a ziplock bag filled about ¹A the way up with what looked like little chunks of soap. Alright, I’m givin’ ya’ll five doves. A dove is a twenty dollar hubba. If somebody ask for a ten shot, bust it in half. If they ask for a five shot, bust it in half again. And if you can . . . shit, try to bust ‘em all and sell ‘em all for Doves. As I watched him cut the cocaine into different price ranges, I couldn’t see much of a difference between a dove or a ten piece.

After I had held the cocaine in my hand for a while it perspired and numbed up, I asked Roc if it had ever happened to him. He looked at me and said Nigga it ain’t like yo hand is going to develop a habit, shit! It’s the cut on it. Cocaine is cut with novocaine, that shit they use at the dentist. That’s why your hand is numb . . . shit!

I could see it, just my hand with a hundred dollar a day habit. It could probably never happen one part of your body on dope, but that’s what I was thinking at the time.

The old Victorian house we were sitting in front of had boards over the windows, a fucked up stairway, trash all over the front yard and there were people going in and out the side of the house. Roc told us to stay in the car, before he got out and disappeared around the side of the house himself.

A couple of minutes later he came back to the car and said, C’mon ya’ll, let’s do it! Mike, Jay and I got out of the car and followed Roc around the house to a side door and I was holding the dope so tight in my hand that my fist throbbed.

An old black woman opened the door and let us in. Roc introduced her as Sarah. Sarah was unusually skinny with a big light bulb head and yellow eyes. She only had two teeth, both on her lower gums, and she was wearing a nasty dirty T-shirt, shiny dirty jeans and a filthy red bandana over a beat-up, nervous, perm that needed a relaxer. Sarah looked like a weird Picasso painting. She voice was high pitched and squeaky sounding when she spoke.

I got folks that’s gonna spend some money here tonight, but it’s gonna cost you !

Roc slipped a dove in her hand and Sarah started yelling, The Candy Boys is here.

The four of us followed her upstairs to a room lit by outdoor kerosene lanterns. There was debris all over the floor; burnt matchbooks, butane bottles, old porno magazines, rubbers, and broken glass everywhere. As I looked around I overheard Sarah asking Roc, Who are the new candy boys?

Roc bluntly said If the house ain’t jumpin, they ain’t nobody you need to know, Sarah went back downstairs, she seemed to be pissed off at the way Roc came at her.

We followed her and Roc and told us to watch. His first customer was a big Jethro Clampett, looking white man, he was about six-three, wearing greasy black overalls.

First he broke the dove rock in half, then he pulled out a small piece of broken car antennae, that he called a hooter and the other in his greasy hand. Then he asked if it was okay to smoke and Roc coolly replied, Go ahead partna. He lit a match, put it to the hooter, and a few seconds later I smelled the weirdest, most indescribable stench ever. I had to stand near one of the boarded up windows for air.

Roc made the most of the sales and after he ran out of dope, he told the three of us to get busy because it looked like we would have to re-cop soon.

Jethro asked Roc for another dove, who directed him to us. As Jethro approached me, Roc stood behind him and flashed five fingers What can I get for ten dollars? Jethro asked, I opened my balled fist and gave the man a five-piece for ten dollars. I asked the man if he needed anything else. He replied, Yeah, ya beepa number cause this is some good dope!" I said no. The fact of the matter was, I didn’t want to have a beeper, that was for real drug dealers, and this was just something to supplement my paycheck.

It must have been about an hour later when Sarah came back upstairs. This time a fair skinned, black girl was with her. Sarah grinned proudly and said This girl is my daughter, Muffy, Sarah said. And yo friends do like girls, don’t they?

Roc said, Yeah but Muffy is too fast for me and my partnas, we only go out with honeys who ride the yellow bus.

Everybody laughed, even Muffy, and while she was laughing

I noticed she had some teeth missing. After taking a real good look at her I decided that she looked like ten miles of hot, lumpy, bumpy desert freeway. She was wearing a bandana around her head just like her mother, a dirty halter top to hold up her saggy titties , a leather hot pink mini-skirt, and matching pumps that looked like they had struck oil . . . The girl looked bad, Damn’t!

Muffy asked if we were staying and said the money would be there all night. It was about 1:30 in the morning when Roc and showed us the empty ziplock bag , We gotta call the hook-up and get another ounce. And now the question whether or not to invest more money into this campaign. I had decided to do it one last time.

Jay reluctantly gave up his one hundred twenty-five dollars of profit. We sat in the car while Roc stood at the pay phone making the call.

Mike was excited and said, Man we about to come up! Fresh clothes everyday, none of that tradin’ shit, and I thought to myself again, Why am I doing this? I looked back at Jay who said. you could be right, man, so when you gone give my Armani sweater back? Mike’s response that was Nigga I have had the muthafucka so long I thought it was mine! We laughed, while Roc waited by the pay phone for a return call.

Meanwhile, the conversion changed from the sweater to Mike’s speculation