YOU ASLEEP WHEN CASH KNOCK on your window holdin’ a tall forty and that little girl from the strip club by the hand. He say he want to take you on a ride and you crawl into your P. Miller jeans and Lugz shoes fast as hell. You want to be lookin’ tight for that girl, show you Uptown all the way.
Y’all soon kicked back in his Escalade, ridin’ past them projects that you share. You gettin’ high with Cash, that man promising you the world just to make him millions if you leave Teddy and the Ward. You marvel at that, the way your mind works, the way it brings in that gold, as you float by the strawberries givin’ out fifteen-dollar blow jobs and thirteen-year-olds on BMX bikes shufflin’ off that crack for grandmamma pushers. Grandmammas who watch their soap operas while their little boys carry Ravens and Glocks.
“That white man won’t bother you no more,” he says.
The girl, still don’t know her name, snuggle into your arm and play with that platinum necklace like a little drunk cat.
The blue-and-red neon in the all-night liquor stores and those hard crime lights over oak trees almost make your mind drunk while Cash tellin’ you why you should get out from Teddy and Malcolm.
He say they don’t want him tellin’ you the truth about yo’ man Dio.
You don’t ask questions. He don’t serve up no answers. To you, Dio was God. He started the whole sound. He played the block parties out in the yard. Showed you that you could break out of Calliope.
Sometimes you wear Dio’s clothes. Malcolm even give you that Superman symbol that the man used to keep on his neck. Sometimes you wonder if his spirit don’t move your rhymes.
Cash is smart the way he play you. He come from Calliope too and turned himself into a billionaire. That nigga just made a deal with some label in NYC that jacked him up about $10 million. Now that make him ’bout light-years away from Teddy and his brother. Cash don’t hustle. He don’t sell from the back of his car. He run with the big dogs.
He say he still tied to CP3. Still get his hair cut in the ’hood and rolls block parties. He say Teddy and Malcolm are just country-ass Nint’ Warders. And you can’t trust ’em. Cash been you, he says. He know what you need.
