Life is bought and sold on Crenshaw every day; what do you sell?
by
Hiram Sims
Everybody is selling something. That is, everyone has something to give and wants something in return. Some people sell their skills, some sell ideas, some sell drugs, and some sell their flesh. I, at the moment, was selling clothes.
Crenshaw
was the busiest, noisiest, most crowded street I'd ever been
on and for a street vendor, it was the perfect location. The
street term for what we did was "Husslin." That was the name
given to all the bruthas who had something for sale, but didn't
have a store in which to sell. Instead of a mall or a department
store, the trunk of your car became the ideal place to start
a business and in the neighborhoods we worked, street vending
was welcome. And believe me, the hussler can be your best
friend or the most annoying, belligerent person you're likely
to come across. A hussler will beg, flirt, tease, yell, scream,
badger, and do whatever else necessary to make a sale. In
a way, hustlers are the psychologists of the street market
because they know a customer will buy something just to get
him out of their face. They also understand the golden rule
of marketing: If you put a product in front of enough people,
somebody's going to buy it.
My
cousin and I were new hustlers and we parked our van in a
den of old and young street vendors who had been at it for
most of their lives. We only sold our goods on the weekends,
but that was more than enough exposure to the life of a hustler.
All day we would hear people screaming, "DVD's! I got them
DVD's for cheap....10 dollars a piece....2 for 15!" " I got
purses, people. Louis Vitton, Gucci, Dolce and Gabana, best
knockoffs you'll ever see for 30 dollars!" " I got perfumes
and oils, ladies. You wanna smell good, come holla at me.
I got White Diamonds, Tommy Girl, Curve, and anything else
you need. I got oils from India, Africa, and the South of
Asia. 20 dollars!" This wasn't the stuff you read about and
get tested on in Economics. This was a real market. I wish
all business schools forced their students to watch these
men for a while, because you could see the exchange of goods
and services for money up close. We were in the grass roots
of our economy. But, before I go on, let me explain why I
chose this particular occupation.
I've always prided myself on being an extremely observant person.
After paying close attention to the people around me, I've
learned two things: first, people have an insatiable desire
for possessions. Most of the time they trick themselves into
believing they only want a certain number of things in life.
Then, once they've acquired those possessions, they create an
entirely new list of things they want. This process continues
until death. And I'd be willing to bet that most grief and sadness
in the world is the result of people not receiving the things
they want, whether it be a husband, or a wife, or a happy marriage,
or cute kids, or a 32 inch waist, or a Mercedes, or simply food
and water. In short, people constantly want more and more possessions,
no matter how much they have. Secondly, I observed that the
human population is made up of either producers or consumers:
those who sell the things people want and those who work day
in and day out so they can buy these things that will satisfy
them temporarily.
So
there it was, my big life choice. Be the pimp, or be the whore.
I, of course, chose to be the more controlling of the two
evils, the pimp. Now, selling clothes on Crenshaw Blvd. was
by far one of the most exhilarating things I've ever done.
Everything was so new to me. I was only nineteen, my cousin
was twenty, and we were taking our place among the merchants
of the world. This was my third week on the strip and people
were starting to know my name. Every five minutes someone
was driving up to our corner and buying clothes. Some of them
would call their friends and family right after buying from
us and say, "Girl, you gotta get down here to Crenshaw and
Slauson. These fools are sellin' velour suits for only 100
dollars. Wake up Junior and tell him to come down here and
get some of this before these bruthas' sell out!!" It
felt good to be successful, even if we were street peddlers
with an old van, three hundred dollars worth of clothes, and
half a tank of gas. So what! We were producers.
But
soon I began to feel we weren't producing enough. Looking
back on it, I don't know if we got greedy or if we wanted
our business to be economically scalable, but we began to
discuss ways of getting more customers. The more customers
we got, the more money in our pockets. So all through the
week we would practice scenarios with customers. " Hey brutha!
We got velour suits for less cheddar than you'll find anywhere
else….only 100 dollars, man. Call your girlfriend up and ask
her if she'll let you spend the money." "That's a nice car
slick. Now I know you need some nice clothes to go with that
nice car, so you can get some nice women. These girls around
here like velour and we got it for 100 dollars. Buy two outfits
and I guarantee you won't have to cry yourself to sleep tonight!"
We
did whatever it took to make sale. We begged, bargained, smooth
talked, whatever it took. We would have sold our soul to the
devil himself if he would have bought enough clothes. Little
did we know that our souls had already been forfeited the
day we began to serve the dollar. And just like any servitude,
it consumed us. See, a true slave has to work all the time,
from the moment he opens his eyes until the moment he shuts
them. Money had become our insatiable master…but it
was a master who would give us, its slaves, all that we wanted
as long as we served him. This type of enslavement weighs
heavy on the soul, but it would be some time before our emancipation
would come.
There
were two common fears among all street vendors. The first
was that at anytime, you could get robbed and lose all your
merchandise. After all, we were in the hood and other street
vendors on that same street had been robbed before. A street
vendor's merchandise is his livelihood so many husslers would
defend their stock with their lives. Unfortunately, pride
caused some to lose their lives along with their products.
We were well aware of this threat early on and decided that
if the day came where someone pulled a gun on us, they could
have whatever they wanted, even our van with half a tank of
gas.
The
second threat at the forefront of every hussler's mind is
getting busted. Cops have ultimate power when it comes to
dealing with street peddlers. If they so desire, they can
confiscate your goods, confiscate your car, give you a huge
fine, and take you to jail. Or they can drive by and do nothing.
And even though one threat may have seemed worse that the
other, the result was the same: your business was shut down.
And without business, a street vendor can't eat. We were well
aware of both threats, but we'd never seen either happen with
our own eyes.
In hindsight, we had too many variables working against us. We had over a thousand dollars worth of merchandise in our van, more and more people were finding out about us, making us more susceptible to robbery, and more than anything else, we were young Black men, which made us a perfect target for the cops.
It may sound like a cliché, but based on my own experience,
I can confirm that cops love to harass young Black men. Every
one of the dozen times I've been stopped by the police, I was
in no way breaking the law. Every police officer simply told
me that I fit the description of men they were looking for.
Needless to say, I should have predicted a robbery or an arrest.
But like I said before, all we had on our minds was selling
clothes and selling them quickly.
Then
fate pulled up in a black and white car that read, "To Protect
and Serve." It was the slowest moment in my life. I was talking
to a young woman through her passenger side window when all
the other street vendors started packing up their stuff and
driving off. I looked around and every other street vendor
was gone. The corner had become a ghost town within 45 seconds.
With my cousin and I both husslin, we never saw them coming;
we were too focused on making another sale. But when I did
look up, I felt like Anne Frank cornered in the attic by the
Gestapo.
I
stood still. My cousin began frantically throwing clothes
in the van and screaming my name, but I stood still. It felt
like death had come to claim me, but rather than flee, I stood
still. I don't even remember hearing the sounds of his sirens.
Just the car and the two henchmen who had come to cut us down.
He pointed his gun at me and said, "Get on the ground now
with your hands behind your head." We did and he proceeded
to pat me down, asking me if I had any weapons on me or in
the car. "No, Sir." It was at that moment, with my face on
the pavement, I quit. (What?) "You stay right there on the
ground…keep your goddamn face on the pavement!" He went through
our van and threw all the boxes of clothes out onto the ground.
With our faces on the ground, we could only hear it. We heard
him emptying the boxes and kicking the clothes into the street.
He then came over to where we were lying on the ground, leaned
down and said, "If I ever see you boys around here again,
I'm gonna throw the both of you under the jail where you belong!
You young men have a nice day."
We knew not to get up off the ground until he was gone. The whole 30-mile ride home we said nothing. We didn't even bother to pick up the clothes the officer threw into a puddle. We just got in the car and left. Even today, when we reminisce on how fun it was selling clothes, we never mention how it ended. We were scarred by that day, I think, and even time doesn't heal all wounds. Truth be told, I found out later that the cops come through there and clear the place out once a week, but by that afternoon, I had already given it all up. Even so, every now and then, I still drive past that spot on Crenshaw and think about the day I became a producer.
Hiram Sims attends the University of Southern California while studying English and Entrepreneurial Studies. His writings reflect his experiences growing up in South Central, Los Angeles.
