Hustling In Transition

By Jeff H. Freeman

I’d seen it so many times before, except in different ways. This time it was a new way, a way I hadn’t yet witnessed in all my years of doing this prison bid. Perhaps it was a direct sign of things to come – worse things, more trivial and mundane stuff, I reckoned. But I really wasn’t too sure of the significance of the new way of things, to be honest. All I was sure of was that prison life was changing. The past ways of hustling and doing business were steadily going the way of the dinosaur. Now, instead of loan-sharking, gambling, or making beds for quarters, something less was being ushered in. It appeared to me on the level of trading baseball cards, but maybe a little worse.

He stood there outside the double-doors that led out into the prison courtyard. A swath of sweat beads laid sparkling against his dark brown forehead. He was a rather big, chunky guy. One could easily assume he may have played sports of some sort one time or another. I guessed he weighed two-thirty or better. He had one of those high asses that grew into his back and swayed inward like some sway-backed mule that had been ridden too hard for too long. But I supposed what made him most distinguished was the fact that he had a glass eye and when he looked at you it gave the impression that he may not be altogether there, you see. Because, as he looked at you, he appeared to be looking as if there was somebody else standing over your left shoulder. It was a peculiar look. I just wondered why folks didn’t call him Deadeye or Lefteye, or something along those lines. Instead, they called him Pictureman.

As I neared the corner of the building and headed toward the double-doors, I saw him as he shuffled his feet a bit and commenced to rapping-off some sort of rhythmic lyrics that appeared to skim the essence of the hip-hop world. I happened to catch some of his wordplay as they shot across the air around me. It went a little something like this: “crack houses with dirty floors, slick pimps with phat-butt hos, pistol-whipping niggas and robbin’ stores…” As I came closer to him, he danced a little jig that made his legs look like warped licorice sticks, as his hips swiveled in some elliptical fashion.

“What’s up with ya?” he asked, as he swiveled to face me.

“Not much. What’s good?” I responded.

“Ain’t shit,” he said. “Just waiting for homey to come back to check out some of these pics.”

“What’cha got?” I asked.

“Aw, man. I got some more of them hos, man. Got some new shit, too – exclusive shit,” he replied, as he reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a white envelope full with 4×6’s and handed them to me.

I shuffled through them rather quickly and spotted a few I hadn’t seen before, some of both Black and Caucasian girls in a variety of poses. Some wore nothing more than a thong with their asses to the photographer as their faces looked back into the lens somewhat provocatively. Some looked rather sexy. Some old and unkempt. A few looked downright raunchy. But there was little doubt that Pictureman had something for all tastes somewhere in that stack.

“What’s up with this one?” I asked, handing him a brunette who laid over the back of a beige couch with nothing on but a white thong.

“Oh, man, let me see,” he said, as he drew the picture up close to his lone good eye. “That’s the ho ol’ boy told me to hold for ‘em,” he continued, as another one of his picture hustling buddies came rustling through the double doors.

“Yo, what up, Johnny G?” said Pictureman excitedly, as he handed me back the picture.

“Not much, dude,” responded Johnny G. “What’cha got new, man?”

“I got a few new joints in there,” said Pictureman. “Show ‘em what I got, Jay.”

I handed the stack to old Johnny G and he commenced to flip through them as if he was shuffling through a deck of cards. Behind us another group of guys were gathering as one of them was trying to sell some stale tobacco he had picked up earlier that day on the prison’s road squad. And somewhere out beyond the concertina-wired fences gunfire rang out on the state’s firing range, a seeming reminder to every prisoner’s plight.

“So, what’s up with this one?” asked Johnny G, holding up some red-headed woman laying splayed out atop a single mattress thrown helter-skelter upon the floor of some rundown bedroom.

“It’s yourn, if you want her,” replied Pictureman. “Just get me soup an’ a chip.”

“Bet it up,” said Johnny G, as he continued to shuffle through the stack.

I just stood there for awhile and watched these cats make commerce in the form of some 4×6’s and wondered just how the hell the prison environment had come to be in such a sad state of affairs. In the meantime, old Johnny G, with his long, silvery hair and growing potbelly, continued to flip through the thick collection of prison eye-candy as if he were inspecting one of his old LP’s for a scratch.

Just as the group behind us was breaking up, Pictureman commenced again rapping-off some sort of rhythmic concoction that bordered something one might have heard from some underground rap group. A few from the group behind us ambled over to listen to Pictureman as he spits off a loop that went something like this: “I see it in her eyes, baby girl, I know she diggin’ me, thinkin’ ‘bout Church’s Chicken, eat with some Texas Pete, baby, phat on da ass, da jeans is the recipe, sittin’ real tall in the money green GMC.”

Meanwhile, old Johnny G appeared to have found another pic that fit his liking. He held it up high and inspected it like he was looking for fingerprints or something.

“So, what’s up with this one?” he asked, holding it up in front of Pictureman.

“Shit, she yourn if you want her,” answered Pictureman, coming to an end of his rap loop. “Just get me ‘nother soup an’ chip.”

As he said this, the prison’s intercom system blared out some distorted words and Pictureman got his pictures back from old Johnny G and shuffled through them a bit. He then pulled out a picture of some leggy, blonde-headed girl laid back on a black couch with both of her legs extended straight up in the air towards the ceiling.

“You seen this ‘en?” he asked Johnny G.

Johnny G took the picture from Pictureman and looked at it rather intently for awhile before finally saying, “I done had this ho. She used to be mine.”

He handed the 4×6 back to Pictureman and told him he had to run and would pull up on him later. He put his pictures together and slid them into the back pocket of his pants and then made his way through the double-doors.

Pictureman continued to stand there, one foot propped up on the façade of the building, collating his 4×6’s and softly humming another rap song. For him, another sale was made and his life and livelihood inside the prison’s walls and fences continued. His hustle assured. This was the way business was conducted in today’s prisons. The hustling life. It’s all in snapshots – 4×6’s. Hustling pictures: a portrait of things to come, I reasoned.

Jeff Freeman