True to the game.

Snowfall ends as it should.

🚨SPOILER ALERT🚨

I’m detailing things from the series…you’ve been warned 🤪

Here I am summer of 95, crack was king, queen, Duke, duchess and court jester.

The Fall of a Saint.

If you know the origin of the show you realize the significance of why John Singleton wanted to do this.

I don’t think he wanted to do a play-by-play on the thing. Freeway Rick Ross and Gary Webb I don’t think ever crossed paths. I assumed The Reporter in season two was going to be more of a series regular thing instead it was just a self-contained season plot point.

The writers went in a direction that ended the idea that Ross and Webb’s direct influence would go beyond the origin of the show.

I don’t know much about Freeway Rick. Older than my oldest sister by a few years, I had nothing on him to read when his name got out of LA and to my ears way over in East New York. He was their Alpo or Supreme as the way I saw it.

Hey we do share the same birthday though😆😉

I probably knew more about Ice Cube than Ross. The crack era was in full swing when Cube’s solo career was at its hottest. As he detailed in A Bird In a Hand, fresh out of high school he was a dad. I was still in high school in the 10th grade.

The idea of being a dad just out of high school scared the shit out of me. Having to sell crack to provide for the baby because it pays way more than flipping burgers scared me shitless.

Death Certificate is one hell of an LP, perfect voice for the crack era.

The show captured the harsh reality of the end of a hustler’s life, if you’re my age Franklin’s demise is exactly how it plays out. Because you’ve seen friends and family go through it.

In some ways, today’s young adults may need to see this. In my era, you did everything in your power to NOT sell drugs. We saw that there’s never a happy ending. You’re never getting that trophy for participating.

Of course, some in my era were seduced and are the butt of Jay Z’s verse from “Dead Presidents” when he said:

Nope. The this particular track is NOT on Jiggas debut. Reasonable Doubt has DP part 2.🤦🏾‍♂️😩

“One day you’re cruising in your 7 next day you’re sweating forgetting your lies. Alibis ain’t matching up bullshit catching up. Hit with the RICO they repoed your vehicle. Everything was all good a week ago. Bout to start bitching ain’t you? Ready to start snitching ain’t you?

I’ll forgive your weak ass hustling just ain’t you aside from the fast cars, honeys that shake they ass at bars you wouldn’t be involved with underworld dealers”.

When Jay spit this verse I was already out of my adolescent years. Only 20 but in street years I was in my senior year. So my response to the verse had as much to do with having survived my teen years but also my logic.

I knew for a while there were a TON OF FRAUDS selling crack. They thought I assumed they were in some kind of way -a Franklin Saint. No one I knew ever came close. I knew these guys weren’t anywhere near a kingpin’s level. At best, they were top-shelf middle management.

If a drug dealer’s destiny is reaching a ki(lo) most that I knew may have reached the summit. But as B. I.G. said their reign was short like leprechauns.

There’s too much that can go wrong really easily in crime. The drug game turns this up to one hundred thousand trillion times the risks. Volatile is being quaint, it’s like gravity on Jupiter, it’s massive -that’s a regular crime.

The drug game is a black hole. Nothing gets out. Well at least theoretically, you hear over and over it’s a binary choice. Death or prison.

Now add the materialistic mindset so many young people are easily attracted to, you can see how sloppy the game gets. Guys will tell you all kinds of reasons why they hustled.

Franklin probably bought into his hype about buying property to help his community-yada-yada-yada. To quote one of the hustlers I grew up with, he flatly told me he sold drugs to make money.

What to do with it?

What the fuck is the dog going to do if it catches the car?

Nobody in the history of hustling has ever bought the block. Never. Ever. Trust me. Never!

But back to death and prison. For the show, it’s just too easy and convenient to kill Saint or have him locked up. Franklin, like Michael Corleone sort of got away with it. But at too great of a cost.

I know guys who didn’t die, lots of them went to prison and got out at some point. But a lot ended up like Franklin. No death or prison, something far more ambiguous.

Colostomy bags, wheelchair-bound for life at 24. Old bones due to past gun injuries-that were only treated at the ER- hurts when it rains and when it doesn’t. Fractured relationships due to the usury tactics one turns to in the street.

They are the guy Jay clowns in the verse. Far more men in the game were that guy trying to be Saint.

A drug dealer before crack…

Worst when all signs pointed they weren’t some unicorn hustler, they doubled down. Which of course makes their eventual downfall much more harsh.

Drug dealers after crack…huge difference

Some are forced to move away from their home city. Largely doing to pissing everyone off. Unwilling to pivot without losing much ground, things start going from bad to worse once they start having to sleep with random women just to stay afloat.

They go through this ridiculous Kabuki theater as the gear gets old. The cars give way to needing a swipe. They become philosophers. Man, it is dizzying. It’s street/gangster purgatory.

For all of their risks and bright ideas, they are left with nothing. They don’t even have the momentum of ex-cons.

Forced by the correctional system to lead a different life and of course who wants to return to prison? But guys like Franklin don’t have the trajectory of the ex-hustler locked up, now free.

He is coming home. He has changed behind bars. He’s no longer “that guy”. He’s had a plan for a while. Doing 15 in the joint will do that to you.

But guys like Franklin…

It’s like the joke about being unemployed when the weekend rolls around. You don’t count buddy. What plans do you have?

It’s the “I’m sleepy but can’t fall asleep” thing. It’s “fever chills”, or a big appetite but can’t find anything appetizing to eat. The irony of these guys who bankrolled their entire lives coming down to them asking you for a swipe on Nostrand Ave is jarring.

Or perhaps he got the swipe but not much else. And I do mean not much else. It’s as if the reality that hustling didn’t work out at all completely rocked their world. They STILL see any life that’s not a hustler’s life as bullshit.

Pride is the problem here. The world is full of also-rans who gave it a shot and came up way short. They licked their wounds and then went on with their lives. Yet, when crack came around it completely fooled an entire generation of men. But that’s not how they (still) tell it.

They were never really good at hustling-they were just good at selling crack. And when that ended they became the joke.