Every neighborhood has a hustler. But my neighborhood had had one of the original kings of con men

his name was G-man.

A thread.

G-man was ageless. He could have been 32. He could have been 68. No one knew.

G-Man wasn’t violent and he wasn’t a thief. You could leave your wallet in G-Man’s lap and he’d bring it back to you.

He was a church deacon and served his congregation faithfully...

I think

Now that I think about it, I’ve never met anyone who says they went to church with G Man but everyone knew G Man didn’t hustle on Sundays.

The other 6 days was “game on”

And G Man KEPT a job, which made everyone happy.

Because when G-Man got a job, everyone knew it was just a matter of time before he figured out a way to give everyone the “hook up.”

When he worked at the furniture store, everyone in the neighborhood had new TVs. And I’m not talking about flat screens either.

This was after floor models but before flat screens, when TVs still had bootys. G-Man laced the whole block with those big projection joints.

When G-Man got a job at KFC, cookouts were popping that summer because you could buy a chicken for $2.39 a case.

How did he do it?

Look man, do you ask that guy who delivers meat in the truck with a deep freezer on the back who his supplier is?

No!

You just pay for your shrink-wrapped ribeyes and keep it moving!

And if you have never bought meat off the back of a truck, don’t EVER invite me to a cookout.

Cookouts with retail-price meats are like churches who use hymnals. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not for me

But all these were side hustles. G-man’s MAIN JOB was also his greatest scheme.

G Man was the cable guy.

I don’t know if they had black cable guys for black neighborhoods but G man must have been the cable dude for our neighborhood specifically

Because all he did is ride around in the cable truck all day and hustle. And he always ate lunch at the same place: Miss Barbara’s

Miss Barbara sold plates out of her house. See, in many neighborhoods there’s an underground economy that a lot of people don’t know about

That’s why I hate that BS star about a dollar circulating one time in Black communities and 7 times in white communities.
Does that include candy ladies? People who do hair in their kitchen? Shadetree mechanics? Bootleggers? Weed mans (no it’s not “weed men.”)

Who do you think does Miss Barbara’s hair for pastor’s anniversary of fixes her alternator? Who do you think the weed man buys his Nowlaters from?

So this is how it worked. If you moved into a new place, you ordered basic, bare-bones cable and G-Man came and officially hooked you up. But you were gonna get HBO, Nickelodeon ESPN17 & even the “nasty channel” (don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about).

This is before they had all that computerized stuff. Back then they G-Man to come out and climb a pole. And for his service, you gave him an extra $10-20 per...well whenever. It wasn’t monthly. Just whenever you saw him, you owed him $20.

And G-Man was always around.

And he always had his “collections book” with detailed accounts of what you owed.
I’m telling y’all, G-Man was a real professional.

But if there was a storm or a cable outage, you BET NOT call the cable company because they might send a white person out and get EVERYBODY’S cable cut off!

Even if you weren’t a subscriber to the G-Man Television Network, calling the cable company was like snitching.

Instead, you called Miss Barbara’s and left a message for G-Man. He’d come out and fix the problem but, before he climbed that pole, you had to pay G-Man that $20

After YEARS of doing this, the cable company must have realized there was a whole part of town that hadn’t subscribed.

So one summer, they just started sending people out to check on cable connections and disconnected EVERYONE’s cable.

Bruh, people were MAD AF! How would they lose their bootleg cable if they had paid G-Man?

Maybe the cable company realized what was going on. Maybe someone snitched. But they FIRED G-Man and made a deal:

They’d reinstall your cable and wouldn’t even charge you for the cable. It was essentially the same price G-Man charged, but no HBO or ESPN 29.

It was a good deal. But guess what happened?

No one got that shit!

They lowered the price but everyone still balked. They sent people door-to-door to offer increasingly lower rates but no one bit.

So they hired G-Man back!

He still hooked people up and you could still call Miss Barbara!

He worked there until he retired

Now, I know G-Man. I asked him about it years later and he said that they were going to arrest him for larceny and he could have done year in jail. They gave him a choice to come back or work for them.

“And you kept hooking people up?” I asked.

He didn’t.

Apparently, after the G-Man incident, the cable company hired Miss Barbara to take calls. All those people who called Miss Barbara after the Great G-Man cable Outage were actually calling the cable company.

And G-Man would still respond to emergencies like he was giving the hookup. But instead of pocketing the money, he was giving it to the cable company.

Fortunately, G-Man negotiated a higher pay to return

Now, I can imagine what the meeting was like when they had to decide whether to hire G-Man back AND Miss Barbara vs losing a whole section of town as monthly customers.

I bet they put that whole fake-bootleg-but-really-legal cable plan in place because they assumed “the blacks” would rather have bootleg service.

Or maybe they thought “the negroes” we’re REALLY loyal to G-Man and he had some kind of existential hold over ou neighborhood...

Nah.

Niggas just want to watch tv.

EVERYONE wants to watch TV.

G-Man had GREAT customer service. He responded when you needed him. We paid him just like any other business. And he had reasonable rates

We were cable customers. It’s who we were the whole time.

And, just like the cable company thought that G-Man was successful because of a cult of personality...

For 4 years, we’ve Ben told that Republicans subscribed to Trump’s racism, lies, stupidity, corruption & white supremacy because he had an existential hold over white people.

But it was NOT a cult of personality!

Now, we’re starting to see that they were just a party of racist, lying, stupid, corrupt white supremacists this whole time.

As one gospel song said: “You can’t knock the hustle.”*

*I think it was a gospel song.

I don’t fuck with hymnals