It was May 12, 1998, two months after my tenth birthday and a week before DMX’s debut album, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, was set to crash-land in stores. In Brooklyn, five-dollar bootleg copies of albums lined the display cases of street vendors well before Tower Records could slap a $15 sticker on them. Occasionally, when I wasn’t sure if there was enough food in the fridge for my mom to scrape together dinner, I would swipe a few copies from downtown Brooklyn to sell to my neighbors back in East New York. Typically, I’d end up with six dollars, earning enough to cover the cost of four chicken wings with shrimp fried rice from the local Chinese food restaurants that outnumbered grocery stores in my neighborhood.

That was my goal that day; hunger was all that was on my mind. A Black vendor, likely three times my age and bodyweight, was tending to a customer when I saw my opportunity to snatch a few CDs and run. Before I could push off my heels, he latched on to my wrist and put me an eyelash away from the barrel of his pistol. My whimpering apologies fell on deaf ears as he kept asking why I would try to take money away from him. I froze. Handling this type of situation never came up in textbooks or family advice. Pedestrians scurried away with the typical aloofness New Yorkers adopt as a means of self-preservation. My mind was blank. I didn’t know if it was because humor was instinctively my third (and preferred) option after fight or flight, but all I could muster was, “I’m just trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.”