When Lil Reese tells you to get out of the car, you exit the vehicle as fast as you can.
The tension began to boil at breakfast when Brandon, a paunchy white kid and perennial sidekick to Chicago’s hip-hop elite, promised Reese a free necklace from a jeweler friend in Los Angeles who bills himself as “Your Rapper’s Favorite Jeweler.” Now, in the backseat of a Chevy Malibu parked on Chicago’s South Side, Brandon’s generosity has been turned on its head by Reese, a brooding 21-year-old with bushy eyebrows and
tattoos that crawl up his arms and onto his neck like lichen on an oak tree. Put simply: If you offer Reese a necklace, he’s going to want it now.
“Let me see that piece for a minute,” Reese says, tugging at the Medusa-head medallion around Brandon’s neck. “No,” Brandon says, pushing Reese away. “This is sentimental.”
A long pause.
“What the fukk is sentimental?” Reese shoots back.
“Reesie,” Brandon pleads, “he’s gonna FedEx two chains to you. I promise, yo.” His voice clears with sincerity. “On my mother.”
Reese is unmoved. “Let me see it now,” he demands.
“Reesie,” Brandon stammers back.
“I’ll give it back when I get those two pieces,” Reese continues, his voice growing cold.
“Yo, Reesie,” Brandon says. “I’m going to New York and I want to wear my piece.”
“Ethan,” Reese’s baritone booms from the back of the car, “step outside.”
That is how I end up standing on the sidewalk on a crisp
Chicago morning, listening to a series of strained yelps and choking sounds emanating from the car. I scan the street for our driver, Idris Abdul Wahid, a.k.a. Peeda Pan. As manager of Glory Boyz Entertainment and Chief Keef, Chicago’s most explosive rapper, Wahid is a kingpin of the city’s young rap talent. He is also the crew’s fixer, facilitator, negotiator and all-around handler. At this moment he has parked us here and gone off in search of marijuana for Reese, who appears in no hurry to catch an impending flight.
Behind me the car door is flung open and a red-faced Brandon clambers out with Reese clawing at his neck. He jerks free from Reese’s grasp and makes a near-Olympian break down the block. “Don’t pull that police shyt,” Reese hollers after, hands cupped around his mouth.
“What the fukk just happened?” Wahid asks with a grin, emerging from around a corner. But he’s less interested in details than in finding the flipped-out white boy. Calls go straight to voice mail, but three blocks later, a taxi appears with Brandon in the backseat. He huffs out, removes his luggage from our trunk, clambers back into the taxi and speeds off. Reese holds a rapacious smile, an internet beat-down video-star smile, one that seems to say, “What the fukk did he expect me to do?”
But Brandon did offer Reese that jewelry, so Reese insists Wahid persuade him back into the car. Wahid gets Brandon on the line and convinces him to meet us at a nearby gas station. When we arrive, Brandon opens the door and eyes Reese with suspicion. He offers a truce: “We cool?” Reese assures Brandon they are in fact cool.
In the spectrum of Chicago hip-hop violence and drama, the event is nothing, a minor blip in the explosive and predatory behavior of the city’s rising hip-hop stars, few of whom are older than 21. It doesn’t rank anywhere near the events of last May, when Keef proclaimed on
Twitter that Katy Perry could “suck skin off of my dikk” and that he would “smack the shyt out her” after she had disapproved of his new single, “Hate Bein’ Sober,” or when video emerged of Reese pummeling a young woman until she falls to the floor and is kicked several times as someone in his crew shouts, “Stomp her!”
As Brandon resumes his place in the backseat, he sparks a blunt, signaling a brokered peace. Wahid steers the Malibu toward Midway airport, kush smoke curling in the air. For the moment, there is peace. Or at least as close as it gets in Chicago hip-hop.
these nikkas are really savages man, shyt is crazy
