by Tiana Laveen
“You were beautiful, baby. From the time you were born, up until right now, you’ve always been beautiful, Paris.” He looked at her with such love, making her heart pound a bit faster.
“Thank you, Smoke. That was very nice of you to say.” She took a deep breath. “Well, uh, so I saw the field,” she continued, “and they let us pick an orange, some grapes and a flower of our choice. The flowers were my favorite. I wanted to know how to make those things grow, and what they needed to become so beautiful. I didn’t care about getting dirty. I wanted to dig in that soil and make something breathtaking. It amazed me that we could put something in the ground, in the earth, and out something lovely would come. I wanted a chance to give life to a thing, to show the world that I could make something that was perfect, even if I wasn’t. You know, I planted everything around my house, Smoke, even the bushes out front.” She smiled proudly, unable to curb her enthusiasm.
“Really?” His thick brow arched. “I figured you had a landscaper do all of that.”
“Well, don’t get me wrong, I had help, but the design, purchases and putting those bushes in, that was all me. I love planting a seed and watching it grow. It makes me feel…like I’ve done something, really done something.” She took a deep breath, getting lost in her own thoughts.
“Keep talking to me, Paris.” He looked at her seriously, encouraging her to let it all out and not second guess her confessions. She hadn’t gotten to the nitty-gritty, and that meant she couldn’t back out. He sensed that…
“Well, after my mother died, things pretty much went to shit. Around that same time, my father had allegedly killed someone, like I told you, but that, that wasn’t the end of what happened there…”
They both sat quiet for a spell before she continued.
“I was left at home for weeks. It didn’t take long for people to figure out there was no parent in the house, and family services came and got me. I was in foster care for a bit. That was not a good experience either,” she said on a ragged breath. “Anyway, that ended. My uncle, my mom’s brother, came and got me. He stood there like a perfect gentleman in that courtroom.” She cracked a sad smile. “He had on a suit, a tie, and he looked so kind and mild mannered.” Her eyes drifted towards the ceiling as the memories swam within her. “I thought I’d caught a break.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Smoke, he took me to his house, and practically turned me into a slave. He had me cooking and cleaning all damn day and I slept on the broken down, stinking couch. He wouldn’t even put me in a room. He had three bedrooms and no one lived there but him. No one from the family services place came and checked on me like they said they would… They just,”—she shrugged—“forgot about me.”
Smoke pulled her to his chest and caressed the side of her face and her shoulder.
“After only three months of living with Uncle Troy, I realized rather quickly the pecking order in the house, and how things were scheduled to go down. After treating me like a princess the first month, and fattening me up with cakes and cookies, to cause my breasts to swell, he set about grooming me as a hot commodity.” She took a long, labored breath. “Then one night, Uncle Troy threw a party… And then…then he had a visitor.” She sniffed and caught her nose with her index finger, bracing herself as her stomach turned to copious muck. “His friend said…” Her gut roiled, sounding much like hunger pangs. She placed her hand across it to steady her nerves. “His friend said, ‘Is that her?’ They woke me up out of my sleep with their talking…and then I saw them both standin’ there. My uncle said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to train her, but first, I need her cherry popped.’ I didn’t know what they were talking about, Smoke…”
And just then, she felt her man’s weight shifting beneath her, adjusting his weight.
“Go ahead…” he said coolly as he got settled. His eyes narrowed, as if he were looking through her, up the hill, over the mountains and past the damn woods…
“And I was really confused.” She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I was only thirteen, Smoke…thirteen!” Her voice trembled. “My birthday was close. I wasn’t gonna have no happy birthday.” She sniffed, and desperately tried to pull herself together. “I never had a happy birthday after my mother died, until this past one.” She smiled sadly. “Anyway, before I knew it, that man was on top of me. I was fighting and crying and screaming! My uncle just stood there and watched, like it was a commercial, like the shit was normal, expected!”
Though Uncle Troy never engaged in sexual activity with her, he fucked her mind on a daily basis like a porn star with tenure, making her ripe for such an occasion…
Smoke began to rub her back again, yet his body stiffened beneath hers.
“That’s why a few weeks ago, when I asked you about what your first time having sex was like, I didn’t offer my story as well. And…I was glad you didn’t ask. I asked you without thinking, because, well, that song was playing. After I asked you, I barely heard your answer because I was afraid you’d give it to me right back. I know it wasn’t my fault, but,” she lowered her head as tears continued to stream down her face. “I was so ashamed, Smoke! I was never the same after that!”
Silence reigned for a few seconds.
“But now, I want you to know…” she said as he continued to lovingly rub her back.
“I love you, Paris.” He said it so quietly, so beautifully, as he looked into her eyes. Those simple words were what she needed to finish the task at hand.
“After it was over, the man got up and gave him some money, and they laughed and talked a while about normal shit, like cars and some new dance spot, and then he left. My Uncle Troy told me to go clean myself up and that once school started, I could forget about going, told me he’d home school me. Of course that didn’t happen. He then told me I had a new job, and he was my boss. Over the next few weeks, I was screamed at, threatened, degraded…my entire self-image stolen from me. I didn’t know who the hell I was anymore, Smoke. I was out on the corner, selling my ass. It was a nightmare, but what could I do?!” Her voice shook as the tears continued to pour. “I had nowhere to go, and I knew what happened to foster kids sometimes too, so I didn’t wanna tell anyone what was happening.
“I had one foster family before my uncle came and got me, where the brother kept hitting me, like actually throwing fists, and another where they would not feed me but a few times a week. I could not take a shower, wash my hair nothing.” The tears fell and fell, and she shook in Smoke’s grip. “I was young and scared. Plus, my uncle told me if I tried to report him or run off, he’d find me and kill me. I had no reason to believe that he wouldn’t.” She hadn’t cried this hard in years, and it was simply debilitating. Smoke held her tight in a hug so intense, she almost lost her breath, but she needed it; everything in her soul cried for his strong touch, to feel his skin close to hers. He was her human blanket, her protector.
“I was out there for over four and a half years. Smoke, I’d been beaten up, raped four times… People laugh when a prostitute says she was raped.” Smiling sadly, she shook her head. “One time was beaten so bad, I blacked out and didn’t even remember what happened. I had no protection over my person, no one watching over me the way I needed to help prevent such situations. It was a different day and time. I was just floating around out there, with a quota…” She sighed, trying desperately to finish the story, give the man the information. “I had knives and guns pulled out on me, and when I’d tell my Uncle what happened, all he cared about was that I hadn’t gotten paid…like it was somehow my fault. He had other girls, too. Most of us were underage. He’d use us to try and recruit other girls. I became good at it, a con artist. One girl, though,” she said, running her hand up and down her neck. “One girl, Smoke, I told her to run away while she still could. She was just…so young…so very young. The girl actually listened to me and somehow he found out I told her to go back home to her parents. Well, he beat me so bad, I almost died. He didn’t take me to the hospital afterward, either. I just
was in the house, bloodied and bruised, and before I was completely healed, he put me right back out there on the street and told me to not come home with less than three hundred dollars.”
“He used an alternate method of guerilla pimping, and he broke a lot of code rules.”
She looked into her sweetheart’s eyes, noting how removed and detached he appeared. His voice soothed her with its calmness, as if he were trying to lull her to sleep, make the pain stop.
“One of the historic pimp codes, Paris, is to never choose or let yourself be chosen by an underage girl, for a few reasons. One of which is of course the legal ramifications one would run into. Not only would you get a solicitation charge, the pimp would also get a corruption of a minor charge so he could pretty much kiss his freedom goodbye. And once his ass was in prison, he’d be marked as a pedophile—because most of us sleep with our product, at least on occasion.
“Secondly, as you know, despite how society views us, we should have some damn standards. A minor selling pussy is just not cool, and there is no way in my mind to make that okay. Real pimps avoid anything on the kiddie stroll like the fucking plague. Thirdly, you were his family member, his niece. We are never to turn out a person that is a member of our blood family, or a friend’s child, even if they ask. Fourthly, guerilla pimpin’ is for the weak, and that is what is often used to break a colt, as it is called. If a pimp has to stoop that low, he needs to cut that ho loose and he put himself in a fucked up position by messin’ with an underage girl in the first fuckin’ place.
“Her body isn’t even fully developed; she could have some physical problems if a john has sex with ’er too rough and sometimes, it doesn’t even have to be rough—it could be just normal, vanilla sex with a guy that is a bit heavier, a bit bigger, you know? And he could mess her up, because she just isn’t built for that. She’s still a damn child, in every sense of the word. She’s not mentally ready for sex, either. It can fuck a little girl’s head up if she is having sex with a grown ass man, or vice versa. You’re aware of all this, Paris…I’m just telling you from my perspective. You lived this shit.” His gaze then brimmed with worry for her. “These kiddie prostitutes are out of control.
“You can’t expect her to stay on top of her birth control, you can’t trust that a john won’t force her to have unprotected sex, and then before you know it, she’s got a STD or HIV and could be pregnant, on top of it all. It’s just not worth it and it’s dead wrong!” The man’s voice elevated as he laid it all out to her. Smoke had never expressed this, but he didn’t have to. He had a serious problem when it came to children being exploited, abused, used and mistreated…and it stemmed from his own, miserable childhood, too. Unfortunately, they shared this in common. They’d been tainted since the day they were born…
“But so many pimps are guerilla pimps, and their whores think it means they care. He beat me one time thinking I stole a hundred dollars from him and another time, he said I had done some reckless eyeballing. I hadn’t. What happened was, I was out and a pimp tried to come up to me, make me choose up. He heard about it and got mad.” She took a fistful of her robe and wrung it in her hands.
“…Fuckin’ simp,” he mumbled.
“Smoke?”
“Yeah, Pussycat?”
“Tell me how you do it…like, how you choose your women and your philosophy. We have never really discussed that. I want to pick your brain a bit.” She welcomed the distraction, anything to step away from the stomach twisting mess of her past…
“Like seasoning?” He sucked his teeth and his eyes gleamed with curiosity.
She nodded.
“Well, I know I’m preaching to the choir, but I’ll tell you. I guess you want to know from a pimp’s perspective… If you pick your whores properly, you rarely will have to resort to guerrilla tactics like that. Some said I was a Romeo Pimp.” He shrugged. “Fine, I have used some Romeo tactics, but it was a combination of things, actually. No matter how desperate I got for a prostitute, I still made sure I didn’t simply go out there and get just anyone. You have to get the cream of the crop. Most of the whores already have Daddy issues, and that helps a motherfucker like me bring them into the fold, but a guerilla pimp will beat his whores into submission, ridicule and publically embarrass them in order to wear them down, break them. A woman that is afraid of you will work harder and longer, but she also becomes dangerous. Not only to her pimp, but also to society. If she becomes dangerous to society, then she attracts negative attention, which then puts her pimp in the limelight, and before you know it, his ass is being hauled to jail. On top of that, broken whores have a high turnover rate. Some of these motherfuckers out here don’t seem to understand that. If I have to invest countless hours, money and time into grooming a new bitch, I could have saved myself half that effort and cash if I had just treated well the one that I had right at the beginning, from jump!
“When I first started, Paris, I did a lot of the verbal and emotional abuse, just like I learned and was taught. I was very good at it, too; I knew just the right damn buttons to push. As I got older, however, I realized that if I wanted longevity and a lower turnover rate, I needed to take a different approach. The same shit doesn’t work for every Mack, but this is what works for me.” He swallowed, then continued. “You see, Paris, what a lot of women fail to realize is that a man, or hardcore Madam who is into that sort of thing, may purposefully pick the most fucked up of the litter.
“They want to do it. Anything we do, regarding who we choose, is deliberate.” He paused, and she didn’t miss the iciness in his eyes. “I go for the most physically attractive, but also the ones with the best mentality. Now, let’s discuss a contentious aspect of my work. Most of my whores, as you know, are white.” He looked at her earnestly. “I don’t give a fuck about race. Either a woman is a bad ass bitch or she’s not, but the tricks do care about race.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” she said with a smirk. “I’ve wondered about that.”
“Well, let me tell you why. You, as a black woman, they aren’t going to be as honest with. They don’t want to offend you, but with someone like me,”—he grinned—“Yeah, they are going to tell the truth. I have my stable that way simply due to profit ratios, Pussycat. It’s not because I think they’re prettier than the black ones, Hispanic ones or anything like that, but because johns of all races tend to ask for white girls more than any other ones. Now of course, you have the johns that only want a black hooker or an Asian one. I get those clients too, but you know our clients have money, and they are paying for an experience, so if they can get a bitch that looks like Angelina Jolie, versus say, a ‘round the way girl’ off the block, that’s what they’ll go for. They want the woman they could never get on their own accord, basically. Just like in society, white women are more coveted. It’s not right, it’s not cool, but it’s the fucking truth and we all know it.”
Paris’ lips twisted into a scowl, but she nodded in agreement. How could she argue with that? The man was telling the truth. Her own white girls were paid more and got bigger tips on average. She’d noticed all right…
“Pimping and hoing have always mimicked ‘normal’ society.” He put his hands in quotation marks. “All successful underground worlds mimic the real world, but go against status quo. You keep a semblance of predictability that way, but also supply what is needed, that which is not provided or acceptable in mainstream. So, I began to tailor my stable not to my own liking, but to the customer demand because personally, I’ve always been attracted to black women. I like Latina women too, I like Asian women, I like all women!”
Paris laughed lightly as he cracked a sly smile.
“But it wasn’t about me,” he said, pointing to his chest. “It was about what would sell the best. We have to be business minded. The black, Latina and Asian ones I do have however, well, you’ve seen them. They are solid, bad as hell. They look fucking amazing. More importantly, they are good at what they do and appreciate what I do for them. I
t is hard to find that, but they are out there. Some pimps stop after they obtain the girl though, you know—stop taking care of them. No, at that time our job has just begun. Once I get a hold of them, I mold them, just like you do yours. I tell them that I don’t swing on my bitches, so we get that out the way.
“Even if a whore is punching me, and yes, it has happened, I will never be the first to strike, look how fucking big I am? I could accidentally kill a woman if I got into some sort of violent tussle and even if I have to get into it with them, it is to stop them from hurting me or themselves and even then, I’m careful because I have a mean left hook, and that isn’t intended for my product, or any woman for that matter. I just can’t get down with that…you don’t put your hands on no woman…just kick her ass out, walk the fuck away.” And this was just one of many things she loved about this man.
“Speaking of getting kicked out, once one of my whores gets on drugs, she’s gone. This is non-negotiable,” he said sternly. “I’ve had two in my stable that had prior drug use problems, but I made sure they’d been clean for a while and I insisted they go to weekly meetings. They think that shit is funny at first, that I’m playing, but I’m not. We have a verbal understanding. The other issue is physical maintenance. They have to keep themselves up, no sloppy bodies. I have some thick ones, thick is cool, but I can’t have someone that is completely out of shape and gets winded fast when riding a dick, can’t get in certain sexual positions, can’t run fast to get away from some damn lunatic, things like that. That’s their claim to fame. I am selling a fantasy, and the catalyst is the human female body…that body needs to be in mint condition. I personally like a small waist on a woman, rounded hips, feminine form, but a nice jiggle on a juicy, round ass.” He smirked, causing Paris to burst out laughing. “But…that’s not everyone’s taste!” He threw up his hands and laughed a bit louder. “I like fat asses, like your’s, but you know, as I stated, it’s not about me.” He grinned and shook his head.
