An aspiring rapper and senior at Overbrook High that January had met in Mr. Ward’s English class by the name of J-Peg X became January’s first boyfriend and was replaced by the guy who took her virginity on prom night, star football player Rodney Wiggins—but for February, there had been no boyfriends due to what she told her mother and January were “voices” in her head instructing her that she was allergic to black men.
May Day replied that it must be the peroxide dye that was “seeping into February’s nigga scalp,” but the man who had become like a father figure to the girls, Rim Shot, took the voices more seriously. He encouraged May Day not to be embarrassed about seeking psychiatric testing once January confessed that her sister had been complaining of “voices” since they’d been small children. Still, after a month long battery of psychiatric tests, the results written in the county records simply stated: “…timid, frightened young black female with over-active imagination; emotionally traumatized by ghetto surroundings. No signs of mental illness.”
“That about sums her up,” May Day had smirked.
And then shortly thereafter—Rim Shot was found dead in a parking lot near Spring Garden. Shot in the chest by thugs who’d apparently jacked him for his car.
A devastated May Day put on a strong front for the girls while January cried for weeks; but it was February who took it the hardest. Telling everyone that she’d been warned by the “voices” that it was going to happen, but hadn’t listened because it had been too painful to even contemplate.
She started smoking pot—something that Rim Shot and May Day would do in their bedroom late at night while laughing at the stories on CNN and FOX NEWS. And along with the blonde hair and fake eyes, she’d started sniffing glue and listening exclusively to music by metal rock bands.
She shocked everyone by announcing she was dropping out of high school and going away to California—to find herself.
May Day and Granny September tried to stop her, but the very people who had babied her all her life ended up being the ones she listened to the least.
The last thing January said to February before she departed for California was: “You have to find the courage to believe in yourself and to stand something, February—otherwise you’re going to end up spending your whole life at the mercy of other people.”
A year later, like magic, February called her mom and sister from California and reported that she no longer heard voices; that she now wore her hair its natural color, weaved in a realistic style; that she’d taken up “creative dancing” and that she’d met the most wonderful guy—that he was black and she wasn’t allergic to him; but madly in love with him.
The part about the voices being gone was all they’d really cared about.
“It’s wonderful,” May Day had said back then. “All she needed was to get away from this rotten ghetto. My baby’s not crazy.”
Crystal clear water rushed against white sand.
From the living room of their luxury suite in Spain, January and her mother struggled to put the longing and the loss behind them. With her eyes searching out in the surf, January admitted, “After February died, I started wearing her glam-chick hair weaves. And sometimes I have this fear that if I don’t think about February at least once every day—I’ll lose her from my mind forever.”
“That won’t ever happen, baby girl. Gravity won’t let it.”
January pressed her fingertips against the skyscraper glass.
GRAVITY
Sexual hunger became like gravity or a lack thereof. Animal magnetism that moved towards Adam and January like some hormonal hurricane surging against night land and forest—and just when January had accepted the eye of the storm’s attraction and the chemistry behind their mutual passion—the whole wild, windy thing changed itself—the approaching hurricane intensifying into a realm of emotional completeness that neither Adam nor January felt experienced enough to fully control or understand.
Pressed close and moving sensuously to the jazzy Bossa Nova music of the hotel’s dance hall band, January closed her eyes, feeling more and more as though she was in the presence of some vibrantly alive part of her dead sister. Being in Adam’s arms felt like sanctuary. And as she rested her head on his strong shoulder, she lost herself for a moment and muttered just what he’d wanted to hear; “I feel so safe.”
“Good—because someday while we’re dancing close like this; and you least expect it…I’m going to ask you to marry me.”
“I don’t ever want to get married again.”
“Yes you do. And for both of us—it’ll be different next time, because it will be our first time in love.”
“I have to be honest with you,” January forced herself to say with glumness. “Love really frightens me. It might not be something you really want to keep pushing with me.”
“I’m ignoring you,” Adam laughed.
As though suddenly startled, January said, “Stop it—the way you’re looking at me right now—you’re making love to me.”
“Very astute,” Adam nodded losing his smile. The gravity of his desires bore down across her face and shoulders. January looking away from his eyes as he said, “When we do it for the first time—it will have to be the most special thing we’ve ever done.”
“You think so big.”
“I’m serious—I want to know, pretty woman. Where have you never been before?”
And before January could answer, they were jetting in a boat off the coast—Adam bragging that few knew about the many hidden coves and secret beaches on what turned out to be the most breathtakingly beautiful place she’d ever been in her life up to that moment—the island of Menorca.
“It seems so private here,” January said as Adam took her hand and led her through a bit of pine tree forest until they arrived at what was hands down the most mystically romantic beach January had ever seen anywhere; that place for lovers—Cala de Algaiarens.
“Now tell me there’s no God.”
“All I have to do is breathe,” January said with tears. “It’s so beautiful here, Adam.”
Towering over her, his deep brown shoulders darkening even more in the soothing stillness of a fully sun-lit paradise, Adam Crown reached down and slowly removed her bikini top.
“You look like a goddess that god carved out of a chocolate bar, January…you should be free.”
She did it comfortably—walked around the beach and forest topless; swam topless; committed herself to the dreamy intoxication that being topless out doors engendered—yet she wasn’t ready to let him make love to her.
In fact, each time they tried to kiss, their mouths grew small, closed and child-like with a chaste refrain. So like children—they swam and swam in the warm see-through waters of white sand floors and tropical fish. And when night finally came upon them like some magenta blue veil, Adam stood at the steering wheel of the boat speeding them back into the real world as January draped her topless body against his bare back and hung there in sheer wonder that she could ever possibly feel that dreamy.
“When I was a kid,” Adam told her. “My father gave me this horse that I named Copper. I named him Copper because he was penny brown and he couldn’t be bent. He was wild and free. And he was so…have you ever read the poem ‘Horses make a landscape look more beautiful?’…well that’s so true. Copper would trot across our pasture land so gracefully, so artfully, it was like poetry in motion. I swear to god, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen—until you, January. Today on Menorca Island, you were like that horse and like that poem. You made the landscape look more beautiful.”
“I look like February.”
“No,” Adam said shaking his head, vehemently. “Not to me anymore. I finally see you and you’re someone I’ve never seen before. No other woman looks anything like you. There is only one January…and I love everything about her.”
“Soon,” she muttered over his shoulder. “I won’t tell you no. I’ll be ready to make love.”
&
nbsp; “There’s no rush. We shouldn’t even be thinking about it—it will happen when it happens. And it will be someplace magical, beautiful lady. Someplace you’ve never been. I want you the way that no man has ever had you before—I want your soul, January.”
“That’s too much.”
“I won’t accept anything less.”
~*~
House of Crowns
Atlanta, Georgia
If Bliss Carrington Crown had previously vowed never to base one of her trashy novels on the Crown family’s dysfunction—all bets were now off.
The check Queenie insisted her husband sign and hand to Bliss was for three million dollars. An amount she’d already earned when one combined the advances and royalties of her first three novels. Blithely, Bliss tore up the check.
“I can’t accept money in exchange for getting pregnant by my own father-in-law and passing it off as my husband’s,” Bliss told them, sincerely.
But from experience, the Crowns knew that people’s sincerity could be changed provided the price was right. Softly, Bliss said, “How could I look you in the eye knowing that I had sex with your husband, Mother Crown?”
Queenie answered sweetly, further shocking Bliss by revealing that to watch Otis having sex with white women (and only white women) had always been a secret fetish and guilty little pleasure.
Casually, Queenie explained that she had been the one to turn Otis on to it at the beginning of their marriage in a small southern Bible belt community. Literally sneaking whatever castoffs from the segregated white community she could find into her husband’s bed at night—fat buck-toothed country white women before Otis made it big; then after they became wealthy national icons—beautiful blonde models, starlets and guilt-ridden “civil rights-quoting” activist types who found themselves enjoying the freakiness of such a regal black wife sitting on a chair in a corner quietly staring as her famous husband banged them into the mattress, happily filling the bedroom with hyperbolic sex moans that were more for Queenie’s ears than anyone else’s.
“You like watching me fuck this white pussy, ha?” Otis would moan from the bed every now and again. And in utter ecstasy, sometimes with the white woman’s panties on top of her head, Queenie would answer while masturbating herself, “Affirmative action is a beautiful thing.”
No one realized that in her daydreams, Queenie imagined herself in the bodies of women like Bliss—blonde and white with eyes of wintergreen or solid blue. It was a taboo fantasy that had been accompanied by innocent young Catherine Jason murmuring equally taboo words to herself in secret since her teenaged years on her daddy’s farm: “God—why you trap me in this ashy black body? I’d be as good as any white woman if I just had these white people’s hair and lighter skin. But I’m trapped in this old black…”
The only time Queenie liked sucking Otis’s dick was when it was fresh and hot from a white woman’s pussy. And now, as Bliss tore up a second check for seven million dollars, the pathetic woman handed Bliss a third check—this one for ten million dollars.
“I’ve always wanted to see my husband make love to you, Bliss. But now there’s more riding on it than a mere fantasy. Please, Bliss—let Otis get you pregnant. And let the child be Adam’s. No one ever has to know that you shared your marvelous Australian genetic inheritance with us. It’s a Crown family secret that we’ll all take to our graves.”
Serious as a heart attack, Otis intoned, “We won’t offer you another penny more.”
Deeply conflicted about what to do, Bliss Carrington Crown finally accepted the check for ten million dollars.
Not only was she reluctantly agreeing to let Otis Crown impregnate her—but she was secretly to begin writing her newest book; the steamy fact-based “American Crown; Family of Sin.”
The Ring
The Circuit de Monaco
Monte Carlo
Energy from Warm Leatherette was reaching across the earth, calling for January’s return. But wrapped up in her romance with Adam Crown she ignored the pangs.
The police investigation in Spain had turned up nothing about who was trying to have her killed (“Noble Sinatra,” she assured herself upon awakening each morning). And at the invitation of her good friends from Paris, Yves Malle and his wife Fendi, to attend the Gentlemen’s Fencing Society Charity Ball—she bid her mother May Day goodbye in Madrid and flew off to Monte Carlo with a protective Adam Crown still insisting that he was her personal bodyguard—not to mention the erotic hurricane that had now become like its own world between them.
Prince Albert’s illustrious principality of Monaco took them like captives as Yves Malle called on his own European gangster pals to keep tight security over January while simultaneously investigating who back in Pismo Beach would dare risk fucking with her. The eighty-plus year old Yves vowed to crush whoever was behind it and admonished January as though she were his daughter—“Mother’s gone back to America; you’ve got an exciting new romantic prospect; it’s your first time in Monaco—knock yourself out kid.”
And that’s what January tried to do.
“There’s nothing like the Mistral winds of the Mediterranean,” she told Adam as he treated her to fresh scones at the intersection of Monte Carlo Street and La Condamine. The two of them strolling along the glamorous champion boulevards that make up the speedway for Monaco’s famed Circuit de Monaco racing course as whirlwind traffic encircled the grand harbor fringing the Mediterranean delta and a very sexy January let the Mistrals fork through her latest diva-luxurious hair weave, her hand running through it as she bounced it around, seductively.
Unlike so many in America who would have frowned on her behavior—acting sexy, thinking herself cute, acting infantile—Adam enjoyed seeing her have fun with herself. He’d arranged for a huge diamond ring to be hidden in her scone and was lit up with butterflies in his stomach, waiting for her to come across it.
“Monaco is a place you’ve never been,” he said suggestively. And grinning ear to ear, January admitted girlishly, “Papa Sinatra brought me to the Mediterranean many times, but it’s true, we never stopped here. I see it’s a beautiful city to make love in.”
Body and soul, January wanted to stick around for that special moment when she and Adam would finally make love. Instinctively, she knew that it was a moment that might not come again. But then there were those pangs—Warm Leatherette, Pismo Beach, Papa Sinatra’s corporation—all of it calling to January; imploring her to get back to America.
Luckily by attending the Gentlemen’s Fencing Charity with Yves Malle and Fendi she had unexpectedly been able to book a major superstar as headliner for the big Mardi Gras festival she was planning at Warm Leatherette. She’d run into Tiger Holden’s superstar little sister, Fox Holden, and been shocked to see the biracial beauty dancing drunk as a skunk with a bunch of punk rockers in a public fountain.
“This girl is drop dead gorgeous, she’s barely twenty years old and already richer than god, every man on earth is having night sweats about her—how can such a super-successful megastar be so unhappy?” Adam ventured after they’d pulled Fox from the fountain and gotten her back to their hotel.
“The fucker made me get an abortion,” Fox confided as January submerged her in a lush bubble bath to run off the liquor. And when January learned that it was rap superstar Jiff Poppy that Fox was referring to—she just about screamed.
“If you had kept in touch with me and your brother, I could have told you everything you need to know about Mr. Atomic dog,” January smirked as Fox soaped and rinsed herself. “Jiff Poppy’s been chasing every female there is all over the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, New York, Jersey, Atlanta and Los Angeles…ask Naomi; as any of us…he’s a walking 2-Live Crew Lyric; will leave you fucked and deserted. And you, young lady, had no business having sex without a condom in the first place!”
“Oh god, January, don’t preach like a mother! Where’s room service—I need a drink.”
“No, you don’t need a dri
nk, Fox!”
“She’s never been raised,” eighty-plus year old Yves Malle told January after the girl was fast asleep. And indeed, everyone in the music business was gossiping about how Fox Holden’s managers had cheated her out of the earnings from such top billboard hits as “P.S (I Love You)” and “Pass the Replay.” Despite Yves Malle advising against it, January helped the girl out by offering her a million dollars to headline the resort’s Fat Tuesday festivities; a move that would be advantageous to Warm Leatherette publicity-wise if nothing else.
“A million dollars to a singer who can’t sing,” Yves fussed. “I was born from the wrong generation, I tell you.”
But the more January got to know Fox, the more she sympathized with her.
“And now there’s this new bitch making music on the internet and stealing my fan base,” Fox complained to January while they were getting back massages and sipping apple cider by the pool one afternoon.
“Keyshia Cole?”
“No—the bitch calls herself Daisy!” Fox spat, contemptuously. Of course neither of them knew that it was really Warm Leatherette’s very own Chinese siren Dao Ming who’d begun web-marketing the funkiest-sounding soul cuts since Brand New Heavies and using a black girl’s face to promote it.
“I’ve never heard of Daisy.”
“A lot of people haven’t—she’s not on the radio or in videos yet; she’s only an internet sensation right now—but she’s blowing up mad, January! I tried to have my peeps contact her so I could work out a collaboration; maybe steal some of her hot new sound—but she’s a phantom soul diva. She can’t be found.”
January avoided bringing up the fact that Fox Holden couldn’t carry a tune and was basically a video pin-up whose voice was engineered in the recording studio. Instead, she said, “The one thing in life you should never do is worry about the competition. Compete with yourself and that’s it.”
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