Thugs Cry

by Ca$H

  “You right; she’s right here in my arms, and she’s doing fine. You wanna holla at her?” the bastard has the nerve to ask. If I didn’t have so much to get off of my mind I would hang up on his disrespectful ass.

  I count to ten, calming myself, then I respond in a nice, sensible tone, “Listen, CJ, I don’t care if Tamika is in your mouth, let alone your arms. I need to know do you love Loran and Leron?”

  What kinda question is that, yo?”

  “Just answer it.”

  “You know damn well I love my seeds,” he replies.

  “They aren’t fuckin’ seeds! They are real live children, with real live feelings, and they need for you to show them some of the love that you claim to have for them, on a consistent basis. Not whenever you find the time.”

  “They need me on a consistent basis, or you need me?”

  “The only thing I need from you is for you to either be a part of their lives or stay the hell away from us!”

  “You don’t want that.”

  “CJ, you can fucking die, for all I care. This isn’t about me; this is about the twins,” I emphasize.

  “You say I could die for all you care, right?”

  “That’s what I said.” I refuse to back down.

  “Well, pretend that I’m dead, cracker bitch!”

  A dial tone pounds in my ear like so many exclamation marks.

  He called me a ‘cracker bitch!

  I feel numb, which is why my eyes don’t water and my heart does not shatter. CJ has just confirmed what I should’ve accepted a long time ago; he does not care about our children.

  I want to catch a flight to New Jersey and go blow his brains out.

  He’ll get what’s coming to him, sooner or later.

  Needing to talk to someone, I call up Hakeem. We talk long into the night. The twins are asleep when I finally say goodnight to Hakeem. I take a shower then crawl in bed and fall asleep listening to Sparkle’s CD, trying not to think about CJ’s cold-hearted ass.

  TWENTY-NINE

  KAYUNDRA/SPARKLE

  The lights in the hotel suite are dimmed. An old school slow jam, “Turn Out The Lights”, by Teddy Pendergrass plays softly on the CD player. I step out of the shower, wrap a towel around me, and walk into the bedroom to find him already undressed, laying across the bed, confident in his beautiful black nakedness.

  It has been two weeks since the last time that we were together. I hadn’t expected him to join me here in L.A., where I’ll be performing this weekend, because he had a prior engagement in D.C., but then he called earlier today and asked if I could send my limo to pick him up from LAX airport.

  What a surprise!

  “Unwrap the towel and let a nigga see your body.” His voice sounds so thuggish and sexy.

  I do as he asked and he sits up on the edge of the bed admiring my nudity, making me feel so beautiful.

  “You’re still as fine and sexy as the last time I saw you,” he comments, licking his lips.

  “It’s only been two weeks,” I remind him.

  “Seems like two years…fa real, shawdy.” He grabs me by the ass and pulls me to him. His face is pressed against my pussy. “Umm!” he interjects, kissing my coochie. “Lay down and let me taste you.”

  I lay across the bed and open my legs.

  “Did you miss me?” he asks while sliding his tongue up the length of my tingling kitty cat.

  “Oh…yes,” I pant.

  “Tell me!”

  “I…missed…you, Scare,” I moan when his tongue makes contact with my clit.

  After an hour of fucking we lay out some lines of coke and get nice. I feel the burn inside of my nose caused by the potent white devil. Within minutes, a rush hits me like a sledgehammer. Then it feels like it’s softly raining inside my head.

  Butt naked, me and Scare snort coke and sip Remy. The high I get from snorting is much different from the paranoid desperate high that I felt when I used to smoke crack. Snorting has me crunk but it also has me depressed. The more coke I snort, the more depressed I feel…the more I snort…the more…

  On and on until guilt hits me and I think, I’ve already fucked up. Gettin’ high and fucking another dude behind my man’s back. Might as well smoke some crack. My life is spiraling out of control, anyway. I’ve allowed the fame to break my will to remain honest with, and devoted to, the one who loved me before any of this. I put a singing career over our love; murdered our unborn child, and hid it from Raheem. Now, maybe God is punishing me for it.

  First, I turned to smoking weed and a little drinking to help me deal with the demons that haunted me after the abortion. Then, Preston kept on pressuring me to hook up with Scare, feeding false rumors to magazines about “the hottest couple in the music industry”! Every time the rumor appeared in print, and I found out about it, I would call Raheem from wherever I was at and reassure him that the shit wasn’t true.

  “I trust you, baby. Just don’t betray my trust,” he would always state.

  “I won’t, sweetheart. I’ll give all of this up before I allow it to destroy our love,” I’d vowed.

  I knew that the rumors had to bother Raheem. He just has too much pride to let it show.

  Then Quida, my backup singer who pretended to be a true friend, let it “leak” to a slime ass magazine: The Truth Why Sparkle Fainted During A Concert In Charlotte.

  For, reportedly, $25,000 Quida sold our friendship and my deepest secret.

  I denied having an abortion, but Raheem saw right through the lie.

  “Just tell me the truth, Kayundra. Was the baby mine?” he asked.

  “Of course!” I cried. The tour was in Kansas City, Missouri at the time, and Raheem had flown in to confront me after reading the story in the mag. Barged into my hotel suite, face twisted. “I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t know what to do. My CD was doing well; I’m on tour, and Preston and others were pressuring me to have the abortion, saying that it was the best thing, in regards to my career.”

  Raheem had looked at me, like…like…he had lost all respect for me. That crushed me. Then he turned and walked out, and flew back to Atlanta.

  The next day I was back in Atlanta myself. “Damn the tour!” I’d told Preston. “I’m not losing my man.”

  When I walked in the house, Raheem was at his desk in the study on the computer.

  “Hi,” I spoke timidly.

  “Good Morning,” he’d replied, kind of dryly.

  “Raheem, baby, we need to talk.”

  “We can talk Kayundra, but not about that. Not ever.”

  “Please, allow me to try to explain.” Tears were streaking down my face.

  Raheem put up his hand to silence me. “I thought about it all last night, and I’m not gonna give up on our relationship; not unless you wish for it to end.”

  I shook my head, indicating that I did not.

  “I still love you, Kayundra, but what you did hurt a nigga real bad. I had a right to weigh in on your decision before you went forward with it. Before you did what you cannot undo.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “I’m not promising you that I can forgive you, and I’m not sure that I’ll ever completely trust you again, but I’m gonna try. But don’t ever bring up the subject of what you did again. Ever!” Raheem’s voice had been heavy with the hurt that my actions caused him. I had wanted to plead with him for us to talk about it because I knew that keeping our feelings inside would destroy us, but I had been afraid to push the issue.

  All I could say was, “I don’t know how, but I’ll make this up to you.”

  “You can’t, so don’t try. Let’s just try to go on from here, Kayundra.”

  I saw in his eyes that he may still love me, but I am no longer his “Sparkle”; he has not referred to me by the pet name since.

  I begged Raheem to travel on the road with me so that the whole world would see that he is my man, but he said that he had business to attend to. A month ago, when I was in New York to receive a
n award for a video, Raheem did join me for a weekend. However, he did not escort me to the award show.

  “I prefer to remain anonymous,” he said.

  Not only that, I could feel the disdain that Raheem has for what I done. That weekend, in New York, he was not eager to make love to me; and when I wasn’t able to seduce him. I could tell that his passion for me was all but gone.

  “You don’t love me anymore, do you?” I asked, crying after the lukewarm lovemaking ended that night.

  “It’s not like that. Just give me time to heal,” he said.

  “Baby, let’s take a vacation together. We can go away somewhere, and get away from all of this,” I suggested. I was desperate to save the relationship, which I felt was on shaky ground.

  But Raheem had to go to Orlando to plan a party for some guy named Dwight Howard who balled for the Magic, and myself and my label mates had to do a three-day gig in Monaco, so a vacation was ruled out.

  It was in Monaco, two weeks ago, that my affair with Scare begun. That’s also when I began using drugs again. The cocaine made me numb to the guilt I felt; Scare made me feel wanted again.

  Mama told me, in regards to what had happened with me and Raheem, “He still loves you; he’ll need time to forgive you, though.”

  “No, Mama, he’ll never forgive me. I told you and Preston that I shouldn’t have gotten an abortion without first talking to Raheem about it.”

  “What’s done is done now,” she’d replied, like it was not a big thing.

  I was so damn mad at her. If it hadn’t been for Mama and Preston pressuring me into aborting my pregnancy, my man would still love and trust me, and I would’ve never gone back to using drugs, and I certainly wouldn’t have started sleeping with Scare.

  “You done with this?” Scare asks, indicating the remaining cocaine laid out in lines on a mirror.

  I toot a few more lines then chase the coke with two fingers of Remy.

  “You wanna try some of these?” asks Scare, holding a palm full of aqua blue pills.

  “What are those?” I ask, already high as a cloud.

  “These them blue dolphins, shawdy. X pills.” Scare hands me a couple and sure enough, a tiny blue dolphin is imprinted on each pill.

  I have never popped X but why not try it? I’ m already snorting coke, creepin’ and all. If Raheem was to find out about any of this, it would end our relationship for sure. Maybe in Raheem’s heart, it is already over between us, ever since I deceived him. So what do I have to lose? Nothing.

  I pop two blue dolphins and before long I am zoning. All of my senses are heightened. Now when I sip Remy it feels extra smooth going down my throat and tingles inside my chest. When Scare talks, it sounds like he’s rapping; I never noticed that before. He licks his lips a lot when he’s high, and his teeth aren’t as pretty as Raheem’s.

  Scare stretches me out on the bed and caresses my breasts. His touch vibrates all over my body. I feel his neatly trimmed goatee tickling my chin as we kiss. When he enters me my whole body surrenders to his hardness.

  This X is the shit!

  Now Scare is sitting up with his back against the headboard, writing rap lyrics in a small leather bound notebook that he calls his “book of rhymes.” I’m sitting up in bed next to him, snorting lines of coke off of my small compact mirror that I carry in my purse. I look at Scare and he turns into Raheem.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them again; Scare is himself. He is so thuggishly fine; one of the hottest rappers in the industry, and chicks would kill to be in bed next to him. But he is not Raheem.

  I know I’m fucking up; I really do love Raheem with all my heart and soul, and I pray that I can regain his trust.

  Not like this, you can’t, my conscience says.

  I’ve got to end this affair. And I’ve got to stop getting high, I tell myself after snorting two more lines.

  The phone rings. I look at the digital clock on the nightstand; it’s 12:01, one minute past midnight. I wonder who’s calling. I reach for the phone and accidently knock it off the nightstand. Am I that high? How much coke have I snorted? A quarter of an ounce? How much Remy have I drank? Dayum! I’m fucked up.

  “Hello.”

  “Happy birthday!”

  “Huh? Uh…who dis?” I babble.

  “Raheem, baby. Happy b-day!”

  “Oh, hi, Raheem…Hap…Hap…Happy Birth…day…to you too.” What in the hell am I saying? Wow! I’m too damn high! Is it really my birthday?

  “Kayundra, are you drunk?”

  “Uh…no…I was asleep.” I quickly lie. I gotta stop lying. “Why is he talking so loud?” The question is a thought that slips out. Oops!

  “Am I talking loud? My bad. Go on back to sleep, baby. I just wanted to wish my Sparkle a happy b-day,” says Raheem.

  Did I hear him just call me his Sparkle?

  Thank you Jesus!

  I’m about to tell Raheem that I love him when Scare starts rapping in the background:

  “On that x havin’ sex/ got a nigga feelin’ like the matrix/scorin’ big like the Patriots/is this shit fa real? What’s next/a hood nigga starring at the Ciniplex?/Out-dueling villains that wanna do me/who me? Wait back up/y’all niggaz lyrics don’t move me/beats don’t groove me/fake capers don’t fool me/I’m from the streets you dudes yap about/over beats, rap about/but I’m on some other shit/so get yo’ bitch off my dick.”

  “Who is that, yo? Scare Me? I thought you said you was asleep?” Raheem asks accusatorily.

  “I was; that was the radio, baby.” I lie, yet again. I cover the phone, stare knives at Scare and motion for him to shut the hell up!

  “My bad, shawdy,” he mouths.

  “Oh,” says Raheem. “Well, go back to sleep, I didn’t mean to awake you. Happy birthday, again. I love you.”

  “Do you really?” I ask in a voice heavy with emotion.

  “Yeah, I love you. A lot,” he replies. And I miss you, too.”

  “Will you come join me on tour? I’ll be playing ten cities with Alicia Keys beginning next week. Please, baby.”

  “Yeah, ma, I’ll join you.”

  “When?” I ask excitedly.

  “Real soon,” the love of my life promises.

  “Raheem, baby, I love you so much.” I begin crying.

  “I love you, too. We gon’ be a’ight.”

  “Okay. Goodnight.” I hang up, happy to know that my sweetheart still loves me.

  Scare looks at me and shake his head.

  “Bitches ain’t shit,” he states.

  I don’t bother to comment. What difference does it make what he thinks of me? Tonight is the last time we’ll do what we’re doing. I swear.

  “You might as well let a nigga hit dat one mo’ time,” he says, as if reading my thoughts. He stands in front of me with his erection in my frace.

  “I don’t think so.” I shut him down.

  “Whatever, shawdy.” He plops down on the bed, grabs the TV remote off the nightstand and channel surfs. Then he orders an adult movie, kicks back and starts masturbating.

  I get up and go sleep on the couch.

  In the morning, a light knock on the door awakens me. Probably room service, I guess as I go to the door in panties and bra, prepared to decline breakfast. When I crack the door Mama is standing there smiling. When did she fly in?

  Ohmigod! Raheem is behind her. They come bounding right past me shouting “Happy birthday!” Raheem is carrying a large birthday cake.

  “Girl, put on some clothes. Ain’t you got any shame!” Mama exclaims laughing. But I don’t move, I’m paralyzed with fear.

  All three of our heads snap around to the sound of Scare’s loud voice as he walks out of the bedroom as naked as the original man, saying, “You still trippin’, Sparkle? Or are we gon’ snort some more coke, pop a few more Blue Dolphins, and sex each other some more?” He doesn’t notice that we are not alone because his nose is buried in a glass bowl of coke.

  “You want some of this? It’s—
” He looks up and says, “Oh shit!” right before Raheem punches him in the grill.

  I stand there wishing that I could click my heels together and disappear.

  THIRTY

  RAHEEM

  It’s been two months since I broke up with Kayundra after walking in on her and Scare Me, apparently, doing what they had been doing all along: creepin’ and getting high.

  All the time that the rumors were out there, that they were more than label mates, Kayundra kept denying them. I never once accused her or doubted her devotion to me, but man was I wrong. I would say that, just like that—at a snap of a finger!—our relationship was over with. Except, nothing ever falls apart just like that.

  The beginning of the end probably was when Kayundra had an abortion and hid the shit from me. I had to find out about my woman aborting my baby, in a goddamn magazine article. Word, I tried to forgive her, and I loved her enough to stick with her, though that shit tore-me-the-fuck up. It took a few months for my anger over Kayundra having an abortion to simmer down. Then my love for her kicked back in and I flew out to LA, where she was on tour, to surprise her for her birthday, me and her Mom Dukes both.

  As you already know, the surprise was on me.

  After I saw what I saw I punched Scare Me in the mouth. Knocked the nigga the fuck out! Not because he was bangin’ my girl, it takes two to tangle. I knocked the nigga out because he had been getting her high.

  While the nigga was ass-naked on the floor, Miss Freeda was crying, “Oh God! This is bad!” and wrapping a blanket around Kayundra as if it could cover up what her daughter was busted doing.

  I searched the suite, found coke, X pills, liquor, weed, and used condoms. Flushed all the drugs down the toilet and said to Miss Freeda, “I’ll ship all of her clothes and things to you.” Then I bounced, without saying a word to a crying Kayundra.

  Reflecting back on it all, it seems like once Kayundra became “Sparkle” to the world, and her CD blazed the charts, our relationship was destined to fail. I had always heard it said that fame and money changes a person; and it changes those around them. I hadn’t wanted to believe that Kayundra would go out like that. I knew for certain that I was not going to change; I was determined to love and trust in Kayundra even after all the rumors surfaced about her and Scare Me.