by Noire
I cut school on Thursday, ditching Pacho when he dropped me off outside of the Rowland Building where I took my finance class. I waited in the foyer and watched him drive off, then I stood outside of the classroom and waited for Brittany to show up.
“Hey Juicy girl.” She was chewing gum and wearing a pair of jeans that fit her like skin. “You do your homework? I didn’t get problem four. Couldn’t understand it no matter how I looked at it. Did you get the answer?”
I shook my head and grabbed her arm. “I need a favor,” I told her, pulling her to the side. I set my backpack on the floor at my feet. “Something came up and I gotta go see about a sick friend. I left my purse in the back of the limo and Pacho must have turned off his cell phone because his ass ain’t answering. Can you let me hold five dollars so I can jump on the train? I promise I’ll pay you back.”
“Uhm, yeah.” Brittany shrugged and dug into her front pocket. Her jeans were so tight she could barely get her fingers in. “You good for five dollars, Juicy. With the setup your man got, you probably good for five thousand. You ain’t gotta pay me back. Just hook me up at the G-Spot again and I’ll be happy.”
I smiled and took the ten-dollar bill she was offering me. “Thanks, Brit. I won’t forget this.”
I was off campus in five minutes, and heading back to Harlem by train. I was so anxious to get with Dicey that I didn’t even pay the men on the train no mind. For the first time in a long time I was riding the subway and there was no fantasizing and no looking at men. My mind was racing, but my coochie was silent.
Dicey lived in a tenement off of 125th Street. I knew because I used to run numbers for her mother when I was little, and Dicey had taken over the apartment when Ms. Jones passed away a few months back. I figured she’d be at home because it was too early for her to be at the Spot, and besides, she was on her period and couldn’t work there until it went off anyway. I rang the downstairs bell and waited. A minute passed and I jabbed the bell again, this time leaning on it.
“Who the fuck is it?” Dicey had her face pressed to the window and her red hair was spiked up all over her head.
“It’s me, Dice. Juicy. Can I come up?”
She buzzed me in and I walked up the two pissy flights to her apartment holding my breath all the way. Dicey was wearing a white nightgown and walking in her bare feet. She didn’t have on a stitch of underwear and her nipples were sticking straight up under her gown. The inside of Dicey’s apartment had changed since her mother died, and it was nothing like the rest of the run-down building. Since Dicey had quit doing drugs a few years ago, her new addiction must have been shopping because her joint was laid out with butter-soft leather furniture, a phat stereo, and wall-to-wall carpeting.
“It’s nice up in here, girl.”
She waved her hand. “Homeboy shopping network. You know how much shit can fall off the back of a truck. What you doin slumming over here this time of morning? G put you out already?”
I dropped my book bag and sank down into the cushions on the chocolate brown sofa. “Nah. I’m playing hooky. Just didn’t feel like going to school today.” I wanted to tell her that I was craving more of what she had to say, but instead I stared at the collection of ceramic elephants she had on a shelf. Dicey was real quiet, and when I looked up she was staring at me with a funny look on her face.
“Look, Juicy. Don’t let that shit I was talking the other day get you down. You fine as hell so G probably planning on keeping you around till he old and gray.”
I gave her a look.
“You eat yet?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Come on in the kitchen.”
I followed her into the tiny kitchen that was decorated in purple and black from the curtains to the rug. I sat at the table while she fried turkey sausage and scrambled us some eggs.
“You like fried onions in your eggs?”
Hell yeah. Grandmother used to make them that way. “Yep. Cheese too.”
Dicey fixed our plates while I made us some toast, then she gave me a fork and a napkin and we carried our food into the living room and ate sitting side by side on the floor. I loved her place. It was peaceful and happy and had the same kind of vibe that Dicey had.
“Check this out,” she said. “I know you don’t hear no good shit like this up in G’s Spot.” Dicey took a CD from the rack and popped it into the stereo. “This Miss Millie Jackson, honey. You need to sit back and suck up what she be saying.”
I closed my eyes and listened as Millie Jackson talked about taking your life back and getting all you could out of a man, sexually and otherwise. I didn’t listen to much music growing up cause Grandmother forbid it, but the stuff Millie was talking about made a whole lot of sense and before I knew it we had listened to the whole CD and over an hour had gone by, with Dicey singing out loud the whole time.
“I might go to a party next weekend,” I blurted out when Dicey got up to turn off the boom box. I didn’t even know I was gonna tell her about the Naughty Girls party, but Millie’s energy had me on a roll and I opened my mouth and started telling Dicey everything Rita had said.
Dicey was stoked. “You’re gonna love it, Juicy. I been to one myself, up in the Bronx, but it was a long time ago. Them women had shit like the D.P.—”
“The D.P.?”
“You don’t know? That’s the double penetrater. A dick for your pussy and one for your asshole too. At the same time.”
“Oh, lordy.”
Dicey stood up and lit a cigarette. “Of course you probably don’t need nothing like that, right? G look like he can bang your head all night long.”
“Shit,” I sucked my teeth. “Bang hell.”
Dicey was on it. “Oh, so Mister Big ain’t all that in the sheets? I always wondered why he chased after young girls, and everybody knows he will only fuck a virgin. He probably couldn’t handle no professional fucker.”
“He can’t even handle me,” I confided. “That’s why I wanna go to this party. I’m tired of wanting what I can’t get. My friend Rita said they sell shit that’ll make you not need no man.”
“Please!” Dicey laughed and turned toward the kitchen with our paper plates in her hand. “They ain’t invented nothin that can take the place of a hard hot dick drilling up in you, but you should be able to find something that’ll come in second place. But why settle for all them tools when you got a real live nigger in your bed every night? Either take charge and make G fuck you right, or go find you some dick you can live with.”
She paused in the doorway. “On second thought, scratch that. G can be a maniac over his pussy—just ask them niggers down at the Spot. You better go to that party on Saturday and stock up, baby girl. Matter fact, if I don’t have to work I might just roll out with you.”
G ruled his empire with an iron fist, and if he came off as ruthless it was because the streets were hard. But sometimes he was stank and nasty for no good reason at all, and the way he did poor Nae-Nae that time just didn’t make no sense.
Nae-Nae was one of the younger girls who stripped at the Spot. Back in the day I used to see her walking with her sisters to the public school we went to a few blocks from my house. When I was in the third grade the school was closed down because of some hazardous stuff in the insulation, and while me and Jimmy got transferred to another school right up the street, Nae-Nae and her sisters got sent to a school way across town.
Nae-Nae was a year older than me, and when she showed up at the Spot a few months earlier she tried to front like she didn’t know me. I didn’t press her though. From what I remembered she came from a quiet, churchified family, and I figured she was ashamed for me to see her humping poles and giving lap dances all night long.
I had no idea what had happened to her sisters or the rest of her family, but Harlem had gotten to Nae-Nae, and she looked just like a lot of turned-out sistahs who didn’t have anything except their asses to fall back on.
One night Nae-Nae came to work carrying a baby on
her hip. I was in my usual spot, chilling at the bar shooting the shit with Moonie while Cooter smiled and stuttered all over the customers and poured their liquor. Nae-Nae walked past so fast I barely even noticed her, but a minute later there was such a commotion coming from the dressing room that Moonie told me to go back there and find out what the girls were doing.
“Look at him.” Punanee was grinning at what Nae-Nae was holding in her arms. “All that curly hair and just as cute as he wanna be!”
I stepped through the crowd to see what they were all freaking out over and saw the cutest, fattest baby I’d ever seen in my life. He was past handsome. This baby had dimples everywhere and the biggest prettiest eyes in his little butterscotch face that you ever did see.
“Whose baby?” I asked, and daggone if that little fat butterball didn’t try to jump out of Nae-Nae’s arms and into mine. He stretched his little chubby arms out for me to take him, opening and closing his hands and grinning at me the whole time.
“Mine,” Nae-Nae said, passing him to me. “This is Maleek. My little man.”
I took that handful of fat and dimples into my arms and almost melted, he felt so good pressed against me. His curly hair smelled just like baby lotion and he was clean and fresh like he had just came out of the bath.
“Oh, Nae-Nae,” I said jealously, hefting him in my arms and squeezing one of his ham hock thighs. “He is too fine. How old is he?”
“Seven months,” she said smiling at him. His chin was wet with baby slobber and I wanted to kiss it off. Fifty million hands were reaching for the baby, hoes and strippers totally sprung over his fat cheeks and dimpled grin. I passed Maleek off to the next sister and stood back watching as almost every chick in the dressing room elbowed in to get a turn at touching and sniffing that sweet baby flesh.
“Girl,” Money-Making Monique said cooing at the little boy. “Why you bring that cute little fella up in here?”
Nae-Nae frowned. “My babysitter got sick and my mama ain’t home. I tried to call in but Pluto said if I didn’t show up I was fired. I was gonna ask one of y’all to watch him while I’m onstage, and right after my numbers are up I’ll run back in here to take care of him.”
Every sister in the room started volunteering to watch him. That poor baby was gonna have arm fever by the time they got finished holding and rocking and spoiling him. Nae-Nae stood back watching the women loving her baby up with a smile on her face. She wasn’t funny over him at all like some new mothers were. Making you put a blanket over your shoulder just to hold ’em, and standing guard to make sure you didn’t kiss their baby in the face.
I watched Nae-Nae, wondering how it felt to have something depending on you like that. A real live baby of your own, one you produced from your own body and could shape and mold any way you wanted to. I’d probably never have the chance to feel what she must be feeling. G was proud of the fact that he’d had his nuts cut, and was quick to boast about his baby-making days being over.
But mine weren’t. I hadn’t even gotten started in life yet. But the sad fact was, as long as I belonged to Granite McKay, my ass was shit out of luck if I wanted to have a baby. There was no leaving G for some young virile hard-backed niggah. And if G ever got it in his head that he needed to leave me . . . well, his pride wouldn’t let me just step. I thought about the Dungeon and that woman in the picture on his desk and shivered. Pushing my way back into the crowd, I snatched for another turn to hold baby Maleek, and as I rocked him and cooed and fought off the hoes, I satisfied myself by pretending for two precious minutes that the fat little baby boy was all mine.
And two minutes was all the time I got with him, too, because one second I was surrounded by strippers a mile thick, and the next second hoes were scuttling back to their rooms and dancers were jumping into their costumes.
G was on the scene.
He hardly ever came into the dressing area, but I guess since all the hoes were talking baby talk instead of flatbacking in the rooms and turning him a profit, he wanted to see what was going on.
“What the hell is that, Juicy?”
G pointed at the baby like it was a snake. Little Maleek grinned up at him and reached out those chubby arms, trying to jump from me to G.
“Look at him, G,” I cooed. “Ain’t he cute?”
“Cute my ass. Spiders are cute. Who the fuck brought a damn baby up in here?”
The only sound in the room was little Maleek happily squealing like a little pig.
G looked around, twirled his ring a few times, then stared dead at me. I couldn’t tell if he was mad because the baby was there, or because I looked so happy holding it.
“I said, whose fuckin baby is this?”
“Aw, don’t be like that,” I said, glancing at Nae-Nae and pushing the baby into his hands. You shoulda seen G’s face. You woulda thought he was holding a bomb. Maleek squealed and laughed and grabbed a handful of G’s nose and tried to pull it off.
Everybody started laughing. Even a hard-ass like G had to have a soft spot when it came to such a cute little baby.
But he didn’t.
“Goddamn it, Juicy!”
And that’s when I knew Dicey had been right. G had a cold black heart. That niggah was so mean he actually bent his ass over and plopped that fat little baby down on the cold, dirty floor.
“Get it out of here,” he said, standing back up and grilling all of us with his stare. “And whoever the bitch is who shit out that little puppy, you get your black ass out of here, too.”
And then he stepped his ass over that baby and slammed out the door.
We were all stunned. There wasn’t a thing we could say though. G had spoken, and poor Nae-Nae was on her own. She picked up her laughing baby and wrapped his blanket around him tightly and headed back out the door.
Chapter Seven
I spent the rest of the week busting my brain trying to come up with an excuse that would get me to that Naughty Girls party with Rita. I had the money because I lied and told G I’d lost two textbooks and needed to repurchase them. I half expected him to give me a lecture about being organized and responsible or send Pacho to the school bookstore to pick them up, but he didn’t even blink when he pulled a C-note from his gold money clip and handed it to me. I pushed that money into my pocket so fast I chipped my fingernail, but I still had a problem. I’d never stepped out on G before and since he did such a good job of keeping me away from the few friends I had, I couldn’t think of a single person I could count on for an alibi.
I had a standing eleven A.M. hair appointment at the Spot each Saturday, and Jewel, the sister G hired to do my hair, had just called the bar phone to say she was running late. I was so nervous over the lie I was trying to cook up for G that my stomach was churning and my muscles were in knots. I was planning to get in the Jacuzzi and let myself de-stress, but changed my mind when I saw the door to Ursula’s massage room standing open.
“Good morning!” Ursula said as soon as I poked my head through the doorway. The massage room was serene and relaxing, done up in all white with overhead heated lights. There was soft music playing in the background and Ursula had poured scented water over a big pot of hot stones to cook up her special aromatherapy.
“What’s up, Ursula. Why are you in here so early today?”
She shook her head and her blond hair fell around her shoulders. “I could not sleep, Juicy. I think I need vacation. Why are you here?”
“Today is my hair day,” I told her. “Jewel’s running late so I’m just killing time until she gets here.”
“You want quick massage?”
I shrugged. Why not? I went behind one of the partitions and got butt naked, draping my clothes neatly over the hangers that were on a long hook. I took one of the freshly pressed silk robes from a cabinet and slipped into it and walked back out to see Ursula spreading a large soft towel over the padded table in the middle of the room. When she was done I lay down and closed my eyes. The warmth of the overhead lights and the aroma of t
he scented water evaporating over the stones was calming and relaxing. I lay there thinking about the Naughty Girls party tonight and my whole body was tingling in anticipation. I sighed deeply as Ursula chopped my calves, massaged my ankles, and rubbed my feet until they went limp.
She moved up to the top of the table and slid my robe down until it covered my feet. I got lost in the soft music and my own sensual thoughts as she rubbed hot oils into my shoulders and down my arms and the small of my back, and the moans slipping from my lips truly caught me by surprise. Ursula was working my ass, and as usual that spot between my thighs was slippery and throbbing. But this time, instead of jumping up all embarrassed and ready to hit the door, I stayed right there. Bit by bit I found myself rotating my hips as she squeezed and palmed my cheeks, and my pussy was so stoked I wondered if she had poured some of that hot oil down my crack.
“So pretty, Juicy,” Ursula was whispering over and over, and I just couldn’t help it. I squeezed my thighs together and grinded my stuff into that table, shivering and moaning out loud and fighting back shame at the same time. I felt her nudge my legs open slightly, and when she slid two fingers into my wet pussy from behind, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop her. I almost screamed out loud as Ursula pressed down on my lower spine with one hand as she rubbed my swollen clit and played in my pussy with the other. I was amazed when I felt her hot breath on me back there. Her lips were wet on my ass and I yelped as she spread me open and stuck her tongue into my hole. I was turned on beyond belief, whimpering like a baby and just about to come when I heard footsteps lumbering down the hall. I froze as Ursula pulled her hand from my pussy and flung the robe over my naked body.
