by Noire
I almost laughed at the sternness in his voice and the concerned look on his face. He musta thought he was my father for real. One of those fathers who have no problem fucking their own daughters.
Three nights later I was partying with this down-south baller. I’d met him in Saks Fifth Avenue and he whipped out his green and paid for the Prada dress I had been thinking about boosting. His name was Dante and he was a newly signed artist who had come to New York to shoot his first music video. I told him my name was Saucy, and his silly tail sang to me all the way to the cash register.
Some mistake me for a pimp cuz I walk with a limp, so good yeah!
And some mistake me for a gangsta and they be saying I’m too damn hood, man…But I’m just your average hustler, yep from up around the way
With that dirty-dirty down south flavah like Cajun steak!
I like Prada…On my fine, sexy women…
I like Cristal, gold bottles let’s keep it poppin till we get finished!
By the time old boy was finished paying for my Prada dress and told me I could go back and pick out a bag and some shoes to match, I was singing right along with him.
“Yeah you like Prada…on ya fine, sexy women!”
He started laughing. “They call you Saucy, huh? Well let’s do us a down-south remix, then! I like hot sauce…on my fried fish and chicken!”
He was funny as hell and sexy too! I told Dante my dream was to break into the video scene and asked him if he had any connections to help me get in the door.
“Girl, you so damn fine niggas would pay good money to have you in they production. If I hadn’t already paid for all my video hoes you woulda definitely had the top spot. Next time I hear about something opening up, I’ll put you on.”
Dante wanted to party, so we hit a few clubs and we drank and smoked until we was both sweating and feeling good.
“Yo, Shawty. Why’ont we go to your crib and hit some skin?” he suggested. He told me he was staying at his boy’s crib and he said the cat’s wife was real religious. After dealing with Frank’s soft fat ass, I was all over old boy. He was young, fine, and best of all, hard as hell. I’d already put my hand in his lap and felt what he was carrying, and his country-ass was a true piper.
We got to the crib and hit some lines, then I danced for him while he took off my clothes. We were tearing Frank’s sheets up when I heard the door slam and some keys hit the table.
“Sweetie, I’m home!!!” Frank yelled from the living room and I panicked like a mother.
“Get up!” I tried to push Dante off me. “Get the fuck up! Frank is here!”
Dante held my waist and thrust deeply down into me as hard as hell. He had the cum face on, and his dick was jerking when I pushed him off me. He collapsed on the bed next to me just as Frank walked in the room.
All three of us was breathing hard.
I jumped up and grabbed the sheet and put it over me, ready to fight Frank’s ass if I had to. I figured he would go for me first since I was the one who had brought some stray nigga home to his bed, and I was hoping Dante would be able to pull his big ass off me before he killed me.
But Frank surprised the hell out of me. Instead of jumping bad or trying to kill us both, he stood there in the doorway…and cried. The perverted motherfucker cried! Fucked my head up!
Big, fat tears rolled down his jiggly cheeks. His eyes were full of pain and disappointment, like my betrayal had cut him in his heart.
“Saucy. You have to leave my house, Saucy. Please. Leave.”
My mouth was wide open as he turned and walked out the room. I had expected some kind of fight. A knife. Some fists swinging. Shit flying through the air. But the tears? Never! I heard the front door open and slam, then I looked at Dante.
He reached between his legs and squeezed his wet dick then grinned. “Your daddy’s a good-ass man, girl. If you was my daughter I’da fucked your fine ass up.”
I slapped him on his hard stomach. “Shut the hell up. That is not my father. Where the hell am I gonna go now?”
Dante rolled over and stood up. He peeled the soggy condom off his long black dick and dropped it on the floor. “Well, ya can’t come home with me. Maybe you can find a hotel room or something. But first lemme introduce you to my man. His name is Greco. He pulls a hellacious grind down at a club called the G-Spot.”
I was seventeen and a half and I had just landed my first job.
I’d heard a lot of good things about the G-Spot, but the cover charge was high and I’d never been inside. The minute I got in there I loved it. Everything about it was live and exciting and I knew I could make enough bank to get me an apartment and get on my feet.
I was never one to click with a lot of females anyway, but I figured out real quick that I needed to keep my distance from some of the crazy-ass chicks up in the Spot.
“I don’t have no dance gigs open right now,” Greco told me. “Give it a couple of weeks, though. These bitches in here be illing so much that somebody’ll be getting tossed in a minute.”
Two days later I had a prime spot. One of their top dancers, Money-Making Monique, was cool enough to give me a hookup, and I worked that stage with her and her girl Honey Dew like I was born for it. I had a prime body and it turned me on to show it off. I liked the way I moved on the stage, and got a thrill out of what I could do to the men in the audience. It didn’t matter what kind of man it was. Old, young. Married, single. If he was in the Spot when I got on the stage, I left him with a rock in his pants.
It was wild! And I was having a ball. The hours were good, the cash was great. I got to sleep all day and party until the sun came up. I started working the back rooms regularly too, and it wasn’t long before they started calling me Brainiac due to all that good neck action I was laying down. I can’t tell you how many cats told me that hands down, out of every other bitch they’d ever been with in life, they’d never had their top done the way I put it on them.
One of my most famous clients, and the one who had the biggest, sweetest dick, was the NBA rapper Thug-A-Licious. For real! I was actually with him the night before he got took down, and if I had known it was his last night on earth I woulda put that neck pussy on him ten times harder!
But it was right about this time that the worst damn thing in the world happened too. It caught me by surprise and rocked my world so hard I didn’t know if I would ever get back up.
I was coming outta my cheap little hotel room when I stopped dead in my shoes. Aunt Ruthie was standing in the lobby talking to the desk clerk. Didn’t nobody but winos and hoes live up in here, and she looked so outta place in her long frilly grandma dress that for a second I was struck dumb. What the fuck was she doing here?
I was just about to turn around and run back up the stairs when she looked up and saw me. We stared at each other for a moment, and all the old shit between us was in both of our eyes.
I took my time walking toward her, bouncing my steps like everything in my world was grand. Her hair was longer but she still looked old, tired, and drug out, like somebody had wiped the damn sidewalk up with her.
“Whassup, Aunt Ruthie? Did Uncle Swag get his deal?”
She looked at my skimpy clothes, ass and titties busting out everywhere, and shook her head. “No. He got dead, Saucy. Dead. The streets caught up with him and choked his ass dead.”
Dead? My knees wobbled and I fell against the wall. Dead?
“Don’t lie like that,” I moaned, tears falling from my eyes. “Bitch you ain’t never liked me! But you ain’t gotta lie like that!”
“He’s gone,” Aunt Ruthie said quietly. She reached for me and held on to me as I howled. “They got him in the shower, Tollie said. Came up behind him and strangled him with a towel. He’s gone, Saucy.”
I cried from the bottom of my soul. All I could see was my Uncle Swag. My hero, my spirit daddy, the only man who had ever loved me from the heart and not the body.
Dead.
I broke loose from Aunt Ruthie and s
lid down the wall. I fell on my knees trying to catch my breath, then stretched out on that nasty floor and wailed like somebody was ripping my heart outta my chest.
“I know you loved him,” Aunt Ruthie kept saying over and over again, and as bad as I was hurting I could tell she meant it. “I know how much you loved him, child.”
I went through the next few days in a coma. I smoked and drank until I couldn’t see shit, let alone feel it. Aunt Ruthie came back to my room two days later and gave me the address to the funeral home. There wasn’t gonna be no wake. She was having a viewing and the service all at once, to get it done and over with.
We buried Uncle Swag on a rainy Tuesday morning.
Tollie paid for the services, and his little fat wife came out with him too. Tai showed up for me, and her mother sent a sympathy card with no damn money in it. The funeral parlor was packed. Full of shady niggas who had called themselves down with my uncle, but the minute he got knocked they had turned their backs on his family.
I walked around glaring at them niggas. “Look at little Saucy!” they was saying left and right. Well little Saucy had grown the hell up. I gave all them fake niggas my worst fuckin’ attitude. Half of them was frontin’ like they was grieving for my uncle, while they were really busy sneaking a look at my hips and ass.
I boiled on high throughout the whole damn funeral. It was a crying shame to me that a G as big, jolly, and powerful as my uncle had come down to this. Cold, silent, and stretched out in a cheap-ass suit in front of a bunch of no-good posers. They kept telling me and Aunt Ruthie they was gonna find out who it was that had Uncle Swag murked and take care of that shit. Why the fuck hadn’t they taken care of shit by getting him a high-level lawyer and getting him outta the joint? I didn’t believe nothing them niggas said, and I walked around that funeral home ready to curse everybody the fuck out. I was so mad that I blocked out my pain. I couldn’t hardly look at Uncle Swag’s body looking stressed and stiff in that cheap wooden box. Kaz just sat there looking at the floor, so I guess he couldn’t stand to look neither.
“Saucy.” A guy named Yan pulled me to the side. “Don’t even worry about this shit, ya know? Them motherfuckers that got him? They gone get handled properly.”
I shook him off and walked up front to sit with Tai and Aunt Ruthie. Kaz had his head on her shoulder but at least he wasn’t sitting in her lap no more. Aunt Ruthie put her hand over mine, and for the first time ever there was love for me in her eyes.
“Saucy, me and Kaz are going back upstate tomorrow,” she said quietly. “I’ll be staying at my sister’s house because I’m leaving this damn city for good.”
I had nothing to say. I loved this city, the good and the bad. Shit. Not only didn’t I have anywhere else to go, there was no other place I wanted to be.
I kept Uncle Swag deep in my heart, and swore all out I’d never love nobody the way I loved him. His murder didn’t slow me down though. If anything I was getting wilder than ever, and having a good-ass time in the process.
I’d been working at the Spot for a few months and I was in high demand. I’d met me a real dumb customer, some old head who was in the navy. He lived in Brooklyn with his wife and kids, but liked to party up in Harlem. He moved me out of that raggedy hotel I’d been staying in and rented me a small apartment so I could be available to him on the weekends or whenever he could lie and tell his wife he was on duty. He wasn’t all that in the sheets and his breath stank like hell, but I tolerated him because he was getting ready to go back out to sea.
With nobody but Kimichi left in my family, I was living my life in my own way, and that’s about the time I met Sincere.
Me and Tai hadn’t hung out much since Uncle Swag’s funeral. Her moms was still shitty and didn’t want me in her crib too much, and I hadn’t answered most of Tai’s calls because she usually called when I was doing something she would get on my case about. But even when I did call her every now and then just to get up with her, she acted all mad. I had missed her high school graduation and she was still holding that shit against me.
“You could have shown up for me, Saucy,” she complained.
I looked at the phone like it was crazy instead of her. I had been smart in school and got good grades when I wanted to, but I had missed so many classes that I didn’t have enough credits to graduate so I was gonna have to do another six months. What in the hell made Tai think I was gone show up at a graduation if I wasn’t part of the damn program?
“I had to work, Tai,” I lied. “You know I’m killing them down at the G-Spot now. I ain’t stripping or fucking or nothing. Just working in the coatroom and sometimes at the bar.”
“Uhm, yeah,” Tai said, and I could tell she didn’t believe me. “I started film school, you know. And I’m working at a production studio. They’re letting me intern as an event producer and I get to meet all kinds of high-profile artists. It’s really cool and I’m learning a lot.”
I got hot. Tai knew damn well that I had always wanted to be in the entertainment industry and in front of the camera! If anybody should have been rubbing asses with the stars it should have been me. I couldn’t even imagine an artist taking Tai’s big ass seriously. She wasn’t no eye candy. She didn’t have the body, the hair, or the ass appeal. She damn sure wasn’t me.
“That’s great, Tai,” I said dryly. “But I gotta go.”
“Wait! I wanna see you, girl. I’ll try to swing by during my lunch break tomorrow. We can grab something to eat. I’ll buy. ’Kay?”
The next afternoon we were sitting in a pizza shop on 125th Street and Tai was trying to hook me up with some guy she said was her new friend.
“You know how I do, Tai.” I picked at my crust. “I meet new niggas every night. I ain’t looking for no relationship or no Big Daddy who wants to fall in love and have a house full of kids and all that shit. I’m cool working at the G-Spot. I do what I do, and that’s how I roll.”
“But you ain’t got your own apartment yet either. What’s gonna happen when that navy guy goes back out to sea?”
“He paid the rent up for a minute. I’ll figure out something else after that.”
“It still won’t hurt you to at least holla at this guy. He’s got connections, girl. I met him at a party his brother invited me to, and the minute he hit the door I could tell he was the shit. People was almost bowing down to him. He’s a big willie, Sauce. Just the type you like. He saw your picture on my key chain and said he wanted to check you out.”
As it turned out, Tai had picked me a winner. Sincere swung by the G-Spot the next night and caught my set. He bought a magnum of champagne and paid for two hours of my time, and we went in one of the back rooms and sat up talking, drinking, and hitting lines the whole time.
Sincere told me he was a hustler from L.A. who was hooked up with some Haitians and owned a string of liquor stores in New York. They also had a nice drug game going, and had a crew of dirty riders who moved product from Miami to Virginia to New York. Sincere was in charge of distribution in several cities, and was a shot caller who chilled at the top of the food chain. He worked in G’s territory, but G got a nice piece of the action so they were cool.
By the time the sun came up the next morning I knew what my next move was gonna be. I jumped right on the bandwagon when Sincere told me what he wanted me to do.
“Check this out, baby. Go ’head out there and tell that big nigga with the two-way that you ain’t working for him no more. I’ll square shit up with G. Don’t worry. It won’t be a problem.”
Sincere had an apartment in East Harlem. We moved my shit out of that sailor’s crib and into his that same day. I lived large as hell up in that joint. I decorated it to fit my personality and everything I put up in there was quality, for real. Sincere was free with his cheese and believed in keeping his woman looking good. He replenished my wardrobe and it was five times phatter than it had been when Uncle Swag was alive. I was living large. Sitting at the top of the world. I shopped my ass off in some of t
he same stores I used to boost in. Only difference was, now I had a pocketbook full of cash and could buy just about any damn thing I wanted.
But nothing good lasts forever. Six months after I moved in with Sincere he got caught up in some shit. One of the Haitians he worked with got knocked and started snitching. He had some immigration issues and was trying to keep from getting deported, so he gave up a couple of names to save his own ass.
Sincere got snatched off the streets but he wasn’t no herb and he’d covered most of his tracks. The only thing they could hang on his head was some bullshit charge for associating with known felons, and for that, they took back his parole.
He got sent to Woodburne Correctional Facility up in Sullivan County for a year. But even the law couldn’t keep a good gangsta down. The only thing that really changed in his game was that instead of calling shots from the crib, he was now calling them from the pen.
Sincere told me he was gonna take care of me, locked down or not, and I believed him. Drugs were flowing in prison almost as easy as they flowed on the streets. The guards were shiesty and greedy, and as long as they got paid off they turned a blind eye to what was happening right under their noses.
I made mad visits upstate to see my boo, carrying his “babies” inside my pussy and passing them to him with the silent permission of the guards. Sincere commanded the same respect in the bing as he did on the block, and his money was never short. When I first met him he had told me he was a businessman and I half-ass believed him. But after seeing how he handled his business behind the walls, I knew what he said to be true.
“Always keep your business associates on a string, Saucy,” he told me. “Don’t never let no niggas think they can do their dirt without you. Make sure you’re a key piece of the puzzle, and that without you they ain’t got shit.”
I watched Sincere do exactly that for ten whole months of his sentence, and I would have rode with him till the end of it for real. But I ran into Akbar downtown one day. I hadn’t seen him since right after Uncle Swag got killed, and he was looking clean as shit. We ended up getting some Henny and going out to eat. He told me he’d gotten tagged with a larceny charge for stealing from an electronics store, and they’d sent him upstate to Woodburne for a good minute.
