by Mack Mama
I worked two legitimate jobs in my life. Both were when I came home from my final bid in 2008. The first one was a ninety-day gig at a work-training program that hired me from the halfway house. It was a factory job and I enjoyed it. I loved the nuns who ran the program, and thank them for that opportunity. Sister Marie founded the program called “IN THE MAKING”, to help women like me who had no work experience and adversities like felonies on our records. Those obstacles usually ostracize ex-cons from the work force. I commend “IN THE MAKING” for giving me an opportunity to work. I am a perfectionist, and I give my all to whatever I do. They hated to see me go, but the program is designed to rotate every ninety days, so everybody can get a shot.
I found my second job on my own. It was telemarketing and I hated it. I had to set up bookings over the phone for Kirby vacuum cleaners. First of all, we’re in a recession, so who has money for a thousand dollar vacuum? You can imagine how many times I’ve had the phone slammed down in my ear, but, surprisingly, I became pretty good at convincing people to hear me out. I became one of the top bookers. I have the gift of gab. It’s a New York thing. We are known as fast talkers. I didn’t like the hours that I was working. Split shifts and weekends for two hundred dollars weekly was Insane! I hardly saw my daughter. It wasn’t worth it, so I quit that job. That was the extent of my adventures in the work force. I had decided I could make money off of what I did best, which was performing.
My first party was in a tiny club in a little town in Connecticut called Ansonia. I made that club live as hell that night. I even had a camera crew film the party. They thought I was doing a reality show. Those people had never seen anything like it. I hosted the party and I performed. I had a booty-shaking contest, which had the chicks battling with their butts for a fifty dollar prize. It was hilarious. Then I got up on a table and performed “Dance On”. It was outrageous. I had the DJ play some of my songs. The song “Work Ya” was a big hit. It is one of my favorite party tunes. I recorded it with a Jamaican artist from Brooklyn named Plucky Ranks. It’s hilarious. We go back and forth on why I think he should try oral sex and his reasons for not wanting to bless me with the treat.
I love performing, and I come alive in front of a audience. On the contrary, I’m so laid-back and reclusive when I’m off stage. That is from getting bit too many times. For that reason, I don’t trust human beings; they are way too complex for me to figure out. When you’re a new artist, you have to let the audience know who you are instead of just getting up there and they have no idea who they are watching. People leave my show feeling like they knew me for years and I am their favorite artist.
I love being Mack Mama. It is who I was born to be. I took a leap of faith when I quit my job and decided to start hosting my own parties, but it worked. I made money doing what I loved to do. The only setback was the location wasn’t ideal. The party goers in New Haven, Connecticut are cheap. It is unbelievable, but they only pay ten dollars to get into a club. I have seen folks pay up to a hundred dollars or more to get into a hot club, so I was boggled. I was only making a paltry two to three-hundred dollars at the door. After I spent two hundred on flyers to promote the event, I barely broke even. I had a couple of clubs agree to let me host certain nights, and I would create the theme for that night like Mack Mama’s Paradise. Then I started bringing in the strippers and it would get real raunchy. However, the money wasn’t right, so I ended the shows. My girls weren’t getting paid enough for all the tricks those cheap guys wanted them to perform. So, I decided to take a break and devise another plan to make money, while getting my brand and music out there.
I started a viral campaign. I went hard on all the social networking sites. I released my album on iTunes, amazon.com and reverbnation.com/mackmama. I had my website designed and uploaded all my mixtapes to music sharing sites like datpiff.com and youtube.com. I filmed my parties and uploaded the footage. Then I began to get the Mack Mama brand out there. I received so much positive feedback and made a lot of connections. The funny thing was, I wanted to test the “sex sells” theory, so I released my newly revised XXX Rated music. Then I did a sexy photo shoot and posted the pics on my facebook fan page. I went from six hundred friends to five thousand in two weeks. I was amazed. Men are my biggest fans, and that is solely based on my image. I really want to reach women who can relate to what I’m talking about on so many levels; whether their hustlers, victims of abuse, or just the underdogs in life who want their time to shine. Let’s not forget the exotic dancers that just want to get paid for their work. It’s so hard to get a job these days, and these bold women are doing what they have to do to survive. I give a special shout out to those ladies, because it’s hard to do all that degrading shit, while dudes wants to slow feed them with dollars all night. I Love exotic dancers and I dedicated my XXX Rated mixtape to them. I personally will go broke making it rain on dancers. I feel their pain. It takes guts and a hell of an imagination to do what those ladies do. I wish I had the patience to be an exotic dancer. I would be paid with my body and sex appeal. People always think I am a stripper. I just don’t have the patience to do all of those tricks. Then I’m spinning on the pole all night while a nicca’ ‘dollaring me to death. I know that I would mess around and rob his ass. I have zero tolerance for a cheap man.
Chapter Thirteen
ALL I WANNA KNOW?
I am hurting as I write this, because I am currently dealing with a very stressful situation, which stems from me opening up my bleeding heart yet again. I always want to help, but I realize that humans have gone bad… plain and simple. It’s only a few good ones left. I did a lot of treacherous shit in my life, and I’m nowhere near perfect, but I am a good person and I have a pure heart. I call myself an Original Bad Girl due to my past lifestyle, along with the trials and tribulations I’ve went through because of my bad choices, but when you know better you do better. I have a tattoo on my lower back that depicts the struggle I go through every day. There are flames flickering underneath my Angel wings with O.B.G. in the center of the halo. I am a lost soul trying to be an angel, trying desperately to be the human that God wants me to be. But, that ‘ole Satan is constantly waiting for me to slip up and fall back into my old ways. If I do, the eternal flames of hell will be waiting
With that being said here is my last tale. It is what I am going through at the time of this writing. I want to prefix this by letting my darling readers know that if by chance I don’t make it out of this situation due to life imprisonment or possibly death, that I am trying with all my power to do the right thing. I have to handle this situation like society dictates that I should, and how Jesus Christ would have handled it, lawfully and compassionately. It is hard because I am a struggling O.B.G. and violence usually fixed all the foul humans that have crossed me. I have surely changed, so I handle things much differently, now.
The title of the song that matches this situation is called “All I Wanna’ Know”. It’s about a man wanting to know if I want to be with him, but I have my guards up due to all of my past drama with relationships. What I am about to share has nothing to do with the above mentioned song. All I ‘wanna’ know is why the hell is my so-called godson stalking me? He stated that he wants me to die slowly and painfully because I deserve it. I promise you that I did nothing to this boy other than looked out for him and tried to help. God knows that I shouldn’t have had anything to do with him because of what his uncle, Crax, did to me. All I wanted to do was merely say “hi”.
I received a call one day from my father. He asked me did I want Crax’s mother to have my number. She had called him and wanted to speak to me. I deliberated for a minute and decided against my better judgment that he could give it to her. I had remembered how good she had treated me and my daughter. I didn’t want to diss her based on what her son had done, so I took her number. That was a mistake.
When I called her we had a nice conversation. I asked about my godson, which is Crax’s nephew. She went on to vent to me about how she had pu
t him out because he was lazy and didn’t do anything but stay on the computer all day. He had been stabbed and wouldn’t tell on his attackers, and she was scared for his life. I gave him a call to see how he was doing and we were both happy to hear from each other. He told me his “sob story”. I’m a sucker for a good sob story. He said he was staying at his mother’s friend’s apartment, but she was kicking him out and he was heading to a shelter. He was so excited to speak to me and immediately started telling me how talented he was with making beats. He wanted to help me with my music so I wouldn’t have to spend money in the studio for engineering or production. He said all I needed was to buy him a program for his computer called Protools and we would be all set. He was always a computer geek, so I considered what he said and decided I wouldn’t let that type of talent go to waste in a shelter. I told him that I would let him stay with me. That was the second worst mistake. I hadn’t seen this boy since he was sixteen, and I was with his uncle. Now he was a twenty-two year old man. He had grown up physically, but mentally he was still a little boy. When I went to pick him up, he looked like a Grisly bear. He had a rough-looking beard and his skin was the color of midnight. He was dressed in all black, which made him look very menacing. That should have been my first sign. But when he hugged me and I began talking to him, he was my old godson (just in a bigger package). I asked him about his life, and why he was in such a rut. That’s when he shared his grief about his mother. She was very close to me. We met in prison and went on to become good friends.
His uncle, Crax was locked up, while his father had moved out of town to deal with his own addictions and his other family. He was on his own and had nothing but his Social Security check that he received monthly. That sealed the deal. I needed that assistance and decided he would be an asset to my career and not a liability, so it could work. He went to a technical school for audio and digital production, so he was trained to engineer and produce music. I was going to get him all the programs and equipment that he needed to begin setting up my in-house studio. I even gave him a laptop off the rip because that’s how I do things. I love to make my love ones happy, and he was so miserable.
I even took him shopping for a few outfits, as well. It was his birthday and the kid didn’t have anything but a small suitcase with more black hoodies and a few jeans. I felt so sorry for him and wanted to make him feel good. I liked to see his face light up like it was Christmas when we went to restaurants like Red Lobsters. That was my seafood McDonald’s but for him it was like a five-star restaurant.
After seven days, I was ready for him to go. He was sloppy, lazy, and didn’t like to put the toilet bowl seat down, which drove me bonkers. I couldn’t believe he was a grown man. He acted like a teenager, and had no home training. Everything he did seemed to annoy me. I finally lost it when I noticed droplets of piss on my bathroom floor. I found myself becoming stressed out, and I didn’t like it. I still gave him the benefit of the doubt because of his talent. I didn’t want to turn my back on him like he thought his family did, but I saw what his grandmother was talking about, which explained why he was on his way to the shelter. That was the first strike.
I told him to start promoting my music on the internet, but I discovered that instead of doing what I needed done, he was watching porn all night. He was addicted to every porn site on the web and knew all of the porn stars. He started telling me about how he didn’t want a girlfriend because he was not well-endowed and didn’t want to be rejected, so he lived in his virtual world. He had his pick of woman with the click of a button. He also admitted that he would masturbate daily in my shower to relieve himself. I didn’t take that information kindly. I went off about that. I started seeing a sick side of him that disturbed me, and it was strike two.
Strike three was the deal breaker. My friend, Mighty dropped by to take me on a date and, while I entertained him, this psycho starts tripping. He started blasting one of Lil Wayne’s rock songs, the one with Eminem where he says, “I’m gonna’ pick up the world and drop it on your f***ing head” I couldn’t believe he had my theater system on level twenty. My walls were vibrating. When I opened my door to tear him a new asshole, this mother sucker was in the pitch dark, pacing back in forth in my living room with a knife in his hand. I lost it for real: “WHAT THE F**K IS YOUR MALFUNCTION?” I pulled him down the hallway into my kitchen and cursed him out in a furious whisper. I didn’t want Mighty to hear me and realize that he had that knife, because he would have shot him on the spot. “What are you doing!!? Why do you have that knife? And what’s with that music blaring in here?”
He slurred out the following response : “I don’t want no nigga’ in here while I’m here. That’s word to my mother, I will kill that ‘nigga! I’m your pit bull. ‘Aint nobody gonna’ have you while I’m in this mother f***er!” By then, I realized that he was drunk, and the crazed look in his eyes told me that he was serious as cancer. I managed to calm him down. Then I hurried back to my friend, and we left out of there. I laughed the situation off as being nothing. I told Mighty that my crazy godson was drunk and loved Lil’ Wayne and Rock music. We laughed about it and enjoyed the rest of our nigh. However, I was seething in the back of my mind, and couldn’t wait to get his ass out of my house.
The next day, I told him that he had to leave. He pleaded and apologized, but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I wasn’t budging. I was going to let him go to Queenie’s building in Ohio to start setting up my studio, but that deal was off. I wanted no parts of his crazy ass. He reminded me of his uncle, Crax, when he started going off the deep end on those drugs. The whole family was cookoo for coco puffs, and I was just as nuts for dealing with them. I was done! The bleeding heart shit had to stop. It was getting dangerous. He wrote me a love letter, expressing how he was in love with me. He went on to state that he wanted to protect me, and was sorry that he acted like that, but he couldn’t deal with seeing me with another man. He even stated that he used to sneak and watch me and his uncle have sex when he was younger. It was all too much for me. I made him pack his things and I drove him back to Brooklyn. I dropped him off right where I picked him up from. I had no idea that he felt like that towards me. In my mind, he was my godson, but this man was obsessed with me and potentially dangerous. I wasn’t scared of him. I was scared of what I would do to him if he tried to hurt me. It was creepy. When I dropped him off, he was still pleading with me. I just let him make a couple of phone calls and gave him a parting speech on his crazy behavior. I told him that I couldn’t be around him if he felt those inappropriate feelings for me, and I wished him well. When I got back home, I felt a sense of relief and started cleaning my crib. The next morning, my daughter left for school, but suddenly ran back into the house. “MOMeeeee my God Brother is back!” she sing songed.
“HUH!?” I couldn’t believe my ears. That nut job was back. He had the nerve to come all the way back to Connecticut on the train after I specifically told him that he couldn’t stay with me any longer. I was steaming. I went to my door and there he was dressed in black from head to toe, looking like a madman with a puppy-dog expression on his face. I starting going off on him. He just went down into my basement where the laundry room is set up for the building. He actually stated that he wasn’t leaving, and he would sleep down there. By then, I was near hysteria. I was so f***ing mad. I felt a fury so deep that if I would have had a gun, I would have definitely shot him just for the brazen nerve he possessed.
