“Ooooh shit, you gonna make me cum again,” I cried out. I buried my face into the pillow to keep the other girls from hearing how good the dick was to me.
I was chanting an erotic mantra.
“Oh shit, I love this black pussy. Ooooh, I love this black pussy,” he chanted. “I’m almost there. I’m almost there.”
He took a deep breath and gave me the last inch of his hard dick and both our legs started to tremble. I felt his dick swelling bigger inside of me. He was finally about to come. And when he did, he gripped my hips tightly, shivered uncontrollably, screamed out, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuukk,” and then he suddenly pulled out, snatched the condom off his dick and I felt his hot cum splash on my back. I didn’t care where he came and how, as long as he didn’t do it inside of me raw.
We both were breathing heavily and my hair was in somewhat disarray from his constant grabbing and my face being pushed into the pillow. Travis was exhausted and drained. He pulled up his pants and smiled gratifyingly.
“Was is good?” I asked.
“Yo, that was some of the best pussy I ever had,” he complimented me.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
We both collected ourselves. My sexual servitude was done and I was happy to have five grand on me. He walked out of the room first; I made my exit two minutes later. I had to get right again. When I walked out the bedroom, there was Kawanda smiling at me. She was waiting to use the room again; the other two had just become occupied. Standing behind her was a black man this time, and the look on his face said he was ready to have the time of his life.
“Damn, girl, you had some fun?” she asked jokingly. “Shit, as fine as he was, I woulda spent an hour wit’ him. Did he pay you well?”
I smiled and walked away. It wasn’t any of her business. I already made my money and I was ready to leave. But the party in the presidential suite was still in full swing and it didn’t look like it was about to die down anytime soon. The men were drunk, horny, and having the time of their lives, and the girls, they were fucking and sucking everything moving in the room. It became a full-blown orgy when a few more girls showed up to get in on the action and they didn’t care where they did their business at, as long as it got done. Pussy and dick was from wall to wall, hip hop music still blaring, and mostly white men with their pants around their ankles, and tiny, hard dicks showing, were eager to stick their wieners into anything wet and sloppy.
I was glad more girls showed up; it made me fall back and just chill. I still flirted and gave lap dances, but when it came to the hardcore stuff, I let the other girls get their shine on. I already struck gold with Travis, and I told myself he would be the first and only trick I turned.
Five hours later, it was five in the morning and I was exhausted. I made $7,000 that night, and I was all smiles. I felt I didn’t need to dance at Crazy Legs anymore and degrade myself. I had enough money for rent, food, clothes, and other important things. But who was I kidding? $7,000 in New York would be gone in three, maybe four months tops, and since I didn’t have a high school diploma or GED, and didn’t have a baller boyfriend to spend on me, I was struggling.
The cab let us out on Laconia Avenue with dawn about to crack open the sky. Kawanda and I walked the block to our buildings feeling like we could sleep for days. I saw the police lights a half a block away and thought something happened, but when we got close, it was cops who pulled over a Chevy Impala with tinted windows and they were harassing the young hoods who had occupied the car. They had the three men handcuffed and lying face down on the ground as an officer thoroughly searched through their vehicle. It was obvious that they belonged to YGC. But it was crazy.
Kawanda and I minded our business and went into our building. The Bronx was heating up like an oven on Thanksgiving. I was sick of it. Gunshots every night, and niggas dying; this had been my world for so long that it felt I could never escape it.
When I got to my floor, I knocked on Ms. Wilson’s door to pick up my son. The heaviness in my eyes showed very much and my pussy still felt stretched out from Travis’s big dick in and out of me. I was paid a lot of money, but I felt dirty and used. The only thing I wanted to do when I walked into my apartment was take a long shower and sleep for hours. But that was going to be an impossible task if Danny was awake with his crying.
“Who?” I heard Ms. Wilson asked through the door.
“It’s me, Sammy.”
I heard the locks turn, and Ms. Wilson answered with the chain still on the door, glaring at me in her bedtime rollers and housecoat.
“Chile, you know what time it is,” she hissed at me.
“I know, I’m sorry, I just lost track of time, Ms. Wilson and then coming from the city . . .” I apologized sincerely.
She continued to glare at me. I didn’t want to keep explaining myself. I only wanted to pick up my son and just leave. “Is he still up?” I asked.
“He’s ’sleep, and you look like shit, chile,” she said.
“I just have a lot on my mind.”
“We all do. But you still need to be here to pick him up at a decent time.”
“I know.” I was willing to pay her more than twenty-five dollars for the extra help. “Well, can he—” I started, but she cut me off.
“Look, you don’t even have to ask me. He doesn’t need to be woke up at this time in the morning, and with you looking like that. I’ll keep him for the morning so you can go and get some rest.”
It was music to my ears. “Thank you.”
“But don’t make this a habit, Sammy.”
“I won’t.” I pulled out some money and handed her fifty dollars. Ms. Wilson wasn’t shy in taking the cash. She may have been old, but like me, she was about her money.
She stuffed the cash into her housecoat and shut the door. I went into my apartment and left a trail of clothes from the doorway to the bathroom. I couldn’t wait to get into the shower and scrub myself clean as the water cascaded down on me like a waterfall. In my mind, I felt like I traded in the drug game for prostituting myself. It had only been one date, but why did I feel ashamed?
I spent almost a half hour in the shower, cleansing myself after a dirty and wild night with millionaire white boys who saw black women as exotic and sexual pleasers for their limp white dicks. We sucked and fucked them for pennies compare to most of their net worth. We were a fantasy to them, and tonight, we made all of their sexual fantasies come true. I know I sure did for Travis.
I dropped all my cash on the bedroom dresser and stared at it for a minute. The heap of it sitting there, spilling over onto the floor, was very impressive. I worked hard to make it. I remembered what Kawanda had said to me: “Girl, use what you got to get what you want.” And I did just that, used what I had between my legs to get what I wanted, or what I needed to feed and clothe my son. I would count it again in the morning.
The minute I climbed into my bed to sleep and dream of some alternative place to be, some slice of heaven for me, pretending I didn’t spread my legs for a dollar tonight, the sounds of the ghetto brought me back to my reality.
Bak! Bak! Bak! Bak!
The gunshots echoed from the streets into my bedroom window at six in the morning, a clear indication that the streets never sleep and there was a war going on between two rival gangs.
Chapter Five
Mouse
I woke up on Erica’s couch feeling a little better, but it was far from okay for me. I was wrapped up underneath the blanket she gave me so snugly I looked like I was in a cocoon. The warmth was so soothing that it made me not to want to get up. It was another cold day, and there was nothing I wanted to do more than just sleep all day somewhere comfortable. But I had to check on my daughter and make a plan for myself.
I got up and became startled at Erica’s grandmother seated across from me in an ugly brown chair. She just looked at me stoically, like she was some zombie, her eyes black and aloof from everything around her. I remembered Erica telling me that her eighty-four-year-ol
d grandmother was senile and had Alzheimer’s.
I smiled and greeted her with a simple, “Good morning.”
“Jackie, you still going to school this morning,” her grandmother said out of nowhere.
Jackie? I looked around me to see if there was anyone else in the room, but I was the only one.
“I need to get ready for school, Jackie. Mama gonna get mad at us if we’re late,” she said. “Jackie . . .”
I was confused; she was talking to me, but wasn’t talking to me. It seemed like she was in a different world, or a different time. Her thin, frail, and wrinkled body was clad in a blue housecoat and her thinning gray hair was in small braids.
“I’m not Jackie,” I said.
The woman’s toothless smile was aimed at me and she repeated, “Jackie, we gonna be late for school. I need to go.”
Yeah, her memory was warped.
“Grandma, your sister Jackie has been dead for ten years now and you ain’t been to school in forever,” Erica said, coming into the room to care for her grandmother.
Erica kissed her grandmother on the cheek and buttoned up her housecoat to make sure she was warm and fine. She took her grandmother’s wrinkled hand in hers and massaged it tenderly. “You hungry, Grandma?” Erica asked.
She looked up at Erica with her warm smile and replied, “Hey, Candy.”
“Grandma, I’m Erica, your youngest granddaughter, remember?”
She nodded.
I never had been around anyone with Alzheimer’s before. It was weird to me. She kept calling me Jackie. I just hoped I never succumbed to such a horrible disease when I got older. Sometimes I thought I wasn’t going to see my next birthday. Every day to me was a blessing, because for me, it was survival of the fittest out here.
Erica looked at me and asked, “How did you sleep?”
“I slept fine.”
“You hungry?”
“Very,” I replied, feeling my stomach growling like a loud engine.
“I’ll make some pancakes.”
“Where’s Eliza?” I asked, becoming concerned about my daughter.
“She’s in the bedroom watching cartoons with my kids,” said Erica.
The first thing I did was get up to check on my daughter. We had a horrible night in the cold and I had to make sure she was fine. I had no changing clothes for her, no food, diapers, toys, or a decent winter coat. We just had each other and the clothes on our backs.
I went into the bedroom and saw Eliza seated between Erica’s daughter’s legs watching cartoons. When she saw me standing in the doorway, Eliza jumped up and came my way with open arms. I scooped my daughter up in my arms and kissed and hugged her tightly. I loved my little girl and didn’t want to let her go.
I said hi to Erica’s kids, but they looked at me like I was some alien from another planet, especially the daughter; it looked like she caught an attitude with me because I interrupted the cartoons. So I went into the kitchen to see about breakfast. Erica was a hood bitch, but one thing for sure: she knew how to throw down in the kitchen. She was whipping up some blueberry pancakes and an omelet.
While she cooked, I sat at the kitchen table with Eliza still in my arms and we talked. Erica smoked a cigarette while cooking. I needed a cigarette too. I removed one from the pack on the table and lit up desperately, allowing the nicotine to seep into my system. I exhaled and didn’t think twice about smoking around my daughter. She was used to it and I didn’t believe in that secondhand smoke shit. Sometimes, Eliza would laugh and smile at the smoke I blew out and try to catch it with her tiny hands.
“How long has she been like that?” I asked about her grandmother.
“For years now. She’s getting worse every day.”
“That’s crazy.”
“What can you do? It’s what happens when we get old,” said Erica.
“I don’t know about me. I might not even see old age. Shit. You know how we used to do,” I said.
“Shit, there were times when I thought I wasn’t gonna see my eighteenth birthday.”
“But we did.”
“Now I’m workin’ on seeing my twenty-first birthday,” she said.
While we talked in the kitchen, her boyfriend walked in on us. He caught my attention knowing he was far from my friend’s type. He was shirtless and lean with no muscle definition at all. His cornrows cascaded down to his back and his upper body was swathed with tattoos. He had baby-face features, but devious-looking eyes.
He walked behind Erica while she was over the stove, threw his arms around her, kissed her, and said, “Good morning, baby.”
“Good morning,” she replied, smiling like a schoolgirl.
He looked over me and simply asked, “Who she?”
“A friend from back in the day,” she replied.
“A friend, huh? What’s ya friend’s name?”
“Mouse,” Erica answered.
“Mouse. That’s a cute name, and she’s cute, too,” he replied. They talked about me like I wasn’t even there. He removed the cigarette from Erica’s hand and was going to finish it off. She didn’t care. She continued cooking breakfast.
He smiled at me, I didn’t smile back. There was something about him that I immediately didn’t like. When he looked at me, it felt like he was undressing me with his eyes and thinking about some devious shit to do to me. He focused his attention back on Erica and said, “You gonna go and get that money tonight?”
“You know it, daddy,” Erica replied.
Daddy?
“That’s my bitch,” he said and then smacked Erica on her ass causing her to giggle. “Call me when you get done up in here; a nigga hungry like a muthafucka.”
He walked by me and winked. I didn’t say anything.
It was crazy to see Erica looking so domesticated, especially for some man who wasn’t even that cute. Back in the day, she ran through niggas like a pack of Newports and had a fierce reputation on the streets for robbing niggas if she wasn’t moving weight for drug dealers. Like us all, she had a hard lifestyle growing up with her mother murdered when she was thirteen and then being molested, raped, and pregnant by her own father when she was fifteen. Of course she had an abortion and her father got fifteen years, but Erica’s life ain’t been sweet since her mother pushed her out her pussy inside of Rikers Island.
She was born in jail, and been going back and forth inside since she was fourteen years old. Like me, she was nothing to play with and a nuclear terror in the Bronx. This bitch was a pit bull in a skirt. But seeing her again, I saw a change in her. Maybe her last stint in jail reformed her somewhat, because the Erica I knew wouldn’t be fuckin’ with the lame nigga she had in her bedroom. She always loved them goon, muscular niggas who got it popping. The nigga in her life now, whose name was Cream, looked like he took advantage of a bitch and was sleazy in my eyes.
But it wasn’t my business. I was living day by day, surviving and trying to lift my head out of the water, trying not to drown. And I didn’t know if I killed Dietra and had a warrant out for my arrest. That night my temper got the best of me.
Erica made a stack of pancakes for breakfast. It was really good to see her home and looking good. She had gained some weight and looked so calm, and to see that she had her kids was great. A few years ago, the state threatened to take her kids away from her because of child endangerment. She had a few hood niggas over her place one night, and everyone was drinking, smoking, and gambling. Now you mix in those three combinations along with some thugs and pussy, and a fight ensued, with muthafuckas getting it popping and started shooting with her kids in the house. Her daughter was two at the time and was almost killed in the melee.
Six months later, she had gotten locked up.
I dined on her blueberry pancakes and omelet, and devoured them like I was Scooby-Doo and Shaggy. It was much better than the food at the shelter. I think I had like ten pancakes all together.
As we lingered in the kitchen with the kids in the bedroom watching TV and th
e day going by, Erica and I got to talking. We shared the last cigarette in the apartment, and while her nigga was locked away in her bedroom, I told her my situation, the fight, being out in the cold, and losing all of my shit in the cab last night.
“You were in a shelter, huh?” she said.
“I had to get away from that place, Erica. Fuckin’ bitches in your business, the rules and shit, bitches hatin’ on me,” I griped.
She coolly countered with, “It beats being locked up, Mouse. At least you got to come and go when you pleased. Fuckin’ upstate is hell. Missin’ my kids, my peoples, and missin’ some good dick in my life.”
I laughed. I took a drag from the Newport and exhaled. Erica and I always connected. She could never replace Sammy, but she came close when she wasn’t locked up. “I feel you. I just can’t go back there.”
“Shit, I can’t get locked up again. I’m on like my third strike, and they gonna try and give me some crazy football numbers if I catch another felony.”
“You ain’t hustling and robbing niggas anymore, huh? You tryin’ to become an old maid?” I joked.
“I’m tryin’ to get this money a different way, Mouse, you feel me?” she returned.
“A different way like how?”
Erica took the cigarette from my hand and took a deep pull herself. And then she went off the subject we were talking about, saying, “When I was locked up, I heard you and Sammy were doin’ ya thang, gettin’ ya music out there. What happened? You still writing, right?”
It was a sad reminder of where Sammy and I were a year ago. We were like sisters, making things happen for ourselves, going to clubs to perform and having Search manage us. Now look at us. Fuckin’ nowhere because everything went to shit so quickly.
“That’s another long story,” I said. “But I’m still writing.”
“I wish I had your talent, Mouse. You and Sammy always been talented, fo’ real,” she said.
La Familia 2 Page 5
