Tomorrow morning, when he had to go check in with his parole officer, the question was, was he truly rehabilitated. Did serving ten years in prison change him? Or was it all a façade?
Tonight, Tango’s mind wasn’t on seeing his parole officer, or anything else. As he lay on his sheetless bed in the quiet, still room with his hand down his pants, he jerked off with the pleasing thought of being satisfied by a beautiful woman. The man was sex deprived and his first priority was fucking the finest bitch he could lay his hands on. It’d been ten years too long since he had a good nut.
Chapter Eight
Sammy
I wanted to make the $7,000 I earned account for something, and make it last. The first thing I did with the money was buy my son some decent winter clothes and an ample supply of Pampers. He went through them so fast. Then of course I took myself shopping, bought a few outfits, new shoes, some things for work, and treated myself to a spa treatment. It was much needed. At first I was tempted to buy some drugs with the cash and flip it into a profit, that hustle was in my blood, but I decided against it. One look at my son’s beautiful and innocent face and I knew he didn’t deserve to have both parents in jail, or maybe one dead.
It was another sunny but cold afternoon. Danny was asleep in his crib and I was in the living room smoking a blunt in my panties and bra while watching videos on BET. It was quiet for once, and relaxing. I hadn’t been to work in a week. I took some time off for myself. It from time to time became tiresome working at Crazy Legs and having various niggas grabbing naked parts of your body, trying to stick their dirty fingers in special places and yearning to fuck you.
It felt good to get away, my mini vacation.
I didn’t want to get too sucked into that lifestyle. I’d seen it suck bitches dry and age them ten years ahead of their time. And at the end of the day, after dancing continually and fucking and sucking niggas left and right, they didn’t have a dime to their name and were left with stretched out and dry pussies and a stained reputation in the game.
Not me.
I had a plan for myself. I wanted to save money, and get myself back into music, maybe open up my own studio, possibly get signed by a label, start writing for a mixture of artists, or just produce something. I still had it in me, my drive and my talents. My brain couldn’t stop; it was running twenty-four/seven with creativity and the next hustle.
I took a pull from the blunt and watched this new female rap group video premiere on BET. They called themselves Vixen Mistress, and I was in awe of the name. It sounded too much like our group, Vixen’s Chaos. But then when I heard some of their lyrics, I was completely taken aback, because those were my words, my flow.
“You keep falling victim to things that really don’t matter, addicted to the person who keeps shattering ya laughter, hooked on a love that’s tainted like acid. It’s blasphemy how you stay chasin’ after an unwilling happening.”
I stood up, aghast, blunt damn near falling from my lips, and screamed out, “Oh my fuckin’ God, are they serious!”
Those were my lyrics, my words. It was the song I performed that night with Mouse at the Latin Quarters in the city. These two fake bitches weren’t even on our level. One was skinny like a number two pencil with a long weave and bad makeup, and the second was thicker with short blond hair and trying to look like Eve. They weren’t even original. I knew Search or someone in the studio had to be behind the theft. Just watching these fake bitches get their shine on with their own music video made me want to cry. I was crushed. It felt like I was about to have a panic attack. I wanted to contact Mouse so badly and tell her what I saw, but I didn’t have a number to reach her by and we still weren’t on good terms with each other.
When the four-minute video went off, I sat there dumbfounded. It should have been us on there, not them. I wanted to scream. I wanted to break something. I wanted to contact Search and shout out, “Yo, what the fuck! Really? Fuck you! Why you playin’ us like that?” I knew he was still upset with the way things played out between us. He really liked me, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. Search was only a friend in my eyes, and I never wanted to fuck him. But I felt he took us for granted. I had him beat down, which was a decision that I regretted to this day. Did he do this just to get back at us, be spiteful? He was out there, grinding in the hip hop scene, on the serious come up, making a name for himself while leaving us behind.
I couldn’t do anything but cry. It was the ultimate disrespect. I was here struggling, dancing naked, spreading my business to strangers and having to turn a trick to keep from drowning in poverty.
“He ain’t gonna get away with this shit,” I said to myself.
I thought about hiring an attorney; sue his ass and that whack-ass group he was managing for copyright infringement. But then I had to think, with what cash? Even I knew better that lawsuits cost, and none of my songs were copyrighted. I wrote them, performed them, and wasn’t thinking on the business level. I was the victim of music plagiarism. I fucked up.
So the tears fell as I dwelled on my mistakes.
For an hour, I sat there stunned and so hurt; it felt like I was becoming sick to my stomach. I kept saying to myself, Search or whoever couldn’t get away with this. I was so hungry to do something about it, that I even thought about getting a few homeboys who liked me to find him and fuck his ass up.
I was in a deep zone until I heard someone knocking at my door. I slowly got up, covered myself with a long T-shirt, and went to see who it was knocking. Through the peephole, I saw Kawanda in the hallway. I wasn’t in the mood to see her at the moment, but I opened the door anyway. She walked into my place smiling and dressed like she was going to the club in the afternoon: six-inch heels, tight jeans, and her shirt tighter than her jeans highlighting her ample tits. She was always dressed like she was going out somewhere with tight clothes that looked painted on and accentuating her luscious curves.
“Hey, girl, what you doing?” she asked gleefully.
I forced myself to smile and returned, “Nothing, just chilling, smoking, and watching TV.”
“Where’s Danny?”
“Sleeping. I ain’t complaining,” I said.
Kawanda made herself comfortable in my place. We weren’t best friends, but she was cool peoples. She took a seat on my couch and decided to smoke with me. She pulled out a phat dime bag from her purse and dangled it in front of me. “I know you ain’t finished smoking yet. I just copped some of that good shit from my homeboy and I ain’t tryin’ to smoke alone.”
“Yeah, I’m down. Let me go check on Danny first.”
I walked down the hallway to see if my baby was still sleeping. He had been asleep for two hours now and I knew it was going to be hell trying to put him back to sleep tonight. For some reason, that boy loved to sleep during the day and keep his mama up at nights. I started breastfeeding him at first; like any nigga, pop a nipple in their mouth and they would shut the fuck up and enjoy. But since I started dancing and smoking weed, I stopped breastfeeding him. I didn’t want my baby getting high too. Because I read online that if you smoke marijuana and breastfeed, the active chemical in marijuana is passed to your baby through your milk. So I felt it was better to abstain from breastfeeding than smoking. Yeah, I was the mother of the year for choosing smoking weed over breastfeeding my child. But a bitch was stressed the fuck out and weed was the only thing that soothed me and made me break away from my worries.
I left the door ajar to Danny’s bedroom. I quietly glanced inside and saw he was still out cold, lying on his stomach probably dreaming about when he was born, or missing home when he was safe and sound nestled inside my stomach and going everywhere with Mommy. I smiled at my little bundle of joy. My baby boy was so cute.
“Sleep tight,” I whispered to him.
I went back into the living room to join Kawanda. She had kicked her shoes off and was rolling up the dime bag on my secondhand coffee table. She had split the blunt apart, slid the tobacco out of the blunt from the mouth
end down, and started loading up all the freshly ground buds into the blunt wrapper. Kawanda was a professional at rolling up. She was precise and fast, not like some of these nonprofessionals who rolled sloppy joints and had bad weed.
She said to me, “We ain’t been seeing you at the club in a week, Sammy,” as she started rolling the mouth piece in her right hand and the burning end in the left, rolling right to left. She tucked the bottom flap under the top flap using her thumbs and thumbnails.
“Niggas been askin’ ’bout you and shit. They missin’ you fo’ real,” she added.
I smiled. I was definitely becoming the center of attention at Crazy Legs. Kawanda continued putting together the blunt by licking what she got done so far and pressing it to the bottom of the flap. She kept licking it until it stuck firmly. Then she said, “Girl, you missed out on some money the other night. This young baller came to the club and just started makin’ it rain everywhere, throwing up money like crazy. I’m tellin’ you, he must have spent at least ten stacks that night.”
“Word,” I uttered.
“Word. Bitches were all over that nigga like sweat on skin,” she joked. “But you know a bitch had to get her money. I got to that nigga first, fucked and sucked that nigga so good in the backroom, made that nigga suck on his thumb afterward. His money might be long, but his dick sure ain’t.”
I laughed.
Finally, she was ready to light it up so we could enjoy a wonderful high. I sat next to her on the couch. I wanted to forget about what I saw on BET. I didn’t mention it to her because I didn’t want her to be in my business. Kawanda was a talkative person and sometimes she could say too much around the wrong type of people. She sat back and lit up the blunt and took a few strong pulls. I could already smell the Haze permeating through my apartment. She passed me the blunt and lounged next to me. I took my few pulls and passed it back.
“You must came up last week wit’ that fine-ass white boy at the party,” she said.
“What you mean?”
“I mean that one nigga you fucked in the room, he was on the news the other day, and yo, they sayin’ that muthafucka is paid!” she proclaimed.
“The news? For what?”
“They sayin’ he was part of some big time Ponzi scheme that netted over something like hundreds of millions of dollars and he was one of the main niggas running it,” she informed me.
“What?”
“Hells yeah, girl. They had that nigga on the news with cops escorting the nigga out some fancy downtown building in handcuffs. I was like yoooo, that’s the muthafucka my homegirl fucked at the party last week,” she exclaimed ghetto loud.
I was just glad it was just us two in the apartment. I didn’t need anyone else knowing my business, especially if I was turning tricks on the low.
“Damn, Kawanda, can you say it any louder? You know my son is sleeping in the other room.”
“I’m sorry.”
I took a few more pulls from the burning blunt and felt my eyes getting seeded. The weed was good, had me feeling like I didn’t have a care about anything at the moment. I just sat there and felt high like a kite.
“He was cute, too,” I heard her say. “You never did tell me how much you came off wit’ when you fucked him.”
It wasn’t her business to know. “And you never will know,” I said.
“Oh, so you keepin’ secrets from ya friend now.”
“No, but you don’t need to know.” I chuckled. She laughed quietly too.
We continued smoking. My son was still sleeping. I thanked God he was giving me my moment to chill. I was too high at the moment to even hold him in my arms. Smoking also made me forget about what I saw earlier on BET, my rhymes being spit out of some other bitches’ mouths, and the betrayal I felt.
“Sammy, what you doin’ tomorrow night?” Kawanda asked.
“Why?”
“I know ’bout this bachelor party in Brooklyn that’s supposed to pop off. I heard some heavy hitters are gonna come through and they want some fine-ass girls to dance and entertain them,” she mentioned. “You can make some serious money there.”
I wasn’t fond of doing bachelor parties, especially in Brooklyn. Most times it was too many thirsty niggas and too little girls to please them, and it could be a hit or miss. You had no security to watch your back. And you left there with more regret than reward. At bachelor parties, especially the hood ones, niggas expected pussy and for you to suck their dicks; sometimes they could become a little too aggressive to get what they want. I wasn’t the one to turn tricks, but I’d heard many horror stories from girls who did these bachelor parties, and it was scary. A few months ago, they brutally raped this one dancer repeatedly, at least ten niggas ran the train on her and no one wore a condom while they raped her, and unfortunately she caught HIV.
It scared me to death, knowing how my mother died from it. I refused to allow that type of problem into my life. That’s why I always had been skeptical of who I fucked and sucked. I couldn’t and refused to die like my mother. I wanted to be healthy until the day I died. I had my son to live for.
I hesitated with my answer. I thought about it. Out of the $7,000 I made from the other party in the city, I only had about $2,500 left over. It was enough for my rent, to pay some bills, food for about a month, and some knickknacks. But by next month, I knew I was gonna be struggling again.
“You need to come, ’cause you know I got ya back,” said Kawanda.
My mind was telling me, don’t do it, but my desperation was screaming out, you need the money, bitch. I looked at Kawanda and said, “I’ll do it. What part of Brooklyn though?”
“Brownsville,” she said.
Fuck me!
Brownsville was one of the most grimmest and worst neighborhoods in New York City. Niggas out there didn’t give a fuck, with one or two murders every week, and it was definitely too far from home.
“Brownsville,” I repeated with trepidation in my voice. “You know how fucked up that area is.”
“Yeah, I know, but trust me, it’s gonna be cool, Sammy. I ain’t gonna take you to no bullshit. It’s gonna be other bitches out there too.”
“You know I don’t do VIP like that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
The bitch talked me into it. I was reluctant to go, but Kawanda was a smooth bitch with words, even when she was high. She amped a bitch up about making that paper and how it was a rapper’s party, and how he was signed to a record label and getting married to his high school sweetheart. And then she mentioned he was kin to Steele from the group Smif-n-Wessun, a well-known hip hop artist back in the nineties.
Kawanda spent an hour at my place. We talked, ate, and chilled. I truly needed the company. The minute she walked out, it was when Danny finally woke up from his nap. I heard him crying in the bedroom. Everything came to an end just in the nick of time.
I went to hold my son and feed him his bottle. I knew he was hungry. As I was holding him against my chest and feeding him his milk, I couldn’t stop thinking about that fraudulent rap group and then thinking about taking this trip to the Ville. I looked around my cramped, shitty apartment and knew I needed to do better. For the reason that I saw myself becoming like one of these bitches who got sucked into that hole of misery and nothing more but dancing, and turning tricks for weed and rent money.
It was my worst nightmare to become a broke-down and bum bitch with nothing to show for all her hard work and sweat over the years; especially when you have kids.
Chapter Nine
Tango
Tango exited the division of parole office on 14 Bruckner Boulevard and quickly lit a cigarette. He truly needed the nicotine. It had been a stressful morning. His first meeting with his parole officer, who was a bitch named Rochelle Hammond, and she was already up his ass about the conditions of his parole. She was a black woman with a curly afro and bad attitude. She looked harder than stone itself and was already warning him how quick she would violate him if he violated any c
onditions of his parole.
“Don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you,” she had warned him.
He had been out of Attica for forty-eight hours, and even though he was a free man, he still wasn’t free with having so many restrictions while being on parole. And there were too many restrictions for him to abide. He had to find a legal job as soon as possible and notify his parole officer of any new jobs. He had to tell his parole officer where he lived and worked, and if he moved, he had to tell his parole officer of his new address before he moved. He couldn’t socialize with any known felons or criminals. He had to ask for permission to travel anywhere fifty miles from his residence and receive approval before he could travel. He couldn’t carry a gun and a knife with a blade longer than two inches except a kitchen knife. He had to take mandatory drug test randomly. He had to abide all laws, not even run a traffic light. And if he broke any law, he could be sent back to prison even if he didn’t have any criminal charges.
Being on parole sucked, but Tango was still happy to be home.
Tango puffed on his cigarette and looked around the bustling area. While sitting in the waiting area of the parole building he ran into a few familiar faces from back in the days. It was somewhat like a street reunion. One particular friend he was happy to see again was Sheldon, his longtime running buddy and partner in crime. They came up together in the mean streets long ago. Sheldon had been sent upstate before Tango for drugs and grand theft; he did his time at Clinton Correctional facility. He had been home for over a year and wouldn’t max out until 2016.
The two men started talking and quietly reminisced in the waiting area as they passed the time until they were called to meet their parole officer. For Tango, it was good to see a friend again.
Tango leaned against the building enjoying his cigarette and enjoying every woman who walked by him, as he eyed them heavily and tried to holler at them.
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