by Mary Monroe
From that day on, I didn’t want Clyde out of my sight. I followed him around like the puppy he never got. But he didn’t feel me. He was a grown-up man with girlfriends up the ying yang, and that daughter I mentioned. He was also working at this place selling used cars in Oakland, and he had a lot of friends his age who he wanted to hang out with.
I dropped out of school because it interfered with my social life. I led a real busy life with my homies, and it drove the foster folks crazy. Then I moved into this place with three of my girls when I was seventeen. We took turns letting the landlord feel us up so we wouldn’t have to pay the rent when we didn’t want to. I was going nowhere real fast.
When we needed money for weed and other necessities like makeup, beer, and hot clothes, we went up to old men on the street and took them in the alleys to give them blow jobs or hand jobs. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to make the money. But it was scary. Especially when the man wanted something other than a blow job or a hand job. I sold my virginity for forty dollars and three fresh-baked bear claws to the man who delivered stuff before daylight to a bakery on Mission Street.
A lot of times I got jumped by other girls, or their men, and they took my money. Oh, my life was so cold and lonely and dangerous. I never knew if I would see the next day. I had nightmares about somebody jacking me up and throwing my dead body back in the same trash can I came from. That made me cry a lot.
The only times I was really happy and warm was when I went with Señor Rios’s brother to visit his lady friend in Oakland. Because that’s how I got to see Clyde. When Señor Rios died, Clyde’s grandmother took it real hard. She encouraged me to keep coming to her house anyway. She said me being around kept her from forgetting about Señor Rios. I was a “woman” by now and a hot-looking one, too, I am proud to say. Clyde, loving the ladies the way he did, really started feeling me then.
When I tell people I was Clyde’s first “wife,” they think he turned me out, wooed me into the sex business. Especially some of his ex-wives. Them ungrateful bitches, they thought that shit because they couldn’t get along with Clyde. They made up their minds that he was the one calling the shots. Nuh-uh. I turned Clyde out. I was the one to get us both in business.
Clyde needed money more than I did with that daughter of his to take care of. She got run over by a fast car when she was a little baby. To see that poor girl with so many things wrong with her broke my heart. Jesus would weep if He seen her. Now, I never knew nothing about medicine and doctors and stuff like that. Them things remind me of sickness and dying, which I came so close to, so I don’t like to think about that shit if I don’t have to. That’s why I never asked Clyde a lot of questions about his daughter. But he talked about her like she was a gift from God, like people say every baby is. Even though God didn’t stop her from getting run over.
Anyway, from what I was told, the girl was normal up until she was around two or three. Clyde’s relatives was supposed to be looking after her but obviously, they wasn’t if she got run over right in a church parking lot. Clyde didn’t have much money in them days, so there wasn’t much he could do to get her put back together again.
One of the reasons I get so pissed off with the world is, if you ain’t got money, you ain’t got no chance if somebody run you over and break your legs and smash your face like they done Clyde’s daughter. Poor Clyde. He told me how he started doing some of everything to get paid—washing cars, driving rich and famous people around in limos, waiting tables, and skycapping at the airport. He was even low-down enough to rob folks, like he was on his way to do the morning he found me.
Clyde said that he needed so much money to take his daughter from one specialist to another. The girl went through hella surgeries and still ended up looking like a nightmare. Words cannot describe that girl. When I tried to tell people who never seen Keisha how she looked in the face, I told them to go rent that old movie The Elephant Man. They thought I said that to make a joke, but it was the honest-to-God truth.
It broke my heart in two when Clyde told me how them doctors told him that Keisha would probably not live past age twelve and that he should prepare hisself for it, and her. Because of the injuries to her head, Keisha had to deal with fluid always moving around and settling in part of her brain. Something about the vessels getting messed up. The blood, and whatever else we human beings got up in our heads, it couldn’t circulate the way it was supposed to. If Keisha wasn’t lucky and too much fluid settled in one place for too long, infection would kill her. Clyde said that doctors told him that the older Keisha got, the more the fluid would fuck with her brain. All Clyde could do was make Keisha as happy as he could while she was alive. And let me tell you, that man would have shot the president if it would have made Keisha happy.
But there was a bright side to Keisha’s mess, if you wanted to call it that. Keisha’s mind was sharp as a tack, so she was a very smart girl. Me, I called it part of God’s plan, which to me, had got even more mysterious by now.
As Lula said when she talked about her baby dying right after being born, God was the biggest pig in a poke the world would ever see. He had hella surprises. The good ones was nice, but with so many bad things happening to good and innocent people, I didn’t know what the world was coming to.
Clyde and his grandmother, they really was off into church, and the Bible, and all that other holy stuff. They couldn’t make no sense out of what happened to Keisha. But they never gave up on God.
Keisha was such a smart and holy girl. She knew she was probably going to be with God a lot sooner than the rest of us, but that didn’t even faze her.
I seen a lot of myself in that girl, and I think Clyde did, too. It got easy for me to see why he liked me so much. Me and Keisha kept that “daddy love” thing in Clyde going.
Even with all of the bad habits I had, I had some good in me. And I hoped I always would. I made up my mind a long time ago that if me and Clyde break up our friendship one day, I would always be there for Keisha.
Instead of Keisha dying as a young kid like the doctors said she probably would, she reached her teens and kept on ticking. But Clyde said it was hard on him because for every year Keisha lived, he felt like it was “borrowed” time, so he made the best of it. He got more and more attached to her. He knew it was going to be hard to let her go when her time ran out.
Keisha’s legs was so weak, she had to start walking with two canes. By the time I met her, she couldn’t even lay down for more than a couple of hours at a time because that fluid was settling faster. She had to sleep propped up in a chair because if she laid her head down, she would wake up with a granddaddy of a headache. It made me cry when Clyde told me how him and his grandmother had to get up umpteen times during the night to turn the girl over and make sure she hadn’t slid off the chair she slept in. When Clyde moved into an apartment by hisself, he hired a nurse woman to go help his grandmother with Keisha a few days a week. That meant Clyde needed even more money…
Clyde told everybody he would do whatever it took to make his daughter’s life as enjoyable as possible. That was probably Clyde’s biggest challenge. See, Keisha being the smart girl she was, she liked the same things other young people liked—nice clothes, all the latest CDs, her own big-screen TV, eating out. Even though some ignorant people pointed at and ran from Keisha in public, that didn’t bother Clyde or Keisha. He still took her out all the time. When he was around ignorant ghetto people, he made sure them motherfuckers all seen that Glock in his waistband. You wouldn’t believe how fast they stopped pointing and laughing at Keisha then.
Being treated like a freak didn’t never bother Keisha. “Daddy says I’m just as good as anybody,” she bragged, grinning out that hole on the side of her face that used to be a mouth. “And even better than some people.”
“And he’s right,” I agreed. I prayed that one day I would have a child as happy and well-adjusted as Keisha.
Even with that face of hers, Clyde took the girl to an expensive beaut
y parlor and the women kept Keisha’s hair looking fly. One month it was cornrows. Another month the girl wanted a weave like Diana Ross.
For her sweet sixteen birthday party, Clyde invited a bunch of kids from the ’hood to come, and every single one of them little devils said no! So Clyde paid them to come, and of course they all came then. I was there, for free, and I was glad to be there. I never seen Keisha so happy than I did that day. Tears came to my eyes when a boy asked her to dance. Even though Clyde had paid him, the boy looked like he was having a good time. And so did Keisha.
“Look at me, Ester! I can dance, too,” she yelled, her feet going every which way as that poor boy dragged her across the floor.
Once that girl got the hang of it, she almost danced everybody off the floor. Them useless legs of hers didn’t slow her down. And let me tell you, you ain’t seen nothing ’til you seen that girl dance the salsa the way I taught her—dragging one leg one way, dragging the other leg the other way, hips bouncing like jumping beans. When Keisha danced, her head looked like a big dented rock, and her eyes rolled back in her head like somebody having good sex. It was such a sight, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Even before me and Clyde got real close, other women, mostly rich White women he met on one of his many jobs, had already spoiled him by giving him money. Besides, it made his life with Keisha easier. So it wasn’t no big deal when I started spoiling him by giving him my money, too. I even told him how I got paid. He didn’t like the tacky way I made money, but he never turned none down, though.
“Ester, hustlin’ them streets the way you doin’ will get you killed or messed up for life real quick. Baby, them street tricks’ll end up hustlin’ you,” Clyde told me. “A pretty young girl like you could play with a much better class of tricks. You ought to be gettin’ paid in nice hotels with clean dudes from out of town or nice married men in the suburbs. Like the ones I know…”
“I don’t know how to hook up with men like that. I been in the ghetto all my life,” I reminded him. “Where they at?”
“They everywhere. I been dealin’ with upscale men like that for beaucoup years,” Clyde bragged.
Clyde wasn’t lying about that. Even though he was friends with a lot of thugs, and other people who worshipped the low-down side of the law, he really did have “friends” in high places. All of them horny as hell. In addition to all the other jobs he had already done, he worked in some nice restaurants, and he worked in some of the biggest, most expensive hotels in San Francisco. Big stars and other everyday rich people went to them places all the time. Clyde had even parked cars and worked as a cabana boy in L.A. There was nothing like the beaches in a lusty place like L.A. to make weak rich people want to get loose. And Clyde was there to tighten them up.
Clyde was the kind of person rich people liked to take aside and spill their guts to when they got drunk. Some of them same drunk people wanted Clyde to do more than listen to them. You would be surprised at how many fat rich ladies, White ones especially, wanted to go to bed with a husky Black dude like Clyde, at least once. Some of them women wanted to do it real bad so they could get back at their husbands for some shit they done. And some did it just to see what all the fuss was about Black men in the bedroom. Them women wanted Clyde bad enough to pay him some money or give him expensive gifts.
Clyde’s own words was, “If they fool enough to give me money to do what I’d probably do to ’em for free anyway, the least I can do is be fool enough to take it.” He laughed when he said that.
When it was men sharing their life stories with Clyde, the subject always got around to women like me.
“Well, since you know so much, you be my man and hook me up with some of them tricks who come from out of town and who live in the suburbs.”
And that’s just what Clyde did.
“I make the phone calls, y’all make the house calls,” he sometimes joked.
I never really liked sleeping with men for money. To me, it was always just a job.
Clyde’s newest “bride” (I guess that’s the best description) Lula, already said she didn’t plan to do but enough tricks to get herself situated. But that’s what Rockelle said and look at her now! As much as I hated to admit, that shit Clyde fed to me about Lula being new and maybe cooking up a scam on Mr. Bob made a lot of sense. I had to go with her to make sure that didn’t happen because I couldn’t have no new girl interfering with my money. Mr. Bob was special to me.
I would have been cooking my own goose by not having Mr. Bob’s back. He asked for me more than any of the other girls. When he traveled, I was the only one he usually took with him for emergencies. So far, all I’d had to do on those trips was sit around and drink and go shopping with Mr. Bob’s credit cards. What more could I ask for?
Mr. Bob was real entertaining, too. He’d play the piano for me, do magic tricks, and teach me French words. The real fun happened once, and if, I got him into his bed. Most of the time he couldn’t come if I called him. I think he just liked being naked with women for the thrill of it. He’d flop around on his bed for a minute or two, then deflate like a stuck balloon. But every now and then, Mr. Bob managed to stay sober long enough to do the job. And, believe it or not, he done it good!
Clyde was right after all. It would be better for all of us for me to go with Lula on her first date to Mr. Bob’s house.
I would make sure she done a good job on Mr. Bob—but not too good. That was my job.
Chapter 14
LULA HAWKINS
Clyde didn’t want me to be Rosalee’s roommate. After only a month, he suggested I move out of her apartment.
“Rosalee needs her space to keep her mind clear. When she get distracted, I got a mess on my hands. She can be as mean as a old settin’ hen. That husband she left back there in Motown let her go around unsupervised. That was why she ran amok to the point where she threw him aside to come out here with her mama. Sister-girl got some seriously spooky, down-home, southern-fried shit goin’ on in her head, and you ain’t too much better. But you a lot easier to keep in line than Rosalee, and I like that,” Clyde told me. I was in his bed with my head on his chest. He had a strong heart. With every beat, my head rose like a cloud.
Clyde was the first man I’d made love to since Bo. Well, there had been quite a few trick sessions since Bo, but they didn’t count. To me, screwing a trick was just another bodily function. But it was still on the same page as lovemaking—but at the bottom of the page, even below masturbation.
While a lot of people just shared a cigarette after sex, or a joint in a lot of cases, Clyde and I curled up in each other’s arms and had some deep conversations.
I’d only been with Clyde a week before he decided to see for himself why so many of his clients were already calling him up and asking for another date with me. One, the popular Mr. Bob, had already put in his bid to be one of my regulars. That really got Clyde’s attention. It got to the point that every time he saw me, he looked at me with a sparkle in his eyes and a sly grin on his face. I knew that the other girls noticed it, Rockelle especially.
“Don’t let Clyde’s long-eyed looks go to your head, girl. He used to do the same thing to me when I was fresh,” she told me with a sly smirk. I noticed right away how Rockelle seemed to keep some distance between herself and the other girls, even when we were all together. She was quick to disagree about something and quick to point out a flaw in one of us. Like the time Rosalee told us how a new trick had admired her long legs. “Too bad you got such knobby knees. And didn’t I see a varicose vein the other day?” Rocky said to Rosalee.
Anyway, I ignored Rockelle’s comments when it came to the attention Clyde paid to me. Ester was the opposite. “Get ready to spread your legs, girl. Clyde’s got that same look in his eyes he had just before the first time he jumped on me.”
I guess I could say that when Clyde was ready for me, I was ready for him. I had experienced such an intense sex life with Larry that I had perfected almost every trick in t
he book and then some. If I didn’t know anything else, I knew how to please a man in bed.
Tonight was my second time in Clyde’s bed. It had been a long day. Clyde had taken me to see some of the magnificent sights in San Francisco that people came from all over the world to see. We’d had breakfast in a sidewalk café in Haight Ashbury, walked and shopped all over Chinatown, rode the cable cars, and had drinks on a party boat on the Bay facing Alcatraz. Since I had never been outside of the south until now, seeing things that I had only seen in movies and magazines was a real experience for me. I behaved like the country girl I really was.
In the Castro District, home of most of the city’s gay population, I played a guessing game with Clyde, trying to determine which people were men and which ones were women.
After a heavy dinner and several glasses of wine in an Italian restaurant near Fisherman’s Wharf, and an hour of salsa dancing at a Latin nightclub south of Market Street, Clyde took me to his apartment in the expensive Marina District. We drank more wine and listened to Miles Davis before we wobbled into his bedroom.
I would curse Larry Holmes until the day he died for spoiling me. I knew that for the rest of my life, I would compare every other man I slept with—real lovers and tricks—with Larry. Poor Clyde. Fucking him the second time was just as dull and unsatisfying as the first.
As cool and sexy as Clyde acted and looked, his lovemaking style was on the level of a schoolboy. At least to me. He would have had a fit if I’d told him how Ester and I discussed his bedroom techniques. He was clumsy and loud. And kissing him was like kissing a fish. He pursed his thick lips, kept his eyes open, and made barnlike noises that would have made me laugh out loud if I hadn’t been so drunk.
