by Mary Monroe
I was two months pregnant. I had just been with Manny, for sex I mean, for the first time just three weeks ago. No way was he the father of my baby. He got me to his bed after I’d finished with a really handsome and sexy trick that night—a very famous star from television! Every now and then I got a little pleasure from screwing a trick, but never the kind I wanted. Not even when it was a sexy famous person. The trick that night had almost done me some good. He would have if he’d done the job a little bit longer. One thing I never did was to try to get a trick to keep fucking once he had cum—unless he wanted to. A trick was all about business for me, not pleasure. So after I left the trick’s hotel room, I drove to Manny’s apartment, anxious for some sexual healing for myself for a change. I had been making my own orgasms for years. That was a sad confession for a woman my age, but it was true.
Manny did a good job in the bed, at least for me, he did. Nothing like that lazy, clumsy Clyde. Manny had a real nice body—most of it at least; six-pack across his chest, toned arms, nice butt, something nice between his legs. I overlooked his battle scars and skinny legs.
“Manny, look, I been in all kinds of shit these last few years.” The commercial was over, but we didn’t look at Friends no more. Manny was still looking in my eyes.
“I know that,” he told me, sipping his second shot of tequila. I wanted some myself so bad, my mouth was itching. But I had my baby’s health to think about.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I know you,” he said, pointing from his head to me. “Maybe you been mulin’ shit inside every hole in your body from Mexico for the cartels like my three sisters. Or, maybe you been robbin’ everybody in San Francisco but the mayor. Maybe you got some games I ain’t never even heard of up your sleeve.” He shrugged, blinked. “I used to do all that shit and then some, but not no more. And you know what,” Manny paused and took a real deep breath, beatin’ his chest with both fists, “it feels good. I didn’t know what it was like to walk down the street and not have to watch my back until last year. I’m thirty-six fuckin’ years old now, and I feel like I just was born. I feel…real good.” Manny had a beautiful smile, and it was aimed in my direction. I giggled like a little girl when he pulled me onto his lap. “Let me tell you somethin’, mamicita. Even when you was a little kid tryin’ to hang with the gangs, I had my eyes on you. You been comin’ to me now,” he nodded and winked and motioned toward his cracker box of a bedroom, “sharin’ with me my bed. I like havin’ you here.”
“I didn’t have nowhere else to go,” I admitted. “Nowhere. I ain’t got nobody I can call my own. I still got a posse still alive over here, but, well…” The homegirls I used to hang with in the old days, the ones who started having babies at twelve and thirteen years old, now their daughters was strolling around them same streets with babies of their own. There was a lot of grandmothers in the Mission still in their twenties. I could have been somebody’s grandmother by now. “I’d much rather be here with you than with them,” I said. I felt myself drifting farther and farther away from Clyde.
Manny squeezed my hand real hard. “Listen, you wanna be with me, I wanna be with you. If you down with me, ain’t nobody gonna jack you up and get away with it.” He looked down at my stomach and patted it real gentle and quick. “Whatever you want to do about the baby, I’ll be with you.” He sucked in his breath. “Now, you plan to have it or what?”
“Don’t you want to know who gave it to me?”
“Do you want me to know?”
“It happened…that night.” I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. “I don’t know which one is responsible.”
“Oh,” Manny said, sighing. He tried not to look mad, but I could see anger in his eyes. He bit his lip and rubbed the back of his neck. He slid me off his lap, and he stood up in front of me. “You want me to help you get rid of it?”
It took a lot to shake me up. My face got so hot, I felt like I was on fire. I stood up from that couch so fast, I almost pissed my pants. Manny moved back a few steps.
“I would never get rid of my baby. I don’t care if a demon came straight out from hell and got me pregnant, I would never in my life turn my back on a child of mine,” I said. My voice seemed like it was coming from my heart instead of my mouth. Manny always knew about me, how I was left with the trash in that alley when I was born. It was something I didn’t like to talk about, so most of the people who knew me didn’t bring it up that much. “I got raped down your street by so many guys I couldn’t count them. They didn’t hurt me that much, and I got over it real quick. But they left me a baby. My baby.” It dawned on me that my mother could have been raped, too. That was all the more reason for me to keep my baby. I couldn’t repeat my mother’s crime.
Manny’s handsome face dropped so fast and far I thought it would hit the floor. “Hey, I’m sorry. I just thought, well, you know, it bein’ so hard to raise kids and all, chicks get abortions left and right. My landlady’s daughter, cheesy bitch that she is, just had her seventh abortion.”
I sighed and sat back down. “Now that you know I’m keepin’ some rapist’s baby, do you still wanna see me? And even after my baby comes, will you? Because, maybe I’m gonna get me a real job.” Like Manny just said about hisself, I was feeling real good, too!
Manny’s eyes slid to the side, and he looked kind of nervous. But then he looked at me and shrugged. “I went from workin’ the streets, makin’ bank, gettin’ paid.” A sad look that I seen on Manny more times than I wanted to, slid across his face now. “At the same time I had so much, but still, I had nothin’. Cops and other hustlers always breathin’ down my neck, so many guns bein’ aimed at me I felt like I was facin’ a firin’ squad—even in my own house.” Manny then lifted his head high up and showed me a proud face, smile and all. “Now I’m a cook in a restaurant that’s so bootsy it ain’t even listed in the phone book. I don’t make much money, but, I wouldn’t go back to the old crazy life if you paid me.” And then Manny said something that just made me want to ball up and cry my eyes out. He said, “I want to live.”
Then I got serious, because I wanted to live, too. “I…If I want to get my shit together, I’m gonna have to move from my place, cut loose, uh, cut loose some people I been kickin’ it with for a long time…” I couldn’t believe the words sliding out of my mouth! Clyde didn’t know about the baby yet, and I didn’t plan to tell him until I had to. Soon, though. Things had changed so much with him. His daughter and his own expenses was still at the top of his list. He was still pissed off with Rosalee for running out on him, putting a dent in his income. Now he was losing even more money, left and right, because of me and Lula ignoring his messages and hiding out from him. Since Clyde ran his business in such a loosey-goosey way, instead of the way other men like him did, enforcing strict rules and using serious violence, he couldn’t expect nothing better from us.
But things had changed with our little family. We were outgrowing Clyde and the business. It wasn’t just because of Rosalee running off and them guys jumping me in that alley.
Things was changing because it was time.
Chapter 35
ROCKELLE HARPER
I had a feeling Ester was up to something that was going to affect us all, one way or the other. But I was not prepared for the information I was able to pry out of Lula.
“Ester’s pregnant,” Lula told me when I called her up the morning after Ester had fainted for the third time in three days on my kitchen floor.
“No way? How could she let that happen? Who is the daddy?” I shouted, looking at the yellow kitchen telephone in my hand. I frowned at chocolate smudges on the receiver that had been left by one of my three little pigs. I padded across the floor to dampen a paper towel to wipe the telephone. Clyde was on his way over, and I liked for everything in my place to be spotless when he visited. Even this late in our relationship, I still looked for ways to impress him. And one thing I could say about Clyde Brooks was he liked a clean woman.
&nb
sp; “I think I’ll let Ester tell you that herself,” Lula insisted, talking in a low voice. “She’s comin’,” she said, gasping. “Gotta go.” Lula hung up before I could say another word.
Ester was the last person I expected to get pregnant, especially while she was still in the business. Apparently, she had already started using her condition as a reason to refuse or cancel dates. The night before she developed a sudden mysterious backache on her way to visit a bedridden trick in Oakland. Clyde called me while I was in the middle of a trick myself.
“Rocky, what you doin’?”
“If you really must know, I’m sucking dick,” I told him, and I was. The only reason I’d answered my cell phone was because all three of my kids were sick, and I needed to be available if my babysitter had to get in touch with me. My trick, the nervous nineteen-year-old virgin son of another trick, didn’t seem to mind the interruption.
“As soon as you finish, call me on my cell. We got an emergency situation with Ester, and I need for you to take over.”
The night before that, Ester had claimed a severe stomachache. Clyde had to dispatch Lula to take care of Ester’s trick, who had requested any other woman Clyde had available. I expected a lot more problems with Ester because of her pregnancy, but I didn’t have much sympathy for her.
I had already had my kids when I started turning tricks, so I couldn’t speak from experience. But I had often run into a lot of pregnant women working the streets. Some of them still dated all the way up to the day or night they delivered. Then, as soon as they were able, it was business as usual.
There was a bowlegged sister from Panama working Capp Street. She went into labor while she was in the middle of turning a trick in the backseat of an Oldsmobile. I knew about it because I was in the front seat with her trick’s buddy taking care of my business.
“For me, havin’ babies is as easy as ridin’ a bicycle,” the Panamanian sister had told me, with so much pain on her face I flinched every time she had a contraction that night. Her trick was so stupid and drunk, he thought that he was the one responsible for all that screaming and moaning she was doing.
After the double trick, my girl and I hopped into my car and made it to the hospital just in time. Her son was born twenty minutes later. A week later, sister-girl was back on the street.
Being pregnant didn’t stop a woman from turning a trick if she wanted to. Especially a woman as rough and tough as Ester.
“So, Lady Ester said she was through turning tricks?” I asked Clyde, handing him another shot of tequila, the third in less than twenty minutes. He had arrived immediately after my telephone conversation with Lula. Clyde’s business was rapidly going down the tubes. Rosalee’s disappearance, Lula hiding most of the time, Ester getting herself pregnant and taking up with a reformed cholo—it was all about to push Clyde over the edge. “You cool with Ester’s condition, Clyde?”
“Hell no, I ain’t cool with that shit!” Clyde roared, looking around my living room for the kids. He trotted to the doorway leading from my living room. “Where them kids at? I don’t want them to hear me actin’ a fool.”
“I just got them a new PlayStation. They won’t come out of the boys’ room until I force them,” I said.
He sniffed hard and unzipped the light jacket he had on, revealing the handle of that useless gun he carried all the time.
“She’ll regret it,” Clyde predicted. “She ain’t never goin’ to find another man that’ll treat her as good as I did,” he added with a frosty pout. “I guess I didn’t give her enough attention,” he complained, sounding more like he was Ester’s father.
With the long history that Clyde shared with Ester, and as hot as he was for Lula, I never thought that I would end up being the only one of his wives he felt he could turn to when he was as distressed as he was. My sudden new position of power and my plan to get out of the business myself soon, forced me to use the situation to my advantage. I rubbed Clyde’s shoulders as he sat down gap-legged and depressed in one of the new plush wing chairs I’d recently purchased along with the new bookcase facing it. A shopping bag full of new books, hard-covers mostly, still sat on the floor waiting for me to stack them on the bookcase.
“You are way too tense, brother,” I told Clyde, kneading his shoulders like he was a pile of biscuit dough. “Let me take care of you.”
To my surprise, Clyde had made love to me for the first time earlier while the kids were at the movies with their babysitter. But it was just as lame for me as it was for him. He couldn’t even come, blaming it on his nerves. His fly was still open and I could see that he still had a massive hard-on, but I had no plans to do anything about it. One thing I had in common with the runaway Rosalee was I hadn’t enjoyed sex since my husband.
“Yeah, I’m tense!” Clyde yelled, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip, a harsh look on his face. “I got so much shit on my mind these days, it’s a damn shame.” He gave me a thoughtful look as he crushed the cigarette in an ashtray then clasped his hands. “Rockelle, I saw my daughter’s mama the other week. Megan. Blond hair, blue eyes, just as White as she can be. And what kinda name is Megan?”
“Hmmm. I didn’t know you still kept in touch with her.” I poured more liquor into Clyde’s glass and made one for myself, too. I needed it.
“I hadn’t seen that heifer since Keisha was born.”
I gave Clyde the most sympathetic look I could afford. I knew the whole story about Clyde and Keisha’s mother. From the part about her working the escort services before she got pregnant with Keisha to the part about the hit-and-run accident that had disfigured Keisha for life. Clyde had even told us about the woman’s sister hanging out with Charles Manson before his downfall and her death from an overdose of heroin. There was enough to this drama for a movie of the week on the Lifetime channel. Of us all, I had to admit that my history had the least amount of pain. Lula had lost her mother, her son, and her husband; Ester had been abandoned at birth and thrown out with the trash; and Rosalee had buried her daddy and all of her siblings, and left the kind of brother I should have married. I considered myself lucky. I would not have traded places with any one of them.
“Did that Megan woman say something that upset you?”
Clyde grunted as he turned to look at me. “Just seein’ her upset me.” An angry look suddenly slid across his face. I didn’t know if Megan was a subject I wanted to deal with any further. But it was too late to stop him now. “Her smug White ass is livin’ like a queen while I’m livin’ la vida loca, and strugglin’ like a galley slave to take care of Keisha.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it? Is Megan going to be in Keisha’s life now? Is she going to help you with some of Keisha’s expenses?”
“She sure is. She just doesn’t know it yet. You just watch me.”
“I hope everything works out the way you want it to, Clyde. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be easy, though. Especially now that Ester’s gone and got herself pregnant.”
“That Ester,” Clyde said, chuckling. He leaned back and moaned. I was still massaging his shoulders, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. He was still as stiff and tense as a plank. “And I always thought that she was my girl. She wouldn’t have even told me she was pregnant if I hadn’t asked her. I ain’t stupid. I knew somethin’ was up when she threw up on my new shoes the other night,” Clyde snapped. “And, she been lookin’ mighty plump around the middle lately.”
“She sure is,” I agreed, hoping Ester’s pregnancy would ruin her shape the way mine did to me. It was a mean thought, but I couldn’t help myself. I had just read a book written by Mo’Nique called Skinny Women Are Evil, and I agreed with everything she said.
I squatted in front of Clyde, looking in his eyes as he squeezed my hand and guided it to his crotch. There was a rare look on his face. He stared straight into my eyes and slid his tongue across his lip. Then he gave me a crooked smile and ran his finger along the side of my face and winked.
�
�That was real nice what you done for me,” Clyde said in a hoarse voice, motioning with his head toward my bedroom. “You got some pretty good stuff between your legs for a big woman,” he said with affection, not malice.
Clyde’s frank comment made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t like the gleam in his eye. The last thing I wanted this late in my relationship with Clyde was to start sharing a bed with him on a regular basis. Unless money was involved, I had no interest in establishing a physical relationship with another man until I met one for whom I had feelings. I took my hand away from Clyde’s crotch.
“Clyde, can you line something up for me this weekend? A few hours with horny old Mr. Bob would be nice, but if he’s not interested, whatever you can put together would be fine. Do you think you can do that for me?” I asked, no, I pleaded. Not just with my tone of voice, but with my eyes as well. I blinked at Clyde the way my kids blinked at me when they wanted something. “I’ll even do Fat Freddie, with his ugly self,” I added with a chuckle.
Clyde’s red eyes stared hard. He twirled his shot glass before he took another sip. He shook his head. “No, baby. I can’t do that. I can’t hook you up with Fat Freddie no more.”
“But I thought Freddie liked me,” I whined.
“That ain’t it, Rocky.” Clyde paused and rubbed his forehead. “You know Cisco? Cisco who comes out from San Jose all the time.” Clyde didn’t give me a chance to answer. “One of Cisco’s wives fucked Fat Freddie to death. Literally. Dude had a massive heart attack while they was doin’ the do.” Clyde shuddered and gave me a pensive look. “Mr. Bob wants to see Lula this weekend, Friday and Saturday night. I just hope that lazy-ass heifer don’t let me down.”
I wobbled up from the floor and peeked around the corner to make sure the kids were still out of sight. “Oh. Well, what else is going on?” I positioned myself in front of Clyde with my hands on my hips. He had already seen me naked tonight, so I didn’t worry about my bathrobe being open. I still received a lot of independent calls from men who’d seen my ad, which I had upgraded a week ago, in The Spectator. My new ad showed me in a more revealing outfit—a black leather thong and a see-through bra—and I was in a more provocative pose: one finger in my mouth, my eyes closed, and my other hand massaging my crotch. Since my days in the business were numbered, I figured I would go out with a bang.
