Natural Born Hustler

by Nikki Turner

  Until she and Fame became an item, D’s favorite pastime was acquiring things other people wanted or needed and selling them for a profit. She felt like a kid in a room full of chocolate and gumdrops as she filled her cart with bargains and steals. This was going to be a good week; she had just moved in with Fame, Recalls had plenty of good merchandise, and her favorite booster would have some nice items for her in a few hours. Things were going better than average.

  Desember’s phone had rung on three separate occasions while bargain shopping; she had not bothered to answer it. If it wasn’t Fame’s ring tone, what else or who else could be more important than what she was doing at that very moment? The fourth time, she took a look and noticed that all the calls had come from the same number. A number she wasn’t familiar with, but something told her to answer it anyway.

  “Hello.”

  “Hey, girl. I been trying to call you. Thank God you answered.” The voice was low and slightly tight.

  It was Kim, her favorite booster and best supplier. Desember got excited because she knew Kim was ready to deliver some other hot stuff—hot meaning straight out of the department store into Desember’s trunk and into the homes of her faithful customers. Just like anything else, since Desember was a faithful buyer and bought from Kim in bulk, Kim sold the stuff to her for next to nothing.

  “I saw the strange number on my phone,” Desember said, “but I was busy and didn’t know who it was. What’s—?”

  “Girl, I need your help,” Kim said quickly. “I’m locked up.”

  “Shit, Kim. Whad da fuck?” Desember was shocked. Kim had to be one of the top boosters on the East Coast. “What happened?” Desember asked, then realized that the what, when and why information wasn’t important right now. “Never mind that.” She could find out what happened later. “What jail are you in? And how much is your bail?” she asked instead. “Now don’t worry about a thing. You know yo’ girl gotcha, chica.”

  Desember took down the information from Kim, then dialed a bondsman who was one of her customers. She always looked out for him, just in case something like this happened. After working out the particulars with the bondsman, she hit Kim’s mother up on the phone.

  “Hi, how ya doing, Ms. Taylor?” Before Kim’s mother could answer, she introduced herself. “This is Desember, a good friend of your daughter.”

  The phone went quiet for a second before the slow-talking lady spoke.

  “I just got a call from her.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know why this girl does this to me. You know I had that girl when I was forty-five and she knows this ain’t good for my heart,” Ms. Taylor said.

  “I know,” Desember agreed, wanting to get back to the topic at hand.

  “I just got off the phone with her myself,” Ms. Taylor, dragging the conversation along, said. “She told me you would probably be calling but I hadn’t quite caught your name.”

  “It’s Desember,” she stated clearly, and shifted back into business mode, “Well, anyway, I’ve already got e’rything worked out with the bail bondsman. All I have to do now is shoot by your place and give you the money. He’s going to meet you at the jail so you can sign for her.”

  Even though Desember loved Kim and they had gotten a lot of money together, she knew better than to sign on the dotted line for anybody, because if they didn’t go to court then that was her ass, and she had enough of her own bullshit to have to deal with someone else’s.

  “That’s fine,” Ms. Taylor said obligingly. “How long before you get here? I’m getting dressed now. Been in most of the day—ya know, ever since I came in from the doctor.”

  After Ms. Taylor ran off the address and a few other non-pertinent pieces of personal information, Desember punched the street address into her navigational system and said, “I’ll be there by six-twenty.”

  “Six-twenty?” Ms. Taylor questioned.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m coming from a ways away, but don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

  Scarface said in the movie: “All I have in this world is my balls and my word.” Desember didn’t have balls to worry about, but she never broke her word.

  4.

  A One-Track Mind

  Clark Station Projects was an open-air market for drugs, prostitution, soliciting, stolen goods, violence and then some. Like most poverty-stricken neighborhoods, life wasn’t as promising or promised.

  Desember parked her 2004 red Altima in the visitors’ parking space with two things on her agenda. First, she wanted to recoup the money she’d just given Ms. Taylor for Kim’s bail. Second, she wanted to pay a visit to her best friend, Kayla, who had been calling the infamous projects home for one month shy of a year now. Since Kayla’s eighteenth birthday, the day she told her mother she was pregnant. In return, Kayla had received an ultimatum: “Get an abortion or find somewhere else to live.”

  Kayla chose the latter and Desember had helped her furnish her apartment and supplied all of the baby clothes and necessities. Since the baby’s daddy was MIA, D was both godmother and father to little Kaylisa.

  Desember was looking for Midget Man, one of her best customers. She knew she could make her money off of him alone. As she searched the scene for him, she was interrupted by a voice.

  “Hey, girl,” Vanessa greeted Desember as she pulled up and got out of the car. “You got some mo of dem Deréon jeans like the ones you sold Keeva last week?”

  Vanessa was a well-developed brown-skinned chick that sold pussy throughout the projects. She had a regular clientele of white boys that came through, and Keeva, light-skinned with green contacts, was her only competition.

  “Girl.” Desember smiled and got in hustle mode. “You ain’t no last week type of bitch, and I’m not gon even try to carry you like one. I got some newer, hotter shit for yo ass.”

  One of the first lessons a good hustler must learn (and Desember was definitely good at what she did) was that if she didn’t have what a potential customer needed or wanted, she made them think they needed or wanted what she had.

  Vanessa’s face lit up. “That’s why I fucks wit yo’ ass, girl,” Vanessa said, grinning. “I might buy two pair if you got ’em in size eleven.”

  Now Desember was the one grinning. “I just so happen to have two pairs of elevens that I was holding for you anyway.” Desember was kicking game.

  After breaking the ice with Vanessa, business wasn’t booming, but it was fair, and she hadn’t crossed paths with Midget Man yet. D had made five or six more sales when a dude walked up wearing a pair of tight-ass skinny leg True Religion jeans with a matching shirt and fleece jacket, and a silver medallion swinging on a forty-inch silver chain.

  He stopped in front of Desember. “Whad up, shawty?” She gave the dude a hard look because she didn’t know him. “I heard you got the new Gortex boots like the ones the nigguh Gucci Mane wo in ’is last video.”

  She wasn’t feeling the dude’s swagger at all, but that had nothing to do with business—especially if his money was green. If cats wanted to let Jim Jones and them dudes dictate how they dressed, who was she to object?

  “Yeah, I got ’em.” She nodded. “I got one pair left in a size ten and a half.”

  “That’s me all day, shawty,” said Silver Chain. “What they hitting for?”

  “Well, they cost like two fifty in the store, but I’m doing ’em for one ten.”

  “I’ve got seventy-five dollars right now,” Silver Chain propositioned, obviously feeling himself. Desember detested an arrogant-for-no-reason-at-all nigga.

  “And you still got it,” she told him, not taking any shorts.

  “Bitch, I know you ain’t going to let no funky-ass thirty-five dollars stop you from getting money.”

  No, he didn’t.

  “First of all”—she waved her finger—“whoever you think you is, I make money, money don’t make me. And second”—she moved her neck around a bit—“I damn sho ain’t gon let yo’ petty ass stop me from getting mines either. I don’t tell y
ou what to sell those lil tiny-ass crack rocks for, do I?”

  “Bitch, don’t get yoself fucked up out dis piece!” he exclaimed in a voice loud enough to get the attention of a few people in earshot.

  “Who gon fuck me up, nigga?” she came back, looking him dead in his face, and he was holding his tough-guy stare beat for beat.

  “Bitch, don’t play with me,” he barked after the slight. “Stay in a bitch’s place and you’ll live longer.”

  She didn’t flinch or back down. “Nigga, I wouldn’t waste my time with a petty-ass nigga no way,” she returned fire. A few people started to sneak peeks in their direction, and as the sun was going down, the daytime crew was being replaced by the night crew, who hung out in pjs.

  “Fuck you, bitch. Stupid-ass bitch. Fuck you, you nowhere-ass bitch.”

  She cut him off before he could could continue with his bitch campaign. “I ain’t going to be too many mo of yo’ bitches, and it takes two to fuck, so you need to pay more attention to your position before you fuck around and be the one assed out.” Then, twisting her neck, she added, “Nigga.”

  Silver Chain looked like he was about to flip or blow a good gasket or something.

  Fame had warned her that her mouth was too raw for some people, but dude had started it. She shrugged her shoulders, didn’t budge; she maintained her position with her hand on her hip. Akimbo style.

  He turned his back and walked away. Desember went on to help her next customer. Meanwhile Silver Chain quietly pulled out a chrome nine and pointed it at her pride and joy, squeezing the trigger three times. Just as he let off the final shot a patrol car turned into the project’s parking lot. Silver Chain didn’t wait around to answer any questions from the law.

  The police cruiser made its way in the direction of the origin of the gunfire. Desember stood by her car in shock as she stared at the three nickel-sized holes in the passenger side of her Altima, which she had grinded for all by herself.

  Though she was mad as hell, when the police asked her what had happened, she told them she didn’t know. She’d seen the building that Silver Chain had run into, and she even saw him peep out the window twice.

  She cut her eyes at the window when the police weren’t paying any attention and gave him the middle finger and mouthed, “Fuck you, nigga.”

  Trust and believe it wasn’t fear that stopped her from handing Silver Chain over to the po-po; it was her belief, or rather what she didn’t believe in: she wasn’t a snitch-ass bitch, and she couldn’t stand the got-damn cops!

  Over the next couple of hours D laid low in Kayla’s apartment. As she was about to leave, she saw Silver Chain coming out the cut. Desember took off running at full speed. And had cameras been rolling, Nike would have paid her a pretty penny for the performance she put on: she was more entertaining than Michael Jordan and LeBron James combined when her Air Jordan-adorned feet rose off the ground. Before Silver Chain knew it Desember had caught him from the back with both of her hands wrapped around his neck in a choke hold, causing him to lose his balance and fall to the ground.

  Once she took him down, she was in complete control. As mad as a demon on steroids, adrenaline made her feel as if she had superhuman strength. She rammed Jackass’s head into the concrete over and over again, and she didn’t stop until she realized he was unconscious. “I bet you won’t mess with nobody else’s car, you bitch-ass nigga.”

  Realizing that he had gone unconscious scared her so bad that she got up and left him there. As she made her way to her car and out of the projects, she heard someone scream, “Call 911!”

  Once she was out of the pjs she pulled over to the side of the road, rolled a fat blunt and smiled. Though she’d have to file an insurance claim and pay a deductible, in her eyes the debt had already been paid. She felt like the ass-whipping that she had put on Silver Chain was payment enough. Indeed, she had really taken the cost of the damages out of his ass.

  When Silver Chain woke up the next morning at a girlfriend’s apartment, still in the projects, he was thankful to still be on the bricks. If the chick had pointed out to the police where he was, he would have been a goner. He was already a convicted felon, on probation with ten years over his head—not to mention the gun charge alone would have given him five years mandatory in prison. Despite being a little bruised up, he smiled.

  As he walked toward his whip, the smile vanished. What the fuck is this? All four of the brand-new tires on his truck were sliced. There was a note under his windshield wiper: Life’s a bitch, then we die!

  5.

  Meet the Fam

  It was a picture-perfect Sunday afternoon in Flowerville, North Carolina: the sky was a cloudless, brilliant blue, and children were playing carefree, as only the youth know how, enjoying the last day of the weekend in the clement 65-degree surroundings while mature red, orange and brown leaves clung to the only home they’d known, some falling from those very same branches onto green lawns, like uninvited guests to a Labor Day cookout.

  The driveway was full, so Fame pulled over to the curb in front of his mother’s modest three-bedroom house. It was several decades old, like most of the others in the neighborhood, but well maintained. His mother, Francine, made sure of it; she took great pride in her home.

  Desember sat next to Fame in the car, uncharacteristically nervous. Fame gave her a pat on the thigh. “It’s going to be fine, boo,” he said. “They shit and wipe they ass the same as you.”

  Actually the Marauders were one of the most, if not the most, infamous families in the small county of Flowerville. And they were as thick as thieves: if one got into a fight, they all fought. They had a reputation for anything illegal: murder, drugs, assaults, extortions—always finding themselves on the wrong side of the law.

  The patriarch of the family was Felix Sr., who was on his nineteenth year of doing a 25-to-life sentence for killing a man with a baseball bat.

  The story was that at the age of twelve, Felix Marauder, Jr. was already a little menace, on his way to being a young terror. One day he got caught blowing up one of his neighbors’ mailboxes with a cherry bomb. It just happened that this particular neighbor played on a rival softball team against little Felix’s dad, and they couldn’t stand each other.

  When the guy found out who Felix’s father was, he made the mistake of telling Felix Jr. that his daddy was a no ’count bully full of hot air—Felix Sr. showed him a bully. According to the court documents the neighbor was more than sixty pounds bigger and a full six inches taller than Felix Sr. But the extra height and weight did him no good at the hands of the meaner mercenary, Felix Sr.

  Once the prosecutors showed the jury pictures of the dead man’s head, split open like a melon, they dismissed any thoughts of letting Big Felix slip through the cracks with a self-defense plea.

  After the incident, Felix Jr. decided he wanted to follow in his daddy’s bootprints. He got what he wanted. Six years later the same prosecutor who convicted his father worked a case against him, and in the end, Felix was sentenced to fifteen years in the same maximum-security prison. They became cell mates—repping Flowerville and the family name.

  “I don’t want to look like an outsider trying to get in where I may not be welcome. I know how close y’all are.” She knew how much family meant to Fame but was more concerned with how much Fame meant to her. She loved him so much and didn’t want his family to be the deciding factor in her being his wifey for real.

  Fame ran his tongue across his bottom lip. “You just as much my family now as my blood brothers and sisters,” he assured her. “And don’t forget it.” Then he leaned in and gave her a kiss. “Now let’s go in.”

  As soon as they walked through the door a girl who looked too much like Fame not to be related jumped up from the couch. They both had the same pecan-colored skin with cinnamon freckles all over their faces.

  “This is my sister, Faith … this is my girl, Desember.”

  Faith didn’t even acknowledge Desember, who was about to sp
eak when Faith turned her back and made her way over to the kitchen. “Ma … Fame got a girl wit ’im.”

  Desember wondered how she would act if she had a brother and he brought a girl home. Damn, I would have at least spoken and tried to make her feel comfortable, Desember thought. Just then Fame’s mother, Francine, came flying into the front room, hands wet, clutching a dish towel. She was about 5′6″ and apparently the donor of the skin tone and patch of cinnamon dustings her kids sported.

  “That’s my mother,” Fame stated the obvious.

  “I’m Francine, but people call me Fran,” Fame’s mother said in a matter-of-fact manner—not too cold, but not too warm either.

  With her hand extended, D said, “My name is Desember. It’s nice to have finally met you.”

  Francine offered a hesitant handshake. “What type of name is that?”

  “It’s the one that my mother gave me,” Desember said in the same cheerful tone, but it was a little harder to deliver. “It’s spelled with an s, not a c.”

  “Oh …” was all Francine said, then, “Nice, I guess.”

  These people are not making this easy, but hey, women never do, Desember thought, but she didn’t waver.

  “Yo two knuckleheaded brothers are in the den playin’ video games with they ol’ asses. Fabian … Frazier.”

  “Where Frank at?”

  “Taking a shit as always.” Then Francine called out, “Come in here and speak to your brother and his friend.”

  The two brothers came lumbering from another room. One was about six foot, the other about 5′10″, the same skin and freckles as the rest of the family.