What is UAE? Is it United African Empire? Ah hell no! When I was whizzing through the darkness it was a longer journey than the other two times it had happened to me. But it wasn’t long enough to have traveled all the way to the African jungle. And when I arrived, there was no safari! And, I didn’t see no broken-down huts or bald-headed ashy babies with flies chilling on their noses, their fingers so weak from starvation that they couldn’t even swat them away. I didn’t see no braless pygmies lined up to get one bowl of cereal from some foreigner scooping it out of a metal trash bin because they pitied them.
So that’s that. It definitely wasn’t Africa. Yeah, I heard of Korea before because they the ones who owned a lot of markets in Brooklyn and who shined up the fruit and stacked it in neat rows before any other grocers started doing it that way. They were the originators or champions of the open-twenty-four-hours salad bar. They was also the ones who was quick to say something slick to a nigga shopping in their store and set off a whole heated situation.
Of course everybody in the whole world heard of Japan. The Japanese got sushi. Any real top bitch has not only heard of it, she’s been served it, and has tasted it. Plus the high-end Japanese restaurants flaunted wicked architecture. Even their interior designs was doped off with separate grill stations at each customer’s table and a personal Japanese chef doing a knife show as he prepared steaks and shrimps and shit like that.
However, Chee definitely didn’t sound like a Japanese bitch. She didn’t look like any Japanese bitch I ever seen while chilling at Benihana. She was above them. See what I’m saying? And, once those foreign bitches, who got our same look, start speaking in different languages, showing the fuck off, how a hood bitch gon’ keep up? How she gon’ shine?
I was cool hugging his back. I had somehow blotted her out. I just wanted to get my moment, my feel, have my way with him without him being able to resist. I had always wanted to suck his collarbone since I was thirteen. Press my nude body up against his. Trace my prettiest finger lightly over his incredible jawline. Hold his face in my hands and feel the pleasure of his thick lips. More than that, he was the only man worthy of me marrying him and whose children I ever wanted to push out and keep and say these are his and my babies. Babies who were not a burden, but a treasure. But when I looked up while hugging him, her hands were dangling there on the backside of his neck. I could see her unusually precious pear-shaped diamond wedding ring. That sent me over the edge. It was the same as if she had stolen my life, was wearing my jewels, was living in my palace, was the mother of my sons, and was loving my man and apparently he was loving her back even more. Of course he was. They were both standing there glistening from the oil I’m sure he had massaged onto her skin. Her wet silky freshly braided long black braid, that after I put two and two together, and from what I had just overheard, had been braided by him. That infuriated me. But when she asked about her shoes, the Jimmy Choo’s crystal pumps, I felt stabbed. With one simple question she had highlighted for me that hey she’s right. This all her shit not mine. The silver, pearls, platinum, palaces, gold, and diamonds were all hers! Worth more than all those precious jewels was the man she had wrapped around her finger. How am I supposed to deal with that? It was as though she had hit the local number, the lotto, and the mega!
My mind switched when she said, “Our sons are about to fight over the Santiaga daughter.” At first I thought, Yeah that’s me. Then I sobered up and figured out what should’ve been pretty clear. Midnight had adopted my twin sisters, Lexy and Mercedes, when Santiaga got locked down. So one of them girls had caught the hearts of two of Midnight’s many sons. That’s stepbrothers in love with their stepsisters. I don’t believe in step-anything! Only real blood relations matter. And the fact of the matter is Lexy and Mercedes don’t share one drop of the same blood with Midnight’s real children.
So Midnight’s sons were fair game for them. Since Santiaga’s daughters all know a real man when we see one, ’cause we are the daughters of the realest man, of course one of them or maybe even both of them peeped that that twenty-one-years-young leader of the bare-backed young men in the palace gym was pure fire. Undoubtedly worth scratching a next bitch eyes out over or even putting a knife in her ribs. Who else could the young leader have been other than the son of Midnight? The king of men.
Wait a minute. My math mind was merging with a memory. When I was seventeen years young I definitely had asked Midnight if he had any children. He told me no. Why did he lie to me? He couldn’t have a twenty-one-year-old son now if he was not already born when I first asked him at age seventeen. Maybe I’m wrong with the number twenty-one that I guessed, from what my eyes saw, was the young leader’s age. Now I felt greasy for wanting to jump on his son’s dick. But not too greasy ’cause I didn’t know. And I did fifteen on lockup. I’m allowed to feel a lil’ anxious. But why were Midnight’s two sons fighting over one twin? They each could have had one to themselves. Hey, my twin sisters both look the same! Or maybe not anymore… Maybe one of them had gotten fat or sloppy. I doubt it, though. Maybe one of them was extreme fashion, and several cuts above the other. Maybe one of them had become an undesirable bookworm. But the fact that Chee was even the mother over my twin sisters, and she had all of the answers and info about them that I didn’t know and she had raised and seen them while I was locked in a cage, was another knife…, this time, through my throat.
Experts of art, fashion, and design, like myself, have eyes that are swift to see, survey, and size up the look, the authenticity, and value of all. Of course I had seen through the sheer white ceiling-to-floor curtains that were pretty but not powerful enough to block the sun. I saw their doped-off backyard replete with everything that hood niggas and average everybody else has to go to the park to enjoy with a million other strange motherfuckers doing the same. Aside from the swings and the seesaws, the outdoor brick-oven kitchen and the barbecue pit was to cry for. The collection of off-road vehicles, motorcycles, and exotic whips were lined up in the distance as well. That choked me, strangled me. To think that my father, Santiaga, was locked up in the box in an eight-by-five cell with no way out, while his man who he put on was wearing his crown, fathering his daughters, living his lifestyle and then some, was way too much.
I got even more heated because I did not know how everything went down between Santiaga and Midnight exactly. Santiaga didn’t say in his letters. I’m not stupid. So of course I know Poppa couldn’t say it in writing and also couldn’t say it to my face because we were both prisoners serving time. I do know that Poppa still trusts Midnight and that Midnight still looks out for him. That meant that Midnight never flipped on Santiaga. Poppa was swift with his revenge over anyone who did. Even from behind bars, Poppa he could make that type of shit happen. Still I couldn’t figure. Why was Midnight, who I saw back when I was seventeen years young on the exact day he left New York to move down to Maryland, rich? No not rich, filthy rich… when on the day he left all he had was one suitcase in the backseat of his black Acura, which I saw with my own eyes. Seeing him and Chee’s monopoly over everything and everyone, his wealth, women, property, possessions in great detail, was suffocating me. Now was I supposed to hate him? I already loved him. The fact that he landed on his feet and blew the fuck up like a real motherfucking hustler made me love him even more.
The real headbanger that happened in that master bedroom was when I realized that there had been mirrors in the palace, placed in the usual spots where mirrors belong. I had even looked into those mirrors one by one. It wasn’t till the end when I saw Chee’s vanity table, packed with perfumes and oils, lotions and creams, then looked up and saw Midnight and her in front of me, and looked back and saw them behind me, that I realized that I was staring into a mirror, but a dead bitch ain’t got no reflection.
5.
Must be in my casket now. I’m still. I’m laid out on my back. My face and neck are numb, paralyzed even. The back of my head feels mushy. I’m cold, no longer a ball of heat. I’m stiff, feel
ing no space on my left or right, over my head or beneath my feet. I don’t know if my limbs are all swelling or if the casket is shrinking. I can hear my own ribs cracking. I don’t know if I am still blind or if this is just the darkest darkness I ever saw. My eyes are glued closed. I can’t scream when I get furious. Someone stitched my lips shut. I feel something tiny crawling on me. Or maybe I’m imagining it. I’m outraged that I can still imagine. If I’m in my casket blind, deaf, and dumb, why isn’t my mind shut off? I want it shut off completely. Who would ever want to be buried deep in the cold dark earth while being 100 percent aware? Not me, but that’s what I am now, nothing else besides thoughts and imaginings. I was never a daydreaming, fragile, action-less vulnerable bitch. Now the tiniest bugs and worms and insects, and whatever else creeps and crawls below the earth, are looking at me like I’m food. On lockup, we had bitches who we treated like food. No one dared to treat me that way.
I’m thinking now, the whole rest-in-peace thing is a sham. I’m dead but definitely not resting and definitely not in peace. I began to think about people who I knew who got dead in my lifetime. One of my closest, tightest Brooklyn fly girls, from way back when we used to say shit like fly girls, was named Nique. We were best friends before I ever met Natalie. Nique was a crazy cutie, a goody two-shoes girl who loved school and was a cheerleader. Because we were both dimes, even though we were extremely different from one another, our looks and mutual popularity pushed and held us together. Only murder could separate us and it did. Nique was killed by her own moms who believed that Nique was fucking her man. Nique wasn’t. Nique wasn’t fucking nobody. And everybody except the donkeys know that fucking and raping ain’t the same damn thing. The night before her moms killed her, I found out from Nique that her momma’s boyfriend was all the time chasing and cornering her, tryna touch, feel, and fuck Nique even though she said no, hated him, and fought back. Her moms stayed stuck on stupid. But I think the crazy bitch was just pretending. She would tell Nique to try and get along with him even though he was not her real father. She would be telling Nique how nice he was and how good he was to her. She even said if it wasn’t for him, their lights would’ve been cut off ’cause she couldn’t afford to pay all of the bills on her own. I think she was on the low trying to convince her daughter that since the asshole was paying a few essential bills, why not overlook “the situation.”
But even she couldn’t take her own advice. She must’ve caught him in the act of lusting or violating Nique. So she mercked her own fourteen-years-young daughter. I was also fourteen, when I lost my fly-ass best friend. The Friday after Nique’s murder, me, Natalie, Simone, Reese, Zakia, Toshi, and Asia all went to school to rep for Nique. We had the wildest, illest “Rest-In-Peace Rally” our high school ever had. We made the whole student body stand up for Nique. We made the cheerleaders cheer for her, the band play for her, the drum line drum for her, and the thugs to feel for her on that day. Now I know it’s all bullshit. I’m wondering if Nique is still laying in her casket umpteen years later, still getting violated by creepy-crawly things same as when she was alive, ’cause now that she’s been dead for years, she can’t move, and her legs and arms are swollen and her casket is shrinking and her ribs are cracking, and the back of her head is disintegrating same as mine.
Before my death, this was my point to the prison chaplain, who along with the prison social worker and the prison psyche were all the biggest frauds. Furthermore, they existed not to cure or correct or inspire us. They were not qualified to do any of that anyway. They were a trio of broken-down bitches barely holding their own lives together, strategically placed and meagerly paid to take out their misery on the prisoner bitches who they stupidly thought were beneath them. Point-blank they were there to interrupt the gangs, crews, cliques, and families we formed to protect and provide for ourselves, instead of obeying any of the bullshit they was all peddling that, put together, all added up to nothing.
I was one prisoner who they couldn’t access. I was one who didn’t ever and never ever would confess or confide in them. When they talked, I’d think of other things, listen to music in my mind. I’d give ’em the glare of the blank stare and the torture of silence. They said I needed an exorcism, whatever the fuck that is. They couldn’t send me to church by force. So they tugged at my team. They even targeted my cellmate, a bitch named Veronica. She wasn’t one of my original Brooklyn crew. She was from Queens claiming Queensbridge. That was a reputable hood on my hood map but wasn’t the reason I put her on. I put her on with my team because me and Veronica was locked up in the same small cell, sitting on the same toilet, spitting in the same sink. She was watching even if she pretended not to be watching me. She could clock my movements, intercept or read my kites and letters, and count my contraband. I jumped her into the gang so she would understand our routine, participate when we breaking the rules, and maintain the confidence of the crew because of the threat that she would also be held responsible if we got caught doing the shit we do.
Next thing I know, Simone da Beast said she saw Veronica coming out of Chaplain Kaplan’s office. She left it up to me to find out what my cellmate was doing in there, what Chaplain was asking her, what Veronica was saying, and who she was telling on.
* * *
“Heard you was chopping it up with Chap,” I said casually. It was lights out and we was both laid out in our bunks.
“Something like dat. I didn’t say nothing in case that’s why you asking about it,” Veronica denied instantly.
“Nah, I know you ain’t no snitch. You know better,” I said softly.
“So what about it then?” Veronica turned the question back on to me.
“Chap’s the one I don’t trust. What did she ask you?”
“She was doing her job, talking about Jesus and saving my soul.”
“Why you was listening to that shit?” I asked her.
“I’m doing fifteen same as you. That’s a long time. I’m scoping out the benefits.” Then she added, “Chaplain got a jar of caramels. I heard another mate talking about it. She was like if you listen to Chaplain’s Jesus stories, Chap will let you chew her caramels,” Veronica said, then laughed.
“Chap got you open with a piece of candy?” I said, letting Veronica hear how ridiculous she sounded. “So all you did was listen?” I asked, still measuring the threat.
“Yeah. I figured if she got caramels, she got some other shit in her stash. So I listened a long time.”
“And what did you get out of it?” I pushed. Veronica went silent for some seconds.
“Chap has a few steaks in her stash. I ain’t taste nothing that good in a while. She threw butter on her beef. I got hooked. After I started chowing down while listening to what Chaplain was saying, it all started to make sense to me. She was talking about sins in a slick way. Like not asking me about confessing my sins but just telling me about what sins are; like lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, coveting other people’s stuff, having sex without being married, sleeping with someone’s husband or wife, shit like that. She was telling me how to confess, pray and apologize to the Lord for my sins and say certain prayers and then I’ll receive blessings from doing that.”
“That bitch is lying,” I said swiftly. “First of all, me and you is both serving ‘mandatory minimums.’ Do you know what the word mandatory means? It means that that shit is nonnegotiable. No matter what you do in here on the inside, even if you kiss the warden’s ass and the chaplain’s ass, and the social worker’s ass, and the psych’s ass, and all the C.O.’s asses, you ain’t getting out till you hit fifteen years’ time served. You can pray to the warden, the judge, the jury, Jesus, whoever! You ain’t getting out no earlier than fifteen. Don’t let her run that psych on you.”
“True dat, but Chaplain was talking about if human beings don’t give our lives to Jesus, and apologize to the Lord for our sins, and stop living sinfully, the only place our souls will go is to hell.” Veronica sounded like she was going for Chap’s talk.
“So what?” Veronica said passionately.
“I agree, so fucking what! No big deal, right?” I was ’bout to show her. “A lot of chicks on lock got their girl lovers. You know why? Because that’s what they want to do. That’s who they picked and that’s their choice, right?” I asked.
“Hell yeah that’s right,” Veronica agreed.
“But meanwhile, Chap doesn’t want to let you do what you want to do, choose what you want to choose. Chill with who you want to chill with. Chap says you gotta confess your sins and stop or else you going to hell. But Chap ain’t confessing her sins and even if she was, she damn sure ain’t stopping her stealing, smuggling, or her relationship with C.O. Baker who I know through the vine is actually married with some other woman! All that shit is a sin, even according to Chap. But not according to me. So what’s up with that? And if there really is a hell, and Chap knows she’s going there ’cause she’s still sinning and not stopping, it must not be too bad of a place to go, or she must not really believe in what she saying in the first place.” I wrapped up my campaign to snatch back my girl Veronica so she wouldn’t break our crew or eventually flip and betray us.
Life After Death Page 6