by Chunichi
Although LaShawn wasn’t secure with her looks, she didn’t think Larry had the right to belittle her and make her feel so unattractive. She made a promise to herself that she would begin to work on herself, to improve areas she could, and the areas she couldn’t improve, she was simply going to learn to love. She would be damned if she would ever let someone make her feel so low.
LaShawn knew that if her best friends knew how Larry was flipping on her and that she was getting her ass beat on the regular, they would have told her that she was stupid for staying with him. But her best friends couldn’t feed her weed habit, and they couldn’t satisfy her sexual needs. And although Larry had a little dick, LaShawn had grown quite fond of it; it worked for her.
Larry had no problem keeping LaShawn high on weed all day and all night. She didn’t know it, but that was a part of his plan for keeping her stagnant. He kept the refrigerator stocked with food so that she didn’t have to go out to get any food to feed her bouts with the munchies. He would roll a fat blunt in the morning and smoke it with her. Then he would leave her a “dove” a day to smoke all to herself. Once she smoked some weed and ate some food, she would lie down, go to sleep, and get up and do it all over again. That was her life.
Larry didn’t think that LaShawn was the best-looking girl he ever had. He was used to fucking with girls with long, pretty hair, and hers was nowhere near long. But she did have the best pussy he’d ever had. He played on her self-esteem because he knew he had low self-esteem. He felt that if LaShawn had experienced a man with a bigger dick, he would be history.
LaShawn turned the lights back off and was trying to go back to sleep. She was very much fed up with Larry and his bullshit. She was hoping that he was asleep in their living room and that his drunkenness was wearing off.
Her hopes were shattered when he came back into their bedroom in a bigger rage than when he had left out.
“Get up, bitch!” he said, as he flipped the light switch back on.
“Larry, please. What’s the matter now?”
“I said get the fuck up!”
LaShawn didn’t move. She was too scared to move. She had never before seen the look he had in his eyes. He stood over her with her cell phone in his hand. Fear pierced through her as she tried to reach for the phone to get it away from him. She had forgotten to erase her text messages. And there was one text that she didn’t want him to see.
“Who the fuck is Calvin?”
“Who?” LaShawn said, trying to play dumb.
“Oh, okay, you don’t know who he is? How about I call him and see?”
“No! Larry, please. I swear, he’s just a friend of mine.”
“Okay, well, since he’s a friend, he wouldn’t mind confirming that for me, right? Call him.”
LaShawn didn’t know what to do. Calvin was a dude she was just getting to know and was secretly hoping he would be her next man. He had a real job with benefits..
“Larry, please. Give me the phone.”
“Man, fuck that! I’ll call him.”
Larry attempted to call Calvin, but got his voice mail instead. He took the opportunity to let it be known who he was.
“Look here, muthafucka, don’t be calling my bitch! You hear me, dawg? This is my bitch. And if I find out who you are, I’m gon’ see you, nigga. I’ll piss in your mouth, muthafucka! You’d better stay away from my bitch!”
LaShawn was stuck. She didn’t know how to react. She knew there was no chance of her ever seeing Calvin again, or him even talking to her again, for that matter.
“Who the fuck is this nigga, LaShawn?”
“I told you, he’s just a friend.”
Larry smashed her cell phone into the bedroom door, breaking it into pieces and then lunged at LaShawn and started beating her ass. The punches were coming so hard and fast, there was no way she could block them all. He gave her several blows to her head and her face. There would be no way to hide the bruises this time.
That wasn’t the end of her beating. He got quite a few body shots in also, after he had damn near twisted her left arm out of its socket.
“Larry, please, stop!” she cried, as her light skin began to discolor.
“What the fuck you mean, he’s just a friend?” Calvin asked between punches.
“I swear to you, that’s all he is.”
“Bitch, you ain’t allowed to have no fuckin’ male friends! You ain’t allowed to have no fuckin’ friends at all!”
“I’m sorry, baby.”
“Yeah, you’re right, you’re sorry. You’re a sorry-ass bitch!”
LaShawn was in a lot of pain. He had really gone too far this time. She knew she was wrong for trying to get with another man, but she had been at the end of her rope with Larry for quite a while. He had been good to her some of the time, but the bad times had by far outweighed the good times.
One day when she was on her way to Whakelah’s apartment, she happened to meet Calvin. He had been installing cable for one of the residents on Whakelah’s floor. As he was leaving the apartment, and running for the elevator that LaShawn was stepping off, he bumped into her and apologized to her for his rudeness.
Calvin never made it on to the elevator. He stopped to carry on a conversation with LaShawn; he liked them thick, and thick, she was.
Seeing that she really wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or have any outside relationships with anyone, whenever another man showed the slightest bit of interest in her, she jumped on it, not knowing if or when she would ever get the chance again.
She did tell Calvin that she had a man. He then asked her, was she interested in having friends. She said that she was.
She had seen Calvin two times after that day. He had to install cable service in several apartments in her building. He had also installed his cable into LaShawn on the roof of the building in which she lived. They were trying to hook up again, but he was always working, so she had sent the text to him to see when he would be available.
“Get your fuckin’ ho ass outta my fuckin’ house!”
“What? Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t give a fuck where you go, bitch. I told yo’ ass I fuck wit’ pretty bitches, and I’m going through all of this shit for yo’ ugly ass. Fuck, no! I don’t think so!”
“Larry, baby, please, we can work this out.”
“There ain’t shit to work out. You fuckin’ another nigga!”
“I am not fuckin’ him. I didn’t fuck him!”
“You lying! You’s a lying bitch and I hate a bitch that lies!”
“Larry, I’m not lying to you, baby. Please, just come here.”
“Bitch, I don’t want your ho ass! You been hanging with your ho friends. Now you a ho, just like them ho bitches!” Larry stated, referring to Misha and Whakelah.
LaShawn could see that his mind was made up. She got some clothes on and started grabbing whatever she could, so she could get out of there as fast as she could. She had no idea where she was going, looking the way she did, but she was leaving Larry’s apartment.
“What the fuck you think you doin’?”
“I’m leaving,” she said, looking at him in bewilderment. Didn’t he just tell me to get out?
“Not with the shit I brought you, you not. You came here with the clothes on your back, bitch, and that’s how the fuck you leaving here!”
LaShawn couldn’t believe he was doing this to her. She had stuck with him through all kinds of bullshit in the two years they had been together. Bitches were always calling his phone and texting him, but she didn’t blow his spot up. She knew he had other women, but she never called anyone or questioned his movement.
All of the times he had hit her, she never called the police on him. She never once tried to get him locked up for abusing her or for selling weed, when she very well could have. Yet, he was throwing her out like spoiled milk.
She didn’t realize just how much she didn’t have until this very moment, but what she did realize was, she had to get her own
place. She didn’t like the feeling of someone telling her to leave a home that was never really hers in the first place. She now knew what her mother meant when she kept telling her, “God bless the child that got his own.”
It was three in the morning, and LaShawn didn’t know where to go. She wasn’t going to her mother’s apartment. One look at her face and her mother would be sure to call the police to come and lock Larry’s sorry ass up.
LaShawn didn’t know why she still wasn’t trying to call the cops on Larry. Was she just as sick and twisted in the head as he was? Did she simply have a heart and didn’t want to inflict the same pain on him as he had inflicted upon her? Or was she just waiting for an opportunity to get his ass back for all the wrong he had done to her?
She thought about going to Misha’s place but decided against it. She really didn’t want to disturb Whakelah and her kids at this hour. LaShawn couldn’t face Misha or Whakelah. She knew they were like her sisters, but she just couldn’t let them see her this way.
She hadn’t even looked at herself, but from the way her face felt, she was picturing Angela Bassett’s face in What’s Love Got to Do with It? One thing was clear to LaShawn—Love ain’t have a damn thing to do with what Larry had done to her.
She didn’t have too many choices, so she went to the only other place that her clouded mind could think of.
“Yeah, we got a cot, but I don’t know if you gonna want it,” the attendant told her, as he pointed to the available cot.
LaShawn looked around the shabby homeless shelter. Her mind was reeling as she tried to figure out how in the hell she went from sleeping in her warm and comfortable bed to standing in the cold, drab, rat- and roach-infested homeless shelter in which she now stood. She knew she wasn’t dreaming, that her circumstances were as real as the homeless man on the cot to her right, picking the skin out of his toes and putting it into his mouth.
“I’ll take it.”
LaShawn just needed a place to sit down and gather her thoughts. She had to map out a game plan. She never had a place to call her very own. All she knew was her mother’s apartment and Larry’s apartment. It was definitely time that she got up, got out, and got something of her own.
LaShawn didn’t dare pull out her wallet or check her pockets to see how much money she had. She would have been beaten up again and possibly robbed for every dime she had. She decided to wait until the sun came up, which was in another hour, and then she would hit the streets and see what was good.
She had learned a little something from Larry in the time that they had been together. All she needed was a thirty-dollar bundle of weed and she could turn that into a hundred dollars in cash in no time. Then she would take the hundred and get an ounce and flip that, and she would work it like that, until she could get up enough money to rent a place.
A homeless woman asked her, “You gonna eat that bread?”
The smell that reeked from the woman’s body was almost stifling. She had a pound of dirt caked on to her already black skin. The layers of clothing that adorned her body most likely consisted of every item of clothing that she had ever owned. Her hair was filthy and matted into four huge dreadlocks. And by looking at what was left of her teeth, bread was about all she could eat.
“No. Here, it’s all yours.” LaShawn handed her the piece of bread from the tray of food they had given her. As the woman began to walk away, LaShawn called her back and gave her the whole tray of food.
She looked around the homeless shelter at all the people who had nowhere to go, no one to love. She didn’t have much, but now realized just how much she did have.
Once she secured her a place, she was going down to Social Services and get straight. She could have used her mother’s address to apply for emergency funds and food stamps, but LaShawn wanted to handle this situation all on her own.
Two weeks had passed and LaShawn had yet to go back to Webster Projects to check her girls out. She had bought a TracFone, but she hadn’t called them either. She hadn’t even bothered to holla at her mother. Needing some dollars to set her straight, she was on a straight grind.
GIRLS 4 LIFE
Noticing that LaShawn hadn’t reached out and touched them in a minute, Misha went to Larry’s apartment looking for LaShawn. She was surprised when another female answered the door. When Misha asked the female to tell Larry to come to the door, she called him, but he wouldn’t come to the door. Misha simply put two and two together.
Once she checked with LaShawn’s mother and she hadn’t seen her either, Misha started putting the word out on the street that she and Whakelah were looking for LaShawn.
Tank, Whakelah’s cousin, had run into LaShawn as he was coming out of the barbershop on 145th Street in Harlem. She was selling weed, hand to hand. He called Whakelah as soon as he had copped a bag from her and told her that he had located LaShawn. Tank had informed Whakelah that LaShawn wasn’t looking like her usual self, like she was going through some rough shit.
Whakelah got off the phone with Tank and took her kids to her mom’s crib, which was only a few blocks away. She then called Misha and told her what Tank had said.
Once Whakelah had gotten back to the projects, she got up with Misha. They jumped in a cab and went downtown to Harlem to find their homegirl. She was in the exact same spot that Tank said she would be.
“Yo, why the fuck you ain’t tell us what was going on?” Misha asked LaShawn, once inside the cab they had to force her into.
“I just couldn’t.”
“Man, we ya girls,” Whakelah said. “If you can’t tell us, who can you tell?”
LaShawn knew Whakelah was right, but she was just too embarrassed to let them in on what she was experiencing with Larry.
“Where the hell have you been at all of this time?” Misha asked her.
“Trust me, chick, you don’t wanna know.”
“Oh, but I do, so tell me,” Misha said, waiting for an answer.
LaShawn had taken a pause for the cause. Should she tell her girls where she had been, and still was resting her head, or should she lie to them? LaShawn was tired of lying.
“I’ve been staying in a homeless shelter on Kingsbridge Road.”
“A what!” Whakelah yelled.
“Oh shit! Chick, for real?” Misha asked in astonishment.
“Yeah, for real.”
As the cab driver drove the three young ladies up Lenox Avenue, and over the George Washington Bridge, Whakelah and Misha caught LaShawn up on things that had been going on in the hood since she had been away.
They arrived back in the Bronx and in front of Webster Projects in no time at all. LaShawn had only been gone a few weeks, but coming from the surroundings in which she had just come from and seeing how the truly poor was living, she was grateful to be walking into her old building. She wanted to go to her mother’s first to let her know that she was all right, since Misha had expressed to her how worried her mother was.
Whakelah ran toward their building. “A’ight, y’all, come on and hurry up, ’cause I’m chocolate and I will melt.”
Misha went to pay the cab driver, but he declined. The middle-aged Hispanic man had been studying her from his rearview mirror. So he proposed a movie and dinner, and she accepted.
Bam! Just like that, she had another client. Things were looking up.
LaShawn watched her girl do her thing. The crazy thing was, Misha didn’t have to do anything. Men simply flocked to her. LaShawn wished she had that effect on men.
Misha and LaShawn got out and followed Whakelah into the building.
Misha pulled the hood of her Rocawear sweat jacket over her head. She had just gotten her hair done, so she wasn’t trying to mess it up. It had been an all right week for her in terms of her clients. Nothing special like the paper Clutch had dropped her a few weeks before, but she was able to get her hair freshly permed, cut, and styled, have her nails done, and pay her cell phone bill.
LaShawn’s mother was extremely glad to see her daughte
r. By looking into her eyes, she could tell her daughter had been to hell and back. She wanted to go grab her .38 special and go knock on his apartment door and blast his fucking brains out for hurting her baby. She could see through the cheap makeup that LaShawn had on. That no-good pimp had been putting his grimy hands on her child. Well, LaShawn’s mother had brothers, and they had something for niggas like Larry. And she would be giving them a call as soon as her daughter and her friends left her presence.
LaShawn took a hot shower and wiped the days of dirt off her skin. She then went to her old room to get some clothes and came back out with a couple of bags.
“Where are you going this time?”
“It’s time for me to do my own thing, Ma,” LaShawn told her mother.
Her girls saw that it was about to be a Hallmark moment. Whakelah and Misha said their goodbyes to LaShawn’s mother and let LaShawn know that they would be waiting for her in the hallway.
Her mother wanted to shake some sense into her daughter. Hadn’t she learned anything at all from this whole crazy ordeal? Didn’t she know that her mother’s home was the best place for her to be? It was her safest option. Her old room was right there waiting for her, and she wouldn’t have to worry about where her next meal was coming from.
“Why are you making life so hard for yourself, LaShawn?”
“Ma, I’m not trying to make life hard, it just is.”
She wanted to tell her mother that she was grown and that she was going to make decisions that may not always be good, but life was hard anyway. After Larry had put her out with nothing but the clothes she had on her back, she knew she had to take some losses, and it was evident that she had lost this round. But she wasn’t going to keep on losing. She had some things to prove to herself, her mother, and that no-good, son-ofa-bitch ex of hers.