by Mark Anthony
The lady in the principal’s office was very sweet and accommodating. She told me to have a seat and she would handle everything. She got on the phone and within about three minutes or so my son walked into the principal’s office.
“Daddy!” he said with a big smile. Because of the expression on his face I know that he was shocked to see me.
“What’s up, homie?” I said to him as I held out my hand for him to slap me five.
I then took LL by the hand and walked him into the hallway so that we could talk in private.
“You okay?”
He nodded his head and told me that he was fine.
“Listen, I just wanted to tell you that I didn’t come home last night because I still have to promote this new book so I’m gonna be out of town for a few days, okay?”
“You’re gonna be with Fifth Ward?” LL smiled and asked. He thought that was the coolest thing, that his dad had written a book with a rap icon.
“Well, he’s real busy so he’s not gonna be with me for the whole time.”
“So when will you be back?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll make sure I call you every day, okay?”
LL nodded.
“And listen, you played real good the other day but what was that stunt you pulled when the coach took you outta the game?”
LL turned up his lips and a frown came on his face as he explained, “I was playing real good and he shouldn’t have taken me out. If I messed up then he should put me on the bench, not when I’m playing good and doing everything right!”
“But LL, y’all were blowing the other team out.”
“So?”
“So, the right thing to do was to take you out so that y’all wouldn’t embarrass the other team.”
LL just shook his head because he totally didn’t agree with me but he knew not to argue.
“Daddy, did you see that move I did when I crossed over on that white boy and he fell to the ground?” LL asked in an animated fashion.
I couldn’t help but laugh at how amped and hyped he got when he spoke about basketball. It was like he was a completely different person because normally he was reserved and somewhat shy, but when it came to sports he was passionate as ever.
“I missed that. I got here too late but I’ll see the videotape when they make it available to purchase. But listen, I just wanted to see you before I left. Make sure you knock out your homework and be good in school, okay? You can’t make it to the NBA if your grades aren’t on point, remember that.”
LL looked at me and nodded his head and then he held out his fist for a pound. “So you’re out?”
I chuckled at him because he was always trying to be so cool, and you couldn’t tell him that he didn’t have an eleven-year-old swagger.
“Yeah, I’m out. So go back to your classroom and remember, call me whenever you want. I don’t care how early or how late it is, okay?”
“Okay,” he replied and then walked off back to his classroom.
After seeing my son, I was good. If anything, I knew that for my son’s sake I had to straighten up and do the right thing. But it still wasn’t that easy to do right.
I decided to shoot back to my crib and see what was up with Nicole, because this getting kicked out of the house shit was crazy, and I figured that after she had some time to calm down she would see things differently.
Apparently, though, when I reached my crib I realized that Nicole was really going hard body! She literally had all of the locks to the crib changed.
“Yo, this is some bullshit!” I yelled as I began banging on the front door and ringing the bell like I had lost my mind.
“Nicole, open the goddamn door!”
I banged on the front door, the side door, and the back door for about five minutes and I got no answer. I realized that Nicole must have left for work. So with my blood boiling, I hopped back in my truck and made it from Great Neck, Long Island to Rosedale, Queens in like five minutes when it normally takes about fifteen.
Nicole rented an office suite that was located inside of an office complex called Cross Island Plaza. It was a nice building located on Merrick Boulevard and it had pretty good security. Since I was always coming there, security already knew me so they never made me sign and never called Nicole’s suite to announce that I was there to see her.
So I said, “What’s up?” to the security guards and I kept it moving. Nicole was on the third floor but I didn’t waste any time waiting on the elevator. I stormed up the steps and into Nicole’s suite.
“Hey, Becky, where’s Nicole?” I asked Nicole’s blond-haired, blue-eyed secretary.
“Oh, hi, Lance, she’s actually meeting with someone.”
I totally tuned the secretary out and I went straight for Nicole’s office and she wasn’t there, so I knew that she had to be inside the conference room.
“Um, excuse me, Lance, but she’s really in an important meeting. I think you should wait until she’s done.”
I ignored her and without knocking I walked right into the conference room where I saw Nicole sitting at the table with a legal notepad and she was writing something down. The paralegal was there and there were two other people in the room, a white dude and a black lady, both of who looked like they were in their late forties or early fifties.
“Nicole, can I talk to you for a second,” I said with a stern tone in my voice.
I was dressed in my Timbs, jeans, a dark blue leather bomber vest, and a hooded sweatshirt, and when Nicole looked up and saw me I could feel the fire coming from her. She had a look that said she wanted to kill.
“I’m so sorry, can everyone please excuse me for a moment,” she said as she got up and brushed past me and headed straight for her office with me following behind her. When we made it into her office she made sure the door was shut and then she turned to me and with her teeth clenched she said, “God help you if you’re not here to tell me that something happened to my son!”
“Nicole, how the hell you change the fucking locks!” I shouted.
“Would you keep your voice down! What is wrong with you? I’m meeting with an important client.”
I saw Nicole’s pocketbook sitting on her desk and I went straight for it.
“You gonna give me those goddamn keys! There ain’t no way in the world I’m gonna pay a bank eight thousand a month and can’t live in my own shit!” I barked as Nicole ran up to me and snatched her pocketbook away from me.
“Nicole, I swear to God I will turn this whole office upside down if you don’t give me those keys!”
“Lance, you ain’t staying there, I’m not dealing with this no more. Now leave or I’m calling the police.”
“Calling the police for what?”
“To lock your ass up if you don’t leave.”
“Oh, you wanna call the police? A’ight, so that’s where you wanna take it?” I yelled. I don’t ever remember being as mad as I was at that point and with rage running throughout my body I went to the front of Nicole’s desk and squatted down and reached both of my hands underneath her desk. After I had a good grip I used all of my might and literally flipped her desk upside down, causing papers and shit to fly everywhere.
“Becky, Becky, call the police for me! Lance done lost his mind!” Nicole opened the door to her office and shouted out to Becky.
Becky came running to the office, not sure exactly what was going on and she saw me and Nicole tussling for her pocketbook.
“Becky, call 911!” Nicole screamed and Becky ran out of the office and picked up her phone and began dialing the cops.
“Let the bag go and I’ll leave,” I said to Nicole, who all of a sudden had a tremendous amount of strength.
At that point I heard the door to her conference room open, and I could hear the white guy asking her paralegal if I was one of Nicole’s criminal clients. Nicole must have heard the same thing because at that point she loosened her grip on the pocketbook and told me to leave.
I looked at her. H
er hair was a mess and her clothes were disheveled and her office looked like a tornado had hit it. But I didn’t give a shit, I meant exactly what I said earlier about there being no way I was gonna pay eight thousand a month in mortgage payments and not be able to live in the house. That was absolutely crazy to me.
I stormed out of the building and I headed home to my truck, and as I let it warm up a bit, I began to calm down. I realized at that moment that I might have taken things just a bit too far. After a couple of minutes I put my truck in drive and maneuvered my way out of the parking lot. While I was handing money to the parking lot clerk, I looked over and saw Nicole coming out of the office building with two police officers. All I could do was shake my head because Nicole didn’t even have to take things to that level, but I knew that she was probably gonna get a order of protection against me or some other type of spiteful shit.
Right after the clerk handed me my change I could hear someone yelling. I turned and looked and I saw Nicole pointing in the direction of my truck and the cops were quickly approaching my car.
“Can you lift the gate please?” I asked as my heart rate picked up.
“Hold it, hold it, hold it!” I heard a voice holler, and the next thing I knew there were two cops were at my truck. One was on the driver’s side and the other one was on the passenger side, and they both had their guns drawn.
The cop on my side yanked open the driver’s door and snatched me out of the truck and slammed me onto the cold concrete. Within seconds my hands were handcuffed behind my back and my face was inches away from a pile of snow that hadn’t yet melted from days before.
“Ma’am, is that your pocketbook?” one of the cops asked Nicole.
Apparently she said that it was but I couldn’t actually see her from my facedown position. But I was able to see the three other cop cars that had arrived in the parking lot. This whole thing was unfolding into way too much drama for absolutely nothing.
“Sir, do you have any weapons or any drugs on your possession?” the cop asked me, but out of anger I kept my mouth shut and didn’t respond to his question, and I soon felt the cops thoroughly frisking me. After about two minutes more of laying on the cold ground, they helped me to my feet and stood me next to one of the police cars as they searched my truck.
By this point it seemed as if every office worker in the building was standing in the parking lot watching what was going on.
“A’ight, Nicole, you win! Now can you tell them to take these handcuffs off of me and let’s end this bullshit?” I said to Nicole, who was still visibly angry.
She looked at me and walked away. The next thing I knew the cops had placed me under arrest and were reading me my rights and had placed me in the backseat of the police car. I couldn’t believe that I had been arrested, but by the time I got to the precinct and had my mug shot taken and was fingerprinted, it didn’t take much more for me to realize that this arrest was really real.
But it really hit home for me when I sat in the cell at the precinct and thought about the charges that I had been hit with: robbery, assault, disorderly conduct, and trespassing.
Ain’t this a bitch? I thought to myself as I sat slumped on the metal bench inside the pissy jail cell.
Chapter Eight
There’s a saying: Hurt People, Hurt People. The saying basically means that when someone is hurt in an emotional way by someone else, they will go out of their way to hurt the person who hurt them. Nicole was obviously feeling hurt by all of my actions and she really was trying to hurt my ass.
It was evident that she was trying to hurt me, because although I had been hit with some serious charges, those charges really had no substance to them, considering that we were still husband and wife. But yet Nicole had a bunch of connections with the Queens County district attorney’s office and with one phone call she was able to get my case buried among the other cases. So what she was able to do with that phone call was to delay my seeing the judge.
I had been arrested on Thursday morning, and under most circumstances I would have seen a judge by Friday morning and either been released on my own recognizance or given a bail. I only would have been kept in jail if I couldn’t make bail. But it was now Monday morning and I was just getting ready to see a fucking judge! And that was only because I had called Layla and she was able to work some of her attorney contacts who also had friends in the district attorney’s office.
In addition to getting my case buried, Nicole had also tapped some of her news organization sources and with one phone call on Thursday afternoon I had instantly become an infamous figure. And that was because my face was on the front cover of Friday’s edition of the New York Daily News. I knew that Nicole had to be behind the sensationalism of the story simply because of the way they connected me to Fifth Ward and The Unit. Her goal was to embarrass me and to hurt me like I’d hurt her. And I must say that she definitely landed some good knockout punches.
The headline in Friday’s paper read: MEMBER OF THE UNIT JAILED FOR ROBBERY AND ASSAULT.
Underneath the headline was a picture of my mug shot that the police had taken of me inside the police precinct. The story went on to say how I was linked with Fifth Ward and how apparently the violence that followed him was now infecting the literary world. And it went on and on and on about things that were not even true, all for the sake of selling newspapers and making things bigger than it really was.
So being that the news organizations now had ahold of this story, the district attorney had to go hard on me and they were pushing the judge to set a high-ass bail. The judge folded under the pressure and hit me with a fifty thousand dollar bail, which was excessive considering the nature of my crime and considering that I had no prior felony arrest record.
My lawyer stood with me before the judge and informed the judge that I was prepared to make bail. The judge stated more legal talk and then he asked me if I understood the seriousness of what I had been charged with. After I told him that I did, my lawyer Victor Spitz, spoke up and said something to the judge, who then noted something on some papers that were in front of him before informing everyone of my next scheduled court appearance. And with that, I was finally free to go.
“Thank you for everything,” I said to my lawyer as he packed up his things and we prepared to leave the courtroom.
Steve walked up to me and Attorney Spitz as we were walking out of the courtroom and gave me a pound and a quick ghetto embrace.
“There’s gonna be a zoo outside with the media,” Victor said to me. “Just try not to say anything specific about the details of what happened on Thursday between you and Nicole.”
“Nah, I won’t say anything. I’ll let you handle that part.”
Just before we got outside of the courthouse, my lawyer stopped so that we could talk for a moment. He reassured me that this was all bullshit and that it would go away.
“The district attorney will throw out the robbery and assault charges and you’ll plead guilty to the two misdemeanors of trespassing and disorderly conduct, and that will be it. This whole thing will be treated no different than getting caught driving with a suspended license. But I gotta warn you, keep your nose clean. Do what you gotta do to work out a healthy situation with Nicole. If you violate the order of protection, you will be spending some time on Rikers Island.”
I nodded my head and told Victor that I understood and I would be sure to watch my temper and stay in line. I also told him that I would follow up with him on Wednesday after I had some time to rest and to clear my head.
After we had taken care of that small talk, we walked out to the courthouse steps that were facing Queens Boulevard. There were a bunch of photographers, cameramen, and newspeople that rushed me, my lawyer, and Steve. They converged on the three of us and started asking all kinds of crazy questions at the same time.
“Lance, were you also a small-time crack dealer in the nineties like Fifth Ward?”
“The stories that you write, are any of them based on rea
l life?”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at the ignorant questions, and I just had to answer. At the same time, I knew that I had to play up the moment to my benefit. It paid to be controversial.
“Why couldn’t I have been a drug kingpin? I think big, but I guess you’re insinuating that I’m a small-fry. And to answer your question, Miss, I write fiction but I draw from real life.”
“Oh, so are you saying you are a former drug dealer?”
I smiled and responded, “I didn’t say that. You did.”
“Why would you stoop to robbing your wife? Do you have a drug problem, Mr. Thomas?”
My lawyer butted in. “Mr. Thomas doesn’t have a drug problem and the charges against him are frivolous. This was nothing more than a big misunderstanding.”
I hadn’t brushed my teeth or washed my ass in like five days, so I was desperately wanting to get to a shower and to a bed so I could get some real much needed sleep.
As we tried our best to make our way to our cars, a reporter shouted and asked me if there was anything that I wanted to say.
So I paused, smiled, and said, “Yeah, I just want everybody to know that my new book is called Harlem Heat. It hit the stores last Tuesday, so go check it out.”
If I was gonna go through this bullshit I figured that I might as well profit from the publicity.
“What is it called?” the reporter asked as she jotted down notes.
“Harlem Heat,” I replied.
Finally me and Steve were able to make it to his car. Just as we were about to get in, a van pulled up and sort of boxed us in. A lady got out of the passenger’s side. She came over to my side of the car and tapped on the window.
I rolled the window down and she introduced herself as Meagan Washington.
“You look familiar,” I said to her as I tried my hardest to figure out where I knew her from.
Then she handed me her card and that’s when it hit me. She was an on-air television personality for this show on CBS called Media Edition. The show was similar to Entertainment Tonight and BET’s Black Carpet.