Still A Dog

by Mark Anthony

  Since I had just been arrested with the incident with Nicole, the judge had the power to deny my bail and he knew that and thankfully, by the grace of God, he had saw fit to grant me bail, but he warned me that if I were to get in trouble for anything—even if it was as small of an infraction as jaywalking—that he would have me locked up until my trial.

  “Do you understand that, Mr. Thomas?”

  I told the judge that I did and some more words were spoken by my lawyer, the district attorney and the judge, and before long I was allowed to leave.

  When I left the courthouse the questioning that I received from the media was intense, not to mention the blistering threats and insults that were hurled at me by protesters who supported causes such as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. I knew what kind of person I really was, but with seeing and hearing all of the protesters I have to admit that I was feeling mad, embarrassed, and ashamed; I just couldn’t show it.

  I left with my attorney and we went straight to his Brooklyn office.

  When I got there, after limping into the elevator and making my way to the conference table he had in one of the rooms where I sat, that was when it seemed like all the pressure that had been mounting up on me hit me and came raining down like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t believe that I had actually took someone’s life. I mean, from day one of the accident I knew what I had done, but it was like for some reason I was just feeling all of the anxiety and pressure all at once. Like it was really real! It wasn’t a game.

  The person that I had killed was a Puerto Rican girl name Olivia Rodriguez. She and her fiancé worked in downtown Brooklyn at the New York City Transit Authority headquarters and they were apparently on their way to work, just three blocks away, when I hit them.

  I shook my head and closed my eyes and before long tears streamed down my face because I truly, truly, truly was sorry and I did feel bad. And I was man enough to show and express my emotions.

  My attorney walked into the room, along with one of his junior attorneys, and he told me that he understood the emotional turmoil that I was going through.

  “I swear it was just a mistake,” I said as I shook my head and buried them into my hands.

  “Lance, mistakes happen and that’s why we have a legal system and a legal process that allows us to put forth a defense. And we have experience in these kind of cases.”

  “So then—just be straight with me—that aggravated vehicular manslaughter charge comes with twenty-five years. Am I really looking at that?”

  “Yes and no. Yes, that is the max that you could be hit with, but no, I doubt that you really will be hit with that. But listen, let’s just back up, and I want you to tell me every detail that happened during that night that lead up to the arrest. Like where were you coming from, what did you have to drink that night, who did you come in contact with. I need you to leave out nothing. I need everyone’s name that you spoke to that night. I want to know their relationship in your life. Everything. You understand?”

  I nodded my head yes.

  “Lance, for example, I know you’re married to Nicole, but if the woman that was in the car with you at that time of the night wasn’t Nicole, I need to know her background and the nature of your relationship with her. How did you get the cocaine, all of that. Don’t leave out anything. And I also need to know the full gamut of your health history, even if it’s embarrassing—just let me know. I say all of this because based on what you tell me, that is what’s gonna guide us in a defense strategy. Do you understand?”

  I told my lawyer that I did understand, and then I proceeded to tell him everything that I knew. As I spoke, he and the junior attorney took notes and asked me questions when they needed clarification.

  We spoke at length for about an hour and when we were done I was spent. Like with everything that I didn’t want to deal with, I was good at blocking things out of my mind. And I had been doing that to some extent with the accident. But being that I was forced to relive the events when discussing it with my attorney, it was like being forced to live through your worst phobia.

  My attorney explained to me that I would likely avoid jail time but that I was likely going to have to pay through the nose, in terms of giving the families financial compensation.

  “You know, I need to be clear. That’s the scenario that I see. I mean, we will put forth an aggressive defense, but based on the facts in this case, and based on the success that you’ve had as a writer, the worst-case scenario is always gonna be out there. And that’s that you get convicted criminally on the aggravated vehicular manslaughter charge and you still get banged for a huge judgment in a civil case.”

  “So basically I could end up broke and in jail?”

  “That’s the worst-case. But I can tell you this, you gotta keep your nose clean. You gotta keep a low profile and you gotta hope and pray that the victims’ families have a compassionate disposition. I say that because we’re gonna eventually try and bargain with the district attorney, but in an emotional case such as this, the district attorney is gonna consult with the victim’s families and basically let the families have the final say as to whether or not they are willing to accept any type of plea bargain.”

  “Wow,” was all I could say as I sat there.

  This entire ordeal had definitely humbled me and I knew that I had to make some serious changes and those changes were going to start that night.

  That night I ended up staying at my mother’s house, and I prayed and prayed and prayed like I had never in my life prayed before. And as I prayed, I knew that my success as an author had translated into financial success and that financial success had given me all kinds of freedom in terms of my time. But in the end I knew that I had misused that time. I apologized to no end to God during my prayers.

  When I was done praying, I took hold of my cell phone and went into my mother’s kitchen and I ran water into a big pot that she had near the sink. I dropped my BlackBerry into the pot of water and left it there for about an hour before throwing it away.

  I knew that I had to make changes, and that those changes would not come unless I first cut off all of my old influences and I stopped partying like a lunatic. And that is exactly what I was determined to do.

  Chapter Twelve

  In my short thirty-four years, there was something that I had learned but at times I would often lose sight of it. And that was that women rarely fucked a nigga unless they had some kind of ulterior motive. Eight out of ten times the ulterior motive that women were after was money. So in other words, there was rarely a time that women would fuck for free. They rarely would straight up ask for cash in exchange for letting a dude sex them, instead what they would do is be patient and look for a payoff somewhere down the road.

  Three months after I had the car accident, I was doing a very good job of staying on the straight and narrow. I was keeping my nose clean. I wasn’t partying. I started going back to church on a regular basis. I wasn’t in contact with people I had no business associating with. Basically, I had fallen off the radar and I had moved in with my mother. Nicole had legally separated from me and I knew that she was dead serious about going through with divorcing my no-good ass. The best thing that I had going for me was that I was spending a lot of good, quality time with my son LL and with my illegitimate daughter Sahara.

  I had lost contact with Mashonda and Layla. Although I was now legally separated from Nicole and could have been spending as much time with Mashonda and Layla if I wanted to, the fact still remained that I wasn’t yet divorced so I knew that I shouldn’t just wild out. And in addition to that, I was really trying to do right by both God and my lawyer. So staying off the radar was the best thing for me.

  During the time that I was off the radar, both Mashonda and Layla showed why they had ever really fucked with me. It was all about dollars to them, and they showed their true colors. They saw me as a cash cow. Since they never got any money out of me, they decided to take a backdoor approach.

  In additio
n to suing my auto insurance company, Layla also personally hit me with a 1.5-million-dollar lawsuit where she was claiming all kinds of injuries, both physical and psychological and she was also claiming loss of income due to her injuries, all which she stated came as a result of my failure to properly and safely operate an automobile.

  As for Mashonda, I had gotten word from Meagan that she was seeking to sell a story to the media in which she was gonna say how me and her did cocaine, and had wild sex just hours before I crashed.

  Both Mashonda and Layla were pissing me the fuck off on one hand, and on the other hand I felt really hurt by the both of them. My attorney had reached out to both Mashonda, Layla and their attorneys because he was desperate to work out a settlement deal to get both of them to go somewhere, sit down and shut the fuck up.

  “Lance, if Mashonda’s story gets out into the media you are screwed, and your credibility is shot and you can kiss a plea deal good-bye. The district attorney is not gonna deal. And with Layla, she was in the car with you, so we need her to corroborate our asthma story, and if not we have no strong defense and you’re looking at the worst-case scenario that I laid out to you three months ago.”

  I sat there and contemplated what I should do. Being that I had asthma and I did have my asthma pump in my pants pocket at the time of my accident, to raise doubt in a jury’s mind, my attorney was going to claim that the cold weather had triggered an asthma attack and that I was panicking because I couldn’t breathe, and my asthma pump didn’t help me. I had blacked out from lack of oxygen and that was what also aided in my car crash. And in addition, my attorney was gonna state that I had the cocaine on me but I didn’t have it in my system. Since the cops had only tested my blood-alcohol content, which was two times the legal limit, and they didn’t test my blood for controlled substances, it meant that unless the district attorney had an eyewitness who saw me using cocaine, they could never argue that I was high on coke.

  However, with Layla and Mashonda suing me, we knew that we had to keep both of them happy or risk them throwing water all over the defenses that we’d planned to use, especially since they were both direct eyewitnesses, not to mention mistresses.

  “So what do you say I do?” I asked my lawyer.

  “You gotta come up with the cash,” he said matter-offactly. “The best I can do is negotiate the best terms possible for you in a settlement agreement.”

  I couldn’t believe how shit was just crumbling and falling down around me with each passing day. I mean, the math just wasn’t adding up in my favor. Including my current attorney and the attorney that I had when Nicole had me locked up, I had shelled out close to twenty thousand dollars in attorney fees, and I hadn’t even gone to trial yet! Plus, I had cash tied up to secure my bail. And over the next two weeks my attorney had reached a fifty-thousand-dollar settlement with Mashonda just so she would keep her fucking mouth shut about me and the cocaine. The deal that we reached with Mashonda was under the guise that I was buying her life rights with the exclusive and sole purposes of creating a movie script or a book manuscript at my discretion. And under the deal that was not allowed to be disclosed by either side, there was a bullet-point list of things that Mashonda was not allowed to discuss with anyone, including the media. As for Layla, I had to shell out a hundred thousand dollars in order for her to settle her lawsuit, which—like Mashonda’s—also came with a strict confidentiality clause.

  Those big hits of cash were having a really big effect on my pockets. I wasn’t starving but it definitely didn’t feel good at all. But it had taught my ass a really good lesson, a lesson that I had already known, and that was that no pussy was ever really free.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was now the middle of May. Four months had passed since I had been involved in the fatal car crash. As time progressed I was getting more hopeful that a plea deal was gonna be worked out with the district attorney and the families involved in the accident. The guy who I had critically injured in the accident had finally been released from the hospital. He would have to go through extensive rehab, but he was going to make a full recovery.

  As time passed I continued on the straight and narrow. In fact for the past two weeks Nicole and I had started going to marriage counseling once a week for one hour per session. The marriage counseling helped, but in some sense it was a huge waste of money simply because the marriage counselor was discussing things with us that we already knew. We had been married for more than a decade and during that time we had seen it all, done it all, and experienced it all, so although he tried his best and I was committed to continuing on with it, I just wasn’t certain how helpful it would be for us in the end.

  “So, Lance, in your mind, tell me what you think the biggest problem is in your relationship ?” the marriage counselor had asked me during our first session.

  I contemplated his question before proceeding to answer.

  “Listen, I know I have issues and a lot that I could do better, but if you want me to get at the root of things I would definitely say that it’s the lack of sex.”

  When I said that, Nicole began squirming in her chair. The marriage counselor immediately told her that she had to watch her body language so that she wouldn’t encourage a hostile environment, which wouldn’t facilitate openness and honesty.

  Nicole apologized and I continued on.

  “Like, in all due respect, we don’t even need to be here. All me and Nicole need to do is have more sex. When we first got married we had sex at least once a day but more like twice a day and I got breakfast in bed and all of that. But fast-forward and I’m lucky if we have sex once or twice a week! And breakfast in bed? I can’t remember the last time I had that. It’s like Nicole will make breakfast for our son and you would think that she would make breakfast for me too at the same time, but that rarely happens. So with the lack of sex, and the lack of attention and affection that I get, intimacy gets tossed right out the window. So what I do is I substitute the intimacy that I used to get.

  I substitute it with my work and I stay at my computer trying my hardest to bang out bestselling books and then I crave and soak up the praise I get from my fans that tell me how much they love my work.”

  Nicole couldn’t take it anymore and so she raised her hand and asked if she could interject something.

  The marriage counselor nodded his head and Nicole spoke up. “Yeah, I just wanna say that Lance always brings up the same thing. But I feel like this is less about sex and more about his low self-esteem. And at the core of it, Lance is just a very, very, very insecure person and he needs so many things just to validate who he is. To me that’s more of the problem.”

  I kept my mouth shut because there was no sense in arguing. And I made a point that throughout the marriage counseling that I would not argue with Nicole, and that I would try my hardest to be cooperative. But no matter what she or the marriage counselor said, the root problem that we had is the same problem that most marriages have, at that was the lack of sex.

  It was mind-boggling to me because it was so simple to solve. All Nicole had to do was fuck me two to three times a day and things would be good. If she didn’t, then we would be fooling ourselves if we ever thought that we could or would dig out of the marriage mess that we were in. That was what I believed, and I believed it with all sincerity. I truly loved Nicole but I knew what I needed and sex was a really big need of mine; and if we were going to make this work then we had to increase the frequency of sex. Just like if I consistently don’t eat food two or three times a day, that’s gonna be a problem for me and it will manifest itself somehow. In the same sense sex to a marriage was like food to the human body.

  So anyway, marriage counseling was cool, but what was scaring me was that I was starting to get comfortable again. I had moved out of my mother’s crib and got an apartment in a high-rise condo building on Queens Boulevard, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. I was only renting it because with the court case looming over my head, it didn’t make se
nse for me to go out and buy another asset that could possibly be taken away from me. And if me and Nicole ended up in divorce then that would be just one more thing that we would have to divvy up among us.

  I didn’t really have the apartment hooked up the way I wanted to hook it up. In fact, after living there for one month the apartment was pretty bare bones. But even though I didn’t have the apartment hooked up the way I wanted it, that didn’t stop me from inviting Meagan over to my place so I could chill with her.

  Meagan lived in a very upscale town in New Jersey called Saddle River, so I was sure that she was used to nothing but the best. My apartment definitely wasn’t the best but I didn’t care if I wasn’t able to impress her, I was just feeling mad lonely and I wanted her company more than anything.

  “Hey, Mr. Lance,” Meagan said as I opened my door for her and she sashayed her way into my apartment with some open-toe high heel shoes that she was wearing. “I bought you something,” she said as she handed me two different packages.

  The first thing that she gave me was a red velvet cake that she had picked up in Brooklyn from the famous Cake Man Raven. And the other thing that Meagan bought for me was brand-new king-sized bedsheets along with towels and different things for my bathroom.

  I laughed and I told her that she didn’t have to do all of that.

  “Lance, you told me that you’re living without a shower curtain. Come on, man. I gotta look out for my people,” she laughed and said.

  I took Meagan on a quick tour of the apartment and she said that she really liked it.

  “No, this is a nice place. You just gotta give it some personality and buy some furniture and you’ll be straight,” she said as she walked out onto the terrace.

  It was still light outside so you couldn’t really get the full effect of the view that the terrace had.

  “The view is sick once it gets dark,” I explained.

  “Is it?” she asked.