by Donna Hill
I believed Mama. I really did. But I liked boys, and boys loved me. I was pretty. I had a big ass. I dressed well and I was outgoing. Still, my teenage years were just full of frustration. I stayed hot all the time. Just burning up. I kissed a lot of boys and I’d grab their crotches and let them rub my ass and my nipples, too, but my legs stayed closed and my pants stayed up. I was dying to be penetrated. I thought about it all the time, and fantasized about how it would feel the first time something big and hard slid into me and filled me up…I learned how to masturbate myself to an orgasm, and the hotter I got the fuller my lower lips would get. I’d be lying there gripping a soggy handful of my own loose flesh. I’d squirm and moan, and those lips would be hot and swollen and sagging along either side of my probing fingers.
Well, the years passed and I finished college. There was this boy I’d been liking, and he really liked me, too. He doted on me. Did anything I asked. He had pretty eyes and rough hands. “Let’s move to a big city together,” he said. “You’re just the kind of girl I want to build a future with. We’re educated and young. We can get jobs and share an apartment. The world is ours, baby. Let’s explore it together.”
I packed.
Mama frowned, but she didn’t try to stop me. What the hell did Mama know anyway? Daddy had died in my junior year of college, and there’d been no shortage of gentlemen comforting her at night.
The boy with the pretty eyes and I planned to head east. We became very close. He said a lot of love words to me. He kissed me and licked my nipples in the cold air. I stroked him, first through his pants, and then with my bare hand. I tasted him and he held on to my hair and pumped hard as he declared his undying love. He touched the wet spot in my pants and begged me to trust him. Joy, I needed to trust him, do you understand? I needed to trust him!
And I did.
My zipper whispered and my clothes fell away. I felt his hands and his kisses on my hot skin, and I climaxed under his touch. He parted my leg with a knee and told me not to worry. He promised not to hurt me. “If it’s too much for you, just tell me, baby, and I’ll stop.”
Stop hell. Stopping was the last thing on my mind. I arched my back and moaned, and prepared for bliss as he guided his hardness toward my ugly affliction. I was wet there and swollen with need. His manhood rubbed against me and I smiled inside and waited for the rapture of penetration.
But it never came.
Instead, he cursed.
“What?” I asked, hoping I didn’t know. He’d risen up off me and was now kneeling on the bed beside me. He reached for the light switch and threw on his glasses. I held my breath as he peered at my naked self. I waited for the love words. To hear plans for our move out east.
But instead I heard the shriek of an eleven-year-old white girl with braces on her teeth and a picture-perfect pussy.
“What is that?” he demanded. His dark finger pointed and his lip curled in disgust. He loomed above me. Anger distorted his face. His eyes were clouded as he grabbed me and flung me off the bed. “What the fuck are you trying to pull on me, niggah?” His fist landed in the pit of my stomach and he grabbed my legs and dragged me into the middle of the floor. “Oh, I know! You one of them sex-change faggots, ain’t you? What? You used to be a man or something?” The boy with the pretty eyes kicked me in the face. He bent over me naked, his fist flying and disgust in his eyes. “You nasty motherfucker! What they do? Cut off your dick and left you with all this?”
I balled up and accepted my ass whipping in silence. When I got back home to Mama, she took one look at my black eye and swollen nose and turned away without a word. She busied herself cleaning me up, wiping away the dried blood and putting ice on my busted lip. She didn’t chastise me and she didn’t admonish me either. She didn’t have to. Because both of us knew that the world would do enough of that for her.
The years passed and God was good enough to answer a few of my prayers. My sexual urges seemed to fall off some, and I resigned myself to a life without intimacy. Things were going well for years until Mama got sick and I had to call an ambulance to come for her. One of the paramedics took a liking to me, and truth be told, I had noticed him, too.
He took good care of Mama and came back by to visit us a few times, and before I knew it we were keeping each other company and hanging out like old friends. His name was Avery, and he was a few years older than me. He’d been married years ago, but had lost his wife and had been by himself ever since.
Mama liked him, but she tried to act like she didn’t. She’d be frowning out warnings whenever me and Avery came in from dinner, or from roller-skating or from one of the picnics we liked to share in the park. Avery worked shifts and I had a tight schedule, too, but we made time for each other and I liked the way his pretty eyes crinkled up when he laughed, and the way his rough hands practically swallowed mine yet were so tender and gentle when he gave Mama her insulin shots or changed the dressings on her sores.
We were both grown-ass people so you know we kissed and flirted and talked a little sexy to each other, but Avery was a real man who wasn’t ashamed of how he lived his life, and when he told me that the last woman he had made love to was his wife, I knew right then that here was a man I could really get used to.
Now, I didn’t tell Avery I was a virgin. And I sure as hell didn’t tell him about my ugly, unnatural affliction, either. But I told him almost everything else about me, and he opened himself up wide to me, too. Avery told me I could trust him. He said I was the kind of woman he could see himself having a future with. He talked about moving east and going to medical school, but said he didn’t want to leave me behind and he sure wouldn’t move me nowhere and leave my mama.
Still…a year flew past and it was only right that he would begin to want something more. We ate dinner together most nights, and I joined his bowling league and he joined my church. I spent time with his mother and he helped me care for mine in her final months. Life was right with Avery, and if it wasn’t for my special problem our love thing would have been perfect.
But a month before Mama died Avery messed around and asked me to marry him. Girl, that big old strong black man actually got down on his knees and pulled out a ring, and when he looked up at me there were tears in his eyes.
“Baby,” he said, giving me the most beautiful grin I’d ever seen in my life. “I’m already all yours. And I want you to be all mine. We’re right for each other, sugar, and I promise to do whatever it takes in this world to keep you happy and satisfied. This is a fit, Silky. I don’t wanna live my life without you, and I’m asking you to be my wife.”
Oh, how I cried. The tears, Joy. The tears. I cried outta my soul, you hear me? Here I had the most beautiful man in the world bowed down in front of me, and I was gonna have to let him go! I took the ring, but I was already mourning him. See, love had done gotten so good to me that I’d almost forgot I wasn’t right! I’d been laughing and dreaming and trolloping around town like I was a regular somebody who could have a regular life. I had been pretending that my lower ugliness didn’t exist. Like this man wouldn’t one day expect to get a little bit of what I was hiding between my legs. All that damn baggage down there! All that mess!
I hadn’t forgotten what happened the last time I tried to get intimate with a man. And when I called Avery over and gave him his ring back and told him that I couldn’t marry him, it was all I could do not to remember.
“Look at me, Silky,” Avery had said, holding on to me as he lifted my chin. I couldn’t. My guilt was too strong, my love way too deep. “Woman! You look at me and tell me you don’t love me! Look at me and tell me I don’t make you happy, baby. Tell me you don’t want me!”
I felt like dying. Joy, there was no way in all hell that I could look at my man and say those words to him. Those would have been lies falling out of my mouth, you hear me? Damned lies!
The weeks passed by slowly and I lost my mama.
I was all alone in the world, and that thought hurt me so bad I didn’t thin
k I would survive it. Avery came by the house to offer me his condolences. He was a good man and a good friend, and he said no matter what had happened between us, there was no way he was gonna let me bury my mama all by myself.
So I leaned on him. On that big rock of a shoulder he had extended for me. Avery got me through the days, and he comforted me through the nights, too. For a whole week we lay together in my bed with all our clothes on. Holding each other and crying together until I didn’t know if I was crying over Mama, or crying over me.
During that time Avery didn’t press me for anything, and he didn’t talk about marriage or having anything other than a friendship with me.
“I’m here to help you through this, Silky,” he told me. “Just hold tight to old Avery, and let me see you through.”
I was grieving, Lord. Oh, was I grieving! But even with Mama in the cold ground, a part of me still hoped for a little happiness. A tiny part of my spirit refused to be quiet. It wanted love. It wanted a man. It wanted joy! It wanted Avery.
I asked him late one night just as he was leaving, “Do…you think we might…you know…try to have something again?”
He was quiet for so long that my hands started sweating in embarrassment. Maybe he already had somebody else! Maybe he was already planning to move her out east! But then he spoke.
“Silky, me and you…” His voice trailed off as he touched my hair and grinned. “We gone always have us something, baby. I’m yours, and you mine. No matter what. Even if I never see you again, nothing can change that.”
So there, Joy. You got it out of me. I told you my secret, now I’m asking for your help. I need somebody to tell me that my love is okay. That it’s possible. Say it to me loud on the radio, Joy. Just give me a yes or a no. Tell me it’s okay to put my trust in a man like Avery, and to maybe see a doctor somewhere about my ugly affliction. I can’t be the only woman in the world with such a big cho-cha. Maybe there’s help out there for me. I would never trick Avery into marrying me knowing I’m a freak, but maybe I wouldn’t have to trick him. Maybe I could just tell him.
I loved my mama, Joy, and may God bless her precious soul…but she wasn’t always right about everything! Maybe she was wrong about Avery. I promise you he’s nothing like that boy with the pretty eyes. My Avery’s a real man. He’s all man. Avery says he’s my man. Maybe.
Just…maybe.
By this time the station manager is banging on my door, frantically trying to get in. I’m sure the FCC is on one of the phone lines. And quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
“Hey, sista Silky. I say go for it, girl. Take that man and all that he has to offer. Who says your oversized pussy lips are a freak of nature? Show ’em what you got!” Ha-ha, no bleeping tonight.
The lights on the phones are flashing so fast and furious it’s like being in a disco.
“I told ya’ll it was going to be hot up in here tonight, and we ain’t stopping till…well, till I say so.” I laugh long and hard. “I’m going to give ya’ll thirty seconds to refill your glass and then we’ll be back.”
My adrenaline is pumping. I know there will be hell to pay, but what else could they do to me? They sure as sugar couldn’t fire me twice! I glance behind me and Mr. Bledsoe has his big, fat red face pressed to the small glass window of my booth. I give him the finger then my back. Macy gives me the five-second countdown.
“So as I was saying before we were rudely interrupted with a station break…we are on and popping tonight. And for those of you tardy listeners who didn’t catch the beginning of the show, tonight is my last night on the airwaves. Yeah, yeah, I was surprised, too, but hey, ya’ll ain’t heard the last of Joy Newhouse. So let’s keep it moving. I have a caller on the line….”
CHAPTER 16
“You said you want to call your story A Player’s Anthem?” I ask the caller.
“Yes.”
“You have a name to go with that?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Okay, ‘Rather Not.’” I crack up laughing. “You’re on the line and we’re listening.” I hear her take a deep breath and it whistles as she blows it out through the phone lines…
Have you ever wanted to taste a man so badly that your mouth watered?
Oh damn. Maybe this was going to be good.
Craved his hardness to stir your sweetness so intensely that the minute his touch graced your skin you damn near ran down the street because you thought you were going to catch fire? Have you ever felt heat that extreme? Ever met a man that was so good for you that he became bad for you because you wanted him too much? Hungered for him too often? Would trade your last breath so he could know a minute more of happiness? Did you ever love a man so completely that without him you’d be incomplete?
My best friend Harmony did. Moved from Chicago to L.A. and fell hard for a player-player from the east side of South Central. Forty-eighth Street between Central and McKinley—an area of the gangster grid. Avalon territory.
His handle was Riz. No bona fide first name. No government last. Just Riz. Her Riz. Harmony’s.
And that’s the reason I’m calling in. I don’t know if I should reopen an old wound or not. My best friend has a problem, and I want to help her but don’t know how to go about it. Her problem is Riz. A brotha she fell hard for a while ago and believed she couldn’t have, but never stuck around long enough to find out if her belief was right. She ran three thousand miles away but still can’t shake him because there was never an ending to their relationship. And now some other man has fallen for her the same way she fell for Riz. Now she’s considering this other man’s marriage proposal, and I don’t want her commit to the wrong person. I also don’t want her to get hurt again but, at the same time, I can’t sit back and watch her settle—not without real closure. Not when I know for a fact that her heart is still in L.A. with Riz and that she still belongs to him in a soul-mate sort of way.
Before Harmony ever wrapped her legs around Riz, she was his. The minute she met him in her apartment on 76th and Western, she had to know him. Was overcome by his swagger that was the male equivalent of hers. His bold declaration of God damn! I gotta have you! as soon as her cousin Alicia introduced them. And once Harmony’d gotten inside his world, something in her caved. The most important part of her that she’d kept protected, walled up in cement. A thing she was sure was untouchable. Her heart.
Riz had given her life, and she lost it as soon as she left him. For her, death would’ve been easier because the hardest thing I’ve known her to do is walk away from him. But she had to because Riz was risky. Dangerous. In the most delicious way. He was the type of player who could turn a woman inside out and make love to her soul until she became weak enough for him to remold. And weakness didn’t flow through Harmony’s blue veins. Her life, stomping ground—everything she’d known to be real—dictated she be otherwise. She’d come from dry-cleaned folks. Family who had the ability to appear clean under the pressure of heat but deep down in their fibers they were dirty. And that was all she’d known. Invisible dirt. Serious money. Men who could make anything happen or disappear. Women who did the same. Harmony owned identical power but with an added splash of untouchableness, a slice of coolness that had separated her from the rest. But Riz kicked down her impenetrable door and rocked her known world off its axis. He was The One. That one man who’d change her life forever. Not because she loved him. But because she couldn’t have him. Wouldn’t allow him to have her—knowingly. But he did have her. I know he still does.
Her feelings for him flowed so naturally they seemed unnatural—especially that evening. The night they’d played the wall. Harmony sat propped up on pillows, watching Riz from where she lay on the bed. Craving him from the depths of her soul. They hadn’t had sex. Hadn’t reached that part of their relationship. Yet. He’d just lain next to her, eyes closed, tangling himself in her essence like always while she wrote things in the journal she’d never invite him to read. What would he think if he knew he’d brou
ght out the little girl in her, exposed a softer side that she’d never shown? Couldn’t reveal. She feared she’d push him away if he knew how badly she’d wanted him—for life—and hadn’t yet had a taste of him. They were folks. Just friends, she’d tried to convince herself. Talk herself down from the high that’d suddenly invaded her when his hand mistakenly brushed her thigh as he moved to the edge of the mattress. Her desiring forever was crazy, she knew that. But she couldn’t help it. Lacked control of her heart, just as she wasn’t able to cool the heat that blazed within her whenever he was near. Or overcome the emptiness she felt when he left.
“Getting ready to go?” she asked, watching her upside-down explanation point brightly reflect in his rich brown eyes.
“Yeah,” he answered.
Harmony followed him to the doorway. Stared at his back under heavy lids as his footfalls carried him down a few stairs. Silently, she moved into the hall, willed him to look back at her.
Riz had disappeared, and his absence killed her. Without him, Harmony’s waking hours were empty and her nights were cold. There were no phone calls. No “What’s goin’on, baby?” No Riz stopping by to rest his head on her pillow while she wrote. Not one trace of the confusion she’d complained about but now longed for. No Riz anywhere.
Harmony stripped herself out her blues and changed into all black clothes. She wanted to slip into the night. Blend in with the darkness while she caught her breath and measured her future. Riz may have possessed her heart but the last time she’d checked, she still owned her life. Not him. And she decided to do just that. Own her future—with or without him. She’d been born by herself, would die by herself. And no one could live her life for her but herself.