by Omar Tyree
“Well, I’ll be out in a minute,” Melanie announced as she walked inside and locked the door back behind her. Then she took a deep breath and stared at herself inside the sweaty mirror. She felt dirty and couldn’t take a shower yet.
“What was I thinking?” she stressed to herself.
I’ve been very bad tonight, she mused. It must have been something else in that drink that made me all loose like that!
Nevertheless, she felt that no one had to know what had happened to her. She would keep it all to herself.
At nearly three o’clock in the morning, Deborah drove Melanie back home to Inglewood in dead silence. They were both worn out from the evening, with another work day ahead of them in six hours. And they were both embarrassed by their actions.
When they approached Melanie’s apartment complex, Deborah finally said, “Well, I guess you know where I was over at Brian’s. But where were you?”
She had been waiting to ask that question all night, especially since she had been caught in the act. She wanted them both to go down in infamy together. But Melanie refused to play the game with her.
“I was just watching movie footage in one of the rooms. They had a big flat-screen TV in there, and I was still a little woozy from the drink, so I didn’t want to be around a lot of people like that,” she fibbed.
Deborah heard her out and nodded. “Yeah, I understand.” Then she perked, “Oh well, at least I scored VIP tickets to the next Iron Nails concert.”
She attempted to laugh it off.
Melanie understood her embarrassment. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Deborah. It’s just Hollywood. Anything can happen here, right?”
“Yeah, you can say that again.” She searched Melanie’s eyes for more information. “But where did you get that ‘inner circle’ line from?”
“Are you kidding me? They were using that line all night. I guess that’s what they say to get people to go along with them. So they kept repeating it until it was in my head like a played-out song,” she stated. Then she laughed at it.
Deborah chuckled at it herself as they pulled up to Melanie’s apartment building.
“Okay, well…what happened tonight is in the inner circle, right?”
She wanted Melanie’s confirmation that she would remain silent about it. She had a reputation to protect to keep her job at the agency.
Melanie squeezed her hand for sincerity. She said, “Of course. I said it earlier and I meant it.”
Deborah exhaled and smiled weakly. “Thank you.”
When Melanie climbed out of the car to end her very long night, she told herself, I can’t even begin to judge anyone now. Hollywood got the best of both of us tonight. And she couldn’t wait to give herself a long, hot shower in her bathtub…even though it would never wash away the sexual reality of her evening.
I guess Hollywood is not all make-believe after all. And now I know.
PARADISE
Brian Culpepper stood in front of the judge inside the New York County divorce courtroom and managed to keep his composure. He had lost possession of his five-bedroom home in Harlem, his dark-blue Denali SUV, his condominium in the Hamptons, and custody of his son and daughter. He had been ordered to pay $20,000 a month in alimony and child support to his wife for the next fifteen years, and until his six-year-old daughter had turned twenty-one to set up scholarship trust funds to mature when they turned eighteen. The total package of the divorce was estimated at nearly six million dollars.
Jesus Christ! his lawyer thought to himself as he stood there beside him. He’s getting hit with everything.
Brian barely cared anymore. He was ready to wipe his hands clean from all of it. A lucrative and generous stock investor at a young age, the fast life had gotten the best of those around him; his wife, his family, his friends, and his business associates. And when the man had finally found an oasis to get away from it all, into the awaiting bed of a woman who he thought had loved him, he found that she was just as deceitful as everyone else around him.
Brokenhearted by her betrayal, Brian refused to agree to the woman’s dollar amount in her attempt to blackmail him. That’s when she followed through on her threat to confess their affair to his wife. And she told her everything. Not only that, but she supplied addresses, dates, pictures, receipts, gifts and stacks of telephone records. With a wife who had been less than warm, overly skeptical, and calculating to begin with, Brian never had a chance. So he bent over inside the courtroom and took his fucking like a bitch at a breeding kennel.
“Do you have anything you want to say?” his lawyer asked him hesitantly. He had no idea what was on Brian’s mind at the moment. He only hoped and prayed the man wasn’t thinking about killing himself.
But Brian shrugged in his impeccable dark-blue suit and bold, colorful tie. He forced himself to appear as if he were a perfect picture of poise over adversity. So he shook his head and answered firmly, “No.”
His ex-wife attempted to read his eyes from her side of the courtroom to gauge how he was taking the final verdict, but he never even looked in her direction. He didn’t want to give his ex-wife the satisfaction of his emotions.
“Let’s settle everything up inside the car,” he told his lawyer as he turned to walk out of the courtroom.
Seeing that the man was impenetrable, his mother-in-law commented loudly from the countroom’s benches, where she sat with her grandchildren, “Well, you can at least acknowledge your kids!”
Her outburst got to him. Brian wanted to acknowledge his son and daughter, and hug them and kiss them inside of the courtroom like any other father would. Yet he understood that it was all another form of their many exploits. Why would they even bring the kids to such a hostile, adult environment? So he fought his urge to give in to the shameful manipulation.
He’s turning into a bitter and hard man, his lawyer assessed of him as he followed his client out of the courtroom.
As they walked toward the awaiting limousine outside of the courthouse, Brian told his attorney, “I want you to set up a power of attorney for the Culpepper trusts and accounts, where I don’t have to be involved with any of it.”
The attorney nodded. “No problem. I can prepare the paperwork immediately.”
Brian nodded to him. “Good. And I want you to call up her attorneys and let them know that we’ll deposit the full six million dollars within two years time, and be done with the whole thing.”
The attorney looked at him and was startled. “Ahhh, Brian, you might not want to do that, even if you had all of the money tomorrow. I mean, that’s only gonna make them skeptical of how much you really have.”
Brian looked back and said, “The judge just gave us the settlement terms, right? So take it right back to the judge and tell him your client does not trust the level of stress that a prolonged settlement would endure, and that he would rather be a normal father to his kids without any bickering over money. And I’m sure that the judge would understand that and order her lawyers to accept our terms without attempting to question where the money’s coming from. And you just tell them that I’d rather go broke paying them off, and have to start my company all over again, than to be forced to have to deal with that woman for the next fifteen years of my life. Because I’m not doing it.”
Brian sounded so clear and precise that his attorney had no more room to argue.
“O-kay,” he agreed to it.
Before they reached the black limousine at the sidewalk, Brian’s ex-wife ran out of the building with their two children holding her hands. And she began to yell down the cement steps toward him.
“BRYY-AN! BRYY-AN! THESE ARE YOUR KIDS!” she yelled at him.
Brian shook his head and never looked back. He asked his lawyer, “You see what I mean? They shouldn’t have even been here today. Even her lawyers know that. But she used her mother to bring them.” Then he climbed into the limo without another word.
As they headed back toward his Manhattan apartment inside the car, his
lawyer shook his head and commented, “Wow! If she’s that bad, then how do you ever get a chance to see your kids in peace?”
Brian paused with his answer. “Well…the reality is…they become casualties of the divorce.”
His attorney looked into his stern and meaningful brown face inside the car and thought, Shit! He just called his kids CASUALTIES!
He figured his client could have used a more humane word. But when they reached Brian’s sky-rise apartment building in busy Manhattan, he stated, “You know…you try to give a woman, your friends, and your family members as much as they need to be happy, and then you find out that it’s a never-ending cycle. Then you try to do something satisfying for yourself, and all hell breaks loose.”
“So, what do you do now?” he questioned. “Do you start the cycle all over again, with a new wife, new friends, and new family members? Or do you try to fix a broken record with Scotch tape?”
Then he laughed, while his attorney sat there dumbfounded.
“Put the paperwork together for me, Wade. And I’ll sign it once it’s ready,” Brian told him on his way out.
Wade placed his hand on Brain’s arm before he could leave.
“Are you okay? You sure you wanna be left alone right now? You don’t want to come up to talk, or go down to your offices?”
He was still concerned about his client’s mental state.
Brian shook it off. “Nah, not today. I’ll go back in the offices tomorrow. And I’m tired of talking or listening right now. Didn’t we both hear enough today? So I need to relax a minute.”
Wade, a young and sharp lawyer on his way up, had been around suicidal bosses before. And the bleak outlook that Brian discussed with him was surely a need for alarm.
Those may be the last words he ever says to me, Wade panicked. Maybe that’s why he’s trying to take care of his family like, RIGHT NOW!
“Are you sure? You don’t wanna do lunch or anything?”
Finally Brian frowned at him, reading his attorney’s obvious paranoia. “Wade, I’m not gonna do anything to hurt myself, okay? Now I’ll talk to you later.”
He climbed out of the limousine and headed into his building for the twenty-first floor.
“Hey, Mr. Culpepper? How’s your day been today?” the bellman asked him.
Brian forced a smile. “I can’t complain about too much. I can still afford to live in this building, right?”
The bellman chuckled at it. “Yeah, I guess you’re right about that,” he commented. The apartment tower was not at all a cheap residence.
But when Brian arrived in his breathtaking apartment, with the New York city skyline in view from his living room, his smiling and joking was over. He walked over to his mahogany bookshelf and grabbed the first pictures he could find of his son and daughter, and he sat down on his dark leather sofa to stare at them. Then he slowly began to weep, with his right hand rubbing the tears away from both eyes.
He broke down and mumbled, “I love you guys. I love you so much.”
But…I can’t stop from living my life, he thought to himself. There’s too much living left to do.
He stood up with the picture of his kids and walked over to his living-room window to look out again at one of the most fabulous skylines in the world; Manhattan, New York.
“I’m gonna miss this city,” he stated. His plans to move far away had already been made. Brian wasn’t just moving to another city, or to another American state. He had decided to leave the country completely. He had been doing good business with well-respected men internationally, and he had traveled to countries around the world. And sometimes he envied what he saw, a world of so many different opportunities…for everything. All he had left to do was to break free from the shackles that held him hostage in America.
So he took another look at his kids in their smiling picture, as he took a deep breath and exhaled. Then he muttered to himself, “…I’m gonna pray for you guys.”
Nine months later in the city of Mumbai, India, Brian Culpepper had officially changed his religion to Islam, and his given name to Khalif Raj Muhammad. From his comfortable mansion off the coast of the Arabian Sea, he paced back and forth with his cell phone to his ear in front of a scenic, second-story living room that overlooked the beautiful blue waters that were less than a mile west of his villa. He was dressed in a golden silk sari, with a white-and-gold headdress, and no socks or shoes in the comfort of his home, while engaged in a long-distance conversation with his older brother, Jacob, in Long Island, New York.
“I mean, what are you planning to do, Brian? You’re never gonna come home again to help raise your kids?” his brother argued.
“With all due respect, my name is Khalif Raj Muhammad now. And I’m hoping, with your good blessings, that you’ll be able to step in and help raise your niece and nephew for me in the spirit of Allah.”
Khalif spoke with calm and poise, and he was free of the constant stress, the despair, the betrayal and the anguish that he had felt over the past four years in America. And he was ready to fulfill a very important meeting that afternoon. So he was anxious to finish his brother’s burdening phone call.
Jacob responded tartly. “Look, man, don’t talk to me with that brainwashing Muslim shit. You could have done that in America if that’s what you really wanted to do. Because my niece and nephew are not my responsibility.”
Khalif responded to him calmly. “Nor have you been my responsibility as my older brother. But En sh’ Allah(God willing), I was always able and willing to help you in your personal struggles.”
Khalif had helped not only his older brother in his personal and family issues, but he had helped plenty of their family members as well; with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and countless hours of sound business advice, only for them all to fail at lifting even a pinkie to help him in his times of need. In fact, it was his older brother, Jacob, who had introduced him to his eventually spiteful mistress, who had led to Brian’s final unraveling in America. So Khalif began to smile to himself and enjoy how much better his life would be abroad.
Feeling guilty about their past, Jacob countered, “Oh, so you still gon’ hold that over my head? Look, man, we all make mistakes in life. You made mistakes, too. Don’t try to act like you all perfect just ’cause you helped me out a few jams. But I didn’t just jump up and try to fly away from my problems. I stood here like a man and faced them.”
“But what if you were able to leave America?” Khalif asked his brother civilly. “And what if you had found a better way to live with people who really appreciate you? Would you have given yourself a chance to make a change for a better life?”
Jacob paused before he answered. He had always realized that his younger brother had been the most driven, rational and supportive of all of their family members. So he became more careful with his choice of words.
“Man, when you go to another country, it’s always gon’ feel like that, Brian. You an American. But the grass ain’t always greener. And sometimes you gotta learn to refertilize your own lawn and get the weeds out, that’s all.”
Khalif smiled again, impressed with his brother’s analogy. Then he countered it. “And sometimes we have to be intelligent enough to know when to walk away for much better acreage. That’s business one-oh-one, Jacob,” he told his brother matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, but your family ain’t a business, man. We talking about your blood here.”
Khalif told him, “The message of Islam teaches us that our families are the most important business of our lives. So why would I not treat my family like a business? That was my biggest downfall in America. But now I am no longer blinded by the separation between church and state. And my business, my family and my religion should all work as one.”
“Aw, Brian, Christianity teaches you the same damn thing, man,” Jacob argued. “That separation between church and state shit is only for the government. But you can do what you want to in your own house.”
Khalif r
esponded, “Exactly. And we did. We did everything that was wrong. And I no longer want to live that way.”
“All right, fine, you live however you wanna live. But don’t cut your kids off, man. What did they do?”
Jacob had a good point. The children were innocent. But as long as they were connected to his ex-wife, and to the old weeds of the damaged lawn, Khalif felt vulnerable to touch them. So he had already convinced himself for the better, to take a tough-love approach with his American children to insulate himself against his past weaknesses.
“En sh’ Allah, when they are old enough to make their own decisions, then we’ll see if they would like to join me.”
“Aw, man, what kind of cop-out shit is that? You know damn well your kids don’t have a choice in something like that,” Jacob snapped.
Khalif said, “And when they do, I will explain to them their mother’s way and my way. And then they’ll have their own choice to come and go as they please, as long as they respect the Prophet Muhammad’s way and his journey to Allah, whenever they are with me.”
He then looked at his eighteen-karat gold watch, and he realized that he had said enough. He would need to be leaving for his important meeting soon.
“Look, man, you can’t tell your kids what to do like that, once they’re already grown,” Jacob advised him.
“Jacob, we’ll need to finish this conversation at another time. I have a very important meeting to make in the next hour that I need to prepare for,” Khalif informed his older brother.
“Yeah, whatever, man. It’s in the middle of the damn night over here anyway. I need to get some sleep. I just wanted to make sure I caught you with the time difference. And we’re not done talking about this either. So you call me back. Your children need you, man. So you think about that for a minute.”
When Khalif hung up the phone with his brother, he was forced to take another deep breath to compose himself. The mental and spiritual welfare of his children was still an obvious weakness for him, as it should be. Nevertheless, he would not stray from his chosen path.