“KOREA, THIS LETTER CAME FOR YOU TODAY,” Gladys said.
“A letter came for me? Who is it from?”
“Some name I can’t pronounce. Open it; let’s see what it is.”
Korea took the envelope and was opening it when the police kicked the front door in and took Gladys away for setting the liquor store ablaze.
IT HAD TAKEN DREAM CROW TWO HOURS TO GET A DEAL OFFER from Jerome, ten days to lock in on a recording contract and a few months to become Mrs. Jerome Bandarofski. She had left her whore clothes and the whore’s life in Keith’s San Francisco condo the night she had met the wealthy record executive who had made her dreams come true.
In his care, Dream Crow had learned to love and trust something healthy, for the very first time in her life. She loved the old man with a passion she had never felt for anyone, or anything. He had turned her into a complete human being who was capable of feeling. He was gentle, supportive, and dedicated to their marriage and to her career.
Dream Crow and Blue released three award-winning albums and a movie soundtrack under the production of their younger brother, Hartford, over the next few years, until Dream Crow retired from music when her husband, Jerome, was diagnosed with cancer. She spent the rest of his life taking care of him. She supported and loved and cared for him until he died and when she buried him, he was a very happy, very old man. He never had children. He left his entire estate to Dream Crow, including his non-profit foundation, a seat on the board of directors of Bandarofski Music Publishing, his music empire, a seven-bedroom home, three acres of land, and a few farm animals. Dream Crow and Blue retired on that beautiful unincorporated land in Blackhawk, California; a million miles away from the Tenderloin.
Dream Crow reached back into her old neighborhood only once a year, to give a scholarship to a talented, at-risk girl. The first scholarship from the Bandarofski Foundation was awarded to a promising young athlete who had a dream to go to business school.
Korea Smith had never even applied for the award, but the offer could not have come any sooner, or have been more appreciated when it did. She walked the stage on the day her mother was arraigned. Korea enjoyed a free ride at UC Berkeley, earning a degree in business management in only three years. She embarked on her career as a businesswoman and philanthropist at the tender age of twenty-one. She visited her mother regularly in a hospital for the criminally insane until a nurse called her one day to claim her body. Gladys had died suddenly, and unexpectedly, from the brain lesion that had been slowly eating away at her mind for years.
Korea never got a chance to put her mother in a fancy house in a gated community. But she developed a program that would ensure that women with no history of crime would be tested and treated for mental disorders before they were put on trial in a criminal court.
The program laid the foundation for business and philanthropic endeavors that would make Korea a respected and prosperous businesswoman.
CHAPTER 6:
DICK, OF COURSE
Stormy was getting sick and tired of waiting for Tom to ask her to marry him. Her engagement ring had been on her finger since she was practically a kid. She had already had it resized once and it was getting tight again, since all she seemed to do since she left her job at the restaurant was cook and fuck. She had laid out a black formal dress with a high neckline and some simple black leather Kenneth Cole shoes, but decided on a cobalt blue silk Bebe dress with a plunging neckline that draped casually over her braless breasts.
Tom wouldn’t like the ensemble because it always made heads turn, but she figured that he needed to be reminded of how desirable she was. She dressed it up with the diamond necklace, earrings, and a matching tennis bracelet he had brought back from a weekend “business trip” to Brazil that lasted two weeks. She had been dressing for over an hour when he knocked on her bedroom door. She had not even started to work on her hair, which was not responding to Sebastian’s curly hair solution the way that it had a week earlier.
Unless she was going to undress and get back in the shower to start her hair all over again, it was going to be downright unruly in the unexpected humidity of the Bay Area’s unpredictable spring weather. It had been a rainy April, sure to bring May flowers, but to Stormy’s mixed crop of Irish and West Indian hair, it brought a frizzy mane of uncertainty. Each hair seemed to stand alone in defiance as she attempted to gel, mousse, and cream it into obedience. As the minutes wore on, her hair grew bigger, seeming to define her mood for the evening.
“If I’m going to look wild, I should be wild tonight,” she decided, finally letting her hair have its way in the twelve inches of space about her head.
The lipstick tube said “crimson,” but looked more like Halloween orange against her golden skin, so she topped it with a true red gloss that she intended to pack in her purse for periodic touch-ups. Before she could apply it well, Tom was at her bedroom door, huffing and puffing about making him late for what could be the defining moment of his company’s future. He was twenty years older than Stormy. He was a haughty passe de blanc who would be better off switching sides altogether. His perspective on the new generation of young black entrepreneurship was dated, and insulting, at a time when young boys made more in a month than some of their parents earned in a year. But she couldn’t tell him that without hurting his feelings and feeling his wrath. So she let him go on for the last few months, confused as to why he was losing his accounts.
Stormy had no money and no immediate plans to leave Tom, but her time would be short if she didn’t do something quickly. She was certain he had been fucking his twenty-year-old secretary, and Stormy wasn’t aging backward. He was definitely the kind of man who needed to have a child to look up to him, and to boss around. And while Stormy was still very beautiful, time had found her becoming increasingly more opinionated. If it were not for the fact that she kept it hot and interesting in the bedroom at all times, she was positive it would have been over. He was, after all, always telling her that if she weren’t such a good fuck, he would’ve gotten rid of her a long time ago. So, though her hair was a mess, as she looked in the bathroom mirror, she realized that she was definitely, undeniably fuckable tonight.
Tom pushed the door to her bedroom open so hard; it hit the rubber stopper and bounced back at him. “Stormy,” he said with a false calm in his voice, “you need to come on.”
“Okay, I need to do one more thing,” Stormy called from the bathroom.
“I told you, this woman is a bitch. If I’m a minute late, she’s going to notice, and I can kiss this contract goodbye. She’d probably much rather give it to one of her little dyke buddies anyway. Get your ass in gear, Stormy. Let’s go.”
“I’m coming, Tom. But don’t say anything about my hair.” Stormy stepped out of the bathroom and stood there for a moment while Tom examined her from her feet, up her legs, around her ample hips, arching his eyebrows at her hard nipples …
“God damn it, Stormy, what is that mess on your head? If your hair gets any bigger, you won’t be able to fit your head in the fucking Porsche.” He checked the time on his Rolex. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”
Except for some frustrated exhaling, Tom was completely silent as he drove down the hill from his Upper Rockridge mini-mansion to Broadway Terrace, and wheeled onto the freeway.
“I have a new CD. It’s so, so smooth. Can I play it?” Stormy asked.
“It’s not more of that rap stuff you like, is it?”
Stormy would love this man so much more if he was cool, but he wasn’t. “No, baby, it’s R&B. Actually, it’s kind of an R&B/jazz fusion,” she said, popping it into the CD player. “I think you’ll like it.”
“Fusion? Yeah, okay. Whatever.”
Stormy sat in the passenger’s seat for the next nine minutes, watching the clock and hoping the music would relax Tom as he sped down Highway 13. He’d nearly jackknifed getting onto the 580 Freeway. Relief filled her as he finally drove off the freeway and rounded the lake until he came to the Lake M
erritt Hotel.
Tom’s was the only car waiting for the valet guy in front of the hotel. “Fuck!” he said impatiently. “It’s ten ’til eight. Everyone else is probably here. Hey…Buddy,” he said to the valet sitting on a stool, talking on his cell phone. When the young man looked up, Tom dangled his keys out of the window.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the valet said, taking the keys.
“That figures,” Tom muttered, stepping out of the car. “I suppose you’re capable of coming to the conclusion that I don’t tip incompetence.”
“Of course, sir,” the valet answered.
“See, baby?” Stormy said. “That’s probably why your Porsche has been keyed three times this year.”
“Perhaps, but that’s what insurance is for,” Tom replied.
He was getting so combative lately. His fiftieth birthday was approaching and she figured that was what was bugging him, but she could not be sure about anything concerning Tom these days. Stormy decided that Tom was on his period. She had read online that men have periods, too. She decided she would allow him to brew over her tardiness, until she stepped into the hotel lobby and saw all the movers and shakers who had beaten them there. The smell of money and power in the air made her want to apologize to him. The lobby was swarming with call girls and businessmen on vacation from their families, and business people who looked like they could eat his sensitive ass alive.
The clerk with long curly nails and a nametag that read: “My name is Quanisha,” said, “How can I help you?” She then directed them to the ballroom where the socializing, networking, and bidding were scheduled to begin in less than two minutes.
While it was true that she wasn’t the most fashion-conscious woman in the world, or even in the room, since Tom kept her on a strict budget, Stormy possessed a beauty that was uniquely hers. Her beauty was obvious and obsession-stirring, but her confidence had been victimized by his obsessive verbal abuse, which was only aimed at keeping her humble and youthful. Stormy’s wild, curly mane of red hair was her crowning glory. Her breasts were plump with promise and her hips were a pledge of allegiance to generations of strong babies and to good times that would come to any man daring to create them with her. Every one of the men in that room could feel her heat. Any one of them would have left his most loyal woman to take a ride around Stormy’s voluptuous thighs. Tom knew this.
The problem was that, as weak as he was, Tom had woven a web of self-doubt so tight around Stormy’s mind that she could not possibly recognize her own power over anyone. So she remained devout, true, and pure to the man she assumed would eventually be her husband; as long as she kept him satisfied in bed.
There were handsome businessmen in formal black suits and tuxedos, huddled together, talking amongst each other and clusters of classy ladies in black evening gowns with their hair brushed neatly in buns and French rolls. She paused at the door, thinking she would stand out like a sore thumb, with her frizzy hair growing by the millisecond, as Tom had predicted.
Tom surveyed the room, too. He spoke in a low angry voice. “I told you not to embarrass me. Eight o’clock means seven-thirty to people with jobs…something you would obviously not know anything about. Now, not only are you making me late, but, you look a hot mess.” He grabbed Stormy’s hand and squeezed it roughly, but as discreetly as he could. “Please do us both a favor and find the bathroom so you can go do something with your fucking hair, or I swear you’ll feel my angst in every muscle tonight. Fuck me, for letting you walk out of the house with a blue dress on.”
Stormy thought of how Tom would retaliate on her later that night. And for a moment, she thought, that might not be too bad. He had never hit her. Whenever she had pissed him off before, he would punish her by becoming an animal in the bedroom, remaining missionary, but thrusting deeply and talking the kind of shit men talked on movies about bad boys. It really got her excited to see him that way, but it was always short-lived.
By morning, he was always the same anal-retentive jerk he had been the day before, barking orders and passing out judgments like she was a house slave and he was her master. Stormy supposed Tom thought he had been hurting her with his penis, but the nights he was his maddest, she had come her closest to having her first orgasm. She could feel it coming…kind of hovering on the brink of something amazing…something that she could not quite describe, but it never happened. In a way, she did not want it to come. If she allowed him to take her body anywhere near the sensation that people had described to her about orgasms, she might be his sex slave for real. Tom was definitely not cool enough to deserve that kind of obedience.
“Fuck!” Tom said, snapping her out of her fantasy flash.
She assumed the position of a mistress being reprimanded and dropped her head. She froze herself into an abused woman’s coma and did not move until he made her move. She wanted him to feel his strength restoring itself. She would humble herself to let him do this until the money was right enough for him to maintain a wife and a mistress, if that is what he needed. He had already lost three city contracts. If he lost another, she might become an expense that he couldn’t afford.
Tom recomposed himself and nodded at a woman with a short haircut in a black suit and a purple shirt, looking curiously at him from across the room. “Go now, before I have to explain you.”
Stormy walked away from him without saying a word.
“So you really gave the cigarettes up,” Korea was saying in conclusion to the conversation already in progress. “Good for you.”
“I get stressed. I think about smoking, but I press on,” Grace Riley said.
Tom painted a smile on his face and walked toward the councilwoman, who was chatting with Korea Smith. They both watched him as he approached.
“Hello, Councilwoman Riley,” he said, “this sure is a fine affair.”
“It is, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically, looking over his shoulder at the woman he had left behind. Stormy was asking the woman at the coat check for directions to the bathroom.
“It’s sure to get more interesting as the night progresses,” Korea chimed in. Korea’s eyes were following a teary-eyed Stormy as she rushed to the bathroom.
“Tom Brown, right?” the politician said, extending her hand to shake his.
“Yes,” he said. “Brown Youth Services. And you are?” he asked, turning his attention to Korea, extending his hand to hers.
“Korea Smith; Project W.H.Y.”
“I’m sorry; I’m not familiar.”
“Oh? Don’t you have a television?” she quipped at him. “I’m sorry, Grace. I see someone that I have to talk to. Will you please excuse me?”
“Definitely,” Grace Riley said with a knowing look on her face. “So, we are clear on the terms and conditions of the program, yes?”
“As clear as crystal,” Korea answered. “I may have to leave quickly, so I will say goodbye now. It has been a pleasure, as always. I’ll have my secretary call yours, first thing Monday morning.”
“Good night then,” the councilwoman said, nodding her head.
“Tom.” Korea nodded at him, excusing herself.
“Councilwoman Riley, if you would allow me a few moments of your time to tell you about BYS. I think our youth should be gainfully employed, staying out of trouble and learning to run a small business. So far I have plans for a coffee stand at the courthouse and a flower shop right on Grand Avenue.”
BS is more like it, Korea thought. She could hear that asshole brown-nosing all the way from the bathroom door, where she was going to find his beautiful wife. “Lots of luck, motherfucker; that deal is already sealed,” she said under her breath as she pulled the bathroom door open.
Stormy stood in the mirror, crying and cupping her hand under the running sink water, lifting the ounces she had collected in her palm to her hair. She seemed to be trying to twist her hair into a bun and hold it in place with a hair bow that was far too small to get the job done.
“What are you doing?” Korea said be
hind her.
Stormy turned around, startled. Her skin was dewy from the struggle with her hair; water streamed down her neck. Her nipples were hard and poking boldly through the blue silk.
“My guess is that you don’t know what water does to silk.”
Stormy looked down at her dress and saw hundreds of water spots staining her dress.
“Oh shoot!” Stormy said, “I give up.”
“You won’t get very far, giving up so quickly.”
“So I’ve heard,” Stormy said. “But some things aren’t worth fighting over.”
“I see. Do you want me to help you to do what seems impossible to you right now? Or do you want me to tell you the truth and save you the headache? ’Cause, lady, getting all that hair into that little rubber band is definitely going to give you a headache.”
Korea was the most perfect thing Stormy had ever seen. She was as confident as any man, yet beautiful enough to be on the cover of a fashion magazine. Even through her handsome black suit, Stormy could see she had amazing curves. She was cool and she was fly. She had stolen Stormy’s voice with a style and swagger that made Tom look like the Uncle Tom she had discovered he was.
“I…”
Korea knew the woman was not able to express what she was feeling in that moment. Korea had put that doe-eyed look on more women than she cared to count.
“Here,” Korea said, “let me help you. You seem like you need the truth more than you need that hair bow.”
Korea stepped quickly to her. She took the fabric-covered band from her hand, letting her finger linger in her palm for a moment. She realized that she probably didn’t have a whole lot of time, but if she played her hand right, she wouldn’t need very much. Korea tossed the band across the room, and then rubbed and fluffed Stormy’s hair until it was something like a curly lion’s mane.
Her tiny glossed lips were only inches from Stormy’s as she spoke. “The truth is…you are the most beautiful woman in this building. You are perfect just like you are. You don’t have to change for them. They need to change for you.”
The Punany Experience Page 8