by Noire
“See, I used to be a crack-head,” Egypt admitted as she dug her hand inside the greasy paper bag and came out with a handful of the mix. “Nah, hold up,” she corrected herself. “I used to be a crack hoe.”
I stared at her. Egypt looked so fly and sounded so smart that it was hard for me to believe she had been out on the streets smoking crack and I told her that.
“Oh, a minute ago I would have said the same thing about me too,” she laughed. “From the outside looking in, I had it going on. My father owned a barbershop called Fat Daddy’s on Livonia Avenue, right across the street from Tilden Projects. We lived in ghetto luxury in our apartment upstairs over the shop, and I had everything a little black girl from Brooklyn could ever want. But anybody can get caught up in a bad spin, Juicy. All it takes is a couple of hard knocks and one or two stupid-ass decisions and you can end up flat on your ass, you know.”
Oh, I knew. I damn sure knew.
“For me,” Egypt kept going, “it started when my dude Lamont—they call him Hood in The Ville—got knocked. And then right after that my father ended up getting murdered by some of the same drug slangers and power players that he had helped raise up in the streets. Those cats fucked him up, Juicy,” she said miserably. “They tortured him without an ounce of mercy. I came home from school one night and found his dead body in the kind of condition that no daughter should ever have to witness.”
Egypt shivered and hugged her arms.
“I was only seventeen, and all of a sudden I was left by myself in the world. All of that loss was just too much for me. I mean, yeah, I was raised in the belly of the hood, but my father had spoiled the shit outta me. He’d shielded me from most of the ugliness that lived in Brownsville. In the world, really.”
She shrugged.
“But after those same guys that he had fed and protected and trusted, upped and betrayed him and murdered him like that…I just slipped. I couldn’t handle it. Girl, you just don’t know. I miss my daddy so damn bad, but in a way I’m glad he’s dead and he didn’t have to witness all the gutter shit his baby girl went through.”
“I do know,” I said, thinking about my family and how it woulda killed Grandmother and Jimmy to know I’d been shot and in jail and was now sitting up in some damn homeless shelter.
“And what made my situation even more grimy and scandalous, ” Egypt admitted,” was that I fell into my addiction because I got blinded by the wrong niggah. By some mental case named Dreko. He was my dude’s best friend. His main manz. His partner-in-crime. When Lamont went to jail that fool had me and Lamont’s mother sucking his dick and eating his ass too. That’s how low-down and shitty that crack had both of us living.”
Egypt shrugged like she was over it, but her brown eyes got flooded with the deep pain of her memories.
I pushed the greasy bag of grub back on the table and kept my mouth closed. Egypt had a hard-knock story, but I wasn’t about to tell her that my life had been even grimier than that. I thought about how G had damn near beat me to death, then peed all in my face and let them nasty tricks run endless trains on me down in that filthy Dungeon. I thought about how my baby brother had gotten tortured behind me and my stupid-ass foolishness. About how he had been forced to murder a man he loved and blow his own brains out just because of me. It was crazy. All that death and drama going down just because I had gotten turned out on the dick of my sugar daddy’s only son. I didn’t dare think about how I’d lost Gino and our baby with one single bullet. I just couldn’t bring myself to think about that.
“I guess we all go through some shit,” I said softly. “If we had lived our lives the right way then we probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it now.”
Egypt nodded in agreement. “I’m here to tell you, honey, I went from sugar to shit so fast that it was unreal. One minute my life was perfect and I had big future plans, and the next minute I was left with nothing, girl. Absolutely nothing. But the worst part of it was that I lost Lamont. I lost his love and I definitely lost his respect.”
Egypt reached for the paper bag and peeked inside. She took out a couple of cheese doodles, then lined them up on the table in front of her and brushed the crumbs off her fingers. “You know, the best thing that ever happened to me was when Lamont drove me up on the Brooklyn Bridge and told me to get outta his whip and jump my ass into the East River. I had gotten to the point where I was so damn gutter, Juicy. I’d do anything for a hit. Anything. I was just stank and desperate and no damn good for nothing except suckin’ dick and suckin’ pipe.”
I had never messed with crack, so I just shook my head as I tried to wrap my brain around that one. “But damn,” I said frowning. “That was some cold shit! Your man told you to jump off a bridge?”
Egypt nodded. “He sure did. And it was good advice too because on the real my ass was already dead. Walking dead. See, Mont understood my condition even better than I did. First, he pulled out his gat and told me to suck it. I was so damn defeated that I actually put that burner in my mouth and pulled the trigger.”
She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
“The gun jammed, though, and I took it as a sign that God was giving me another chance to pull my shit together and do something right.”
She stared at me real hard. “Nobody wants to end up where we are, Juicy, but it’s a whole lot better than sleeping in abandoned buildings and crack houses. I move my ass around from shelter to shelter every ten days because it benefits me. The people who run this system hooked me up with a drug treatment program, and then they helped me get my GED and some counseling too.”
She shrugged and popped one of her cheese doodles in her mouth. “I’m telling you, God made me get humble when I fell down on my ass. I was two seconds away from graduating at the top of my class in high school, and my plan was to go to college and medical school and become a doctor and all that. And I believe I can still do it too. It ain’t over. I’m just chilling here until the situation is right and I can make the move that’s gonna take me to the next level, you know what I mean?”
She stopped chewing and looked at me real hard.
“You’re a cute girl, Juicy. You don’t look like a junkie or a hoe. Hell, other than those crazy lumps and bruises that were all over your face when you came in here it don’t look like the streets been riding you that hard at all. So why are you up in a shelter instead of out there letting some investment baller keep you laced?”
I shook my head. Fuck how I looked on the outside, Egypt just didn’t know how raggedy I was on the inside. The last thing I needed was another psycho-ass big willie who wanted to own me.
“Girl, I used to be caught up with this big-time drug kingpin in Harlem,” I told her. “He was rich as hell and old enough to be my damn daddy, and any little thing I did he beat my ass real good for it. He took good care of me and my brother when it came to money and jewels and all that, but that just wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to be regular, you know? I was only seventeen at that time too, and I wanted to hang out in the streets and do all the crazy shit my friends was doing. So I started creeping on him. Getting me some outside dick. And when that niggah found out he turned into the devil and tried to kill me.”
I didn’t have the heart or the energy to tell her why my fucking-out had hurt G so bad, or about how me and Gino had ran away and tried to build a new life together. And failed.
“Damn!” Egypt said with her eyes real big. “So you up in here hiding out from that fool, or what?”
I shook my head. “Nah, he’s dead. My brother killed him.”
Egypt shook her head. “You lucky then. It’s better that niggah be dead than you.”
I nodded my head and reached for the last little cheese doodle that she had left on the table. I picked that shit up and bit into it and whispered real low, “You ain’t lying. For real.”
$$$$$
Sharing a room with Egypt made my situation something that I could almost bear. I didn’t really know my way around Croo
klyn, New York’s biggest borough, all that good, but Egypt was Brooklyn-born and bred, and she understood this town’s unique brand of New York City flow.
We hung out for a little bit. Nothing big, since I was broke and Egypt didn’t have a whole lot of money. But my foot was feeling almost all the way better so we walked up on the avenue and got a slice of pizza once or twice, and when Egypt went to class then I just sat around and tried to figure out what life had in store for me next.
On my fifth day at the shelter a big old Goodwill truck came and dropped off a bunch of used clothes and other stuff, and after the workers got it all sorted out then the residents were free to take what they needed.
I was one of the chicks in the house who needed every damn thing. Where I had once stayed draped in the best fabric that money could buy, every stitch of gear I now owned had come out of a donation box, and I wasn’t mad about it neither. For one thing I wasn’t tryna be fly and attract no attention, and for another thing I would rather wear another woman’s used shit than depend on a man to put clothes on my back.
On Saturday morning Egypt got up and said she wanted to go downtown and buy some natural products for her hair. I asked her if I could go with her just to hang out. We rode the train to Nevins Street and got off and went upstairs. We walked up on Fulton Street so Egypt could get the stuff she wanted from a street vendor, and then we walked down toward Albee Square, just running our mouths and window-shopping.
We were right outside of a hair salon when a commotion broke out. I frowned as a bunch of chicks with half-done hair busted out the door fighting their asses off.
“Kick her ass!” a bunch of girls were screaming as the whole damn shop seemed to empty out on the sidewalk. It was a sight. Females had wet hair, weaved hair, wrapped hair, and creamy-crack perm all up in their hair, but not one of them seemed to give a fuck about their hair as the mass ass-kicking went down. “Beat that bitch’s ass!” They swung haymakers and kicked and fought. “Fuck her up! Beat her ass!”
“Crazy sistahs,” Egypt smirked as we jumped off the curb and walked around a parked car trying to get out of their way. “Black women need to stop that shit.” She frowned and crossed her arms as we watched chicks scrapping and scratching all over the pavement. “And that big-ass trannie over there really needs to stop,” Egypt pointed with her chin and rolled her eyes.
I looked over to see who she was talking about. There were three chicks fighting off to the side and they were really going at it. One had bleached blond hair and she was laying flat on her back getting her mug drilled by the trannie, who was sitting on her chest and banging her head on the ground. A real skinny girl with half of her hair braided in extensions and the other half flying everywhere had yoked the cross-dressing dude up from behind. She tried her best to pull him off her friend who was getting her head cracked on the concrete, but mami had no wins because the big dude was too much for both of them.
I blinked real fast as he reached behind his back and slung the skinny female down on the ground right beside her friend. Still sitting on the blond-haired chick, he leaned over and started beating the hell outta the skinny girl too.
I was just about to turn away from the fight when I caught a look at dude’s face and my heart banged in my throat. I damn-near slumped over the parked car we were leaning on as the truth slammed me hard in the gut.
“Uh-uh. That ain’t no damn transvestite!” I shouted to Egypt. And it sure as hell wasn’t neither. It was that treacherous bitch from the West coast who had ruined my life and brought death down on my baby and on the only man I had ever loved.
It was DarQuese.
$$$$$
I lit into that two-faced bitch with the fury of a Japanese tsunami. I mean I jumped on her ass and got to kicking and punching and slapping and scratching her with the backed-up rage and fury that boiled all down in my bone marrow.
The two chicks she was already fighting didn’t know what the fuck was going on when I jumped in wildin’ like a madwoman. I grabbed Quese’s head and brought my knee up hard under her chin. I slammed into her face as many times as I could before she twisted away from me and fell over on her side. Jumping over the girl she was sitting on, I gave a flying kick to DarQuese’s nose, and when the heel of my shoe connected with her face I heard a snap and blood spurted outta her nostril and gushed all over the place.
Fuck her blood, I raged as I kept right on going after her ass. Me and Gino had spilled much more blood than that.
For a Harlem chick who couldn’t fight for shit I wasn’t doing all that bad. Quese reached up and grabbed me around my waist, and I banged furiously at her face as she took me down to the ground. My fists were slick with her blood as I kept swinging and started kicking and squirming even harder as we scrapped.
Egypt ran over and jumped in swinging when she saw that I was down. She boxed the shit out of Quese’s ass like a true-blue Brooklyn girl, and all three of us was panting and breathing hard as we got it on.
“Stop fuckin’ hitting me!” DarQuese screamed on Egypt as she wrestled me flat and laid her huge self on top of me. “I ain’t hurting her!” she yelled over and over again. “Juicy is my fuckin’ friend! I would never fuckin’ hurt her!”
“They done called the cops!” a girl with a head full of white perm hollered as the rest of the fighting girls got ready to break out. “They called the cops!” She had fought so hard that her plastic smock had twisted around her neck and was flapping behind her like a cape.
DarQuese and Egypt both froze, and even above my rage I could hear the sirens in the distance. “Y’all better dip,” the chick warned as she straightened her smock and ran back inside the hair salon. “Them mothafuckas are coming!”
$$$$$
“I swear, Juicy!” DarQuese pleaded. “On my dead mama! Girl, I put my right hand up to God!” she cried. “You gotta believe me. I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
We were sitting in the back of Bella Pizzeria on Hoyt Street, and DarQuese was crying and babbling as she held a napkin full of crushed ice to her nose. That shit was swollen and crooked from the driving force of my thrusting shoe, and every now and then she dotted a fresh drop of blood from the tip.
“You had to know!” I barked on her. “If Pit was down with that shit then you was down too!”
“But Pit wasn’t down with it, Juicy!” she insisted. “I’m telling you he didn’t do nothing to y’all! By the time I found you and Gino laying on the floor Pit had already left the church!”
“But how did he know where we were gonna be, Quese? He wasn’t invited to the goddamn church! Just like he wasn’t invited to my wedding dinner the night before that either, but I caught his ass smoking weed outside in the parking lot anyway! That niggah warned me out of his mouth that night that my honeymoon was gonna be a nightmare and Gino was gonna get sat down. Nah,” I waved my hand and dismissed her bullshit. “Pit did it. I know damn well he did it. And the only reason that fool knew where to find me and Gino is because you told him, DarQuese.”
Her eyes were red as she continued to shake her head in denial. “Look,” she sniffled and set her bundle of ice on the table. “This is God’s truth, Juicy. God’s truth! Yeah, I let Pit give me a ride to your wedding dinner and that’s why he was there. And yeah, he came by the church the next day and I opened the side door and let him in. But I had left your wedding present in the back of his Range Rover, Juicy! Me and Cynthia had chipped in together and bought a big bag of freaky sex toys for you to take on your honeymoon, and I called Pit and asked him to bring the bag to the church for me.
“And I swear to God, that’s all he did. He came inside and gave me the bag, and then I watched him jump back in his whip. As soon as he pulled off I came right back downstairs to your dressing room. And the minute I opened the door and saw you and Gino laying on the floor in all that blood…I started screaming.”
I shook my head. That shit was unbelievable. Her story had to be bogus. It left too many questions unanswered. “So yo
u’re trying to say you was upstairs with Pit when me and Gino got shot?”
“I’m not tryna say it, that’s what I’m saying. And that’s what I told the fuckin’ cops, too. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Pit neither.”
I smirked at her, my rage still going strong. “Okay, if it wasn’t y’all then who the hell was it, DarQuese? Tell me that. Who the hell was it? Who shot me and Gino?”
My old friend with the burnt up face took a real deep breath and stared me straight in the eye. “I think it was Gino’s boy,” she said quietly. “That greasy asshole who was always hungry and always scheming. I think it was Slick Sallie.”
$$$$$
There was a time when I would have brushed off anything Quese said about Slick Sallie as pure bullshit, but after the ruthless shit he had just pulled with my money I didn’t put anything past him anymore.
“I tried to tell you them Italians was shiesty,” DarQuese insisted, “and you ran me some mess about them just being good businessmen and all that. But I told you I peeped Sallie from the gate. That cracker stayed up on the track creeping chicks out. He didn’t want nothing to do with the Latino hoes or the Asian prostitutes. He went strictly after the black sistahs, and every last one of them came back with a wild story about some sick, twisted drama he had put them through.”
DarQuese smirked and shook her head. “I never trusted his ass. He was all the time begging to lick my pussy. The way he stayed strapped up and brandishing his tool is what made me start watching his ass. You shoulda been watching him too.”
“Sallie was Gino’s friend, not mine. I didn’t have no reason to watch him.”
“Well them mafia fuckers didn’t have no reason to do me and Pit the way they did us neither, Juicy! They came after us hard. They tore up Pit’s shop and destroyed my salon too. Yeah, I ended up losing every damn thing I had worked for, but Pit got it worse ’cause they tracked him down like a dog. And when they sniffed him out they tortured him. They smiley-faced him and cut off his hand for some reason, and then those animals hung him up to bleed to death in his own shower so his mother could find his body.”