by Mink, Meesha
I looked over at Mr. Alvarez reaching over the arm of the chair to pick up the glass that had crashed to the floor.
“My father asked me to bring this juice over here,” I said, biting my lip as my head started to pound. I hurried to set the bag on the table by his chair.
His funky house was really getting to me.
He reached out and patted my wrist. “Such a good girl,” Mr. Alvarez said, his voice raspy with his sickness.
I jerked away from his touch. Turning to get the fuck out of there. Maybe it was the old smell of the house or his little spit show. What the fuck ever. It was straight deuces for me. I closed the front door behind me.
I looked over to see if my father was waiting on me on his porch. He wasn’t. That shit made me feel so sad and so fucking angry. All at once.
I shook my head to clear it of all the emotions fucking with me. Maybe I was PMSing or some shit. I didn’t know. I was just glad that by the time I walked over to my parents’ I felt a helluva lot better.
That night, I stopped by to pick Michel and Eve up. Michel didn’t have a car and Eve let one of her sisters borrow her little convertible. I called Michel’s phone. “Hey, bitch, I’m outside,” I said, double-parking beside a green Honda Accord.
“I’m almost ready,” he said. “Come up and don’t bitch. Just park that pretty Jag and drag your black ass up here.”
Click.
He hung up on me.
The block was crowded and the front porch of the building was covered with people trying to find some escape from the heat of their brick-encased apartments. I remembered my little AC window unit broke one summer night, and my box fan didn’t do shit to keep the sweat from soaking my sheets even as I lay naked in bed.
Humph. Living in the Twleve50 had me all about central air.
I looked up and down the street but the cars were parked bumper to bumper, without a parking spot in sight. I wasn’t trying to park around the corner and walk back in my five-inch stilettos. I stayed double-parked and put my flashers on before I shut the car off and locked the doors once I got out.
“Whaddup, Luscious? Let me get tickets to the show?” Millie, a toothless addict with six kids asked, barely sitting up straight on the metal chair she sat in. Her eyes were damn near shut and I was surprised she could see enough of me to even know who I was.
“They’ll be at the door, mama,” I said, squeezing her shoulder as I passed.
Millie laughed as she scratched at her face with raggedy fingernails. “You full of shit, Luscious, with your bad ass,” she said, her words slurring.
I just smiled as I waved at everybody on the stoop and walked into the building. Growing up in the hood, drug abuse was pretty much in your face. The more dealers, the more users, the more shit to see. It wasn’t nothing to see a dozen Millies . . . or to hear a dozen stories about how they got to be strung out.
Some man they loved introduced them to the shit and then left them behind with the addiction.
A preteen starting out with weed and beer and then escalating to harder shit because it started to take more weed to feel the high.
A woman who was running from a past of some kind of abuse that she needed the escape of drugs to forget.
Plenty of stories that ended in nightmares.
As I stepped onto the elevator, I realized my ass was lucky I didn’t get hooked on coke when I was dating Make$. And I was dumb to have taken the chance. Just as dumb as I was as college kid, popping pills and shit. I could’ve just as easily been Millie. Or Erin.
I wondered if my old college roommate was somewhere fading in and out of reality on a high. Or worse. Was she dead? The thought of that made me sad.
So I never judged. I just thanked God for the grace he bestowed me.
I smiled at the flyers for our comedy show on the wall of the elevator as I stepped on. All the bright colors stood out against the whitish walls. Eve actually designed the flyers and I must admit she surprised me, because they looked hella good, had plenty of info, and made someone curious to see what was popping off.
The elevator stopped on the third floor and I stepped aside as a tall and muscular dude stepped on. The smell of weed and cheap cologne filled the air, and I was glad when the elevator stopped on the eighth floor and I got the fuck off. His shit was about to choke me.
My heels drummed against the tiled floor as I walked the short distance to Michel’s apartment. The sounds of the bass of somebody’s music was thumping. Boom-boom-boom.
Michel had left his door open. What the fuck is up with people and their doors today? Either I had to stop watching all those crime shows or people were reckless. I pushed the door open. I jumped as I envisioned my friend lying on the floor covered in blood. So much fucking blood. All of it soaking his turquoise rug from between his thighs. His dick lying on the carpet cut away from his body.
“Luscious, why the fuck are you standing in a daze?”
I blinked and shook my head as the image of Michel’s mutilated body disappeared just as quickly as my paranoid-ass brain made it up. What the fuck? Okay, no more First 48.
I shifted my eyes up to Michel standing there looking at me like I was crazy. He was in a silk robe without one of his lace-front wigs, but his makeup was just as beautiful as ever. Just as alive as ever. I shook my head as I stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind me. “You shouldn’t leave your door open,” I said.
“Girl, I am loved in this building,” he said, strutting across the studio apartment to his white dressing table in the corner. Above the table were two shelves with six wig heads. He reached for the one with the auburn lace-front wig before sitting down on the bench.
“I worry about you,” I said, moving to the kitchenette to pour a glass of moscato.
“Why?” Michel said, turning to look at me, his wig still in hand.
“I’m just thinking about the dude from the last comedy show about to fuck you up because he didn’t know you was a man under all that pretty.” I leaned against the small counter. “What if I wasn’t there that night?”
Michel turned all the way around on the bench and crossed his long, shapely legs. “I’m just being me and I can’t change that. I love being a girl. The makeup, the clothes, ooh, baby, the shoes. All of it. Love it. And I’ve loved it since I was a little boy being told, ‘You look like a girl,’ every day of my life.”
“But you’re not a girl, Michel, you got a dick big as a bat. You’re a boy playing dress-up and not every dude is feeling that,” I insisted.
“But a lot do,” he stressed.
“But how do you know the difference?” I shot back.
He shrugged and waved his wig.
“Would you ever have the surgery?” I asked, finishing my wine and moving around the counter to pour another one. Fuck it. Michel could drive.
“I’m sorry, friend, but there is no surgery to turn me straight,” he said, sounding hurt and a little angry as he pulled the wig over his own hair that he kept cut low.
I sat my goblet on the counter and came around to help him put the adhesive on the back of the wig. “No, I mean would you get the titties and a pussy. You know, become a woman.”
Michel looked up at me in the mirror. “I do not want a pussy or even want to be anywhere near a motherfuckin’ pussy. There is nothing like the taste, the touch, and the feel of a hard dick. I’m gay. I’m not taking hormones or getting THE DICK cut off.”
My face screwed up as the bloody image flashed in my head again. I definitely could do without that shit.
“Now, if you ready to get up outta my business,” Michel said, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt, Michel,” I said, turning to pick up my glass of wine to sip.
“I can understand that but I’m good, so don’t worry,” he said. “Plus you got enough on your plate.”
The front door opened and Eve strolled in. Her face was free of makeup. “Whassup,” she said, not at all looking or soun
ding like her usual lively self.
Michel lifted an arched brow as he finished putting on his wig. “Humph, somebody got drama for days,” he muttered under his breath, giving Eve a mean side-eye.
I turned and eyed her. “What’s up with you?” I asked, pouring her a glass of wine.
Eve turned and just crossed her arms over her chest.
I leaned back at that. Eve—“I love alcohol whenever I can get it”—turned down moscato. There was one of two things going on. “You pregnant or on antibiotics?” I asked her, sitting the wine on the counter.
“Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,” Michel said in a falsetto.
Eve glared at him. “Shuddafuckup, Michael,” she snapped.
I sighed, because Eve didn’t need a baby or a disease. “So you two keeping secrets now?” I asked.
“You been busy,” Eve said, walking the short distance to plop down on the sofa.
“Not that busy,” I popped back.
Now Michel gave me a side-eye and a mouth twist that said, “Whatever, bitch,” before he dropped his robe and started to get dressed, his padded bra and thong already on. I finished my drink as he dressed in a short black ruffled skirt with a skintight black tee that read yummy entertainment in neon colors. Sky-high fuchsia pumps and fingernails were bright enough to glow in the dark. He sprayed his Gucci perfume in the air and then stepped into the mist with a wink.
Ignoring him, I looked back at Eve. “Which one is it?” I asked, feeling more like her older sister than a cousin and friend the same damn age.
Michel mimicked a baby’s cry.
Shit!
Eve sat up straight. “I’m not pregnant!”
Michel shrugged. “I know that. I just wanted you to answer the question . . . with your itchy coochie.”
No he didn’t. I turned my head so Eve wouldn’t see me fighting not to laugh.
When Michel pretended to scratch his crotch with a crazy face, even Eve had to laugh as she tossed one of his throw pillows at him.
“Can we go now?” I said, already planning to buy my cousin enough condoms to fill a drawer. Eve didn’t believe in relationships and boyfriends. She was a female playa, but I thought she was playing safe.
“Let me beat this bitch face real quick,” Michel said, motioning his hand over his dressing chair.
Eve made her way into the chair and I finished sipping my wine while Michel did her makeup and spiked her hair. We were out there in less than ten minutes. Michel locked his apartment and we laughed as we headed downstairs.
I climbed in the driver’s seat and closed the door as Michel let Eve climb in the back via the passenger door. A carload of dudes rolled by in an old Chevy Caprice. One of them leaned out the passenger window. “What’s up, lovely?” he yelled back at Michel.
Michel blew gloss-covered kisses as he flipped his wig before he finally climbed in my car as the rear lights of the Caprice disappeared around the corner. There is no way he could convince me that every last one of the niggas in that car would wanna fuck him and not beat his ass for being an undercover dude. Michel was flirting with danger.
“You don’t judge me. I don’t judge you,” he said, closing my passenger door.
I pressed my lips together as I checked the rearview mirror and then pulled off to zoom up the street.
The comedy show was another hit for us. Profits all around. As soon as the last people left we settled up with the owner of the venue and headed to Club 973 to party the last few hours of the night away until the club lights came on.
“Let’s go to Dino’s,” Eve said, her legs looking twice as long in the black linen shorts she wore with matching gladiator sandals and her Yummy T-shirt.
My cell phone vibrated in my hand. I looked down at the caller ID as we stood by my Jag in the parking lot. “I gotta take this call,” I said, moving away from them as I flipped my hair back and pressed the phone to my ear.
“What’s up?”
“Goldie sent me on a job, right?” my snitch said. “A car service picked me up, took me to the motherfucking Plaza, back entrance, penthouse suite.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Girl, I just fucked the hell out of a senator. Goldie on some real big-time shit. Like for real. She making money, you hear me?”
No wonder that bitch was living on the Upper East Side and pushing a Bentley. She was on some politician-type shit. Major.
“I got the video of me and the senator for you. If me letting this freak pretend to be a baby, putting baby powder on his saggy nuts, and diapering his old ass ain’t enough for you, I don’t know what is.”
I paced around the parking lot thinking, while Michel and Eve motioned for me to hurry. “Do you got him on video paying you?” I asked, looking up at the full moon in the sky.
“No. Goldie handles the money. We never touch it or see it.”
“Then all we have is a political scandal. Some freaky politician getting served up by a young girl. We got him by the balls, not Goldie.”
My snitch sighed.
“I need paperwork. Can you get into her office?” I asked, starting to walk back over to Michel and Eve.
“I want Goldie just as bad as you, but you asking for the impossible.”
When she told me Goldie was pimping bitches out, I never expected her to actually start tricking for Goldie—but it was her pussy to handle. “Just try for me. Okay?”
“A’ight. But the number I had in my head for payment just went up.”
I ended the call and looked over at Eve and Michel. “Let’s roll—”
They both waved their hand and sshhed me. “Girl, Tek-9 and about nine other niggas got arrested in a big drug raid about an hour ago,” Eve said.
That shit made my steps pause as Michel turned up the car’s radio.
“More news to come later on this just-breaking story.”
Damn. “What did it say?” I asked.
“Just that the police had been investigating him and a group of people for over a year and when they raided his house they found guns and a lot of weed,” Eve said.
“Damn,” I said.
I liked Tek-9 and now his ass was locked up for slanging dope. Like, why rap if you still was going to hustle? When I first met Make$ he was still in the dope game. But he eventually left that shit alone when he got busy touring and making money.
“And the DJs cracked jokes about him and Make$ winding up in the same facility or cell and be up in there fighting butt-naked over you,” Eve added, getting a nasty stare from Michel.
“What? They did?” Eve said, defending herself.
Was I ever going to live that lie down?
“Let’s go eat,” I said, climbing into the driver’s seat. I wished Eve drove so that they could ride together. I didn’t feel like all they gossiping and shit.
My mind was racing the whole way to Dino’s diner. I hated to hear about Tek-9 getting locked up, especially since I couldn’t even chance trying to visit him. The rumors would never die after that. And there went my plans to expand Yummy Entertainment. How was he gonna perform in jail? Goodbye, Bentley. Goodbye, upscale New York apartment.
Goldie always came out on top even when the bitch wasn’t trying.
The parking lot of Dino’s was packed as always for a weekend night. After the club, it was the spot to catch a meal before taking it to the crib. In the days after Dyme’s wife made him kick Goldie’s ass to the far left, the bitch had worked the third shift at the diner. Eventually Slick Rick recruited her ass to dance in the restaurant’s private dining room for a grand.
I wished I coulda seen her around that motherfucker, greasy and sweating and smelling like French fries.
Once we walked into the twenty-four-hour diner we waited for a clean booth. A lot of the chatter in the diner was about Tek-9’s arrest. I still couldn’t believe it. Dudes had to stop being so damn greedy wanting to make legit and illegit money.
The hostess finally led us to a booth in the back by the emergency door.<
br />
“Yo, Luscious!”
I stopped and stepped back to look through the open doors of one of the private rooms at Slick Rick the Ruler and his crew of dancers. Slick Rick’s sexy self made mad money as an exotic dancer in the tristate area before he opened his own strip club on Clinton Avenue. It was a Club Naughty tradition for him to take the nighttime strippers for breakfast after the club closed.
“Whassup, y’all,” I said, eyeing Rick’s cinnamon-brown complexion with his jet-black hair freshly faded and framing up his handsome round face.
It’s funny that as fine as Rick was, especially with a twelve-inch ruler-length dick, he never did anything for me. He had been one of Goldie’s exes too, but it never crossed my mind to fuck him out of revenge. Not like Has. Rick couldn’t fuck with Has. Not in my book . . . or Goldie’s either.
“I ain’t seen you in a minute,” he said, dropping his napkin onto his unfinished stack of buttermilk pancakes.
I shrugged. “I been busy.”
Rick chuckled. “So I hear,” he said, running his tongue over his white and even teeth like he was freeing something from them.
“You still mad, Rick?” I asked, frowning at him like I wasn’t in the mood for jokes.
“Nah, I ain’t mad.”
“What the fuck ever,” I said. “Enjoy your breakfast.”
I turned and left him and his smug-ass expression behind. Rick was pissed off when Goldie dumped his ass, opened her own strip club in her apartment, and then hired me and Missy from his club to dance for her. He’ll be the fuck all right.
“Excuse me, Miss Jordan.”
I turned to find a white dude in a shirt, tie, and slacks standing behind me. My eyes dropped down to the detective’s badge hanging on a metal chain around his neck and the gun holster on his hip.
My nerves instantly got shot to hell . . . especially since he knew my name. He came looking for me.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I need to talk to you in private,” he said, already lightly grasping my elbow.
“For what?” I asked, my heart pounding and my stomach feeling like that childhood song “Diarrhea” was going to be real appropriate in a minute.
“You want to discuss this here or outside?” he asked, his New York–Italian accent thick as hell.