“Um…actually Compton is where I used to live until I was, like, twelve. It’s a lot further south. Then we moved here. Right now we’re in the Hollywood Hills.”
Woods’s brow pulls low as the houses get bigger and bigger. “So you were struggling to make ends meet back in West Virginia, but your family lives here? In one of these big houses?” he repeats. “Are they, uh… live-in servants or something like that?”
I grimace. “No, it’s a long story. But I guess you could say my dad didn’t support my decision to move to West Virginia and become a doctor. Really didn’t support it, in fact. And Mom is old-school. Like one of those women who believes whatever the man says, goes. So I ended up having to do it on my own dime.”
He digests this information and opens his mouth to ask another question. But then the nav system interrupts with a command to turn right onto to the small access road leading to our house. And then he’s left without words, because he’s too busy ogling the white stucco mansion sitting just beyond a double gate with two microphones sculpted into its iron bars.
We stop at the gate, because according to Waze, we’ve reached our final destination.
Woods stops the car, letting it settle into a silent electric idle as he continues to stare at the house in front of us.
“This why you didn’t want to bring me home to meet your family at first?” he asks me. “You’re ashamed of me, because I don’t have nothing to my name but a backpack full of money and your daddy’s got all of this? Is that why we’re pretending to be married already, because you know they ain’t going to accept me as the father of your baby unless they think we’re already hitched?”
Woods’s tone is so sincere, his expression so hurt, his questions so valid given how little I’ve told him of my past. Which is probably why I come off as a straight up bitch when I burst out laughing.
“No, no! That’s not it at all,” I answer. “If anything, my dad’s going to love you. Like love you way too much, and then immediately try to use you.”
Woods just shakes his head at me. “Call me dumb, Doc, but I’m not even close to understanding any of the words coming out of your mouth.”
“I know,” I answer, sobering. Then I take a deep breath because this is it. No more stalling. I need to come clean with him about everything.
“Before we go in, there’s something I have to tell you,” I say, peeping up at him. “Actually, it’s a big something about my family…”
But just as I’m about to spill the beans and share everything I didn’t tell him back in West Virginia, the microphone gates part and my larger-than-life father comes out dressed in boxer shorts, a white tank top, and a velvet robe.
Of course he’s holding his smart phone—the exact same make and model as my latest special phone—at chest-level. And he makes sure we’re fully lined up in the shot before yelling, “What the hell, Nitra! You got married to some random white nigga in Vegas and you didn’t tell me?!?!”
Chapter Twenty
Oh, eff the internet. I’d been living so long in a place where every other person and their child does not have a smart phone, I’d forgotten how everywhere it could be at all times here in Los Angeles.
As romantic as yesterday was, I now curse our impromptu trip to the jewelry store. I knew that sales clerk was up to no good the way he was eyeing me. Yet, I’m incapable of feeling violated. Not after how I grew up.
Right now, I only feel worried. Mostly about Woods, who’s already out of the car and getting between me and my father like a Southern wall.
“Excuse me, sir, I’m not sure who you are, but I cannot and will not allow you talk to my wife that way.”
Dad looks over John’s shoulder at me, popping his eyes and, because he’s my dad, asking out loud what most folks would only think, “Nitra, is this nigga serious?”
Then he lowers the phone to whisper-ask me, “Did you not explain things to him?”
“I was about to,” I answer, coming to stand beside Woods. “But then you came out here, dropping n-bombs in your underpants.”
I snatch the phone out of his hand, making sure to turn it all the way off before I put it in my back pocket.
“Hey!” My dad starts to yell.
But I cut him off with my introduction. “Woods, this is my dad. Curtis Dunhill, but you know him better as C-Mello.”
Woods comes out of his protective stance to blink down at me. “C-Mello?” he repeats, probably thinking of all the hardcore lyrics from the songs I’d included on his workout mix. “C-Mello is your dad?”
“No, Curtis is my dad. C-Mello is the role he plays...”
“Fuck that! Tell this nigga I will go back in my house and get a gun to put a cap in his ass if he doesn’t stand down right now and let me get this hug in.”
“A role he plays, like, all the time,” I finish wearily as I step forward to present myself for one of Dad’s signature bear hugs.
Dad grabs me up in his arms like I’m still a kid, and kisses me on top of the head.
“Good to see you, Nee-Nee. Hair and make-up will be here in about an hour or two. And the rest of the crew’s going to meet us at the VMH awards.” But in a flash Dad goes from informative back to hurt. “You seriously didn’t tell him nothing about us?” he asks me.
“I didn’t know how to,” I admit, casting my eyes downward and to the side, pretty much as far away from Woods as I can.
But then I force myself to look back up at him, if only to say, “I wasn’t planning on letting him ambush you like this. I was going to tell you before we went in.”
Now Dad is looking at Woods sideways, like I’ve brought home a green alien. “Okay, since you took my phone, I’m just going to straight up ask: where did you find this boy? He been living up under a rock or something?”
“He’s got a rare form of retrograde amnesia,” I admit to Dad. “So even if he’d heard of us, he wouldn’t remember it.”
Now Dad’s eyes really bug. “No shit!?!?”
“No shit,” I grudgingly confirm, really not loving how much delight he’s taking in Woods’ ongoing medical condition.
“Hot damn!” Dad says, rubbing his hands together. “Wait till Sandy gets a load of this nigga! She going to lose her fucking mind.”
But Woods is shaking his head, obviously having a hard time processing this. “So your father is a rapper, and your mother is a pastor, and your brother dresses up as women for his career. You guys sound a lot like that reality show I was watching in the hospital...”
Dad nearly loses his shit then. “Nitra! You have got to be fucking kidding me with this!” he yells.
“He has amnesia Dad. Amnesia!” I shout back, full bitch. “I seriously couldn’t figure out how to tell him, okay?!”
But then I force my voice back down to a much more pleasant register, turning back to Woods to say, “Funny, you should mention that…”
As if on cue, a 90s era Hummer comes tearing around the corner.
“Ooh, Nitra, you going to get it!!!” my dad sing-songs, pointing at me like a kid in the schoolyard as the oversized car screeches to a halt in front of the gate.
At my dad’s words, Woods once again goes into his protective stance, fists bunched, ready to meet whoever comes out of the car head on.
That is until the door flies open to admit a five-foot tall, middle-aged woman screeching, “You’ve got some freaking nerve, kid. First West Virginia, and now this? Did you really get married without telling me first? And if so, tell me you’ve got something on tape other than that shitty security camera footage!” She glares at Woods. “And he’s cute, kid, but if you found him on a competing network, I swear to you, I will lose it. I will kill you and your entire family and tell VMH exactly why I did it at the contract negotiations.”
Woods goes from defensive to confused. Really confused. “I’m guessing this isn’t your mother, the pastor,” he says to me.
“Worse,” the little woman answers. “I’m her mother fucking executive producer. Bu
t the real question is, who are you?”
“So, Woods…” I say in the quiet that follows. “I’d like you to meet Sandy, the executive producer of Rap Star Wives, which, ah…just so happens to be the reality show my family sort of headlines.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“I’ve got a joke,” the twelve-year-old version of me tells everyone gathered around the dining room table at her unusual parents’ swanky new Malibu mansion. “Why did the chicken have a gun?”
“Why, baby?” my mother’s honey-warm voice asks as she sets a beautifully roasted chicken down in the middle of the table.
“To defend itself against the cruel humans who were trying to eat it,” twelve-year-old me answers.
Beside me, my sixteen-year-old brother, kitted out in waist-length dookie braids and a full face of heavy make-up, falls out laughing.
But my father and mother stare at me stonily as my six-year-old sister, Chanel, asks, “What does ‘cruel’ mean?”
“It means somebody at this table need to get her ass whooped,” my dad answers, glaring at me.
“Curtis…” my mom starts.
“Or a pistol whipping. See how many chicken jokes she be making then.”
In the screening room of the same mansion, Sandy pauses on that image to crow to Woods, “This scene’s got over ten million YouTube views!”
“And then look what she does next. Look at it…” my father, who’s sitting beside Sandy in the front row of red velvet stadium chairs, adds.
On screen, twelve-year-old me pulls a microphone out of nowhere and drops it on top of her empty plate.
Dad falls out laughing. “Oh, no she didn’t! No she didn’t! See, that right there is why we’re the first family of Rap Star Wives! Why we’ll always be the first family.” Dad gives Sandy a pointed look as I sink even further down into my seat.
I’m sure there are worse ways to confess to your pretend husband that you grew up on a reality show called Rap Star Wives. And that your family “visits” are, in fact, a contractual obligation to make four appearances on said reality show every year. But seriously, I can’t think of any.
Luckily, I have the show’s long time executive producer and America’s most embarrassing father—Entertainment Weekly voted him number one in a list that included Gary Busey and Charlie Sheen a few years back—to explain things to Woods that I just can’t.
For the next hour-and-a-half, Sandy and Dad narrate a literal highlight reel of my life, which, yes, the show just happens to keep on hand. They start with my introduction to America as the bitchy vegan middle daughter of rapper C-Mello and his wife, Cassandrea, an evangelical pastor. The show, as first conceived by Sandy, a graduate of Columbia University’s prestigious journalism school, was meant to be controversial. An incisive and somewhat feminist look at the real lives of rap star wives.
Our family had been the main focus of the original show, thanks to Compton rapper C-Mello’s refusal to tone down his language or violent lyrics, despite having a wife in the ministry. Also, because of his and my mother’s complete acceptance of their cross-dressing son, Curtis Jr.
After securing funding from Video Music Hits, a then-flagging music video channel looking to make the jump into unscripted programming, Sandy had gone into the first season of Rap Star Wives hoping for a Peabody. However, what was supposed to be a six-episode character study, ended up garnering huge ratings and attention for the music network airing our little “docudrama,” thanks mostly in part to our strange family dynamic.
Eventually Rap Star Wives became a franchise. Many of the other rap wives would come and go on the show, but C-Mello and his family remained the anchor of Rap Star Wives. My mother went from Cassie Dunhill, the pastor at a little Compton storefront church, to Cassandrea Mello, a “spiritual advisor” who regularly sold out stadiums in cross-country tours. And my brother moved up from cross-dressing to becoming Cee-Cee Mello, one of the most well-known drag queens in America.
In Season 1—which is nowhere on my reel—we’re exactly what we say we are, a loving family living in Compton. By Season 3 however, we’ve got a house in the Hollywood Hills, and I’m dropping my now iconic “dinner plate mic.”
On screen, Woods watches with squinted eyes as I go from a know-it-all twelve-year-old vegan, to a super spoiled teenager constantly stirring up catty drama amongst her crew of carefully curated friends, to a heartbroken eighteen-year-old crying over her little sister’s dead body and screaming at the cameras to get out.
“Just fucking get out of here!”
At this point we’re in Season 1 of my spin-off show, Rap Star Wives: College Mic Drop, in which me and three of the other kids who grew up on Rap Star Wives (barely) attend various colleges around California.
The next highlight is of me rolling my bag up a set of concrete stairs and collapsing in the middle because there isn’t anyone around to carry my bags for me. This is typical Nitra Mello behavior. Not only am I the snottiest vegan ever, but I’m known to fly into ridiculous rages when not shown proper respect by servants, friends, and ex-boyfriends alike. I also expect L.A.-level service every single place I go. Even if it’s a college dorm.
At least that was how the show portrayed it. But in reality, I collapsed and began crying for much different reasons. Because my little sister had died of a disease that didn’t give a fuck what popular reality show she was on six months prior to my first day at ValArts. Because the end of her life had been a ratings bonanza for both the original Rap Star Wives and my new show. Because here I was, pretending to haul my own luggage up the stairs, when obviously, obviously, there were like a million burly crew guys within a few feet of me who could have helped me do it.
Because I didn’t have any real friends.
Because I had never had a real relationship.
Because for the first time, I was realizing how silly and fake my entire life had become.
For that and a million other reasons, I ugly cried on those stairs.
And though the next few scenes go on to show quite a few ill-advised adventures with hard-partying “friends,” the only true friend I have is the one who never appeared on any episode of the show: Sola, who until a few years ago, was technically an illegal immigrant and therefore considered a legal liability and never filmed as a result.
The last highlight in my reel is of me coming home to tell my parents that not only was I dropping out of ValArts, I was moving across country to a place where the cameras couldn’t follow me to become a doctor.
On camera, my parents do a good job of acting like themselves. My dad tells me my decision makes no goddamn sense because it ain’t going to bring Chanel back. While my mom goes into full pastor mode, saying we should pray over it. This is our lives as lived on TV, so of course they don’t show the truly ugly stuff.
Dad yelling at me about ratings. Sandy, who no longer gives two shits what the Peabody folks think of her, threatening to sue me to the moon and back if I leave a half season into my new contract. Technically, America hates my spoiled, vegan ass—especially the parents who had to deal with an onslaught of children dropping toy mics on their empty plates whenever they didn’t want to eat what was being served for dinner. But the truth is, the ability to engender rabid hate is one of the true qualities of a reality star. So I’m easily the most popular character on the college spin-off show.
In real life, the producers knew the college spin-off wouldn’t survive without people tuning in to hate-watch my overly bitchy vegan dramatics. In real life, one of the reasons I couldn’t afford medical school without substantial loans was because I had to spend so much money on lawyers to get out of the reality jail they wanted to keep me in.
But on screen, my mom prays and cries over the fact that her baby is moving over three-thousand miles away. And no one mentions the months of litigation and screaming fights, or the fact that by the time this scene is filmed, I’ve already completed a semester of my combined program. Or that this episode is a part of a new seven-year “
compromise contract” that requires me to film at least four episodes of Rap Star Wives a year.
Sandy watches my last highlight with a shake of her perfectly frosted head, “A born reality star, our Nitra. Too bad she decided to completely ass-fuck the franchise seven years ago.”
Dad shakes his head right along with Sandy. “Ratings took a real dip after she left,” he tells Woods. “And now the network’s talking about not renewing the Mellos contracts for next season, since Nitra won’t be coming back. Don’t think any of us ever going to forgive Nitra for leaving.”
“But maybe if she makes a big enough splash this weekend, that will be enough to convince the network to let the rest of you stay,” Sandy points out to Dad, though obviously, so ridiculously obviously, her comments are directed toward me.
But I don’t care about their latest guilt trip. Only about Woods who’s watching the credits roll in our dark screening room. His face unreadable.
I miss him already. His hand on top of mine. Our closeness. It feels like it’s all slipping through my fingers with each bitchy highlight of my on-screen life.
Shame and concern wash over me, making me want to talk this out with him and run away at the same time.
But in the end, hair and make-up makes the decision for me.
“NITRA!!!!” Frannie and Carlos, my freelance hair and make-up team, yell from the doorway of the screening room.
The next thing I know, I’m being pelleted with questions. “Is it true. Did you really get married, girl? Is that him? Where’d you find a hottie like that in West Virginia?” Frannie and Carlos demand, never giving me more than a millisecond to answer their questions
“Take her upstairs,” Sandy tells them irritably. “I’ve got to get him cleared and into hair and make-up, too.”
“But—” I start.
“We’ve only got a few hours to get you camera ready and rewrite the scenario for the Vemmies tonight. Do not fuck with me on this, Nitra. This is your last episode, and we’ve got our lawyers on standby…”
The Very Bad Fairgoods - Their Ruthless Bad Boys Page 41