by Noire
On the real, I loved my mama, but I loved me some of Daddy’s on-the-side hoes too. Them was some bad-ass chicks, and most of them were slick and beautiful and had side-hustles of their own. And I looked so much like my daddy that they took right to me and spoiled the hell outta me. I used to play hooky from school and hang out with them up on the avenue, and they would sneak me cigarettes and weed and as much liquor as my lil young throat could swallow.
And by that time I had some brand-new titties poppin’ out on my chest, and my hips and booty had poofed out and spread deliciously wide too. My daddy would give me money to buy food and shit, but instead of taking it home to Mama I would trick it up on Kush and Coronas, and it wasn’t long before I started dressing like his most butter hoes and flaunting my firm young body on the streets just like they did too.
But my father peeped my game when he overheard some little corner slanga talking about how he was gonna get at my cherry, and Daddy put the brakes on all that ill shit. He busted up in Mama’s crib screamin’ on her for not watching me and dogging her out for letting my hot ass run wild and loose on the streets.
I felt so bad when I saw how hard my mama cried!
Sniffling and hollering, she broke down and confessed that she had liver disease from all that drinking she used to do when she was younger. She told Daddy she was sick and she couldn’t be running up and down the streets behind my fast ass no more! Mama got on her knees and pressed her face to Big Moe’s shiny shoes, hugging his ankles as she begged my daddy to come back home so they could get back together and raise me together as a real family. But as bad as I felt for Mama, I wanted to slap the hell outta her for getting down on the floor and begging a man like that! As young as I was, I knew it didn’t matter to a playa if a chick had his kid or not! When a nigga didn’t want you no more, he didn’t want your black ass no more! I was only thirteen years old, but I knew damn well that Moe LaRue was never coming back home, and I would never forget the look on my daddy’s face when he told Mama that.
“We ain’t no goddamn family, Jude!” he spit at her. “Mink is my baby, and me and her is gonna always be blood. But me and you?” He kicked her off his foot like a dirty Kotex had dropped outta the sky and landed on his shoe. “Bitch you ain’t shit to me. You never was and you never will be.”
It seemed like something just broke in Mama’s spirit after that. All them years of hoping and praying and running the streets behind that man just fell down on her head and she couldn’t take it no damn more.
“I’ma kill your ass, you yellow muthafucka!” Mama rolled over on the floor and screamed as Daddy kissed me then headed toward the front door.
“Just fuckin’ watch!” she hollered. “You think Valentina fucked you up? Well you just watch, you piss-colored muthafucka, you! I’ma kill your ass!”
Mama didn’t sleep a wink that night. I heard her walking a hole in the floor in our small apartment just’a crying and muttering nonsense under her breath.
She was standing right by my bed the next morning when I woke up.
“Get up, Mink. I need you to come with me to my appointment,” she told me as I slid out the bed and got ready for school. Mama was already dressed, and her hair was done real nice. She had on makeup and all that. Perfume too.
Mama said there wasn’t enough time for me to fix breakfast, so she handed me a Pop-Tart and a cup of sink water with two ice cubes floating in it. We went downstairs and climbed in our car, but instead of driving me to her doctor’s appointment like she said she was, that fool went and drove both of us off a loading dock and straight into the Hudson River.
My mama fucked up three lives that day.
When Daddy got word that she had driven me into all that cold water he jumped straight in his whip and jetted toward the west side of Manhattan tryna get to me.
But Big Moe never made it. Less than a mile from the pier he had a heart attack and crashed into a light pole. One of his girlfriends was riding with him, and she said the last words to come outta his mouth were My baby. My baby. Mink, my baby.
And then he died.
I don’t know how I got outta that sinking car, but I did. It was dark as hell as I scrambled outta my open window and clawed my way up to the surface, and then I coughed and choked on all that cold water until some white man jogging on the pier jumped in the river and dragged me out.
They pulled Mama out too, but not in time. She was still alive when the ambulance got her to the hospital, but she had brain damage from being under that water for so long, and even though her body was still here, her mind was way gone.
Daddy’s family wasn’t shit after that. They blamed my mother for killing Big Moe, and whatever money and jewelry his hoes didn’t pocket when they found out he was dead, them trifling-ass sisters of his stole and I didn’t get not one penny.
The state made me go see all kinds of counselors and psychologists so I could get my head right, but it didn’t matter what nobody said because it still added up to the same thing: My own damn mama had tried to kill me. Now tell me, what kid would wanna remember, let alone live, with that?
CHAPTER 3
“Ummm, hold up. Say that shit again?” Pilar Ducane batted her fake eyelashes at her cousin Barron as he sat across from her with the two-hump-chump look on his fine chocolate face.
“You heard me. The board met. I signed the papers Suge got drawn up and they voted to open Daddy’s trust fund and kick out the first cash payment. To everybody.”
Pilar blinked. They were kicked back and chilling on Barron’s king-sized bed, drinking expensive wine and eating some gourmet Chinese food.
“What do you mean to everybody? Including Mink and Dy-Nasty?”
Barron frowned and nodded. “Well, yeah. Whichever one of them ends up being Sable is gonna get three hundred grand every year.”
“Uh-uh, B!” Pilar exploded. Her blood boiled at the thought of those ghetto bandits digging their grimy fingers around in the Dominion’s multi-billion-dollar cookie jar. “Your black ass has got to be bullshitting!”
She held her slim, manicured hand in the air.
“Please, please, PLEASE tell me you didn’t go do no stupid shit like that!”
“Yo, it wasn’t stupid,” he grilled her and frowned.
“But you were supposed to stall them, dammit! You were supposed to submit a request for a vote delay!”
Barron’s broad shoulders slumped forward and his eyes searched the bedspread as he tried to figure out how the hell he was gonna tell Pilar the rest of his fucked-up story.
“It ain’t like I wanted to sign that shit. I just didn’t have no other choice,” he said quietly.
“What the hell do you mean you didn’t have no other choice?” Pilar dropped her chopsticks and hissed through her clenched teeth. “You fuckin’-a-right you had another choice!” Her pretty face was twisted up in rage and a thunderstorm was crackling in her gray eyes.
“Oh I did? Then what the fuck was it?” Barron sat straight up and barked. “Yo! That ol’ slick nigga Suge had my back against the wall! He had me bent over kissing my own nuts! What the hell was I supposed to do?”
Pilar narrowed her gray eyes. “You were supposed to tell him you weren’t gonna sign a goddamn thing! We needed the board to name you the CEO of Dominion Oil before those thirsty hood bitches got their DNA results back, remember? I don’t understand why you just gave up and wimped out on all our plans just like”—she snapped her manicured fingers—“that!”
Barron bit down hard on his lip as he felt his control slipping. Pilar was about to go too damned far. It was bad enough that Suge had ass-fucked him with no Vaseline. He didn’t need Pilar digging up in his guts too.
“Yo, I’m telling you. I did what I had to do. Uncle Suge got crafty on me. He paid some chick to go on camera and say I was the father of her baby and that she wasn’t getting no child support. That nigga had me by the balls so I had to tap out.”
“A baby?” Pilar shrieked. The only coochie you better
be shooting a goddamn baby up in is mine! “Are you telling me some skeezer went on camera and said she had a baby by you?”
Barron grilled her as he nodded. “Yeah. But I also told you it was a setup, didn’t I? Yo, I ain’t nobody’s baby daddy, and you can believe that shit. Besides, I ain’t never seen that white girl in my life. And I definitely never boned her ass.”
“Aw, damn!” Pilar jumped off the bed and marched around in an exasperated circle, throwing up her hands and stomping her feet on the shiny hardwood in disgust. “You and your goddamn white girls! When are you gonna get over that dumb shit, Bump?”
“Yo, hold up!” Barron said, getting real swole. He jabbed his pointer finger toward Pilar as rage bubbled up out of him. “What the hell are you talking about? I had one white girl, Pilar! One. She was the only woman I ever asked to be my wife, and I dropped her ass for you! So I am over that shit! I don’t know where he got that young chick on the film from, but she’s probably just a stray piece of ass that Uncle Suge laid a buck on to put the squeeze on me. The only reason I went along with that shit is because I can’t be having no kind of negative light shining on me right now.”
“But still”—Pilar crossed her arms over her breasts—“why in the world would you fall for that kind of hustle anyway? Even if Suge did pay somebody to run that baby-daddy bullshit all over the local news, you’re an attorney, Barron! You’ve built yourself a solid rep in this city! There’s no way in hell those kind of bogus charges would stick to you! A quick paternity test would bury that tired-ass scam deep in the dirt real quick. I can’t believe you let Suge twist your arm up like that!”
Barron took a deep breath. This chick was always pushing. Digging. Probing. She didn’t even know how to chill. But if he was ever gonna shut her up then he was gonna have to give up the goods and come clean.
“There’s a little bit more to it than that though, Pilar,” he said quietly. “Matter fact, this shit gets a whole lot worse. See, I ran up on some trouble when I went to that frat party the other week, you feel me? One of them hatin’ niggas must have dropped a bomb in my drink because I passed out. I don’t really remember a whole lot, but I guess I woke up at some point because I tried to get out of there and drive home. But”—he swallowed hard—“I fucked around and crashed my ride and I . . .” Barron’s face turned to stone as he lowered his eyes and frowned. “I ran over a little kid.”
“Oh my God!” Pilar shrieked. “Barron, no!” She jetted over to his side and wrapped her arms protectively around him. “You hit somebody’s kid?” She pulled his face deep into her juicy breasts. “Oh, damn! I’m so sorry! Why didn’t you tell me this from the jump? Is the child okay?”
Barron nodded as he closed his eyes and sucked up her titty fumes. He snuggled his nose into her warm cleavage as his hands circled her tiny waist.
“That damn kid is fine,” he muttered. “His ankle is broken, but other than that he’s okay.”
Barron didn’t tell her the little bastard’s father was trying to shake him down for five hundred grand, but he was gonna have to tell her about those X-rated pictures that somebody had snapped of him before he left the frat party.
Shame flashed through Barron’s body and he pulled out of Pilar’s embrace. His hands shot up to his face as his fingers skimmed over the brittle stubble of his growing eyebrows. One of them frat fools had slipped him some knockout dust and shaved his brows until they were damn-near bald. And then some idiot had drawn some new ones on him with a thick black pencil.
Barron thought about that ugly-ass rose-colored miniskirt they had dressed him up in and that skimpy little push-up bra. It was bad enough that he’d had to stand up there and take a mug shot wearing that shit, but it fucked him up that his moms had seen his dick hanging outta that skirt, and she’d seen him with mascara on his eyes and some clown-ass lipstick colored all around his mouth too.
And them fuckin’ pictures!
His boy Animal had called and told him all about the photo shoot that he had starred in while he was fucked up, and even now bitter tears of rage sprang to Barron’s eyes as he remembered going to that Web site and seeing some strange nigga’s meat pressed up against his painted lips. That shit had fucked him up so bad that the only thing on his mind had been to get him some get-back. He was about two seconds away from calling his gutta peeps down in Houston and flying a posse up to Dallas so they could bust the door down on that frat house and blast it up with a couple of fuckin’ Uzis, but the thought of having to explain them pictures to any fuckin’ body was simply more than his manhood could handle.
But still, Barron bit down on his shame and told Pilar everything. Trembling in fury, he laid it all out and ran the whole shit down to her, because if she was gonna be fighting on his team then she needed to know exactly what kind of shit they were going up against.
By the time Barron finished running it down Pilar’s ass was on fire. She crossed her arms over her plump breasts and grilled her cousin like he was an idiot for real.
“You can’t be fucking serious!” she spit. “I know damn well you’re smarter than that! You’re a lawyer, Barron. Criminals pay you big dollars to lie and scheme under oath, baby! I can’t believe you let yourself get caught in a trick bag like that!”
Barron grimaced. If he’d been expecting a little sympathy from her cold-hearted ass he was shit out of luck.
“I know I’m an attorney, Pilar. And that’s why I hooked up with a top judge who’s gonna handle all this shit for me. But I still couldn’t let Suge toss me under the bus while all this other bullshit was still going on!” He threw up his hands. “So I signed the fuckin’ papers, man. Suge was out to burn me, and I ain’t got enough skin left on my black ass to take that type of heat!”
Pilar stared her cousin down as she fought the urge to knock the shit out of him. After everything they had worked for. After all of her scheming and conniving. They had gotten this damn close to cutting that stank bitch Mink out of the family trust and Barron had almost thrown it all away.
“So what now?” she asked, turning her lip up as she eyeballed him in disgust.
Barron felt like a piece of shit as he shrugged.
“Now we wait. The next step is getting the final documents signed and notarized. Once that’s done, we get those DNA results in our hands, and if they come back saying what I think they’re gonna say, then we still come out on top.”
Pilar smirked. “And how’s that?”
“Easy. Mink’s results are gonna be negative, so we just expose her ass as a fraud, and then make an official declaration that Dy-Nasty is Sable. And then after that we pull out Dy-Nasty’s arrest records and get her ass disqualified from the trust fund real quick.”
Barron reached out and patted Pilar on her firm booty. “And once that’s over, me and you can go back to doing what we always do, baby. And everything will still be everything.”
“Yeah, but that’s your Plan A,” Pilar whined. “What if it doesn’t go down like that, Bump?” She saw her potential piece of the Dominion pie shrinking, and shrinking fast. “What if the DNA results don’t come back on time and the board signs off and finalizes the vote before we know which one of those skanks is really Sable?”
Barron shrugged. He was feeling Pilar’s pain because tearing off three large bills to that scandalous trick Mink LaRue every year would be the greatest fuckin’ failure of his life.
“I don’t know, P,” he sighed. “If the DNA results ain’t back before the cash is kicked out then we gotta find another way to stick their asses.” Barron shook his head miserably. “We’ll just have to dig around in our trick bag and come up with a Plan B.”
CHAPTER 4
There were plenty of “Bad News LaRues” stirring shit up on the streets of Harlem, but only a handful of the half-hungover ones had come out to the Three Brothers Funeral Home to see my mama put in the ground.
I was sitting in the front pew between Granny and one of my half-blind uncles, and the skinny black preacher who
had come with the one-price-fits-all funeral package was standing up front talking about Mama like they went way back and had been tight runnin’ buddies from the cradle.
“Jude Jackson was a saintly woman . . .” He stood up there and lied like a muthafucka as everybody looked around to make sure they was at the right funeral. “A woman who lived her life like she knew God!”
I ignored all that bullshit yang coming outta his mouth as I sat there staring at my mama’s stiff-looking body while some spooky-ass organ music played over the speakers. The lil chapel where they had laid Mama out was so empty it felt like the chill coming off of her body was keeping the whole room cool.
Even though only a few people were sitting around slumped in the pews today, almost the whole damn family had shown up last night when Granny threw a card party and big-ass fish fry and called it a wake for Mama.
Granny had charged five dollars a head for a plate of fried porgies and a scoop of potato salad, and she tacked on three dollars if you wanted a shot of cheap liquor to go along with it. All the money she raked in was supposed to come to me so I could finish paying the funeral home and square up with the car service for the limousine I had rented for the close family. Aunt Bibby had passed around her pimped-out Kangol and told everybody to dig deep down in their bras, socks, and drawers and be sure to come out with a couple of dollars to help me send my mama off right.
Sheeeiit. That sweaty-ass hat had gone around the room about three damn times, and I coulda sworn I saw mad slick-fisted LaRues drop a dollar bill in and then skim out a couple of fives. By the time Aunt Bibby’s Kangol got back across the room where I was sitting there wasn’t but sixteen one-dollar bills left in that sucker and three gooey, stuck-together pennies.
I still had me a little pocket change because Uncle Suge had torn me off ten g’s before I left Texas, but it cost a real big gwap to bury somebody in New York! You had to pay for the grave, pay them to dig the damn thing open, and then pay them to throw that same damn dirt back down once they dropped the coffin in the hole too. You had to pay the funeral home and the mortician, and I won’t even talk about how much them lil cheap-ass cardboard caskets cost!