by Anna J.
“Just tell him it’s you or her. Let him feel like he’s losing out. If you let a man feel as if you’re in need of him, he will step all over you,” Mecca explained while Karmen removed the micro braids out of her hair. Daphne was out of town, handling business, so Mecca had opted to go to Karmen’s Bushwick apartment to get her hair done.
Talking to Karmen about her problem with Miguel made Mecca feel in control. She felt as if she had Karmen’s emotions in her hands. She couldn’t have been more elated about it. It made her secret affair with Miguel much more exciting. She couldn’t wait to travel with him to Europe, where he was a star, to be seen in photos taken by paparazzi, and to send them back to Ruby, who would probably show Karmen. Mecca laughed inside.
“Anyway, what’s up, Mecca? You trying to hit Speed up tonight? I’m putting my ‘fuck ’em, girl’ gear on and enjoying myself,” Karmen uttered. Mecca knew it was a front. Women that were hurt usually tried to hide the pain by hanging out with the girls, getting drunk, and sometimes waking up hungover in some strange man’s bed, feeling disgusted at themselves. To watch Karmen act a fool over her broken heart would be entertaining.
“Yeah, why not?”
Later, they showed up at Club Speed, fashionably late, of course, and Karmen had definitely thrown her “fuck ’em, girl” dress on. The strapless, formfitting Donna Karan dress, reaching just below her shapely hips, made men almost catch whiplash as she cat walked by in the aqua blue piece. There was no mystery to the fact that she wasn’t wearing full panties that covered her ass; instead, she wore a scarlet lace G-string.
Mecca’s attire was much more classy and expensive. Her black, spaghetti-strap Versace knee-length dress fit nicely, showing her curves, but not fitting like a glove. Her princess-cut diamond earrings complemented the small diamond tennis bracelet she had adorned her wrist with. She realized instantly that she was dressed too classy for the club; it was more of a hip-hop crowd. There was a mixture of casual dressers among the baggy jeans and Timberlands-wearing men and girls that looked like copies of Karmen.
As they danced with a couple of guys, Mecca quickly grew uninterested in dancing and went to the bar to have a shot of Belvedere. Karmen joined her and quickly made the night much more interesting. Shot after shot of various drinks were bought by men trying to leave the club with her, and she drank each one of them. Mecca even warned her about how much she was drinking.
“Karmen, you’re overdosing on the liquor. Slow down, before you pass out.”
“I can hold my liquor. Don’t be such a party pooper. Enjoy yourself,” Karmen responded in a drunken slur, which made Mecca want to slap her. Instead, Mecca shrugged and watched her dance with a bunch of different men, letting them grope on her. She took out her phone and put in a text message.
Minutes later she watched Karmen being led into the men’s bathroom by two men. Mecca followed. Once inside, the two athletically built men led her to one of the stalls. Karmen lifted her dress up, and while one guy sat on the toilet, she took him in her mouth, while the other went in her from behind. No more than ten minutes into their X-rated action, the stall door flew open. Karmen was too drunk to even hear it. She kept on performing orally on one guy.
“Karmen, what the fuck!” Karmen stumbled to face the voice that had called out her name. She wiped the saliva from her mouth and smiled. Mecca stood behind him, shaking her head.
“Miguel, you came to join us?”
“C’mon, Karmen. You going home,” Mecca said as she grabbed her by the hand and pulled her out of the stall.
After dropping her off, Miguel and Mecca drove to his apartment.
“Damn, I didn’t know she was that type of girl, Mecca,” Miguel said while driving Mecca’s truck.
“Me neither,” she lied.
“Well, at least I don’t have to worry about breaking her heart any longer. I was definitely about to cut her off,” Miguel said, shaking his head.
“And why were you going to do that?” Mecca asked to see if he would answer truthfully.
Miguel looked at her and smiled his sexy smile. “Because my heart belongs to someone else, and I’m about to show her how much of my heart, mind, and body she has.”
“Wow, she must be a hell of a woman.” Mecca continued to act as if she didn’t know who he was talking about.
“You sure are one hell of a woman.”
Mecca thought about the two hundred dollars she had paid to those two guys to take Karmen into the club bathroom and smiled before adding, “Yeah, I sure am a hell of a woman.”
Karmen woke up the next day, in the afternoon, feeling like someone had run over her head with an eighteen-wheeler truck. Her mouth was dry as sand, and her jaw was sore, as well as her pussy. Lying on her stomach, she realized she was still dressed. When she lifted her head, she could see the vomit stain on her black satin sheets.
“Karmen, why are you still in bed? Ruby’s been calling you all day, and you ain’t answer the phone. She is pissed.”
Her sister’s loud voice made the pounding in her head worse. Karmen had to pee bad, so she got up and dragged herself to the bathroom, walking past her sister.
“We opened the store, anyway, so don’t worry, but it sounds like you got more to worry about with Miguel. Tell me it ain’t true!”
Karmen sat on the toilet with the door open and groggily asked, “Tell you what ain’t true?”
Her sister appeared at the door of the bathroom. “He came over here and got his clothes, and he left. He told me it was over between you and him because you were at Speed last night, getting doubled by two dudes in the bathroom!”
“What?” Karmen barked. Though she tried hard, she realized she could barely remember last night. She did remember going to the club with Mecca, but she didn’t remember seeing or going with Miguel.
“That’s what he said,” her sister continued.
She hoped she hadn’t blacked out and done anything stupid. It began to make sense why her pussy and jaw were sore.
“Karmen, how did Miguel know you were at the club last night? Who did you go with?”
“I went with Mecca,” she responded while getting off of the toilet and looking at her face in the mirror. She looked a wreck.
“That’s strange, because she’s the one that drove him here to get his clothes.”
“Oh no, that bitch didn’t!” Karmen’s eyes opened wide with a sudden jolt of sobriety. She realized at that moment that she had been played, and payback was definitely coming in the near future.
“The guns, the weed, everything. Nobody knows who did it,” Mo Blood explained to Ruby while they sat on a park bench in Brownsville as a basketball tournament was under way. The roar of the crowd and the whistles of referees blocked out their conversation from any possible ear hustlers. While Mo explained what had happened when masked gunmen entered the spot, Ruby sipped on a strawberry shake from McDonald’s. Her clothes were unusually feminine, a pair of black capri pants, a white halter top, and a pair of Jimmy Choo pumps. Ruby nodded as he ran down the details that were given to him by one of the workers.
“Mo,” she said abruptly, “take a ride with me downtown.”
Mo couldn’t read the tone in her voice. It was flat, and he couldn’t tell what type of mood she was in. That made him nervous.
“Downtown? For what?” he asked. Sensing his nervousness, Ruby tried to make him more comfortable.
“Listen, two other spots of mines got robbed, and I think I know who it is. I want you and your team to handle it for me. I’m going to show you who it is.”
Mo shrugged his shoulders. He knew she wouldn’t try anything crazy in busy downtown, or so he hoped. Plus, he was holding heat, so if anything got funny, he wouldn’t hesitate. He was sure she had no idea that he was involved in the shooting of her niece and Shamel. The only names that came up in that in the streets were Tah Gunz and them. The “them” could be anybody. Mo coughed violently as he walked to Ruby’s car.
“You need to check tha
t cough. It sounds crazy,” Ruby warned.
Mo waived it off, continuing to cough. In between, he murmured, “Too much of that weed, that’s all.”
Mo never saw the girl Tasha from the strip club again after that night he went up in her raw. Nor did he go get himself checked out. Tasha quit working at the club once she got the results of her HIV test. She just left without notice to anyone.
At first, she’d wanted to confront Mo about her status, because he was the last person she had unprotected sex with since her last HIV test. She couldn’t believe that she let him hit it without a condom. She realized that confronting him wouldn’t change her status, and it probably would cause him to blame her if he was positive, and she knew Mo and the guys he ran with were a bunch of cowboys. She would let the disease take revenge for her.
Ruby and Mo drove downtown to the sounds of “Wanksta” cranking out of the car’s sound system.
After a minute or so Ruby turned the sound down and said, “Let me ask you something, Mo.”
“What’s up?” he replied from the reclined passenger seat.
“You grew up in Brownsville projects?”
Pushing his blue Yankee fitted cap up from over his forehead, he replied, “Yeah, lived there all my life.”
Ruby nodded, with a thoughtful expression on her face. “Do you remember a dude they called Wise that used to work out there? This was in the eighties.”
Mo tried to recollect. “Yeah, that name rings a bell.” A moment passed. Then his memory cleared, and he continued, “Matter of fact, yeah, I remember now. He used to live in Langston Hughes. Yeah, I remember dude.”
“Do you know any of his family?”
Again Mo tried to recollect. “I know he had sisters, but they didn’t live in the PJs. I heard they lived somewhere far out in Brooklyn.”
Ruby nodded her head, then turned the music back up. While the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ CD played, Mo wondered why she was questioning him about a dead old-school gangster and his family. Figuring Ruby out was like trying to answer a calculus problem in Chinese.
Ready for something to eat, she pulled over at a pizza shop on Fulton Street. “You want anything?” she asked before exiting.
Mo began reaching into his pockets. “Yeah, let me get a slice with extra cheese.”
He held out money to her, but she simply opened the door and said, “It’s on me.”
Mo shrugged, putting the money back into his pocket. While she walked away, he stared at her backside, and just imagining getting a piece of that bubble made him hard. Then his thoughts shifted back to the questioning about Wise.
Mo remembered the rumors of who Wise was killed by and why. The rumor mill had it that Ruby and her dead lesbian lover killed Wise in a Langston Hughes project hallway after Wise helped her set up a local hustler named Darnell. Darnell was allegedly responsible for killing Ruby’s sister and her sister’s boyfriend, Bobby Blast.
Mo knew those were Mecca’s parents. Maybe, he thought, Ruby figured someone related to Wise was responsible for the robbery of his spot. If that was the case, Mo would have to do some homework and put his ear to the street, because someone had to pay for the loss that he took.
Ruby got back in the car and handed Mo his pizza. “I got you some grape juice with it,” Ruby said, placing their juices in the cup holders between their seats. Mo immediately devoured his pizza due to him having the munchies from all the weed he’d smoked earlier. After eating, he reclined his seat back as Ruby changed the CD to the radio. Jaheim’s voice leaked out of the speakers.
The last thing Mo remembered before falling off into a deep sleep was Ruby looking over at him, smiling. He could no longer fight the heaviness in his eyes. He barely heard her voice.
“You think I don’t know... .” he thought he heard Ruby say, and then everything went black.
Mo felt something cold on his face when he came to. He coughed and blinked his eyes, trying to clear whatever fluid had been thrown in his face. He couldn’t move his arms and realized they were bound behind his back, as were his feet. He knew he was seated in a chair, though, and when his vision cleared, he didn’t know where he was. The first thing he saw was Ruby’s grinning face.
“Glad you can join us, Mo,” Ruby snorted.
“Ruby, what’s the deal? What’s going on?” he asked with fear in his voice. The dim room appeared to be a basement. The concrete walls, with boxes stacked against them, and the floor gave him that impression.
“I’m sure you know what’s going on,” Ruby said, walking behind Mo and turning him in the chair toward her. The sound of the wooden chair scraping against the cement reverberated through the basement. Mo was shocked when he was now facing a bound and gagged figure in a wheelchair. He focused his eyes on Tah Gunz.
“Allow me to introduce you to the infamous Tah Gunz. Tah, this is Mo Blood. Does he look familiar?” Ruby smiled and grunted tauntingly. Tah’s voice was muffled from the gag. Mo immediately began sweating and pleading.
“Ruby, I swear on everything I love, it wasn’t me who did your niece.”
“Damn, Tah, this is the type of dude you had in your crew?” Ruby asked in a chuckle.
Ruby had found out about Mo’s involvement when she visited the East New York neighborhood of Sutter Gardens, where Mecca had once lived. It was Shamel’s old neighborhood. She was a legend in that part of the borough also. Everyone knew that Shamel ran the area, selling drugs that he got from her.
When she got out of her Benz in front of one of the buildings, a group of guys playing dice all stopped what they were doing to gaze at the car and the thick, stylish woman getting out of it. Most of them were too young to know who she was. They figured she was coming to see relatives that she had in the Gardens. One of them, the oldest in the crowd, smiled when he recognized his former boss.
“Oh, shit! I know that ain’t the boss lady herself,” the chubby, Rocawear-jean-suit-wearing guy barked as he walked toward Ruby.
Ruby recognized him even though he had put on weight. “Breeze, what’s up, baby boy?” she asked excitedly.
They embraced in a warm hug. “When you get home, Ruby? I thought they threw the book at you, Ma!”
“You ain’t know I got that overturned last year? I’ve been home almost a year now. We need to talk,” Ruby told him.
Breeze told his crew that he would be back after Ruby asked him to take a ride with her. During the ride, Breeze updated her on what had been going on in East New York since she’d been absent. They talked about how the September 11 attacks put a serious dent in the crack game, but weed became the new crack.
“It’s like it was in eighty-eight, Ruby, but with weed.”
When the subject turned to the murder of Shamel and Mecca’s shooting, Breeze became sullen as he told her, “I miss my nigga, Ruby. I’m sorry about your niece. How she doing?” Ruby told him about Mecca being back to her old self, which made Breeze smile. Afterward, he told her about what he’d heard about the incident, and the names responsible.
“A lot of my homies are Blood. They let me know that some Bloods out of the Ville did it. Some dude named Tah Gunz and his flunky Mo Blood. They from Brownsville Houses.”
Ruby couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She almost broke the steering wheel, she squeezed it so hard. She was actually helping a guy get rich who had something to do with her friend and niece being shot. She looked at Breeze’s brown, pudgy face and said, “I know who they are. You want some payback?”
Breeze smiled. Mo Blood stared at Breeze as he leaned against the stack of boxes for recognition. When Mo realized he didn’t recognize who Breeze was, he looked back at Ruby. He wouldn’t look at Tah, because he couldn’t stand to look at the guy who had got him caught up in this position. Mo remembered advising Tah that he should forget about Mecca.
“Dog, she ain’t all that to be going all the way out to Long Island for,” he’d warned through a smoke-filled haze as he sat back in Tah’s car, but Tah was adamant about making her and
Shamel pay for trying to make him look bad in the eyes of everybody in Brownsville. “Nobody takes nothing from Tah,” was his motto. Not even women.
“Breeze, which one you want?” Ruby asked as he straightened up off of the boxes while rubbing his palms together. Breeze poked Tah Gunz with his index finger, making his head move backward.
“This nigga here,” he growled.
“Hold up, Breeze. I wanna play a game,” Ruby said with childlike excitement. Pointing to a wooden staircase that led up to a door, she continued, “Untie Tah, and if he can make it up those stairs to that door in thirty seconds, we won’t kill him. If he can’t, he has to kill Mo here, then kill himself.”
Breeze laughed at Ruby’s proposal. He knew there was no way a paralyzed Tah would be able to crawl ten feet to the stairs and then pull himself up to that door in thirty seconds. But if Ruby wanted to play ... so be it.
Breeze pulled a thick wad of cash out of his pocket and began counting some. “I got five hundred he doesn’t make it.”
Ruby pulled out her wad of cash from her jeans pocket. “I got five on it.”
Breeze untied Tah, looked at his Oyster Perpetual Rolex, and barked, “Your time starts now!”
Tah leaped out of the chair by pushing himself to the floor. He began crawling frantically toward the staircase. With money in their hands, both Ruby and Breeze roared as if they were at a horse race.
“Go, boy! Go!” Ruby screamed.
“Ten, eleven, twelve ... ,” Breeze counted.
Tah’s mouth was still gagged with a red bandanna, which was Breeze’s idea of a sign of Tah’s affiliation with the Bloods, yet he still mumbled inaudible words. Sweat dripped from his face; his black Akademiks jeans were stained with dirt. He stopped a few times to catch his breath and looked longingly at the door.
“That’s five hundred for Breeze, baby!”
Ruby howled, “C’mon, Tah! Do it for Brownsville, baby!”