by Mary Monroe
Since the day I was born, me and Clyde had a real deep understanding between us. He was my homeboy, my man, and sometimes, my best friend. I could talk much trash to him any way I wanted, and I didn’t have to worry none about him jacking me up. You show me another girl who can talk trash to her man the way I talk trash to Clyde, and I will show you a girl who’s got a miserable relationship with her man. “What’s the matter with you, papi?”
Clyde could turn his face to stone and stare at me like he could see clean through me. He could be sweet-talking me one minute and cussing at me the next. “Ester, please do me this one favor, baby. See the best—dammit! I ain’t playin’ with you, girl! Shit.”
“Clyde…go masturbate!”
Clyde held up his hands, bucked out his eyes the way he did when I took his gun from him and pointed it to his face. That Glock he carried was still in the waistband of his pants where it always was. He was just fucking with me.
He laughed a little and waved his hand at me. Clyde was not the kind of man I could get mad at and stay mad too long, no matter how much he pushed the wrong buttons on me.
“One day you gonna wake up and I will be gone, man,” I threatened. But he didn’t even listen to that because he already knew better. Clyde always got his way with women, and I couldn’t figure out how. Me, I had my own reasons for being in his corner, but other women had a hard time letting him down, too. He ain’t no Denzel in the looks department, and he sure ain’t no Romeo in the bedroom. That didn’t stop him from always getting his way when it came to women. He just got it like that.
“Ester, baby, everything you do, you doin’ for us, remember?” Clyde said, looking at me like I was the one with the problem. “I want you to go with Lula to pay Mr. Bob a visit.” Clyde stopped talking and sucked in a loud breath, slapping his hands on his hips. “My man’s been askin’ for two girls all week, and you know how tame he is once he gets drunk. Everybody in the business knows that Mr. Bob is the easiest trick in the world after he done had a few drinks. Even I could go out there to his pad and tickle his dick and he wouldn’t know the difference.” Clyde covered his mouth, but a laugh squeezed out anyway. “He ain’t goin’ to give Lula no trouble, and that’s the kind of trick she needs to get herself broke in! She ain’t never done this kind of shit before…or so she says.”
“Clyde—”
“Baby, I need you to make sure Lula don’t go up in that White man’s house and get loose, act ignorant, clumsy, and countrified. I can’t let nobody fuck up my reputation with my clients,” Clyde whined. “She ain’t as sharp as you. And, she ain’t as pretty.”
Clyde got a real strange look on his face after his comments about Lula, and I know why. I’m smarter than I look, see. He had probably been thinking the same thing about Lula that I been thinking. Was she for real? I mean, I know some dude killed her husband the other night when I was at the motel. I seen the whole damn thing go down through the window of that store, see. I even knew the shooter’s name and where he lived, on account of me and him used to live with the same foster family at the same time. Whatever, whatever. Five-O got the goods on the dude anyway because he blabbed to his homies and then they blabbed. I didn’t need to say nothing no way, not that I ever would have. Dude knew where I lived, too.
Oh well. I had to get my mind back on Lula. I believed everything else she had told me about her baby daddy playing her and then the baby dying. Now, I did believe that story Lula told me about her mother dying when she was a little girl and her mean stepmother she had to live with, too. But this Lula woman didn’t just get out of diapers. She had been around this crazy world for a while. She had more years than my twenty-five. Shit. What seemed crazy was her saying she never done no tricks before and then, at her age, she slide right into the game like her booty been greased with butter.
“You think Lula smart enough to play me…us?”
“Heeeellllll no!” I hollered.
I almost choked on the toothpick I held been between my teeth. I still had on the trick clothes that got me the most attention: jeans ripped at the knee, a plain tight T-shirt, and sandals. My hair was parted down the middle of my head and in two braids with ribbons tied to the ends. Everybody said this kind of shit made me look like a teenager. A real young teenager at that, like around thirteen or fourteen. I never knew much, but one thing I’d known all my life was every straight man wanted to poke a real young girl at least once. I handled my business with men and it was a full-time job. I had to stay on top of shit if I wanted to get paid. I didn’t need Clyde dumping more shit on me.
Clyde stood there looking at me. He was still holding the Benjamins I had greased his hand with as soon as he came through my door a few minutes earlier.
He shrugged and looked at the bills and frowned, like he was wishing the wad was thicker. He didn’t say that, but I knew Clyde as good as Clyde knew Clyde. So I always knew what he was thinking. He knew me real good, too. So he knew how to respect and treat me to keep me happy.
“I know Mr. Bob is a easy trick, baby. That’s why I’m sendin’ Lula to him. I told her it would be like takin’ candy from a baby.” Clyde followed me to my little kitchen, his arm around my shoulder. “Whether she done turned tricks before or not, she new to us. I can’t turn no new girl loose on one of my best clients by herself. She fuck up and I’m fucked up.”
Without him asking me to, I poured Clyde a tall glass of orange juice into one of my best glasses. I drank my juice straight from the carton, batting my eyes at Clyde because the juice was so cold it made me shiver. It felt good going down my throat, though. Much better than some trick’s slimy pecker. Since AIDS took the fun out of fucking, a lot of tricks didn’t want straight intercourse. Not even with a condom. For some reason people thought they couldn’t get AIDS from oral sex. Well, I got news for them. We got a homegirl, a White girl name Sherrie Armstrong, over at this clinic where AIDS people go to get attention. She caught AIDS from giving bareback blowjobs. The odd thing about that was, she caught it way before she started selling her stuff. She was from some rich-ass family over in Berkeley and studying at U.C. Berkeley. She was a real smart girl, but she done some dumb shit.
Anyway, our girl, Sherrie, she was the prettiest White girl you ever gonna see outside of the movies. Blond hair that didn’t need no help from no dye bottle, big clear blue eyes, lips that should have been on a Black girl’s mouth, and legs so long she used to straddle two tricks at the same time. Girlfriend used to be hella hot. Almost as hot as me. Once upon a time, you could stand her up next to that Michelle Pfeiffer, that movie star I seen in Scarface, and you couldn’t tell one from the other.
Thinking about Sherrie made it easier for me to deal with Clyde. Just knowing how much luckier I was than her eased my anger.
Right after I swallowed my orange juice, I closed my mouth real tight and looked at Clyde. He was standing there looking at me like I just swallowed a rock. I didn’t want to say nothing I would regret. Not with Clyde standing so close to me. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand and just nodded. I shook my head real hard so I could get my mind off Sherrie and back on Clyde, because thinking about Sherrie always made me sad.
Clyde put his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me, his eyes in mine, talking to me in his sweetest voice. “Baby, we can’t take a chance on Lula goin’ up in that White man’s house alone and gettin’ loose. For all we know that sister might go out there and knock Mr. Bob upside his head and steal everything he got. Then where would that leave us? Didn’t I tell you that Mr. Bob told me you was his favorite girl?” Clyde blinked real hard, one eyebrow lifted and stayed up until he blinked some more. When he did that, I knew he was trying to play me.
“Look, Clyde,” I had to stop talking long enough to laugh, but just a little. Clyde was quick to tell anybody he wasn’t no Eddie Murphy and didn’t appreciate nobody laughing at him when he was trying to be serious. “Look, you know you can’t pull that shit with me. Me and you go back to the beginnin’. You told
Rosalee that Mr. Bob said the same thing about her last month.”
Clyde scratched the side of his head and rolled his eyes back in his head like he was trying to remember something. Then, still scratching his head, he looked at me. “Oh,” he mumbled. He let out a deep breath, looked at me real hard, and then put his hands in his pockets. When he did that, his jacket flew open and I seen the handle of his Glock sticking out of the waistband of his pants.
As long as I been knowing Clyde, he never had to use that gun. Well, just one time. One night we was walking down Army Street from a Salsa nightclub. Out of nowhere, a big rat—not some thug—but a real rat, came charging at us like a bull. Clyde let him have it. I seen people get killed before, but it was something I never got used to. Not even when it was a rat.
Rockelle told me that Clyde kept that gun in his pants near his crotch, the way some men put balled-up socks down there, so that when women in bars sit on his lap, they’ll feel it and they’ll think he’s packing a big dick. Of course I told Clyde, and the next time he seen Rocky, he showed her his dick. She didn’t say nothing else about what Clyde was packing in his pants. That’s the kind of man Clyde was. He didn’t have no shame, except when it came to his daughter or business.
Clyde seen me looking at his piece, so he looked down. He pushed that bad boy off to the side and buttoned himself up. Then he blinked at me and swiped his lips with his hand.
“You wanna finish tellin’ me that lie?” I asked, glad I didn’t have to look at that Glock no more.
“Well, I wasn’t lyin’.” He pouted, looking straight-up guilty. “Mr. Bob did tell me that same thing about Rosalee, and I believe he meant it. See, last month, Rosie was Mr. Bob’s favorite girl. This month, it’s you.”
I let out some hot air and sucked on my teeth. “Shit, man. I was lookin’ forward to trickin’ with Rosalee or Rockelle tonight.”
“Baby, you’ll be trickin’ with Rosie and Rocky tomorrow or the next night. Tonight, Lula needs you.”
“All right. But after tonight, you owe me a big favor.” I shook my finger in Clyde’s face, but that didn’t stop him from smiling. “I want that cruise you been promisin’ me.”
Clyde clapped his hands around mine, squeezing first, then kissing them. “Baby, I already got the tickets. This time next Saturday, me and you will be floatin’ on the ocean outside of Mexico, smokin’ some of the best dope they got down there. Remember them hombres from Cabo who we hooked up with in Mexico City last year? They got some good shit, and they know how to party. Who knows, we might even stumble across some of your kinfolks this time.”
Clyde knew where my buttons was and he knew when and how hard to push them. He would have kept at me for as long as he had to until he got his way.
Clyde wasn’t just my man, he was family. Well, not by blood or even by marriage, but by other things. We go all the way back to the beginning of my life.
I didn’t find out about myself and how I got where I am today until I was eleven. I had heard bits and pieces of my story, but it didn’t all come out until I got with Clyde. I should say, got back with Clyde, on account of he was there for me from birth.
From what I’d heard, from what people told me, and from some old newspaper clips I seen, I found out all about the things in my sad past. Things that happened when I was too young to remember. See, Clyde was hella older than me, but I knew his story, too. He told me.
When Clyde was a teenager, he was always in trouble. It was the usual “boys will be boys” type of shit. He fucked up in school, beat up on kids, and broke into cars. He spent some time locked up in juvie and was always on some kind of probation. They made him go back to school and work part-time jobs after school and on weekends, so he wouldn’t have too much time on his hands to be getting into trouble.
Clyde was being a real good boy. He came all the way from Oakland to San Francisco on the bus every Saturday morning to work at this Mexican restaurant in the Mission District. To break up the boredom, and to make a little extra spending money, him and one of his boys who worked at the same restaurant came up with a scheme.
Before they started working, they would shake down drunk men for just enough money to buy a good lunch and a bag of weed. To show he had a good heart for a thug, Clyde would only take what him and his boy needed, and they never, ever hurt these men. One time he told me that after they robbed one man, they walked him home so he wouldn’t get jacked up by nobody else that morning. If one drunk man didn’t have no money, they moved on to the next one. They did it while it was still too early for too many folks to be out walking around to witness something they shouldn’t be seeing in the first place.
One morning Clyde and his homie followed a drunk old man to the alley behind the restaurant where they worked. They was only going to take him for enough money so they could go to the movies after work. Just before they caught up to the man, they heard some noise coming from the Dumpster behind the restaurant. Thinking it was the puppy he always wanted, Clyde peeped in that Dumpster and got the surprise of his life. He come to find out somebody had dumped a baby! Well, that baby was me.
Clyde fished me out and took off his shirt and wrapped me in it. I was almost dead, and the doctor that examined me said that maybe one more hour in that trash would have done me in. My grave would have been a Dumpster full of every kind of shit you can name if Clyde hadn’t been out there to rob that drunk man.
Nobody came forward to claim me. Like what woman crazy enough to dump a baby in the trash would be crazy enough to admit it? Shit like that happened only in the Bible. So, I never knew nothing for sure about myself. Like my race. San Francisco being the kind of place it is, I could be just about anything. My skin is beige, almost the exact same shade as that fat Rockelle (except she calls the color high yellow…), my hair is shiny black and wavy. With my face looking the way it looks, I could tell people I was Black, Filipino, Latino, even Indian, and nobody would doubt me because I could be any one. Maybe even all of them at the same time. Whatever.
But because I was found in the Mission District, which is almost all Latino people, and because the social worker who took me over was Mexican, and she’d named me after herself, I went with being Mexican. I spent a lot of years in foster homes run by people who spoke Spanish. And me speaking Spanish, much better than I speak English, helped me choose to claim a Latin background over the others.
I was a lot of trouble to my foster families. I regret that now. I got in trouble at school, I lined the streets with the gangs, and we done all kinds of crazy shit. Even snatching purses from little old ladies. I even seen people get killed on the street by people I knew. That was a lot to see before I even got to my teens. But when you trying to “find” yourself, like I was, you gonna see things you don’t need or want to see. Living a crazy life meant a lot of bad surprises.
Most of the foster homes I got sent to was in the Mission District. I didn’t go too far away from that part of town unless I had to. Until I was fourteen, the only other place I’d ever been outside San Francisco was that freak-ass Berkeley, across the Bay, right next door to Oakland. I had never been to Oakland, and that was where Clyde Brooks was all that time since he found my little body in that Dumpster.
I can only believe that it was God who brought me back to Clyde after all that time. I was staying with the Rios family on Cesar Chavez Street. I felt like I was living in a zoo because they had hella chickens in the backyard, strutting in and out of the house, waiting to end up in a Crock-Pot. Them chickens and the man of the house, an old mule from Mexico City, his whale of a wife, and five pig-faced foster kids, was what I had to deal with.
The old man had an even older brother who lived in Oakland with his morena lady friend. A Black lady. Her grandson lived with her. The first few times that lady and her grandson came to our house didn’t mean nothing to me. Now remember, I still didn’t know who I was, where I came from, or what race I was at the time. And, for the record, to this day I don’t know. All of that was unknown
to everybody but God.
Since I didn’t even know for sure what my race was, I figured it wouldn’t do me no good to dog people out from a race that I could be part of. Señor Rios having him a Black American lady friend wasn’t no big deal. Anyway, me and that lady friend’s grandson got along real good right off the bat. But most of the time, Clyde went his way, and I went mine.
I’d been told by several people about how I’d been thrown to the garbage right after I got born but it wasn’t something to be conversating about with nobody. I never brought it up anyway. I was fourteen and Clyde was like thirty-something. We didn’t have a lot of things to talk about. He didn’t waste much time with me when he came around. Besides, he had a teenage daughter, and she took up a lot of his time.
One day out of the clear blue sky, when Clyde was at the Rios house, he started talking to me about his teenage years. I’d had some trouble with some girls down the street, and there had been some bloodshed. Not my blood, so I wasn’t feeling too bad myself. But I cooled off long enough to hear what Clyde had to say. Being older and trying to do better hisself, he shifted into that position that OGs go into when they trying to get a younger person to do the right thing before it’s too late.
When he got to the part about going to rob that man in the alley that morning, but finding a baby in a Dumpster first, I got real stiff and started crying. Clyde had to scoop me up off the floor like the pile of dog poop that I felt like. That’s when it all came out. I still had some of the newspaper clips the lady from Social Services (the one they named me for) saved for me, and I showed them to Clyde that day. He got tears in his eyes. There it was in headlines in black and white: OAKLAND YOUTH FINDS NEWBORN IN TRASH. Right up under the headlines was a picture of Clyde standing between two cops. He was grinning like he had won the lottery. Clyde didn’t have on no shirt in that picture because he had used it to wrap me in it. The person I owed my life to had come back, and this time I wasn’t going to let him get away. It was the spookiest thing in the world. Nobody could tell me that this wasn’t God working in His mysterious way.