Never Knew Love Like This Before

by Denise Campbell

  “Miss, I think you two will have to leave.”

  The words finally found a shape in her head and issued out of her mouth. “Wait a minute, mister. You don’t have to put us out. We are leaving. You’ll be hearing from my attorney tomorrow. And here’s my card.”

  The security guard looked down at the card, then threw it in the trash.

  Deni took Shana’s arm, as they simultaneously threw their heads up with dignity. Deni felt fibers inside of her reconnecting with something quintessential that she’d lost, but which upon finding, the tapestry felt more whole.

  “Yeah, sho’ you right, cuzz!” Shana joined in, slamming the restaurant door with a resounding echo.

  Chapter 4

  Coleman

  August 29, 2005

  What Makes a Man?

  It was funny the things you thought about while sitting in a car, inching along a crowded, gridlocked freeway, not knowing if you were going to live or die.

  Coleman thought about how he’d bought the blankie for Blossom when she was a baby. How he’d learned too late that Mellon had what they called a “yellow liver.” How she was a straight-out nymphomaniac. How she had the nerve to have the baby’s blankie thrown across the headboard when he caught her in the act, legs straddled over Luke’s shoulders.

  Now that hurt. Perhaps he could’ve taken it better if Luke hadn’t been family. No, he couldn’t have. Didn’t matter that now and then he’d slipped up, but at least he’d been discreet when he was creeping. Anyhow, what kind of woman would bring her man home to her own house?

  So all the rumors had been true.

  Thinking about it, now that was enough to make a man lose his mind or catch a case such as in Ron Isley’s joint, “Contagious.” The only reason he hadn’t killed Mellon was because of Blossom. He had felt something tugging at his pants leg and looked down and saw his baby, rubbing the sleep out her eyes.

  “Daddy, I want a drink of water.”

  Had it not been for Blossom, he didn’t know what he would’ve done. He had calmly closed the bedroom door, woke up Britton, and without saying a word, drove his children over to his mother’s house. When he returned to his home with his loaded gun, Mellon and Luke had disappeared. He never saw them again.

  It’s funny how a small thing like that could change someone’s destiny. Blossom’s needing a glass of water was the thing that had brought him back from the brink. But now he felt like less than a man that he didn’t kill the two people he’d once loved who were defiling the marriage bed.

  What was a man after all? He thought of a man from his neighborhood, Willie Ben, who had found his wife in a compromising position in a car with another man. He’d shot and killed his wife, then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.

  Underneath Coleman was glad he didn’t kill either of the adulterous couple or himself. He guessed the comedians were right. You couldn’t make a housewife out of a hoe. After his experience with Mellon, he didn’t trust women. He’d have a woman just to release himself—almost a way of wreaking vengeance on the female gender. Just when they would get hooked on him, he’d do the old disappearing act. No, everything still felt too raw to him to expose himself. He didn’t think he’d ever go there again with a woman—that is, love one like he’d loved Mellon.

  Now, because of his children, he was glad he hadn’t done what he wanted to do, what he still wished he’d done just for the sanguine satisfaction. The truth was he didn’t want to go to penitentiary or worse, even get the chair. Secretly, he was glad it had worked out this way. Naw, Mellon wasn’t worth dying for.

  He still wasn’t healed. Once he got back to the house, his mother moved in with him and they had built a nice life together. He worked nights and didn’t have to worry about a babysitter. He had no regrets about Mellon leaving, but sometimes he fantasized he’d shot her. The pleasure he vicariously would have received in seeing her bullet-riddled body. . . . Yet, in his crazy way, he still loved Mellon; he just could never forgive her.

  At the same time, he was glad that his ex-wife Mellon was no longer in his life. Here he’d finally gotten a little safety net going for his children, and Mellon had moved away with Luke and then, just when he was finally able to exhale a little, life dealt this blow—Katrina, which hit, knocking the wind out of his epicenter. Just when he thought everything was finally getting under control....

  He’d never been more afraid in his life. Would he and his family live? Would they make it to safety? Never in a million years did he believe that the levees would break. Somehow, he’d have to keep his mother, Miss Johntrice, his eight-year-old son, Britton, and five-year-old daughter, Blossom, safe.

  Driving, heart pounding, and the deafening silence in the car, made him make a vow to God. If he lived, he’d give up smoking blunt. He’d give up sleeping with women who he didn’t have any feelings for. His thoughts turned to all the old albums he’d listened to that taught him to play the saxophone. Coleman “Hawk” Hawkins, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane. He had left them behind. That was what he would miss the most.

  Why didn’t he get his family out sooner? Why didn’t he keep an emergency disaster kit in the house? Regret washed over him as he inched along the highway.

  His only consolation was this. At least they were in better shape than many of the residents. Hopefully, his friends and fans from the nightclub would be able to get out.

  Chapter 5

  Deni

  Los Angeles, California

  August 29, 2005

  Category Three Storm

  People pay for what they do. And still more, for what they allow themselves to become. Moreover, they pay for it simply by the lives they lead.

  —James Baldwin

  “I swear, Shawn, this is the last time I’m getting you out,” Deni fussed as Slammer slid into the buttercream leather seats next to her in her Mercedes. They were sitting in front of the Los Angeles County Correctional Twin Towers Jail. The Los Angeles smog had just lifted at noon and sun rays were finally piercing the clouds. The August day was not sweltering; in fact, it had been a somewhat chilly month for August. She didn’t know herself what had changed her mind about Slammer, but something about what happened at the restaurant when she was with Shana had stirred the fight up in her. After all, he was family.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Slammer clicked on his seat belt.

  “Don’t get smart. I’ll get you locked back up.”

  “Okay, cuz.”

  Deni revved up her engine. As she pulled off, she switched the radio to 92.3 the Beat. She had been listening to the classical music station, but because she didn’t want Slammer to know, she cut the radio off when he got in the car. She headed for the 101 Interchange Freeway. The palm trees sped backward in a blur as she merged onto the freeway.

  “Now, the first thing I want you to do is go find a job. It will look good when you go back before the judge.” Deni switched over to the fast lane where she could drive at her usual 70 MPH speed.

  “Look, when you’ve been locked up, it’s hard to get a job,” Slammer protested.

  “Save it. I know one thing. You better get a job so you can pay me back my money.”

  Deni began to mumble as though her cousin wasn’t present. She wanted him to hear her thoughts. “One thing I know for sure. When you around seven broke nuccas, you’re going to be the eighth one.” Deni began mentally balancing her checkbook.

  She’d wound up taking 5,000 dollars out of her personal checking account to pay Slammer’s bail.

  “Look, cuz, I really appreciate what you did for me.”

  “Why don’t you do something productive with your life?”

  “When did you start talking so proper?”

  “Oh, because I speak standard English I’m speaking proper. If you spoke it, perhaps you could find a job.”

  “Society doesn’t want me to rehabilitate. Every time I put in for a job, they say you’re an ex-con.”

  “Well, you
know you have to see your probation officer and you also have to find a job. I pulled some strings to get you out. You know you got two strikes now.” Ever since Deni’s ordeal, as she now preferred to call her waltz down the wedding aisle, she had thrown herself into her work. As a result, she’d covered a lot of cases for other attorneys who now owed her favors.

  “I know, I know. The system is set, Deni. They make money every time they lock a brother up—just like in slavery. They get free labor.”

  “I don’t want to hear your excuses. You mess up again, I’ll help you get that third strike.”

  “Don’t be sweatin’ me. All I know how to do is hustle and that’s always been my thing.”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem to be working too well.”

  “You think I wanna work at McDonald’s or some hamburger joint at my age?”

  “Why not? It’s an honest living.”

  “Well, I was tryin’ to get my entrepreneur hustle going. I was selling clothes and things like in John Singleton’s movie Baby Boy.”

  “Shawn, you can’t be selling hot clothes.”

  “It’s easy for you to say, laying up there in Santa Monica in your nice condo with your swimming pool and shit.”

  “I earned it, fool.”

  “Well, I just don’t want to be a sellout.”

  “Sellout?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, you’re trying to say I’m a sellout?”

  Slammer didn’t say anything, as if he knew he’d gone too far as it was.

  After they drove off the Harbor Freeway, Slammer changed the subject. “Hey, cuz. Could you stop over at Mama Cheng’s store and get me some hog headcheese? That’s all I’ve been craving. They don’t have that in the joint.”

  “Well, where did you think you were? In a country club?”

  “Aw, cuz, don’t be like that,” Slammer laughed as Deni pulled over to a corner store at Crenshaw and Stocker. A group of men clustered around the corner store, holding bottles of forty-ounce malt liquors and smoking blunts. The smell of marijuana permeated the air.

  Beauty salons, Jamaican restaurants, candle shops huddled on the main thoroughfare. Black Muslim brothers selling bean pies, and young men selling “bootleg” DVDs stood on the corners and in the medians by the red lights. Everyone was selling or buying.

  Suddenly Slammer stuck his head out the window and threw out both hands in the “gimme five” sign.

  A man with his hair braided in cornrows called out, “Hey, Killah. Wassup?”

  “It’s all copacetic.”

  “Attitude, dawg, when did you get out?” Slammer called out. Deni cringed. Slammer acted as though he was at some type of class reunion.

  “Last week.” Deni observed that the man called Attitude also looked as if he had a bad one at that. Unconsciously, Deni moved her purse closer to her chest. Where did her cousin meet all these renegades?

  Another man wearing a black scarf on his head and sagging pants, who sat in a wheelchair, questioned Slammer, “Man, when you get out?”

  Slammer stayed in the car, bellowing out words as though he was on a loudspeaker. “Yeah, P Dog, they let a nigga out this morning.”

  Deni couldn’t take it anymore. “Can’t you try to change, Shawn? You’re about to kill your parents. You need to get off the chitlin’ circuit.” Deni sucked her teeth in disgust.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna do better, counselor.” Slammer spoke in a placating voice.

  The words from the street-corner men flew through the window like jackals. “Dig this, mahfucker.”

  “Check this out, dawg.”

  “Stay up, baby boy.”

  “Hey so you out?”

  Deni couldn’t believe it. The men gathered around her car and carried on as though Slammer was some hero returned from the Iraq War. Was jail the new graduation system? Deni smirked.

  Three hood rat-looking girls with attached individual braids, large hoop earrings, and small hoops in their noses and lips, large tattoos emblazoned on their arms and revealed bosoms, hovered around the cluster of men. One woman had a definite razor cut across her face. Each woman drank from a 40-ounce malt liquor bottle and, as if in imitation of each other, had cigarettes hanging dangerously off the edge of their lips.

  “Who that fine shorty with you?” Attitude inquired.

  Slammer threw his palms up in protest. “Aw right now. This my cuz.”

  One of the girls glared at Attitude. Deni presumed she was his girlfriend.

  “Who that you tryin’ to get to holler at you, ’Tude?” the girl with the razor cut quipped, her hands placed on her hip.

  “Excuse me, Miss Ma’am,” Attitude did a bow from his waist toward Deni. He turned to his girlfriend. “Aw, l’il mama, don’t trip. I’m just being polite.”

  Deni said under her breath, “Stay away from him. He looks like a Blood.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s an O.G.”

  “What’s that?

  “An original gangster.”

  “You say that like that’s something to be proud of.”

  “It is. Most of them don’t live to get old or either they are crippled or up in somebody’s jail.”

  “Is that what you want to happen to you?”

  “Aw, cuz. Don’t worry about me. I’m not going to be a sellout like you.”

  Slammer bounded out the car and ran into the store before she could retaliate.

  Without wasting a second, Deni used her electronic buttons to lock her doors, roll up her windows, and switch the channel to the local news channel.

  Absently, she listened to the news. “Hurricane Katrina has hit New Orleans. Everyone has been told to evacuate, but we’re afraid for the sick, the shut-in, the elderly. Blah, blah, blah.”

  Within seconds her mind tuned out the news. Sitting in the middle of the hood, somehow the danger of the hurricane in the Gulf did not register on Deni’s radar. Although she had grown up in what used to be called South Central but now was more politically correctly renamed South LA, drive-by shootings were becoming so rampant, she was more concerned about getting hit by a stray bullet than she was about some hurricane a thousand miles away. If anything, she could kill Slammer herself for putting her in harm’s way. She felt her hands getting clammy and her heart begin to pound with a loud thud.

  When Slammer finally loped back to the car, Deni unlocked the doors. She didn’t breathe easily until Slammer slid in the seat next to her.

  Just before she could pull off, out of nowhere, a white-and-black LAPD patrol car fishtailed, screeched, and belched to a stop. The police car siren wailed mercilessly. Before Deni knew what happened, an officer came over to her car, looking as if he was going to draw his gun.

  The crowds began to scatter and disperse. “Five-Oh. Let’s book.”

  “Run, Primo. Get P-Dog. The PO-Po!”

  Four more police cars pulled up, sirens whirring. Several of the street-corner men were collared before they could get away.

  Protests rose from the throngs. “Officer, we didn’t do nothin’.”

  “This is bullshit! We just mindin’ our own business.”

  “Ain’t gon’ be no Rodney King shit going on here.”

  Deni took a deep breath as she studied the white law enforcement officer swaggering towards her. She noticed he had scarlet pimples on his face and he looked rather young.

  “Miss, keep your hands on the steering wheel,” the officer commanded. “Now, we want to see your license, your insurance, and registration.”

  Slowly, Deni reached into her dashboard and took out her insurance and registration. Before she could hand over her ID, another police officer snatched opened the rider’s side door, reached inside, and grabbed Slammer out and flung him up against the car’s hood. One policeman beat him over the head with his billy club.

  “What the—” Deni was flabbergasted.

  Within minutes, several more patrol cars arrived and began to rush after the crowd in front of the liquor store. Before Deni knew what was
happening, the police had her door opened, and had thrown her out of her car and up against her hood. The next thing she knew, she felt white hands groping all between her legs and on her breast. She was so humiliated, she wanted to scream. She was able to see the badge of the officer who was fondling her. Officer Charles Malloy.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see two officers hitting Slammer and throwing Slammer on the ground. She was livid, but she didn’t know what to do.

  Deni tried to remain calm. “Officer, what did we do? You don’t have any probable cause to be pulling us over. That’s my cousin you’re beating on. I have his release papers in my purse.”

  Deni could see them handcuffing several of the guys, and laying them on the ground like they were so many sardines.

  “What did they do?” she cried out.

  “Miss, shut up, or we’ll arrest you too.”

  When Deni pulled her court badge from under her suit jacket, the officer threw his partner a strange look. He was silent for a moment, a twitch tugging at the corner of his mouth. “The store owner complained that they were selling drugs on this corner.”

  “Do I look like a drug dealer to you, sir?”

  “Let them go,” he said to his partner. He wrote down Deni’s license plate, her information, and Slammer’s information, off his release papers.

  When Slammer got back in the car, Deni noticed his head was beginning to swell.

  She knew they had been loitering but didn’t see any of the crowd particularly breaking the law. Hadn’t LAPD had enough police brutality lawsuits against them? When would they learn?

  “You give a fool a gun and a badge, an immature fool at that, and they feel they can come down here and trample on people,” she mumbled. For the first time in a long time, she felt some connection to her people—even if these people weren’t up to her standards.