by Ritz, David
POWER & BEAUTY
A Love Story of Life on the Streets
Tip “T.I.” Harris with David Ritz
Epigraph
Turn the fear into energy
’Cause the toot and the smoke
Won’t fulfill the need
—MARVIN GAYE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
HIM
The Nightmare, the Dream
Slim
Wanda Washington
Cascade Heights
Just Got Paid
September
Heart to Heart
Dreams
New Education
Irv Wasserman
Hair Is Where It’s At
Winter
Spring
“Premature Ejaculation”
Sugar
The Renato Ruiz Agency
Get Back Up, Got Your Back
Whatever You Like
Ride Wit Me
The Holly Windsor Agency
A Quiet Place in the City
HER
Anita Ward
Nina Golding
Noah Sanchez
Calm and Cool Clothing
The Plaza
Emmanuel Baptist Church
Claire’s
Buckhead
Kato Yamamoto
New York
Tokyo
Young Beauty
Charles “Slim” Simmons
165 Charles Street
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
HIM
The Nightmare, the Dream
It was a Saturday in June, nine o’clock in the morning, when the explosion hit. It rocked our little apartment in Conway Court; rocked our whole neighborhood; rocked my world and flipped the script on our lives.
After that morning, just two months before my sister and I turned sixteen, nothing was ever the same.
At first I thought it was a terrorist attack. But why the hell would terrorists be launching attacks on niggas on the west side of the ATL?
“It’s Charlie’s Disco!” my sister started screaming. “I can see it from here!”
Charlie’s Disco sat right across the street from where we stayed. Charlie’s Disco was run by Moms’s friend, Charles “Slim” Simmons. Moms helped Slim with his bookkeeping. Sometimes when she was working in his office above the club she’d let me sit downstairs at the bar and drink lemonade. I liked that. I liked being inside the smoky club with the black leather booths and plush ruby-red carpet. I studied the disco ball that hung over the dance floor and imagined what it was like when the place was packed with the flashy pimps, hustlers, and hos—Slim’s best customers.
But Moms would never allow me in there when the place was packed. Moms knew better. After all, she started out as a waitress at Slim’s. She said Slim was always good to her, but Moms wanted to do better. Moms went to night school to learn bookkeeping so she could buy me and my sister, Beauty, nicer clothes. Moms put money away in our college fund. Moms always said she was raising me to be a polite Southern gentleman. People said Moms was the only woman Slim respected. Everyone respected Moms.
“Where’s Mom?” I yelled, jumping out of bed when the explosion hit.
“I don’t know, Power,” Beauty said, her voice shaking. “She mentioned something about going over to see Slim.”
My heart started racing. My brain started panicking.
Moms couldn’t be at Slim’s.
Moms had to be okay.
Just last night Moms had made us dinner. Just last night Moms had helped us with our math homework and read out loud from the Bible.
Moms was a young woman, healthy and strong. Moms hadn’t gone over to Charlie’s this morning. She probably just went shopping. Moms was fine.
I threw on some sweats and, together with Beauty, ran across the street.
Holy shit!
Charlie’s was ablaze. Biggest fire I’d ever seen up close. The heat was incredible. Fire trucks, firemen, cops, folks milling around, everyone trying to figure out what the fuck had happened.
“Anyone inside?” someone asked.
“They pulled out one body. The woman was dead.”
The woman was dead.
Beauty and I heard the words at the same time.
“Can’t be Moms,” I said to my sister. “Moms went shopping.”
Beauty didn’t speak, but I knew what she was thinking.
“Moms is probably already home by now,” I said.
Beauty ran over to the firemen and started asking questions. The fireman directed her to a cop. The cop said something that made Beauty’s eyes go wide. She put her hand over her mouth. She started screaming. I ran over there.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“He’s gonna take us to the hospital. We gotta get to the hospital.”
After that, my brain went blurry. Riding in the cop car. Sirens screaming. Arriving at the ER. Running through the hospital. Looking for doctors. Talking to nurses. Going up and down hallways until we finally found the one doctor who asked the question that I didn’t wanna hear.
“Are you related to Charlotte Clay?”
“She’s our mother,” said Beauty.
“I’m afraid she’s gone.”
“Gone where?” I asked. “Gone to Macon? Gone back to where she was born in Alabama? Gone where, motherfucker?” I was losing it.
“She’s dead,” the doctor said.
“Can’t be dead!” I started hollering. “Must be another woman. My mother went shopping. She didn’t go to no Slim’s. Not that time of morning. She’d have nothing to do with Slim that time of morning. It’s all a big mistake!”
The doctor put his arm around me. I pushed him away and screamed even louder. “Fuckin’ hospitals get shit mixed up all the time! Fuckin’ hospitals can’t keep nothing straight! That woman who died ain’t my mother!”
“Would you like to identify her?” the doctor asked.
I couldn’t.
Beauty could.
Beauty went into the room.
I stayed behind.
Beauty came out, shaking and weeping, running to me, falling in my arms.
“She’s gone.” Beauty was crying.
My heart was hammering so hard it felt like it was coming out my chest.
“She’s gone,” Beauty said again. She looked up at me and asked, “How we gonna live without her? How are we going to make it, Power?”
Relatives and friends called. Relatives and friends came by. The crib was packed when we got back home. But we made it clear that we really couldn’t be with anyone. Seeing other folks weeping and sobbing was too much. We told them that we appreciated their concern, but we needed to be alone.
No mother. Just sister and brother.
That night, the first night without Moms, Beauty slipped into my bed. She was crying so hard her body was shaking. Her shaking didn’t stop until I held her.
She wasn’t my blood. Beauty had African-American/Asian blood. She had Asian eyes, Asian skin. Mom had adopted her five years ago when we were both eleven. But she was still my sister. Didn’t matter that she was beautiful; didn’t matter that she had a killer body that every boy in school was looking to tap. I knew that I couldn’t see her that way. Moms always said, “You gotta watch her back, boy, not her backside. She’s family. And never forget it.” But at times I did forget it. I took me more than a few peeks in the keyhole when she undressed at night. And I caught her taking more than a few peeks at me coming out of the shower.
Sometimes—well, more than sometimes—most times when I jerked off, I saw Be
auty in my mind. In my mind, I did everything to Beauty to make her scream out my name. But that was fantasy. When it came to reality, I did what Moms told me to do.
But tonight Moms’s body was at the funeral home, and Beauty’s body was next to mine. She had come to my bed. She needed to be held. I needed to be held. We needed to do something to make this new and horrible fear go away. The fear was all over us.
The midnight hour came down on us.
We were alone in the crib without our mother.
We were alone in bed.
Beauty brought her mouth to my mouth.
I had never tasted her mouth before. It was soft, sweet. I pressed my lips against hers. I felt her tongue touching mine. I felt her opening her heart, her mind, her soul.
I knew it was wrong.
She knew it was wrong.
We were crying out to each other.
Moms was gone, Moms was dead, we were alive, we were holding each other, feeling each other in a way we’d always wanted to but never had.
We couldn’t.
We shouldn’t.
But the horror and the confusion of losing the most important person in our universe had turned our universe upside down. The person who made sense of the world, the person who kept us safe, the person who gave us the rules was no longer there. The rules were no longer there.
We could do what we wanted.
In our confusion, our pain, our fucked-up fear, we faced each other that night in bed. We did what we had longed to do.
It was not the first time for Beauty, and it was not the first time for me. But it might as well have been.
Once we started, we couldn’t stop. It was crazy. My mind couldn’t stop saying crazy crazy crazy crazy but my body wasn’t listening, my body didn’t care, my body fought off my mind.
For five years we had fought for Moms’s attention. We had teased and taunted each other to the point of tears. For five years we were rivals.
Now we were lovers, loving so deep and with such crazy don’t-stop don’t-ever-stop passion that I wasn’t even sure it was really happening.
I had fallen into a dream. I was loving Beauty in a dream. In a dream, we were doing everything we had long dreamed of.
But when I woke up, the dream was there next to me.
I was naked.
She was naked.
The dream was not a dream.
The dream was real. The nightmare of Moms’s death was real. Our reaction to her death now seemed like a nightmare.
“Power,” Beauty said to me, “we can never tell anyone. We can never do this again.”
“I’ll never say a word.”
“Never,” she said. “Never ever!”
Slim
I’ll take care of everything.”
Those were the first words of the first person who showed up at our doorstep the day after the night everything changed.
“Don’t you worry,” said Charles “Slim” Simmons. “I’ll take care of everything. Your mama was my best friend. I treasured her like a precious jewel. She was my heart and her kids ain’t gonna want for nothing—not now, not ever.”
We were in the front room of our small apartment. Beauty was sitting in front of the television, staring at a blank screen. She wasn’t even looking at Slim. It was a hot day, and she was dressed in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt. She wasn’t even looking at me.
I was looking at Slim.
He was about my height—this year I’d shot up to five eleven—and where I was thin and wiry, he was big-boned and thirty pounds too heavy. He had a belly on him. I guess he’d been slim when he was young. At forty-five, he looked his age. He had good hair that he styled in silky waves. I got kinky hair that I cut short to my scalp. His skin was light tan; mine is dark like Moms’s. His eyes were green; mine are brown. He wore an open-collar blue silk shirt, black alligator low-top boots, a fancy Monte Carlo Panama fedora, and a sleek slice of dazzling ice on each wrist. Matching diamond wristbands were his trademarks.
Slim wasn’t a smiling man. He had a serious vibe, a take-care-of-business vibe, and before this day, he had never given me a second’s worth of attention.
“Just got back from Cutler Jefferson’s funeral home,” he said. “Cutler’s my friend from grade school. I said, ‘Cutler, give this great lady the send-off she deserves. Lay her out in satin and ermine. Make her even more beautiful in glory than she was in life. Set out your best coffin, the one made in hand-polished mahogany where the hardware is fourteen-karat gold. You dealing with a queen, Cutler. You dealing with royalty. Spare no expense.’ This here tragedy happened in my place. This here accident, where the gas heater blew up and caused this terrible explosion, this thing was something so unbelievable that only God knows why. She didn’t deserve this. You kids know that. You know it better than anyone. Your mama was a sure-enough angel of the Lord. She’s gone, but I’m here, and I’m here to set things right for y’all.”
I didn’t know what to say or do.
Beauty kept looking down. She never did face Slim.
Slim saw Beauty. All men saw Beauty. She was just an inch or two shorter than me, and her long black lustrous hair fell halfway to her waist. Her almond-shaped eyes gave you a dreamy feeling; when she did look at you, it felt like she was writing a poem about you. She was small-waisted and slender like a model. Lots of models have small breasts, though. Beauty’s breasts weren’t small. They were perfectly proportioned to her body. They jutted out. They stayed up and out. She never wore a bra because she didn’t need a bra. She had amazing breasts. Her lips were thin and her mouth wide. Her cheekbones turned up to the sky.
Her mama, Isabel Long, had worked alongside my mother in the bookkeeping department at Fine’s Department Store for years. They lived in an apartment right next to ours. Beauty’s daddy was some Japanese dude who knocked up Isabel and wanted nothing more to do with the whole affair. When Isabel died, my mother felt like she had no choice but to adopt the girl, whose name was Tanya. Even as a baby, Tanya was so gorgeous everyone called her Beauty. She and I grew up together. She was just like a sister.
At about the same time eleven-year-old Tanya came to live with us, my daddy, Paul, fell down at his job at the plant. He was just a young man, but a stroke did him in. He was in the hospital for only a week before he died. He was the one who called me Power. I’m Paul Jr., but when I fell in love with the Power Rangers at age three, Daddy renamed me after my favorite toys.
“Power,” said Slim, “I’m taking you and your sister outta here. I’m taking you to my crib. You gonna live with me.”
For the first time, Beauty looked up. She stared straight at Slim. Her eyes looked at him like he was some kind of devil. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
“I got six bedrooms and I only use one,” Slim said. “You’ll have your own bedroom and your own bathroom. One of the bedrooms has a canopy bed and a little room right next to it with a vanity table, the kind where women put on their makeup and do all that womanly shit. That’ll be your room, Beauty. You gonna love it. Power, I’m putting you in the room above the garage. It’s like a private apartment, with its own entrance and everything. You’ll come and go as you please. If you wanna bring your bitches up in there, I got no problem. Youngbloods gonna do what they gonna do.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“I gotta slide outta here,” said Slim. “I’ll be back later with all the details on the funeral. The funeral will be something no one will ever forget. My man Cutler is going to turn this funeral out. So start packing up your things. I’ll have one of my boys come by with a pickup and take your suitcases over to my place whenever you’re ready. God bless you both. God bless your beautiful mother. I loved that lady, and nothing in this world can stop me from making sure that her kids get every last goddamn thing they need.”
Wanda Washington
After Slim left, time hung heavy on our heads.
What could we say?
The shoc
k of Moms’s death had caught us up in a terrible grief. The grief was choking us. The fact that we had slept together fucked with our minds. The guilt was choking us. Grief and guilt were all over us; we couldn’t even look at each other.
I was sitting on the couch. Beauty was sitting on a kitchen chair, her back to me. The morning was hot. The TV was off. The windows were open. A neighbor across the way was screaming at his wife so loud we could hear every last word.
“Bitch!” he yelled. “Why do you care if I get home at four A.M.? You ain’t giving up no good pussy anyway!”
“That’s ’cause that sad old dick of yours can’t stay up long enough to please no normal woman. You out there foolin’ with them freaks.”
I got up and closed the windows, muffling the fight.
Finally Beauty spoke, although she still wouldn’t look at me. “I’m not going to live with him.”