by Ritz, David
We were alone in his office when he leaned back in the red leather judge’s chair behind his desk and said, “Want another hit?”
“No, man,” I said. “I’m already wasted.”
“Did I say primo or did I say primo?”
“You said primo.”
“Slim said he gave you an envelope.”
“I got it.”
“Before you give it to me, let’s mark the occasion with a special treat.”
“We already marked the occasion with a special treat.”
“This is a better treat,” said Sugar, opening a drawer and pulling out a small jewel box. He dumped the contents of the jewel box on a small mirror that sat atop his piano-desk.
“It’s among the world’s finest,” he said, referring to the small quantity of cocaine spread over the mirror. “You need very little. The truth, man, is that I do very little of this stuff. I keep my distance. I know how to handle it. I’m an expert at this product. I should be. I’ve been selling it since I was a kid. There’s nothing about this product I don’t know. I know that you can’t fuck with it much. The first hit is always heaven, but you gotta be smart enough to know you’ll never get back to heaven. You land in heaven, you look the fuck around, you get out. That’s it. One hit. Not one night or one week or one month or one year or one lifetime looking to get back to heaven. That’s why cokeheads end up broke or dead. They think they can live in heaven. You can’t. All you can do, hombre, is make a quick visit. So tonight, to celebrate meeting my new brother-man Power and his special delivery from Mr. Slim Simmons, we gonna take a quick trip to heaven. You ready?”
I wasn’t sure how the blow, on top of the grass, would work on me. But given my already fogged-over state, I didn’t have the energy to argue.
We went down on the coke and came up smiling. I came up clear. My dizziness was gone and, at least in my mind, I felt like I understood absolutely everything in the world. Everything was in order. All the dust was blown out of my brain. My brain was working overtime. I suddenly saw that this guy, Sugar Ruiz, was absolutely brilliant. He knew how to use drugs. One hit and you stop.
“Nice, huh?” he asked me as he snorted up a few flakes.
I had to agree. “Very nice.”
“Clean and pure. The product is here. The product is high-octane super-quality grade A-plus. The product has put me in the mood, bro. The product has put me on the cloud. The cloud is where I wanna be sitting when you give me that envelope. Sitting on the cloud and looking down on the sweet earth below. Am I reaching you, Power?”
“The cloud’s soft,” I said.
“And the envelope’s thin, ain’t it?”
“Real thin.”
“That’s ’cause it’s only holding one slip of paper. You wanna slip it to me, bro?”
I reached in my pocket and handed Sugar the envelope. His green eyes were beaming.
“Let me just look at it first before I open it,” he said. “It’s kinda like when shorty is up in your bed flashing you that sweet pussy. You wanna take a minute and just look at it. You wanna cherish that motherfucking moment before you go in and actually taste it. So I’m fingering this here envelope. I’m getting it wet, baby. Then I’m going in.”
Sugar held the envelope up to the broken shafts of light coming off the fancy chandeliers. He just looked at it.
“I know what you’re thinking, Power. You’re thinking if just a little bit of blow made us feel that good, a little bit more will make us feel better.”
Sugar was right. That’s exactly what I was thinking.
“But you gotta outthink the blow. See, the blow’s designed to get you thinking that way. But this is the time to say no to the blow or else the blow will blow off the top of our heads. We don’t want that. We wanna be cool. This is the perfect time to stop the blow and instead get a hit off this envelope. Compared to what’s in this envelope, the blow ain’t no stronger than Sweet’N Low.”
Slowly, slowly, Sugar tore open the envelope. I was fixated by how much time he took to do it. It was all happening in slow motion. When the last eighth of an inch of the flap was torn and he reached inside, all I could see was a thin piece of paper with lots of typing on it and some kind of seal.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Key to the future. Key to expanding the empire.”
“Are they ownership papers?”
“You got that right. Ownership papers to the business that I’ve been looking to buy for two years. This fool woman thought she had it tied up forever, but Slim outslicked her. When it comes to slick moves, Slim’s king. I did Slim a serious solid some years back. He was grateful and said he’d take care of me when it mattered. Well, bro, this mattered big-time. With this,” said Sugar, holding up the paper, “my man has come through like a motherfucker.”
“What’s the business?”
“The Holly Windsor Agency. Biggest modeling agency in Miami. Biggest in the South. She got a roster of the hottest models going. Models from all over the world come to Miami to get signed by Holly. But with this beautiful little piece of paper, we can wave Holly Windsor good-bye. She’s out. I’m in.”
“How’d you do it?”
“She got overextended in real estate. This building of mine was designed, constructed, and leased out before the market fell. But Holly, she bought a fancy hotel and high-rise up on Collins at exactly the wrong time. Ate up her cash and left her near bankrupt. She needed cash to keep the modeling agency open. Slim got her the cash, but with the proviso that if she needed more, she’d have to give him, at least on paper, ownership. She agreed. Two months later, the well was dry and she had to go back to Slim. She never thought he’d make her stick to the agreement and take over her business—or let someone like me take over. Well, I am taking over and the first order of business, my friend, is to kick her flat white ass out of town. What do you think of that?”
“Cool” was all I could think to say.
“You don’t sound very excited,” said Sugar. “You came to town with a piece of paper that’s gonna change my life. You better get excited about it.”
“I’m excited—excited to be here.”
“You thinking that with a little more blow, you’d be even more excited, but that ain’t happening. What’s happening is this new agency. What’s happening is that I finally got my chance to put up a slate of models like this world ain’t ever seen before. I was born for this job. No one knows beautiful women like me. You can’t argue with that. You can’t argue with the truth, hombre. It’s something you gonna see with your own eyes. So we ain’t getting any more fucked up than we already are. We ain’t turning into no freakin’ cokeheads. Slim would have my scalp. Couldn’t do that to my man Slim. Couldn’t do that to his boy. He sent you down with a piece of paper that I’m holding high in my hand. Beautiful piece of paper, ain’t it, bro? He sent you down here ’cause he knows you’re interested in beauty. If you with Slim, you already seen beautiful women. Slim likes to talk about his beautiful women, but listen here, partner, this is Miami Beach, where beauty takes on a whole ’nother dimension. We going into that dimension on a personal and professional basis. You ready to follow me into that dimension?”
I could feel the effects of the coke fading. I wanted more. I wanted to go back up, not down, but I also knew that when it came to drugs Sugar knew what he was doing. I figured that Sugar’s Shack was built on drugs. He was the expert and I was the amateur. Drugs had never sat well with me before. I understood that just because his grass didn’t make me paranoid and his coke seemed to clear my mind didn’t mean that more of the same wouldn’t fuck up the works. I was better off chillin’. Slim had sent me to Irv, who, before he got sick and lost his mind, taught me not to trust no one. Slim was sending me to Sugar, another cat he admired, to learn whatever Sugar had to teach. Sugar was teaching me that one hit is enough.
“We going to VIP so you can see what this thing’s all about,” he said. “You ready?”
“Ready,” I
said.
“You cool?”
“Cool,” I assured him.
“You like champagne?”
“I’ll have me a little sip.”
“My man! That’s what I like to hear. You getting the idea, Power. A little sip. All we need is a little sip.”
To get to VIP we followed the curvy lines of the club to a back door guarded by another one of Sugar’s super-tall female security guards. She was a sista with a short-cropped Afro and the longest arms I’d ever seen on a female. The minute she saw Sugar, she stepped aside. He stopped to kiss her on both cheeks. She looked at me approvingly. I was still wishing I had had another hit of that top-shelf blow.
VIP was one medium-sized room with a dance floor and lots of smaller rooms with couches and easy chairs and TVs. There were no doors on the smaller rooms, just sheer curtains made of a see-through fabric. Like everything else at Sugar’s Shack, the furniture was odd shaped, like it was designed by someone high on coke. The women dancing with each other—it was almost all females in there—were not odd shaped, just perfectly shaped. They all looked like models, tall, reed-thin, gorgeous in the face, edgy in their clothes—knee-high black boots and silver silk short shorts, flowing capes that flapped open to show their naked chests. I got the idea they had taken Ecstasy. They had that X look in their eyes. They were floating to a smooth groove—a Latin groove with a techno flava—and a couple of them were making a little show by touching and kissing each other while they danced.
It was like a United Nations of beautiful women. Lots of Hispanic ladies, but man, there were chicks from all over. German chicks, Swedish chicks, French chicks, Italian chicks, Russian chicks, here a chick, there a chick, everywhere a chick chick. My eyes were popping out of my head. I heard all these different languages being spoken at once. I was knocked out by all these different skin types, different eye colors, different dancing styles. As Sugar took me through the rooms, he stopped to introduce me: here’s Gretchen, here’s Smeralda, here’s Ingrid, here’s Brigitte, here’s Natasha, here’s Olga, here’s Liu, here’s Mi. Mi stopped me cold.
Mi was Japanese. She was tall, just about Beauty’s height—five ten or eleven, just a little shorter than me. Unlike Beauty, though, she had dyed her hair the color of red wine. Falling to her shoulders in a loose and breezy style, her hair had a purplish sheen. She had thin lips and a large sexy mouth. Her outfit looked like an art project—pleated pantsuit in stripes of purple and white made out of some kind of crinkly polyester.
“Mi just arrived from Tokyo,” said Sugar. “Holly Windsor wouldn’t sign her. According to Holly, she’s too far-out. According to me, Holly’s full of shit. And now that Holly’s out, Mi is in. Isn’t that right, Mi?”
Mi just smiled. She didn’t know English, so another Japanese model named Yuko, who’d been living in Miami for a while, came over to translate. Yuko, though, didn’t understand the word “far-out.” She asked Sugar to explain.
“ ‘Far-out’ means ‘different,’ ” he said. “ ‘Far-out’ means ‘not afraid to do her own thing.’ Far-out is good.”
Yuko was several inches shorter than Mi. Her wide face and big eyes gave her the look of a baby doll. Her skin almost looked plastic. Mi’s skin looked like silk.
“Mi was a model for Issey Miyake,” said Yuko.
I hadn’t heard of Issey Miyake, but Sugar said he was one of the most famous designers in the world. “Everything he does,” said Sugar, “is far-out.”
I was feeling far-out myself. The high from the grass and coke had gradually faded. The little sips of champagne had me a little tipsy. I was feeling strange. I was feeling like I wanted to talk to Mi more. I was feeling like I wanted to take Mi to bed.
“You want her?” asked Sugar, reading me right.
“If you think it’s cool.”
“No, bro, I really don’t. Not right away anyway. See, she just got here and I don’t want to overwhelm her. Don’t want to confuse her. I’m guessing she’s about your age—eighteen or nineteen—and I’m not sure it’s good for her to start fucking the boss’s assistant right off the bat.”
The boss’s assistant? So that’s how Sugar saw me. Well, why not? The only thing that bothered me, though, was his tone. It was almost like he was saying, the boss’s water boy.
“No problem,” I said. “You’re calling the shots.”
“I’m calling someone who can show you to your apartment upstairs. Not the best in the building, but hell, at least you are in the building.”
A few minutes later—with me, Mi, and Yuko sitting on the couch and listening to Sugar talking about his modeling agency plans—the security sista who’d been guarding the VIP entrance arrived.
“Yolanda,” said Sugar, “take Power up to his apartment. Make sure he’s comfortable.”
“No problem,” said Yolanda.
We had to go back through the club, exit, and reenter through a door for the residential part of the building. As I followed Yolanda, I found myself ranking her high bubble booty among the top ten I had ever seen. My eyes were all over it.
But by the time we rode the elevator up to the ninth floor and walked down the slate-and-metal hallway and into the apartment where I would be staying, my eyes were half-closed. The apartment was tiny, barely big enough for a double bed and a dresser. There was no kitchen, not even a kitchenette. The apartment looked like it was really a closet. My suitcases had been placed on the bed. Yolanda asked me if she could unpack for me. I said yes, and as she opened the suitcases and started putting my clothes away, I stretched out on the bed. I forgot about her booty. I forgot about everything. I was so dead tired from the trip and the drugs and the sips of champagne that my eyes closed completely. I couldn’t open them. I fell deep into the sleep of the dead. And when I woke up the next day it was past noon and I was all alone.
The Renato Ruiz Agency
For you to understand what this dude has done,” Slim told me over the phone the first week I was in Miami, “you got to know a little about his history. His old man was a kingpin in Cuba kicked out by Castro. He comes to Miami, sets up shop to sell his wares, and the first week he’s in business the competition takes him out. Blows off the top of his head. Sugar, his sisters, and his mom have to scuffle ’cause they’re left with nothing. The mom gets sick and dies a year later—cancer or a stroke, I can’t remember. The sisters go back to Cuba to live with an aunt. But this Sugar, this young cat’s got balls the size of cannons. He works the streets. He learns the city. He learns the trade. By the time he’s your age he’s got his own setup. He comes to Atlanta looking for opportunities. I met him when he started looking for real estate opportunities in our neighborhood. A young Hispanic kid looking to buy real estate in the black ghetto. That impressed me. His cash impressed me. We went in on some stuff together and everything he touched turned gold. We made money. Like me, Power, this kid had an eye for prime pussy. He was a magnet for beautiful ladies. The ladies love green eyes on a brother. Doesn’t have to be a black brother. Long as he’s tan. Anyway, next thing I know he’s building his own building and buying up restaurants in South Beach. So after living that life with Irv in Chicago, I knew the last thing you needed was another old Jew. Sugar has something to teach you that even Irv doesn’t know.”
“What?” I asked.
“It ain’t for me to say, Power,” said Slim suavely. “It’s for you to find out.”
In the first days I didn’t find out much except that my willpower to resist willing women was next to nothing. Sugar lived in a world of willing women. In his club, willing women were all over him, and when he announced that I was his boy—“his assistant”—they were all over me. I was tested. Sometimes I was tested twice in the same night. I proudly passed the tests with flying colors. When it came to sex, I was flying higher than I had ever flown. Yet even in these sky-high flights, even with world-class models whose bodies were most men’s wet dreams, even if she happened to be a fair-skinned Norwegian or a Greek glamour girl with an olive
complexion, when it came time to bust my nut, I’d have to give her Beauty’s face.
This was something, of course, that no one knew. I wanted to unburden myself, but who was I going to tell? Slim? Hell no. Wanda. Of course not. Sugar? I was just getting to know the guy. I could see that he liked me and wanted to be my friend. He wanted to get me laid and was doing a great job of giving me the cream of the crop. He’d also seen that I had my eye on Mi. My idea was that of all the beautiful women passing through Sugar’s Shack, Mi was the one who could break Beauty’s spell. Mi did something to me that the others, no matter how gorgeous, did not.
All this was on my mind when, on a Monday morning following a crazy weekend devoted to an insatiable lady from Milan who was six feet four and once on the cover of Italian Vogue, I rode up on the elevator to the penthouse of Sugar’s Shack. Once he had taken over ownership of the Holly Windsor Agency, he had shut down her office and moved it to his building. He had also renamed it the Renato Ruiz Agency. Renato was his real name. “Sugar is a good name for the club and the building,” he said, “but the agency needs a Tiffany-type brand. Sugar’s Agency doesn’t sound right, bro. Renato Ruiz Agency reeks of class, doesn’t it?”
I agreed, and I also agreed to work there every day and try to learn the business from a white woman named Pat Vine, the lady who had run the day-to-day operation for Holly Windsor and agreed to stay on and work with Sugar. Mrs. Vine was in her fifties. She was overweight, she wasn’t pretty, but she was smart with computers and knew the game. She was no-nonsense. She was the one who told me that after the transition of ownership, most of the models signed by Holly Windsor were happy to stay on with Sugar. Holly was seen as pushy and bossy. Apparently she had a bad temper. The models liked the idea of working for a rich, green-eyed, playboy Miami Beach rock-star-style businessman.
“We have a good roster of models,” Mrs. Vine told me, “but rosters are always being raided by the competitors. The key is not only to keep the girls we have but to be on the lookout for fresh talent. That means going to the fashion shows and seeing what models the designers are using. The idea is that Mr. Ruiz will be flying off to New York, Paris, and Milan, and that you and I are in the office making sure that the business is run like a business, not a hobby. Are you good with computers?”