Sweet Red left Curtis alone and turned her attention to the two men the boss had schooled her on an hour before the SNAC coaches made their way down that dirt-and-gravel road. She bounced her fat but exceptionally toned booty around a few times. As soon as Castilleo saw the tattoo he stood up, pulled off his suit coat, dug in his breast pocket, and pulled out a wad of bills. He couldn’t wait to throw money her way because he was dying to discover all that Sweet Red knew how to do. And he secretly hoped he could play “daddy” to Sweet Red and spank that thang.
Charles made quick eye contact with Sweet Red to take all of Castilleo’s money and keep the house’s part as a bonus for handling her business right. He had every intention of sending that negro home flat broke because he didn’t like the way he’d tried to run some raggedy game on his frat’s niece—a sweet and beautiful assistant principal at the gifted elementary school who deserved far better than that FNN (fancy-name negro) with barely a pot to piss in.
Sweet Red pulled a cherry Dum Dum lollipop out of her low-cut bra, which was red with black lace running through it, took the candy out of the wrapper and began sucking on it with those sparkling ruby-red lips. She licked her lips and held a hand out toward Castilleo, who promptly put ten dollars in it. Sweet Red frowned and started to walk away. Castilleo pulled off nine more of those tens. She slowed her roll, smiled, slurped on that Dum Dum, turned around, put her behind right in Castilleo’s face, clapped her booty a few times, and stood still until he put another set of ten tens in her hand.
Happy, Sweet Red dropped down and didn’t come back up until “to the window … to the wall” was blasting out of the sound system. She bent over and jingled a single cheek. Castilleo started hyperventilating. Kordell handed him one of the paper bags that were on all the tables. They looked like the barf bags on airplanes. Castilleo took a few slow, deep breaths, sat back in his chair, took another swig of his Mojito, and put another hundred dollars in Sweet Red’s outstretched hand. She looked back at Castilleo, crunched the Dum Dum, and jiggled the other cheek.
Both Castilleo and Kordell broke out in a cold sweat. Kordell grabbed a red linen napkin and mopped the top of his bald head. He always bragged to his posse that the ladies called him Herr Doktor because he had the cure for what ailed them. But sitting here watching Sweet Red work that thang like that gave Kordell cause to pause a moment, and contemplate if he was the one who needed to see the doctor.
Kordell winked at Sweet Red, who pretended that she was moved by this football-player-looking basketball coach with the gleaming pomegranate-shaped head. She knew that he fancied himself a ladies’ man and believed his own hype that he had some serious game. Sweet Red had taken one look at Kordell Bivens in that JCPenney special and quickly discerned that he was cheap. It was clear that this Kordell planned to bamboozle the younger coach into spending all of his money on the dance Kordell was dying to see.
But that was just fine with Sweet Red. She knew that the boss was settling a score with the younger coach and had decided to hit him where it hurt—his pockets. On the other hand, the big pomegranate-head negro just needed to be played. She could look in his eyes and tell that he thought he had special powers where the ladies were concerned. Sweet Red knew men who sincerely had it going on with the sisters—her boss, Pierre Smith, and Coach Parker just to name a few. This joker, however, didn’t have anything close to the class and down-home dap that those three men possessed.
Sweet Red knew that this negro was hoarding his money for a private dance. She was going to give him a private dance he’d never forget. And just when he thought he had her right in the palm of his hand, Sweet Red was going to collect all of her money and then give him her gangsta cousin Lil’ Too Too’s cell phone number when he asked the inevitable question, “When can I see you again?”
Sweet Red and Lil’ Too Too had an understanding—she paid him one hundred dollars a month just to threaten and cuss out everybody calling his number looking for “that fine thang from the strip club.” Lil’ Too Too stayed in trouble at school and relished the opportunity to act bad for the right reason. Plus, Sweet Red didn’t even sleep around. Her man was in the Navy, and she was dancing to pay the bills and help them save money to buy a house when he came back from his tour of duty.
Sweet Red winked at Kordell, and then clapped her booty real close to Castilleo’s face. When he picked that barf bag back up, she dropped down and then went into a split and came back up with such grace even Charles wanted to see her do that move again. Castilleo was still breathing in the bag and Sweet Red was now popping her booty to the remainder of the song, and kept popping right into the new song, “Big Things Poppin’” by TI.
She clapped her booty one more time, and held that clap until she saw Castilleo pull out a hundred dollars. This time she frowned and made as if to walk off. Castilleo reached back into his wallet and put what was left on the table. Sweet Red smiled and plopped her butt on that table and picked up the money with her behind.
The coaches were beating on the tables and giving wolf calls. Sonny Todd had moved from his spot over in the cut on the window seat to a chair with a much better view. And Kordell was now on the lookout for another mark to pay the sweet red thang enough money to keep the floor show going. This girl was good—she was doing all that dancing and there wasn’t a pole in sight.
Charles, smooth as can be, clapped Curtis on the shoulder. He had gotten up and stood next to Charles so he could get an eyeful of this incredible floor show.
“Coach,” Charles said. “I need to speak to you for a minute.”
He made sure the other coaches were so deep into Sweet Red that they had absolutely no interest in anything Curtis was doing. Curtis glanced backward at Sweet Red for a hot second and followed Charles. He was relieved that he didn’t have to stay in the room with the other coaches. Not that Sweet Red wasn’t entertaining—the girl was putting a hurting on that dance floor. Good or not, though, Curtis found that he wasn’t in the mood to be up here today. He was glad to go and hang out with Charles. As good as Sweet Red was, the last thing he wanted to look at was some woman popping her butt around—especially a woman he did not know.
Charles knew Curtis didn’t have any business in Rumpshakers. If Eva T. had not been the host school for this meeting, he would have told his boy to go home, go see his grandmother, go and try to talk to that fine Yvonne Fountain over in the Department of Design at Eva T. Go and break off that foolishness with Regina Young. Go and do anything but hang around up here.
Plus, Charles knew Regina because he had tapped that tail on several occasions before she got hooked up with Curtis. That’s how he knew, firsthand, that Regina wasn’t worth the thread used to tie in the hair on that fancy weave.
She couldn’t even be classified. The girl wasn’t a gold digger—she had plenty of money of her own. She had just enough class to get past being a skank. She was a skeezer of sorts, but again had too much class to remain in that classification for too long. And she was too stiff and boring to qualify as a hoochie.
That made the girl dangerous. A brother could get an angle on a woman with one of the above classifications. But a woman like Regina could get you twisted up in a foul game that was hard to end because you couldn’t dig into a little bag of tricks and pull up a simple formula for handling gold diggers, skanks, skeezers, and hoochies.
These groups of women may have had high drama indexes but they could be handled. Furthermore, they could handle what you dished out. They knew they fit a high-drama index classification, and were well schooled concerning what could happen between them and their man at any given time.
Regina, who thought she was above all of that, demanded everything she didn’t deserve from a brother. She expected to be treated with a level of respect she wasn’t in any way inclined to give back. And she insisted on a brother being loyal and honest at a level she wasn’t even capable of thinking about giving back to him. That was why the girl could be all up under Curtis, block his ability to find
the right kind of woman, and then go off and sleep with his boss, Gilead Jackson, when she felt the need for some variety in her life.
Sometimes Regina Young reminded Charles of his cousin Marquita’s trifling husband, Rico. His sister, his mama, and his Aunt Margarita could not stand Rico, or any of his people. Aunt Margarita always said that those Sneeds thought they were so much better than everybody else, even when they were still living in the old Cashmere Estates, using food stamps and eating government cheese just like everybody else.
Charles didn’t like any of those Sneeds, either. They were the meanest, nastiest, and coldest people he’d ever met. Charles’s folks were hustlers and hood rats. But the Sneeds were hateful, and they talked to folks any kind of way—just saying anything, no matter how nasty, spiteful, and hurtful it was. Aunt Margarita made it her business to stay away from those people. Said she’d never met such a bunch of plain and mediocre negroes who were always prancing around being mean and acting like they were the cat’s meow.
Whenever Charles and his sister, Charmayne, talked about Rico and his mean family, they couldn’t help but think about the need to be in church and getting right with God. If there was ever a reminder of what people acted like when they didn’t know the Lord, it was the Sneed family. Even though the two of them were out in the world, they knew about church and living for the Lord. They had been visiting Fayetteville Street Gospel United Church for so long, folks didn’t even know that they were not members.
Charmayne had once told him that there were times when she thought about getting saved and making Jesus Lord of her life while she was still ahead. That day Charmayne had put her arms around her baby brother, whom she loved so much, kissed him on the cheek, and then popped him on the back of his head like she had when they were kids and he was getting on her nerves.
“I feel like we are running out of time, Charles. We can’t keep running from God and think that things will continue to work for us.”
“You really think we are running out of time?” Charles had asked his sister, looking at her with the same expression in his eyes that he had had when they were home alone and he’d asked her when their mama was coming back home.
She hugged him tight with tears in her eyes. Truth was their time to be in the world was almost up. But she didn’t have a clue as to how they could let go of all that they were gaining in the world to live for God. She didn’t ever want to be broke again, and neither did he.
Charles steered Curtis down a few corridors far away from the music, conversations, and coarse jokes going on in the main section of the club. As far as Charles was concerned, Curtis needed to be as far away from Kordell Bivens and Castilleo Palmer as possible— especially when all of that gyrating and booty-popping was going on.
Charles didn’t like Kordell and Castilleo, and he didn’t trust them, either. Actually there were very few people Charles Robinson liked, and even fewer that he trusted. Curtis Parker was one, and the others were Maurice Fountain, Obadiah Quincey, and Yarborough and Denzelle Flowers. They weren’t his boys, even though he liked and respected them all. But Charles knew that they had integrity and could be trusted.
On the other hand, Charles knew that not one of the men he had left salivating over Sweet Red could be trusted. And out of that group, Kordell Bivens and Castilleo Palmer were the least trustworthy—especially where Curtis was concerned. Charles had good instincts and he always trusted what his gut told him.
He knew, just by watching both Kordell and Castilleo, that they wanted the head coach position at Eva T. so bad they would do anything to get it—including trying to use one of his girls to help them get some bogus dirt on Curtis Parker. He didn’t know what made those two second-rate coaches believe they were capable of doing Curtis’s job. But that is exactly what they thought.
Charles had figured out that Gilead Jackson wanted Kordell and Castilleo to make it hard for Curtis to succeed. And he wanted to know why Gilead didn’t want the basketball team to prosper and grow when he stood to gain so much with a winning team—especially one that took a conference title. And it didn’t make any sense that Sam Redmond was sitting back and allowing this to happen.
Charles’s cell buzzed a text from Pierre that read “Check this out, Boss.” Charles turned back to Curtis and said, “Wait here a minute.” He opened the door to a private dance room and nodded toward a comfy sofa. “I’ll only be a second, man.”
“No problem,” Curtis answered and sat down, wondering what happened in this room. It didn’t necessarily look like the kind of place where the only thing that a brother received was a lap dance. There wasn’t even a chair in the room, and he knew that the best lap dances were done with sturdy chairs. At least the best lap dances he’d ever been a party to were done with a sturdy chair.
This room had gold-painted walls, a plush red-and-gold shag carpet, a cushy gold leather sofa, a dark cream Ultrasuede fainting or reclining couch that resembled a daybed, a red silk throw on the reclining couch, a small, high window, and several novelty items in a big red wooden basket with cream silk moire ribbons all over it. Now, Curtis was a grown man who had gotten down and dirty on a few occasions with the kind of girl the late R&B singer Rick James used to sing about. But he’d never, ever been in a room like this, and it made him very uncomfortable. He thought about how Gran Gran always tried to get him to carry a small vial of anointing oil.
Gran Gran had once said, “Baby, you never know when you’re gonna run up on or find yourself in a situation where the first thing you are going to want to do is call on the name of Jesus, and then anoint yourself in Jesus’s name.”
At the time Curtis had thought that Gran Gran was having one of those senior moments and being just a tad over the top. But right now, sitting in this room and looking at that basket with the mysterious stuff in it, made him wish he’d listened to his grandmother and taken that oil she’d purchased for him.
Curtis closed his eyes and touched his fingertips to his heart. He whispered, “Cover me with the blood of Jesus, Lord,” and worked overtime to keep his eyes from straying over to that basket. But every time he looked away, it felt as if a string or something were pulling his eyes right back to the spot he kept trying not to see. Finally, Curtis closed his eyes and whispered, “Where is Gran Gran when you need her?”
Pierre buzzed Charles again.
“Where are you, Boss? You need to hurry up so you can see this going down.”
“Where are you?” Charles asked as he’d headed toward Pierre’s office and then found it locked.
“In the security control room with Bay. He’s the one who texted me about this.”
Charles turned all the way around and headed back in the direction of his office, where the tightest level of security was. Bay was the head of security, and if he said to come to the control room, where all the monitors for the club were, Charles knew to get there in a hurry.
Charles punched in the security code and hurried into the control room. Pierre and Bay were deep into what was happening on the monitors.
“Check this out, Mr. Robinson,” Bay said and pointed to the monitor for the parking lot.
Charles stared at it for a moment and then frowned. He was not happy watching Kordell Bivens, Gilead Jackson, Sam Redmond, Jethro Winters, and Sonny Todd Kilpatrick huddled up together as if they were discussing the next play for a football game. How they had gotten out of the room with Sweet Red, and to that parking lot that fast concerned him. But what made Charles so mad he felt steam blowing out of his ears was the sight of Rico Sneed coming up on the group grinning and puffing on a cigar as if he were somebody worth the time of day.
“What the hell is that negro doing with that pack of wolves, and on my parking lot?” Charles demanded.
Pierre shrugged, and Bay said, “That’s messed up, Mr. Robinson. Rico is married to your cousin and he should have told you he was coming here with a bunch of men he knows you don’t like.”
“Yeah, Boss,” Pierre said, “that’s m
essed up.” He punched his big, meaty hand with his huge fist. “So when are we gonna mess that negro up? He is just getting more and more beside himself—and more and more out of control.”
“True that, Mr. Robinson,” Bay said, frowning at Rico’s image on the monitor. “I know he’s married to your cousin and all but there are times when he comes up in here that I want to cuss him clean out. I know Miss Marquita. She is good people. She deserves better than that trash standing out there doing who knows what with God knows whom.”
Charles studied Rico for a minute. He could not believe the negro was at his club with those men and dressed to the nines in a suit he’d bought from Charles’s suit man, Mr. Booth, who was Sweet Red’s uncle and his cook Miss Hattie Lee’s brother-in-law. Lowell Booth got his clothes at discounted wholesale rates and was able to sell them at some seriously good prices. Charles bought practically all of his suits from Mr. Booth, and he was one of the best-dressed brothers in Durham.
Rico had never been able to afford suits like the one he was wearing until Charles had turned him on to Mr. Booth. He should have known better. Because now Rico was in Charles’s parking lot, wearing a sharp chocolate silk-and-wool suit with mint-colored chalk stripes, full-cut pleated pants, mint shirt, and a chocolate, powder blue, and mint green diamond-print silk tie, making deals with the Devil and betraying his entire family.
“Look, Boss, Rico is ushering them towards the door and they are …”
“ … Coming right in … every last one of them,” Bay said.
Charles’s hazel eyes narrowed into slits.
Up at the College Page 14