“It can be quite pleasing to someone on the receiving end, from the right hands and mind.”
“Touché! A lawyer, huh? Can you defend me and get me off? Oh, oh I didn’t mean that as it sounded…really.” Mintfurd didn’t mean it, but Darcelle was cracking up.
“It’s all right, Big Boy. It’s okay. I know what you were saying. You’re innocent until proven guilty, but I can get you off.”
“Oh, so you got jokes?”
“Yes, I do . . .I do.”
“Okay, Ms. Taking-Advantage-of-My-Slip-Up. They do call me Big Boy. That is my nickname I’ve had since I was a baby, as anyone might tell you.”
“I might have thought you’d had a nickname like that for a while.”
“I’m a big man, as you have seen. That wasn’t a problem in your eyes?”
“No, not at all. You are a handsome man, and you’ve made me laugh, and that makes you fine in my eyes. Now, do you know I’m a short woman?”
“I have no clue what you look like, and as of now, I honestly don’t care. You’re funny and insightful. From the short time we have been talking on the phone, this feels good. Ah, but hold up; you don’t look like a female version of Li’l Wayne, do you?”
“My twin.”
“Oh, hell nah.”
“Big Boy, I think you’ll be pleased to meet me in person.”
“Don’t have me running a marathon to get away.”
“Keep it up, and I’ll have you running after me.”
“Maybe you’re worth it.”
Two hours later, Mintfurd and Darcelle had talked about Seattle, her daughter who was at Darcelle’s mother’s for a few days, and politics, teasing each other and laughing.
“Mintfurd, I should get off this phone and get ready for another day. I have to say, after our conversation, it makes you wonder whatever happened to a good old-fashioned telephone calls where we could feel smiles and hear laughter. It’s gratifying to have engaging, meaningful conversation.”
“Darcelle, you are so right. People have dumbed down with the overuse or misuse of texts, IMs and other forms of digital communications. The intimate human interaction of voice to voice is a lost art.”
“Mintfurd, you’re right. You hit it in the heart of what is going on. We have lowered our capable minds to use social media and tweets, to convey thoughts of what we used to keep to ourselves. In return, we expose our lack of communication skills, laced with insecurity and other issues.”
“Yes, Ms. Lady, sadly, you are so right. It seems no one wants to talk, because of lost, or never-learned, effective one-on-one communication. As a man, I don’t mind talking on the phone, but I need to have an intelligent conversation coming back at me in order for me to open up and engage. Talking with you—as I said, you made it easy for me, thank you.”
“You’re welcome, and thank you, Mintfurd. We all have fallen in to the trap of lazy communication, some more easily, and some more reluctantly. Some of us try to limit the smartphone and its multiple choices of dumbing down, but talking face to face or on the phone is a pleasure and treasure we’re losing.”
“Darcelle, if I could find a telephone booth, could I call you? Would you answer and speak from your heart, or would you let me go straight to voicemail? Would you text me back, or would you replace a face-to-face opportunity with an email, block me, or simply ignore me?”
“I can tell you I’ll be waiting to hear from you again real soon, how about that? They say actions speak louder than words.”
“The song says, ‘I’d rather hear you breathe than to hear nothing at all,’ so I’ll call you soon—like in about five minutes.” They laughed.
“Rather hear me breathe than nothing at all, huh?” Darcelle thought a minute. “Mintfurd, would you recite a poem for me before you go?”
“Like what kind of poem?”
“Something sexy.”
“Are you grown enough?”
“Big Boy, quit playing and recite me a sexy, adult poem, please.”
“Okay, check this:
“Good Love
My body and soul wants to lie in your warmness
As I feel your hands on me seemingly reaching inside parts of my soul
I feel you twirling and mixing us
Blending with your inner body, we let our juices intoxicate
. . .We are high, and we are hot, as we lay face to face, eyes aligned and aimed
We kiss, our tongues invade
With my hands lifting your legs, you brace for my fall from the sky
My landing pad…an oasis, soft and wet
Pressure of inches wide, you’re melting, inches down, you smile, and more inches I’m melting, into the birth place of mankind
…and it feels like I’m tearing out the screen of the back door
About then, fingernails cut trails from my shoulder blades and down to my thick muscles in my ass
Ah baby, it’s about more than just inches and pain
It’s the rock and roll of my hips, and you don’t have to call my name, your groan has told me all I need to know
You are my Eve
I am your rising sun
Good Love
Rising and heating, a place deep within
Like the moon, earth, and sun…you rotate
On all fours, you expose multiple sights, as I place my hands on your hips
I pull that hair to keep you near
As I cruise slow, then drag race to the no finish line
Take a break, and lick the bowl clean
Slight rest
We dream, and turn fantasies into what we do
I’m mesmerized by your velvet skin, and how you feel against my chocolate peel
I do, as you say, and I place my teeth lightly, but tightly around your breasts, where normally my head would rest after you have drained me
You’re holding me tight
We love being perfect at what we do
Your love, my love
You and I, there is no greater love, when we make love
Good love.”
“Okay, Mintfurd, let me go get a gallon of water. I’ve sweated that much, I’m sure. Goodnight, Big Boy.”
“Goodnight, Darcelle.”
Hearing Mintfurd call her name once more, Darcelle felt more wetness. His voice seemly vibrated deep between her thighs, but now he had recited intense erotic words and each line vibrated on her clit. She hung the phone up and pulled off her panties; all she had on was a T-shirt. She closed her eyes and played a movie of Mintfurd’s face sliding in and spreading her legs wide apart. She let her fingers be his tongue for an encore.
CHAPTER 35
Explicitness of Foul Folks
Two more people left the room after they had sexed all over Evita. She learned that screaming produced more harm than good in her situation. An injection of some kind of drug had put her in La-La Land. It took hours to recover from the drugs injected in her, and she had lost count of time. All her earlier calculations of distance, doors and the window were rendered useless.
Several times a day, they used Evita’s body for nastiness. Men and women came and used her body. Some used forceful sexual intercourse, and some performed softer, but just as destructive, abusive molestations. Evita realized she was a pawn in a sex game. Freaks paid to come do her any way they wanted. The only saving grace was that at least the men wore condoms. She believed she was getting injections of pain-killers near her genitals and anus to most likely keep her calm.
Her tattoos were an attraction for the freaks; many of them licked and sucked all over them. She was a fantasy for those who wanted to commit rape, but didn’t have the means or balls. She was a toy, a human dildo.
Evita knew of such things. She had participated in human toy shops while living on the wretched side of her past life. She had pimped and whored a couple of decades ago. The human sex toy business was for buyers who had money to waste, and had a lot to lose if caught, so they paid only the best organizations to provide their k
ink and to not get caught or outed.
The illicit organizations often kept some kind of proof to make deals with if they didn’t get caught. The rich and ignorant users of the game never seemed to understand they were recorded, photographed, or both. All of the foul records of the foulness were a setup to protect the head of Humpty-Dumpty’s mini-mafia. The masterminds behind them needed one safe place to protect themselves from spending time in prison.
Who used these illicit organizations and paid crazy money? Cops, politicians, CEO, wealthy business owners, and their housewives and husbands who couldn’t get freaky, dick-hardening sex at home.
In the days when Evita had her hands dirty in the human toy business, kidnapping had not been a part of it, nor did holding anyone against their will. At least Evita didn’t run her game like that. She had a history of abuse and that wasn’t the game she wanted forced on someone else. She knew a few of the kids in her program had a taste of the new rules in the game now. The new players in this game beat, killed, discarded, and acquired the newer human toys.
Evita understood she was a human toy worth a bit more than the average. She was an adult with a young person’s body, with scars and tattoos, and a black woman. Most human toys were young and many were underage, and often Eastern European or from South of the Border. To some eyes, Evita’s deeply tanned flesh with her rare and beautiful tattoos, and no silicone implants, made her highly marketable. She knew her feet were a selling point for foot fetish freaks. They were perfect, with lovely arches, straight toes, and no imperfections. Since she’d been captured, many users had licked and sucked every inch of her feet, both men and women. Several men had ejaculated on her feet.
Her rare and beautiful tattoos had the freaks grunting, almost chanting, in religious tongues. Her body was a work of art that lined her scars. Like mapping out a travel plan, men rubbed their dicks along Evita’s tattoos. A tattoo of a painted face covered her ass, with the tongue seemingly coming out her asshole. It was perfect in design and color, and the customers licked along every inch, going in and out of her body, using fingers, tongues, toys, and dicks. Several women tried to force their nipples into her pussy or rubbed them on Evita’s male-female genitals.
Three to four times a day, these people touched Evita’s body revoltingly. She knew her captors were trying to keep their customers separated by hours. She noticed the two who were watching her at first were no longer there. Another pair guarded her now, and took her to use the bathroom and to shower. The hood came off when she was not being used as a sex slave. Being allowed to see handlers’ faces, she knew, meant that one day she was going to die. Evita assumed other sex slaves were in different parts of the house. She alone could not produce enough money for The Voice, assuming he was the head pimp.
She knew The Voice now; she was aware who Pretty Boy was. It took a while, but she remembered that accent, and that he loved to take a belt to a woman’s ass. It was a former client from her days of running in human sex toy joints. He would never let his face be seen. He came in with a leather face mask, as did others who thought it made them weirder.
The word in her friendly circles that came to her joints was that he was a minority owner of the Seattle Supersonics before he and others sold the team. When she first met The Voice, he was the owner of a moving company that had gone national, but later, he was shut down for ripping people off. He kept his hands in many small, lucrative ventures, and amassed money, but once again, he had participated in unscrupulous business deals and lost it all.
Evita serviced him and his friends with bondage, S&M, and other kinkiness. With Evita being a rare hermaphrodite, she was a valued prize in the human sex toy business.
From time to time, she heard foghorns from big ships outside. She had to be on the western side of the Puget Sound on one of the islands, across from Seattle. Maybe she was in a house near a bluff of Vashon Island, or Bremerton, or Whidbey Island. She had to be up high, because she couldn’t hear any wakes—waves made by big ships and tankers—against the shore. The people holding Evita never opened any windows, and the blinds were kept closed. But, she thought she detected ocean water smells.
Bathroom and shower time—to pee, shit, and wash off the explicitness of foul folks—was the best part of her day.
That was when they changed the sheets, too.
CHAPTER 36
Kinship
Psalms
The plane tips its wings. I see a ferry crossing the Sound and it reminds me of my grandfather. The blue ocean waters of Puget Sound look calm, and the islands still have more trees than man-made structures. There are still more lakes and more parcels of land from when only Native Americans owned and ruled the land.
My grandfather often found hidden burial grounds, where small native villages were surrounded by old growth trees. Whenever the land’s new owners wanted something built over them, my grandfather often told them it wasn’t possible and couldn’t be done. He knew they wouldn’t give a damn about the sacrificed dead souls. He would tell them the ground had problems, and whatever they built there would not be safe and sound. He would smile, and say ghosts would come and swallow up the house, and suggest they build houses a hundred feet away from this spot.
When my grandfather found the Native American grounds, the new owners wanted to put a garden or golf course in that parcel of land. He said the water table was too high, that it would change the land in time, and destroy anything as it reshaped it. Although my grandfather had no Northwest Native blood living in him, he had Southwest Navajo kinship flowing through his heart, and he respected life differently from the people he worked for who now resided on the land.
The plane tips its wings again, and I see a little house next to a big one. It feels strange in my soul like fiery, melting silver pouring through my veins.
Looking out of the plane window, I see the sunset’s red streaks in the blue water. I see the islands in the Sound between Seattle and Tacoma, Vashon Island and Whidbey Island. I see a reflection of the past. Her face. Her face . . .staring through the window overtakes my vision. A little white girl, not much older than me: she used to stare in the windows of the little house on Orcas Island. She came from the big house, the little castle. Grandfather and I might be eating, and she would peek in one of the windows. Sometimes, as Grandfather was doing his Bible study, she would appear in another window.
When my grandfather would read to me by the fire at four years of age, the little white girl would be there, staring in the window. She would have such a sad face. There were times when she would raise her hand in almost a wave, and I think I remember smiling, but I never waved back. In some ways, she might have frightened me.
I know now that the little white girl was my mother. That is the message she passed down through Gabrielle. I wanted to meet her years ago, but lawyers met me instead, offering money, and a shut-the-hell-up clause. I signed legal documents that told me to keep my mouth closed. Not even a wave, not even a hello, not even a face to face.
What world has she been in? Did she have nightmares of her black son born out of wedlock, the shame of her perfect, white world? Maybe. Has time been cruel in her dreams? What kind of world has she lived in that made her refuse me when I reached out? Is her nightmare that the world will find out she once had a child with a man who didn’t kidnap her over forty years ago? Is it a horror of reality that she and he blew up other peoples’ worlds? Now she wants to meet me…does she want to blow mine up, to hurt me, too?
As this plane is about to land, I can’t help but sit here and think I might be a man who has problems with women as it stands right now:
My Mama Dearest, Gabrielle, and Evita.
I have trusted Gabrielle wholeheartedly, and now that trust is gone after her decision to alter my, and her life, with her death decree. How dare she make a ruling about people close to me out of pure shrewdness, as if making a decision to send a smart bomb in to kill a terrorist?
I reflect on my relationship with her. Maybe she and
I were irrational to cross the line as we did when we became lovers. If we had been exposed, the government could have been sidetracked in all that it was doing for the American people, right and wrong. Think of the headline:
SECRETARY OF STATE IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH HER SECRECT SERVICE AGENT.
That would have overshadowed deliberations about whether we should have gone to war to stop a man from killing his own people.
She and I, as black people, would have been burned in a modern-day burning at the stake. In some circles, the conversation would have been all about how we hurt other black people. We would have hurt many people no matter who they were. I say all this, but when I’m in her presence, I’m the happiest. I’m confused right now about what is right and wrong, and I need to be clear. If it is true that we were irrational, then anything we have done is wrong—but it can’t be, can it? We did nothing wrong other than fall in love while on the job. Now she’s done with that job and they want her dead. The irony of it all.
Evita has caused me a lifetime of hero shit, as well as having my grandfather put a notch on his belt that he didn’t need when he took a man’s life to protect her. Then I do the same thing years later, saving her ass. I have tricked my heart and mind in to a form of love…is that irrational, too?
We do care about each other, but she is never going to be my woman in the classic sense. Shit, I have known it since the beginning, but I enslaved my head into some ass-backward thinking.
I look over to Suzy Q and she is asleep, holding a trophy: the reigning Jell-O wrestling champ. Her crazy ass has told me the truth about Evita. I need to stop thinking she is my soul mate. I care about every breath Evita takes, but with this latest little act of floating away as if it has no effect on others, I’m pissed and concerned all in one.
Now my birth mother says she wants to talk to me. How can I not have a warped way of thinking when it comes to what good this is going to do for me now?
I understand why my father wasn’t in my life. I’m sure I’m feeling like a lot of grown-up children, wondering where the other parent went or where they were. Like a lot of hurt children, I’m going to have to find out what she wants…now that she has pulled her head out of her ass some four decades later.
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