Also by Wendy Williams and Karen Hunter
* * *
Drama Is Her Middle Name
The Wendy Williams Experience
Wendy's Got the Heat
1
The beige Nissan pulled slowly down 213th Street. It was a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, where most people had manicured lawns and minded their own business. That's what Jacob Reese loved immediately about the neighborhood and that's why he decided to rent a one-family home on the block. Here he could blend into the background of the clapboard- and aluminum-sided homes, with their playing kids, their azalea bushes and maple leaf trees. Jacob was ready to start a new life.
But what happened just a few hours before could possibly upend all of his plans. He pulled into the driveway of his home. With the engine still running, he just sat in his car. Beads of sweat were still forming on his brow, threatening to run streaks down his face.
The adrenaline rush was beginning to dissipate, and Jacob was tumbling down— crashing down. It was like coming off a crack high. He sat motionless for a moment, then grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, squeezing it so hard he started to feel pins and needles running up his forearms. He embraced the sensation.
As he gripped the steering wheel, Jacob shut his eyes as hard as he could. He wanted to stop the shaking. He wanted to squeeze out the guilt that was rushing through his body like a roaring rapid.
“That bitch! That bitch! That fucking bitch!!!!” Jacob cried out at the top of his lungs.
One neighbor next door turned off the light to his front room and peeked out the window through the blinds to see what the screaming was about. In typical New York fashion, he decided the screaming was not quite piercing enough to rate a call to 911. He closed the blinds and went to bed.
Jacob put on the black baseball cap that was in the passenger seat and prepared to go inside. He sat for a minute and reflected on what he had just done. He already regretted it. But it was over. He was mad at himself, but he was FURIOUS at Ritz Harper for being such a dumb bitch— such a smarmy, money-grubbing bitch— that people would gladly pay to see her dead.
He hated being so desperate that when the call came and the money was offered he jumped at the chance. Jacob Reese was a lot of things, but he was no killer.
He decided to do the thing he did best. He buried the thoughts he was having. Jacob was cursed with an uncanny ability to be totally delusional. He could fool himself into thinking anything he wanted. As a result, he didn't have many friends and he hadn't achieved anything in life.
Jacob wanted to be a megaproducer in the music industry. He believed he could be the next P. Diddy or Rodney Jerkins. He could see it. He knew it. Of course he could.
He was delusional.
The closest Jacob had ever come to living his dream was when he contributed eight bars to a new artist's first single. The first time he heard the finished product, Jacob convinced himself that he was the next Quincy Jones.
Jacob was always “on the scene”— hanging in the right places, going to the right parties, trying to hobnob with the right people. He partied like he owned Motown in 1968. He dressed the part. He looked the part. But the fronting was wearing thin on his psyche and his wallet. A woman can tell if a man is broke— it's in her DNA, like the mothering instinct— even if you give her all the X she can handle. Jacob had a steady supply, but not an eternal supply. One day, the keg of ecstacy would run dry, and he knew it. That was why he was desperate.
Jacob was determined to get to “the top”— whatever that meant— but he wasn't going to get there by being on the bottom of some powerful man. He was not going to be that new bitch; he was going to scratch and claw the hard way and make it on his own. Being a new bitch in the record industry wasn't much different from being a new inmate in a small cell on Rikers Island. If you come into Rikers without a rep or street credibility or much muscle or hustle, or without somebody watching your back, you are open to being eaten for lunch— literally.
In the music business, if you come in new without any rep, or anybody who will stand up for you and have your back, you are subject to being the next Bentley the Butler, with an emphasis on the bent part, as in bent over and drilled in the butt by any mega rapper/rap mogul. There are lots of Bentley the Butlers in the music business, and very few of them actually get to be anything but. Very few of them ever get that career in the business outside of being a Bentley. In the record industry, just like in jail, you either bend over and take it, hoping for the best, or you find another way. Jacob was determined to find that way. He already had an asshole that worked just fine. He didn't need to be ripped another one.
Jacob, in his delusional mind, had other ways to succeed.…
He got out of the car and scooted discreetly into his house. He smiled as he looked at the copy of Confessions of a Video Vixen on the floor of his bedroom, a book about one of those “star fuckers” whose claim to fame was that she knew how Shaq's, Jay-Z's, Vin Diesel's, and Ja Rule's dicks tasted— just like chicken!
A good read, he thought. When I make it, I will have to look that bitch up. He also wondered when the male version of that book was going to come out. Video hos weren't only females.
Jacob flipped open his cell phone and dialed. This particular number wasn't stored in his phone and it never would be. It was a number he was to use only once, and he had to memorize it. He hesitated before dialing the number. He couldn't remember the last time he had to remember a phone number by heart. The person on the other end picked up on the second ring.
“Yo, what's good?” the voice spoke.
“It's done,” said Jacob.
“Good!”
Jacob heard a click on the other end of the line. He knew that things were set. This was his first hit and he hoped it would be his last. He wasn't cut out for real shooting. He had threatened a few people but never carried it out. He had broken a few arms and legs, cracked some ribs, but he had never killed anyone. He never had a real good incentive to do so. Not even rage could bring Jacob to actually shoot somebody. But desperation and money could. He was promised two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.
He had plans for his money, big plans. He was going to buy real estate and become the ultimate slumlord. He would sit back, collect fat rent checks every month, and pursue his music career.
If that didn't work out, he would focus on buying more real estate and making more money, which would give him the lifestyle he felt he deserved. He didn't want to be greedy. He didn't want to go to jail. He just wanted to have the last laugh when the semisuccessful crew he occasionally hung out with ran through all of their money and he was sitting on his, a mini Donald Trump, minus the comb-over, wallowing in dough.
Money, hos, and clothes all a nigga knows.
Jacob had a year of college under his belt, so he knew he would also have to get some sort of job to make it all legitimate. He needed to make his quarter of a million dollars clean before he tried to use it. He needed benefits. He had some dental issues that needed attending to. All those years wearing gold fronts had compromised his bottom teeth. He had at least four cavities that needed filling, and he wanted to get that Zoom whitening treatment that would make his teeth ten shades whiter, or so the advertisement said.
Jacob, in his delusional way, was very sharp when it came to knowing what women liked. He knew that women liked men who smelled good, had nice arms and circumcised dicks.
He also knew that women LOVED men who had good teeth. Once he had the money, he had to find a dentist. Tight balls were always trumped by lousy teeth!
He walked over to the pull-up bar in his bedroom doorway and took down the new suit he had hung there while he was in a rush to get to
Manhattan for this job. It was a black Hugo Boss suit, shirt, and tie, still in the garment bag. It brought a smile to his face. He always wanted a nice suit. So he splurged before this job and got it in anticipation of his big payday.
“I want to look fly when I pick up my money,” he said to himself. “I want to look like new money.”
He hung the suit up in his tiny closet that was filled with mostly oversized polo shirts, khakis, and jeans. He promised himself more suits and more adult clothes soon.
“Hell, I'm in my thirties now. It's about time I start to look like a grown-ass man.”
There was nothing childlike about his body. He didn't have a gym membership, but he regularly did calisthenics in his home. He reached up and began to do pull-ups unconsciously, losing count of how many he did, thinking only of his money— the money that would buy him his freedom, and his new teeth, and his new clothes, and the world, and all the wonders in it.
2
“Maddie! Maddie!”
Cecil Robinson hung up the phone and screamed for his wife, who was in the bathroom.
“What?!” Maddie responded, somewhat annoyed. “What's going on?!”
“It's Ritz, honey. Ritz has been shot! It's on TV!”
Madalyn Robinson looked haggard. She had been spending more time than she cared to in the bathroom lately. She had been on the treatments for less than two weeks, but she felt it was killing her— literally. Chemotherapy affects people in different ways, but it makes just about everyone nauseous. Chemo had hit Maddie hard. She was constantly sick. She vomited so much that her throat was raw and hoarse from the stomach acids ripping through it. She couldn't keep any food down. She lost ten pounds in less than two weeks.
“This is one diet I never wanted to be on,” Maddie tried to joke with Cecil one evening. “I have been trying to lose weight my whole life, but not like this. Richard Simmons would be proud of me!”
Cecil didn't find it funny. He felt helpless watching her go through this. But he was there every step of the way for her, like he always was, like he always would be. In heaven, there is a special place for men like Cecil— quiet, dignified, hardworking, strong, responsible MEN— men who accept their responsibilities without complaint, men who take care of their own no matter what it costs, men who love their women until the day they die, men who are rocks that cannot be moved, because they are the rocks that are the foundation on which a family is built.
Men like Cecil need no great monument, or tomb, or tacky eternal flame dedicated to them when they die, because men like Cecil do not die. They live eternally in their healthy children, and their children's children, and their children's children's children, and on and on…
When they were “courting” back in the 1940s, Cecil and Maddie used to write each other “love letters,” and Maddie of course kept them, in a little cedar box, tied in a blue ribbon, stashed in her closet. Every ten years or so, she took them out and read them.
They were so young, so innocent, so naive. Cecil wrote about how he would be satisfied to spend his life just “holding her hand”!
Maddie was very touched by that sentiment at the time, but she and Cecil quickly learned that there was a lot more fun to be had than just “holding hands.”
And that is what kept her going through the pain of the chemo. She wanted to be ready again for her baby. She wanted to look good for her man.
The real truth is never seen. The real truth, God knows, is never broadcast over the airwaves. Sexy is all about how you feel inside. It cannot be achieved through liposuction and botox. Sexy clothes don't make you sexy. Feeling good about yourself makes you sexy. And right now, Maddie didn't feel so good.
Despite that, she was still sexy to Cecil. He loved the roundness of her belly. He even loved her stretch marks. He said they made her look like a tiger, and he loved to lick them.
The thought of him doing that again— hell, just the thought of him— was what was going to keep Maddie alive, no matter what, no matter what.
The chemo had made all her hair fall out, including her thick pubic bush. Cecil had always said that her bush turned him on the most, even more than her dark erect nipples or her firm ass.
When he saw her bald pussy for the first time, he got down there, examined it, and kissed her newly exposed clit.
“You look like a tropical plant!” he said. “A Venus Flytrap! But I feel a little funny, though.”
“Why?”
“Look at you. You look like a nine-year-old. I feel like a child molester!”
“Well, I can be your baby, Mr. Child Molester,” Maddie said, toying with him. “Don't make me wait all night!”
And he didn't.
Maddie and Cecil loved to laugh and they loved making love. That's what they had been doing for forty years, behind closed doors, just the two of them. No one else knew what they did together, and no one would ever know.
Maddie was ready for another forty years, and maybe she would spice it up a bit when she beat the cancer and keep her pussy shaved. Or maybe she would get a Jackrabbit vibrator and do herself in front of her man. That would be something new. He would like that, she was sure.
Fuck you, Cancer!
There was a bigger malignancy in Maddie's life than the tumor that was eating away at her breast, and Maddie knew it.
Her niece, her dead only-sister's only child, had not spoken to her in more than a year. In many ways, Ritz was dead to Maddie, too. The little, sensitive, precocious child whom Maddie and Cecil loved to pieces had turned into a self-centered, vile, insensitive, malicious bitch. Maddie hoped the time away from her family would soften Ritz, help her to realize what she was missing. But it seemed to do just the opposite.
Ritz never called. Her friend Tracee did call from time to time to check up on them. Tracee had spent a weekend at Cecil and Maddie's a few years back and had such a blast that she adopted them as her own aunt and uncle. Tracee's family had moved from Jersey to California and she didn't really get along with them much. There was a story there, one Tracee never shared with anyone.
Tracee loved the down-home feel of the Robinsons'. She loved Aunt Maddie's mashed potatoes, whipped to perfection with just the right amount of butter and salt. She loved her sweet tea, which you only got south of the Mason-Dixon line unless you made it yourself. Tracee never understood why they never served sweet tea up north. She loved sitting on the porch after dinner in a swing chair and hearing the crickets and actually getting to see the stars in the sky, a rare sight in New York City. Being at the Robinsons' in Virginia was one of the reasons that made Tracee want to head even farther south to Florida. That felt more like her roots. While the big city, the biggest of them all— New York— had its appeal, with its opportunities, fast pace, and wall-to-wall people, the South gave you room to grow. For Tracee, who had conquered New York and made enough money to last her a lifetime, she wanted to take some time to smell the flowers, and be still, and listen to God's voice.
Tracee and Aunt Maddie often talked— just the two of them— on Saturday mornings, when Cecil would be gardening in the yard and Ritz was still in bed up in Jersey. Ritz loved to sleep, so Tracee kept Maddie and Cecil abreast of what was happening in Ritz's life while Ritz got her beauty rest.
It was Tracee who tried to get the two to reconcile, but Maddie was firm that Ritz needed to apologize and Ritz was firm that she would never apologize.
The ancient Greeks used to wonder what would happen if an irresistible force met an immovable object. Tracee wished they had discovered the answer so she could go online and look it up. She could use the solution with Ritz and Maddie.
Maddie never told Tracee that she had cancer. She knew that news might bring Ritz running back to her, but Maddie didn't want Ritz to come back like that. She wanted Ritz to change. She wanted Ritz to see herself, to see what she had become.
Years ago, Maddie and Cecil had seen a movie called The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was the story of a man who sold his soul in return for eternal youth,
the same way Ritz had sold her soul for Arbitron ratings.
In the movie, Dorian Gray never ages, but his painted portrait does. (Back in that day, they didn't have cameras.) Every time Dorian Gray hurts someone, his portrait ages: It grows another wrinkle, it becomes more and more grotesque and ugly, until his face in the painting is nothing more than a bloated, wrinkled mask oozing pus and blood. Dorian hides the portrait in his attic and covers it with a cloth. He cannot bear to see what he really is.
Maddie wondered if Ritz had a similar covered-up portrait in her home— a picture of herself swaddled in furs and diamonds, but if you looked closely, the fur was teeming with lice, and the diamonds were just cheap glass. And her nose would look strange, too. And what about that nasty “butterfly rash” spreading across her face?
And did those once-pearly-white, thirty-five-thousand-dollar teeth now look brittle and stained and yellow?
Maddie also wondered if Ritz was aware that she had gained the world but lost her soul.
The soul… that was now seeping out of her life.
Maddie had to get to New York— immediately.
“Is she… is she…” Maddie couldn't get the words out as she looked at her husband.
“I don't know, Maddie,” said Cecil. “Tracee called from the hospital. No one can get in to see her. We are her next of kin. We have to leave now.”
Maddie gave him a puzzling look.
“I know you're not in any shape to leave now,” he said. “But, Maddie, Ritzy needs us. We're all she's got.”
Madalyn Robinson dug down deep and found some strength that she didn't even know she had. She went to the bathroom, took some antinausea medicine her doctor prescribed for her, took a quick shower, put on her brand-new wig and some makeup, and was waiting in the living room for Cecil within an hour.
“I'm ready, baby,” she said. “I'm ready.”
They could have gotten a flight out of Richmond that would put them in New York by the morning, but then they would have to catch a cab or rent a car. Cecil hated being at someone else's mercy. While everyone in New York seemed to catch cabs and ride the subway, Cecil preferred to get around in his own car. He didn't care how much it cost to park in the city. Besides, they also didn't know when they would be returning. Would they have to make funeral arrangements and go through settling Ritz's affairs and then head back to Virginia, or would they have to stay in New York for the long haul to help nurse their only niece back to health?
Is the Bitch Dead, Or What? Page 1