Thug-A-Licious Page 17

  I was the only one who swore up and down that I didn’t get no pussy from that girl. Everybody else who was there admitted that they had fucked her, but they said she was down for it the whole time and had set the rules by herself. They said she was the one who had decided who was gonna hit it first and who would be next. And even though the prosecutor tried to say she was too drunk to give permission to get fucked, the school fixed it to where all my boys had to do was go through some bullshit counseling sessions and be done with it. They came out lucky, though, cause nobody got kicked outta school or got their eligibility tapped.

  But a few weeks later I had even more drama in my life over that crazy night from hell.

  Breezy dropped it on me that she was pregnant. It had happened right before I banged big girl over the tub, then went upstairs and watched that psycho yellow jawn strip so she could holla rape.

  I sat there and stared at Breezy as she talked some unrighteous shit about telling that big-headed football player it was his kid, even though she knew it was really mine.

  “You could do some shit like that to your man?”

  She looked at me like the slicksta she was. “Damn right. Me and my baby can do much better with him than we can do with you.”

  I fronted her off. “Girl, you don’t know who baby that is. Your ass prolly been run through so many times you having a frat baby who looks like every last one of us.”

  “I don’t give a damn who it looks like,” she said. “I’m telling you who’s gonna marry me and help me raise it.”

  I dug what she was saying. She had confidence in that other guy’s skills. She knew he was destined for the NFL. And she looked at me like I was a stupid little fuckup just waiting to get started. But all a that noise got shushed real quick a few days later when she came crying and whining to me. Talking bout football-head told her to get an abortion cause as soon as he graduated and got in the NFL he was marrying some fat, ugly white girl who lived in the next dorm.

  I got a call from Lani a few weeks after she had the baby. She said it was a boy, and she was naming him Dante. She also said not to worry about trying to reach her cause she had sought the Lord and He told her to forget all about me.

  Not long after that, Breezy had Malik. He was cute and fat. I had promised to be in the room with her when he was born, but instead I was on the road playing ball. She got mad and would barely even let me see him. She found them a little apartment and tried to juggle things on her own for a quick minute, but when Malik was about two months old she gave it all up and went back home too.

  I stayed to myself after that. I wasn’t all the way icy. It wasn’t like I could just give a girl a baby and forget about them. It fucked with my head, but I tried not to let it cause I couldn’t do nothing for nobody until I got on and got paid.

  School days went by. I ran across Sly a couple a times, but I wasn’t in no mood to talk. He could save all that philosophical bullshit he liked to holla. Didn’t nobody need to tell me what was up. When Noojie died, all my bullshit tendencies had died with her. Life was seriouser than a mutha for me now. School was where it was at. I only had a year to go before I graduated and was eligible for the draft. So what else was I gonna do, and where else could I go? Muddah was living her life, and I didn’t wanna fuck with that. She told me she was really getting tight with her man, that square from Washington Heights who she said really treated her right.

  “Better than I treated you?” I wanted to know. I knew the lame cat she was talking about. Ya-Yo. Some off-brand niggah with glasses and a big forehead. I didn’t even wanna think about his weak ass pumping dick in my Muddah.

  “Why you wanna compare shit, Dre?” She had screwed her face up like I was crazy. “I ain’t never asked you about none of them girls who got all them babies by you. And you need to be paying some damn child support too. Those sistahs shouldn’t have to struggle all by themselves to feed your seed, Andre. Them kids didn’t ask to come here.”

  I acted like I was ignoring her, but I heard her. I was getting lawyer letters out the ass demanding child support. I just kept sending them back. Along with a copy of my college registration.

  Even still, I knew Muddah was right. I needed to get my life right, just like she had done. She had her college degree. She had gotten her own shop. She was rolling. She didn’t even have no kids to be worrying about, but she always made me feel like shit for not taking care of mine.

  “Do good things for yourself, Dre,” she had told me before I came back up to school. “Your mother is gone, but me and Mere’maw gone always be here for you. Believe that.”

  I had nodded. “Smoove is getting stationed in Italy, and Pimp is chillin’ lovely. I’ma be cool, girl. Thanks. I luh you, Muddah.”

  She didn’t tell me she loved me back, but I knew she did. I could see it all in her body movements and the way she looked at me.

  So once again I fell back on my music and my balling skills. We tore shit up at the Final Four that year, and I landed front and center in mad sports papers, which was real cool since I was gonna be a senior soon and there wouldn’t be too many more opportunities to prove myself. I started showing up early for every team practice, and when all those other cats jetted to hit the showers, I put in even more work on the court, eliminating my weaknesses, practicing drills and perfecting my outside shot.

  And when I wasn’t strengthening my game I wrote mad gangsta lyrics, and I dug up in them books too. I couldn’t take a chance on going on academic probation and having Coach yank me off his starting roster. Plus, I had something to prove to that old white motherfucker. He was a good man and knew his shit, but in the back of his eyes I could see exactly how he saw me. Just another talented but ignorant black kid who couldn’t shake his hood tendencies long enough to make something out of his life.

  And that’s basically where Sly had put me too. I was sitting in the caf eating a taco when he sat down across from me.

  “You still here, huh?”

  He was licking a vanilla ice cream cone and had a look in his eye that I didn’t like.

  “Where you from, man?” I said quietly.

  He shrugged. “Why? Where I come from don’t matter. Where my black ass ended up is what it’s all about.”

  I chuckled and took a real big bite of my taco. I crunched that shit down in about three seconds. “You must be from some fuckin’ suburb somewhere. Prolly from up here with all these white people.” I shook my head and picked up another taco. “You sure ain’t from the city, though. A city niggah would know better than to keep fuckin’ with me.”

  Sly grilled me. He bit into that hard ice cream, chomped it fast, then stuck the whole cone in his mouth. “I’m from Chicago, niggah. And we know how to burn a niggah out there too. But I ain’t in the Windy City now, and your ass ain’t in Harlem. We sitting up in Syracuse, boy. One of us done been somewhere, and the other one is already a junior and still don’t know where he wanna go.”

  I didn’t wanna fight. I liked Sly cause he reminded me a lot of T.C. But he was wrong about me. “I know where I’m going, man. Straight to the NBA. I ain’t you, niggah! Just cause you didn’t make it don’t throw shit on it for me.”

  “Andre,” Sly stood up and wiped his hands on my napkin. Then he balled it up and tossed it in my plate. “I hope your next rap album blows up, man. You can make it in the music world cause you cold and got lyrical skills like that. But college? And the NBA?” He smirked. “Niggah, you get smashed with one more offense this year and you might as well come downstairs with me and grab a fuckin’ broom. Because one more fuckup, and the only thing you gonna be good for around a gym is sweeping up.”

  I was tired of this drill. So many people seemed to think cause I’d lived the low life I was gonna crawl around blind and deaf forever. I promised myself I’d spend my last year in college working damn hard to prove them wrong.

  Chapter 20

  Carmiesha got a phone call from Mrs. Washington that made her blood freeze. She sounded nervous and
shook up, and Carmiesha knew something was wrong right away.

  “Baby, I hate to call you like this, but Bert is sick and I can’t leave him here by himself.”

  “What’s wrong, Ms. Jessie? Is something going on with Jahlil?”

  The older lady made a noise, and Carmiesha could almost see her shuddering. “I’m so sick of that boy I don’t know what to do. I just got a call from the center. Jahlil done hit some poor little girl with a chair and knocked out her tooth. Her mama and daddy is down there cussing and carrying on and threatening to call the police to come arrest him.”

  Carmiesha’s heart banged five times straight. “Dammit! I can’t believe that boy!”

  Mrs. Washington sucked her teeth loudly. “Well, I can sure believe him. Look like every other day he doing something even more crazy. Last Thursday they kicked him outta school for a day for trying to get some girl to go in a mop closet and pull down her pants. Before that they said he took a bottle of something called Grey Goose to school and was drinking it with some younger boys. There just ain’t no end to it, Carmiesha. The boy just can’t get right, and with me getting old and Bert being so sick I just can’t keep up with him all the time.”

  “I’ll go down to the center, Ms. Jessie,” Carmiesha said. “Don’t worry. I’ll see what’s going on and bring Jahlil back home, but I’ll probably be done beat his ass real good before we get there.”

  Carmiesha apologized to the client sitting in her chair and told her stylist Toya to finish the girl’s hair. The sistah was getting a perm and cut, and was ready to clown until Carmiesha told her today’s service would be free on the house.

  She caught a bootleg taxi right outside the shop and was at the youth center in a matter of minutes. She stepped inside with her kick-ass face on, even though there was no way she’d be able to defend Jahlil if he had done what Ms. Washington said he did.

  Carmiesha walked into the office and saw a little girl sitting on a chair who had been upset for so long that she was hiccup-crying. She looked about eleven, and had curly red box-braids hanging almost down to her butt. Carmiesha winced when she saw how the little girl’s front tooth had been knocked straight out of her mouth, and even though her real cries had stopped long ago, the child still couldn’t control herself.

  She opened her mouth to say how sorry she was, but a heavyweight woman jumped up in her face before she could speak. “This your son? Huh? Is this your crazy-ass motherfuckin’ son?”

  She was holding a bloody washcloth and had big splotches of blood all over the front of her shirt from where she had held her bleeding child. She was also pointing a big fat finger at Jahlil, who was sitting on the other side of the counter looking guilty in the face.

  “I didn’t do nothing, Carmiesha!” he said, standing up and beefing as soon as he saw her. “She hit me first! I didn’t do nothing to that goddamn girl!”

  Carmiesha couldn’t hold it in. “Sit your ass back down and shut the hell up! Don’t tell me you didn’t knock that baby’s tooth out when she sitting there with blood all over her—”

  Feeling dizzy, Carmiesha stopped in midsentence. She’d been so mad about what Jahlil had done till she didn’t realize who he was with.

  “What the hell?” she screamed on the man, her hands clenching into fists. If she thought she was hot when she walked in the door, her ass was burning up in flames right now. “What the fuck are you doing here? Get over here, Jahlil! Right goddamn now!”

  She turned to the center director who hadn’t had a chance to open his mouth. “I wanna know,” Carmiesha said, spitting her words out like little bullets, “why this mothafucker is sitting over there with Jahlil. Ain’t nobody gave him permission to be around this boy, and I want his ass outta here right now!”

  The director said, “Excuse me, I didn’t get your name. You are…?”

  Carmiesha rolled her eyes and pointed at Pimp, who just sat there grinning. “Don’t worry about who the hell I am. Worry about who this street gangsta is you got up in here around all these damn kids!”

  Even the little girl and her parents stopped trippin’ and stared at Carmiesha. She knew she was making a big scene, but she didn’t give a damn. This crazy motherfucker didn’t have no business nowhere near Jahlil, and she was ready to kick his ass all around that office.

  “Ma’am,” the center director said. “This is Carl Williams, one of our volunteer youth counselors. He’s been working with Jahlil for some time and was with your son during the incident. In fact, he was the only person who could get Jahlil to calm down at all.”

  “Youth counselor!?”

  Pimp laughed out loud. “Yo, dis her son?”

  The director gave her a questioning look. “Jahlil is your son, right?”

  “No,” she lied quickly. “He’s my nephew. I’m Carmiesha Vernoy. I’m on Jahlil’s emergency card, and I’m here to pick him up and take his little butt home!”

  It took a while, but Carmiesha managed to talk the little girl’s parents out of pressing charges on Jahlil. She made Jahlil apologize over and over and then promised to help pay for the child’s dental care. She told the mother that she knew what Jahlil had done was wrong, and that she wasn’t gonna let him get away with it.

  “I can only imagine how your baby girl feels,” Carmiesha told her. “And how you and her father feel too. If you need to press charges against Jahlil, then I understand. But his mother is elderly, and his father is really sick. I think the boy is going through some stuff right now, and he needs help more than he needs a juvenile record.”

  By the time they left the center Carmiesha was totally through. Not only had Jahlil busted that damn child in the mouth with that chair, that asshole Pimp had been right there when he did it and probably didn’t try to stop it neither.

  “I don’t want this motherfucker around my nephew,” she’d warned the center director before she left. “Y’all need to do some background checks before you let just any old body get in here around these kids. I know for a fact that that his crazy ass been locked up in jail a few times. He’s a bad influence. Keep him away from Jahlil.”

  Three days after Jahlil busted the little girl in the mouth with the chair, Carmiesha came into her shop and found a white envelope on the floor. All the other envelopes she had found before had been just plain old blank envelopes, and after a few weeks of ignoring them they had just stopped appearing. But now they were back, and this one had something written on the front. It said DOUBLE.

  “Bullshit,” Carmiesha said out loud. She picked it up and ripped it in half, then tossed it in the garbage can and went on about her business. She didn’t give a damn what Mr. Ward said about needing protection. She wasn’t taking one penny of her hard-earned cash and giving it to no niggahs running the streets. They could believe that shit.

  For the next four weeks straight she found an envelope with the word DOUBLE waiting on her when she opened up on Friday mornings. And every Friday morning she did the same damn thing. Ripped that shit up and threw it away.

  But the next Friday morning when Carmiesha came in she was really through. There was another envelope waiting on her. But this time it said TRIPLE.

  “That’s it!” she screamed into the empty shop. It was still very early and she had a few hours before the shop would be open. She marched her ass over to the phone and dialed the number to the Eighty-third Precinct.

  “This is Carmiesha Vernoy. I’m the owner of Locks of Love on 123rd and Frederick Douglas. I got a problem going on with some wannabe street gangstas and I need to file a complaint….”

  It wasn’t more than ten minutes later when a fly sports car pulled up outside of her shop. Carmiesha was rearranging hair-care products in the display case when she saw two police officers in uniform get out. She couldn’t believe they’d gotten there so fast and was glancing at her watch when one of them knocked on the glass door and motioned for her to open up.

  “We got a call that you’d like to make a complaint?”

  Carmiesha sig
hed. Both of the cops were brothahs, and one looked old enough to be her father. They wore no-nonsense looks on their faces, and she knew they wasn’t gonna be happy about Pimp and his bullshit.

  “Yeah. Every Friday morning when I open up my shop I have an empty envelope waiting for me.”

  “Waiting for you?”

  Carmiesha nodded at the older cop. “Yeah. Somebody slides it under my door after I leave on Thursday night, and it’s on the floor when I open up on Friday morning.”

  The cops looked at each other.

  “And?”

  “And, according to some of the other people on this block who have stores and businesses, I’m supposed to put five hundred dollars a week into that envelope and leave it in the back alley.”

  The younger cop took off his hat. “You sure about that?”

  “Yep,” Carmiesha nodded. “I’m positive. I ain’t never put no money in it before, but all this month I’ve been getting an envelope that says double on it. Like somebody expects me to give them a thousand dollars a week!”

  “The only reason I decided to call today was because this morning when I got here I had an envelope waiting that said triple. Now you know that’s crazy!”

  The older cop stared at some papers on his clipboard, then looked back at her. “Do you have any idea who could be leaving you these envelopes?”

  Carmiesha nodded. “Yeah. His name is Carl Williams, but he goes by his street name, Pimp.”

  “Pimp, huh?” The younger cop said. He moved over to the door and locked it, then started pulling down the blinds.

  “Hold up!” Carmiesha moved toward the door. “What the hell is he doing?” she asked the older cop, and for the first time she noticed that he wasn’t wearing a name tag and there were no numbers on his shiny silver badge.

  The other cop had the blinds down on both windows by now, and his partner looked at Carmiesha and shrugged. “Oh, today is collection day, sweetheart. He’s just helping you get ready to pay what you owe.”