Candy Licker Read online

  The first time I heard the name Homicide Hitz, my girl Dominica Santiaga was screaming it in my ear.

  “Did you hear what the fuck I just said, Candy?” she shrieked through the telephone, calling me at my crib in L.A. “I got a call from some chick who works at Homicide Hitz! She said they checked out our demo, and they wanna see what else we got! Girl we about to get a contract and make Destiny's Child sit their skinny asses down!”

  Dominica was a fast-talking Hispanic girl I'd met in foster care. She'd ended up in the system 'cause she snuck out her window one night to go sing in a talent show and got back just in time to catch her house burning down and her whole family going up in the flames.

  “Calm down, Dominica!” I said. “And stop talking so damn fast. Who checked out our demo, and how the hell did they get it?”

  She sucked her teeth and I could tell she had her hand on her hip. “Hurricane Jackson, stupid. I ran into one of his boys at a show and slipped it to him.”

  “Hurricane Jackson?”

  “Yeah, Hurricane. You know the fine-ass Hurricane who owns the House of Homicide in Harlem? The baddest record label in the nation? You ever heard of Big Joe or that new kid Dolla Bill? Hennessy? Too Tall? What about Dead Moon, that hot group from Brooklyn that came out this year on his new Homicide Hitz label?”

  Dominica was steady talking, but I was so shocked I couldn't answer her. Hell yeah I knew who Hurricane Jackson was. Didn't everybody? He had shit on lock all over New York and way out here in L.A. too. I just never thought we'd get close enough to make a bleep on his radar screen, let alone get him to check out our demo.

  We had started singing together in foster care—me, Dominica, and our girl Vonzelle. Dominica was real pretty with big titties and a high ass, and she was also loud and ghetto. Vonzelle was just as bad, but she was sneaky and ten times prettier. She was originally from the Bronx but ended up in foster care after her mother OD'd and her and her baby brother sat locked in a room with the dead body for two days watching it rot and swell. All of us had been through some shit and none of us had had it easy, but Vonnie was the worst in our bunch. She was slick and conniving, and I swear sometimes I'd look in her eyes and see some wild shit lurking there that scared me 'bout to death.

  We'd hooked up together and formed a group we called Scandalous! and when I left New York and moved out to L.A. my girls thought I was gonna flake out and leave them hanging, but I didn't. I made sure that every trip I took to the East Coast we got in some studio time, and we'd just finished recording our demo a couple of weeks earlier.

  “So what now?” I cut in as Dominica flapped her tongue in about three different languages. “What does he want us to do now?”

  She laughed. “He wants us to get our asses down to the House of Homicide for an audition, Candy! Next Friday at ten. The chick on the phone said he was thinking about offering us a little something in writing.” Excited, Dominica screeched loud enough to bust my damn eardrum. I wanted to curse her out, but instead I laughed right along with her 'cause I was just as happy as she was. “I gotta call Vonzelle and tell her this shit,” she said. “In the meantime get your chocolaty-red ass back to New York real quick so we can get in there and tear Hurricane's muthafuckin’ House of Homicide down!”

  When I look back on how things went down tears come to my eyes just from thinking about my girl Dominica. She didn't deserve the terrible shit she ended up getting, and my heart twisted up when I remembered our last ride.

  I followed Jazzy and Danita upstairs shaking my head. For a hot second I started to sit those two young chicks down and put them up on what was real. Hell, there wasn't no damn recording contract in their future. The most either one of them could hope for was a photo shoot for the porn calendar Hurricane put out every year or maybe a spot in one of them triple-X videos he shot and circulated underground. At best one of them might get picked as an extra ho when Hurricane produced his next video for a hot artist, but a recording contract? They had a better chance of being hit by a speeding train or getting dicked down by a vicious dog.

  Something in me really wanted to tell Jazzy and Danita to jet. To warn them that the House of Homicide was really a house of horrors, with young girls like them being nothing but expendable victims. I wanted to tell both of them to head straight toward the door and put as much ground between them and Hurricane Jackson as they could. But? And? Then what? Nobody had bothered to school my ass on the way in, and even if they tried, I'd had industry fever. I was hell-bent on becoming a big-time recording star, and all the schooling in the world wouldn't have mattered.

  It had taken me way too long to figure out that it ain't about how high you climb in the music business. It's what you give up in the process. It only takes a split second for things to go bad in this industry, and Hurricane played the game so well his empire was stacked strong and tall. A lot of people ask me how I got here, and others wanna know why I stay. So I'll just give it to you raw and dirty, the same way it was given to me. How 'bout I put you up on square one so you can see for yourself how it all began. Take a look at what went down before Hurricane grabbed hold of my world and spun it around like a tornado, totally out of control. Check out this snapshot of what my life was like before the passion and the pain. Before the money and the madness.

  Chapter 2

  Back in the Day …

  Back in the day, I dreamed of becoming a hip-hop superstar. Salt-N-Pepa, Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, Aaliyah—those were the singers I idolized and looked up to because for as long as I could remember, gripping a microphone in front of a million screaming fans had been my one true desire.

  By the time I was seven or eight I was making mics out of toilet tissue rolls. I'd tape those cardboard tubes together and sing until my throat got sore. Back then, Mama was my biggest fan. You know how some people are all the time bragging 'bout having some Indian in them? Well my mama really did. Mama told me she was one quarter Cherokee, one quarter Navajo, and two quarters African. She had beautiful reddish-brown skin and thick jet-black hair that hung down her back in waves. And Mama had one of those all-the-way live bodies too. Her frame was graceful but curved out to the max. Mama's skin and hair mighta been mostly Indian, but her hips and ass were definitely African.

  While I sang into those toilet tissues rolls and pretended to be onstage, Mama would sit on the coffee table smoking a blunt and guzzling Bacardi and watching me get down. “Damn my doll baby can sang! Work that stage, Candy Raye!” she'd scream at the top of her lungs. “Work that whole muthafuckin stage!”

  Then she'd jump up and snatch my cardboard mic and give me a drunken demonstration. “You gotta move them hips, little mama. Feel the beat deep down in the bottom of your coochie and move them damn hips like they on fire.”

  I was just a shy little kid and we were poor and raggedy, but when me and Mama sang and danced together, our living room became the main stage at Madison Square Garden and money didn't mean a damn thing. So what, we moved every other month from a roach-infested apartment to a rat-infested room to keep from getting put out on the street? So what, me, Mama, and Caramel slept huddled together on a lumpy mattress to keep warm every night? So what, I went to school dressed in grimy jeans and shirts fastened in the front with three fat safety pins? So what, we ate cornflakes mixed with cold water for breakfast and sometimes for dinner too? When me and Mama did our thing it was all about the vocals and the beat, and nothing ugly or crazy about my world could touch that.

  But me and Caramel got hooked on the streets early because Mama kept us out there with her all the time. At night when other kids our age had been washed and fed and snoring for three hours, Caramel and I would still be hungry and dragging behind Mama. Going from bar to liquor store, dope house to card party. At the age of eight I saw hoes getting their asses beat, men getting shot up and stabbed, and one time we were sitting in one of the houses Mama used to work from when a woman bust up in there looking for her man and ended up with a butcher knife in her chest.

>   She bled out right there on the floor near the spot where me and Caramel were sitting, and I watched that lady's soul leave her eyes. Mama came out of a back room when people started screaming, then snatched me and Caramel and jetted for the door. The bottom of my plastic jellies stayed sticky with that lady's blood for three whole days.

  Mama might not have been one of those model TV show parents, and sure, she had her faults, but she had a sweet way about her and was the prettiest woman I'd ever seen. Men stopped and drooled when she walked into a room, and sometimes the ones she brought home at night groaned and hollered out loud too.

  Some nights Mama came in with the landlord. Or the butcher who cut meat at the shop down the street. Other times it was Freaky Calvin who ran numbers on Third Avenue. Every now and then it was Mr. Fred, who lived across the hall from us with his wife and six kids.

  Mama danced in nightclubs, and she met a few high-rolling men who sometimes swung by with presents in big fancy whips and took her out riding. She always came home happy, and she always came home with cash money.

  But Mama drank too much, and after a while the men friends dried up, so when she couldn't get a dancing job or the weather was too bad to take us out in the streets with her, Mama would “work” from home, and me and Caramel would snuggle together quietly on the floor. We'd press our noses together and close our eyes and cover our heads with a pillow until the moaning stopped and the man was gone.

  “Ya'll can come on out,” Mama would call as the door slammed shut. Then she'd laugh and light a cigarette and show me the wad of bills clutched in her hand. “Gone and get me a washcloth, doll baby, then get your sister dressed. I'm hungry! Y'all want some chicken wings tonight?”

  This is how Mama kept a roof over our heads and managed to put a little bit of food in our stomachs too. Mama hustled hard, and she taught me a lot about survival. But as young as I was, I had already figured out something that Mama probably should've known a long time ago: Life got tricky for the girls in our hood. Hustlin men were the ones who held the cards and ruled the money game. And if you were smart enough to luck up on the right one, he could set you up lovely and keep you straight for life.

  Everywhere I went as a kid, I sang. I sang to escape the hunger pains in my stomach, I sang to comfort Caramel when she was sad, I sang to make my mama feel good when she needed a drink. I sang just to keep on living.

  The artist I admired most was Mary J. Blige. We didn't look nothing alike, but I went around walking like her, talking like her, and of course, singing like her. Mama had her favorite singers too, and she swore up and down that under the right light she could pass for Toni Braxton with a hooked-up weave.

  Caramel couldn't sing at all, so we used to make her sit on the mattress and be our audience while we pretended we were hot stars in a talent show. Just me and Mama. We would strut around our room like long-legged runway models, singing our asses off, and then Mama would teach me how to wind my hips and do the back-alley booty-rock until my muscles got sore and I had all of her moves down pat.

  Mama was real outgoing and liked to party a lot, and that's why she got dumped by Seagram, a drug dealer who worked out of the projects around our way. Seagram was into guns and had a whole collection of them. He'd carry ten, twenty pistols around in a gym bag, and he told us he had bodies on every last one of them. His favorite piece was a .44 caliber Magnum. He said he liked it 'cause it had a hair trigger, and when he drew on a niggah with a piece like that he was guaranteed to get a good hit. I was with him and Mama one night when two young heads from 125th Street tried to stick him up for his product. Seagram pulled out that long-barreled .44 Magnum and fired, leaving a hole in one of them kids that was so big I coulda stuck my entire head through his back. Mama tried to hide my eyes, but it was too late. I got so scared I pissed down my leg. Seagram was damn proud of himself though, and to this day I can still hear him laughing.

  Seagram mighta been a killer, but he wasn't all that large in the drug game. That didn't matter to us. He was rich in our book, and he really liked Mama. When they were together he treated me and Caramel like princesses and gave Mama everything she asked for. Our lights never got cut off and we never went hungry. But Mama messed around with other men when Seagram wasn't watching her. She was only thirteen when she had me, and she told me she was trying to make up for all the fun she'd missed. When Seagram found out she was cheating he cut her loose and told her to step, but before he dropped her he grabbed Mama by the neck and mushed her face down in the floor and punched her in the mouth so hard he knocked out her front tooth. When Mama jumped up and tried to cut him with her knife, he knocked her back down again and pulled out that long .44. He told Mama that if he didn't love me and Caramel so much he woulda put a bullet in her head right then and there.

  After Seagram cut out on us we were hungry again. Our one-toofed Mama could turn a dollar but she couldn't hold on to one, and I remember a lot of nights when she didn't come home at all. On those nights there wasn't even no cornflakes for me and Caramel to mix with our cold water.

  When she finally did show up Mama was usually worn out and sick, and I would help her get undressed and lay down on the mattress while me and Caramel slept together on the cold, dirty floor. I didn't care that Mama smelled funny when she came in off the streets or that sometimes she slobbered down her clothes or threw up all over the place. It didn't bother me none that Mama had trouble finding her way to the bathroom when she drank too much. She'd walk right over to the kitchen chair or sometimes to our mattress and squat down and pee just like she was on the toilet. What did I do? I cleaned it up! I'd do just about anything for my mama. I had big dreams for us. For me, Caramel, and Mama. I was Mama's doll baby and she was my world. My love and devotion to Lovely Bird Montana was just that strong.

  Daddy died in jail the summer I turned ten. He'd been locked up since right after Caramel was born, and I didn't hardly remember much about him, except the color of his eyes. They were ocean-blue, just like mine and Caramel's.

  Daddy was mixed, like Mama. His hair was red and his skin was dark olive. His mother was half white and half black and his father had come from Cuba, but other than that he didn't know much about his family. As a kid, Daddy had come to Harlem to stay with his aunt for two weeks and never left. Mama told me he was one of those pretty niggahs. Slick and fine. He was attracted to hard drugs and foxy women, Mama said, and if he couldn't get a woman, that was okay too. Just as long as he had his drugs.

  Daddy used to skin-pop horse back in the day before crack came on the scene. Eventually he graduated to mainlining, and when he went on methadone and kicked the lady altogether, he jumped on the crack wagon and got lost in that drama just like everybody else.

  Mama had told us that Daddy was sick in jail, and kids or not, she didn't put no sugar on it. “Rogelio got the AIDS,” she told me and Caramel a few months before he died. “He say he got that shit from shooting dope, but if you ask me I think he got up there in that penitentiary and started taking it up the ass.”

  She took us upstate to see him before he died. We rode the Prison Gap bus from Columbus Circle up to the Elmira Correctional Facility, where they had him on an AIDS ward. The man in the bed looked old and shriveled up. He had about ten strands of dirty red hair slicked down on his scalp and didn't look nothing like the fine-ass Daddy Mama had been describing all these years.

  Mama stood there for a long time, just staring at Daddy in a strange way. I kept quiet and held tight to Caramel's hand until Mama turned and spoke to me in her most serious voice.

  “Get a good look at him, Candy. This is what sex and street life can get you. I been loose with my shit too, so for all I know I might be laying up here one day looking a hot mess just like him. But I'll be damned if I wanna see you or Caramel with it. I ain't been out here selling my pussy all these years just so you can lay down somewhere and give yours away. Remember, sex is good, but keep your coochie to your goddamn self. There'll be plenty of mens who wanna use it for they
own pleasure, but you gone hafta be smarter than that! Concentrate on your career, Candy. You got a voice, doll baby, and you gotta use it. It's your only ticket out of the kinda life I've lived, so don't fuck it up. Use what you got, Candy Raye. Make something of yourself so that whatever me and your daddy had together doesn't end up being a total waste of a good fuck.”

  I wanted to heed her warnings, and I can honestly say I tried. The problem was, I had the same kind of high nature that she did and Lovely Bird wasn't the only one with a body that wouldn't stop.

  I was a hottie to the max coming up in New York. At eleven I had an ass just like Mama's and a set of titties to match. Boys were forever trying to feel me up on the sly or pulling me under the staircase in our apartment building hoping they could get a few quick humps. I can't even count the number of times somebody's big brother tried to put my hand on his hard crotch or talk me up the stairs and on the roof to see the surprise he had for me in his pocket. I was scared of heights so that wasn't happening. Plus, thinking about the way Daddy died and seeing how Mama was living kept me slapping all those sweaty-ass male hands away.