Real Wifeys: Get Money (20 page)

If I really had kept that damn DVD of her getting that girl jumped I woulda sent it to the police and been done with her ass for a good year or so.
Fuck that crazy bitch.

I called Tek-9’s number but his shit went straight to voice mail. “Tek-9, you need to handle this. Issue a statement. Put out a video. Whatever. But
handle
this. Come on, dude. Back me up on this bullshit,” I said, dropping my head into my hand. “Just call me.”

I just couldn’t believe after all the shit Make$ put me through, now people was side-eyeing me and talking reckless, when I was never anything but loyal to his little whack gherkin-dick ass. Life stayed a bitch. Damn!

O
ver the next two weeks, shit got even crazier with the rumors flying about me and Tek-9. We both released statements that the rumors weren’t true, but shit got even more crucial when the bloggers made it seem like Tek-9 and Make$ was getting into a war of words—and maybe more—over me. They were on some re-creation of the whole Biggie, Faith, and Tupac drama.

Bullshit.

These mofos were completely clueless. Regardless of Peaches’ lies trying to be relevant, I knew Make$ didn’t give a fuck about me, my pussy, or what I did with it. If he did, he wouldn’t have risked losing it by fucking around.

It’s just that this rumor shit was fucking with my business. I was trying to ride it out and wait for someone else’s life to take over the gossip sites, but my plans to keep fucking with Tek-9 until he cut his fee to perform for us was so
dead.
I did not need them saying I was out fucking the talent to perform for Yummy Entertainment.

And Tek-9 still bragging on his gorilla-size dick every time we spoke was getting on my nerves anyway. He
really
wanted this pussy.
Pause.
Double
pause.

“’Cuse me?”

I turned away from the racks of ribs I was checking out in the Pathmark on Lyons Avenue. Three teenage girls stood there eyeing me. And they missed not one detail. My hair in a side ponytail. My jewelry. My army-green short-sleeve romper with an off-the-shoulder neckline and ruched hem just below my knees. Bronze, copper, and green stilettos. Skin gleaming. Makeup on point. Yes, banging . . . even in the grocery store.

No lie? They made me nervous and I clutched my Gucci signature tote a little tighter. There was plenty of good and some bad in the hood. Sometimes the bad could be male or female. Fuck what you heard, there was little gansta boos out there.

“You Luscious?” the thick one asked, with her medium-length hair up in one of those firecracker ponytails that I hated. Every hair stood on end like someone blew that shit up. The style didn’t do shit but showcase split ends.

I eyed each one. “Yes. Why?”

The skinny one with a bob smacked her tongue like she was trying to clean it. “Can we have your autograph?”

I smiled. “Y’all must have heard about Yummy Entertainment parties . . . but you’re not old enough to get in,” I said, taking the thin notebook the dark-skinned one gave me. She reminded me of myself at that age.

“Your parties?” the mouth smacker asked, looking confused. She made
parties
sound more like “paw-tees.”

“No, we want your autograph because you got busy with Make$
and
Tek-9. Girl, you the shit!”

I paused in signing my name to cut my eyes up to them. “That wasn’t true about Tek-9. I was trying to line him up to . . . perform at a event,” I told them.

“No, no, uh-uh uh-uh. I read it on Ursula Stevens and there was pictures and everything,” the mouth smacker said, like she was referring to a legitimate news source and not a gossip blog.

Okay. Fuck it. I signed their notebook and wished them well, just wanting their young, naïve, and gullible asses out of my face. But then hell, there was grown people—grown, educated people—who took the shit on those blogs for truth like it was the Bible.

Sliding on my shades, I finished getting the rest of the things my moms would need to make two big pans of her honey-and-orange-glazed ribs for the all-female comedy showcase we were having that night. This Pathmark was always crunk—especially the first of the month—but I knew where everything was and I could get in and out quicker.

Soon I was pulling up before my parents’ house and my father stepped out onto the porch. I eyed him, tall and slender, with a short salt-and-pepper ’fro that reminded me way too much of that squared-up bullshit the daddy on
Moesha
wore. He looked every bit the nerdy professor, with his Malcom X spectacles and chinos on. “Harriet,” he said, his voice deep. “Take the bottles of apple juice and orange juice over to Victor. Your mother wanted those for him. He’s not feeling well.”

I frowned as I looked over at Mr. Alvarez’s white house with red shutters and brick steps.
Fuck I look like?
“Why didn’t his perfect daughter go to the store for him?” I snapped.

Umph.
Those lines of disapproval deepened across my father’s forehead. I just knuckled up and did it because I was not in the mood for an “I have a dream of a perfect daughter” speech. I slammed the juices into their own plastic bag and made my way up onto the lightly cracked sidewalk and the brick steps to Mr. Alvarez’s door.

I knocked and the door opened a little bit. This section of Weequahic was filled with working people and all, but who left their door open? This was some shit straight out of a crime scene on
The First 48
or
Law & Order.
What if Mr. Alvarez was stretched out in the motherfucker with a knife in his guts?

“Come in, Naomi,” he called out suddenly.

Okay, so he’s alive
. I stepped inside and closed the front door, but that made me feel claustrophobic as hell. I left the door wide open as I looked around the house. Even though I hadn’t been in there for over a decade it looked just the same as it did when me and Sophie were the best of friends growing up. Ain’t shit changed at all. Same old floral furniture. Same mismatched rug. Same dust. Same smell of old food and a house that needed its windows opened with a quickness.

Each step that took me closer to Mr. Alvarez sitting in the same brown recliner in front of his TV made me feel like I was six years old again. I looked down and saw a vision of me and Sophie playing with naked baby dolls. I smiled at my huge Afro puffs and Sophie’s lopsided ponytail done by a father without a wife.

“Oh, it’s you, Harriet,” Mr. Alvarez said, looking over his shoulder as he coughed, hacked, and brought up phlegm in a dingy handkerchief.

Damn, like that? Just, “Fuck it. I’m a hawk spit like it ain’t nasty as hell?”
I looked away as he opened the rag to study his shit. My eyes landed on a teapot setting on a tray in the center of the coffee table. I noticed the crack along the side. It was glued back together, but the crack was clear as hell.

I heard a loud crash and I thought I could almost see the teapot on the floor, broken in half. I felt loopy, like I had took an E or popped a hydrocodone. I felt nauseous.

“Shit!”

I looked over at Mr. Alvarez reaching over the arm of the chair to pick up the glass that had crashed to the floor.

“My father asked me to bring this juice over here,” I said, biting my lip as my head started to pound. I hurried to set the bag on the table by his chair.

His funky house was really getting to me.

He reached out and patted my wrist. “Such a good girl,” Mr. Alvarez said, his voice raspy with his sickness.

I jerked away from his touch. Turning to get the fuck out of there. Maybe it was the old smell of the house or his little spit show. What the fuck ever. It was straight deuces for me. I closed the front door behind me.

I looked over to see if my father was waiting on me on his porch. He wasn’t. That shit made me feel so sad and so fucking angry. All at once.

I shook my head to clear it of all the emotions fucking with me. Maybe I was PMSing or some shit. I didn’t know. I was just glad that by the time I walked over to my parents’ I felt a helluva lot better.

That night, I stopped by to pick Michel and Eve up. Michel didn’t have a car and Eve let one of her sisters borrow her little convertible. I called Michel’s phone. “Hey, bitch, I’m outside,” I said, double-parking beside a green Honda Accord.

“I’m almost ready,” he said. “Come up and don’t bitch. Just park that pretty Jag and drag your black ass up here.”

Click.

He hung up on me.

The block was crowded and the front porch of the building was covered with people trying to find some escape from the heat of their brick-encased apartments. I remembered my little AC window unit broke one summer night, and my box fan didn’t do shit to keep the sweat from soaking my sheets even as I lay naked in bed.

Humph. Living in the Twleve50 had me all about central air.

I looked up and down the street but the cars were parked bumper to bumper, without a parking spot in sight. I wasn’t trying to park around the corner and walk back in my five-inch stilettos. I stayed double-parked and put my flashers on before I shut the car off and locked the doors once I got out.

“Whaddup, Luscious? Let me get tickets to the show?” Millie, a toothless addict with six kids asked, barely sitting up straight on the metal chair she sat in. Her eyes were damn near shut and I was surprised she could see enough of me to even know who I was.

“They’ll be at the door, mama,” I said, squeezing her shoulder as I passed.

Millie laughed as she scratched at her face with raggedy fingernails. “You full of shit, Luscious, with your bad ass,” she said, her words slurring.

I just smiled as I waved at everybody on the stoop and walked into the building. Growing up in the hood, drug abuse was pretty much in your face. The more dealers, the more users, the more shit to see. It wasn’t nothing to see a dozen Millies . . . or to hear a dozen stories about how they got to be strung out.

Some man they loved introduced them to the shit and then left them behind with the addiction.

A preteen starting out with weed and beer and then escalating to harder shit because it started to take more weed to feel the high.

A woman who was running from a past of some kind of abuse that she needed the escape of drugs to forget.

Plenty of stories that ended in nightmares.

As I stepped onto the elevator, I realized my ass was lucky I didn’t get hooked on coke when I was dating Make$. And I was dumb to have taken the chance. Just as dumb as I was as college kid, popping pills and shit. I could’ve just as easily been Millie. Or Erin.

I wondered if my old college roommate was somewhere fading in and out of reality on a high. Or worse. Was she dead? The thought of that made me sad.

So I never judged. I just thanked God for the grace he bestowed me.

I smiled at the flyers for our comedy show on the wall of the elevator as I stepped on. All the bright colors stood out against the whitish walls. Eve actually designed the flyers and I must admit she surprised me, because they looked hella good, had plenty of info, and made someone curious to see what was popping off.

The elevator stopped on the third floor and I stepped aside as a tall and muscular dude stepped on. The smell of weed and cheap cologne filled the air, and I was glad when the elevator stopped on the eighth floor and I got the fuck off. His shit was about to choke me.

My heels drummed against the tiled floor as I walked the short distance to Michel’s apartment. The sounds of the bass of somebody’s music was thumping.
Boom-boom-boom.

Michel had left his door open.
What the fuck is up with people and their doors today?
Either I had to stop watching all those crime shows or people were reckless. I pushed the door open. I jumped as I envisioned my friend lying on the floor covered in blood. So much fucking blood. All of it soaking his turquoise rug from between his thighs. His dick lying on the carpet cut away from his body.

“Luscious, why the fuck are you standing in a daze?”

I blinked and shook my head as the image of Michel’s mutilated body disappeared just as quickly as my paranoid-ass brain made it up.
What the fuck? Okay, no more
First 48.

I shifted my eyes up to Michel standing there looking at me like I was crazy. He was in a silk robe without one of his lace-front wigs, but his makeup was just as beautiful as ever. Just as alive as ever. I shook my head as I stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind me. “You shouldn’t leave your door open,” I said.

“Girl, I am
loved
in this building,” he said, strutting across the studio apartment to his white dressing table in the corner. Above the table were two shelves with six wig heads. He reached for the one with the auburn lace-front wig before sitting down on the bench.

“I worry about you,” I said, moving to the kitchenette to pour a glass of moscato.

“Why?” Michel said, turning to look at me, his wig still in hand.

“I’m just thinking about the dude from the last comedy show about to fuck you up because he didn’t know you was a man under all that pretty.” I leaned against the small counter. “What if I wasn’t there that night?”

Michel turned all the way around on the bench and crossed his long, shapely legs. “I’m just being me and I can’t change that. I love being a girl. The makeup, the clothes, ooh, baby, the shoes. All of it.
Love it.
And I’ve loved it since I was a little boy being told, ‘You look like a girl,’ every day of my life.”