In Love with a Thug (18 page)

He loosened his grip and stepped away. “Well, get ya shit then.”

I could feel the whole left side of my face swelling up and there was a lump forming on my head. He watched me like a hawk as I walked around the room grabbing all of my belongings.

“Naw, nigga, put your clothes on. You're not walking through my house like that,” he stated with his fist still balled up. As my face swelled, I had to let go to put on my pants and T-shirt. While putting on my shirt I wasn't sure if he was gonna try something else. Before putting on my sneakers, I turned to him.

“Why?” I asked as the burning tears rolled down my face.

He looked me dead in my eyes and responded. “Why not?”

He didn't flinch nor crack a smile. I hurried up the stairs and busted open the basement door to my freedom, or so I thought. Bryant followed.

In the kitchen Ms. Bernice was sitting down having breakfast with Mariah, Rain, and Bryant's sister, Loretta.

“Baby, what happened?” Ms. Bernice asked.

“Grandma, let him go. We got into a fight over some money; that's all,” Bryant lied as I walked out the kitchen and then the front door.

T
he rain poured heavily as I sat and watched from my bedroom window. I hadn't left the house in two days. The salon wasn't making any money due to the bad publicity from newspapers and word of mouth. I definitely wasn't answering any phone calls unless it was one from one of my connects to deliver me some candy.

You would've thought I'd learned my lesson by now but I hadn't. I sat by the window going through the mortgage information on the salon. I had ten days to pay the balance in full or they'd be closing Ché Mystic for good.
Fuck it, maybe I should go be a stylist in a hair salon,
I thought. At least I wouldn't have to put up with the bullshit of paying a fuckin' mortgage. I sat and thought of all the shit I'd been through in the past few months. I got up and walked into the kitchen to get a candle from the drawer.

I lit the candle and sat it in the middle of the coffee table. I bowed my head to say a prayer. I was always taught that if you keep God first, then everything else would work out. And maybe that was my problem all along. I was not keeping God first. I would put God, everybody, and everything above Him. While Darnell lay asleep in his grave I had gone buck wild.

“Buck wild” is a term that I never used when discussing myself. I was always the one to have my shit together. I know that Father Tyrell was looking down on me right then shaking his head asking,
what the hell is he doing?

I lit another candle—not for the
death
of Darnell but for the
life
of him. I had waited for him to live his life through me. A man who loved me for who I was and not for what I had or what I was worth. A man who would never put his hands on me or tell me to take drugs. Yes, he may have sparked up a blunt or two but
my
lips never touched one.

I felt tears starting to rise from my tear ducts but I refused to cry another tear. I was gonna hold my head high and live my life like it was meant to be. I lit another candle for my mother and father. There was a time when they were the most important people in my life but now they would be known to me as associates. Associates that I would call my mother and father because they were no longer “Mommy” and “Daddy.”

My last and final candle was lit for the life of my baby Anthony. The one person who gave a damn about my well-being. A person whom I could trust hands down. There was no question or doubt in my mind that he wasn't my brother. May God bless him and give him the gift of life just like He gave me. It was my time to shine.

 

“I'm not gonna lie to you, Juan. This is gonna be a tough case,” said my attorney Robert Datner as he leaned back in his chair and cupped the back of his head with his hands. I had been working with Mr. Datner for some years now. I had hired him when Ieshia and I had gotten into trouble a few years back when we were cashing fraudulent checks. Before Darnell came along, that was how I really had made my money. The term in this gay lifestyle for that type of work was called “crafting.”

Now believe it or not crafting was really what it was—crafting. You really needed to learn a skill to portray that type of lifestyle. And if you were a fierce crafter then there wasn't a doubt that you lived FAB. I started off living fab when I earned my first hundred thousand by going to different banks around Philly cashing fraudulent checks. Ieshia and I would cash checks from Philly to Maryland to Richmond. We were unstoppable when it came to the check-writing game.

See, most faggots craft to buy fancy clothes and cell phones and shit. Ieshia and I crafted for money. The
real
money. Money that was used to buy us fancy cars like Beemers and Mercedes-Benzes and shit. But as they say; easy come easy go. We went through that money so quick by buying clothes, jewelry, and cars. And until this day the only thing I had to show for it was my apartment and my car. Now ask me what Ieshia had to show for it—shit.

“I figured that it would be a tough case.” I sighed as I looked around his office taking in the scene of pictures of his wife and kids. Robert Datner was one of the best Jewish lawyers that money could buy. He had gotten me and Ieshia off that check-writing shit plus he had gotten my cousin off a murder charge when he used to roll with the JBM (Junior Black Mafia) back in the day.

“Yeah it is. Especially for number one, they found drugs in
your
apartment and number two, there is a key witness that sent them there,” he said now looking through his mess of papers on his wooden desk. “Melissa Childs, that's her name,” he said as he held the report in his hands.

“So what do I do now?” I asked, trying not to worry about the tremendous jail time I would be facing in the future.

“Well, do you know this girl?”

“Well, I don't
know
her per se, but I do know things about her.”

“Well, for this to be so early in the case, I suggest you go to her and talk this out with her so she can't testify at your trial.” I was stumped for a minute to think about what he had said.
Me and Melissa talk? No, no,
I thought.
I am gonna kick her ass for spraying mace in my face and stampeding into my shop.
He looked right into my eyes and saw that his suggestion wouldn't work.

“So you're saying that you can't talk to her?”

“I don't think so,” I responded, slumping down in the chair.

“Well, like I said, this is still early in the case and the trial will not begin for a few months. We have numerous options to explore. Such as what gave the police probable cause to come search your apartment? Just because they got a tip from some ghetto chick, that's not enough for a warrant from where I stand.”

See, that's what I liked about Mr. Datner; he always knew what to do and that is why I wouldn't mind paying top dollar for his services. I stood up from my seat as my cell phone rang. I looked at the number, recognizing that it was my mother and rejected the call.

“Well, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule and seeing me. And I would also like to thank you for getting my ass out of jail so soon.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” he said, flagging his hand away. I will help you in any way that I can.” He extended his arm for a handshake.

“I will call you when I get some new news about your case. But for now lay low for a while and try not to get into any trouble,” he said to me before I walked out of the door.

While walking to my car I heard my cell ring again and it was my mother calling for a second time.
What the hell is she calling me for?
I thought as I opened the phone and closed it. I didn't have anything to say to her after the way she had treated me the other day. I stopped at the pretzel stand a few steps away from Mr. Datner's office and brought me a pretzel with light salt smothered in mustard and a large cherry ice—my all-time childhood favorite.

I took one bite of the pretzel as I started to get a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. I began to have flashbacks of Darnell lying there in my arms with blood leaking from his nose. I carried the water ice in one hand, my pretzel in the other and it felt like I was holding Darnell in both of my arms. My cell phone rang for a third time but by me carrying these two items to my car, I couldn't reach for it to see who it was.

By the time I got to my car my cell phone had stopped ringing. I jumped in the driver's seat when a voice entered into my head. It was my voice saying good-bye. It was my voice in the same exact tone that I'd used to tell my parents good-bye the other day when I walked out of their house. I licked the top of my water as the voice still flowed through my head and into my ears.
Good-bye…good-bye…good-bye
was all I heard and then a vision of my father appeared in the passenger seat. In an instant, he went away when my cell phone rang a fourth time. This time I looked down at the phone and it seemed like I heard my mother's voice in my head screaming,
Juan, you better answer this damn phone.
I flicked open the phone and held it to my ear for a second before saying hello.

“Mom,” I answered.

“Juan, you were the first person I wanted to call. Your father passed away about ten minutes ago,” she informed me as she wept. I sat in the driver's seat in silence, letting the water ice drip down onto my hands. My eyes swelled up with tears.

“Mommy?” I cried.

“Yes, Juan.”

“I'm on my way.”

“Okay,” she responded before I closed my phone.

More and more tears started to fall as I got closer to West Philadelphia and the Arch Homes. I glanced in the rearview mirror thinking of an explanation to tell my mother about how my face had gotten like this. The closer I drove to the streets of my childhood the memories started flooding.

There was the time when my father had taught me how to ride a bike along with the time when he first took the training wheels off. I rode past Fifty-fifth Street where we used to light firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Apple Tree Street, hmmm; that's the block where my father came and got me out of a house party that took place at two in the morning.

The field across the street, which was now turned into a nursing home, was where I'd first played the game “Catch a Girl, Freak a Girl.”

The Salvation Army; now that was my spot back in the day. I would go there every day for the after-school programs. Then by the time I was old enough, I would go to the gym and sit in the bleachers and watch the boys play basketball. I always had my eyes on this one particular boy named Terrance. He was a lot older than me but he was fine as hell. I loved the way he'd run up and down the court grabbing the ball and shooting it into the net. He moved away when I was sixteen and I hadn't seen him since.

By the time I got to the projects, the ambulance was taking my father away. I pulled up in the driveway and got out, passing by the onlookers who were trying to find out what they could see.

“I'm sorry to hear about your father,” said a skinny, dark-skinned lady who used to babysit me when I was younger. She was now known as a babysitter-turned-crackhead.
What am I saying? Like I got room to talk.

My mother stood in the doorway as the ambulance rode slowly down Vodgers Street.

“Mommy,” I cried, running into her arms as she welcomed me. I squeezed her flesh as tight as I could, trying not to let her go as she did the same. We both held each other and cried. I cried for good reasons and bad.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, holding me tighter as tears fell from her eyes.

“Mom, no! It's not your fault.” Only if my mother knew all the hurt and pain that I felt on the inside. I missed my family so much that I couldn't breathe. She pulled away from me with red eyes.

“Your father loved you. He always loved you,” she said, wiping my tears away with her thumbs. I grabbed her again as we held each other tight and let the nature of a death in our family take its course.

 

“Thanks for everything,” said a female client as she paid me for her do as well as gave me a ten-dollar tip.

“You're welcome. I'll see you in two weeks?” I asked, knowing that her curls would fall in one.

“Yup,” she responded walking out the door. Rob was finishing up one client's hair when he walked over to me.

“Are you okay, girl?” he asked, still holding a styling comb in his hand.

“Yeah, I'm fine. How about you?”

“I'm doing well. Your face is healing well. How's your mother doing? Are y'all done making the funeral arrangements?”

“No, we still have a little more prepping to do. Everything will be done by Wednesday,” I said, walking back into my office.

“Oh, okay, so that's when the funeral is, huh? Where is it gonna be?”

“It's gonna be at my grandmother's church; Liberty Baptist on Fifty-seventh and Larchwood.” I went into my office, sat behind my desk and started up my computer. I hadn't checked my email in quite some time. I signed on to AOL and I had over a hundred emails. Most of them were junk emails but two were from Bryant.

My first instinct was to delete the email but then I decided to read it only to hear what he had to say. I opened it to see that it was a poem written yesterday.

 

Listen to my words as I say that everything's gonna be OK

Sometimes you might have a bad day but know,

everything's gonna be OK

Your day might not be going too good and you wish

you were home, around the hood

Laughing and joking with your love thinking everything

was all good

To make the time go by, do what you gotta do

Cuz, boy, you know ya man is here, sitting here waiting on you