The Last Street Novel (34 page)

Shareef finally blew his lid and spat, “You don’t get shit in this world for free, Jennifer! You gotta
pay
for the shit I give you. That’s just the way life is. Grow the fuck up and stop thinking somebody gon’
give
you something without
work
!”

He said, “We all gotta fuckin’ work in this life, girl. So if your job as a wife is to fuck your husband for all of the things that he does for you, then you fuck your husband! Is that so hard to do? Am I an ugly-ass man now? I didn’t used to be. Other women don’t think so.”

He said, “And don’t tell me no shit about no cooking, cleaning, washing, and all of that. Because I’ve never sweated you about that. I can hire a chef, a maid, and a housekeeper for that. I know you’re an educated, working woman. But I can’t have no wife I can’t touch when I come home. What I gotta make a fuckin’ appointment for you? Mark the shit off on your little calendars? Well, fuck that! I’m not living like that. And if you thought you married a man who would just sit there and stand for that shit, then you got me wrong. But you
know me
better than that. You knew I wasn’t gonna go for that shit. So what the fuck was you thinking?”

Jennifer took all of his heat and responded to him calmly, “I was thinking that you would treat your wife with respect and honor, that you would cherish your wife and stay committed to her. I had no idea that I
owed you
anything for loving me. But obviously, I was
wrong,
Shareef. I was wrong for ever marrying you. Because it’s obvious to me now that you don’t really want a wife. You want a live-in whore you can do what you want to with and have your way with, and I’m sorry to disappoint you because I’m not that kind of a woman.”

She pressed the off button on the cordless phone and hung up on him. But then she realized that Kimberly had not had a chance to speak to her father. And what about Shareef Jr. and his football practice? She wanted to teach him a lesson on how to act to make sure he was never rewarded for disrespectful behavior, but at the same time, she never wanted to stop either of her children from doing what they wanted to do and enjoying themselves in life.

But there’s a right and a wrong way to do things,
she argued to herself.
And Shareef is not right,
she insisted. Nevertheless, it hurt her that her son and husband were so deliberate in having things their way. If only boys and men would learn to just…
behave.
But since they didn’t, and she couldn’t seem to win either of them over without bringing so much pain to herself in her forceful attempts to maintain dignity, she took a seat on the front steps of her home and began to cry.

Being a smart, respectable wife; a good, responsible mother; and a mature and honorable woman seemed to be a torturous affair. But Jennifer was determined to maintain her stature. And no matter how much the struggle seemed to hurt her, she was no man’s doormat and would never allow herself to be walked over.

S
HAREEF STOOD UP
from his bed at the Hudson Hotel in Times Square and was pissed. He looked at his cell phone after his wife had hung up on him, and he thought of throwing it up against the wall and breaking it. But instead he threw it down against the soft pillows.

“Mother-…” he began to curse and caught himself. He was breathing heavily and pacing the small room from the window next to the bed, all the way to the front door and back.

“Fuckin’ girl gon’ change up on a nigga,” he mumbled to himself. “She’s the one who lied from day one. I thought she loved me. But now she don’t wanna touch a motherfucker after all I gave her. After
all
I fuckin’ gave her!”

He couldn’t understand how his wife could live in a million-dollar home and not honor his passion for her. They had dreamed about their lives together. They had discussed it before marriage. And Shareef just assumed that their sex life would remain as it was when they were dating, a heated, passionate, spontaneous romp.

He burst out and screamed, “Why you fuckin’ lie to
me
?!” to the hotel walls. Then he sat on the edge of the bed with tears building in his own eyes. He even felt his chest tighten up.

He put his right hand over his heart to calm himself down from the stress.

“Okay…now she’s try’na kill me,” he stated. He stood back up from the bed to pace the room again with his hand still placed over his chest. He said, “Well, you know what? Since it’s all about me, that’s how it’s gon’ be then. I’m not gon’ be respected for writing no fuckin’ romance shit just to pay for your ass. So I’m gon’ do me now, all the fuckin’ way. That’s what I’m supposed to do, right?”

He continued to pace the room with angry energy, while going over his thoughts and decisions out loud.

“Richard Wright wrote about the streets. Chester Himes wrote about it. Langston Hughes. Eldridge Cleaver. Iceberg Slim. Donald Goines. James Baldwin. Ishmael Reed. Claude Brown. They
all
wrote about the streets. And their shit
lasted.
And not one of them is famous for writing some romance shit. None of them!”

He mumbled, “I can’t even hold down my own fuckin’ romance, so how the hell I’m gon’ write about that shit for other people? It’s hypocritical. It’s all about the money.”

Then he stopped in his tracks and stood still in the room. He said, “Well, you know what? Thank you, baby. Thank you for lettin’ me see what I need to do. It’s a clear picture now. I’m right where I’m supposed to be. I’m a street nigga. I was
born
to the streets.
Harlem!
I don’t even know my parents. So if I die fuckin’ with this book, then that’s my legacy. But I’m not running from shit. And if you don’t want to be a part of my life, then that’s
your
fuckin’ problem. You can stay your ass out in the fuckin’ suburbs.”

Just as he got all the ranting out of his system, his cell phone rang from the bed. He walked over and picked it up to view the number. It was his wife calling him back from home.

Shareef exhaled and shook his head. “What she got to say to me now?” he grumbled. He answered her call anyway. “Hello.”

“Your daughter wants to speak to you,” Jennifer told him. She put Kimberly on the line.

“Hey, Daddy.”

Shareef went soft again. “Hey, baby girl. Did you have a good breakfast this morning?”

“Yeah, but I don’t like eggs.”

“Yeah, I know. You like cinnamon toast with butter. And a glass of milk.”

“Yup,” she confirmed with a giggle.

Shareef listened to his daughter and smiled. Family was family, no matter what. And he would never forsake his children. But at the same time, he had a job to do in Harlem, and he remained focused on getting that job done.

Your daddy ain’t no punk,
he thought to tell his seven-year-old daughter.
For nobody!
So after a brief conversation he told his daughter that he loved her, ended the call, and prepared his mind to get back to business in Harlem, USA.

F
IRST
S
HAREEF CALLED BACK
his friend Polo. And as soon as Polo answered the call, he went into overdrive.

“Yo, where you at, B? The cops are looking for you. Don’t go back to that hotel, man.”

“The cops are looking for me for what?” Shareef asked him.

“Them killas who were after you got shot up last night. Only one who got away was the driver.”

Shareef said, “What does that have to do with me?”

“What does that have to do with
you
? The cops feel like you hired them. They think they were part of your crew.”

Shareef thought about that and said, “Even so, it would be self-defense, right? I mean, them guys were trying to kill me, man. It wasn’t like they got shot for no reason.”

Shareef was already siding with Baby G and his team. It was old-school loyalty. The kid had looked out for him in a life-and-death crisis, and Shareef had to respect him for that.

Polo paused a minute. He said, “Yo, you don’t want to tell the cops that. Just say you don’t know who they were. I mean, you didn’t know who they were, right?”

Polo already knew more about it than Shareef felt he should. He wasn’t even there. So Shareef listened to his instincts and commented on it.

He stood deadly still in his hotel room and asked, “Polo…you know what’s going on, don’t you? I mean, don’t bullshit me, man. This is serious. They were straight up trying to kill me last night. So who the fuck is after me, man?”

Polo took a deep breath over the phone line. That’s all Shareef needed to hear to know that he was right. His friend had been holding out on him.

He said, “Yo, son, I tried my best to get you to leave Harlem and go on back home to your wife and kids in Florida, man, but like…I’m sayin’, you just about the hardest-headed nigga I’ve ever known in my
life,
Shareef. I mean, you smart, man, but sometimes you fucking
stupid
. I told you, just leave that street shit alone. Make your book money, go chill out on an island somewhere, and stay away from these streets. They don’t care about you out here.”

He said, “But you just keep pressing for this shit, over some damn girl at that. I mean, you don’t know her like that. What’s wrong with you?”

Polo was getting sidetracked, but Shareef went back to his initial question.

“So who the fuck is after me, man?” That’s all he wanted to know.

Polo said, “Come on, man, you know who it is. This ain’t no damn mystery book. What, you been off the streets too long?”

Shareef was puzzled. He had no idea what Polo was talking about.

He said, “Come on, man, if I knew who it was, I would have stopped this shit. I would step right up and ask what the problem is to get this shit over with.”

“That’s what I told him,” Polo commented.

Shareef froze in his tracks. “That’s what you told him?” he repeated. “You know who it is then?”

O
VER AT
P
OLO
’
S APARTMENT
in north Harlem, he was dressed in a long bathrobe, purple with gold trimmings. A black pistol hung heavy in his robe pocket.

He grimaced while listening to Shareef’s ridiculously naive responses. He shook his head and walked toward the hallway bathroom to get away from his young son, daughter, and their mother, who were playing video games and eating the last crumbs of breakfast on the living room sofa.

Polo walked inside the bathroom and closed the door.

He said, “What the fuck, I gotta spell it out to you, man? Who was the first one who said something about you talking to Michael Springfield in jail?”

Shareef paused and answered, “Trap.”

“Exactly,” his friend told him. “And y’all just alike, man. Hardheaded. So his whole thing was gettin’ you to drop the idea, and your thing was still trying to fuckin’ do it.”

Shareef said, “Well, how come he just didn’t come out and tell me that?”

Polo got excited. He said, “He did tell you that shit. How you just gon’ sit here on the phone and say that? He told you that shit in front of all of us. But as usual, you went right ahead and ignored him. That’s what you always do. I mean, you crazy, man.”

He said, “So now I gotta keep a loaded gun on me because you got this nigga ready to kill all of us. That was one of his cousins who got shot last night.”

B
ACK AT THE
H
UDSON
H
OTEL
, Shareef couldn’t believe his ears. Trap was way too obvious. But it felt right. It had to be him. Trap knew everything.

Shareef stood with a dazed look in his eyes as he held on to the phone.
So much for old Harlem friends.
He then shook it off and said, “Well, yo, I’m just gon’ call Trap and get to the bottom of this. He just made the situation worse than what it had to be. All he had to do was tell me he was involved in some shit, and I would have left his name out.”

Polo said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, horsey, don’t do that shit, man. ’Cause you gon’ put my name up in it, and he don’t give a fuck no more. He don’t wanna hear that shit now. I wasn’t even supposed to be telling you this, Shareef, you was just supposed to leave.”

He said, “The streets is way more complicated than what you trying to make it out to be, man. So even if you left his name out of the book, like he said from jump, other niggas gon’ be concerned about
their
names. So you gotta leave it all out. Which means you can’t write that fuckin’ book.”

Shareef said, “But who’s to say that Springfield was even trying to drop names on me like that? He was just talking about his story. And Trap knew I wasn’t leaving. He know me better than that. I ain’t no bitch-ass out here, man. I’m from Harlem. All he had to do was talk to me about it. I’m standing right here.”

B
ACK INSIDE
P
OLO
’
S BATHROOM
, he burst out laughing and pulled his black pistol from out of his robe pocket. He looked at himself in the mirror while holding his gun out.