Thong on Fire (10 page)

Tollie paid for the services, and his little fat wife came out with him too. Tai showed up for me, and her mother sent a sympathy card with no damn money in it. The funeral parlor was packed. Full of shady niggas who had called themselves down with my uncle, but the minute he got knocked they had turned their backs on his family.

I walked around glaring at them niggas. “Look at little Saucy!” they was saying left and right. Well little Saucy had grown the hell up. I gave all them fake niggas my worst fuckin’ attitude. Half of them was frontin’ like they was grieving for my uncle, while they were really busy sneaking a look at my hips and ass.

I boiled on high throughout the whole damn funeral. It was a crying shame to me that a G as big, jolly, and powerful as my uncle had come down to this. Cold, silent, and stretched out in a cheap-ass suit in front of a bunch of no-good posers. They kept telling me and Aunt Ruthie they was gonna find out who it was that had Uncle Swag murked and take care of that shit. Why the fuck hadn’t they taken care of shit by getting him a high-level lawyer and getting him outta the joint? I didn’t believe nothing them niggas said, and I walked around that funeral home ready to curse everybody the fuck out. I was so mad that I blocked out my pain. I couldn’t hardly look at Uncle Swag’s body looking stressed and stiff in that cheap wooden box. Kaz just sat there looking at the floor, so I guess he couldn’t stand to look neither.

“Saucy.” A guy named Yan pulled me to the side. “Don’t even worry about this shit, ya know? Them motherfuckers that got him? They gone get handled properly.”

I shook him off and walked up front to sit with Tai and Aunt Ruthie. Kaz had his head on her shoulder but at least he wasn’t sitting in her lap no more. Aunt Ruthie put her hand over mine, and for the first time ever there was love for me in her eyes.

“Saucy, me and Kaz are going back upstate tomorrow,” she said quietly. “I’ll be staying at my sister’s house because I’m leaving this damn city for good.”

I had nothing to say. I loved this city, the good and the bad. Shit. Not only didn’t I have anywhere else to go, there was no other place I wanted to be.

I kept Uncle Swag deep in my heart, and swore all out I’d never love nobody the way I loved him. His murder didn’t slow me down though. If anything I was getting wilder than ever, and having a good-ass time in the process.

I’d been working at the Spot for a few months and I was in high demand. I’d met me a real dumb customer, some old head who was in the navy. He lived in Brooklyn with his wife and kids, but liked to party up in Harlem. He moved me out of that raggedy hotel I’d been staying in and rented me a small apartment so I could be available to him on the weekends or whenever he could lie and tell his wife he was on duty. He wasn’t all that in the sheets and his breath stank like hell, but I tolerated him because he was getting ready to go back out to sea.

With nobody but Kimichi left in my family, I was living my life in my own way, and that’s about the time I met Sincere.

Me and Tai hadn’t hung out much since Uncle Swag’s funeral. Her moms was still shitty and didn’t want me in her crib too much, and I hadn’t answered most of Tai’s calls because she usually called when I was doing something she would get on my case about. But even when I did call her every now and then just to get up with her, she acted all mad. I had missed her high school graduation and she was still holding that shit against me.

“You could have shown up for me, Saucy,” she complained.

I looked at the phone like it was crazy instead of her. I had been smart in school and got good grades when I wanted to, but I had missed so many classes that I didn’t have enough credits to graduate so I was gonna have to do another six months. What in the hell made Tai think I was gone show up at a graduation if I wasn’t part of the damn program?

“I had to work, Tai,” I lied. “You know I’m killing them down at the G-Spot now. I ain’t stripping or fucking or nothing. Just working in the coatroom and sometimes at the bar.”

“Uhm, yeah,” Tai said, and I could tell she didn’t believe me. “I started film school, you know. And I’m working at a production studio. They’re letting me intern as an event producer and I get to meet all kinds of high-profile artists. It’s really cool and I’m learning a lot.”

I got hot. Tai knew damn well that I had always wanted to be in the entertainment industry and in front of the camera! If anybody should have been rubbing asses with the stars it should have been me. I couldn’t even imagine an artist taking Tai’s big ass seriously. She wasn’t no eye candy. She didn’t have the body, the hair, or the ass appeal. She damn sure wasn’t me.

“That’s great, Tai,” I said dryly. “But I gotta go.”

“Wait! I wanna see you, girl. I’ll try to swing by during my lunch break tomorrow. We can grab something to eat. I’ll buy. ’Kay?”

The next afternoon we were sitting in a pizza shop on 125th Street and Tai was trying to hook me up with some guy she said was her new friend.

“You know how I do, Tai.” I picked at my crust. “I meet new niggas every night. I ain’t looking for no relationship or no Big Daddy who wants to fall in love and have a house full of kids and all that shit. I’m cool working at the G-Spot. I do what I do, and that’s how I roll.”

“But you ain’t got your own apartment yet either. What’s gonna happen when that navy guy goes back out to sea?”

“He paid the rent up for a minute. I’ll figure out something else after that.”

“It still won’t hurt you to at least holla at this guy. He’s got connections, girl. I met him at a party his brother invited me to, and the minute he hit the door I could tell he was the shit. People was almost bowing down to him. He’s a big willie, Sauce. Just the type you like. He saw your picture on my key chain and said he wanted to check you out.”

As it turned out, Tai had picked me a winner. Sincere swung by the G-Spot the next night and caught my set. He bought a magnum of champagne and paid for two hours of my time, and we went in one of the back rooms and sat up talking, drinking, and hitting lines the whole time.

Sincere told me he was a hustler from L.A. who was hooked up with some Haitians and owned a string of liquor stores in New York. They also had a nice drug game going, and had a crew of dirty riders who moved product from Miami to Virginia to New York. Sincere was in charge of distribution in several cities, and was a shot caller who chilled at the top of the food chain. He worked in G’s territory, but G got a nice piece of the action so they were cool.

By the time the sun came up the next morning I knew what my next move was gonna be. I jumped right on the bandwagon when Sincere told me what he wanted me to do.

“Check this out, baby. Go ’head out there and tell that big nigga with the two-way that you ain’t working for him no more. I’ll square shit up with G. Don’t worry. It won’t be a problem.”

Sincere had an apartment in East Harlem. We moved my shit out of that sailor’s crib and into his that same day. I lived large as hell up in that joint. I decorated it to fit my personality and everything I put up in there was quality, for real. Sincere was free with his cheese and believed in keeping his woman looking good. He replenished my wardrobe and it was five times phatter than it had been when Uncle Swag was alive. I was living large. Sitting at the top of the world. I shopped my ass off in some of the same stores I used to boost in. Only difference was, now I had a pocketbook full of cash and could buy just about any damn thing I wanted.

But nothing good lasts forever. Six months after I moved in with Sincere he got caught up in some shit. One of the Haitians he worked with got knocked and started snitching. He had some immigration issues and was trying to keep from getting deported, so he gave up a couple of names to save his own ass.

Sincere got snatched off the streets but he wasn’t no herb and he’d covered most of his tracks. The only thing they could hang on his head was some bullshit charge for associating with known felons, and for that, they took back his parole.

He got sent to Woodburne Correctional Facility up in Sullivan County for a year. But even the law couldn’t keep a good gangsta down. The only thing that really changed in his game was that instead of calling shots from the crib, he was now calling them from the pen.

Sincere told me he was gonna take care of me, locked down or not, and I believed him. Drugs were flowing in prison almost as easy as they flowed on the streets. The guards were shiesty and greedy, and as long as they got paid off they turned a blind eye to what was happening right under their noses.

I made mad visits upstate to see my boo, carrying his “babies” inside my pussy and passing them to him with the silent permission of the guards. Sincere commanded the same respect in the bing as he did on the block, and his money was never short. When I first met him he had told me he was a businessman and I half-ass believed him. But after seeing how he handled his business behind the walls, I knew what he said to be true.

“Always keep your business associates on a string, Saucy,” he told me. “Don’t never let no niggas think they can do their dirt without you. Make sure you’re a key piece of the puzzle, and that without you they ain’t got shit.”

I watched Sincere do exactly that for ten whole months of his sentence, and I would have rode with him till the end of it for real. But I ran into Akbar downtown one day. I hadn’t seen him since right after Uncle Swag got killed, and he was looking clean as shit. We ended up getting some Henny and going out to eat. He told me he’d gotten tagged with a larceny charge for stealing from an electronics store, and they’d sent him upstate to Woodburne for a good minute.

“Get the fuck outta here!” I told him. “I didn’t know you was up there! My man Sincere is doing a bid in Woodburne. I ride up there to see him on the regular.”

“Sincere?” Akbar looked at me like I was a real fool. “Light-skinned nigga? Built? Got that real slick hair? Down with them Haitians who own all them liquor stores?”

“Yeah.” I nodded all proud. “That’s my boo.”

“Saucy.” He sighed, shaking his head like what I said was incredible. “You mean you fuckin’ with that grimy nigga after what he did?”

I looked at him like, what?

“You for real? You ’on’t know?”

He glanced around, then leaned in close to me. “That’s the fool who got your uncle murked. Your boy ordered it up because them Haitians wanted it done. You know most of them motherfuckers snuck over here on a boat anyway. They ain’t got no papers. How you think they was getting licenses for all them liquor stores?” Akbar shook his head and took a few swallows of his Yak. “Your uncle was hooking them up, Saucy. When he got knocked and tried to make that deal, they got nervous. They slumped him. Shut his ass down. That’s some hard body truth.”

Everything in me went cold. An image of Uncle Swag in the shower naked and with a towel twisted around his neck flashed through my mind and I almost fell over.

“Damn,” I finally managed to say. I wiped the tears from my eyes and finished the Yak in my cup and then picked up Akbar’s cup and killed that too. Pain was running up and down my arms and legs. Sitting in my bowels and making them loose. The knowledge that I’d been sucking the dick of my uncle’s killer was devastating. Despite all the shit I’d been through in my life, all the grimy predators like King, and the Mr. Warrens and the dirty nasty Jacks-in-the-box, nothing, I mean nothing, had ever hurt me so bad.

“That’s some good shit to know, man. Thanks for putting me on.”

I stayed there with Akbar for a little while longer, but the whole time he was talking I was zoning. I didn’t hear shit he said. My mind was in a dark tunnel and I was steady thinking. Planning. Scheming. My boo Sincere was due for a re-supply visit soon, and I was gonna make damn sure it was his last one.

I
TOOK MY
last Prison Gap ride on a hot-ass night in September. My game was so tight that I played it just like I had played every other visit over the last ten months. The bus was nasty as hell and rabbits and chickenheads started swinging on each other while I was waiting in line at a rest-stop store. I laughed inside at these bitches and all their man drama. How they loved these cats so much got right past me. The only man I had ever loved was my Uncle Swag, and that’s the reason I was riding next to these funky bitches—so I could get inside that joint and do what I had to do.

I almost laughed as I sat there watching Sincere’s grimy ass choking off all that dope like he had a dick down his throat. He knew exactly what time it was when I put my hands around my mouth and whispered, “
Swag Robinson,”
to him right before he clocked out for good. Yeah, he’d murked my fam, but I’d laid this ill na-na on his ass and now he was straight outta the game! Fuck Sincere! I didn’t care how much he had done for me. My loyalty was to Uncle Swag! The rent on Sincere’s apartment was paid for the next month and a half, but I wasn’t crazy enough to go back there. I had done them Haitians a favor so I knew they wasn’t mad at me, but still. Ya never know. Besides, I had sold every damn thing I could sell outta there before making that last trip upstate, and I used the money to move back into a shitty little hotel so I could keep right on doing my thing.

But a few months later some more drama jumped off that pushed my life in another direction. Some madness went down at the G-Spot. Juicy got caught fuckin’ that fine nigga Gino, and Jimmy went bonkers and G ended up getting popped. The cops shut the club down and everybody who had worked there was suddenly ass-out and unemployed in the middle of an ice-cold winter.

Tai was the first one to tell me about it and she sounded happy as hell when she called me on my cell. “Did you hear what happened at your job?”

Damn! Now I was gonna have to find a way to pay for my hotel room. The place was a real dump, but I wasn’t there much. I didn’t have no money saved because I had to dress and get my high on too. My whole life revolved around getting high and working the clubs all night, then stumbling back to the room to sleep, shower, and get up and hit the streets all over again. I opened my mouth to answer Tai, but she was on a mission.

“Your boss got shot! By that crazy guy Jimmy who be with Flex and them over in Taft. They closing the G-Spot down, so that means you’re gonna need a new job.”

Tai was a trip. She didn’t like me working at the G-Spot anyway, so I wasn’t surprised that she was so happy to see it go down. I didn’t give a damn about G. That old nigga was scary. Bitches meant absolutely nothing to him. But I liked the job, and most of all I liked the power that lived in my pussy.

“I don’t know why you sound so damn happy about that, Tai. Some of us ain’t got no mommy we can live up under. I gotta pay the rent on my room next week, and since don’t nobody do nothing for me, I got bucks to earn.”

“Well that’s why I’m calling your stank ass! I met this guy at my job who’s a casting director. They’re having an audition near the South Street Seaport. D. Man is shooting a video for his new single and they’re looking for some principal models. The audition is closed, but my friend said he can get you in.”

My ears perked up.

“Principals? They’re the ones in the spotlight the most. More spotlight means more money, right? When’s the audition?”

I scribbled down the address and Tai’s friend’s name, then got my ass up. This was my big chance to shine and I knew I had to blow the spot up. I started looking through my gear, trying to find something bomb. I was gonna throw myself together something lovely. It didn’t matter how many other hoes showed up, I was claiming the top spot like it was already mine.

I took a taxi down to the casting spot. It was being held in a small hotel that looked like hell on the outside, but was actually clean and inviting on the inside. It was snowing like crazy and cold as hell too. But the moment I walked in the door my ass was on fire. The hall was packed with girls lined up on either side. I sashayed down the middle in slow motion. All eyes were on me as I stripped out of the floor-length mink coat Sincere had bought me, sliding it off my toned arms then slinging it over my shoulder as my white Chanel shorts and sleeveless belly shirt emphasized the hue of my sexy brown skin.

I was slaying them other bitches. Shining like a star. My heels clicked on the floor and I checked them out from the corner of my eye as I strode past. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
Hell
no. None of them birds were holding it like I was. There wasn’t a bit of competition in the house.

It was more of the same thing when I stepped in the auditioning room. They put the cameras on me for a test shot and I started cutting the hell up. Dazzling the producers. Stunning the rappers. They’d never seen nothing as sexy as me. I was hot and exotic. My Asian eyes merged with the lens on the camera and held them captive. I bonded with that videotape. I swirled my hips, then turned around and let them see that black woman’s blessing I was holding in the back. I heard breaths being sucked in as I gyrated down low, my fly thong peeking out. I gave them sexy combined with just the right amount of slutty. I let my tongue play slip-slide on my open lips, and could almost see those dicks getting hard. I sucked my stomach in and showed off my tight little waist and my nice thick hump of lady lumps, and I swear to God I heard a moan and at least five niggas in that room shot off in their drawers.

“Whew!” the casting director said when I was finally through. The production manager, who was also Tai’s friend, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his forehead. The guy holding the big camera put that shit down and turned his back on us to do an adjustment, and the brother on the small camera, who was gay but still in the closet, gave me a nasty look ’cause his ass was jealous.

“Thanks for coming in,” the casting director said, reaching for my hand. I shook it and my expression never changed when he squeezed my fingers twice before letting go. “We’ll, uhm, be calling the finalists shortly, okay? Listen for your call.”

When I walked out the room eyes was stabbing me like knives from all directions.

“Jealous hoes,” I said with a big cocky smile. After the hurting I’d just put down in there, the rest of those bitches could just pack it up and take it home.

I left the hotel walking on a cloud. I had twelve funky dollars in my purse but I felt confident and lifted. I saw the ice on the ground, but damn if I could feel the cold. I leaned against the building watching the traffic go by and replaying my sexy routine in my head. I had a blunt in my purse and I had just lit it and took two long pulls when my cell phone rang. The number on the caller ID was one I’d never seen before, but I answered it anyway.

“Hello?”

“Saucy?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Mackie P. You blew that audition up, baby. We want you to come back.”

“Then why’d y’all let me leave?”

He laughed. “You saucy all right. But my bad. You’re right. You’re probably on your way home, huh? I should’ve asked you to stay while you were here. Can you come back for another shoot?”

My broke ass giggled. “What’s the magic word?”

“Please. Can you come back please?”

“I guess. But it’s gonna take me a minute.”

“I’ll wait. We’ll all wait. Just come back.”

I clipped my roach and stuck it back in my purse, then turned around and walked back into the hotel. Sixty seconds later I had swept past all those still-waiting bitches and was standing in front of Mackie P. with my hand on my hip.

“Damn, girl. That was fast.”

“I told you,” I said, taking the hand he was holding out to me, “it was gonna take me a minute.”

I knocked all them other chicks out the box. I got the lead in D. Man’s hot new video, and I made that chick he had with him in his first video,
Lil’ Baby,
look like a child for real. Just for future security, I broke Mackie P. off with some neck action that had that nigga stuttering, and he hooked me up with private advance auditions with some of the hottest artists on the come-up scene. In a matter of weeks I went from stripping and hoeing in the G-Spot to getting casting requests out the ass.

They couldn’t stop telling me how much magic I produced in front of the cameras. In the music industry sex is what sold, and I was carrying a hot exotic package that got mega attention everywhere I went. I loved being on the set too. The hours were long, but the attention was energizing. Set workers catered to me, bringing me water and snacks and making sure I was straight at all times. The atmosphere was one big party. Piff, X, boat, all that shit was passed around freely and I smoked and popped as much of it as I could.

I watched some of the more aggressive extras trying their best to get my kind of play. If they had asked me I woulda told them they were going about things all wrong. How the hell they thought somebody was gonna notice them standing in the middle of the pack, I don’t know. Even when I went to an open call, I got my ass out there and made myself stand out. Eroticism was my middle name and I worked hard to be a big success.

I would hear some of them other girls complaining that they didn’t wanna take off their tops. They didn’t wanna wear the hot little ho clothes.
Shitttt
. I would walk up there with nothing but a stick-on tattoo covering my nipples and leave absolutely no doubt about what I was selling. I learned real quick that I needed to set myself up in some shot caller’s crosshairs. You couldn’t get shit in this business if you wasn’t in the middle of the playing field.

Let a producer or director tell me to put my pussy on a rapper’s arm. I smiled into the camera and wet that arm up. Somebody needed a beautiful girl for an uncut video? I was there. I was relentless. I made connections and networked from my knees. By early spring I was drinking more than ever, but I’d also landed a lead role in one of the hottest urban videos on the air.

Right about this time I started traveling a lot too. I was hitting casting calls in Atlanta and Miami like crazy, and walking out with top spots each time. Those cities were hot! Dirty, raggedy Saucy was flying on airplanes for the first time in her life! I got a blast out of hopping on chartered jets and traveling to different cities between shoots. I was also drinking and drugging and having as much sex as I could, and my name started getting around. I’d pop a triple stack of X, and within minutes my sex drive was off the damn radar. I was known to give the absolute best head on the urban scene and the name “Brainiac” was being whispered by men on sets, in party clubs, and in country clubs too. I didn’t fuck with no testers, though. I left all that for the jump-offs who didn’t know what they were doing. Nah, Saucy went straight for the stars, and because I was smart and knew how to keep my mouth closed, I got some damn good referrals.

I was at a gentlemen’s club in Atlanta one night when somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to see one of the most popular music moguls in the country, and it shocked me that he was out partying with the regulars, and even more that he had approached me directly instead of sending a tester over to feel me out.

“I think I know you,” he said, smiling. His right eye had a little winking twitch to it that I could tell he was trying to control.

I nodded, star struck. “I think I know you too. You look a lot like Marshall George.” Oh, this nigga was extra large! I’d seen him in New York pushing a four-hundred-grand azure-blue Mercedes Maybach 62 with a cream-on-cream leather interior.

He laughed. “Yeah. I get that a lot. I don’t see it though. That fella ain’t half as smooth as me.”

We both laughed at that one. Marshall bought a magnum of champagne and I followed him into a private VIP room. He didn’t dance, but he said he would like to watch me dance.

“That’s if you’re cool with dancing for me, you know?”

Cool with it? I was sippin’ Krug with the man who had launched hundreds of successful music careers and produced some of the top black movies and comedy shows of the damn decade. If he wanted me to hop on one leg, suck my big toe, and oink like a pig, that woulda been cool too.

But I played it easy. As big as he was in the industry, he wasn’t a ruffneck. He was a gentleman and yeah, I knew he was married. His wife was beautiful too, but she didn’t have the right kind of body. Her shape was long and slim, but she had a flat ass and no hips. I had heard they was going through some changes, but Marshall was all about his image and you couldn’t tell that shit when you saw them out together in public.

I danced for him and made sure he got a good look at the type of curves he was missing at home. He sat there watching me with a big smile of appreciation on his face, and when he called his driver over and told him to get the car ready, it was already understood that I was leaving with him. I followed him out the club feeling like a princess. All them other bitches he could have gotten with and a willie like him chose me? It was almost unbelievable.

He took me out to Buckhead, to what had to be the most expensive hotel in the whole damn state. The suite was huge and of course it was full of high-priced quality shit, and the service was top-shelf all the way as the whole staff went outta their way to accommodate the great Mr. Marshall George.