Lust (10 page)

“Get high in
hell,
bitch!”

Shooting another glance at Trey, Lil Lee turned around and switched her bomb-booty back down the aisle, parting the crowd with a wide sweep of her gun. Her young’uns pushed out of the aisles and followed behind her like trained puppies, walking backward and keeping their wary eyes on Trey and every other pistol-packing niggah in sight.

“That’s the guy!” Taleah stood up from her hiding spot and elbowed Trey as the posse of drug slangas moved toward the church’s door. “Trey, that’s him!” she half-whispered. “That’s the guy!”

“What guy?” he leaned over and asked her as he watched Maleek and the others back outta the door. “What guy, Taleah?”

“The guy who so—” The teenager bit her tongue as she locked eyes with the fine skinny dude with the cornrows who had conducted the drug transaction with Princess and a chill zipped through her bones.

She took a quick glance at her best friend laying up dead in her coffin. “Never mind,” Taleah said softly. “I don’t know
what
the hell I’m talking about. Never mind.”

By the time the church’s door slammed shut there were plenty of gangstas left standing in the house of the Lord who were ready and willing to rush outside and go head up with Lil Lee and her crew. But Trey quickly checked them. He held his hand in the air signaling to let the Divine Nine posse leave in peace. There was a time and a place for everything, and with countless pews filled with scared women and children this wasn’t the time for gunfire and mayhem, and it damn sure wasn’t the place.

$$$$$

The church was finally settling back down as the people of Harlem regrouped from the rude disruption and continued to pay their last respects to Princess. The preacher had stood up from his crouched position behind the podium, and the funeral director had emerged from behind Princess’ coffin where he had ducked and hidden when all the guns came out.

Trey and everybody else had taken their seats again, and the preacher was rushing to wrap up Princess’ eulogy before any more ghetto nonsense could jump off.

“Yo,” Trey’s man Skeet leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder. He nodded towards the center aisle of the church where once again the crowd of mourners was parting, but this time it was to let four uniformed police officers get through.

“What the fuck is up with this?” Skeet muttered. “First this child gets disrespected by some come-up crew, and now the blue boyz is rollin’.”

Trey’s expression never changed as the cops walked through the grieving crowd and came straight up to the front of the church. The preacher looked confused, and he stumbled over the words in his sermon as the officers posted up in the front row directly in front of Trey and old Mr. Howell.

All four cops were well known in the community, and Trey knew exactly why they were there. He nodded at his boy Skeet, then slid Mr. Howell outta his arms. Skeet threw his arm around the old man as Trey stood up. He towered over the cops as he grilled them with a cold, neutral expression in his eyes.

“Yo, y’all niggahs straight buggin’, son,” Rain hollered as one of the cops went to grab Trey’s elbow and lead him down the aisle. “We at a funeral, fool!”

Trey shot the cop a ‘wish-yo-ass-would’ look that was so dark and menacing that the little dude backed off and put his hands back down at his sides.

Trey strode unhurriedly outta the church with his head held high and his eyes full of love for the people in his hood.

“What y’all messing with him for?” A wrinkled old man hollered from the back of the room. A loud chorus of voices joined him. “Where the hell was y’all ten minutes ago when a gang of drug dealers was up in here about to shoot us down?” the people shouted. “Huh? Huh? Where was all of this so-called police presence in the community then?” they screamed.

Trey’s kids from The Crossover were back up on their feet and yelling too. They looked swole and hyped and ready to wild the fuck out this time, but there was a calm authority about Trey as he motioned for them to sit back down and chill. Giving his boys an example of how to handle themselves under this kind of pressure was a big part of teaching them how to survive in this world as young black men, and the self-assuredness of Trey’s mad swagger was all they had to see in order to confirm that he had everything under control.

Trey took his time leaving the church and the cops trailing behind him had no choice but to stop and wait each time he paused to hug an old lady or dap out some of the older men of Harlem. He lingered in the crowd accepting the love he was being shown from the young and the old alike, and there were tears in the eyes of countless mothers who reached out to hug, kiss, and thank him for saving their children from the same fate that had befallen the young girl they had all gathered to mourn.    

Finally, Trey paused at the door, and looked back at the crowd of people who had turned to watch him go. He could tell they were still mad about the disrespect Princess had suffered, and male and female, young and old, they looked agitated and ready to get something started. Like they were just itchin’ to jump all over the po-po if Trey would just give them the nod.

His Talented Ten crew had also followed him toward the doors, and the little peashooters the cops were strapped up with were no match for the superior firepower Trey knew his dudes were packing.

But Trey also knew this day was about honoring Princess and not about reckless rage. He gave the enormous crowd a fearless look that said, “I got this,” and then he stepped calmly outside the church doors and into the bright sunlight.

“Dig, Trey,” one of the cops who had been his manz back in high school reached for some dap as they walked toward the squad car. “We just out here doing our jobs, ya know?”

Trey didn’t even look at dude as he folded his long legs and muscular body into the cramped backseat of the car.

“Then maybe y’all muh’fuckas need to do a
better
job,” Trey spit coldly before the officer closed the door. “So a niggah like me ain’t gotta keep doing that shit for you.”

CHAPTER 13

My roommate’s name was Egypt and she was a real sharp chick from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. We had finally started giving each other a little convo after almost a week of doing the New York-thang and staying out of each other’s space.

Egypt had stayed in this shelter quite a few times so she knew the drill and how they liked things done. The staff had put us on the schedule together to clean the kitchen, and now that the dishes were done and we’d wiped all the counters down with bleach and water, we were sitting at the table together tearing up some cheese doodles, onion and garlic Wise, twisted pretzels, and Dipsy Doodles corn chips that we had mixed together in a brown paper bag. 

“I don’t know, Egypt,” I said, running my mouth as I crunched on a pretzel. “I’ve had some fucked up things happen in my life, but I never thought I would end up in a homeless shelter. I don’t even know how I got here.”

I was glad we had finally stopped igging each other and started talking. Neither one of us could believe that life had stomped us down so far that we’d ended up in our present situations.

“Well my ass ended up in here because I was stupid as hell,” Egypt told me bluntly, without putting a drop of sugar on it. She was tall and dark-skinned and very, very, pretty. She had a stacked body, beautiful dreadlocks, and a gorgeous white smile, but there was something real sad and haunted about the look in her eyes.

“See, I used to be a crack-head,” Egypt admitted as she dug her hand inside the greasy paper bag and came out with a handful of the mix. “Nah, hold up,” she corrected herself. “I used to be a crack
hoe
.”

I stared at her. Egypt looked so fly and sounded so smart that it was hard for me to believe she had been out on the streets smoking crack and I told her that.

“Oh, a minute ago I would have said the same thing about me too,” she laughed. “From the outside looking in, I had it going on. My father owned a barbershop called Fat Daddy’s on Livonia Avenue, right across the street from Tilden Projects. We lived in ghetto luxury in our apartment upstairs over the shop, and I had everything a little black girl from Brooklyn could ever want. But
anybody
can get caught up in a bad spin, Juicy. All it takes is a couple of hard knocks and one or two stupid-ass decisions and you can end up flat on your ass, you know.”

Oh, I knew. I damn sure knew.

“For me,” Egypt kept going, “it started when my dude Lamont—they call him Hood in The Ville—got knocked. And then right after that my father ended up getting murdered by some of the same drug slangers and power players that he had helped raise up in the streets. Those cats fucked him up, Juicy,” she said miserably. “They tortured him without an ounce of mercy. I came home from school one night and found his dead body in the kind of condition that no daughter should ever have to witness.”

Egypt shivered and hugged her arms.

“I was only seventeen, and all of a sudden I was left by myself in the world. All of that loss was just too much for me. I mean, yeah, I was raised in the belly of the hood, but my father had spoiled the shit outta me. He’d shielded me from most of the ugliness that lived in Brownsville. In the world, really.”

She shrugged.

“But after those same guys that he had fed and protected and trusted, upped and betrayed him and murdered him like that…I just slipped. I couldn’t handle it. Girl, you just don’t know. I miss my daddy so damn
bad
, but in a way I’m glad he’s dead and he didn’t have to witness all the gutter shit his baby girl went through.”

“I
do
know,” I said, thinking about my family and how it woulda killed Grandmother and Jimmy to know I’d been shot and in jail and was now sitting up in some damn homeless shelter.

“And what made my situation even more grimy and scandalous, ” Egypt admitted,” was that I fell into my addiction because I got blinded by the wrong niggah. By some mental case named Dreko. He was my dude’s best friend. His main manz. His partner-in-crime. When Lamont went to jail that fool had me
and
Lamont’s mother sucking his dick and eating his ass too. That’s how low-down and shitty that crack had both of us living.”

Egypt shrugged like she was over it, but her brown eyes got flooded with the deep pain of her memories.

I pushed the greasy bag of grub back on the table and kept my mouth closed. Egypt had a hard-knock story, but I wasn’t about to tell her that my life had been even grimier than that. I thought about how G had damn near beat me to death, then peed all in my face and let them nasty tricks run endless trains on me down in that filthy Dungeon. I thought about how my baby brother had gotten tortured behind me and my stupid-ass foolishness. About how he had been forced to murder a man he loved and blow his own brains out just because of me. It was crazy. All that death and drama going down just because I had gotten turned out on the dick of my sugar daddy’s only son. I didn’t dare think about how I’d lost Gino and our baby with one single bullet. I just couldn’t bring myself to think about that.

“I guess we all go through some shit,” I said softly. “If we had lived our lives the right way then we probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it now.”

Egypt nodded in agreement. “I’m here to tell you, honey, I went from sugar to shit so fast that it was unreal. One minute my life was perfect and I had big future plans, and the next minute I was left with nothing, girl. Absolutely nothing. But the worst part of it was that I lost Lamont. I lost his love and I definitely lost his respect.”

Egypt reached for the paper bag and peeked inside. She took out a couple of cheese doodles, then lined them up on the table in front of her and brushed the crumbs off her fingers. “You know, the best thing that ever happened to me was when Lamont drove me up on the Brooklyn Bridge and told me to get outta his whip and jump my ass into the East River. I had gotten to the point where I was so damn
gutter
, Juicy. I’d do anything for a hit. Anything. I was just stank and desperate and no damn good for nothing except suckin’ dick and suckin’ pipe.”