Thong on Fire (24 page)

My hands was shaking like I was a fiend. I didn’t know what I
should
do, but I knew what I was
gonna
do. I headed straight to the hotel bar and proceeded to order and gulp down beer and double shots of Rémy until I couldn’t see straight and was having some real trouble holding my head up.

“Sorry, miss,” the bartender told me when I tried to order another round. “You look like you’ve had more than enough, and I’d be violating the law if I sold you any more alcohol.”

I cursed that motherfucker out!

“Who da fuck is
you
?” I screamed on him, trying to lift my head up off the bar. Some older dude who had been sitting next to me the whole time was nodding like he felt what I was saying. “I’m
grown,
goddammit! I tell me when I had enough! Not
you
tell me, you greasy gay fuck!”

They put my ass straight up outta there, but it was cool ’cause the old guy sitting next to me helped me get upstairs to my room and he was funny as hell! He was telling mad jokes and then laughing at them shits himself, hugging and squeezing all over me every time he reached the punch line.

He helped me slide the hotel card in the lock outside my suite, and when I got the door open he came in behind me.

“They got plenty to drink in that thing right there,” he pointed toward the room bar. I staggered over to it and took out a bunch of little bottles of cognac and he twisted the caps off for me and told me some more stupid jokes while I put those little bottles up to my lips and swigged the liquor down, chasing it with some Coke from an open can that had been sitting on the counter.

I was bending over to get me out another one of those little bottles when a blow from the back knocked me down.

I landed hard on my stomach, my face pushed down in the floor and he jumped on top of me and started rubbing his dick on my ass and moving around. The force of the impact rocked me, shaking me up and making me nauseous. I opened my mouth to blast that nigga out, and instead I threw up, choking on the sharp, nasty smell of cognac and beer pooling beneath my face.

“Motherfu—” I started to say, but he pressed down on the back of my head, killing my noise in my own vomit. He hiked my dress up in the back, and fumbled around with my thong, and when I felt his dick enter me I tried to squeeze my legs closed but he penetrated me deeply anyway. I moaned and gagged in puke as he fucked me with quick deep strokes. It didn’t take him but a few seconds to finish, and the next thing I knew he was climbing off of me dripping cum, leaving my ass wet and cold.

I wanted to get up, but all that liquor had me, and soon I passed out. I was dreaming and I didn’t like it. I was five years old and I was sitting on Mister Jack’s lap while his thang jumped outta its box. It was sweaty and hot and poking around my little booty, stabbing me in my pee pee hole and making my butt get wet.

I pushed against Mister Jack and tried to climb off his lap, rolling over onto my back.

“It a nice game, Seung Cee!” Kimichi scolded me as I cried. “Uvvah kids play it very much, yes? Be still and let Meester Jack finish.”

I heard a door open. Footsteps and loud men’s voices were coming toward me. I was scared and my butt was really sore. I didn’t want to play anymore and I begged Kimichi to make Mister Jack stop.

“SAUCY!”

“Please, Mama,”
I moaned out loud.
“Don’t make me play no more. Please. Mister Jack, it hurt real bad when you touch me right there. Please. Ow, that hurt me, Mama. Please! No! Ow! Mama! Mama!”

“SAUCY!”

I tried to open my eyes, but shit was too blurry.

“Saucy! Get the fuck up!”

I looked up and Free was standing over me. And so were Tone, Bandie, Cuban, and all the rest of his homeys.

“Yo, what the fuck is going on?” Free screamed. “Close your fuckin’ legs, girl! What you doin’? You got some nigga up in here or what?”

I heard him stomping around the room like he was looking for somebody.

“Who you been fuckin’ Saucy, huh? That bitch nigga Quaison? Where that sleazy nigga at? Huh? Where the fuck he at?”

He started wilding, yanking open the closet doors and turning over chairs.

“C’mon, man,” Feety said, trying to calm Free down. “Ain’t nobody in here homes. Take care of ya woman, man. She look like she needs some help.”

Feety rounded up them niggas and made them get out, and when the door slammed I still hadn’t moved. Free walked over to me and looked like he wanted to spit down on me.

“What kinda fuckin’ woman
are
you?” he asked quietly, like he was amazed. “How you getting tore down drunk when you about to be somebody’s
mother
?
My
kid’s mother? You worse than my moms,” he said and stepped up on me, and for a second I wished he would just go ahead and stomp me out.

“You’re an embarrassment, Saucy,” he said, looking down on me, making me feel low. I
was
tore down drunk, but I could hear the deep pain in his voice and see it in his eyes too. “A big fuckin’ embarrassment.”

“Free…” I reached up toward him. “He…I got ra…”

“Save all that shit for the next nigga,” he said coldly as he walked away. “’Cause I ain’t trying to hear it.”

F
OR EVERYBODY ELSE
the weekend had just gotten started, but for me it was straight over. Free woke me up bright and early the next morning and told me it was time for me to fly.

“Your flight leaves at nine. Herc is gonna be at the airport waiting for you, and he’ll drive you out to Jersey. And that’s where I want you to stay, too. There’ll be plenty of food in the house when you get there, so feed my seed. I’ll fuck with you when I get back Tuesday.
After
I finish handling my business.”

I sat up in the bed with my head swimming and the first thing I saw were my suitcases. He had them shits packed and lined up at the door. I still had on my dress from the night before and there was dried vomit in my hair but he didn’t even wanna give me enough time to take a shower.

“You had that same shit in your hair last night, Saucy. You wasn’t worrying about it then.”

He watched me as I pulled my nasty dress off and dropped it on the floor. Last night’s thong was on me all crooked and stiff in the crotch with dried cum, not even in between my ass cheeks like it was supposed to be. I tried to fix it as Free stared at me with a crazy face.

The baby was pressing down on me and I went in the bathroom to pee. Bits and pieces of the night before came back to me, and when I realized why my thong was so nasty I wanted to scream and fight. What the fuck! Warren, Jack, King, Jim, James, Paul
and
Tyrone! It was no-good violating niggas who had taught me to take whatever I wanted in life! Thinking
fuck all them niggas and Free too,
I jumped in the shower and scrubbed last night off me the best I could. When I came out the bathroom Free was looking at his watch and grilling me as I reached for one of my bags.

“What you doing?”

For some reason I touched my stomach, which was feeling a little rounder. I pulled my towel tighter around me.

“I’m getting something to put on, Freedom.”

While I was sleeping he had packed every stitch of anything that looked like it might have belonged to me. He had packed so good he forgot to leave me out something to wear home.

I took out a pair of Capri pants and a knit vest, and got dressed real quick. Free acted like he couldn’t wait to get rid of me, and I was still buckling my sandals when he started rolling my bags out the door.

He didn’t say a word as he put me in a taxi and sent me to the airport. I was hoping he was gonna ride with me, but he killed that fantasy when he gave me a one-hundred-dollar bill then passed the taxi driver some ends too.

“Bye,” I said in a real small voice as I slid into the cab, but he didn’t even look at me. He flung the door real hard and was already walking away by the time it slammed shut.

Five hours later I was sitting in that little cracker-box house in New Jersey staring at Free’s Aunt Mercy Ann. She was a hideous-looking old hag, and we hated each other on sight. She wore a jacked-up wig sitting crooked on her head, and she had a big, nasty black mole hanging off the side of her nose. She sat there twisting that shit all day like it was a permanent booger.

I didn’t say much to her and she sure didn’t have nothing to say to me. She had her shoes off and her feet stank, and my stomach was feeling too funny for me to try to sit there and socialize with her smelling like that. The flight had been jacked up and I couldn’t wait to land. I didn’t know whether I was hungover or airsick, but whatever it was, my son musta been mad at his mama because my stomach heaved the whole time.

Herc had picked me up at the airport and driven me straight to Jersey, and when he said he was taking Aunt Mercy Ann food shopping I just waved both of them off. I kicked off my shoes and slid out of my clothes, then got in the bed and closed my eyes. I heard them come back in about an hour later and then the sound of the cabinets and refrigerator being opened and closed filled the little house.

I stayed in that room going from being mad to feeling stupid and back again. Yeah, I’d walked away from Quai but so what? Look at what he had did to me! Licking my ass out on film then threatening to show it to Free. Damn right I was down to show it around first instead of letting him hold that shit over me! What did he expect?

And Free? Shit. I put my hand over my stomach for a second, then took it off and set it on my thigh. This “let’s keep the baby” game was his damn idea. This was what he had wanted. To be somebody’s daddy and show off his shorty to the world. Of course I dug all that shit that had happened with his moms, but I wasn’t her! I wasn’t out there lushing and driving no damn kids around in a car, so it wasn’t fair for him to talk to me like that! And he didn’t even give me a chance to explain what had happened in the hotel room last night! He just figured Saucy was a ho so she musta been doing some more hoeing. He was mad now, yeah, but I knew how much Free felt for me. He loved me and had told me so a whole bunch of times. Now all I had to do was chill and let all the confusion and drama pass on by, and then soon me and my man would be wilding together, right back in step again.

I was miserable as fuck for the next three months.

When Free came back from Atlanta he not only locked me all the way down, he laid out the rules for me in a way I could understand.

“You put bad light on me,” he told me. I had been itching to get the hell outta that house and away from his stank-feet Aunt Mercy Ann, but Free had other plans for me. “You gave me some real bad press. You my girl and things, but from now on we gonna do shit my way, Saucy. And you can believe that.”

This cat called himself trying to dignify me up. He was the boss and I was the bitch. He decided what clothes I was gonna wear. How I did my hair. What jewelry went with what, and how I should walk, talk, and act when we was out in public.

“Just check out Beyoncé’s flow,” he told me. “She’s all class and shine, baby. B gets down for the camera, but it don’t matter how she grinds it up on that stage, when they stick a mic in her grill she opens her mouth and her game is silky clean. She walks it and talks it like a real lady. She’s amazing.”

Well I wasn’t no damn Beyoncé! First of all, I looked better than her. All that fake-ass blond hair and colored eyes, who needed all that when you had chinky eyes and good hair like mine? And yeah, B was real cute and she could sing, but I had a higher ass than she did, and bigger titties too. Plus, my waist was a lot smaller and you could tell if she stopped dancing she was gone be fat one day. As soon as she stopped shaking her ass around the stage or dropped a couple of brats, she’d be walking around here looking just like Tai.

I wanted to kill Free’s ass when he told me I couldn’t go back to the apartment and get none of my stuff. I wasn’t about being no damn prisoner, and I told his ass that.

“You ain’t locking me up,” I said, when he came in one day and stated that I would be staying in his shitty little house full-time until I had his baby. “I’m a grown-ass woman, Free. And I ain’t ya damn wife.”

“You ain’t gotta be. You my lady and my personal incubator right now. You harvesting my first seed. And until he gets here, I’ma make sure you stay straight.”

He took Aunt Mercy Ann out shopping and they came back with all kinds of old lady maternity shit they wanted me to wear. You shoulda seen them clothes! Horse pants! Walrus shirts! Big, calf-length tent dresses, coffee-colored support stockings, ugly black old lady clunker loafer shoes, and the drawers! Goddamn! Huge, horrible Fruit of the Looms that I coulda pulled all the way up over my titties! WHERE THE FUCK DID THEY STASH MY THONGS!?!

But Free wasn’t finished.

“And until you learn how to speak right, baby just keep your mouth closed when a whole lot of people are around. Especially them chicks from
S2S
and those kinda joints. You’re real pretty, Saucy. Nah, you’re more than that. You’re a stunna. Beautiful. They all wanna be up in your flow trying to catch your true flavor. But don’t let ’em. You ain’t gotta say shit, Saucy. Just stand there and take your cue from me and you’ll be straight. Matter of fact, a good friend of mine is gonna swing by next week. She’ll give you some inside tips on what you can do to improve the kinda image you trying to present. Back in the day she was the one who taught Mary J. and Queen Latifah how to slow their hood game down and come across looking and sounding correct in public.”

It burned me the fuck up that Free was more worried about his public damn image than he was about what I wanted! I hated when he turned that big-ass cheetah grin on whenever a camera was around. Forget all that shit about creating the right perception for his damn business. If he had been on his game and his partner wasn’t so shady, he wouldn’t be having to rebuild his shit up from scratch in the first place!

Between him and Aunt Mercy Ann I stayed mad for three months. Fair Lawn, New Jersey, was dead, dead, dead! It was like a damn cemetery out there! The only action going on was watching little white kids riding skateboards and scooters up and down the street or shooting baskets in the hoop at the end of the block. That’s about all I did every day. When I got tired of leaning over the porch rail I went back inside and read some
Vibe, Source,
and
Don Diva,
to stay up on the industry happenings and bring some excitement to my life.

I lived for those few times Free came and got me and took me out to some show or event with him. Yeah, some other bitch woulda been happy to latch onto his arm and smile for the cameras, but it was that whole “image” thing that kept him drawn to me. The word was out and everybody knew I was having his baby. There was no way in hell Free Moore was gonna have them writing no crazy “baby daddy” shit about him in the
National Enquirer
. He was gonna make this shit look right if it killed him. If it killed me too.

So I sat around his little crib getting fat and feeling miserable, while Tai was out there loving life. She called a lot too, just so she could get in my head. That coat hanger had fucked up her uterus so she pretended like she was all interested in my pregnancy. She was always telling me who was doing what on the streets, which top artists she’d been hanging out with, and what slamming parties she was hitting. Whenever I got off the phone with Tai I felt worse than ever. I mean, she was working with some real shot callers and power players, and the way she made it sound she was real popular and they all liked her, inviting her to their phat mansions in L.A. and Vegas and whatnot. I knew damn well if people like that dug Tai, they would love the hell outta me, and I couldn’t wait to drop this load and get back on my game.

“You know your boy been going around talking mad shit about Free,” she reported to me one day.

“My boy who?”

“You know who. That dude Quaison. He just signed with that small label Crazy Cuts and now he’s going around dissin’ Free on all his tracks.”

“That boy is just stupid. He’s outta his league.”

Tai agreed. “Yeah he is, because now everybody out there is getting back at him. Saying his lyrics are wack and the only reason he’s tryna bring beef between him and Free is so he can get his name out there.”

My lip was poked way out. I didn’t like Tai having to tell me everything that was going on. “Free didn’t even tell me nothing about that. He got me stuck all the way out here in Jersey when all the real shit is happening in New York.”

“Just relax, Saucy,” Tai said. “He probably didn’t tell you because Quaison is a minor player just trying to come up by starting some shit. And besides, you’re right across the bridge in North Jersey, girl. I can spit from there to New York, so don’t act like you down in Mexico somewhere.”

“So what else is going on?” I said, hating that I had to ask, but dying to hear more.

“Same stuff, girl. We’re real busy at work and Jaheim is signing more and more clients. Did I tell you we got your friend Marshall George on our account now?”

“That stupid, stank-breath, winky-dink, ugly mother-fucker?”

Tai laughed. “That rich, stupid, stank-breath, winky-dink, ugly motherfucker! Besides, he wasn’t all that when he had you living up in his phat crib and paying your bills. I guess Dymond Jackson don’t think his breath is that bad. They got married on the hush tip a few weeks ago.”

“What!” I damn near shrieked. “And nobody told me?”

“What was there to tell, Saucy? They didn’t have no ceremony. They just called a preacher over to the crib and did it. Wasn’t no big party involved, or nothing like that.”

“Who cares,” I muttered. “I bet she don’t know he got a new bitch he moved into that apartment when I left him. And I know he don’t know some shit about her that I know either. The last time I seen that girl she tried to front me off, remember? We was at that release party y’all did for Lil Killa?”

Tai sighed in my ear. “You was drunk, Saucy. And pulling all over that girl’s dress. She was embarrassed, shit. I woulda been too if you was hanging all off my clothes trying to get me out on the dance floor!”

“Stop exaggerating!” I yelled. “Every damn body was drinking that night. Even you. So don’t even try it. Plus, chicks dance together all the time at clubs and stuff. She didn’t have to play me like I was just a regular groupie and we wasn’t really tight.”

“But a slow song was playing, Saucy, and couples were on the dance floor! Dymond is rich and world famous! Don’t tell me you was gonna get her out on the floor and slow-grind her pussy! That shit woulda been worse than Madonna kissing Britney Spears. White girls can get away with that shit, but Dymond’s name woulda been on the floor. Nah. She played it
and
you the right way.”