“Check this out,” she said. “I know you don’t hear no good shit like this up in G’s Spot.” Dicey took a CD from the rack and popped it into the stereo. “This Miss Millie Jackson, honey. You need to sit back and suck up what she be saying.”
I closed my eyes and listened as Millie Jackson talked about taking your life back and getting all you could out of a man, sexually and otherwise. I didn’t listen to much music growing up cause Grandmother forbid it, but the stuff Millie was talking about made a whole lot of sense and before I knew it we had listened to the whole CD and over an hour had gone by, with Dicey singing out loud the whole time.
“I might go to a party next weekend,” I blurted out when Dicey got up to turn off the boom box. I didn’t even know I was gonna tell her about the Naughty Girls party, but Millie’s energy had me on a roll and I opened my mouth and started telling Dicey everything Rita had said.
Dicey was stoked. “You’re gonna love it, Juicy. I been to one myself, up in the Bronx, but it was a long time ago. Them women had shit like the D.P.-”
“The D.P.?”
“You don’t know? That’s the double penetrater. A dick for your pussy and one for your asshole too. At the same time.”
“Oh, lordy.”
Dicey stood up and lit a cigarette. “Of course you probably don’t need nothing like that, right? G look like he can bang your head all night long.”
“Shit,” I sucked my teeth. “Bang hell.”
Dicey was on it. “Oh, so Mister Big ain’t all that in the sheets? I always wondered why he chased after young girls, and everybody knows he will only fuck a virgin. He probably couldn’t handle no professional fucker.”
“He can’t even handle me,” I confided. “That’s why I wanna go to this party. I’m tired of wanting what I can’t get. My friend Rita said they sell shit that’ll make you not need no man.”
“Please!” Dicey laughed and turned toward the kitchen with our paper plates in her hand. “They ain’t invented nothin that can take the place of a hard hot dick drilling up in you, but you should be able to find something that’ll come in second place. But why settle for all them tools when you got a real live nigger in your bed every night? Either take charge and make G fuck you right, or go find you some dick you can live with.”
She paused in the doorway. “On second thought, scratch that. G can be a maniac over his pussy-just ask them niggers down at the Spot. You better go to that party on Saturday and stock up, baby girl. Matter fact, if I don’t have to work I might just roll out with you.”
G ruled his empire with an iron fist, and if he came off as ruthless it was because the streets were hard. But sometimes he was stank and nasty for no good reason at all, and the way he did poor Nae-Nae that time just didn’t make no sense.
Nae-Nae was one of the younger girls who stripped at the Spot. Back in the day I used to see her walking with her sisters to the public school we went to a few blocks from my house. When I was in the third grade the school was closed down because of some hazardous stuff in the insulation, and while me and Jimmy got transferred to another school right up the street, Nae-Nae and her sisters got sent to a school way across town.
Nae-Nae was a year older than me, and when she showed up at the Spot a few months earlier she tried to front like she didn’t know me. I didn’t press her though. From what I remembered she came from a quiet, churchified family, and I figured she was ashamed for me to see her humping poles and giving lap dances all night long.
I had no idea what had happened to her sisters or the rest of her family, but Harlem had gotten to Nae-Nae, and she looked just like a lot of turned-out sistahs who didn’t have anything except their asses to fall back on.
One night Nae-Nae came to work carrying a baby on her hip. I was in my usual spot, chilling at the bar shooting the shit with Moonie while Cooter smiled and stuttered all over the customers and poured their liquor. Nae-Nae walked past so fast I barely even noticed her, but a minute later there was such a commotion coming from the dressing room that Moonie told me to go back there and find out what the girls were doing.
“Look at him.” Punanee was grinning at what Nae-Nae was holding in her arms. “All that curly hair and just as cute as he wanna be!”
I stepped through the crowd to see what they were all freaking out over and saw the cutest, fattest baby I’d ever seen in my life. He was past handsome. This baby had dimples everywhere and the biggest prettiest eyes in his little butterscotch face that you ever did see.
“Whose baby?” I asked, and daggone if that little fat butterball didn’t try to jump out of Nae-Nae’s arms and into mine. He stretched his little chubby arms out for me to take him, opening and closing his hands and grinning at me the whole time.
“Mine,” Nae-Nae said, passing him to me. “This is Maleek. My little man.”
I took that handful of fat and dimples into my arms and almost melted, he felt so good pressed against me. His curly hair smelled just like baby lotion and he was clean and fresh like he had just came out of the bath.
“Oh, Nae-Nae,” I said jealously, hefting him in my arms and squeezing one of his ham hock thighs. “He is too fine. How old is he?”
“Seven months,” she said smiling at him. His chin was wet with baby slobber and I wanted to kiss it off. Fifty million hands were reaching for the baby, hoes and strippers totally sprung over his fat cheeks and dimpled grin. I passed Maleek off to the next sister and stood back watching as almost every chick in the dressing room elbowed in to get a turn at touching and sniffing that sweet baby flesh.
“Girl,” Money-Making Monique said cooing at the little boy. “Why you bring that cute little fella up in here?”
Nae-Nae frowned. “My babysitter got sick and my mama ain’t home. I tried to call in but Pluto said if I didn’t show up I was fired. I was gonna ask one of y’all to watch him while I’m onstage, and right after my numbers are up I’ll run back in here to take care of him.”
Every sister in the room started volunteering to watch him. That poor baby was gonna have arm fever by the time they got finished holding and rocking and spoiling him. Nae-Nae stood back watching the women loving her baby up with a smile on her face. She wasn’t funny over him at all like some new mothers were. Making you put a blanket over your shoulder just to hold ’em, and standing guard to make sure you didn’t kiss their baby in the face.
I watched Nae-Nae, wondering how it felt to have something depending on you like that. A real live baby of your own, one you produced from your own body and could shape and mold any way you wanted to. I’d probably never have the chance to feel what she must be feeling. G was proud of the fact that he’d had his nuts cut, and was quick to boast about his baby-making days being over.
But mine weren’t. I hadn’t even gotten started in life yet. But the sad fact was, as long as I belonged to Granite McKay, my ass was shit out of luck if I wanted to have a baby. There was no leaving G for some young virile hard-backed niggah. And if G ever got it in his head that he needed to leave me… well, his pride wouldn’t let me just step. I thought about the Dungeon and that woman in the picture on his desk and shivered. Pushing my way back into the crowd, I snatched for another turn to hold baby Maleek, and as I rocked him and cooed and fought off the hoes, I satisfied myself by pretending for two precious minutes that the fat little baby boy was all mine.
And two minutes was all the time I got with him, too, because one second I was surrounded by strippers a mile thick, and the next second hoes were scuttling back to their rooms and dancers were jumping into their costumes.
G was on the scene.