Table of Contents
This book is
dedicated to urban scribes far and wide.
Keep doin’ the damn thing.
Acknowledgments
All props go to the Father above for
blessing me with the ink that flows from
my pen. Thanks to Jay, Missy, Tyrone,
and Man for having my back 24/7.
Stay black.
NOIRE
In the beginning . . .
Have you ever rolled over in the middle of the night and realized you were doing shit you swore you’d never do? Sexing brothers you vowed you’d never touch? Bending backward and stooping lower than you ever thought you’d stoop? Well, if you can feel me even a little bit, then let me hit you with a story that might just blow your mind.
And I swear, as crazy as it sounds, every word of it is true. Let me take you to the G-Spot.
A gentlemen’s club in the heart of Harlem. A place where playa-hating and disrespect can cost you your life, and betrayal guarantees you a fate worse than death. My name is Juicy Monique Stanfield. I lost my soul in the G-Spot and this is my story. . . .
Chapter One
I
t was right around midnight and bodies were heating up at the G-Spot. I should have been at home studying for a chemistry test but instead I was sitting with my girl Brittany in a private booth at the most expensive gentlemen’s club in Harlem.
“This place is the shit, Juicy.” The music was loud and Brittany was dancing in her seat. “Your man is large,” Brittany said. “Old as dirt, but large. If Cecil owned a fly joint like this instead of a detail shop, I’d be hanging lovely every night. I can’t believe they charge a grand just to get in the door, but with all these rich-ass basketball players and rap artists up in here I guess cheddar ain’t nothing but cheese.”
Saturday night was Ladies’ Night at the G-Spot Social Club.
Although the lap dances and private parties catered to the men, one night a week sisters came out to drool over some of the sexiest brothers on the New York street scene.
Brittany was steady running her mouth. She was in my finance class at Fordham University, and I had invited her down to the Spot because I liked having company.
“Juice,” she said, “this place is not only classy, but it’s also hot! Thanks for getting me in for free, but damn, girl, when are the brothers coming out?”
“Hold on,” I told her. “The male strippers are coming up next.”
And that’s when my trouble will really begin,
I thought, crossing my legs.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Brittany said. Dressed in a short white skirt and a silk halter, she was drinking double shots of alize and had three lines of coke laid out on the table in front of her. “I mean, the girls are working it, but where are the men with the fine bodies? I want to see some hard asses and Mandingo backs. Maybe even get me some dill-zick, if they slinging any!”
As soon as she said that I looked around for G and saw him walking up the stairs like he did every night at this time. G was a man of habit. I could put my money on it that every night at exactly midnight, he would disappear upstairs to check on his drug operation and make sure each nanogram of his powder was accounted for.
The house rule was to get the men to spend every dime in their pockets, and every girl had to do her part. It was about getting them to buy drinks all night, pay for lap dances; and if they wanted to fuck, they paid for the sex and the room, too.
And Brittany was right. Money wasn’t a big thing for the drug dealers and playas, but I could see how it would turn her on. The dollars had my nose open at first too, but not anymore. These days chasing the thing that I wanted most could get me killed. It was like being addicted to candy and working in a chocolate factory where the product was off limits. Night after night I sat in the G-Spot, the biggest sex den in New York City, and watched others get what I needed.
Let me just put it out there.
I was a nineteen-year-old Harlem girl with a healthy appetite. But it wasn’t sweets that I craved.
And it wasn’t drugs. It wasn’t jewelry, and it wasn’t Prada skirts or fur coats neither.
All that stuff was at my fingertips, mine for the taking. I was miserable in spite of all the bling. Because even though I rolled with the richest man in Harlem, I couldn’t get my g-spot hit. I was Granite McKay’s woman, and I craved dick.
I
guess you could say G inherited me from my grandmother, who had been good friends with him and his mother.
Even though he was twenty-seven years older than me, I had known him all my life. When I was a kid we lived on 136th Street in Harlem, and I used to run numbers for my grandmother. I could remember what everybody on the block played, and I never forgot a bet. Grandmother was sanctified but she played her some numbers every day. I would run up to the number house and put the numbers in, then keep track of who hit without ever writing any of it down.
Every afternoon when whoever hit got paid, my grandmother got her cut and me and my younger brother Jimmy got a Nehi grape soda, a pack of watermelon Now & Laters, and some rainbow jawbreakers.
G owned the number spot and a lot of other businesses in Harlem, too. He had been married to a Puerto Rican woman at one time, but people said she disappeared one day and nobody ever went looking for her. G had a son named Gino, but nobody had seen him in years. He went to college in another state because G wanted him to live a different type of life.
By the time I was fifteen I was looking at Granite McKay with grown-woman eyes because he had a body that was out of this world. I had heard all kinds of rumors about older men like him. Old men give you worms. Old cum turns into buttermilk. Old balls sag and have gray hairs on them. I didn’t listen to none of that shit because I didn’t think it applied to the way G was laying it down. Young or old, he was the finest man I’d ever seen in my life. G was tall and had dark skin and hair that was real black and wavy.
Every six months he was driving a spanking new car. People on the street worshipped him and treated him like the king of Harlem.
But one day me and Jimmy and Grandmother watched from our window as G beat a man down on a street corner. The man was bleeding and begging for his life, and G held him down and bent his fingers back one at a time.
All ten of them. I could feel his bones crack. A cop car drove up and when the patrolmen inside saw that it was G administering the ass-whipping they pulled away and kept right on going. When I asked Grandmother what the man could have done that was so bad, she told me he was G’s cousin, and that he’d cheated G out of twenty dollars on a bet. I couldn’t understand it because G was so rich. He owned all the drug dealers in Harlem. He owned the number spots and restaurants and clubs. Twenty dollars was nothing to a man like him.
But Grandmother said it was the betrayal and not the money that almost got the man killed. She said G had killed other people for less than that and the only reason G didn’t kill this man because they were family and had grown up together and G loved him. I saw the man not too long after that on Malcolm X Boulevard and both of his hands were in a cast. One of his eyeballs was gone out the socket and he had no front teeth. Grandmother said G let his cousin live as a lesson to everybody walking the streets of Harlem: Nobody betrayed G and got away with it.
“G
irl, you sure the dranky dranks are free?” Brittany picked up her glass and guzzled her drink down. She sniffed a line from the table and then offered me some. I shook my head. My mother had been a junkie ho so I never used drugs.
The crowd started clapping and Brittany pointed up at the stage. Her mouth fell open as the spotlight shone on a sister who was squatting with her back to the crowd. The girl was named Honey Dew, and dollars was being thrown up on the stage like mad. Honey Dew bent over and spread her butt cheeks and picked up a full bottle of Coke using just the muscles in her pussy.
“Oooh! Did you see that!” Brittany and everybody else was going crazy. “I gotta learn that move!”
“I don’t know if she’s giving lessons, but drink all you want.” I turned away from the scene on the stage. “Go on, Britt. Order another round. Whatever you want is yours tonight.”
I wished I could say the same thing about myself. I couldn’t get what I wanted if I tried. None of the men in Harlem were crazy enough to touch me. G would never cheat on me, and he played me so close I couldn’t cheat on him either. He allowed me
to go to college three days a week, but that was only to keep me from getting bored.
“A busy mind will keep the devil out of you,” he said. So I went to Fordham University in the Bronx and studied dance. My dance instructor said that although I had never taken classes before I was one of the best students she had ever seen. She said I moved my body like it was for sale, and in a way it was. G paid all the bills for me and Jimmy, even for Jimmy’s special doctors, and I gave up my life in return. Since he was letting me go to college I had wanted to enroll for a minor in political science. But G said that would only make me sound like one of those smart-mouth bitches who needed their tongues cut out.
And whatever G said was exactly what went.
Even though I was in school, G liked to take me out with him to the club every night, just to show me off. He’d pick out my clothes and tell me how much makeup to put on, then march me around in front of his friends. “You a fine chick, Juicy. Pretty hair, caramel skin. You got the finest body I’ve ever seen. Don’t make me kill none of these motherfuckers over you.”
So you might ask, if I had a rich sugar daddy who looked good, adored me, let me get my education, and kept me and my brother in the finest condition, why was I so unhappy? Well, I can tell you! G was a lot older than me and the truth was he just couldn’t keep up.
Even though he had the right package, the goods just didn’t function like I needed them to. Besides, G didn’t trust women so he was sexually limited. He didn’t eat pussy and he didn’t tongue kiss, which were two things I was dying for. G said pussy was nasty and he only put his dick in it because he had to.
I remember the night G made me his. It was two years ago and even though I was only seventeen, I was more than ready. I had always been a sexual person. I started masturbating as soon as I discovered what my clitoris was, but fear of my grandmother had kept me from messing with boys. One time I got a sex flick from my girlfriend Rashida and snuck it home and watched it while Grandmother took Jimmy to the doctor. Seeing all of those hard dicks made me so hot I tried to push a cold fat cucumber up inside me, but it hurt too bad and I had to stop.
G had been looking at me for a long time and I knew it. I was a senior in high school and I worked part time at a beauty shop on
Amsterdam Avenue run by Dominicans. G used to park his freshly waxed car outside the shop and just watch me through the window.
All those old women in there swore he was looking at them and they would be posing all up in the window and shit, trying to get his attention. They just couldn’t believe a big-time playa like him wanted my young dumb ass.
A month later I graduated from high school and the next day my grandmother laid down for a quick nap and died in her sleep. G came by the apartment with a sympathy card and enough cash for us to put her away nicely. Like most people I was scared of the dead, but I was even more afraid of cemeteries and dark holes. When I was little some hysterical saint from the First Baptist Church had almost pushed me into my mother’s open grave, and that was the last time I’d stepped foot inside a cemetery.
I told G I didn’t want to go to Grandmother’s burial, and he said he understood. He arranged for Grandmother to have a private burial and even paid for her headstone and let me pick out the type of letters and what I wanted it to say. The next night he picked me up from the apartment and took me over to the Spot. He made security lock all the doors and turn on the bright lights. He told them to turn off the music, get the hoes out the back rooms, and then he called out all his staff, even the cleaning people.
“All right. I’m gonna ask y’all once and I expect the motherfuckin truth.” He held me by my arm and walked me up on the stage. “This is Juicy from 136th Street. Who in here done had some of this?
Anybody in here done sucked her or fucked her? I wanna know if you so much as
smelled
this pussy. If your fingers been in it. If your tongue been in it. If your dick been in it. If you’ve rubbed your clit on it.”
All I heard was a bunch of “no G, no”s.
“Good, then. Juicy is
mine,
and that’s all I’m gonna say.”
Everybody knew what that meant. I was smiling inside because like I said, I had never been touched. Plus, I was hyped about G’s money and thought I had just hit the number big time. I just knew I was going to lay up in that phat apartment he kept on Central Park West and have neck-cracking sex with an experienced man in a round waterbed.
Instead I was so disappointed I could have died. G’s entire bedroom was done up in mirrors, the walls, the ceilings, and even the floors. There wasn’t a streak of dust on them either. The bed wasn’t round and it wasn’t a waterbed, but it was huge and it felt like the mattress was made of pillows. He had taken me shopping during the day and to a classy, expensive restaurant afterward. He’d been so nice to me, holding doors open and buying me roses. I just knew my whole life was set. Back at the apartment that night I took a long bath and put all kinds of lotion all over my body. It was the first time I had ever been in a bathtub so deep or felt water so hot. I was so excited about what was about to happen that just the sensation of rubbing my own flesh turned me on. I waited until G got in the shower, then stuck my towel between my legs and thought about what he was going to do to me. I was ready for the real thing by the time he turned off the water.
When G walked into the room wearing only a pair of white silk boxers I almost fainted. He was old, but he didn’t smell like old people and he didn’t look like old people neither. G was in his middle forties but he ate right and lifted weights. He had a ripped stomach and a built chest, and when I saw all that long black dick pressed up against his stomach I felt blessed. But as soon as he got in the bed it all changed.
“Oooh, baby.” I was rubbing my hands all over his body. I felt his arms and his chest and before I could stop myself, I grabbed his big dick with both hands. He pulled away.
“Girl, what the fuck is wrong with you?” He sat up in the bed looking at me like I was crazy.
“Nothing, baby. I just want to make you feel good.” I took off my thong and bra and held my breasts in my hands. I rubbed and squeezed them like I did when I was alone. I was ready to finally get them sucked. I wanted to push my nipples in G’s mouth, but instead I leaned over and tried to put my tongue between his lips.
He slapped me so hard I almost flew off the bed.
When I sat up the room was spinning.
“Juicy, I know you young and don’t know shit. But I’m gonna tell you something you bet’not never forget. Don’t you ever put your mouth on my lips, or on nothing I have to drink or eat.
And don’t worry about me putting mine on you neither. And let this be the last time you rush me, too. I’m the man up in here, so I’ll come for the pussy. Don’t you be chasing my dick like you no ho, else I’ll put your ass to work in the G-Spot.”