A thick, mustard-colored girl was outside. I remembered her from the night I’d seen them perform at the Townhouse. Butter Pecan. She had on tan capri pants, three-inch black sandals, a sleeveless cotton blouse that showed off her boulders. The only thing that was tacky was the fluorescent pager clipped to her front pocket, and I wasn’t too fond of hooped nose rings. I don’t think people should draw attention to the place where stalactites originate.
Jefferson sighed, “Butter? How you know where my woman live?”
Butter’s swollen eyes were almost the color of ketchup. Her tone feather soft when she spoke, “You tell me, Jefferson.”
Gerri maneuvered around Jefferson’s huge body, opened the black screen door, and let Butter in. The girl’s posture and movements didn’t have any real femininity. She had that manufactured hardness that was attractive to certain type of peeps.
Butter said, “I write the songs. Everything was fine before you hooked up with Gerri. Now you want to control everything—”
Gerri snapped, “I’m not trying to control. You need to learn to lis—”
“Butter,” Jefferson said, “don’t do this. After all I’ve done for the group, don’t playa hate because I switched lead singers on a few cuts. Okay, you know this here my woman, and I don’t know why you tripping.”
“I write all the songs, put the group together, and now you trying to make me sit in the back of the bus.”
Butter had a deranged scowl that didn’t quite go with her pretty face. I had a feeling that something wasn’t right about this girl. Her eyes told me that.
Jefferson stood as close to Gerri as he could.
I asked, “How old are you, Butter?”
She hesitated. “Nineteen.”
Startled, I asked, “Then, you’re in school?”
“Uh-huh,” she said. Her tone was a lot nicer when she talked to me, maybe because my tone was a lot nicer when I talked to her. She added, “I go to LACC.”
“Well, good for you,” Gerri said with undisguised sarcasm. Then she cut to the chase and moved the meeting forward. “You sticking to the same story and telling me Jefferson screwed you on a regular basis?”
“Yeah.” Butter paused. “We got busy a lot.”
“Whoa, whoa, hold up here,” Jefferson was shouting. “Why you up in my crib sweatin’ me? Stop lying, Butter.”
Gerri asked Butter, “Without a condom?”
“He didn’t like the way they felt. Said one of them, I think the one with the suicide stuff—”
I corrected her, “Spermicide. I think you mean spermicide.”
“Yeah, that stuff. He said it made his thing itch or something.”
Jefferson laughed and threw his hands up. “She’s lying.”
“We can settle this real quick.” Gerri opened a Ralph’s grocery sack on the kitchen table. “EPT time, sweetheart. If you’re pregnant, you won’t mind taking this pop quiz.”
My heart was a rock. Butter’s shaky hands took the box from Gerri. Jefferson’s mouth opened, eyes bugged out like the slaves on the two-hundred-year-old poster.
Butter fumbled with the box, turned it side to side. Her forehead wrinkled in a way that let me know she was confused about the directions.
I asked, “You ever had to do one of those before?”
She shook her head. “Have you?”
“Too many times,” I mumbled. I went over and gently put my arm on her shoulder. “You pull the strip out, pee on it.”
Butter looked at me and asked, “Then what?”
“You pray you don’t get two dots.”
“What does two dots mean?”
Gerri jumped in with venom: “That means you’re knocked up and somebody’s about to be homeless. One dot means you’re not pregnant and somebody’s lying. Either way, somebody’s lying to me in my house. You’d just better hope it ain’t you, Jefferson.”
With his face hung low, Jefferson massaged his neck, looked flushed. He hopped up and grumbled, “Enough of this madness. I’m going down—”
“If you walk out that door,
don’t look back
.”
He sat back down, rubbed his face. He looked so young. Gerri, so old. Butter was aging in front of my face, frozen by indecision.
I found some tissue in my handbag right next to my never-used stun gun, then blew my nose. Cleared my sinuses and wondered how this day would change the rest of Butter’s days. How it would change Gerri’s.
Butter’s chest heaved. She shifted to and fro, made me think that she was going to make a mad dash for the front door.
“You see, she lying.” Jefferson chuckled like the girl was insane. “Butter, fess up. Nobody gonna be mad because you jealous and told a lie.”
Butter said, “My major is criminal justice. I want to be an entertainment lawyer—well, I used to want to be—so that’s why I know what Jefferson and Gerri, that contract ain’t right. You trying to pull the same shit they pulled on TLC. That’s why they went bankrupt, because they wasn’t handling their business. I ain’t stupid. Just because I’m trying to be a rapper doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I don’t like the way you let Gerri talk down to me, Jefferson. You’ve mistreated me ever since you met her.”
She sounded smarter, had dropped that hip-hop persona she had whenever she was with her friends. A tear rolled down the girl’s face, but was wiped away before it got beyond her pudgy nose. Butter looked at Gerri in a way that made me think she’d changed her mind about the pop quiz.
Gerri told the kid, “Want me to show you the way to the bathroom?”
“I already know where the bathroom’s at.” Butter looked down on Jefferson, cringing like she was smelling the depths of his anus, but kept talking to Gerri. “Down the hall on the left. That one’s small and the shower backs up if you turn the water up too high. The bathroom in the bedroom is bigger and always much cleaner. And you got some boss perfume on your dresser by your glass jewelry box. And your peach and green comforter is all that. Your sheets don’t really match because you gotta different shade of green in ’em, but it’s all good.”
Gerri’s face contorted a thousand different ways.
Jefferson gulped, dropped his oily face into his hands.
Butter wiped her eyes, lowered her voice. “Yep, I know where to go.”
Gerri moaned, wiped her damp eyes.
When Butter returned from the bathroom, she moved with labored steps down the carpeted hallway, like she was on death row. She shot a watery-eyed scowl at Jefferson.
Butter mumbled, “Two dots.”
14
Vince
I took my partner with the Rick James-looking hairstyle up to the 24-Hour Fitness inside the Hilton on Century Boulevard, the one all the brothas and sistas flocked to. We ran into our old crew, Stomach Man and John Marshall, hit the free weights, worked chest, some back, threw in some abs. Then we did Evelyn Orange’s advanced-step class. Showered. By eight o’clock we were at the pool hall on Crenshaw and Jefferson, not too far from the unused train tracks and the overused probation department.
“Why you shooting so hard?” I asked as I fanned a cloud of the clove odor from my face. “What are you trying to do, make the balls explode?”
“Play your game how you wanna play,” Womack said. He took a draw on his Djarum. “I’ll play mine my way.”
“What was the point of us going to the gym if you’re gonna fire up a cancer stick as soon as you get out of the sauna?”
“This is my first smoke in two days, so lighten up.”
“You’ve got four kids and a wife.”
“That’ll drive any man to smoke.”
Womack had been snappy all evening. In the locker room at the gym he’d been talking about Rosa Lee, his marriage, the kids. He felt he was doing all he was supposed to do, but Rosa Lee was always complaining, had been in the habit of making snide remarks. And since meeting Dana, Rosa Lee wanted to go to New York and visit Times Square—without him or the kids.
When we were in the step class, he was in a world of his own. Good music and a funky class brought out the rhythm in a brother. He was footloose, fancy free. Womack has always been a good dancer, could do all of that pop lock’n, break dancin’, moonwalkin’ crap, so he put an ethnic twist to the moves like the hurricane, snake, double dutch, merry-go-round, and got his clown on in class. Had everybody watching him, was the center of attention, like he used to be when we were in high school, hanging out in the same halls that Lisa Leslie and Byron Scott walked every day.
But that aerobics class was over and the music had ended.
I asked, “You all right?”
He nodded. Sighed.
The CD machine near the double white doors was thumping out the tune “Harry Hippie.” Those melodies masked the sounds of arguments, laughter, and pool balls colliding at the nine or ten tables around the room. A den filled with restless, energetic people who exchanged gambling monies in the guise of a handshake.
I asked, “Sure you all right?”
Womack sank the eight ball and said, “Rack ’em up.”
A couple of African sisters walked up, laughing and smiling, talking in their native language, and put their pool balls down at the table next to us.
Womack said, loud enough for the light-brown-skinned women to hear, “Two Somalian women are really pretty.”
They didn’t speak back.
Womack responded with a big smile and a lot of humor, “Damn, y’all can’t speak to your African American brothers?”
First they made incredulous faces at each other, then said something in their native tongue. Their brows rose and their light brown faces didn’t have pleasant expressions. They shot us scowls like we were peasants who had spoken to the queen.
Me and Womack looked at each other.
He said, “I think we’ve been dissed.”
I shrugged and muttered, “Inter-fuckin’-nationally.”
“They act like somebody trying to get in their draws. It’s called being cordial.” Womack spoke again, a little clearer, a little louder. Asked them, “How are you lovely ladies doing this evening?”
Both of the women were early twenties, that age when a sister didn’t have too much mental luggage. At least that’s what a brother would assume, because a man never knows what a woman has been through. One had on a dark, fall-flavored miniskirt, the other a springtime sarong. Long, wavy-haired daughters of Africa living in two different seasons.
As for Womack’s last question, no response from the motherland.
Womack blew out his Djarum’s smoke. “You Somalians treat all yo’ African American brothers like that?”
“Arrgh.” The shorter one frowned and gave us stiff words. “We are not Somalians. How dare you. We are Ethiopian. Learn the difference before you speak with ignorance.”
Womack shifted his lean to his other leg, shrugged, chuckled out, “Lighten up. We all from Africa, one way or another.”
“Arrgh!” Once again the shorter one frowned like she was having a root canal with no anesthesia. “What part of Africa are you from?”
Womack leaned back on one of his legs, tilted his head sideways. “What you mean, ‘What part of Africa’?”
“You
black
Americans are always talking about Africa, waving our flag and screaming about the struggle and the cause, and know absolutely nothing about the land. Your
black
American women dress head to toe in my country’s Kente cloth and can’t find my home on a map without a tutor.”
Sounded like it was the wrong time of the month for that nation. I knew when to hold ’em, knew when to fold ’em.
But Womack said, “Woman, I know all about Africa.”
The tall one in the sarong walked and stood in Womack’s face. A straight-up dare. She said, “Okay, Mister African American, name ten nations in Africa. South Africa not included.”
That nose-to-nose challenge was enough to make me and a few more brothers put their lives on pause and turn around. Womack hemmed and hawed, but nothing came out. The girls chuckled. He’d opened himself up for this, but I had some empathy for the man. For my friend. What he was doing was harmless. Every now and then a brother just tried to flirt to see if he still had it.
I spoke up. “Womack, ignore ’em. It’s your shot.”
The women said something rugged in her native tongue, walked away shaking their heads, their hair and backsides bouncing in an aggravated rhythm.
“We in America,” Womack shouted at their table, “I don’t need to know no geography about no damn Africa no way, right, Vince?”
I nodded.
“That’s why I can’t stand them Africans. Hell, we were slaves for four hundred years, and how many of them left their cozy little colonies and tried to help a brother or a sister catch a rowboat back home?”
“None that I know of.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
“Tell it like it ’tis, Brother Womack.”
“Name ten countries.” He mocked her better-than-thou tone, then frowned. “I bet she can’t name ten damn states east of the Miss’ssippi River, Miss’ssippi not included.”
“That’s right.”
“Better yet, name ten freeways between here and the 710. I bet they don’t know about the Red Summer of 1919, when there were twenty-six race riots here in America, or the Tulsa race riot back in 1921 or . . .”
“Preach it out, Womack, preach it out.”
He sucked his teeth. “Nobody wanted to talk to her big flapjack-looking forehead noway. And ain’t neither one of ’em got no kinda ass. How the hell you gonna come all the way from Africa and forget to pack up the booty? They probably from Compton.”
I joked, “Or Santa Ana.”
“Yeah, they probably from Orange fucking County. They needs to hop on John Wayne’s horse and ride back down the 405 with all them Republicans.”
Womack preached through two games. He lost both of ’em. That put twenty extra dollars in my pockets.
We hopped in Womack’s car and headed back to Stocker and Degnan. The air was cool, the area pretty calm, so we sat out on the three concrete steps in front of my building for a while.
That was when I told him what Dana had told me about Rosa Lee being unhappy. Told him about how he had embarrassed his woman down at 5th Street Dick’s, the night when he let his eyes wander all around. Womack could be as sensitive as a woman with tender nipples, so I had wanted to creep in that direction, but sometimes the best approach was the direct approach. That struck a nerve that made his curl straighten out.