The Punany Experience (5 page)

“Man, I’m telling you, this girl is different. I can’t seem to break her,” Keith said, when he found Dream Crow sitting at her dressing table again.

“Mmmm,” she mumbled, as she primped one last time in the mirror, thinking of her brother, Hartford, and her promise to him to meet a friend of his who was in town for a music convention at the Moscone Center. He had been blowing up her pager all night with reminder calls that the man would only be at The Bellevue Hotel until six o’clock the next morning. Hartford was desperate
to get his sister out of the life. He was only nineteen and already on his way to the big time in the music industry. When they were children, he had made a promise to her to make her a star.

Hartford was always complimenting her. He would say, “Your voice is almost as beautiful as you are, big sister.”

Part of Dream Crow thought that Hartford was simply being a good brother, or working on her self-esteem to get her off the track and back on track. The other part of her knew that it was his way of taking care of her, as she had taken care of him, all that time their mother was too broken to even take care of herself. Their natural father, the late Jay Crow, had been a well-respected musician whose talents were as well known as his sins. He was a good provider, but he was also a violent and suspicious husband, prone to jealous rages. On nights when their father would come home drunk, the nights when a beating could be anticipated for their mother, Dream Crow would feed Hartford and Blue early and keep them in their room, entertained by concerts featuring herself as Chaka Khan, Patti LaBelle, or Donna Summer.

When Jay Crow died at forty-four with an enlarged liver and a surprised look on his face, staring at his wife from the pillow beside hers, he still had a fist full of her hair in his hand. Except for the house they lived in, he had gambled away most of his possessions by then. He didn’t have life insurance or a savings of any kind, leaving his family impoverished and his uneducated, inexperienced wife severely depressed. She had always stayed in the house, day and night. Their father forbade her to leave. But when he died, their mother could not get out of bed. Dream Crow became the woman of the house, and raised Hartford and Blue on pure love and a diet of Oodles of Noodles. Asking for help from the government meant asking for trouble, so Dream Crow did whatever she needed to do to survive and keep her
family together. Her younger sister, Blue, was assigned to nurse her mother back to health and Hartford made sure he did his part with his paper route.

“Girl, you got a body that could make a blind man blush,” a voice said to her from a Lincoln Continental, driving five miles an hour beside her as she walked home from school one day. Dream Crow was budding into a promising young artist with vocal, dance, and acting skills. She was focused on her education, but desperate for a break from the poverty and responsibility she had faced by the time she was only fourteen years old. So when Seth came along, she was all ears.

Seth was thirty-two, and had been a player all of his life. He had a good car and some decent hustles that included an uncanny ability to find things for people. But he needed a place to stay. When he found some antidepressants for her mother, Dream Crow named a price and cleared a space for him that he could call a room.

One Saturday morning, the children and Seth were sitting down for breakfast when Seth looked up and saw the children’s mother standing in the doorway. “Who are you?” she asked him. “Who said you could bring my children pancakes?”

Seth looked to Dream Crow for an answer. “Momma, this is Seth. He’s been waiting to meet you…”

Seth married her mother, but everyone in the house realized that he was there for Dream Crow. He was a supportive and present adult in Dream Crow’s life, and had won her heart easily with attention. He attended her recitals and showed up for parent-teacher conferences when her mother was too medicated and numb to be a parent at all. Dream Crow might have stayed there with him, seen her brother and sister off to college, and taken care of her mother, but Seth got caught up and started using. When
she was seventeen, he traded Dream Crow to Keith for a brick of cocaine.

Hartford hated his stepfather for what he had made his sister become. He wanted to save her. He wanted her to realize that she needed to save herself and that she had the talent to do it. Now that he had both feet in the door, and a hit song waiting to be recorded, he was inviting Dream Crow and their sister, Blue, to come inside.

Dream Crow noticed the roots of her hair sweating back and her curls going limp. She checked the clock.
Ten more minutes and I need to be walking out of the door
, she thought, firing up her curling iron again.

“I can’t believe it, man. I think I love her.” Keith had not meant to say the words out loud, especially not in front of the only girl on his team, but they had been said and he couldn’t take them back.

“You think you love her? What kind of shit is that for a pimp to say?” Dream Crow hissed at him. She grabbed her curling iron and playfully lunged at his image behind her in the glass.

“Aw, baby, that’s what pimps do. We love everybody.” Keith kissed at her annoyed reflection in the mirror. “But, for real, the bitch ain’t budging. Here she is, going to be able to leave home soon, and she’s talking some bullshit about business school. And she had the nerve to be talking about ‘ain’t no basketball scholarships for this school,’ like I’m supposed to pay for the shit. She’s got me twisted.”

“It sounded to me like she was mad about something else.”

“Huh? Don’t get beside yourself. Not now. I really don’t feel like beating your ass tonight.”

Yeah, I’ve heard, an outbreak can make you tired
, Dream Crow thought as she avoided his eyes charging at her in the mirror. In
the early 80’s, Castlemont, the high school in her East Oakland neighborhood, had been nicknamed “Herpes High” when the
Oakland Tribune
newspaper reported that a lot of the students had been infected. The high school clinic made a point of preparing all incoming high school students with information on the incurable virus, so Dream Crow knew exactly what to look for. The second she saw the scars on Keith, she laid down the law about sex with him. If he wanted her to work for him, she would, but there would be no fucking between them.

Sex was more than a pastime or a good time for Dream Crow. She was not an innocent girl when she met Keith. Sex was neither a sin nor a misdemeanor punishable by God, or by law, in her book. Sex was a business, like any other business, and it was not to be compromised or jeopardized by incompetence, ignorance, and especially not sexually transmitted diseases. She could spot a man who was not clean over the phone. When she met Keith, she had examined him thoroughly and knew the scars were the mark of the beast. So theirs was not a relationship based on sex. She was loyal to him like one was to a job or a boss, but she was beginning to see his weaknesses. She was beginning to see that he wasn’t qualified to pimp her or anyone else.

“I can hear you thinking,” he said. His words were code for, “Get the fuck out and make us some money before I get my belt.”

He was threatening her a lot lately, but he had only used his belt on her once. But once was enough for her to know that she should never disrespect him. The whipping she had endured had been vicious and painful. The very thought of it had been enough to keep Dream Crow in line ever since.

She had been with him for a year; it was her eighteenth birthday and he had taken her out for dinner. They had a nice time, but back then she didn’t know how to control her alcohol. So when
one drink led to another, her mouth had started running. Over dinner she had let him pick her brain. She confessed that she had fucked an associate of his. She had laughed into her brandy glass when she told him that she didn’t charge a dime. She wanted to fuck the guy, so she did, she told him.

“You can’t imagine how liberating it was to fuck for pleasure,” she blurted out in the car when he strapped her in her seat belt. Then, she passed out. When she woke up, naked in the bed, Keith was pouring water on her sheet. He had a belt in his hand.

“Are you sober now?” he asked. “I want you to be sober so you can feel this shit.”
Whap!
His belt came down on her.
“Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you
…” He sang the birthday song while he dropped his belt across her ass, thighs, and back over and over again.

Dream Crow screamed and tried to get off the bed as he burst into the second chorus:
“How old are you
?” But Keith had tied the sheet down so Dream Crow was stuck between it and the mattress. After a minute or so, she was getting numb. “I might not be fucking you, but you
will
respect me.”

Dream Crow wasn’t surprised that he had beaten her. She lay in the aftermath with the feeling in her skin returning and burning. She was thinking,
“Maybe I wanted him to beat me.”
She thought,
“It wasn’t that bad.”
And she thought,
“It could have been worse.”
She never thought of leaving.

“At least I know you ain’t a punk,” she had said when he untied the sheet.

She deserved to get her ass whipped that time, she told herself, but it would not happen again. So she did what she was supposed to: brought in the money, kept her personal business to herself, and never got drunk again. Now, with money getting funny, she was afraid that it would not be long before his ego brought his
pimp hand out again. She would not be able to live like that girl next door, getting beaten every night.

Ugh, Ugh, no way
, she thought.

There was a moment of understanding silence between Dream Crow and Keith. Then he continued to talk about “Korea Smith, a high school basketball player, beautiful enough to model, smart enough to run a corporation someday…she loves her mother… she wants to move her mother out of the projects…she lives in the 69th Avenue Village Projects…”

“Bla, bla, bla…”
Dream Crow said inside her mind as she curled her hair. She checked the clock every thirty seconds, and let him talk until her hair was finished.

“Keith, can I ask you something, and you promise not to get mad?”

“If I might get mad, maybe it’s something you shouldn’t ask.”

“Why do you want to turn a girl like that out? This life isn’t any kind of life for the girl you’re describing. This life is for women who don’t have so many choices; women who aren’t so talented.”

Keith ignored Dream Crow as if she hadn’t spoken at all. She exhaled in defeat and started straightening up her dressing table.

“She needs to come to an understanding about this here,” he said. “Maybe you can help me, baby. I think she may have a thing for girls. It’s not that she plays hoop; she naturally has a lot of dude in her. I think she might even shave her chin.”

Distracted from her own thoughts, Dream Crow looked at Keith and repeated what she thought she had heard. “Did you say she has a beard? Damn, at sixteen? Gross! Now you know I’m strictly dickly. If I wasn’t, I’d be licking my way to riches all over Nob Hill, getting paid for real. I’ve heard lesbians and lonely widows can be real generous.”

“So you’ll consider it then?”

“Me, fuck a bearded kid, to pull her for you? No, absolutely not. Some things are simply out of the question. I wouldn’t do that, not even for you, Daddy. Sorry.”

“That’s cold, Dream Crow. That’s real cold. But for real, she’s really pretty though. She’s brown-skinned with a real tight body, big titties, a fat ass, the whole nine, you know? I thought…I mean, this is San Francisco, and with things being kind of rough around here, it wouldn’t hurt you none to open your mind up a little bit. Who’s going to know you’re munching on fur burger?”

“Gross.”

Keith laughed. “Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t be down with that shit. I was fucking with you.”

“Look, Daddy,” Dream Crow said, “I don’t have to keep staying around for this crazy talk. You sound kind of desperate, like you’re losing your confidence. The Keith I know wouldn’t be chasing after some kid and spending money like you’ve been doing. Besides, we don’t need a child to do a woman’s work. I heard there were some outlaws over in the Tenderloin. I could take off tomorrow night and go recruit there.”

“I like top-notch bitches. You know how much I dropped on Seth for you? It took you a long-ass time to work off that debt. Shit, I’m just now seeing any real profit, since you’ve been taking calls instead of making corners. When I saw you, I realized we could do some real business. You think my stable cut out on me, don’t you?” He looked at Dream Crow with seriousness in his eyes. “Don’t you?”

“Didn’t they?”

“Hell no; I traded them hoes.”

“Traded them?”

“Yes, I did; Mickey, Trina, and Sasha. I traded them twenty-dollar bitches to Rico. He ain’t pulled shit from me. I didn’t need them anymore. I didn’t need them once I had you. I didn’t want
to tell you; I didn’t want you to get all beside yourself, thinking too high. I didn’t know you like that. I didn’t realize how loyal you are. When I was dealing with street hoes, I didn’t know anything about business. I got you off the streets as soon as I could line up the kind of clientele you should have. In no time, you were pulling in what all three of them put together were making working those corners.”

It was a rude awakening for Dream Crow. She hadn’t realized how valuable she had been to Keith until that very moment.

“Now that we’ve learned that street money ain’t money at all, you want to go pick up some trash in the Tenderloin and bring it here? Here? I don’t think so,” Keith said. “This ain’t the Open Door Mission. I’m only dealing with the best, baby, so we can make that top money. If we start scraping the bottom of the pond, we’ll have a stable full of bitches in and out of county jail and rehab. Instead of paying for Gucci bags, we’ll be stacking up medical bills. Remember how Trina was always getting her ass beat because of her mouth?”

Dream Crow had to laugh at that. Trina could fuck up a dude’s wet dream with her foul mouth. She had no business trying to sell fantasies.