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  My mama told me I had a fortune down between my legs, and my mama ain’t never told me a lie.

  I’m sorry, what was that?

  What about love?

  Pulllllleeeeeeeeesze. What about it?

  Love is like religion: it’s a crutch for people who don’t have the looks or the smarts to make it in this kick-ass world. Besides, I tried it in my twenties and it just didn’t work for me. I’m not what you would call a committed type of sista. I have a short attention span when it comes to men. You know, I can be digging a guy, but if another one comes along with more bank for my bang, I’m there.

  I’m also a mistress of illusion. I like to change up my appearance. Ladies, don’t you get bored looking in the mirror and seeing the same old person every single fucking day?

  Well, I certainly do.

  I like to dazzle myself and whoever it is I’m dating at the time. Well, usually I’m dating about three or four mofos at any given moment.

  That’s the way you gotta do it, ladies, ’cause there is no perfect man, but if you get three or four okay guys, you can certainly build one. Every man has a purpose.

  Lean in close and let me school you.

  You have to have one that takes you to expensive restaurants. Another that will buy you clothes. Another that will pay your bills. Another that will keep you in hairdos and acrylic nails. And then there’s the sugar daddy who’s popping Viagra like mints and still can’t keep it up for more than five minutes. He’s the one who wants to have a beautiful woman on his arm in Monaco, Madrid, London, and St. Barts. Yeah, I got one of those too.

  What about the one to love me, you ask?

  We back to that love shit again?

  I love me, my mama loves me—what I need a man to love me for? All I need from a man is his money!

  Reality?

  Well, whose reality are we speaking about, yours or mine? My reality is get yours and move on to the next fool and get some more!

  Take this place, for example: Tuesday night, Café Aubette. Wall to wall black people, everybody styling and profiling. Most of them look real good, but then some of them . . . well, over there, for instance. Yeah, yeah, that table full of tired-looking bitches with their twenty-five-dollar weaves and Lee Press On Nails.

  Oh my God, do you see that? Sister-girl’s tracks are showing! And she grinning all up in that waiter’s face—he’s probably cracking up laughing on the inside!

  Readers, should I tell her?

  If I tell her that, then I would have to go on and tell her about the pink and green nail polish. What kind of fucked-up colors are those?

  Hey, girlfriends, I have to let you know that AKA colors do not a French manicure make!

  Oh, and do you see that outfit? Lord have mercy—a hot pink glitter tube top, faded black capri pants, and Payless pumps. That outfit ain’t fit to be worn out-side!

  I’m looking down at a lot of shoes and I see that Star Jones done got a lot of people tripping on some bullshit. Cheap shoes are just a prelude to corns, hammertoes, and bunions. Believe me when I tell you.

  Now you see, the proper way to come up through here looking for a man that got some dollars is the Chevy way.

  The $300 weave. Um-hmm, and the silk-wrapped nails. A reasonable length, not the claws these sisters run around here with, making you wonder how in the world they’re able to wipe their asses properly.

  Oh yeah, don’t forget the Tahari suit and Italian leather pumps. You gotta know how to do it right. You come up in here dressed like homegirl over there with those hanging tracks, and you gonna get just what you deserve, which is the brother who works in the mail-room, got five baby mommas, is still living with his mama, and is fronting in the passenger seat of his homeboy’s ride.

  Simply put, a scrub!

  I don’t want that.

  So that’s why I come correct. I ooze class and sophistication and that’s what I want in return. Don’t come all up in my face talking that “baby, baby” shit to me. Been there, done that when I was a teenager. That shit is for homegirl across the bar. She looks like she’s about my age, but she still got that ghetto project mentality. I grew up in the projects and fought long and hard to get out of there and I don’t plan on ever going back. Shit, not even to visit.

  I’ll be the first one to tell ya, I’m all about the Benjamins because I ain’t got none of my own. I’m one paycheck away from being put out of my apartment. My credit cards are maxed out and now I just carry them around for show.

  I got one ride left on my Metro card. You don’t believe me; if I’m lying I’m flying!

  But you would never know my real situation just by looking at me. I know how to fake the funk!

  Tonight I’ll go home and dig for change from between the cushions of my couch. I’m sure I can find enough to get me to work in the morning.

  Or I can always give Geneva a call; I know she got a change jar up in her place. And if she holds out on me, I can bum a few dollars from Noah. He’s a tightwad, though, and I probably wouldn’t be able to get more than five dollars from his cheap ass.

  But I can’t ask Crystal; I borrowed five thousand from her two weeks ago for some “required” surgery and ain’t paid back dime the first.

  Crystal

  This time next year I’ll be thirty-five. The middle of the road, the halfway point between whatever this is and forty. I’m not scared. I’ve read all the magazine articles. “Forty and Fabulous.” “You Know Who You Are When You Reach Forty.” “Sex Is Better at Forty.”

  I’m well prepared.

  I hold a BS and a MS from Princeton and Cornell Universities, respectfully. Five foot nine inches, one hundred and thirty-five pounds, honey-colored skin, hazel eyes, and an ass like a racehorse’s. I am a prize filly, at least that’s what my boyfriend, Kendrick, tells me. And he should know—he rides it well.

  I live in a turn-of-the-century building on Central Park West. Funny, I read something once that said people generally die five to ten miles away from where they were born and raised.

  Well, I was raised exactly one block away from where I live now. Right on the corner of 90th and Columbus Avenue. Come to think of it, we were all raised there, and we all got out. Well, everyone except Geneva.

  So here I am, living a block away from the projects, in a beautiful building with a doorman who refers to me as Ms. Atkins and is at my service whenever I need extra hands to help with my groceries or Bloomingdales bags.

  I have a two-bedroom, two-thousand-square-foot tenth-floor apartment.

  Moët, pâté, and Evian fill my refrigerator the way government cheese fills Geneva’s.

  I am the director of the Ain’t I A Woman Foundation. We assist women who are in abusive relationships. We get them out of their unhappy situations, place them in safe houses, and counsel them until they feel confident enough to reenter society.

  I am one of a handful of African-American females holding a top director’s position in an old-boy, stuffed-shirt, all male, all-white private organization.

  I know I’m a token and I know I have this job because over the past twenty years a lot of brothers and sisters have been popping up on Fortune magazine’s wealthiest people list. Black people are pulling some serious bank, and AIW wanted some of that money. Installing me as director guaranteed donations from Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan.

  I can’t say if affirmative action helped me, so I’ll just leave that alone. I do know that I worked my ass off to get to this point.

  Children?

  I used to think about having children all the time. I kept scheduling and rescheduling the year I would finally get pregnant. But something always disrupted my plans: a change in boyfriends, another promotion, the state of the world.

  And then I looked up and I was thirty and then thirty-two, and so I just started telling myself that there was no place for a child in my life. I mean, how would I do it? Where does a child fit into traveling around the country and working thirteen-hour days?


  Then I turned thirty-three, met Kendrick, and started hearing my biological clock ticking loudly inside my head.

  Two years later and it’s so loud at times that I can hardly sleep at night.

  Kendrick and I have spoken about children in passing. He says he would love to have a baby with me, a little girl. He has a son from a previous relationship. But he says now is not the time. He says we need to enjoy our lives before we settle down and have babies.

  I never hear the word marriage from him, just babies. I assume he means marriage too, just like in that movie Ghost, when Demi Moore knew that Patrick Swayze meant “I love you” when he all he would say was “Ditto.”

  So I pushed back my baby-having year and just hope that Kendrick’s schedule is open at the same time mine is, because I love him and we’re good together—when we are together.

  He’s been working so hard these past few weeks. Running from one country to another, buying and selling property, initiating plans for new buildings.

  There’s been very little us time, but I don’t complain. I know that being with a successful black man can be lonely sometimes.

  Sometimes after he returns from an exceptionally long business trip, he’s cranky and wound up so tight he snaps at every little thing. But I understand and work through it with him until he feels more like himself again. And when we do finally get him back to the Kendrick that I know and love, he’s got to jet off again.

  So that’s me. Crystal Atkins. Not bad for a girl who was raised on welfare and ate pork and beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Not bad at all.

  Noah

  I have a secret.

  And the secret ain’t the fact that I’m gay. I came out of the closet when I was fifteen years old. I’m thirty-six now. You do the math.

  I’m talking ass-switching, wrist-snapping, eye-rolling, will-cut-you-till-you-bleed-with-my-tongue-trashing, one hundred percent homo and proud of it!

  So that’s where the dilemma comes in. You see, recently . . . okay, over the past few months, I’ve found myself in a precarious predicament.

  What is it, you ask?

  Well, calm down. I’m about to tell you, but I have to whisper it.

  I’m on the down low.

  What! How can you be? you scream in disbelief.

  Well, not the type of down low that you all are familiar with. No, no. I’m not into animals. You and your filthy, filthy minds!

  I’m talking about the ill nana, the punany, the cat, the snatch: you know, pussy!

  And you know where there’s a pussy, there’s a woman attached to it.

  So what’s wrong with me?

  I’ve been happily homosexual for more than twenty years now, and one day I woke up with a taste for pussy and a craving for titties!

  It’s disgusting, I know.

  It’s that damn Beyoncé Knowles who done it to me.

  I mean, did you see her in that Sean Paul video or any of the others? She is a sexy bitch! I didn’t want to believe that watching her was giving me a hard-on. I mean, I tried to fool myself into thinking that it was whatever man happened to be in the video. But the whole time I was jerking off, it was Beyoncé I was seeing dancing across my mind’s eye!

  Oh, just talking about it gets me hot!

  Is there a group out there for this particular problem?

  My therapist says, “Maybe you’re not really gay?” But I say, “What the hell do you know?” One hundred and fifty fucking dollars an hour, and that’s what he has to offer?

  This obsession is taking over my life.

  I’m sneaking into straight bars, plying beautiful women with alcohol until they look at me and no longer see my processed hair, glossy lips, or perfectly manicured fingernails.

  All of a sudden, their hands are on my thigh or their heads are resting against my shoulder—in any case they’re all up in my face, telling me how cute I am and saying, “When you first sat down, I thought you were gay!”

  I laugh along and say, “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

  Up until a few months ago, I’d been able to walk away from the temptation. But one March evening I found myself sitting at Night of the Cookers on Fulton Street, enjoying an apple martini and the live band that was playing that Friday night.

  I’d had a ballbuster of a day. Back-to-back meetings with factory presidents who spoke very little English, after which my boss practically got down on his knees and begged me to take this young, hip new designer that Women’s Wear Daily hailed as the second coming to lunch in the hopes that she would come and work for QV.

  WWD may have hailed her as the second coming, but they failed to mention that the French talent had no table etiquette whatsoever and had no idea that there was a pecking order where her silverware was concerned, because she used her entrée fork for her salad and her salad for her entrée.

  Yes, those things bother me.

  And finally, my train ride home was disrupted my a lunatic preaching wannabe evangelist who marched up and down the aisle of the car screaming, “All child molesters, fornicators, and gays are going to hell!”

  Why do they always group us with child molesters?

  Anyway, I needed a drink after having a day like that.

  Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the woman that had sidled up next to me ask if the stool beside me was taken, and so I was a bit startled when she touched my shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” she barely uttered above the music, and when I turned to look at her, I almost fell off my stool.

  “B-Beyoncé?” I whispered, everything in me going to mush.

  “Sorry?” she said, leaning in with a puzzled expression.

  Well, at first sight she did look like Beyoncé. The flawless skin and long gold-blond hair that framed a beautiful set of eyes.

  I swallowed hard, and my eyes traveled down her body to see if she only resembled Beyoncé in the face. And low and behold, wrapped snugly in the cream-colored lightweight wool skirt she wore, were Beyoncé thighs, hips, and, best of all—the famed Beyoncé bottom!

  A wide grin slowly inched across my face.

  “Someone sitting here?” Beyoncé’s look-alike inquired.

  “N-no,” I mumbled, recovered enough to feel embarrassed about my reaction.

  I returned my attention to my drink. She ordered a glass of the Shiraz, and for a good ten minutes we said nothing to each other, while I seized every opportunity to snatch glances at her in the wall-length mirror behind the bar.

  She was quite magnificent, and so when she drained her glass of wine, I quickly offered to buy her another.

  She accepted, seemingly without thought, and we fell into a conversation that took us through two of the band’s sets, three apple martinis, and a glass and a half more of Shiraz.

  Her name was Merriwether Beacon, and yes, she had been told on a number of occasions that she resembled Beyoncé, but Merriwether considered herself to be better-looking.

  Merriwether Beacon would be the beginning of my descent into heterosexual hell.

  She asked me to walk her home. “I’m just around the corner,” she purred, and she took my hand before I could even decline.

  She lived in a two-bedroom brownstone apartment that sat on the corner of South Oxford and Dekalb and smelled of cheap candles and a long-neglected litter box. This woman had taken shabby chic to a new level. Her furniture didn’t even look secondhand; it looked more like third- and fourth-hand.

  An invitation for a late-night cup of coffee, which I would learn later as I descended into my addiction was nothing more than a thinly disguised prelude to sex.

  I waited anxiously on her overworn green and yellow brocade sofa as she stole off to her bedroom to slip into something more comfortable. While waiting I amused myself by mentally rearranging her furniture, tossing out the pieces that not even Goodwill would take. And that was most everything.

  It occurred to me quite quickly that the only thing this Merriwether had going for her was her good looks. As a st
raight man, I would need a woman who knew how to decorate!

  When she came back, she was dressed in a raunchy, crotchless leather and lace one-piece that looked as if she’d painted it on.

  Merriwether took a seat at the far end of the couch and then began a slow, catlike, erotic inch-and-crawl across the cushions toward me.

  I was scared and excited at the same time, and when her lips closed around my earlobe I heard myself yelp like a bitch in heat.

  Her hands were everywhere: in my hair, pinching my nipples through my silk shirt, fumbling with the zipper of my khakis.

  I told my hands to push her away, but they were defiant, clamping down on her waist and pulling her closer. Her mouth was suddenly on mine, her tongue pushing at my tightly pinched lips until I lost all feeling in my face and my mouth dropped open. A second later my air was cut off by the yard of tongue she’d stuck down my throat.

  Everything seemed to be happening so fast. The room was spinning, and I lay there helpless as she wrangled my zipper down, slipped her hand inside the opening of my red silk boxers, and grabbed hold of my Johnson.

  “Damn, baby, for a small guy, you carry a big stick.” Merriwether drooled, her eyes sparkling beneath the milky moonlight that spilled into the living room.

  Was I supposed to say thank you?

  In flash she’d yanked khakis, boxers, and all down to my knees. I tried to object, but by then she was on her knees, yanking off my shoes and tossing them aside.

  “Hey, hey, wait a minute!” I pleaded, but it was no use. She’d gotten to all of the buttons on my shirt and now we wrestled as she tried to get it off me and I tried in vain to keep it on.

  She won, and my $200 silk shirt went flying over the arm of the sofa.

  In no time, Merriwether had stepped out of her Frederick’s of Hollywood getup and demanded that I follow her to the bedroom. I didn’t want to, but my Johnson was like a magnet, and he pulled me along helplessly after Merriwether’s jiggling behind.

  The bed was early Ikea, queen-size. When she tossed me down onto the mattress I could immediately tell that the sheets were less than two hundred count and knew that my body—which I faithfully treated to a ginger salt scrub every other Tuesday—would no doubt go into shock after the chafing from her cheap sheets.