“You have beautiful body, Juicy,” Ursula would tell me in her Swedish accent. “You smell delicious, you have pretty color and soft skin. Your ass is magnificent. Many people would love to be G.”
Sometimes I would feel my pussy get soaking wet as she rubbed my butt into a rhythm, and I’d feel so confused! I would jump up and take my towel and run out the room. Ursula would be laughing as I left because she knew I’d be coming back for more.
I was so frustrated I didn’t know what to do. I obeyed G because, like everybody else, I was scared of him. Plus, being raised by old folks had made me obedient. G had enough years on me that I just naturally did anything he said. Grandmother said we were lucky she’d taken me and Jimmy in after our mother got killed for dipping in Big Sonny’s pot. Mama’s jive little trick game coulda got us all shot, so it was only natural that Grandmother accepted us with a reluctant heart. She was scared I’d turn out to be a no-good street ho just like her daughter, so she whipped my ass on the regular and made damn sure I minded her.
Everything I did as a child, I had to sneak and do it. I didn’t do nothing more than hide candy under my pillow or listen to 98.7 KISS FM when she left the house, but at least once a week Grandmother would anoint my whole body with holy water and pray over me until she got hoarse. But maybe I was my mother’s child, because by the time I was twelve my female urgings had come on strong. I kept a notebook called the Juicy Journal that was filled with my sexual fantasies, and I couldn’t even see a man without my panties getting wet-and he didn’t necessarily have to be fine neither. Grandmother could pray all she wanted to, I’d vow as I hid under the covers and explored the softness of my insides. I was gonna get me some dick if I had to buy me some.
But I never did. Grandmother was real strict on me and she had to be, because the streets of Harlem were nobody’s joke. So I fantasized and masturbated my ass off, careful not to make enough noise to disturb Jimmy, who slept on the love seat across from my sofa bed.
But while Grandmother was busy watching me, she tried not to press Jimmy too hard. Our father, James Joseph, was a mental case and had been locked up on the crazy ward at Bellevue ever since Jimmy was a baby, but his genes must have been real strong because Jimmy was something else. A real live piece of work. Grandmother feared he might get sent to the crazy house just like our daddy, and just the thought of losing Jimmy sent chills through me because as much mess as he got into, I was Jimmy’s heart and my baby brother was my soul. I’d lay down and die for him without a second thought.
Don’t get the idea that Jimmy was a bad boy or nothing, because he really wasn’t. He couldn’t help the things we’d been through no more than I could. Life had really shit on us, so of course Jimmy bore scars from it. When he was little he had to be watched all the time. Grandmother would send him to the Spanish store on the corner and that boy would be out there throwing rocks through car windows. On check day Grandmother would tell him to go downstairs and wait for the mailman, and we would find him on the roof hours later. Striking matches and watching them burn out.
Grandmother used to throw rent parties every month, and one day we left Jimmy at the house while we went to get some fatback to go in the collard greens. That crazy boy took and threw my kitten Fee-Fee out the bathroom window. “Where’s Fee-Fee?” I ran around the house crying when she didn’t meet me at the door like she usually did. I saw Jimmy’s eyes slide toward the bathroom. I ran in there and the window was pushed open and my cat was bleeding on the ground in the alley downstairs.
“I thought she had nine lives,” Jimmy cried like a damn fool when I jumped on him. I kicked him in the balls then punched him on the arm so hard he got a frog in his muscle.
I cried for weeks over that cat. Grandmother prayed for a while, then said that was the last straw, and she put Jimmy in a special day school so the doctors could find out why he did so many crazy things. Like she didn’t know! It took all the money we had to pay for Jimmy’s new school and his doctors, but we did it. Jimmy was a lot better now, but every now and then it seemed like he had a flashback that made him do something straight to the left. I tried to keep him as close to me as I could, praying like hell that that crazy bug wasn’t still living in his head because except for G, me and Jimmy were all alone in the world with only each other to hold on to.
So even though I felt cheated, I thanked God for sending G our way. He took good care of me and Jimmy, and without him we probably would have ended up in a shelter someplace. G was the father we never had, and he gave us everything we missed having when we were kids. The only difference between G and what I imagined having a father was like, was that I slept in the bed with him and he climbed on top of me twice a month. But even that part was over with so fast I sometimes thought I had dreamt it.
The apartment we lived in had four bedrooms. I shared the largest one with G, and Jimmy had a nice one that was down the hall on the other side of the kitchen. G gave us the best of everything. Jimmy had a wide screen television in his room, Xbox, and all the latest games that came with it. He was only seventeen, but he was as almost as tall and fine as G. Everybody in Harlem knew what had happened to my mother, so G understood the problems Jimmy had and didn’t mind paying for his special school or the medication my brother took to keep his brain straight. In fact, G didn’t mind paying for anything we wanted, and when I stepped out in the street people didn’t know what to do with me. I was just that fly.
G was like that with his people, too. Everybody who worked for him, from the cleaning ladies on up to Greco, who was in charge of the staff, and Moonie, who was the chief of security, got paid out the ass. G was conniving and cutthroat, but he believed in sharing the sugar, and his philosophy was that when everybody got fed, everybody stayed happy. I guess he was right because he’d been running things in Harlem for years and, while one or two had tried, none of the young bucks out there were bad enough to take him down. The wall of soldiers surrounding him was just that solid.
The only thing G asked his people for was exactly what he expected from me. Honesty. Honesty and loyalty. He was hip deep in hustlers and hoes every day, and in a woman he wanted somebody who had been touched only by his hands. And for what he was putting out, that should have been a simple request. But in the back of my mind I knew it was only a matter of time until I failed him. G was forty-six and I was only nineteen. He liked it cold and I liked it hot. There was just too much wrong with that picture. It wasn’t even a matter of if I would mess up, but when, where, and with who.
Chapter Three
There were twenty-six students in my dance class, including me. I didn’t socialize with most of them because I didn’t want them asking questions about my life. I could tell we were different. They lived in the dorms and went to campus parties at night. I had a Samoan driver named Pacho who dropped me off at school and picked me up after my last class. Then I hung out with strippers and hoes until the sun came up.
I liked school and would have been a better student if G would let me stay home and study sometimes. I was failing my science class. I could not get the hang of chemistry with all those symbols because I did not study. When I told G he said not to worry about getting an F in the class. Just take it again next semester.
There was a guy in my dance class named Vincent. We got paired up together a lot because we were both so good with our bodies. G said men who danced in tights were all gay, but I thought he was wrong. Vincent had a strong body and nice eyes. He smiled a lot and I liked the way his hands felt when he held my waist or lifted me up in the air. Sometimes it seemed like we moved so good together it was almost like we were only one body.