What seemed like ten hours was actually closer to two. Gino pulled up in a rented Sean Jean edition Explorer and I forgot about how cold it was outside. I was busting out the front door, duster and all, before he could step on the sidewalk good.
Gino almost broke down when he saw me. “Juicy.” his whole body shook and he cupped my face in his hands, careful not to touch my thousands of bruises. “Damn, baby. Oh, Juicy.”
Gino had a black eye and a long slash down the side of his face that had about thirty stitches holding it together. His left arm was in a sling and a cut had scabbed over on his top lip.
In the privacy of Rita’s bedroom, me and my man cried together as I told him about Jimmy and G. Gino cried even harder when he heard how Jimmy had sacrificed himself for me, and he said he was sorry he wasn’t there to protect both of us.
My man was a rock for me as he held me in his arms and we drew strength from each other. I saw the deep pain in his eyes as he traced the bruises all over my body. I knew I looked bad, and it hurt him to see how G and his friends had beaten and abused me.
Even though I knew Gino loved me, I didn’t want to tell him how I had worked the rooms at the Spot. I couldn’t tell him how his father had pissed all over me and brought in mad niggahs to use my body like a piece of meat.
I was hurting so badly for my brother that I didn’t want to relive all of that pain and humiliation and Gino was cool with that. He said he’d never press me to tell him anything and that I didn’t have to talk about it ever again in life if I didn’t want to.
We fell asleep in Rita’s bed holding on to each other as tightly as we could. I kept waking up during the night, startled and crying, and checking to make sure Gino was still there.
“I’m right here, Juicy,” he whispered in my ear. “I’m right here and I ain’t going nowhere.”
We hid out at Rita’s for two days until it was safe to slide downtown. Shit was hot on the streets of Harlem with G gone. The police, his connects, everybody was out of control. Rita told us G’s whole crew was being shook down and locked up left and right. She said Flex was in the hospital on critical after getting popped by some kid trying to take over the projects, and Moonie’s apartment had got raided but the cops were too late. The house was empty and nobody had seen Moonie in days.
Gino had mad family in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. A bunch of loud-ass close-knit Puerto Ricans who loved their Gino to death. They took us in and treated us right and gave us time and space to get our heads together and heal, which was exactly what we needed.
Three weeks had passed since I’d run naked out of the G-Spot, and the backlash from G’s murder was still vibrating through New York City. With all the arrests and street hits we were reading about in the Post and the Daily News, Gino and I both agreed that it was time to put this crazy city behind us. We had kept the Explorer even though renting it for so long had gotten expensive. I wanted to pay for it out of the twenty-five hundred I’d stolen from G’s safe, but Gino said he had some decent change and that I should hold on to what I was carrying. We were planning to turn it in at the airport later on today, right before we hopped on a flight out west.
Gino drove slowly as we headed toward Woodlawn Cemetery on 233rd Street in the Bronx, and I held on to his thigh real tight the whole time, dreading what I was going to do, but knowing it had to be done.
I hadn’t stepped foot inside a cemetery since the day I almost fell into my mother’s grave, but with Jimmy gone and no closure to be found, I was determined to visit the spot where my grandmother was buried and tell her good-bye before I left New York for good. Maybe I would feel better just being near her final resting place since I didn’t have a clue to where Jimmy’s bones were buried.
The Boogie-Down was hopping when we came off the Cross Bronx Expressway and headed for the Bronx River Parkway, and when we got to the cemetery the tall black metal gates were open and we drove right in. I looked down at the slip of paper in my hand, and read Gino the name of the section that Grandmother was buried in.
There were crazy rows of tombstones in here. Woodlawn was seriously overcrowded. I couldn’t help reading the dates on the bigger tombstones as Gino drove slowly down the narrow road, following the signs to the section I’d given him.
We drove past what looked like a small city of the dead and buried, and into an area that was full of mausoleums. These dead folks musta had some money, I thought. There were no in-the-ground graves over here at all. Just those little concrete houses built for people who could afford not to go six feet under.
“This is the area,” Gino said, and I nodded as I rechecked the paper in my hand. He was right. We were in the right section, but I wasn’t sure if it was where I wanted to be. G had taken care of Grandmother’s funeral and burial. Since I was too scared to walk close to a ditch, let alone stand over somebody’s open grave, G had paid for a private burial service for Grandmother.
I remembered it like it was yesterday because right after her funeral he had put me and Jimmy in a limo and sent us straight back to the apartment on Central Park West. I’d already written down what I wanted to have engraved on her headstone, and G had promised me that everything had been taken care of.
But a mausoleum?
This couldn’t be right. Where in the hell was my grandmother’s grave?
All of the little concrete houses had a number on the outside, and I told Gino to stop near the one that matched the gravesite number Rita had gotten from G’s computer files.
“I don’t know…,” I said as we got out the Explorer. “This don’t look right. Ain’t even no headstones over here. G had my grandmother put in the ground.”
Gino took my hand and pushed open the door with his shoulder. He didn’t look scared at all, and I was suddenly so happy that this big strong man was still by my side. “C’mon,” he said. “This gotta be her. Who else could be in there?”
We went inside, and suddenly I wasn’t scared no more. There was a smooth wall with the name Orleatha Mae Stanfield carved in script in the center, and a long brass hinge ran sideways almost halfway down the wall.
“Grandmother,” I whispered, and held on to Gino, and then I started crying just like a baby. Being here, this close to the woman who had loved me and raised me was just too much. So much shit had happened in my life, and most of it I didn’t think I deserved. And now, except for Gino, I was all by myself in the world. No grandmother, no brother, and not even a junkie for a mother. I was totally assed out, and it hurt me to my heart. I stared at my grandmother’s name on the slab and more tears than I knew I had left just fell from my eyes.
“It’s okay, baby,” Gino kept saying over and over. “You gonna be all right, Juicy. Everything is gonna be all right.”
There was a bunch of dried-up flowers on a small table against the back wall, and a metal chair right beside it. As bad as G had done Jimmy, I couldn’t believe he had still been coming here visiting with my grandmother, but the flowers proved it. Nobody else could have left them there. Gino held me as I collapsed into the chair, and when I put my head on my knees and hollered, he stayed right by my side, rubbing my back and rocking me the whole time.
I don’t know how long I stayed there with my head down in my lap. Lost in my grief. I hurt so bad inside I wanted to die. Not even all those ass-whippings and beatings I had taken, all those men who had run up in me and used me like animals, none of that shit came close to causing the kind of pain that losing Jimmy and Grandmother did.