Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents) (36 page)

At first, I thought they were engaged in rough girlfriend talk, like when black men call each other
nigga.
But once Catherine tried to reach across the table and grab Carol by her hair, that idea was off.

“Oh, shit,” L responded. He grabbed Catherine back across the table. I moved my hands to protect Carol from her friend as well. But that all seemed to make Catherine more adamant to get at her.

“
Bitch,
I’m tired of your
fucking ass, showing off!
” Catherine shouted across the table.

“Well, why don’t you stop
calling
me up to go out with your ass, and learn to get a
real
personality?” Carol shouted back. “Then maybe all your
niggas’ll
stop trying to
get at me
so much!”

The shit was loud and embarrassing at that point. People were starting to turn away from the music and look back at our table. Then the bouncers rushed over.

“Hey, what’s going on over here?” one asked.

“Oh, we got it,” L told them. He stood Catherine up to pull her away.

“Get the fuck off me!” she cursed at him. “If you want that bitch, too, then go get her then!”

Alonzo let her go as she turned and looked toward the exit. At least a
third
of the people inside the jazz club were watching
us
now.

Catherine turned back and hollered, “Have a nice night,
bitch!
”

“Yeah,
fuck you, too!
” Carol screamed with her middle finger up.

L and I were both shocked by it. We looked at each other and said, “Damn,” in unison.

“I guess that’s your
ride,
” I commented to Carol.

She frowned and shrugged it off. “I know how to catch a fucking
cab.
”

“Well, you don’t have to do that, if you don’t want,” I told her. “I can drive you back home.”

“I don’t think my man would like that shit. In fact, I
know
he wouldn’t.”

Alonzo heard that and started chuckling. I wondered if he had known the shit all along.

“Well, how come you didn’t say that
earlier?
” I asked.

She grabbed her purse from the table and snapped, “I didn’t
need
to. We don’t know each other like that.”

“Oh, but I can pay for your damn
dinner
though, right?” I snapped back at her. I didn’t understand the fairness of women sometimes.

But then she pulled out two twenty-dollar bills and threw them at me.

“
Here,
motherfucker! You satisfied now? Eat your fuckin’
fish
wit’ it!”

I looked over at Alonzo, standing there staring, and he started laughing his ass off as Carol headed for the door.

I shook my head. “Man…don’t you
ever
ask me to go on another
blind
double-date again in your
life!
” Then I tossed a fifty-dollar bill on the table with Carol’s twenties.

L took all of the money off the table and placed a hundred-dollar bill down to pay for everything.

“Look, man, what do you want me to say?” he asked me. “I didn’t know they had a
feud
like that. Women are
catty,
man. And homegirl even had catty
eyes.
”

I started toward the door myself. That was one of my favorite spots to relax in. But someone else in there could write a column about
me
now.

“Yeah, you didn’t help matters much by getting into it with her,” I reminded Alonzo. He had started it all.

As we walked back out after the commotion, Carol was already jumping into a taxi, and Catherine was nowhere to be found.

Alonzo told me, “Look, man, it’s just one of them nights, S. But it’s
early,
man. Let’s go do something else.”

I frowned at him. “Are you
bugged,
man? I’m not going out somewhere else after
this.
I need to relax with people I already
know.
And I don’t even think I know
you
sometimes.”

I was already walking toward my car on V Street to leave.

L screamed across the street at me. “Come on, man, stop girlin’!”

I could still hear him laughing.

I immediately jumped on my cell phone and called a woman who really knew how to
act
with a man.

“Hey, Felicia, is it too late? It’s Sean.”

“No, I was just about to go out,” she answered.

I looked at my watch. “At
midnight,
you just going out?”

She chuckled. “Well, I didn’t feel like going to sleep yet. What are
you
doing?”

“I’m coming to see you,” I told her. The adrenaline of the night had me all pumped up for it.

Felicia paused. “Umm…okay. Where are you?”

“I’m down on V Street. So I could hit your place on Connecticut in like, ten minutes.
Tops.
”

She laughed. “You in a hurry?”

“Nah, I’m just, ah…tired of all this extra
commotion
for one night. So don’t leave yet. I’ll be there.”

She paused again. “Oh…okay. I’ll see you when you get here then.”

“Now
that’s
a fucking woman,” I grinned and told myself as soon as I hung up her. Felicia was originally from Memphis, Tennessee, and she was a real
dime
piece, too.

ALONZO BRADSHAW

Naw, naw,
naw,
man, that ain’t even how it
went.
First of all, S called
me up
asking what I was about to get into, because he was tired of sitting around in the house with his girl, Felicia. Well, she’s not really his
girl,
but he fucks with her the most. He goes over there and plays chess, board games, cards, watches movies on DVD, and all other kinds of shit before he tightens her up. But he wanted to get out and do something else that night, because the girl is
boring
as hell. I mean, she look good and all that, but she’s just a damn
homebody.
So I told him I had these two girlfriends I had met a week ago, and he said, “All right, let’s do it.”

So I told him he could pick the place, because I knew he would bitch about where I would want to take them, like to Hooters or the ESPN Zone. And this guy chooses a damn
jazz club
on U Street. Now, I don’t mind the new U Street corridor, because that shit is happening now the way Georgetown used to be. But a
jazz club
with two new women? That’s the kind of place you go with a woman you’ve already known for a while; because it’s too laid-back for new conversations, you know? It ain’t like the old jazz clubs up in Harlem where couples would throw down on the dance floor and really get to know each other. These new jazz clubs remind me of fucking museums. They lack
excitement
to me.

Anyway, we show up at this place called The Revue a little late, after waiting for these girls to park their car, and there’s this long-ass line going all the way to the corner. Now I promote and throw parties in D.C., and I know everybody who works them, so I’m not standing in no damn lines. But this guy actually walks to the back of the line like he’s a damn nobody. And I told his ass to let them know that he’s a nationally syndicated columnist for the Gannett newspapers in there, and that he could put their spot on the map all over the country with just one article.

He tells me, “Nah, man, I’m a regular customer like everybody else.” That’s the way Sean is; he never tries to bring attention to himself.

But as I watch the damn line at this place, I can see that it’s not moving, so there’s no sense in us waiting there. Either we’re gonna get in or we’re not. Then I spotted my man Reggie Mack inside, working with security. So I called him out to talk to me.

“Hey, what’s up, man? What can you do to get me in the bar?”

Reggie Mack owed from many prior occasions, so there wasn’t even an argument.

He looked back inside and said, “Let me see what I can do. How many you got?”

“Four.” And that was it. I called S and the two girls to the front of the line.

Now the girl Catherine, who I knew the best, was the loud type. So she walks to the front of the line and starts running her damn mouth.

“It’s about
time.
It’s chilly out here.”

She was wearing this damn two-piece, black-and-gold outfit, looking like she wanted to fuck anybody who asked her that night.

Then she started beefing with the white couple at the front of the line.

“You’ll get in soon. And make sure you order some Bailey’s Irish Cream when you do to thaw your cold-ass nose off.”

I thought the shit was funny myself. But I knew that S wouldn’t want to deal with her. He doesn’t like shit like that, especially around white folks. He thinks black people should always be on their best behavior. So I already knew to let him have her light-eyed girlfriend named Carol. She seemed a lot more civil for him.
And
she was fine! So I figured I’d take one for the team and let him have her. She was a little
thin
for my taste anyway. She was one of them slim,
classy
bitches.

So anyway, we go inside, and of course, we didn’t have anywhere to sit yet, not even at the bar, and these white folks started tripping.

“Hey, guys, you’re all in our way over here.”

Catherine turned around and let this motherfucker have it,
quick.

“Well, if we had a damn
seat,
we wouldn’t
be
in your way. Unless you wanna give us
your
seat.”

Then her girl Carol tried the civil approach. “We’ll be moving out of your way as soon as we have a table.”

S was backing down and shit. He started talking about, “Let’s just hang in the corners of the room, or near the back walls until they find us something.”

I tell you, man, Sean is my boy and all, but that nigga need to take some
swagger
pills every once and awhile. Because I wasn’t standing against no fucking wall in there.

Then the second white boy at the table came off at Carol, like he had a personal beef with her or something.

“Well, what happens if they
don’t
find you a table?”

I looked over to S to see if he was gonna speak up on that shit, and he seemed embarrassed by it. So
I
said something.

“Hey, man, calm your ass down. They gon’
find
us a damn table, all right.”

That white boy ain’t say
shit
to me. So Carol looked over and grinned at me. And my boy S was already losing his cool points with her.

Then they found us a table near the bathroom hallway, and Carol started talking about, “Aw, this is
nasty.
I
hate
being near restaurant bathrooms.”

Now, we wasn’t all
that
damn close to the bathrooms. Those bathrooms were way down the hallway. Carol was just trying to get some attention because S was
boring,
like his girl,
Felicia.
He acted like he didn’t know what to say to this fine-ass girl. He tried to act way too cool sometimes. So I tried to spark shit up for him.

“Aw, cut it, girl. You know we all gotta use the bathroom. Or you don’t
take
shits like that?”

I mean, I was only kicking the
truth,
right? Then Catherine jumped in on it.

“Oh, she takes
shits.
I’ve smelled them
personally.
”

Now I wasn’t trying to go
that
damn far with it. That shit sounded
foul, for real.
What kind of bitch smells another bitch’s shits? But I was only trying to mix things up at the table a bit. A jazz club wasn’t my kind of place to take these girls to begin with.

Well, Carol didn’t like that shit. So she eyed us down across the table and started asking for the menu. Since this was a damn jazz club, instead of a sports bar, everything was overpriced on there. So I let everybody know.

“Damn, eleven dollars for a
garden
salad?”

But Sean jumped on me about that. “Look, man, we grown men in here. We’re not college students at Maryland anymore. And these finer restaurants have to pay the rent.”

He was always talking that grown-man, price-of-living shit, as if I didn’t
know.
I knew we were both turning thirty soon. I was just trying to save us both some money by putting it in these girl’s heads that it wasn’t a free-for-all on
us
in there. We could’ve ended up spending a few hundred dollars in there,
easy,
and on some girls we barely
knew.

So I told him, “That’s bullshit, man. I know what all these guys have to pay around here. And they all raise the prices, claiming that high-rent shit. But if they’re not getting a good deal on the property, then they’re not gonna be in business long.”

I knew a lot more about stretching a dollar and doing good business deals than what Sean knew. He was just a damn
writer.
So I forgave his ignorance on the issue. But the next thing I knew, he hauled off and called my marketing slogan
corny.

“I said,
corny?
Sean, if the shit
works,
who gives a fuck if it’s corny or not? ‘A.B.C. you at the show’
works.
I don’t say shit about your corny-ass
columns
sometimes. But some people think the shit is
good.
”

Then he started calling my events corny. So we got into the shit for a minute, talking about who made what, and who was willing and able to pay more for shit.

That’s when Carol said, “So, I got the man with the
big
bucks.” She was fucking with her friend Catherine across the table.

The shit didn’t faze me, because I made my own money on the regular, while S had to wait for a damn
paycheck
from the newspaper. And there were several times when I had to loan his ass money in between checks. But I didn’t bring
that
shit up; we were
boys!

Catherine finally chilled us all out when we got our drinks. “Ah, guys, can I get my drink on without getting a damn headache from all this unnecessary arguing?”