Drive Me Crazy (4 page)

The years I’d lost did a number on my stomach. I faced her, took our words eye-to-eye.

I asked, “What you running?”

“Who said I was running something?”

“Don’t bullshit me. Squares don’t come up in a joint like this.”

She smiled. “Are you a police officer?”

“Hell no.”

She swayed with the bluesy music, like the alcohol was making her ramble out things she should keep to herself. “Let’s just say I’m investing in a few real estate opportunities.”

I stared at my drink, at that golden liquid that did some of us in. “Short or long?”

She knew what I meant. “Long con, but I’m working a short to generate cash flow.”

My eyes stayed on my drink. On its color. Drifted to an old memory. Tommy Castro was singing his electric blues. Served me right to suffer. Served me right to be alone. A man like me was born to suffer. But I didn’t like being alone. Couldn’t stand the silence. I sipped. Tonight alcohol made me remember what being with a woman might help me forget.

She said, “Looks like you’re a long way from here.”

I blinked those memories away. “Look, I’m not trying to revisit the Gray Goose.”

That was prison speak. A language she understood. The Gray Goose was the wonderful bus that drove you to the free motel, chaperoned by sheriffs with shotguns, handcuffs on your wrists, chains on your ankles and between your legs, while the man next to you either cried for his momma, or puked his brains out from the fear of getting his sphincter supersized.

“Relax.” Her words remained gentle. “Just having a conversation, being hypothetical.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. Are
you
a police officer?”

“No.”

“Working for law enforcement?”

“No. Relax. No one’s trying to trap you. Guy I used to ... date ... learned a lot watching him scam. He used to pull thirty large just like ...” She snapped her fingers. “He was good.”

The word
was
echoed. I asked, “Where is he now?”

Her grin remained strong, but sadness erupted in her eyes. The absence of crow’s feet and presence of grief told me all I needed to know. He was either in jail or dead. Or had died in jail. If he was living and had left her for another woman she would’ve said that with bitterness in her tone, no smile on her face. Women always dogged a man out when they were dumped.

She never answered about her friend. I didn’t expect her to.

She said, “It’s all about reading people. Finding out what they need.”

“What do I need?”

“I don’t know what you need. But I know what you want.”

I should’ve walked away from her then. If I was a smart man, maybe a smarter man, that would’ve been my cue to exit stage left, get in my car, and drive home.

But I had a buzz, looked at her soft skin, skin that I had never touched or tasted, and found myself anchored by my own desires. Found myself being a man in need of a new sin.

We ended that conversation when Pedro came back to check on us. He cut me a sly stare like I was a man named Humbert trying to seduce a nymphet named Lolita.

Arizona bought the next round, ordered in perfect Spanish; her accent had turned as authentic as Pedro’s. That made me look at her a different way, try to dissect her features, see if she had some Jennifer Lopez in her bloodline. I couldn’t tell. America was so amalgamated, the racial lines so blurred that anybody who looked any way could be anything.

Pedro smiled and talked to her while he made our poison, kept talking in Spanish, while he glanced at her cleavage. Then he was gone.

I asked Arizona, “You’re part Mexican?”

“Filipina and black. Not necessarily in that order.”

“Filipinas speak Tagalog, not Spanish.”

“I speak five languages. English. Spanish. Tagalog. French. Ebonics.”

She was curvy but small. The Jack she’d sipped had her light-headed. It showed in her tone, in how her eyes went in and out of focus. I asked her how far she had to travel to get back home. She said she was crashing somewhere on the other side of Hollywood.

I said, “Would hate for you to get a DUI.”

“I can handle my liquor.”

I told her she was more than welcome to crash at my apartment. It was a lot closer.

She looked at me, knowing.

A man bought a woman a drink in a bar as an investment of things yet to come. A woman bought a man a drink to cancel those things, to keep it on the fair exchange level.

I didn’t know where we stood.

She said, “Can’t you recruit you a bed-warmer up in here?”

“These scallywags are all after the ballers. Black woman don’t think about you until you walk into a place looking like you’re rich or have a white woman. And you better not have both.”

She laughed at that. She didn’t agree, but she laughed.

She said, “I was supposed to go hook up with someone when I left here.”

That was the game. Truth begets truth. I lowered my wall, she lowered hers. I admitted I wasn’t a virgin, then she admitted she wasn’t Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house. She was on her way to a scheduled booty call.

“Your body ... your arms.” She reacted like most women, stared at my arms the way men stared at loaded guns. “Like ... muscles etched in ... in ... in chocolate.”

“You ain’t seen my muscles.”

“Maybe you should show me.”

“You like chocolate?”

“Love chocolate.” She licked her lips like she was addicted to the taste. “Love chocolate. Love mature men. Love mature men in nice suits and nice shoes.”

Our stares became tropical.

She touched my leg. “Cuff links, silk tie, shoes, suit, that tells a lot about a man. Tells me who he is or who he wants to be.”

I touched her skirt, rubbed the leather over her inner thigh with two fingers. “Same goes for a woman.”

We abandoned our drinks and she followed me out the front door into the bright lights and traffic in this part of the big city. Music followed her sugary walk, John Lee Hooker was back to singing, telling me that his woman left him early one morning and the blues had healed him, sang that the same blues could heal me too. Carlos Santana was cosinging with his guitar.

Outside, a brother was hustling incense and oils with names like Black Sex, Bootylicious, even had Pussy; the Afrocentric sister next to him had every knockoff perfume ever made.

Arizona said, “It’s cold as hell.”

“Yeah. Unseasonably cold. Weatherman said it’s gonna be that way a few days.”

“Been gloomy all week. Freezing out here.”

Cold as hell in Southern California meant you might have to put on a T-shirt and socks with your shorts and sandals. Tonight, by L.A. standards, it was fur coat weather.

Back Biters was situated in a rundown strip mall, between Geral dine’s Fish and Grits and Luther’s All Nite Washerette. Outside the pool hall stood a wall of chain smokers living in nicotine clouds. A few feet away there was a line of people getting fried catfish, trout, snapper, salmon; that high-cholesterol aroma fattening the air. The Washerette was packed with apartment dwellers, reminding me I had a couple of loads to do tomorrow. At least four women were inside Platinum Beauty getting their weaves and perms hooked up at midnight. One was sleeping underneath a dryer. Music bumped from every passing car.

Arizona was moving her honey at a mellow pace, taking deep breaths like she was trying to get it together. Halfway across the uneven parking lot, I stopped her stroll, brought her to me.

She tiptoed, put her arm on my waist, let the spirits on her tongue dance with mine in slow motion. I held her face in my hands and drank her for a while, the brisk air flowing over us.

I kissed her neck, her ear, whispered, “What we gonna do?”

She slid her hand between my legs, rubbed John Henry, gave me her tongue again.

“You’re a fine man with so much
duende,
you know that, Driver?”

“You have a lot of charm yourself.”

“I’m serious.” She moaned. “Something about you excites a woman and makes her want to do things she knows she shouldn’t be doing. You have pheromones to be reckoned with.”

Jermaine Dupri had Janet Jackson. Tonight I had Arizona.

Bright lights covered us when somebody sped into the lot, hit a speed bump hard enough to make some noise. I jumped, blinded. Arizona reached into her purse, grabbed something and turned defensive. Vehicles had body language and that ride moved like a death threat.

It looked like an armored car with chrome rims, but it was a Hummer. The nose-and-mouth-shaped grille looked like bared teeth. Those bright lights like angry eyes.

That vehicle bulldogged past other cars, came to a sudden stop near my ride.

The driver killed the lights, got out, moving fast.

A few people stopped and checked out the bringer of the drama, others moved on.

Five-five, but her heels made her five-eight. Caramel skin. Bambi-like eyes. Shoulder-length auburn hair underneath a scarf, Audrey Hepburn style. Low-rise jeans and a leather coat with leopard fur around the collar. My eyes went to her left hand, my way of reminding her that she wore a five-carat emerald-cut in platinum. She cranked up a harsh smile as she came toward me and Arizona, got close enough for me to see the cleavage that pimped out the curves in her upgraded boobs. Head to toe, wedding ring to thong, everything on her was paid for by Wolf.

Arizona stayed at my side. She was alert, body ready like a warrior. That let me know she had some enemies out there, the kind that could roll up on her at a moment’s notice.

When the owner of the Hummer was closer, I licked my lips and said her name. “Lisa.”

Lisa held up a few feet away, stared at Arizona, dissected her, then glowered at me.

“Whassup, Playa,” she said, her voice small, tight, and cold.

“My name is Driver. Same name your husband calls me.”

“Is that right, Playa?”

Lisa’s thin nostrils flared.

I told her, “You just missed your husband. We had a couple of beers and he left. Said he was on the way home before it got too late.”

Her eyes cut deep. Lisa’s father used to be chief of police in Compton, then mayor of the same city until a stroke took him out of office and sent him to a convalescent home. Her old man lived in Compton but she grew up in Ladera with the Black and the Bourgeois.

Lots of people were around. Too many for anybody to act a fool without notice.

Lisa did an about-face and went back to her Hummer, sat there in the darkness.

Arizona asked, “What was that all about?”

I shrugged, told her that Lisa was my boss’s wife. They were having problems.

“That grenade has a loose pin.” Arizona glanced Lisa’s way, then turned back to me, read my face, said, “Pretty woman. Worn around the edges, but pretty.”

I diverted where she was taking the conversation, asked, “You strapped?”

She reached into her purse again, showed me her switchblade. It was the kind that you flipped open when you gave it some wrist action. She put it back inside her bag.

An engine revved, lights flashed, a horn blew. We moved away from the middle of the aisle. Lisa zoomed by us. Behind her angry eyes I saw the edges of her dark side glowing.

I swallowed the regret in my throat, asked Arizona, “You following me home?”

“Three things about me, Driver.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not a stripper. Two, it takes more alcohol than that to impair my good judgment.”

“Uh huh.”

“Third, I’m not a whore. I might look young, but I’m not easy or naive. ”

My lips moved up into a one-sided smile. Hers did the same.

Checkmate.

I asked, “It’s still early. Barely after midnight. What time you have to get up?”

“Hustlers set their own hours, you should know that.”

“That’s bull. I’m a hustler.”

“You’re a working man. True hustlers don’t have a nine-to-five. Real hustlers never
think
about getting a nine-to-five. We’re too busy trying to take a nine-to-fiver’s money.”

She pulled out a bar napkin from her cute little purse, wrote down a phone number in red ink and handed it to me. Area code 818. Hollywood and parts of the San Fernando Valley.

She told me, “I have connections with access to flat screens. Fifty-inch. Electronics for twenty-five percent. Jewelry for twenty percent. A referral gets you a small kickback.”

She sounded as smooth as a politician. I’d bet that everything she had on had fallen off a truck. Her connections made her the woman to know. I handed her my black and gold business card. It was actually one of Wolf’s business cards with my cellular written in at the bottom.

She said, “Want to help stimulate economic growth in our depressed economy, hit me.”

“What about stimulating other things?”

She waved the business card I had given her. “Then I’ll hit you.”

Her tight eyes were devilish, her skin innocent, almost angelic under the streetlights. She traced her fingers over my chest, down my shoulders, to my biceps, over my forearms, then her fingers lingered across my palm. I caught her fingers for a moment, then let her go.

She took sugary steps away, blew me a kiss. “I’m already late for my date.”

“I see.”

Arizona headed toward a BMW. Silver. Convertible. New. She let the top down, then looked back at me and winked, did that in a way that sent me a message, told me she wasn’t bullshitting about the business. That chump change she had lost inside wouldn’t be missed.

The streetlight turned red as soon as she pulled out of the lot. Arizona pointed something at the streetlight and—I don’t know if it was real or my Jack Daniel’s talking to me—the streetlight changed right back to green.

She vanished into the night.