Hyena (4 page)

Where were you five minutes ago? I ignore him and keep calling her fat and he keeps trying to say shit back, but it doesn’t matter what he says, cuz I keep on disrespecting his woman and his honor and he’s not doing a fucking thing. Ain’t shit to do but punch me. I might be a bitch and not wanna fight, but guess what? He’s a bitch, too, and I’m gonna remind him.

Now I’m pointing at my mouth smiling.

He says, “What the fuck is that? All I see is an ugly red beard.”

I say, “That’s me smiling. I live in your head now, motherfucker. Cuz you know your wife is getting fat and every time she gets seconds on some food or gets dessert and you tell her not to . . . you’ll be thinking about me.”

It’s true. He’ll be thinking about me when he sees that cottage cheese on her legs and when she’s on her period, feeling fat, and he’ll have to reassure her. That’s me, motherfucker. And I bet you she won’t be wearing those shorts again anytime soon.

You shoulda seen her face. You shoulda seen her put that popcorn down. Fuck her. That’s what she gets for being married to a douche bag.

And now he ain’t talking as much and his wife is whispering for him to just calm down and to drop it and it’s okay and she knows she’s not fat.

I’m sitting in front of them sipping my lemonade, smiling, watching the game, bleeding into my maxi-pad.

LORI TRIED TO BLOW ME
in Jamaal’s basement after the homecoming dance. I wouldn’t let her. I was afraid of pussy and thought my dick was too small. I didn’t want her going back to school talking shit.

I told my homeboys, “I ain’t let her to do it cuz she was a ho.”

They was like, “And?! That’s who you sposed to let suck your dick!”

They’re calling me all types of lames. I pound a forty of beer. “Let’s run some spades.”

I was a fat fucker. Some fat kids are okay being fat. I was the one who wore his T-shirt in the pool like I was fooling somebody. I was a chump. I’d sit on the phone with girls I liked and listen to them complain about how their man was dogging them; I was waiting in the wings while they stayed with him.

When I was little, my mom used to take us with her to go cheat on my dad. He cheated first, but we didn’t know that. My
sister and I would be in some guy’s living room sitting on the couch watching Hall and Oates on MTV while she was off in the bedroom doing whatever.

Years later I watched her hold down a bunch of jobs to support her deadbeat-ass husband. He’d be laid up on the couch, hungover with his sunglasses on, watching
The Young and the Restless,
talking to her like she was a fucking gerbil. And she’d take it. I used to beg her to leave, but she wouldn’t, and after a while, I’d be like, bitches ain’t shit if my own mom’s this dumb.

Over the next few years I started dropping weight, pulling more chicks. It was Valentine’s when I finally got some ass. I met her at McDonald’s and banged it out in a church parking lot, made it halfway through that Des’ree song and nutted all over my Nautica shirt.

I dumped her a few months later. Her ass was so flat I’d get mad when she bent over. She’d be in front of the TV changing the channel, ass looking like a cookie pan.

She’d be like, “What’s wrong, Jude?”

I’d be like, “Nothing, take me home.”

After that, me and Loc would try and run girls. I’d be getting head in the laundry room from some chick and he’d show up with his dick out. Most of the time, they’d look up at me, mouth full of penis, like, “Really?”

But every now and then, they’d suck us both up.

One time we were riding in the car. Me, Loc, and his girl in the middle.

He looks over to me and whispers, “You gotta rub her.”

So I throw my hand between her legs, start rubbing her
pussy through the jeans. The whole ride back from Seven Mile, I was on her. They drop me off and she’s mean mugging.

Loc gets out, he’s like, “Ay, you got that shit, cuz?”

I say, “Got what?”

He says, “You got a rubber?”

I said, “Hell naw! That’s what you was askin’? You got a rubber? Man I thought you said, ‘You got to rub her’! ”

We’re laughing about it. She’s in the backseat salty.

We were some dogs but where we lived, it was Animal Planet and the chicks were no better. Ben’s baby looked an awful lot like Jermaine. Melody put Pooh’s kid on Jamaar cuz she found out Pooh was fucking his retarded sister.

Dont was claiming a son for two years, then went and got a blood test right before the kid’s second birthday. Wasn’t his. Canceled the party, took the gifts back. Never saw him again.

We all had told him that bitch wasn’t shit. She used to borrow Dont’s car and we’d see her other baby’s daddy driving that bitch down Perry Street. Told Dont about it, he ain’t do nothing, so we clowned his ass, too.

Years later I asked him why he dealt with that shady bitch. He told me cuz he didn’t think he was good enough for anybody else.

I get it.

Roach used to cock-block. He’d get the neighborhood whore and turn her into his girlfriend. We’d be about to run a train on this chick. He’d get the pussy, then block the doorway talking about, “Me and Krista spoke on it, dog, and it’s just gonna be just me and her.”

Fine, we’ll run her purse.

Next day, he’s like, “That’s fucked-up, you didn’t have to take her beeper man.”

And we’d be like, “You didn’t have to wife our fuckin’ busto.”

One time I had this drunk chick in the bathroom about to blow me, but her big cousin kept knocking on the door, so I told Roachie, “Take her ass down to the graveyard while we keep her cousin busy, and me and Myron’ll meet up with you in like ten minutes and we’ll all get our dick sucked.”

He didn’t even go to the graveyard. By the time we found ’em under a tree somewhere, Roachie’d already gotten some head and was talking to her about her boyfriend and she’s sittin’ there crying.

We’re standing over her arguing.

Myron’s like, “What the fuck you do to her? Why the fuck is she crying? All you was sposed to do was take her down the street and wait for us.”

“Yeah,” Roachie said, “but we just got to talking about her man. She started crying. That’s it.”

Myron says, “That’s it? Man, we all trying to get our dick sucked, why you talking about her man?”

She’s bawling under the tree talking about how she misses Mikey or some shit. I go over to her, take my dick out, and tell her, “Put this in your mouth; it’ll make you feel better.”

She starts crying even louder.

I put my dick away and we leave her there under the tree.

MY LAST BED WAS HAUNTED
. It was my dad’s bed when he lived in LA. He got it from someone else, and when he went back to Detroit, it was mine. I lugged it around town with me from apartment to apartment. I dragged it along.

I fucked my homegirl on it. The next day, when I was cleaning up the mess, I peeled back the sheet to see a mattress pad covered in stains. She called them types of stains “maps of Africa.” Like if you fuck someone so good, you leave wet marks on the sheets that look like a map of Africa.

That’s what I’m left with: maps.

I’ve forgotten half the women who contributed to my mattress. They’ve moved on, got boyfriends, and forgot about me, too. But their marks are still there.

I stood in the bedroom of my new apartment, the one I was supposed to have gotten with Julie, wet towel in my hand, sopping up this mess I made with somebody else.

I thought back to an argument Julie and I had had. She
was sitting on that bed in Burbank, we were yelling at each other. I was hurt about some lame she had slept with when we were broken up. People are gonna fuck who they’re gonna fuck, but some failed rapper turned real estate agent I knew from back home? She couldn’t have fucked an astronaut or somebody worthwhile? She had to fuck a lame from my area code? I was mad she told me about it, I didn’t need to hear about that shit, but since she did, I was grilling her. Where, when, why? How many times? She sat there silent and defiant.

I said, “Fuck it, I don’t give a fuck who you fuck. You think I care who you fuck? I don’t give a shit. You know how many girls I fucked right there where you sittin’? Right there, in that spot, where you sleep every night? You laying in that shit.”

She sat there arms crossed on the edge of the bed, right where I had bent over some black hooker and fucked her on her period. Something in me was happy knowing that. She acts like she don’t care. I know she does.

I was looking at those stains on my bed. My dad’s bed. Thinking about that fight. Looking at all that DNA. Thinking about what a cruel thing that was to say to someone I love.

I didn’t wanna be able to say that to my next girl.

I got a new bed now. I’ll make new memories.

I saw Julie at Target today. She’s lost weight. She was buying travel-size soap and toothpaste. She was reading the labels and didn’t see me. I didn’t want her to.

I turned around and left the store.

I thought about where she might be going with her travel-size toothpaste.

I pushed that out of my mind, told myself to harden the fuck up.

EVERY TIME I GO TO
flint, i end up at LLT’s, this grimy little strip club on Saginaw. They do a five-dollar lap dance, and I know you shouldn’t go bargain hunting for your tattoos or sex workers, but I just can’t turn down a good deal.

In my defense, you’ll understand that five bucks isn’t as cheap as it sounds. Flint’s like Detroit except it’s smaller and shittier. It looks like they built a shantytown, dropped bombs on it, and then moved people in. So five bucks in Flint is like ten bucks in Detroit. It’s the Tijuana of the Midwest.

As plants close and jobs leave Michigan, LLT’s has been a good barometer of how hard the recession has hit. The first time I went there in ’99, I got a lap dance and a hand job from a cute little Filipino chick who would’ve been a ten if it wasn’t for the birthmark on her face. Last Christmas they had a girl with Down syndrome working. She had on a Coca-Cola sweatshirt and a hip pack. I didn’t get a dance from her, though; I got
mine from a black chick with a bullet wound in her back. Times are tough.

Six months later and I’m back in town, looking to stimulate the economy, throw some money at these broke chicks, get my dick grinded. It’s the day shift, about 98 degrees, the AC’s broke so they got the back door open with a box fan in it, daylight coming in. It smells like the carpets haven’t been vacuumed in months. Some old white dude’s on a Rascal chatting up a fat redbone playing the touchscreen with a Newport 100 dangling from her lips. The one security guard working is sitting in the middle of the bar getting a lap dance.

The dancers are murderers row: one’s Wesley Snipes, another’s a carny, the redbone looks like a glob of peanut butter. I get a dance from a forty-year-old meth head with a half-shaved Mohawk and a ponytail. But fuck it, she’s a grinder and has a good attitude. I give her a fiver and keep it moving.

I’m shooting pool when this haggard broad comes up to me with a sob story about her baby daddy in prison. I buy a dance. She calls herself Tweety. I think she’s Mexican because of the brown C-section scar on her belly and the knife wound on her shoulder. She’s got a tattoo of her baby’s footprint on her neck and another one, prison style, in the middle of her back, off center, that says
GOOD MOM
in block letters.

I ask her how’d she get the knife scar.

“Fighting with my old man.”

Of course.

Her skin’s saggy, the dance is lackluster, and I’m losing interest. It’s always the begging-ass strippers that give the shittiest dances. That’s why they’re begging.

And then I see her, from across the bar in all her majesty, tucked in the corner, grinding on some pathetic chump. My Moby-Dick, a white girl with dreadlocks and an ass like a Clydesdale. She looks like a Robert Crumb drawing straddling his knee, pushing her thigh into his groin, Nine Inch Nails banging away.
I wanna fuck you like an animal. I wanna feel you from the inside.

And what’s that I see? Could it be? It’s too good to be true. . . . She’s only got one arm.