The Last Street Novel (6 page)
Read The Last Street Novel Online
Authors: Omar Tyree
They both looked at the urban jungle cover jacket of the two-hundred-page paperback with The Spear printed at the bottom. Both girls shook their heads in unison. They hadn’t heard of it.
“Well look, y’all need to get up on this one. Your boyfriends, brothers, uncles, fathers, nephews, they’re all in a crisis in America, and reading them romance books ain’t gon’ help them. You young sisters need to understand the struggle of a real black man,” he explained to them.
He said, “So, here’s what I’ma do. These books are thirteen dollars each, but I’ma give them to you both for ten.”
One of the girls concentrated, trying to understand his math.
“You gon’ give us both these books for ten?” she asked to make sure she heard him right.
He looked her in her eyes to make himself clear.
“Ten dollars for each book,” he told her. “That would be twenty.”
The girl frowned and said, “Oh.” She was immediately disappointed. Two books for ten dollars would have been a great deal. She would have gone for that. But twenty dollars for two books from a street author she had never heard of before was robbery. So she snatched the copy her friend was holding and handed both books back to the man.
“Naw, that’s all right.”
He said, “You gon’ pay twenty-five dollars in the store. What’s that, fifty? I mean, do the math, sisters. This book is to help you understand your brothers for real, not just what they look like in the bedroom.”
The girl grinned and said, “We want ’em in the bedroom,” and forced her girlfriend to laugh before they walked away.
He spoke to their backs as they left him. “That ain’t gon’ get you nowhere but pregnant. And a pregnant woman can’t help no man in the struggle. That’s just another burden on him. Y’all need to get y’all minds right.”
As soon as the two girls walked into the bookstore with the rest of the crowd, one of the bookstore staff hustled out to have another talk with the man.
“Please, brother, we’ve already told you, you can’t be out here.”
“Well, invite me in there then.”
She said, “All you have to do is talk to our events coordinator and we’ll work out a date that works for all of us. Now please, you have to leave.”
She was being as pleasant as she could, but the brother felt slighted anyway. He looked over at the large poster of Shareef Crawford and his latest romance novel that was posted in the bookstore’s window, and he frowned at the whole suave, chocolate image of the man.
Fake-ass Billy Dee Williams wannabe,
he told himself.
That seventies playboy shit is over.
The bookstore staff member was still waiting for him to leave the premises.
He looked at her and barked, “Aw’ight, aw’ight, I’m leavin’. And I’ma talk to your events coordinator tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” she told him, and walked back into the store.
The brother shook his head in disgust, and as soon as he turned to pack up his box, he nearly rammed into a woman.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sister,” he apologized. He stepped back and looked the woman over. She wore expensive black heels, a lavender business suit, a black lace top, and was astonishing from head to toe—all five feet six inches of her. She smelled like the most expensive flowers mixed with vanilla and cinnamon spice. She had flawless brown skin, and jet black Caribbean hair with the thick waves swimming through it.
The brother opened his mouth and said “God
damn
!” before he could catch himself. He said, “Sister, you’re not going into that book signing, are you? Don’t tell me you’re going in there.”
She didn’t even get a chance to answer him. He was all over her.
“Look, these romance books are not gonna get us out of our present crisis, sister. We really need to understand one another in the struggle.”
To his surprise, she nodded to him and said, “I agree.” Then she extended her hand for a copy of his book.
He handed one right over to her.
“How much is it?” she asked him.
He looked at her again and said, “Thirteen.”
She took out a twenty-dollar bill from her small black purse and told him, “Keep the change.”
The man was falling in love right there on the sidewalk.
He said, “You want me to sign it for you?”
She opened the pages of his book and said, “Sure.”
S
HAREEF
C
RAWFORD
pulled up to the curb of 124th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in his black Lincoln at 6:45
PM
, so he had a few minutes to prepare himself for the standing-room-only crowd of eager fans. The bookstore was jam-packed with customers with more still walking in.
Daryl looked out into the crowd through the store windows and said, “They’re feeling you in there tonight, brother.”
The bookstore staff had blocked off room out front for the limo driver to park.
Before they climbed out of the car, Shareef asked his driver, “Are you coming in for this one?”
Daryl hesitated a minute. He still didn’t want to get too involved. Then he said, “Sure, why not? They already got a spot out here for me.”
“Okay, well, I might need you to do me a favor,” Shareef told him.
Daryl turned and looked him in the face.
“What’s that?”
“Well, usually, after the last signings, I like to take a lucky girl out to dinner. But since they’re all up in my face inside the store, I usually can’t do it by myself. So I always pick out somebody with me to be the one to say something.”
Daryl smiled and started laughing.
He said, “You got it down to a science, hunh?”
Shareef grinned and said, “All I need for you to do is tell her that I would like to treat her to dinner if she has the time this evening. And that’s it. I’ll look at you to tell you which woman to ask.”
Daryl nodded to him. “All right. I think I can do that.”
Shareef said, “Okay, let’s do it then.”
Daryl let him out of the car and escorted him through the front doors of the bookstore like a bodyguard.
“There he go, there he go,” a single, young woman swooned.
“Hey, how are y’all doin’?” Shareef spoke to them all with humble authority.
“Waitin’ for you,” someone answered. The room broke out with a ready laugh. That was a good thing. The crowd was loose and bubbling.
The bookstore owners, Rita Ewing and Clara Villarosa, immediately greeted the author and pulled him into a side storage room for privacy.
Clara the older partner with striking gray hair and shorter stature, spoke up first.
“Shareef, we’re about to run out of your books.”
He looked at her and then at Rita, the younger, taller partner with freckles.
“How many books did you have?”
“We ordered two hundred of the new book, and the other books have been selling out all week.”
“So how many do you have left?”
Rita answered, “We have seventeen of the new book left. And I’ve lost count of the other ones. But it’s not much.”
Clara added, “It’s probably less than that now, since you’re here. You know, there are people who won’t buy the book until they see the author first.”
At that point, there was nothing Shareef could do about it but continue with the game plan. So he shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, when we sell out, we sell out. And we just tell them that we’ll have more books in stock tomorrow. Do you have any of those name plates that I can sign to stick inside the books?”
Rita said, “I wish we did.”
“Okay, but we don’t. So let’s just do what we do then,” the author concluded. At the end of the day, he would much rather sell out than to sell nothing. So he was ready to rock and roll with the punches.
“Are we ready to do this?” he asked them both.
“We’re ready when you are,” Clara told him.
“Well, let’s go do it then.”
They returned to the bookstore showroom where Shareef was led to the front of the crowd. There was a small table covered with Kente cloth, a comfortable reading chair, a bottle of lemonade, and a plastic cup all ready for him to sit, read, drink, answer questions, and sign copies of his latest novel as well as his previous novels.
Clara stood in front of the crowd to make the introduction while Shareef took a seat in the reading chair behind the table.
“Without further ado, the man you’ve all been waiting to see is here.”
“Yeeaaahhh! a few of the women in the crowd cheered before the store’s co-owner could finish her introduction. Off to the side, Rita smiled as Clara continued.
“
New York Times
and
Essence
bestselling author of
Chocolate Love, I Want More
, and several other hot and steaming titles of black on black romance, Harlem’s very own, Shareef Crawford!”
Thunderous applause rang out from the standing-room-only crowd of fans. They filled every section of the bookstore, nearly two hundred people, most of whom were women. Only a few men speckled the crowd, including The Spear. He looked unimpressed, but he was there mainly to observe the nonsense voodoo Shareef was able to pull on so many women, including the gorgeous sister in the lavender business suit who stood not far from him in the back of the room.
Shareef stood at the front of the room with a copy of his latest novel in hand.
“First of all, I want to thank everyone for reading and loving my work, because without your kind support, I would have no inspiration to write.”
More applause met his humble comments.
“Don’t worry about it, baby, just keep doing what you do and we’ll keep doing what we do to support you,” someone yelled.
Shareef smiled and nodded to the woman. He said, “That sounds like a fair trade to me.” Then he raised his new book to eyesight level. “This new book of mine,
The Full Moon,
is all about the power of yes and no. And my whole idea to write a novel about it was based on a magazine essay I wrote last summer, where I explained that ‘yes’ is the dominant answer for most happy relationships. Now, that doesn’t mean that we never say no, but if we’re saying no more than we say yes, then there’s obviously something wrong with that relationship. Because in a happy relationship, we’re eager to say yes. Am I right or am I wrong?” he asked the crowd.
Most of them nodded and mumbled in agreement with him.
He said, “In fact, there is no relationship without a yes.” He then looked at several of the women in the audience and asked each of them a specific question. “Can I have your phone number? Will you take mine? Will you call me up sometime? Are you free on the weekends? Can we go out?”
He said, “Now, if every one of these sisters tells me no, then who can I start a relationship with?”
“Who would tell you no?” an older woman sitting in the second row of chairs asked him. There were only six rows of chairs of eight across, and those forty-eight chairs had been filled long before seven. Everyone else had to stand.
Shareef responded, “Oh, you’d be surprised. Everybody gets their share of nos. But let’s think about it, without the yeses, there would be no stories for me to tell. So I want to read from one of the hottest chapters of many in this new book of mine.”
“Yeaaahhh!” the crowd responded again.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” someone else yelled.
The Spear continued to shake his head in the background, joined there by Daryl, who was impressed. From Daryl Mooreland’s perspective, any man who could hold the attention of that many women for a book was well worth watching.
As Shareef thumbed through the pages of his novel, the anticipation continued to build in the room. The crowd of women breathed deeply, swallowed hard, readjusted their stances, smiled from ear to ear, and gave the author their undivided attention.
He found his chapter, took a sip of his lemonade, and began to read from his standing position:
Carla looked down at the phone number she had scribbled onto the back of one of her business cards and thought about the man’s proposition. Why travel to Bermuda by herself to begin with if she was only there to window shop? She could window shop at home with friends in Houston. But what was the use in lusting for a man through a window? Either she would decide to wear his soft brown skin, aroma, and hard flexing muscles while she was there on the exotic island, or she would only have her moist dreams to remember him by when she left. Still, she could have had her wet dreams back home at Houston.
If she was not willing to indulge herself and become physical with the man, she could have been just as easily served watching the movies of Denzel, Morris, Kodjoe, and Shemar under slippery satin sheets. For what was life if she didn’t live it? For how long would she allow herself to continue being a spectator. Every grown woman had been hurt to some degree by love and loss; it was the victorious women who were courageous enough to move on and find new love. Then again, becoming a revolving door of sexual fantasies, a human McDonald’s, where every customer was served, and cheaply, was not an option she would allow herself to entertain.
That was Carla’s dilemma. How much would she be willing to give of herself? To whom? And at what price to her conscience? Nevertheless, she was an honest woman who craved a man’s touch, his words, his comfort, his caress, and his intimacy. Holding out would only build up her intensity and anticipation of release, and indeed, a release was needed. She was woman enough to admit it; “I need what I need.”
Suddenly, she became antsy. Normal human lust was winning over. She felt butterflies in her stomach, quivers in her legs, and twinkles in her toes, as fresh blood rushed to her bosom, producing the perfect firmness for foreplay.
Her desires were undeniable. Her cravings were strong. Her will was weakening? Or was it strengthening? For what was the equal balance between yes and no? Was no more courageous than yes? Or was yes more courageous, particularly while Carla held the phone number and her fate in her own hands. A no was as simple as no phone call, but a yes had to be initiated.
Then again, she reasoned that there was room for a series of yeses and nos. For instance: she could say yes to a walk on the beach, but no to a temptatious glass of wine too late in the evening. She could say yes to dinner in a public restaurant, but no to a private nightcap. She could say yes to an afternoon swim in her bathing suit, but no to a skinny-dip after dark. Such was the proper etiquette of a tactful lady.
Nevertheless, at the end of their courting, Carla would still have a pressing question to answer; yes or no, with only three nights left between them for seduction.
So she took a deep breath and boldly decided to pick up her hotel phone and call the number he had given her. She would start with that first yes—a phone call—after that, she would determine how far another yes would lead them.
