The Coldest Winter Ever (30 page)

Second cause of my tension today was the womanhood meeting. I was itching to bounce. The reality that I had no place to go was pissing me off ’cause I’m not the dependent type. I would be forced to attend another boring event. Somehow I was hoping that I could make it work for me. The difficulty would be seeing Rashida again, who I was determined to avoid completely.

“Let’s go see Doc,” I told Lauren.

“Nah, you go. I gotta make some calls,” she said. Perfect. I went down to strike up a conversation and to see what I could see. Doc was
on the first floor. I heard her moving around behind the two wide wooden doors. I knocked softly. There was no response, so I knocked a little harder.

“How you doing, Sasha?” she said in a pleasant voice, but looking distracted.

“I was a little bored. Curiosity led me down here to see you.”

“Oh really, what are we curious about?” she asked, like I was a preschooler.

“About what you do. I’m fascinated with the fact that you’re a doctor,” I said, speaking her language while gassing her up for my plan.

“I didn’t know you were interested in medicine.”

“Yeah, very.” I looked past her figure into her office.

“Well, come on, let me show you around.” Now all I had to say was I was interested in medicine. She showed me every slide under a microscope, every test tube, instrument, and even the tables her patients lie down on. She pointed out charts on the wall, breast self-examinations, pregnancy information. She even asked me, “When is the last time you had a checkup?”

“I don’t remember,” I responded.

“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” she said, looking as if she wanted to examine me or something. “Well you know once you become a young woman like yourself, you need to get regular exams and a pap smear every six months.”

“Pap who?”

“Pap smear. It’s part of a vaginal examination. We check for any sexually transmitted diseases, cervical cancer, everything. Since your mom has cancer you have to be extra careful.” She pulled out a long steel tool. “It looks worse than it feels,” she said. “This is a spectrum. It’s used in a gynecological exam.”

“Don’t point that thing at me!” I joked, as if it were a gun.

“This is a serious matter, Sasha. Are you sexually active?” I knew the answer to that question would lead me into a trap so I said, “No, not yet.” The doctor raised an eyebrow and twisted up her face. She didn’t want to call me a liar, but I could tell she didn’t believe me either. She walked away as if she was insulted. Opening a small drawer, she pulled out a gang of condoms.

“Alright, even though you’re not sexually active,” she said sarcastically, “take these just in case something unexpected pops up.”

“And if I wanted an exam, how much would it cost?”

“Do you have coverage?” she asked.

“Not right now. What will it run me?”

“Well, usually it would be a hundred and fifty dollars, but since you’re a houseguest, I’d be willing to examine you at no charge. You pay the lab fees.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Don’t wait too long,” she said, with the serious concern I had grown to hate.

Talking to Doc for half an hour had gotten me more useful information than eight days with the upstairs duo. I had peeped the strong-box where I was sure Doc kept her money. I had figured even on a bad day she had at least two patients who each paid her a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. Depending upon what day she goes to the bank, and whether or not she goes every week, there could be a minimum of fifteen hundred weekly or three grand every two weeks in that locked box. I would watch her carefully, get to know her. I wouldn’t be satisfied until I was able to see what kind of treasures she had on each floor of this castle. After all, she pushed the Benz. She paid the bills, so what was I wasting my time with the other two for?

Right away, I understood why Lauren said she went to the woman hood meetings for the laughs. As a gazillion chicks with an assortment of bad taste filed into the big room on a Sunday night, I bugged at the whole scene. Girls with turbans on like they were straight out of the desert. Girls with ashy feet and ashy elbows. A bunch of fake jewelry, cheap shoes, and bald heads. I couldn’t believe that these girls couldn’t understand that the real problem was they had no style. How you gonna be a female with a head full of unkept nappy hair or a fade like a man? Now they didn’t all look the same, but they all looked busted. Some of them were young, like fifteen. Some of them seemed as old as thirty-five or forty. I’m thinking if you’re forty years old getting advice from a twenty-five-year-old, you might as well hang it up.

A wave of young girls came in ten minutes later. They was regular block girls. What a combination. Everybody stood around, eating cheese and crackers, celery sticks, carrots, dip, and other types of rabbit food. When Souljah came out her room in the back, they all got quiet like she was Confucius or Kung Fu or something. When she sat down, they all sat down, like dummies. I spotted Rashida’s pitiful ass and bounced my eyes in another direction. Determined to get my attention,
she picked her chair up and moved it to where I was, squeezing herself into a small space.

“How’s it going?” she asked, all overexcited. I held my finger to my mouth,
sshh,
I said like I was really interested in the meeting.

Souljah started talking. “Well, the purpose is for us as women, especially young women, to come together, learn from each other, and prepare for our future. If we plan well, we will be in control of our lives instead of being controlled for the rest of our lives. Hopefully, all of us can improve the way we think, and the things we do as a result of how we think.” Then Souljah gave out a book list. “This is a list of the books we will be reading for this class.”

I’d say that’s when she lost me and about half of the girls in here. When we looked at the list of ten books to be read over a period of one year, we were like, “She’s crazy.” We didn’t even have to say it to one another. It was a silent agreement.

One of the girls couldn’t take the silence so she blurted out and said, “Well, it seems to me like the main issue is money. I came here to get with some other women like myself who wanna get paid. We can give parties, do bus rides, all that shit. Once everybody gets a little bit of money in their pockets, then all of us will feel a little better.” Then Souljah moved to shut her down even though at least half of us could feel what that female was kicking.

“Money is important, no doubt,” Souljah said. “But there is some business we need to take care of before money comes into the equation.”

“Like what?” the girl with the ideas asked.

“Like, how are we gonna have a business together when we don’t even like each other? How we gonna trust each other when we don’t even know each other? Think about it. When you first came in this room and you looked at the other females in the room, what kinds of things were you thinking? I’m willing to bet the majority of females here had a bunch of negative thoughts about the other females in this room.” Everybody let go a nervous chuckle. But the big girl with the ideas was not convinced.

She said, “Business is not personal. I could go on a bus ride with fifty people. I don’t care if I like ’em or not if the price is right.” Some girls nodded their approval.

“Yeah, you could do that,” Souljah said. “But it wouldn’t mean anything. The reason why I open my place for these meetings is so we
can do something meaningful, something dramatically different from what goes on in our community from day to day. Everybody thinks it’s all about the Benjamins, but if every black person in the ghetto received a thousand dollars cash in the mail tomorrow, what would happen?” Most people got excited at that thought. A bunch of side conversations about what people would do with their thousand jumped off.

“Exactly,” Souljah said. “In one week, 90 percent of our people would be broke. The money would be spent on overpriced jewelry, clothes, liquor, food, and crack.” Everybody started laughing.

“True,” some of them said.

“Now if we could work on who we are, what we stand for, getting to know each other, and what we believe, then we can make better decisions. For example, if everybody in here received a thousand dollars each and we believed in unity, we could have fifty thousand to buy a piece of property or put a down payment on a house, or we could open up a business and all become shareholders. It would be hard work, but at the end of the day it would mean so much more.” People got quiet as they thought about it.
She’s slick,
I thought to myself. I watched as she turned everything around the way she wanted it to be.

The girls in the room got sucked into her hustle. Meanwhile, I’m thinking how all the girls in the room was basically broke. Most of them took the train to get here. Meanwhile, Souljah was chilling in this mansion with full access to the Benz. I was waiting for her to pass around the basket for everybody to make a donation to her personal treasury.

Then she had us go around in a circle. “Say your name, and state what you believe.”

“My name is Tashay,” the first girl said. “And what do you mean by what do I believe?”

“Do you believe in something, anything?” Souljah asked, but the girl’s face was blank.

“Are you, say, a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, 5 percenter?” The girl didn’t say nothing.

“Do you believe in God, for example?” Souljah asked.

“Everybody believes in God,” the girl said.

The next girl said her name was Kim. She’s a Christian.

“Do you believe in premarital sex?” Souljah quizzed her. The girl laughed.

“Well everybody has sex, nothing wrong with that, is it?”

“I’m not here to judge,” Souljah said. “We’re just listening to what you believe.”

“My name is Phoenix,” the next girl said. “I’m not tryna impress nobody, and I don’t know what I believe.”

“What do you live for?” Souljah asked.

“What do you mean?” Phoenix asked.

“What makes life for you worth living?” The girl looked uncomfortable and she didn’t answer.

“Okay, what is so important to you that you would risk your life for it. Fight for it, die for it?”

“My daughter. I’ll do anything for her. I’m a dancer. Sometimes people have a lot to say about that, but I don’t care. I gotta feed my daughter.”

“What kind of dancer are you?”

“In a club.”

“What club?”

“The Silk Den.”

“That’s a strip club,” another girl blurted out. Phoenix rolled her eyes at her.

“Yeah … and what, you got something to say? I bring home three to five hundred a night. How much you make?” The girl with the big mouth didn’t say nothing.

“How old is your daughter?” Souljah asked.

“One.”

“Do you need three hundred dollars a night to feed your one-year-old daughter?”

“Oh snap,” the girl with the big mouth said. Phoenix didn’t answer.

“I’m not tryna play you. I’m just asking that in introducing ourselves we be as honest as possible. If you strip because you like to strip, or because you like to have a lot of money in your pocket, or because you have a habit, then say that. I’m not here to tell you what to believe in. But I am here to say that if you don’t know what you believe in, everything else in your life will be confused. Knowing what you believe lays a foundation for your life. Then you can have principles and ideas that you follow. Things that you are unwilling to compromise. If you’re deciding what you believe every day and every day you believe something else, you have nothing to look forward to but chaos.”

“I want to look nice,” Phoenix said confidently, after a short pause. “Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“It depends on what you’re willing to do to look nice. Are you willing to let strangers feel you up at a bar? Are you willing to do a lap dance in a string? Are you willing to suck a dick for a new dress?”

“I don’t do all that,” Phoenix said.

“A lot of women do. Then they think the new dress is going to make them feel better. It won’t. A new dress might make you look better, but that’s it.”

One by one she knocked them down like bowling pins. She had an answer for everyone about everything. I could tell she had sat and thought up these responses. She said she was doing it to help. Somehow people couldn’t figure out whether she was helping or just getting off on herself. After a while it didn’t matter. There was one girl left before my turn. Suddenly, I felt the need to pee. I tiptoed off down the corridor and stayed locked in the bathroom long enough to stick my head out the window to get some fresh air.

By midweek, I had successfully explored the entire house. For a surgeon, the doctor was not so hard to figure out. Just showing a little interest got her to spill her guts. At night, after hours, she was easy to talk to. At the time when any other woman would be chilling with their man, she would be on any of the four floors that were exclusively hers with all the finest stuff in the world, but no mate. It wasn’t long before I put it all together. Four years in one college, four years in another college, two years working around the clock in the hospital with no pay, then back to college and certification for this and that. She was a medical doctor, a gynecologist, and a surgeon. By the time she looked up twelve to fifteen years later, everybody was all paired off. All she got was a bunch of degrees. She could fix people’s bodies and brains, but she couldn’t repair her personal life. I wasn’t gonna make that mistake.

Lauren busted down the bedroom door holding party laminates in her hand. “This is it!” she said, throwing herself on the bed. “GS’s birthday party is tomorrow. Every bad ass in the entertainment industry is gonna be in the jam. What’s wrong with you, Sasha? Maybe you didn’t hear me. GS’s birthday jam is tomorrow at the Palladium. LX is giving him the party. That’s like chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup and nuts all over the place.” My face was twisted ’cause all I had left was three hundred fifty dollars. I would have to buy something special. But there was no doubt that I was going.

Life is a crap game. Or, as Santiaga would put it, life’s a poker game. So the next day I laid my three hundred on the counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. I walked out with a designer shopping bag with one Calvin Klein slip dress inside. I already had the banging shoes and a matching shoulder bag.