The Glamorous Life (8 page)

“What’s going on, girl?” Egypt asked in a worried tone.

“It’s my dang-gone car, and it’s smoking like a chimney. I got to bail out before this bitch blows up. I am going to call you back.”

“Where you at? I am coming to get you.” The phone went dead before Egypt could get an answer.

Bambi pulled into a little bootleg, jackleg mechanic shop where she was greeted by a light-skinned, sloppy grease monkey with his belly hanging over his pants and sweat rolling off his face even though the weather was rather brisk outside. He had come out of the shop when he saw all the smoke pulling into the parking lot. Bambi was furious when she hopped out of her practically brand-new Corvette that she had literally just taken from the shop. But with the grease monkey looking at her eye to eye, her car wasn’t the first thought that came to her mind. The first thing that ran across her mind was,
Shit, he takes grease monkey to a whole ’nother level.

“I need you to look at my car,” she said.

“Pop the hood, ma’am.”

She did as she was told. While he fumbled around under the hood, she called Joe, who was busy with another customer at his shop. Egypt called her wanting to know what was going on and got there within ten minutes while Mr. Grease Monkey supposedly diagnosed the car. Looking around at all the broke-down, old, half-way-taken-apart cars on the lot, Bambi wasn’t comfortable with the idea of leaving her car, but what choice did she have? She gave Grease Monkey her cell phone number to call her if he found anything, and she and Egypt went to get something to eat.

While they were eating, Joe called back and explained to Bambi that the smoke she saw wasn’t anything to worry about. Oil had probably spilled on the motor when the oil had been changed. He assured her that it would eventually burn off in a day or so. Although it seemed a little crazy that a professional dealership didn’t have a way of avoiding spilling oil on the motor, she believed Joe. Egypt said she had heard that before, too.

Within minutes after Joe’s phone call, Grease Monkey
called. “Miss, I got some bad news and some good news. Which one you wanna hear first?”

“Give me the bad news first,” Bambi said into the phone, while rolling her eyes at Egypt.

“Your motor is in bad condition.”

While Bambi was thinking,
This is some bullshit,
Egypt questioned her with her eyes.

“Your motor is about to go any day now. I can always fix it for you, less than the dealer or any other mechanic shop will, but as pricey as these cars are, you are better off getting you a new car.”

“Is that right?” she said nonchalantly.

“Yup, but I do have some good news, too.”

“Ahhh, let me hear it,” she said.

“Look, I can take the car off yo hands if you want to sell it.”

“Is that right?”

“Yup, I mean I fix cars, so I can make you an offer so you can have enough to get a down payment towards a new car.”

Bambi listened as the Grease Monkey tried to run game on her. She told him that she would talk to him when she got back to the shop. When she arrived back at the shop, she told him that she had to think about it and would be calling him.

She later met Joe at the junkyard. While he removed the mirror off of the junk Corvette, she went inside to pay for the part. She sat down in the dingy blue chair that had permanent oil stains and filed her fingernails. The man who owned the junkyard was Joe’s friend, and he asked Bambi, “May I make a suggestion to you?”

Bambi did not really want to hear his comments, but she was willing to listen to him.

“The parts on your car are not cheap. Now I have that Corvette out there that has been wrecked. Corvettes are not something
that come through this junkyard or any junkyard much, so what I am suggesting to you is you should buy the whole Corvette. I will give it to you at a good price. I would let it stay here, and whenever you need a part, it’s here for you to get. And if anyone else needs parts off of it, they’ll have to call you and pay you for them.”

She thought for a minute, and all of a sudden filing her nails didn’t seem so important.
Hmm, it’s like an investment, huh? I guess like Reggie would say, I can wholesale the car. It’s like buying a key of coke and breaking it down to flatfoot it, selling other people parts of it.
She smiled because it sounded like a good idea.

“How much?” she asked.

“Ummmm, give me 900 for it?”

“Oh, hell no, I’ll give you six for that smashed-down, beat-up looking car.”

“Deal.” They shook. She wrote a check and realized she was just about down to the wire, but soon she wouldn’t have to worry—as long as Disco kept his word.

He left and went to the back and got the title. “Keep this in a safe place. You never know when you will need it.”

CHAPTER 7

He Done Messed with
Good Help

B
ambi headed over to see her cousin, Zonna, who lived with Grandma Ellie. Grandma Ellie lived in Church Hill, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Richmond. Her house was three blocks away from where Patrick Henry gave that famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech. Grandma Ellie’s house was the prettiest house on the block. It stuck out like a sore thumb since the surrounding houses were so run-down. She always changed the color of the two-story house, which kept it looking new although it was old. Now it was pink with white shutters; the professionally landscaped flowers and grass complemented the colors.

Zonna was Bambi’s older first cousin by four years. Zonna’s father was Tricia’s brother. Zonna’s mother and father had divorced when she was eleven, and when she’d turned fourteen, her mother had married and shortly after that had claimed that Zonna was getting into an excessive amount of trouble and had shipped her down south to live with Grandma Ellie. Once
Zonna arrived in Virginia, there was never a peep out of Zonna’s mother. To this very day Grandma Ellie will tell everybody how Zonna’s mother sent her away for a man.

Zonna and Bambi were close. They never hung out together, but they were always there for each other. Zonna was light skinned, with sandy brown hair that she wore in a neatly maintained ponytail. With a petite frame, she stood at only five feet two inches tall. Although she was a grown woman, she could easily fit into a girl’s clothing. She wore wire-framed glasses and was a computer wiz.

Grandma Ellie firmly told Zonna when she was fourteen, “You can stay here, as long as you stay in school. The day you leave school, you’ve got thirty days to get up out here.”

Zonna took full advantage of those living arrangements, completing one educational program after another. For some reason she never saw fit to get a job. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to work. The girl was a computer genius, and surely she could have gotten a job at Microsoft, IBM, or any of those places making a top-dollar salary, but she had decided early on she wasn’t taking any orders from any white man.

“You think I am going to build up them folks’ company and devote my all to their company and the next thing you know after I put in years of playing fair, they come handing me a pink slip talking ’bout
we are downsizing
?” she said.

The bottom line was that she wanted to work for herself, but was too shy to get clients. She did, however, have a few folks that she met at school; she typed and composed resumes and letters for them to earn some money. The computer was Zonna’s best friend. When she wasn’t in class, she could always be found at home with her eyes glued to the monitor. She was addicted to it, like crack.

When Bambi decided to start her business, Zonna was the
first person she wanted to recruit. She offered her a position as office manager/vice president of the company. If it had been anyone besides Bambi, Zonna would have declined the job, but since it was her cousin, the closest thing to her sister, she had no choice.

“So, do you have my back or what?” Bambi asked.

“Of course I do.”

“I can’t really afford to pay you a salary, but as soon as I get paid, then you’ll get paid,” Bambi told her, knowing that Zonna would agree anyway.

Zonna said, “You ain’t never been selfish when it came to money anyway. Besides, I know that you would mess things up without me by your side,” Zonna teased. “You’re very smart, but at the same time, working together I know we could move mountains.” Then the cousins hugged and discussed Bambi’s next steps.

“I need you to do a contract for me to get the ball rolling,” Bambi added.

The next day Bambi pulled up to Grandma Ellie’s house to pick up the contract from Zonna. As she got out of the car, she was greeted by Ruby, who lived next door with her mother. In the state of Virginia, Ruby Lee Meedlepoint was a legend that went back to the mid eighties, and even now her name still rang bells throughout the state.

Back in the mid eighties, Ruby was a pretty, young, carefree factory worker who had everything going for her: a house, a late-model BMW, lots of friends, and a job that paid well where she could get all the overtime she wanted. She dressed sharp as a tack. She had long, flowing black hair and a smooth Hershey complexion. She was big on the social scene, and she had a man, Uno, that she loved. Uno was fine and always had plenty of cash.

They lived high on the hog until the cops showed up at her doorstep, wanting to question her about Uno’s drug empire. She wouldn’t cooperate. Although they tried to strong-arm and threaten her, she never budged. She knew everything about Uno, and with all that pressure, she could have sung like a bird—especially after she was locked up and indicted on the same charges as Uno. But to their surprise, she stayed true to the game and her man and never breathed a word. The media had a field day labeling them the “Bonnie and Clyde of the eighties.”

While she sat in jail, she lost everything, including her job and her house. Friend after friend fell off, and everything that she had worked so hard for went up in smoke. Still, she maintained. She got beat down badly several times by some of her fellow inmates as she awaited trial. To someone on the outside looking in, she had every right to tell on him, especially since he was out on $100,000 bond and living his days on the street to the fullest, never bringing her a dollar. She had the perfect opportunity to “help herself” out of jail. Instead she held tight and never ratted her man out.

Uno, however, wasn’t as thorough as he portrayed, and he ended up ratting her out to get a lesser sentence. He blamed everything on her and was out within three years while she wound up giving the state of Virginia ten years of her life. Not long after Uno was released, he was found dead on an old abandoned slave plantation in a guillotine, with his dick cut off and resting in his mouth.

Ruby was immediately indicted on murder charges. The DA claimed that she had the power and connections to have the hit arranged from prison. The state, along with the media, put her through a high-profile murder trial, dragging her name through the mud, so Ruby Lee Meedlepoint became a name that would
never be forgotten. Since the charge was bogus, though, the jury returned within thirty minutes with a not-guilty verdict.

Ruby had been blackballed and her life ruined by the man she had loved so dearly. Although she was the victim and had suffered tremendously, no one ever regarded her as anything but a menace to society, simply because she had a weak man who couldn’t take responsibility for his actions while she was woman enough to do so.

Ruby had thought that once she was released, her life would eventually fall back into place, but it never did. With her name ringing so many bells, no one would hire her. No one would give her a chance. The only place she could get a job was at Burger King, and that’s only because she knew the manager. The manager paid her minimum wage and made her work the longest and crappiest hours. What else could Ruby do but accept it, which she did for a while. After working there six months, money started coming up missing, and she was sure it was the manager skimming money off of her register. Ruby knew if this ever surfaced, it was a free ticket back to the penal system. So she never returned to Burger King again, and the issue died.

Ruby’s dream was to save enough money and move to a new place to get a fresh start. In the meantime, she lived with her mother, the only family she had. Ruby cooked, cleaned, and did all she could to make her mother happy, but it was never enough. Ruby’s mother dogged her, always reminding her that she was nothing but a burden. It tore Ruby’s self-esteem up to have to put up with her mother’s verbal abuse, but where else could she go?

Bambi felt sorry for Ruby and always passed on clothing to her that she no longer used.

That day Ruby ran over to her smiling. “Hey, Bambi.”

“Hey, girl, how you doing?”

“I am fine, but I need to talk to you. It’s real important.”

“What’s up?” Bambi stopped.

“Look, I overheard Ms. Ellie telling Momma that you was starting your own business and that you hired Zonna.”

Bambi didn’t respond; instead she listened as Ruby said in such a sincere tone, “Bambi, I would never ask you if I didn’t need it. I want to know if you would consider hiring me? I would do anything. Run errands, scrub the floors, clean toilets, anything. I need a job, and I need one bad. I am honest, and I got yo’ back. If I don’t know how to do whatever you need me to do, I can learn.”