Yaccub's Curse (21 page)

Like Huey, Mom thinks I’m a menace to my own people. I am. I’m a menace to just about everyone, but my friends. Still, she hasn’t had to walk home in the snow without winter boots or a heavy winter coat or with holes in her underwear since I started taking care of business in the streets. Grandma hasn’t shed any tears over overdue bills and mortgage payments. Mom hasn’t had to think about selling her body to put food on the table or clothes on our backs like many other moms in the hood often have to consider. No dating men she doesn’t even like just to have someone to borrow money from should she need to. But more to the point, I didn’t have kids laughing at my old, cheap, out of date clothes and calling me dirty anymore. I didn’t intend on doing this forever. The plan was to save up enough money to pay for college and pay off the mortgage on the house and then I’d be done with this shit.

“’Sup, Mom?”

“Don’t talk to me like one of them ignorant street niggas, boy. I ain’t no damn ghetto trash.”

“I just said, hello,” I said shrugging my shoulders

“You said, ’Sup’, like some ignorant ass street nigga. You know how to talk English you save that ghetto slang for when you’re out with your drug dealin’ friends.”

“Well, good morning anyway.”

“I don’t suppose you plan on coming to church with me this morning?”

“Since when did you start going to church?”

“Since you started runnin’around in the streets and worrying me to death.”

“I love you too, Mom. I gotta bounce though. If you leave before I get out of the shower the car keys are in my jacket.”

“I’ll walk.”

“Aw, Mom come on! If you give me a sec I’ll drive you and grandma.”

“Your grandmother left an hour ago while you were sleeping off your hangover. Your food is on the table. I’ll be back by three o’clock.”

She kissed me automatically, lovelessly, then left quickly as if she couldn’t stand to be in my presence anymore. My heart ached.

I showered and left without eating. The bright morning sun seared into my skull giving me an instant headache. My nerves were fraying, raw and bleeding. I needed to calm down and take my mind off my work and family. I needed some pussy.

I didn’t really have a girlfriend. The truth was that I was still kind of sprung on Iesha even though she was having a kid by Huey. I still fantasized about making her mine, falling in love and treating her right. I wanted to do all the things for her I could never imagine doing for any of the cheap money-hungry hoes that got passed around the neighborhood from one thug to the next, their virtues vandalized and pillaged until they wound up catching a disease and burning some poor fool and getting fucked up so bad nobody wanted them anymore. Then they’d wind up turning to crack and selling that thang to the fools who didn’t know or didn’t care. It was funny how girls who nobody ’round the way would touch could still sell their ass to guys outside the hood. I had started looking at every woman I saw in the hood as just a future crackwhore. Not one of them was worth my time—except Iesha.

Deep down I knew Iesha would stay with Huey forever if for no other reason than that he was pretty and there were too few things of genuine beauty in the ghetto that didn’t get spoiled quickly. Iesha would feel like it was her duty to preserve this one beautiful thing. And I was far from pretty. Sure, I had money and a brotha with cash could have just about any woman he wanted and her momma, but I wasn’t about supporting a woman just for some pussy and Iesha was one of the few who wasn’t like that anyway, though I might have made an exception for her.

Lately, I had been bangin’ a neighborhood girl named Yolanda and, even though I knew I wasn’t the only stud she was dirtying the sheets with, something about her raised her above the rest of the hood rat hoes the local thugs passed around like trading cards. Yolanda commanded respect around the way. She was not a small woman, five-foot-ten inches tall and one hundred and eighty pounds or more. For such a big girl she was as fast as a viper. Idiots foolish enough to try to diss her usually ended up with a straight razor against their balls and her thirty-eight pressed to their temple. She was a true player who knew every aspect of the game. One hard-ass gangsta bitch.

Yolanda seemed to be involved in everything. She sold alcohol after hours that she brought over from New Jersey by the caseload. She also sold the best weed in the neighborhood. Besides that she knew everybody’s business and was more accurate and reliable than the six o’clock news. She was the type of person whose name happened to pop up in every conversation. You couldn’t talk about G-town without mentioning her and any argument concerning G-town street history could be settled with one word from her. No one had ever had any reason to contradict her and I doubt they ever would. Even the old-heads consulted her when it came to anything that had happened in her lifetime. Yolanda was the first woman I’d ever had and the best by a long shot. No matter how many girlfriends I had since her I always wound up back in her bed.

She was gorgeous in her own way. Big black eyes with long lashes that covered her half-lidded eyes almost completely giving her this sultry satisfied look that gave you the impression she had just gotten finished smoking a blunt or having one hell of an orgasm. Both guesses would probably be right at any hour of the day since sex and weed were her two favorite vices and she indulged them both obsessively.

Her lips were obscenely full and curvaceous as was the rest of her body. They seemed to pout, smirk, and sneer all at the same time. If she licked her lips around any group of men it was a sure bet that somebody’s dick would get hard. That dick sucker pucker of hers was a perfect argument that fellatio was not an unnatural act and that at times nature even seemed to favor it. Her breasts were pornographically exaggerated. They burst through her shirts like over-ripe fruit ready to explode with nectar. She had an ass that was perfectly round and firm, but it too was exaggerated beyond all sane proportions like two basketballs squeezed together into a skirt that usually crept high up her chocolate thighs so that the bottom of each ass-cheek was visible as was the neatly manicured mons.

You could almost hear the wetness between her thighs as they swished together as if the rubbing of her own flesh against her sex kept her constantly aroused. Her lascivious curves, her movements, her voice, her attitude, even her scent was a fuck me, bitch-in-heat musk, thick with pheromones. She never wore a bra and so her tremendous mammaries bounced and swayed with her every movement. Even though she had hair that looked like it had never seen a comb, even with those worn down flip-flops she wore on her feet in the summer and the tacky white pumps she wore the rest of the time, even though her clothes were always a little shabby and she didn’t look quite clean enough, or neat enough, or proper enough for anyone to ever call their girlfriend, her very essence was sexual and you’d have had to be half-dead not to notice. She had the best pussy in town and she knew it.

Yolanda had been my babysitter when I was seven and eight years old. She was only twelve years old herself then and already far from innocent. All my homies had her as a baby-sitter and almost all of us had our first sexual experiences with her. I remember she used to sit me on her lap and pretend like I was her baby. I would suckle on her breasts, which at twelve were already 44DD and she would fondle my genitals and masturbate herself. I guess, looking back on it now, she had molested all of us. But we didn’t look at it that way and still don’t. If she had been a guy or something or if she had been old or unattractive then I might feel differently. As it was, I always looked forward to her visits. She made me feel special. In the hood fucking the babysitter was normal. It was just a part of growing up.

When I was ten I got my own key to the front door and Mom decided I no longer needed a babysitter. I didn’t see her again until I was twelve and puberty was kicking my ass. It was her that I fantasized about when I woke up with the sheets tacky with semen. I thought I was going crazy. All I could think about was tits and asses. I used to get into fights two or three times a day just to give my mind something else to think about. Then one day during the worst of my pubescent satyriasis I went to visit Yolanda. My mind felt like it was rending itself to ribbons with tension and frustration. I thought I was turning into some kind of sex fiend.

“Boy, you just becomin’ a man is all. It’s how your body gets prepared for you to make babies someday. Thinkin’ about sex all the time is just part of it. That’s normal. Fuckin’ is all men think about anyway. It’s just worse for you now because you ain’t really done it yet. I can take care of that for you though. Come on upstairs to my room.”

She led me by the hand up to her room. I wasn’t nervous at all when she undressed me. After all, it was Yolanda. She’d seen me naked dozens of times. When she touched me though, it felt better than I could ever remember it feeling.

“I’ll do it for you this time. But you’ve got to learn to do it for yourself. If you don’t learn how to jack-off you might just go crazy. All that cum might back up and clog your brain.”

She started stroking me slow and steady until I felt like I was going to explode. Then she bent down and took me in her mouth. Her lips and tongue worked me into a frenzy. She slid my manhood up between her breasts while she continued to suck on me and soon I was vigorously fucking her cleavage. That first orgasm felt as if I was having a seizure. I thought I had broken something. When the semen erupted from my organ I stared at it expecting to see blood. It felt like my brain was going to shoot right out my urethra. Yolanda rubbed my cum all over her nipples. She licked the last drops of semen from my spent organ and then lifted each breast up to her lips and licked them clean as well. I was transfixed as I watched her gobble up my seed. To this day I can’t get the image of her beautiful pillow-soft lips glistening with my semen or of her serpentine tongue lapping up my cum. I started going over her house everyday after that and she showed me every possible way to please and be pleased by a woman.

After I got out of Daniel Boone, Yolanda became like a surrogate mother for me since my own mother refused to speak to me after learning that I was working for Scratch. She cooked for me. She bought me clothes. She listened to my problems and offered advice. And she fucked my brains out.

As I rushed over to her house my mind was fixated on the idea of getting my head buffed by those big sexy lips and of course drenching her beautiful breasts in my cum again.

When she answered the door she could sense that something was wrong.

“Did you and your mom have another fight, baby?” she asked while reaching out to caress my face. Just the feel of her skin against mine instantly relaxed me.

“Yeah, but it’s cool. I ain’t trippin’”

“Uh huh. Look, this is me you talkin’ to, not one of those other dumb ass hoes you fuck around with. I know when my baby ain’t feelin’ good about something. You don’t need to front with me. I know you’s a hard nigga, but I know your weaknesses too. Now what is it? Is your moms givin’ you grief about workin’ for that white boy again?”

It wasn’t like Yolanda approved of me blastin’ fools for Scratch or anything. She was just a hell of a lot more open-minded about it than Moms was. She was willing to talk about it, giving genuine thought to my point of view, whereas Moms wouldn’t even talk about it. As long as I was involved with drug dealers she had nothing to say to me. Yolanda, so often the victim of harsh criticism herself, was less quick to judge and condemn. Still, that didn’t stop her from letting me know how she felt about things.

“You know that you and Huey are two of the brightest kids in this neighborhood. If ya’ll stopped fuckin’ around in the streets and took some kind of interest in school ya’ll could make something of yourselves out there. Ya’ll could be whatever ya’ll wanted to be and wouldn’t have to go around shootin’ and killin’ to do it. I always imagined that someday I’d pick up a magazine and read about you being some big-time politician or activist or something instead of another tool of the white man in the genocide of our people. I’m sorry to put it that way, but everyday I’m afraid that I’m going to look in the paper and see you in handcuffs or lyin’ dead in the streets. That would just break my heart, Malik.”

“Don’t worry, it wouldn’t make the papers anyway. I ain’t that important.”

“Nigga, why is you so damn cold? I used to change your diapers and rock you to sleep at night. I know you ain’t as hard as you front like you is. You just a little baby boy trying to imitate a man.”

“Fuck you, bitch! You don’t know shit about me. Don’t you know most fools would lose their lives for just suggesting that I’m anything less than a man? You know Malik, but you don’t know Snap and that’s me too. That’s who I am out in the street. Snap, the maddog psycho killer that everyone’s afraid of. That’s me. That’s who I am. So don’t get it twisted. ’Cause you don’t know if I might turn around and smoke
your
ass. You keep pissin’ me off I could put a cap in you right now.”

“Anytime you feelin’ rabbit you just jump, little boy. I done put bigger dicks in the dirt than yours. I love you like you was my own kid and at the same time like you was my man, but I’d still deal with your ass like all the rest of them wannabe gangstas I’ve had to put in check over the years.”

“See, that’s just the thing, Yolanda. That’s what you ain’t feelin’ me on. I don’t want to be no gangsta. I don’t want to be no killa. If I was some white kid growin’ up in the suburbs I’d probably never touch a gun. But these are the cards I’ve been dealt. I was born into the game. This is what I am. This is all I am.”

“Oh, Malik, you can be so much more.”

“How! How am I supposed to go to school and compete with kids who eat three square meals a day when my stomach is empty? Kids who get driven to school everyday when I’m walkin’ two miles back and forth in the goddamn snow and rain and shit and even when it’s ninety degrees outside? How am I supposed to do that? How can I compete with kids who can afford to wear nice clothes everyday when I’m fightin’ everyday because all the kids are dissin’ the fucked-up hand-me-downs that I’m wearin’? I got to compete with kids whose mothers cook all their meals and clean their rooms and wash and iron their clothes for them and help them with their homework every night while my mom is comin’ home from work exhausted every night and I’m out in the streets hustlin’ to get just a few of the things they get handed to them on silver platters. Fuck that shit! I ain’t got to go through all that shit now that I’m workin’ for Scratch. I got money in my pockets and clothes on my back. I got my own car and a full stomach. Those white boys and those rich ass Mount Airy niggas look at me like I ain’t shit ’cause I’m poor. But they all start jockin’ when they see me come to school wearin’ a platinum necklace that they know they couldn’t wear even if their parents can afford it because someone would jack their asses for it. I’d kill every last one of them fools just for how they’ve made me feel all these years. Fuck all of them!”