“Ain’t no party like a Brooklyn party and a Brooklyn party don’t stop!” Ameer rhymed and the crowd repeated the rhyme. He had ’em all caught up. Another girl rushed under the table and was pulling the Black Caterpillar down by her ankles. The Black Caterpillar tried holding onto Ameer. He shook her off and threw on a cut called “Ego Trippin,” by Ultramagnetic MC’s. The crowd got swept into the beats and rhymes, ignoring what was happening up front.
A girl brawl broke out beneath the table and all the equipment was shaking. Ameer’s eleven-and-twelve-year-old crew flew out the wings where they had been chilling in the dark, got on opposite sides of the table, and held it down steady, screaming, “Back up from the DJ table!” Some of them girls tried to stand up even though the table was above them.
Ameer’s pops and the one in the yellow dress began tugging the girls from beneath the table, their clothes out of whack from fighting like alley cats and junkyard dogs. They each came crawling out or got dragged out and tried to straighten themselves and their clothes and hair.
“We gonna slow it down,” Ameer announced. “So girls, take it easy. Us men are here for you. All the single ladies, come to the dance floor right here.” He pointed. All of the single men over here.” He pointed. “This is for you. Don’t be shy. I’mma dance with this troublemaker right here,” he said, pointing to the Black Caterpillar. “My pop’s gonna hold the turntables down for me.” His pops stepped up and nodded like a cool old dude and the crowd gave him props like they were all familiar with him. Then Ameer announced, “The birthday girl is gonna dance with my man Romeo Black!” He nodded, and then pointed at me without waiting or checking for my reaction.
“I like it” by DeBarge was spinning. “I’m bringing the love back,” his father said, all smoothed out like he was Frankie Crocker, one of them late-night radio announcers. The throwback record raised up the lust level in the young bodies. Now all teens were paired up and pressed together. Mitzie, the birthday girl, was standing alone, staring at me.
Ameer’s pops was looking my way with a big smile on his face. Could be because the one in the yellow dress was right at his side, or because he knew his son had put me on the spot and in the spotlight, the place I hated the most.
I was thinking about the nine on my waist, the ring on my finger, my second wife in my heart, and the niggas in the room. I was looking at the sweet sixteen walking up on me.
“Hey Romeo, or should I call you Black?” she asked me.
“Happy Birthday,” was all I said. I put one hand on her waist but didn’t let our bodies or our eyes connect.
“You not from around here,” she said.
“Nah.”
“But you are from Brooklyn, I can tell,” she said. I didn’t say nothing.
“You go to college?” she asked me.
“Nah,” I said.
“You seem much calmer than some of these boys,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Can I make you my birthday present?”
* * *
That was all before the finale. Ameer’s pops threw on “Don’t Look Any Further,” by Dennis Edwards. That song was saying something and had the girls open. He let it rock uninterrupted and grabbed the hand of the one in the yellow dress, and they began dancing right in front of the DJ table. He was leaning her back and she was laying into him. Then he leaned her the other way and molded her body to his lead.
She is the mother of four daughters, a grown woman. I calculated the youngest actual age she could be was thirty. Yet she fit right into a sweet sixteen party, not as a chaperone or guardian, but like all the rest of the young ladies in the jam.
* * *
No one saw her walk into the party, but she did. I didn’t see her until she was already beating the woman with the yellow dress’s ass. The birthday girl flew to her mother’s rescue. The Black Caterpillar and Ameer and two more girls ran off the dance floor and tried to stop the fight.
She was a vicious fighter, ripped the yellow dress off of the birthday girl’s mother and dragged her by her hair naked all the way to the light switch and flipped it on. Ameer tried to stop her. She slapped him. She got away with it too, ’cause she was his moms.
* * *
“Chill in my room for four more hours,” Ameer said to me, and he was dead serious. I had helped him lug all of his equipment and belongings back to his building and upstairs to his apartment, along with the five-man eleven-twelve crew. He gave each of them twenty dollars. “Damn, now I’m down a hundred,” he said, muttering to himself.
“My moms, I understand that she’s emotional, but she’s getting worse. She fucked up the money on my first gig. If I hadn’t listened to Chris talk about getting a deposit and per diem when we were setting up to build the wall, and shit like that, I would’ve got jerked for the whole 350 and still had to pay my young boys. Now, out of the 175 dollars up-front money, I only made 75 dollars off of this situation,” he said.
“I’m gon’ bounce back to my spot,” I told him. It was two in the morning and I didn’t want my wives to worry.
“You need to trust me on this. From twelve to six a.m. Pee Wee and them is downstairs sticking up anything moving. You won’t even see them. They hang back in the shadows. And you ain’t from around here,” Ameer warned. “Them dudes is nasty. They’ll take your steel and kill you with it.” He sounded straight up.
“I’m not worried about Pee Wee, and them,” I told Ameer.
“You not worried. I am. So do it for me,” Ameer added with an emotion I didn’t feel coming off of him ever. So I chilled, waiting on the sun.
“You asked me to show you how to make the prayer,” I said, reminding him of what he had said the night before I went to Asia, when it was just me and him in my empty Brooklyn apartment.
“I remember,” he admitted. “But after a party? Maybe not.”
“What difference does it make?” I asked him, not to push, but to hear how he was thinking about it.
“I’m saying,” he said and then paused. “If I’mma get serious, I wanna be serious, not sliding back and fourth. I’m not one hundred that I’m ready to get serious with it,” he said.
“No pressure,” I told him. Then I asked, “What are you serious about? The girl in the black dress?”
“Mimi? She’s the freaky fourteen-year-old, Mitzie, the birthday girl’s sister,” Ameer confided.
My mind was blown and I stood still, putting it all together. The mother in the yellow dress purchased a Red Lobster coupon, dinner for two for the winner of the musical chairs game. And even though she was the mother and she brought the prize, she still participated in the game and jumped in the last chair remaining and declared herself the winner. Even though she is the Black Caterpillar’s mother, her daughter still snatched the chair from under her and watched her crash down to the floor and twist her ankle, didn’t help her up, but sat in the chair showcasing her legs and toes. Even though the Black Caterpillar is the sister to Mitzie, the birthday girl, she still upstaged her, and aggressively challenged her over Ameer.
“Who were the girls who were underneath the table fighting?” They were not the other two sisters, were they?” I asked, thinking and knowing it had to be impossible for all four sisters to be trying to give Ameer the panties.
“Nah, the other two sisters are older, seventeen and eighteen. They came to the party late with their boyfriends, so they were up under them. They all had on the same dress, different colors. You should’ve caught on from that. Their moms, Minerva, was in the yellow; Mitzie, the birthday girl, in the light blue; Mimi in the black; Mina in the red; and Misha in the green. Now, if they was some random chicks who just happened to be wearing the same dress on the same night at the same party, that right there would’ve set it off,” he said.
It was crazy, I thought, him thinking anyone who didn’t live in his building or live the way that he and these people think is normal could guess at some actions and happenings that were unimaginable, at least to me.
“The girls under t
he table were two girls that I talk to from time to time, and the third one was best friends with one of them.” He broke it down for me.
“Why not choose the one you think is the one who you could chill with?” I asked him. I really wanted to know.
“None of them is the one,” he said. “Maybe I’ll import me something exotic like you did.” I didn’t say nothing back. I don’t want anyone commenting on Akemi, my first wife, or on the second one either, but Ameer never met her.
“And don’t throw me none of your girls no more. You know I don’t like that shit,” I said, referring to Mitzie the birthday girl who he said was sweet on him.
“I threw you a virgin. Something no one else can seem to get. I knew you would like that,” he said. But he was wrong.
“Don’t worry, brother,” Ameer said. “I’mma get my weight up. I’ll need three more years. When I’m eighteen, I’mma do the prayers same as you. I’mma have a badass wife like you do. I’mma have my business popping so I could be calm and cool like you. You so calm, so cool, you never even borrowed a dollar from me. Plus I’mma have clout and reputation, so I could walk in and out on the team anytime I feel like it, and still play in the playoffs.”
“You still heated about that, huh?” I asked him, but it was really a statement.
“I’m more heated that you don’t trust me enough to even fill me in on how you got put back on,” he said.
“I made an appointment with the black team coach, Vega. Then bam, the owner, Ricky Santiaga, showed up instead of the coach. He wanted me to play. I wanted to play. So, I agreed,” I said.
“That easy? The hustler, Ricky Santiaga, showed up for self, in person? I’m sure there was more to it. You secretive and stingy with your stories,” he complained. “What was he pushing, that Black Ferrari 288 GTO you said he had the last time you saw him a couple of months ago?”
“Nah, a Maserati Royale,” I said calmly.
“Damn! A Maserati what? Just a Maserati is crazy enough. A Maserati Royale, I never even heard of that. That’s twice I missed out on seeing something mean like that. Did he let you ride in it?”
“He let me drive it,” I said. “I’m telling you that ’cause I trust you enough to know you won’t repeat it.”
“That’s something no one would believe if I told him. That’s something a cat would have to see for himself,” Ameer said. “You think he lets any of the other players on your black team ride in his whip like that and push it too? Nope! He got some kind of connection with you. You linked up with a major player. You think it’s about basketball? He might want you on his real team, for real,” Ameer said and we both seemed paused to consider it.
“Did he mention anything besides the junior basketball league?” Ameer asked curiously.
“He told me that he doesn’t believe that there is any such thing as a bad man,” I told Ameer truthfully about the conversation I had had with Ricky Santiaga. Probably I mentioned that one sentence to Ameer and left out a hundred others, because of how it had stood out in my mind. I began to recall it clearly.
Santiaga and I had been back in the parking garage below the upscale high-rise condominiums where he had stopped immediately after he first picked me up. It was nighttime. He had asked me to drive home from Edgewater, New Jersey. I did, but once I was about to round the bend and head into the Lincoln Tunnel, he told me to pull over. I did. He took over the driver’s seat and I was back in passenger position.
When we reached the Manhattan condos, he asked me to come up with him.
“For what?” I asked.
“I have someone who wants to meet you,” he said.
“Who?”
“A lady who I bragged so much to about that shot you made, that she wants to meet you in person,” Santiaga said comfortably. But I was uncomfortable.
“Is she the only one upstairs where you’re headed?” I asked him.
“Two,” he said. “There are two women upstairs who want to meet you, and that’s it.” So I agreed and rode up on the elevator with him. He pulled out a small key with an unusual shape and placed it in an unusual-shaped slot on the elevator control panel.
“You seem not to trust no one,” Santiaga said solemnly. Then he asked me, “Do you think you’re the only trustworthy man and everyone else is below you?”
“Why would I think that?” I responded.
“Do you think there’s ‘good money’ and ‘bad money’?” Santiaga asked, ignoring my questioning of him. I understood. He was talking real calm but seemed tight all of a sudden because I did not take the $25,000 cash from him that he wanted me to take. Instead I made the vending-machine business deal with him. Maybe he’s feeling fucked up about it after we shook on it, I thought.
“All money is good money. And there is no such thing as a bad man, so don’t look down on the next man,” he said oddly. I was thinking that he was the one with the elite exotic vehicle collection. Why was he now asking me not to look down on him? Or maybe he was tight because I thought his man Allastair is an ass and had punched him in the face. Maybe he thought that I looked down on Allastair. If so, then he was right.
Then he said again, “There’s no such thing as bad men. There are only bad situations. And you, son, will never know if you yourself are a bad man, or if you would do the same things as a bad man, until you get caught up in a bad situation.” He paused.
The elevator opened and were standing in an impressive living room in the sky. The beauty of it was in its spaciousness, and the placement of each of the few pieces of imported furniture. There was no do-it-yourself, build-it, borrow-it, or rent-it–type pieces in there and the huge, wide windows made the sky, moon, and stars seem like part of the penthouse.
The design of the marble floors was only matched by the design of the Persian rug that was perfectly placed in one area of the room. There were Tiffany lamps and tropical flowers, porcelain vases and expensive abstract paintings; even the media area could only be described as cinema and not television. An open-air professional kitchen, two bedrooms, and a greenhouse. I was sure that this was a female place, paid for by man-made money. The type of place that a man would only provide and maintain for someone close to his heart, perhaps his mother, I thought.
“This way,” Santiaga said, walking quietly in his leather Gucci driving shoes. He slid the heavy glass doors open and shut them as soon as we were both standing outside. On the terrace was a marble card table and four matching marble stools. On the table was a chessboard made of beautiful twenty-four-karat gold, with pure gold chess pieces; the king and queen pieces were detailed with genuine diamonds, and around the perimeter of the board were inlaid tiny princess cuts. It was an exquisite board, made with fucking passion and precision. It had to be conceived and designed by someone who loved the game, felt they’d mastered the game, and for whom the game had a deeper meaning than it carried for most. I got drawn to it.
“Do you know the game?” Santiaga asked me.
“Somewhat,” I replied.
“Think you can beat me?” he asked casually.
“I think I can, but since you own that board, I think I’d have to let you win,” I said. We laughed.
“Then one day we’ll play in a broke-down little spot, on a cheap cardboard board with plastic pieces. On that day put all of your effort into it, so when I beat you, you won’t front like you let me win,” he said smoothly.
“A’ight, we’ll do that.” I put my word on it.
Facing the money-making Manhattan night lights and its unrivaled urban skyline, Santiaga said suddenly, “And if you are a good man in a bad situation who does something bad, you’re still a good man, just fighting for your own survival, like all real men have to do.”
* * *
“So what do you think about what Santiaga was saying?” Ameer asked me.
“I think if I don’t take some sleep, I won’t be able to figure nothing out,” I told him, and put my head to rest on my knees in the sitting position on the floor in my best f
riend Ameer Nickerson’s room. As I drifted off, I thought about how there was only silence coming from Ameer’s parents’ bedroom. His mother had got what she wanted, I figured: her husband, in her bed, every night. I thought of my wives, then my mind drifted back to the two women Santiaga had introduced me to in that plush penthouse. I considered what message he was relaying to me by introducing me to them at all. One thing I sensed and felt that I knew for sure was that the introduction and the manner in which he was dealing with me that day and night, like Ameer suggested, went beyond a teen’s basketball league.
With blue eyes and blond hair elegantly wrapped into a flawless bun, the white-skinned woman in that expensive condo did not speak a word yet welcomed me warmly and was still very expressive. She approached with her eyes first, and then walked right over, reached out and touched my face with both of her palms, and opened both of my palms, then looked inside. She held my hands until the black-skinned woman, same complexion as myself, approached and took my hands from her.
Dark brown eyes. Dark brown was the lightest color on her. Her black hair was natural and each strand was twisted, instead of cornrowed, into a royal sculpture at the nape of her neck. She was thick, but not fat. Her clothing was fine fabric, her heels expensive and sturdy, not stylish. Unlike the white woman, whose hands were cold yet soft in a way that revealed she had never done a day’s work, the African woman’s hands were warm and worn like a worker’s. Her heavy hands felt like the hands of a woman who had lived, really lived and loved deeply and strongly and continuously every second of her life. They were the hands of a mother, perhaps a cook and seamstress as well. Her voice was unusual and unexpected, high pitched.
“Son coeur est pur. Il est fidele. Il porte le couronne. Il sauvera votre vie un jour,” she said, speaking in what I knew was French even though I do not speak any French. I tried to press her French words into my memory and store them long enough so I could speak them to my second wife and she would tell me their meaning. She is the only one whom I know who speaks the French language.