Sweet St. Louis

  Ant said, “I don’t really feel comfortable with that. I mean, if we lived together or something, and you had a key—”

  “If we lived together and I had a key, this wouldn’t even be an issue,” she snapped, cutting him off.

  He denied her with his silence, still heading home at the wheel.

  “I just wanted to be with you tonight, that’s all. And I apologize if I caught you at a bad time,” he told her.

  “Well, it took you long enough to decide that you wanted to be with me. It’s after midnight now,” she pouted.

  “What does that mean, that I’m supposed to wait until tomorrow?”

  “You could have. I mean, at least we would have had more time together.”

  But I want some now, he thought with another short grin.

  “I’ll make it up to you then,” he promised her with a squeeze of her inner thigh. “Okay?”

  She was sold without another word from him. She decided to just let it happen. Stop fighting the process, and let the chips fall as they may, she told herself. What was the use of fighting? She wanted him as much as he wanted her. Or as much as he wanted it. The sweetness of a woman.

  On Ant’s end, his mind reflected back to Sharron. He had to make certain that he turned his phone ringer off and came up with a clever excuse for her in case she called him that night and received no answer.

  The rest? Well, who needs regurgitated details. A man takes a woman. A woman accepts a man. They tire themselves. Then they fall asleep. But many times, the women are not half as tired, particularly when men are more greedy than they need to be, taking all and giving none. Which was the case that night. Shawntè felt cheated, not so much physically, but mentally and emotionally. So she went sleepless in St. Louis. But did he care? Are you kidding me? He just wanted to blast off into outer space.

  That next day at work, Ant was terrified. It’s funny how women can seep into a man and become a part of his daily consciousness. Women may not believe as much, but it’s true. Even for fast-thinking guys like Ant. Especially for fast-thinking guys like Ant! After all, he had to stay ahead of his own game, and the deeper it got, the more he was forced to think about it.

  Sharron Francis was seeping into him. As he worked, he wondered about the numerous phone calls she had made the night before, only to hang up on his machine.

  Damn! She even has my number at work! he thought. How did she do that? And what the hell was I thinking when I gave it to her? That girl asks too many damn questions, that’s her problem. And now it’s my problem for even trying to answer ’em.

  So he waited for the phone to ring, all day long, thinking that every ring was for him. Sharron would call with an earful of questions that he would attempt to duck and dodge. Why? Because he wasn’t finished with her yet. She hadn’t given him a piece of herself. She was still testing his waters with her toes, thinking before she jumped all the way in. He was forced to respect her for that. But a booty call? Shawntè? What about her? If she was easy to him, she could be easy to someone else. The hypocrisy of humanity was a bitch indeed!

  “Hey, Anthony, your friend is out at the front,” a co-worker told him close to lunch hour. He had a big smile on his face that made Ant suspicious.

  “My friend?” he asked quizzically. “Is it a guy or a girl?”

  His heart skipped four beats as he slid out from a Chevy Nova that needed to be trashed rather than repaired. The rusty, dark green car had a million different problems with it, but the owner refused to let it die. And why should he, when Paul gave him such good deals for being a committed customer for over twelve years?

  “That guy who always comes to get ya. Tony, right?” his co-worker asked him.

  “Oh, Tone,” Ant responded, relaxing. For a minute he thought Sharron had gone bananas like a wife showing up unannounced at her husband’s job to beef about another woman. Since that was far from being the case, he walked out to greet his partner with a huge smile of relief.

  “You goin’ to lunch soon?” Tone asked him.

  “Yeah, give me twenty minutes.”

  A good talk with his partner Tone during lunch hour was just what he needed to free his mind from Sharron. But on the way back to the garage, his boss stopped him.

  “Hey, Anthony, what’s with this friend of yours? Does this guy have a job or what? What is he gonna do, wait around and go to lunch with ya again? How many times is he gonna do this? Get a life for crying out loud.”

  Ant was surprised by it, but not that surprised. He knew his partner’s shortcomings. And he knew that Paul could have a lack of patience for underachievers. So he blew it off and went back to work until lunch.

  “Is your boyfriend still waitin’ for ya, tiger?” his fellow mechanic asked him, teasing him when he returned to the garage.

  “So that’s why you were smiling,” Ant responded with a nod. “Paul was cracking on my boy, making jokes and shit on him.”

  “I mean, is the guy lonely or what, man?”

  “That’s my boy. He’ll get his life together. He ain’t dead yet.”

  “Yeah, and that’s about the only thing he’s not.”

  “Yeah, whatever, man.” And if you keep talking that shit, you gon’ have a fight on your hands, he thought, in defense of his longtime friend. But the issue was dropped as quickly as it started as both mechanics got back to work.

  Nevertheless, Ant felt self-conscious about Tone’s lack of direction. He pulled out a cheap white sheet to lay across his Chevy’s interior for cruising again at lunchtime.

  “Where was you at last night, man? You had another girl with you?” Tone asked him as soon as he hopped in on the passenger side, wearing his St. Louis Cardinals jersey again.

  Ant thought about that as well.

  “Damn, man, you ever thought about buying another shirt that you like?” he asked him.

  Tone said, “Why, I wear this one too much?”

  “Yeah, man. Like every day.”

  “Aw, dawg, I don’t wear it that much. So where were you at last night, man? I called you about five times,” Tone lied. It was more like eight times.

  Ant looked at him and was pleasantly surprised. “So you were the one with all them hang ups on my machine. I thought it was Sharron.”

  “I told you to pick up the first two times, then after that, I just didn’t leave no messages,” Tone explained. Then he smiled. “You thought it was Sharron, hunh?”

  “Yeah, man. I left her crib last night and hooked up with Shawntè again, so I turned my phone off. Then I checked my answering machine this morning and got all of them hang ups.”

  “You was nervous about that?” Tone wanted to know.

  Ant hated to admit it. And he didn’t. Not directly.

  “I’m sayin’, man, I still ain’t got with this girl yet. I just didn’t want to mess it up.”

  Tone broke out laughing.

  “Yeah, dawg, she got you. You sniffin’ yourself all over, making sure you smell good.”

  “I’m just sayin’, man, I don’t want to fuck it up. At least not until I get with her first. You know how that goes, because after that, who knows what’ll happen. It’ll be back to business as usual, just like with this big-butt girl over here. God!” he exclaimed, watching a well-curved woman in form-fitting black pants who waited at the bus stop.

  Tone looked and smiled.

  “You’re saying that you don’t really like this girl?” he asked, pressing for an answer. Just a month earlier, Ant seemed to be running out of gas for women. But all of a sudden he seemed rejuvenated and back in the hunt for more. Or was it a last hurrah?

  Ant thought about that for a minute and hunched his shoulders.

  “I don’t really know, man. Who knows? I might like this girl more than I think I do.”

  Tone nodded, and smiled again, “I do,” he said.

  Ant grinned back at him. “I know you do.”

  Tone said, “Yeah, this girl make you think, man. In a good way.”

  “
But she be overdoing it though,” Ant told him.

  Tone thought about that. Overdoing it?

  “Well, maybe that’s what you need. Because a lot of girls don’t make you think enough. They’re either too easy or they don’t want to talk to you at all,” he commented with a laugh. “Or at least not to me. Then you got girls who want to talk all the time but never give you no ass. I don’t like them much either.”

  Ant broke out laughing. “What if this girl Sharron is like that? And she don’t like to fuck?” he questioned rhetorically. “I was over her crib last night, and she was dressed for bed in a long nightshirt, and she stayed like that while we ate fried rice and talked, teasing the hell out of me.”

  Tone looked at Ant incredulously.

  “And you let her do that to you?” he asked.

  “Man—”

  “Aw, yeah, dawg. She’s the one,” Tone cut him off and commented with a laugh. “She’s playin’ with your Johnson and everything. She even had me going home callin’ up old girlfriends and whatnot,” he confessed.

  “Speaking of calling up old girlfriends,” Ant said, “have you tried making calls anywhere about a job?” He was dying to get at it, he just hadn’t found the opportunity to bring it up without forcing the issue. Tone needed direction and some kind of purpose in life.

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” he responded. “I thought about calling up this carpet cleaning service out Richmond Heights.”

  “Richmond Heights? My boss lives out that way in Ladue,” Ant said, surprised. “My boss got like a mini mansion out there. He let me ride out there with him a couple of times. I even ran ball with his two sons.”

  Tone looked into Ant’s face and asked, “He got it like that? A mini mansion?”

  “Yeah, he invests his money in stocks and bonds and shit. Paul’s a smart guy, man.”

  Tone smiled. “Are you sure he ain’t a part of the Mafia? That repair and body shop might just be a front.”

  Ant shook it off. “Just because he’s Italian with some money don’t mean that he’s into Mafia shit. That’s like saying we both hustlers because we black.”

  “I have hustled,” Tone said with a smile. “I was just never good at it.”

  Ant thought about that.

  “What are you good at?” he found himself asking his partner as they cruised up to a Taco Bell drive-thru.

  “I was just thinking about that myself. It don’t seem like it’s shit that I can do.”

  Ant started laughing, but it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.

  “I mean, I’m twenty-eight years old, man, and I got no skills,” Tone said. “I mean, you, you got that car shit that you into, but I was never really into that. And then you got into gamin’ women and whatnot, and I just had to take what I could get.”

  Ant stopped laughing and ordered his food.

  “Yeah, gimme three soft chicken tacos with plenty of hot stuff.”

  Tone wasn’t even hungry, he just wanted to talk.

  “That’s why I was calling you last night, man,” he said. “Now I know what you were talking about when you said you get bored a lot. It feels like I haven’t done shit with my life.”

  Ant was sorry he even started the conversation. Tone was trying his best to depress him.

  “Yeah, well, you ain’t dead yet,” Ant told him. “So just call up this carpet cleaning place and see what’s up.”

  “I’m gon’ do it,” Tone said.

  “You sure you ain’t hungry, man?”

  He shook his head. “Naw, I ain’t hungry. But thanks for asking. You a good friend, man,” he added. “One of the only true friends that I got. I just wish that some of your enthusiasm about shit could rub off on me somehow.”

  “You need some inspiration, hunh?” Ant asked, stuffing his mouth with his first bite.

  “Exactly. I need some inspiration,” Tone admitted with a smile.

  “Well, like they say, man, where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Ant mumbled through his taco. “You just have to stay at it and keep yourself busy. And once you do that, only time will tell.”

  Time will tell indeed. And time can never be rushed with friendship. You can try your best to speed up the process to make fast friends, but in the end, time will eventually kick your behind, and untested friendships will eventually betray you. A commitment to anything has to be walked through. And as corny as it may seem, the computer age held nothing on the old-school principle of getting to know each other as friends before lovers through time. Yet, the year was 1999, and now the end of June; the beginning of summertime. And as young Americans arrived at the last summer before the year 2000, they seemed more than ready to do away with time’s lessons of faith and patience, while fast-forwarding to get to the good parts—the good life, the good money, the good sex, and the good love—as if time was running out on them. Unfortunately, in their rushes of immaturity, too many of them made hasty decisions with their new opportunities, new friends, and new lovers, ending up with a fast hour of pleasure, followed by a full decade of misery.

  Like it or not, Sharron had the right idea, to slow things down and discover one another inside and out before indulging each other. Let’s just enjoy the good things in life like my twenty-fourth birthday, before we ruin things, she thought. So she had Anthony take a drive through slow-moving traffic on Natural Bridge Avenue on her birthday, Sunday, June 27, 1999, in the midst of St. Louis teenagers celebrating their youth and another summer of the mating game.

  Sharron smiled, relaxing in the passenger seat, dressed in a new skirt outfit of cream-colored cotton with brown leather sandals. “I haven’t done this in ages,” she said, referring to cruising the avenue amongst the giddy teens blowing horns, walking the streets, and showing themselves off to one another.

  Anthony chuckled, dressed again in all blue denim. He didn’t believe he was even driving there on Natural Bridge during the weekend. Nevertheless, it was something to do, and something to see, on a long birthday date for Sharron. He enjoyed her company that much, whether he admitted it to himself and to his partner Tone or not. She had given Anthony peace. And he had given her peace. But how long would that peace last? Again, only time would tell. Yet, with faith in one another, they had all the time in the world.

  “So, this is what you want to do on your birthday?” Anthony asked Sharron. He was embarrassed. What if someone saw him there? Embarrassment stopped guys from doing many simple things in the first place; simple things like holding a woman’s hand for a walk in the park. Macho men laughed about those things, or at least while they were still young and didn’t know any better.

  “Why?” Sharron asked. “You don’t feel comfortable here? We can drive somewhere else. It doesn’t matter to me. We got all day, right? You promised.”

  Boy did she know how to hold a man to his word. All Anthony could do was smile. He did promise it to her. They would spend the entire day together.

  “I’m just saying, Sharron. There’s a million other things for us to do outside of driving around with … these people.”

  “Aw, don’t act like you never came up here before, and to O’Fallon Park, to check out the tight jeans and high skirts. Don’t even try it,” Sharron snapped at him with a grin.

  He laughed and didn’t deny it.

  “Yeah, but it’s different now. I’m older.”

  “There’s guys older than you out here,” she countered. And there were.

  “And those are the kind of guys that I don’t want to be with either,” he told her.

  Sharron thought of his friend and could not hold her tongue.

  “What about Tone? I don’t think he would mind being out here.”

  “Me and Tone are two different people just like you are Celena are different.”

  “Whatever happened to the saying ‘Birds of a feather flock together,’” she said with a laugh.

  “That’s bullshit,” Anthony responded. “You mainly hang out with people you know, and who you like, whether
they act like you or not. We ain’t all twins out here. I told you about that before.”

  “Yeah, when you talked about sharing pieces,” she remembered glowingly.

  Anthony looked over and grinned, shaking his head at her.

  “Are you ever gonna forget that line?”

  She looked him straight in his eyes and answered, “Of course not.”

  He nodded. “That’s just what I thought.”

  “Why? Would you want me to?”

  Hell yeah! he thought to himself. It was as if his one line had given her permanent keys to the workings of his mind. She could lock him up whenever she wanted to.

  “Sometimes I do,” Anthony admitted, grinning.

  “Yeah, well, you can forget about that,” she told him defiantly. “Because I won’t forget. Unless you knock me in the head and I catch amnesia.”

  He laughed a little too hard for comfort. Maybe those thoughts had come to his mind a few times to release himself from her vice grip on him. His laugh made her curious.

  Sharron looked at him real hard and asked, “Have you ever hit a girl before? You know, for getting on your nerves or something? And you just hauled off and punched her in the mouth?”

  Anthony nearly crashed into the car in front of them. He couldn’t believe Sharron! He turned and looked at her with horror.

  “Girl, you just say anything that comes to your mind. I mean, most women have a conscience that tells them ‘No, I’m not gonna ask him something like that.’ But you just don’t care.”

  Sharron found his statement ironic. Usually, she allowed her conscience to control too much. Questions that needed to be answered went unasked. But not anymore. And not with him. Because she was tired of assuming and complaining to girlfriends. She wanted a man to speak up for himself, and be a man.

  “You still haven’t answered the question,” she pressed him.

  Anthony snapped, “No! I ain’t never been into that shit!”

  “Never?”

  “Naw!”

  He hadn’t. He was too busy sexing them up.

  Sharron, tickled by his outrage, egged him on some more.