“Yeah, I would have told that motherfucker something if I was you.”
“If you was me, you would have done the same damn thing I’m doing now; tell your boy to stay away from the job. That’s all. ’Cause I gotta get paid.”
Tone grimaced. “Aw, man, it ain’t like he got the only repair shop in the damn city.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to mess up a good thing over some stupid shit.”
“Whatever, man. It sounds like he playin’ you like a damn fool. Racist ma-fucka’.”
“If he was so racist, he would have never hired me in the first place.”
“Naw, if you didn’t know what you were doing he wouldn’t have hired you,” Tone responded. “He knew what he was doin’ when he hired you. You one of the best mechanics in St. Louis. Fuck that! You could even run your own shop, and I could set up your appointments for you.”
Ant laughed and said, “Yeah, man, just stick to that carpet cleaning business.”
Tone chuckled to himself and decided to change the subject.
“What’s up with Sharron? Or you don’t want me to ask about her no more?” he questioned.
“Why do you ask about her so much anyway?” Ant asked him back.
“Because I’m jealous,” Tone admitted.
Ant laughed at his blunt honesty.
Tone said, “Seriously, man. I can’t even lie about that shit. I wish it was me that had her. Your ass don’t even care about the girl. Or maybe you do care about her after you hung up on me like that,” he added with a laugh. “You sounded pissed than a ma-fucka’.”
“I was pissed. And I do like her. That’s my girl, man,” Ant said with a grin.
“Oh, she your girl now? You must have fucked her then,” Tone responded. “What it feel like? What she taste like?”
Ant stopped and shook his head. “Here you go with that crazy shit again. I don’t even think I wanna talk about her with you anymore. She’s off-limits.”
“Off-limits? You sound like you try’na make her your wife. You looked at any rings yet?” Tone joked.
“Come on, man. Change the subject.”
One of the neighborhood park hangers walked over to the bench to speak with an extended hand. “Hey, Ant. Haven’t seen you around here lately. What’s up, dawg?”
“Yeah, well, some people gotta work every day,” Ant responded with a handshake.
The park hanger with sagging blue jeans, a white tank top, and a marijuana joint rolled behind his right ear, didn’t appear to enjoy his statement.
“So what you sayin’?” he asked.
“I’m sayin’ exactly what I said.”
Tone stared the beef down, and the park hanger decided to blow off his steam elsewhere.
“You need to check your boy, Tone,” he said, walking off to a more crowded section of the park.
Tone was speechless. He addressed Ant after the scene was clear again.
“You could make yourself a little more friendly when you come around here, man. They already don’t like you around here. Seem like you had too many girls in this area,” he added with a chuckle.
“What am I supposed to do, man? Come around here and smoke a few joints and shoot the breeze. I don’t have time for that shit. It’s almost the year 2000. I’m starting to think about buying houses and raisin’ kids.”
Tone looked at him surprised. “Oh yeah? You been thinkin’ ’bout that?”
Ant had discussed it all with Tone before. Tone just hadn’t paid him any attention at the time.
“I’m dead serious, man. We ’bout to turn thirty in a couple of years. You before me. Don’t you think about that shit?”
Tone smiled and started laughing. “I was thinkin’ ’bout that the night you hung the hell up on me. I was tellin’ myself, ‘The next fine girl I get with, I’m gon’ fuck her raw and drop a bomb on her.’”
Ant frowned at the idea. “Aw, man, you crazy. You ain’t goin’ out like that. We ain’t been using rubbers all this long to just start shootin’ missiles in the ocean. I already got two loose nieces and a nephew from my brothers goin’ out like that. And Rico got three loose kids.”
“Like you said, dawg, I’m gettin’ old, and I ain’t got nothin’ with my name on it yet,” Tone responded.
“What, you thinkin’ ’bout marrying somebody, too?”
“Why the hell not?” Tone answered. “That way my kids won’t be loose. And I’d get me a girl that got a nice job and her own money, and just turn her ass out in bed. It’s plenty of working girls out here looking for some good meat to keep.”
Ant just laughed. Tone made no sense at all. Even when he was sober.
“You ain’t thought about busting one in Sharron yet?” he asked his friend.
Tough question. Ant actually did think about it. He wondered what the consequences would be: how she would respond to it, how he would respond to her, and where they would go from there.
“I told you, man, she’s off-limits,” he repeated.
Tone looked through the night lights of the park and saw too many of the wrong people gathering.
“Hey, man, let’s take a ride in your car,” he said. Not that he was intimidated by anyone. He just didn’t want any unnecessary disputes to break out in the park with Ant. He loved his partner too much to mix him with crowds that Ant had consciously stayed away from.
“You wanna ride back up to the old ’hood in Jennings?” Ant asked, reminiscing.
Tone smiled and said, “Yeah, let’s do that.” They stood up and walked to the car.
Once they were headed farther north to Jennings, Ant said, “I was out this way for Sharron’s birthday last week, and I messed around and took her to the crib to introduce her to my mom. That shit was funny.”
“I thought you told me she’s off-limits,” Tone cracked.
“Man, fuck that, I feel like talkin’ ’bout her,” Ant snapped defiantly.
Tone grinned. “I knew you would talk about her before the night was over. You can’t hold no shit like that to yourself. So let it all out.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, my mom was in there tellin’ Sharron that my pop was a player. And she asked me about that.”
“And what you say to her?”
“You know me, man, I dodged the question. All men got a little player in them. Even loyal guys. They just too scared to admit it.”
They laughed loud like two young and free men would.
“She asked you to go steady with her yet?” Tone joked.
“Go steady? What, you been watching 90210 or something? Naw, she ain’t asked me no shit like that.”
“What she been kickin’ to you? I know she got some kind of plans for you. All women do.”
Ant nodded and thought about it. Plans. “You know, she ain’t really pressed the issue on that yet. But I know it’s coming.”
“Did you fuck her yet?” Tone asked him again.
“Come on, man. Stop that shit.”
“Well, tell me then and get it over with.”
“That ain’t gon’ get it over with. ’Cause then you gon’ ask me how it felt.”
Tone laughed, admitting it. “So you did fuck her then,” he responded, putting two and two together.
Ant ignored him with a telling smile.
“Was it good?” Tone asked for the hell of it.
They broke out laughing again, until tears came to their eyes.
“You know you always tell me, man. So go ahead and do it,” Tone pressed him. “Come on, dawg, get it over with.”
“What, you just want to hear me say it? It sounds like you know it already,” Ant commented.
Realizing it was the truth, that his partner had scored once more, Tone went silent, feeling jealous and lonely again.
He said, “Damn, man. Sometimes at night, I just wake up with a hard dick, and it be nobody there to do anything about it.”
Ant smiled and said, “That happens to everybody. Especially after a few drinks on the weekends. I’ve been there
before. Plenty of times.”
“Yeah, and then you call somebody up and take care of it. I call bitches up, and they be like, Tone who?’”
Ant laughed but had to stop himself.
He said, “That’s why it’s always good to keep a home base, man. Somebody you can always call. That’s why I ended up gettin’ Sharron when I did. I didn’t have Shawntè anymore, and I didn’t feel like calling up no old girls. That would have been boring as hell.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. But boring is better than nothin’,” Tone commented.
“Is it though? I mean, think about it. If guys wasn’t bored, we wouldn’t need so many girls in the first place. ’Cause I get bored fast”
“Are you bored with Sharron yet?” Tone asked him.
Ant smiled. “Naw. Not yet.”
“But you think that you will be?”
Ant paused. “I can’t really say, you know. She asked me that same question, and I told her the same thing. We just gotta wait and see.”
“What if she fuck around and get bored with you first?” Tone joked.
Ant smiled again. “That’s what I asked her. And she said that it was impossible.”
“Impossible? She said that? Damn! She really into you then.”
“What girls are not? Even Dana was lovin’ me when I had her,” Ant bragged.
“And you fucked it all up,” Tone responded.
“No I didn’t, man. You just don’t understand. You can’t keep no girls like her. She don’t know what the hell she want. All she’ll do is drive a ma-fucka’ crazy. I feel sorry for the guy who ends up with her.”
“I just wish he was me,” Tone responded with a grin.
By that time, they were cruising the familiar Florissant Avenue, where Ant recognized a house on a corner that held too short of a sweet memory for him.
“Remember that girl Leanna Brady used to live there?” he asked Tone, pointing to the house.
“Yeah, I remember her. She was pretty as hell!”
“She said that she would be my girl right before her pop moved her ass to Denver. You remember that?” Ant asked.
Tone said, “Aw, man, we was like eleven and twelve years old. So what? That wasn’t nothin’ but puppy love.”
“No it wasn’t either,” Ant snapped. “She said she was gon’ write me and she never did. I was asking my mom for mail for weeks.”
Tone broke out laughing.
Ant said, “That shit wasn’t funny, man. I used to go to sleep dreaming about that girl. And every time the Denver Broncos came on TV, I used to change the damn channel. My brothers was like, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?! That’s John Elway!’ And I was like, ‘Forget John Elway! I hate Denver!’”
The hard laugh brought more tears to Tone’s eyes.
“She probably lost your damn address, man,” he said through his laughter.
Ant made a U-turn and drove back to take another look at the house.
Tone said, “What are you doin’, man? She’s gone, dawg. You can’t bring her back.”
Ant reflected on those lonely nights he spent as a young boy anyway, where he prayed to the stars at night to send him a letter in the mail from Leanna. It was a letter that never came. And he was crushed. So crushed that he never wanted that disappointment to happen to him again. Ever! And although women believe that men forget everything, they do remember some things.
“Yeah, I thought about getting Sharron pregnant,” Ant admitted, making another U-turn on Florissant. “I thought about it with a lot of girls. I just wasn’t stupid enough to do it.”
Tone nodded and said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I had to pay for two abortions.”
Ant was surprised as ever. He faced his friend and said, “You never told me that.”
“I know. I was too embarrassed to tell you. And I ain’t want no kids if you didn’t have none,” Tone responded. “I was real young back then, man. But now that I think about it, that shit didn’t make no sense. And both of them girls are married now with children. Ain’t that a bitch?”
“How do you know that? You stayed in touch with them?”
“Naw, man, this was years ago. One girl was two years older than me. Last I heard, she moved with her husband to Texas somewhere. The other one hooked up with this dude right after she broke up with me and got pregnant by him. I guess she wanted a baby.”
“Damn!” Ant exclaimed. “And you never told me that.” He shook his head, still finding it hard to believe. Not that Tone had gotten two girls pregnant, but that he had never told him about it. Boys told each other everything. Especially boys like Tone. Or at least Ant thought that they did.
He shook it off and said, “But that’s what I mean, man. Time is movin’ on. I think about that more and more now. I’ve been tellin’ you that for months.”
“I know,” Tone conceded. “It’s just now startin’ to sink in on me. Every girl I call now got something else going on. You kind of think that their world stops as soon as you stop calling them, but it don’t.”
Ant nodded, agreeing with it. “Dana claim that she in love now, too. And I still can’t believe that shit,” he commented.
They rode around until late at night, reminiscing on the girls they’d had and the ones who’d slipped away. Then they discussed what kind of a woman they both hoped to have for themselves in the future. But when it was time for Ant to head back in, the only woman he could think of was Sharron, and her two hundred questions. That scared the hell out of him. Because sometimes, we actually get what we really want. We get what we really need. Then many of us choke up and drop the ball, scared straight, and not really knowing how to handle the pressure.
Pressure can make us think and do the most ridiculous things. Things that make you stop and say, “What the hell was I thinking?” Of course, that statement is usually uttered well after the fact, and when the pressure is long gone. But in the process of the act, when the heat is still on, we make our moves, and therefore, we must learn to live with them. Yet, learning to live with our mistakes is a hard thing to do. And when embarrassing or hasty decisions are made under pressure, many of us try and run from them. We form attitudes to distance ourselves from these mistakes, while making up excuses, or simply trying to move on without facing the music that we previously chose to dance to.
Sharron felt embarrassed and insecure about even continuing a relationship with Anthony. Or whatever it was that they had, because they had never bothered to officially define it. And why was she so insecure? Because she didn’t have “plans” for where they were supposed to go or how they were supposed to get there. She had planned things in her relations with black men before, and they had never worked out. Now she had gone ahead and slept with a new one, and she didn’t quite know what to do about him yet. What women did? Love was supposed to be a great big accident waiting to happen. Or was it?
Do we just continue like we’ve been doing? Will he back away now that we did something? Or will he only call me now to get some more? she asked herself, second-guessing all of the way.
Unbelievable! The position that men were able to put women in after the first time. So without wanting to, Sharron found herself becoming standoffish with Anthony, like other women had become with their insecurities. And they had all lost that way, under pressure of a broken heart, in the mix of confusion with a free man. No wonder Anthony only talked about pieces. He wanted to remain free from the get go. Free forever.
“It’s Anthony,” Celena said, pulling the phone into Sharron’s room.
Sharron sighed and reached out for it.
Celena noticed her displeasure and placed her hand over the receiver.
“What, you don’t want to talk to him? I’ll tell him to call you back. All you have to do is say the word.”
Sharron hadn’t told her roommate anything. Celena was just a pro at getting rid of hassles, particularly male hassles.
“No, I’ll talk to him,” Sharron told her.
“Okay, well, we?
??ll talk about this later then,” Celena commented.
“Great,” Sharron huffed, sarcastically. That’s just what I need right now, an I-told-you-so talk with you, she thought.
She held the phone to her ear and faked contentedness.
“How are you?” she asked.
“I’m fine. How ’bout you?”
“I’m okay.”
Silence. What a dry conversation. It was that way after the first time for a whole lot of women.
Anthony began to laugh, breaking some of their unusual ice.
“What’s so funny?” Sharron asked.
“I know what you’re thinkin’, and it ain’t even like that,” he told her.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
Anthony said, “You’re feeling like what we had was the beginning to the end. And it’s not.”
“Why would I even think that way?” Sharron countered. “It sounds like you’re telling on yourself. Is that how you were thinking, that it was the beginning to the end?”
Anthony paused far too long for it to be a positive. He was usually fast on the draw. But it’s funny how your gun gets stuck in the most important battles, the ones you want the most.
“Can you handle the truth?” he finally asked her.
“I’ve been handling it, haven’t I?”
“Yeah, so far.”
“Well, how much more truth do you have? Or in other words, how many more lies do I have to see through?”
“About a hundred or two,” he joked. “Naw, seriously. Everything is all right between us.”
“Everything meaning what?”
“You know, how we feel about each other.”
“And how do we feel?” she asked, breaking his back.
“We still both like each other, right?”
“Why wouldn’t we, unless we didn’t expect to?”
Anthony broke out laughing again.
“You sure haven’t changed with all of your damn questions, that’s for sure,” he commented.
Sharron finally cracked a smile and loosened up. She realized how petty she was becoming. Why give him that much power over her because of a one-night sleepover? It was silly. He didn’t own her just because of one night. Nor did she own him. Take it like it was, and go back to being yourself, the girl who sparked his curiosity in the first place. Exhale. Men don’t like uptight women. Women don’t like uptight men.