Even before it’s out his mouth, you down at this club off Airways Boulevard where nineteen-year-old women are grindin’ their sweaty asses in your lap and rubbin’ your head with their soft fingers and rakin’ their long red claws over your neck. Cash and his playas watchin’ you as you strut from that VIP room while he sips on a bottle of Cristal and nods to move on.
You do, leavin’ the girl at work. You move on to three other clubs before he drop you back lakefront, to that mansion you was designin’ from a space movie you seen on cable. High humpback gates like you seen on MTV, all surrounded by cement mixers, stacks of plywood, and plastic sheeting popping in your empty windows.
“Why Teddy kick you out and now he say he want you back?”
“Mad, I guess.”
“Friends don’t play like that.”
Cash’s boys crack open some Cristal and y’all drink it straight from the bottle. You take a couple hits from a joint, making it wash deep into your lungs, and listen to all them boys talkin’ shit ’bout their new Italian cars, freaks they met out on the road, and high-dollar restaurants with pink shrimp as big as yo’ big toe.
Cash tell you again about Teddy and Malcolm and all about what happened to Diabolical. He say that Teddy and Malcolm finally gonna pay for what happened to the man who made Dirty South. He say the Paris brothers only killed that young nigga so his sales would double. And truth be known, Dio weren’t nothin’ till they jacked his ass at Atlanta Nites.
You remember that thug’s face and his rhymes when you was a kid and now all them T-shirts and lost albums and tributes. Death make you live forever.
All that talk about Dio and your own chances and risks make you want to take the boat out.
When you start that motor, Cash flashes a smile loaded with platinum and diamonds on the dock and then you disappear. His dogs playin’ with green-and-yellow bottle rockets out by your pool and hills of green grass on the levee.
You take that boat way out in the lake, where the lights don’t mess with the crisp stars. You smoke a blunt to take it all down, flat back in that skinny little boat, just driftin’ in loopy choppy circles trying to figure out what happens next. You think about that, the way you drift, and that’s cool with you. Because you are a puzzle. Them pieces come to be known as you grow. Ain’t that right?
