Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

Code was nodding to all that Rhyme said, but kept his eyes on the most magnificent-looking one-eyed bitch he had ever laid his own bloodshot eyes on. She was dark, and Code, like most niggaz, tended to go for the current J. Lo model of Boricua negritude. But T-Sound was fine , despite the one eye, and she displayed her finery with even more subtlety when she excused herself and went to the ladies’ room. Code assumed that she sucked Rhyme’s dick; that’s what bitchez were good for. That, and giving a nigga a son. Rhyme recognized the trajectory of Code’s male gaze.

“She’s one of my producers,” said Rhyme. “T-Sound discovered your tape and listened to it. Girl got ears.”

“And one eye,” Code retorted. Not bad for a one-eyed bitch — and with a wicked ass to boot, thought Code. If she didn’t return, he’d have to start licking the chair she sat in.

She was Tanya Sonido, from el barrio , and Code was trying to calculate how he could get her away from his new contact, the man who was going to produce his way outta the ghetto. He may have to kill him to snatch her. He had done it before — but before business?

“Will she be my producer?” asked Code.

Rhyme looked at him. “You don’t mind a woman producing your sound?” This was unheard of, and Rhyme recognized that this was one nigga who didn’t give a fuck what other niggaz said or thought.

“Shit, she could suck my dick while doing it.”

Rhyme nodded: “Yeah, she’s a bad motherfuckah…”

“You Negroes talking about me?” asked a suave voice.

The two turned around and found T-Sound standing behind them. She returned to her seat and flashed the whitest pair of teeth that Code ever saw on a black woman. It was also her almond-shaped eye and wide, sensuous smile. She was an older woman, maybe about thirty. She probably knew how to really fuck a man. Not like these amateur bitchez who watched skeezer videos and acted like they could hump. This bitch could probably fuck as well as a dude; that is, putting her back into it as if she had a dick. Men knew how to fuck; bitchez just got laid.

Dinner proceeded with Rhyme and T-Sound finding their prospective new talent something to eat on the exotic menu. After coffee and cognac, they — Code, along with his boys — went to Rhyme’s nearby hotel room and discussed his vision for his project, The Code

While fixing drinks at the room’s wet bar, Rhyme saw the effect that T-Sound’s bod was having on Code. It was her pulchritudinous figure and that black eye patch. There was something mysterious, remotely kinky, about a fine-looking woman wearing an eye-patch that got some men’s third leg thumping in their pants. There was heat between them, the bitch and the nigga. Rhyme watched them as they sat down and talked about his lyrics, life, and production ideas; who he listened to and what he wanted to incorporate. It would be a chronicle of gunz, bitchez, and bodacious niggatude. Code was surprised that T-Sound had produced many of the CDs that he liked and had been deejaying in clubs. Code mentioned that he enjoyed listening to women screaming and hollering, and told her that he watched a lot of porn.

“So do I,” she said, “but I like to watch men getting their asses busted.”

Code smoothed the waves on his head. “Shit, the only people who do that are faggots.”

“Yep, and they be the only ones getting it up the ass, baby. I especially enjoy she-males busting a nigga’s ass.”

“Whut?” He looked at Rhyme and then back at her.

“Have you tried it?” asked T-Sound, an inquisitive arch rising over her good eye.

“Fuck no ,” laughed Code, slightly put off that a bitch he was getting hard for would ask a 100-percent black man like himself that kind of question. “I’m the fucker; not the fucked!”

“Too bad.” She looked him over as if she were imagining herself doing something very nasty to him.

“If you were a dude, I’d have killed you for…”

Tanya tossed her head back. A mane of rich black hair swept through the air as she sat invitingly across from him. Her legs were parted slightly, as if she was offering a taste of herself.

“Well, come on, nigguh,” she challenged. “You want to slay me like you do those niggaz back in Brooklyn? Or you wanna fuck this Boricua bitch? This black bitch? This disease-free bitch? I got something for you.”

She rocked her head as if she was good to go, kicking it to him in Spanish. “Yo, popi…”

Rhyme watched him. Tanya was taunting him before a room full of men, his niggaz. This would have been different if it were just him and the boys, but Tanya was playing with fire. A few seconds went by and Code gave her a hard nigga stare, an icy glance that he had perfected when deciding another man’s fate.

Rhyme understood what was going on and walked over with a drink and handed it to Code, who took it down in one swallow and said to his boys, Bebop and Cisco, “Let’s roll. I’ll have my lawyer contact you about a contract. Bitch, I’ll see your fine ass in the studio.” He grabbed a fist full of crotch before he went out the door, then added, “You better not bend over while we’re there, or you’ll get this!”

With that, they left.

“Damn, that nigga was fine,” moaned Tanya as she grabbed her own crotch, taking a drink from Rhyme. “I wanted to fuck his ass there on the spot!”

“Shit, that boy would have shot you, Tanya.”

Tanya reached down and pulled up a Glock pistol from between the cushions of the couch. “Or he would have died trying. How much do you think we can get for him?”

“Well… if we do this CD, he’ll be a premium,” surmised Rhyme.

A few months later, a contract signed and time spent in the studio, Tanya walked into Club Prospect on Franklin Street and sat down beside Code, who was sticking dollar bills in a dancer’s G-string with his teeth. He could feel himself thickening even when she sat an inch or so away. Lately he had been having dreams about her… pulling her clothes off, inching his way down to her crotch, getting her hot and nasty for his coup de grâce. But now she wanted to talk about some business, music business.

“Look, one of them sounds like someone is being choked to death,” she said, flicking an ash of her clove cigarette into a tray on the bar.

It was homage to an original gangsta, the legendary Nate Ford, he told her. Ford excelled in the “asphixiation of love,” a love/death grip. Ford had learned that by choking a bitch, his hands on her throat, he could involuntary cause her vaginal muscles to firmly grip his dick as he simultaneously exploded into and suffocated her.

Not even the Marquis de Sade had that one in his arsenal of techniques, Ford was reported to have told a Russian business associate as they sat around one evening laughing over coke and cognac. “Kinky technique,” Code explained. Ford had even shown his Russian guest a video of himself snuffing a young Puerto Rican woman. On the tape, Ford leered into the camera and then, with the brio of ultimate contempt, pulled out and discharged over the dead woman’s body. “Good to the last drop,” Ford then said. This was the sort of video that Code collected.

“That’s what you want on your debut album?” asked T-Sound. “You want people to see you as a sick, demented fuck?”

“I don’t care what people think,” snarled Code, his eyes narrowed nearly to slits, mocking an African mask. “I am the last of a dying breed: the last of the bad-ass niggaz. True to form, true to the code: I just want niggaz to buy my music…”

“And shine your shoes…”

“Whut?”

“Skip it,” said T-Sound. She wasn’t going to engage in self-disgust just because of dealing with low-lifes like him. This was a business, and it sometimes became nasty when dealing with nasty people.