Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

“T-Sound…” he rolled off his tongue.

“What?” She was looking at a dancer who could have made better money by keeping her clothes on.

“How’d you lose your eye?”

“Fighting a nigga who wanted to get some free pussy the hard way,” she coolly replied. “He didn’t understand any part of the word no.” She went into her hand purse and pulled out a matching onyx cigarette case and lighter.

“Did he get any?”

“No,” she said, lighting the cigarette. Tanya turned and faced him fully. A shadow fell across her face, the dark patch growing into a partial shroud over one side of her head. “All he got was an eyeball, but his balls got some of this!” She pushed a little black switch upward on the lighter with her thumb, and a gleaming, sharp two-inch blade appeared.

What Code found menacing wasn’t the blade, but that she was too cool; nothing frazzled her. She was just like him: a deadly nigga. Weeks ago he had walked into the recording studio with his boys, armed, stinking of liquor, and she had thrown out his bodyguards with her even bigger, badder, and bolder bodyguards, niggaz who worked day jobs with the city’s most feared gang, NYPD. He tried to stare her down during a disagreement about one song in which he was going for the soap-soft. After dissing women for ten tracks, he wanted to include some lovey-dovey sop — asking a “girl” if she would love him even if he didn’t have money — after having extolled the sociopathic virtues of getting it by any means necessary on the rest of the recording!

T-sound had told him: “Look, it is clear to me that even though you enjoy fucking us, you don’t like or have any respect for women. So who are you trying to fool with this track, your mother? Niggaz like you don’t have mothers. You’re the classic son of a bitch, tu sabes?

She told him this an inch from his face, like a Marine DI to a jarhead, and added: “You gonna be hard, be hard all the way. No half-steppin’. Save that pussy love shit for your second album — if you live that long.”

Tanya Sonido. She looked like a woman, smelled like a woman, and even dressed like one. She wore the kind of clothes — dresses, suits, or blazers with jeans — that accented a woman’s best features, and she had rounds of features like the military had rounds of ammunition in Iraq. A phat, firm ass that didn’t bust out the seams like other nigga bitchez; voluptuous breasts that hung underneath her shirts in their own right, not assisted by silicone injections. She had nice calves and strong-looking muscles that ran along her thighs, evidence of gym work, and nice definition to her shoulders and biceps. The bitch was built . She was hard like him: ghetto — but she had style and grace, and wasn’t nigga-down 24/7. That was all he could ever be, and he was beginning to suspect that this was limiting.

T-Sound exhaled some smoke from her nostrils: “Hear that, Code? Hear 5 °Cent kickin’ it on the jukebox? That’s the nigga you ought to have a problem with, not me. I’m on your side.” She set down her cigarette and looked at him, her full red lips slightly parted. “Or are you having trouble concentrating?”

Suddenly it was getting hot. OGs had talked about a special kind of woman that men found hard to beat, hard to resist. The French called them femmes fatales , mysterious women that could do a nigga in if he wasn’t careful. Code realized that his dick was getting hard due to his overpowering lust and fear of her. She could do what no other man or woman had ever been able to do: read him. She knew what he wanted from her, needed from her, and what he could never allow anyone else to do: become close to him. His rules of engagement dictated that he possess no friends, only associates; that he have no real love, only pussy; no family — that had been destroyed years ago.

But Tanya was different; she took her time with him. She reminded him that despite being shot four times; despite never being convicted of killing two men and exterminating another man and his two children; despite raping or gangbanging a dozen women of various races and nationalities, as well as engaging in numerous hold-ups and burglaries; and despite selling vast quantities of controlled substances, he was just breaking twenty-two. She could be his mentor and get him out of a life that he didn’t mind rapping about, but had worn thin since the last time he was shot. The code dictated that a nigga didn’t last too long.

But he did have a problem with her, and she had scoped that out earlier.

“You want to fuck me , right?” prompted T-Sound. She reached over in his direction to get another napkin from a bar dispenser for her drink. “No can do. Someone else has fucking rights to my cunt.”

“Rhyme?”

She shook her head. “No, we’re partners. My wet-box is saved for someone else… but you can either fuck my ass or come in my mouth. Two out of three ain’t bad, is it?”

T-Sound, looking at her watch and announcing an impending meeting, told him that if he wanted to do it, it had to be now, in the piss-smelling, HIV-potential men’s room of Club Prospect. “And you better get that tongue of yours good and moist, because you’re going to stick it up my ass before you stick your third leg in me. See you in a few minutes, chocolate.” She slid off her seat and grabbed a handful of him at his below-the-belt area. “Hmmm, I’m gonna like this entering my back door. She slipped into the men’s room, making sure the video camera would capture them at the right angle.

Code went to work on his tongue. Water, followed by orange and grapefruit juice, and then some club soda with a twist of lime. He purchased a few sample bottles of one of those new-fangled sweet-tasting cognacs that all the niggaz had been singing about and promoting over the airwaves and in intellectually deficient shop-and-fuck magazines. He was going to drink them out of her ass-crack. Armed with them in the side-pockets of his urban fatigues, Code pulled out his notebook and jotted down a few pre-coital lines:

The Prospect Place Ladies’ Auxiliary liked what they saw. They saw fine-looking black meat inching in and out of an even finer, perspiration-coated posterior — Tanya’s. The audio portion was still better, with Tanya saying all kinds of nasty things Español , and the preferred exclamations in Niggaese about bitch this and bitch that

“Believe me, girls, this boy can barely read,” confirmed Tanya, “but he knows how to work a woman’s ass.”

The women cackled and hooted when Tanya told them that she had emptied him three times, enjoying the feel of his warm spunk oozing down her legs as she left him nearly drained on the john at Club Prospect.

“Watch this, ladies,” she said, directing their attention back to the TV/video monitor. The tape showed a limp but massive black snake slowly retreating from Tanya’s rear.

“Mon Dieu , that boy is hung!” said Francesca, an Afro-Francophone from Paris. “But can he eat?”

“He can be trained,” Tanya commented with an authoritative crack of her crop against her boots. “Any man can be trained under the proper regimen.”

“What’s the word on the bidding?” asked Janette.

“It’s starting at a million,” replied Tanya.

“What?” said another woman, Carmen. “Why so much?”

“Because your GOP friends in the Log Cabin Society and several of the Sons of the Confederacy want a raw nigga as much as some of you do,” Tanya explained, “and when The Code is released and he suddenly disappears, he’ll be a collector’s item.”