Skin Game Read online

  Skin Game

  Skin Game

  Lawrence Ross

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Skin Game

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 1

  Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

  —Gloria Steinem

  As Ray made a left turn onto Crenshaw Boulevard, he knew that just like clockwork, Marty would start bitching. And he was right. Right as rain.

  “I’m so fucking tired of working this stretch of L.A.,” Marty said while puffing on his sixth Marlboro of the night. Marty was a tiny muthafucka who had a Napoleonic complex worthy of Jermaine Dupri.

  Ray, on the other hand, was a little different. Tall and skinny, he was a bit more thoughtful and more self-assured, but knew both of them were floating through life. That’s what happens when you take shortcuts.

  “We need to find a new place, because this shit is getting tired, like quick,” Marty continued. “Steven is fucking himself by limiting Pimp to this same old shit.”

  He looked out the window at the endless body shops and liquor store buildings, then turned back to Ray.

  “You know, we could work some of the spots in the Valley or at the downtown clubs. All of the bitches down at the Chi Chi Room look the fucking same, and I think people are getting tired of watching them. Shit, I’m getting tired of watching them. I wouldn’t mind seeing some white girls with big titties rather than all of these big black asses.”

  Ray tried to ignore him and kept driving. He’d heard Marty say the same thing each week for the past year, but they always found themselves going to the same clubs. It had to be that way.

  “Look, if you want big asses, then you go where big asses are,” Ray replied, pulling into the parking lot of the Chi Chi Room. “Steven wants big asses, our readers want big asses, and the Chi Chi Room has big asses. So quit complaining and come help me find some more big asses. Besides, what type of nigga are you when you talk about not liking a nice big black ass?”

  “Muthafucka, all I’m trying to say is that we have other options,” Marty said. He unbuckled himself and stepped out of the car. He took a long drag of his cigarette, then flicked it to the gravel.

  “You see,” he continued as they walked to the club entrance, “that’s the problem with niggas. Just like way back in slavery, they only want to live on the plantation and then can’t see anything else but that plantation. Never wanting to escape, they just stay fat and happy eating collard greens and pigs feet. I say that we could move off the big-ass plantation and you instantly tell me we need to stick with big asses. Narrow-minded muthafucka.”

  Ray stopped.

  “One of the things I learned in college—”

  “Ah, now you gotta pull out all of that college-boy bullshit!”

  Ray had spent three semesters at Cal State Northridge before dropping out to get in the biz, and Marty hated it when he would start talking about something he’d read or been taught. It made him feel like he was dumb, and Marty didn’t like feeling dumb.

  “—is that you have to give the customer what they want. I read it in a book. I think the cat’s name was Dale Carnegie.”

  “Dale who?”

  “Carnegie, you simple muthafucka.”

  They got to the front door, where Blackie Whiteside, Chi Chi Room’s doorman, met them. Blackie was named “Blackie” because he was as dark as a moonless night. And since he was damn near seven feet tall and three hundred pounds, the blackness seemed to encompass everything around him, like a black hole gobbling up galaxies. To say that Blackie was intimidating was an insult to him. Intimidating is what a local tough man is. Blackie was beyond intimidating. He had a stare that made tough men sober. Instantly.

  “What up, you two?” Blackie said, pulling out the red stamp. He stamped Ray’s and Marty’s hands like he was squishing ants.

  “Nothing much. Where’s Sean?” Ray asked, sliding past Blackie’s massive frame.

  “He’ll be out in about ten minutes,” Blackie answered. “Go have a drink.”

  “Thanks, Blackie.”

  The two walked over to their usual bar stools as the music blared from the speakers. Destiny was on the pole, and the pervert pit around the stage was lightly filled. They were early.

  “Okay, so who the fuck is Dale Carnegie?” Marty asked, sipping his Heineken. “You might as well tell me some of your college bullshit.”

  “I read his book in a business class. He wrote some shit called How to Make Friends and Influence People or some shit like that. I can’t remember the exact title. Anyway, he talks about how he went fishing and how he liked strawberries and cream—”

  “Who the fuck eats strawberries and cream while fishing?”

  The woman on the stage began shaking her tits, so that they bounced up and down, almost hitting her in the face. Ray liked that. He had a glazed look on his face, the same as when a child gets a twenty-dollar bill in a candy store.

  Ray was annoyed.

  “I don’t know, muthafucka, but Dale Carnegie says that he likes strawberries and cream. But that’s beside the point. He went fishing and said that he likes strawberries and cream, while the fish liked worms.”

  Ray pulled a handful of dollar bills from his pocket and threw them in the air. The dollar bills hovered, and then fell all around the stripper. She dropped and started putting bills into her g-string.

  “That’s right, bitch, I made it rain,” Ray said, with a silly smirk on his face. He turned back to Marty, his face pinched, as though thinking really hard.

  “Okay, maybe I’m missing something, but what the fuck does strawberries, cream, fishing, and some goddamn worms have to do with big black asses?”

  Ray drank a bit from his beer.

  “The point of the story is that you don’t feed the fish strawberries and cream because you like it. You’ll never catch any fish. You give the fish what they want. So you fish with worms. And so we need to give our customers what they want. They don’t want big-tittied white women. They want big-assed black women, so that’s what we’re going to give them. And that’s why we’ll stay here at Chi Chi’s until the supply of big-bootied black women is exhausted.”

  Marty looked at Ray curiously and then sighed.

  “I still don’t understand why a muthafucka’s eating strawberries and cream in the first place. I mean, who the fuck eats that shit?”

  “Shut your dumb ass up,” Ray said, finishing his beer. “Just shut your dumb ass up.”

  Ray turned back to the bar and waited for Sean to arrive.

  Across town, it was a little after seven o’clock at 9537 Budlong Avenue, and things were in the “same shit, different day” mode for the Montez family.

  “Keisha! Keisha! Bitch, I know you heard me!”

  Keisha Montez k
ept putting on her makeup, ignoring the sound of the voice outside the door.

  She can scream all she wants, Keisha thought as she took a pull from her joint, but she wasn’t getting riled. Not today and not tonight. There was money to be made tonight, and Keisha was going to make sure she got her share.

  Keisha, eighteen years old and full of life, was the beautiful star of Budlong Avenue. Her Mexican and black heritage combined to create a beauty that had tantalized men of all ages. And some, if given the chance, gladly would have tried to get at her before she was legal. About five foot five, with wavy hair and beautiful café au lait skin, Keisha was stunning. But she also lived in South Central Los Angeles, a place that spit out pretty girls left and right and ground them up for all to see.

  As she looked around the dingy bathroom, all Keisha could see was the broken yellow tile, the faded bathtub, and the ever-dripping sink.

  What a fucking mess, she thought while putting on her lipstick. I’ve got to get out of here.

  Suddenly the bathroom door burst open, banging against the bathtub. Keisha didn’t even flinch.

  “Keisha! When I’m talking to you, you better fucking answer me!” Veronica Montez was the spitting image of her daughter, except her face was full of worry lines. That was for good reason. Veronica Montez stayed angry, 24/7. She’d been like that since Keisha’s father, Felice Montez, had gone out to buy some beer. That was eighteen years ago and he hadn’t come back with that beer. Actually, maybe angry wasn’t the correct term. More accurately, Veronica Montez was pissed every minute in her life.

  “This is my goddamn house and if I say jump, you better say ‘how high?’. Do you hear what I’m saying, dammit?”

  Her face was so tense that Keisha could see the veins in her forehead. Veronica walked even closer to Keisha, squeezing into the tiny bathroom.

  “Getting out of high school was the worst shit that could have happened to you. Now you think you can do what the fuck you want,” Veronica continued. “Uh-uh. Not today. Not as long as I’m paying for shit.”

  “What do you want?” Keisha asked, looking in the mirror and putting on her mascara. She tried not to let Veronica get to her.

  “After you finish shakin’ your ass at that nasty-ass club,” Veronica began, fumbling through her purse looking for change, “bring me back a carton of Newports. Don’t bring your ass back here without ’em.”

  She put about three dollars on the sink and left as quickly as she’d come in. Veronica knew, and Keisha knew too, that three dollars wasn’t going to buy any box of cigarettes. But Veronica expected Keisha to make up the difference from the money she made at the club. Instead of supporting her children, the children supported Veronica.

  Bitch, Keisha thought as she threw the money into her purse. Fucking bitch.

  Makeup done, Keisha walked to the kitchen. Andre, her brother, sat at the table eating Cocoa Pebbles like it was early eight in the morning instead of being close to eight at night. For Keisha, a twenty-six-year-old black man eating a children’s cereal while staying at his mother’s house was symbolic of how fucked-up this house was.

  “Hey, Keisha,” he said, barely looking up from his cereal. “Let me ask you a question.”

  “What?”

  Keisha just wanted to get her orange juice and get out of the house. She didn’t feel like dealing with Andre’s bullshit.

  “Let me borrow some money?” he asked.

  “Nigga, please. I ain’t loaning you shit,” she said, taking a swig of orange juice.

  “I’m serious. Loan me fifty dollars.”

  “I don’t give a fuck if you’re serious or not. I didn’t ask you if you were telling jokie jokes, or being dead serious. You still owe me for that hundred you spent on that stank-ass girlfriend of yours. So I repeat, nigga, please.”

  “Ah, see, why you gotta be like that?”

  Andre leaned back in his chair and looked at Keisha as though he was searching for something. He was looking for an opening, some way to get what he wanted. Keisha knew that look and stood there, resolute. She wasn’t going to give in to his con.

  “Nah, see, I need that money because I need to get something for Veronica.”

  Keisha finished off her orange juice, looked at her watch, and threw the empty orange juice bottle in the trash.

  “Then this is what I suggest. Get off your narrow ass and find a goddamn job. Stop fucking asking me for money when all you do is sit around this goddamn house watching TV all day. Again, for the third and last time, nigga, please!”

  Keisha walked out of the kitchen to the front door, and Andre followed her.

  “Bitch!”

  Keisha never turned around. She turned the deadbolt lock and opened the front door.

  “I gots your bitch right here,” she yelled, throwing up a middle finger at her brother. “Find some other fucking sucker.”

  Finally she was out of the house, and the cool night air surrounded her. It was as though she’d finally been allowed to breathe. And yet, she could still hear Veronica shouting from the living room.

  “Don’t forget my goddamn Newports!”

  Back at the Chi Chi Room, the main lounge was starting to fill up. And sauntering in like a bad ’70s pimp was the guy who owned the place. When he saw Ray and Marty sucking down Heinekens, he walked up to them and got right down to business.

  “Don’t waste my time, niggas, don’t waste my time,” he said. “My time is precious, valuable, and expensive.”

  Sean Edwards always had the same greeting for anyone who had the audacity to want to talk to him. But he saved his best for Ray and Marty. He tolerated them because they made him money. And money made Sean talk to anyone, even if he felt that they could be wasting his time.

  “I liked it better when your daddy owned the club,” Marty said. “He never rushed us.”

  “Yeah, well, that nigga’s dead and he never made any money,” Sean responded, taking a glass of Hennessy from the bartender. “I’m about money, while that nigga just wanted to get some pussy from time to time. I can get all the pussy I need. But money, nigga, that’s what’s hard to get. So as I said, nigga, my time is precious, so don’t waste it. What do you two niggas want?”

  Sean had owned the Chi Chi Room ever since his dad, Big Sean, died in 2000. Big Sean had opened the club back in the 1970s after his friend, the actor Rudy Ray Moore, was thrown out of a white nude club downtown. There hadn’t been a place in Los Angeles for black men to go see naked black women shake their asses, so he decided to open one.

  “I like ass just like the next man, and I wanna see black ass onstage every day. So I got up and did something about it,” Big Sean would scream to anyone interested. “I’m the fucking Jackie Robinson of black ass!”

  Maybe he wasn’t the Jackie Robinson of black ass, but what he’d done was take that retirement money from the Hughes Aircraft factory, where he’d been an electrician since he’d gotten out of the army back in ’51, and opened up a little black nudie bar in Gardena. It was an instant success. Gardena was and is an L.A. backwater, so no one messed with him or the club. He paid his taxes just like the bakery across the street from him did, and he made sure that the only reason police showed up was to get private dances on their breaks from eating donuts. Things were good when the old man was alive. A combination of big asses, a little spending money, and some friends meant that he was living the life he wanted.

  But even when the old man was alive, it had been apparent that there needed to be some changes at the Chi Chi Room. The club was getting old. The red velvet walls could tell you that. The women onstage were old. The men watching them were old. And now, unlike in the 1970s, there was competition.

  So when Big Sean finally died of cancer, his son had a vision for something different. He dreamt of Chi Chi Rooms across the country, just like the white club Spearmint Rhino had done. Franchise black booty from coast to coast, Sean thought. But to do that as a black club, he had to shake things up.

  He got rid of
a lot of the fat women his father had on the stage and brought in some young talent. His father, like a lot of men in his generation, didn’t care about a girl being fit. They just wanted a lot of body. But Sean knew that younger men, the hip-hop generation, wanted body, but not body fat. And that meant putting together a new roster.

  “Yeah, I have a club over in Gardena, and I think you would be great onstage,” Sean would tell a young woman at an L.A. nightclub. He could usually get five new girls per weekend this way, and one or two per month would stick. That formula had worked to the point where the Chi Chi Room was the top black club in Southern California. But Sean wanted more. That’s why he was talking to Ray and Marty tonight.

  “I heard you got some new dancers in,” Ray said. He kept wondering why he had to do this same dance each and every week.

  “Yeah, I got a few new bitches in,” Sean said, shifting his weight from side to side. He was what the old black men at the barbershop called an itchy nigga. Always moving. Always twitching.

  “What are you looking to do, and what are you niggas paying?”

  “The usual. We’re going to start them off with print first, and then move on. You’ll get the same percentage.”

  “No doubt,” Marty said.

  Sean turned toward Marty and smiled.

  “This dumb muthafucka,” Sean said, pointing to Marty, “sayin’ ‘no doubt’ like he’s the one givin’ the percentages! Nigga, let Ray talk, ’cause you don’t know what the fuck you are talkin’ about. See, that’s why I hates an ignant nigga.”

  “Why I gots to be ignant?” Marty asked.