“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.
“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.