Love the One You're With Page 11

“Hell-fuckin’-yeah.”

  “A’ight, then. But, just one more—”

  Slurp!

  “—for the road.”

  “Ah,” he exhaled.

  “Now I’m takin’ aim. I’m gonna rim that bootay.”

  He was gettin’ antsy. “Nah, nah, Baby, don’t tease me, now …”

  “Ha, I can hear that bootay callin’ me.”

  Womp, womp, womp.

  “C’mon, Little Bit, I want it.”

  “Ya want it, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ha, don’t sound like ya do.”

  “I want it, I want it!”

  He wanted it—and he got it.

  “Hooooooh,” he grunted, as I’ve often heard him express when I’ve made my entrance.

  “Ooh yeah, I’m slidin’ all up in that ass, Pooquie. Ya feel it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t hear you …”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ya want it all?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You sure you want it all?”

  “Yeah, Baby, give it ta me, give it ta me now.”

  I gave it to him.

  “Aaaah,” we both sang.

  “You diggin’ that, huh, Pooquie?”

  “Uh-huh,” he snapped.

  “But wait, don’t get too excited just yet. We gonna take a slow groove, slidin’ back and forth, back and forth, back …”

  “Ooh.”

  “… and forth.”

  “Aaah.”

  “Back …”

  “Mmm …”

  “… and … forth.”

  He moaned. “Doin’ me on tha sneak tip, huh?”

  “Sneaky and freaky.”

  He giggled.

  “Mmm, I’m all up in dat bad boyee now. Gettin’ a real jood feel of this. Yeah. I’m gonna bang them boots off yo’ feet.”

  “Yeah, work that azz, mutha-fucka.”

  “Ha, ya want me to work that azz?”

  “Yeah, Daddy, work it!”

  “Well, ya gotta work with me, Pooquie, so, come on and back that azz up, back it up!”

  I could see him twirlin’ that ass into me and feel it as he clutched that dick.

  “Woo, woo, woo,” he huffed.

  “Ah, yeah, work it. You twist and clench while I bang and bump.”

  “Uh-huh, mutha-fucka, bang that azz, yeah.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna dig a trench in that ass, wage a war, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I smacked my own thigh—he knew what that was.

  “Oh, yeah, mutha-fucka, spank it while you swing it!”

  You got it. Smack, smack, smacksmacksmack.

  “Yeah, mutha-fucka, slap and tap that azz like ya know!”

  “Ha, don’t you worry, I will.”

  “Aaaaaaay, sss,” he heaved.

  “Ha, that’s right, you wiggle it while I jiggle all up in it!”

  “Ay ya ay ya ay ya,” he stuttered.

  “Uh-huh, Pooquie, I’m housin’ that new jack bootay, ain’t I?”

  “Cha cha cha cha,” he chattered as if he were freezing.

  “Ha, you know how to give that azz up. I’m mountin’ them bootay mounds and you just lovin’ it, huh?”

  “Mmm, take it all.”

  “Hmmph, I’m takin’ it all and some more.”

  “Ssss … oomph,” he screeched.

  Uh-oh. I knew what that meant. “Ah, you ’bout ready to cum, huh?”

  “Aw yeah.”

  “Me, too, baby boyee, me, too. So cum with me, come on with me, cum on …”

  “Aw yeah, I’m gonna cum.”

  “You gonna cum?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, then cum on now. Spray it all over, Pooquie.”

  “Ooh, yeah, I’m cummin’, I’m cummin’ …”

  “Yeah, Pooquie, bring that tide on in.”

  “Oh, Baby, Oh, Baby, oh, Baby, oh oh oh oh …”

  “Oh, yeeeeeaaaaah!” I howled as my volcano erupted.

  But Pooquie just didn’t blow his top—he toppled off of the bed and onto the floor. At least that’s what it sounded like.

  “Pooquie?” I could hear him going “Oomph Oomph Oomph” over and over. I must’ve called him a half-dozen times before the receiver was picked back up.

  He was out of breath, as if he’d just run a marathon. “Yeah, Baby. I’m here.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What happened?”

  Not only did he take a tumble, he brought the phone and the Yellow Pages that were on the nightstand down with him.

  “Well, I wanted to knock your boots off, not knock you off!” I laughed.

  “That’s a’ight. It was worth takin’ that fall, Baby. Oomph.”

  I chuckled. “You still on the floor or back on the bed?”

  “Sittin’ against tha bed on tha flo.’”

  “Ah. Didn’t have enough energy to pull yourself back up, huh?”

  “Ha, nope.”

  “You still squirtin’, ain’tcha?”

  “Ya know it. Day-um.”

  “Hmmph. Me, too.” And I was. It was real thick and gooey. “Don’t leave remnants all over that room now.”

  “I won’t. I was ready. Wiped up some of it already.”

  “Jood. And that was day-um jood.”

  “She-it, that was better than jood, Baybay.”

  “Indeed. Folks gonna think you have somebody in there with you.”

  “Tha way that shit felt? Ya couldn’t tell me you wasn’t here.”

  “Same here. And I’m sure the operator got much more than an earful.”

  “I bet she was enjoyin’ it, too.”

  “Ha, or he.”

  “Ah, yeah.”

  I looked at the love jism all over my thighs and stomach. “Who would’ve ever thought that you could get lovin’ this jood over the telephone. Now I know why some folks are so crazy about it.”

  “Ha, me, too. But there still ain’t nuthin’ like tha real thang, Baybay.”

  “Mmm-hmm. There ain’t. And don’t you worry: when you come back home, we’re gonna have an instant replay.”

  He giggled. “Uh … I guess you gotta go back ta sleep now.”

  “How can I, after a workout like that!”

  We laughed.

  I rubbed my dick. “Besides, we got up together, we gotta come down together.”

  We sighed a moan together.

  “Thanks, Little Bit.”

  “Ha, thank you, Pooquie. I’ll be tired, maybe a little cranky today, but I’ll be smiling on the inside.”

  8

  FOR THE LOVE OF MONEY

  “So … guess who’s going to be a millionaire?”

  I was in the office of my lawyer, Jozette Wilkes, an attorney with Brandt-Myers-Albrecht, one of the most successful firms in the nation that specializes in discrimination cases. Interestingly, she’s the only African-American and the only female at B-M-A—and those are two of the reasons why I hired her. When I decided to sue Your World for racial discrimination, I had been advised by many to get white representation because it would play better in front of a jury. Sadly, some studies show that white and Black jurists place more stock in the words of a Caucasian attorney than a Black one when it comes to matters of race; I guess the assumption is that if a white person sees it, it must be true and the Negro(es) leveling the charge isn’t/aren’t just crying wolf (as many believe we often do). But I didn’t feel the least bit comfortable placing this in the hands of someone white; I felt that the person I was paying jood money to had to know, on some level, what it was like, what I had gone through. And in corporate America, no one knows more about the isms than the sisters, who have to wage war every day on two fronts. Add her being a homegirl from the ’hood (Red Hook in Brooklyn) and a Columbia alum like me, and Jozette was the perfect choice.

  She’s a diminu
tive woman (no more than five feet) with Milky Way dark skin, big light brown eyes, a cleft in her chin (“It’s real, honey”), and a headful of auburn spaghetti braids that fall just above her waist. But don’t let her size fool you: like Julia Sugarbaker on TV’s Designing Women, she’s been dubbed “The Terminator.” Many have underestimated her presence and power—and have lived to regret it. She may appear delicate and soft, but she can be tough, even vicious. She joined B-M-A three years ago and has never lost a case; she won three multimillion-dollar judgments and settled her last two cases out of court. (Her wrath has other lawyers running scared; it’s rumored that Your World’s company attorney, Teddy Levine, bowed out of representing them because he lost to Jozette two years ago and wasn’t about to suffer another humiliating defeat.)

  Because of her reputation, Jozette believed we wouldn’t have to go to trial. And after almost ten months of talk, it looked as if Your World was ready to strike a deal. I was praying they would be: I really didn’t want to go to trial, for it would’ve proven too costly (both in terms of money and time). While I had a jood shot at winning and relished the thought of watching Jozette destroying every one of their witnesses on the stand, there was always the chance that my efforts would prove to be less than fruitful. The jury could find in my favor but award me only a fraction of what we asked for since I am young and the discrimination wasn’t blatant. (As Jozette explained early on: “It wasn’t as if you were finding dead rats in your locker, nooses hanging over light fixtures above your desk, and the word nigger spray-painted on your car.”) Or the appeals process could take so long that any monies I eventually received wouldn’t be enough to cover my lawyer’s fees. Or worse, I could lose altogether and really be left emotionally, spiritually, and financially spent. On top of the unknown outcome, I also would’ve had to take a leave of absence from my teaching job and I couldn’t afford that (a “fuck-you fund” can last but so long). And, since I knew that few racial discrimination suits are successful (be it an in-court judgment or out-of-court settlement), the cons certainly outweighed the pros. But, as Pooquie argued, this was something I had to do: if I just shrugged my shoulders and walked away, that would give them the license to continue doing it and I would be indirectly saying it’s okay to mistreat us because of who we are.

  So I was more than pleased when Jozette called me last Monday, excited she had come across the evidence that would, as I’ve heard many a lawyer on television declare, “break this case wide open.” And it came from a source I certainly wouldn’t have expected …

  Phillip Cooper.

  Phillip and I were barely speaking when I left Your World a year and a half ago, mainly because he decided to become the User-Friendly Negro—you know, the kind of colored person who won’t rock the boat, who will go out of their way to make white folks comfortable, who will be as nonthreatening, nonconfrontational, non-Black as possible. His very accommodating manner was directed at one person in particular: my nemesis, Elias Whitley, aka the Great White Dope. No matter how nonsensical and stoopid Elias’s position was (yeah, it was usually both), he could always count on Phillip to be his yes-man, going along with whatever he said. Phillip stroked much more than Elias’s ego, though. I hadn’t told Jozette about catching them fucking; if confronted, both would surely deny it, and it certainly had no bearing on my case. But I guess his arrogance got the best of him: being the only Negro on staff, doing the boss, and not believing what happened to me could happen to him went to both of his heads. According to Your World, his performance was unsatisfactory the first six months of 1994, and after he was placed on probation, it didn’t improve during the rest of the year. He was fired three weeks ago.

  Phillip tracked Jozette down to see if she’d also represent him. Problem was he didn’t have a case for racial discrimination; Jozette had to control herself from laughing in his face when he related his tale, a story that sounded very similar to mine except that he didn’t have the credentials or documentation to back it up. Judging from some of the comments made about him in his employee file (“frequently misses deadlines, research skills are elementary, doesn’t pay attention to detail, writing is uneven and unfocused”), Your World actually ended up accommodating him: my lawsuit might’ve helped him keep his job longer than he should’ve had it (letting him go the same time they were served with papers would’ve been a real public-relations nightmare). But in his haste (or desperation?) to convince Jozette to take him on, he was all too happy to turn state’s evidence on them. We already knew about my being paid less than Elias even though I had more experience (not to mention talent). But he did provide us with a piece of information that Your World had managed to keep secret.

  Last September, Elias won an Eddy, sort of the Pulitzer of the education journalism world. I had been nominated three years straight and won my third time around. That Elias also managed to snag one—and on his first nomination—was shocking. And I gagged when I learned what he won for: a feature about a high-school program in Newark, New Jersey, where Black male teen fathers are schooled on parenthood. Given how much contempt Elias has for Black people (including the ones whose dicks he sucks), I found it hard to believe that such a well-written, thoroughly researched, incredibly incisive (if not pathologically themed) article could have been penned by him.

  My hunch turned out to be correct: he didn’t write the story. The article in question had been published some five years before. This was discovered by a student at Elias’s alma mater, who was doing a profile on him for the school paper. When the student did a Lexis Nexis search on the program, he found himself seeing—and reading—double (it was originally published in The Eye, an alternative newsmagazine in Newark, and the Associated Press picked it up). It was the exact same story; Elias wasn’t crafty enough to change the title, subtitle, or find out if any of those quoted still worked at/with the school (or, in the case of one of the teen fathers interviewed, was dead). When the student (who just happened to be Black!) notified the folks who hand out the Eddys, they stripped Elias of the award and demanded the $2,500 prize that came along with it be returned in forty-eight hours.

  But that’s just the tip of that iceberg. The student also discovered something else: Elias wasn’t a college graduate. He dropped out of Yale during the latter half of his junior year. That copy of a diploma with honors (summa cum laude) hanging up on his office wall is a fake.

  Now, after being exposed as a plagiarist and a fraud, you’d think Your World would have fired Elias. Well, they didn’t. In fact, according to Phillip, one month after all these revelations, he was given a promotion and a raise. The entire editorial staff—which, in addition to Phillip, included Editor-in-Chief Steven Goldberg, Managing Editor Andrew Goodman, Assistant Editor Dennis Higgenbotham (he replaced Denise Garafola, a white woman who left a month after I did and would be a witness for our side), and Simon Churday, an Indian-American who filled my associate editor slot—met to discuss what action should be taken against him, and no one voted for his ouster. He only received a reprimand (i.e., a stern lecture from Steven) and a two-week suspension with pay. (I’m sure that if I or Phillip had been involved in such an unethical scandal and it was discovered that we lied about our education or experience, we would’ve been suspended without pay, if not fired on the spot.) Phillip claims he wanted to suggest a harsher punishment be meted out but feared doing so would’ve put his job in jeopardy (uh-huh … we know the real reason why). Two weeks after Elias’s return (his suspension was just an extended Christmas vacation), Phillip was given his pink slip—and, yeah, it was delivered to him by Elias (and knowing how smug Elias is, if they were still fucking, he probably expected that to continue). So Phillip was all too happy to supply us with this ammunition.

  Your World was pretty confident that I wouldn’t be able to prove a thing in court: they were betting the bank on Elias, their star witness, to portray me as the difficult, combative militant he saw me as. But now they could not call him to the stand: how could they argue to a jur
y that, when deciding who to promote to senior editor, a liar and a cheat was the best man for the job? Your World must have found out that we knew because, the very morning that Phillip provided Jozette with all the materials related to Elias’s charade, their lawyer faxed Jozette an offer: $300,000. Yup, it was unacceptable. For Jozette, the most unacceptable thing was the dollar figure: given that they deliberately underpaid me and my efforts changed Your World from a dry textbookish magazine into an enlightening and entertaining publication for teenagers, she believed compensatory damages should include retroactive pay for doing a senior editor’s job on an associate editor’s salary, as well as the annual salary and bonuses I would’ve received had I remained with the company for an additional five years and been promoted the way I should’ve been. Adding punitive damages, the figure clocked in at a cool $3 million, with half paid upon signing an agreement and the other half coming a year later. Naturally, a third would be going to Jozette (or, rather, B-M-A).

  I didn’t care about the money; it might address the betrayal and disrespect, but it wouldn’t redress it. I deserved and wanted an apology—and this was something they didn’t plan on offering. In fact, their offer stated as one of its conditions that the settlement in no way meant that they were admitting any wrongdoing (the other was that I couldn’t disclose the details of the agreement). I was doubly insulted: they fuck me over and then expect me to sign an agreement that absolved them of any responsibility for doing it and, by extension, forcing me to leave (while I did quit, I had no choice given the unfair treatment I received). And even with their backs against the wall, they were still more concerned with covering their own asses and keeping an incompetent Caucasian like Elias on board.

  Jozette argued that they would messenger us over a check for the three mill before they admitted they intentionally wronged me. So we went around this by requesting two things that would indirectly tell the world that they did in fact discriminate against me and were taking proactive steps to make sure it wouldn’t happen again:

  • they had to hire a full-time affirmative-action officer

  • they had to sponsor a college internship and writing fellowship program

  Jozette had suggested that the other usual suspect—“sensitivity training”—be included on this list, but I nixed that. Such an exercise would truly be a waste of time and money. Can you really teach people to be sensitive? I don’t think so. Having someone come in once a month to convince employees the way they’ve been conditioned to think and feel about a particular group is wrong won’t help create a better working environment, it’ll just foster resentment and fuel whatever indifference those who are white, male, and/or heterosexual have for those who aren’t white, male, and/or heterosexual. Like my aunt Ruth says: “You can change the laws but ya can’t change people’s hearts.”