Stolen Me, K. Michael Washington [ready to read books TXT] 📗

when you bump into him or her on accident and even then, never make plans to do so much as call. It will simply just be nice to see them. A real friend has only heard of you or at most met you once when someone else comes asking. I know this shit from experience. Every guy I ever worked with coming up didn’t make it. They’re either out the game and working a bullshit job because they wasted their youth playing crook instead of preparing for life, strung out on shit, dead, or locked up. Nine out of ten times a guy in the business goes to jail over dope, pussy or a fake ass friend snitching them out. One out of ten times, it’s just good police work and that’s what happened to me. SON

When I left California for the Mid West in search of my father I never even considered the possibility of not finding him. Although he had only been released from prison around a year ago, I knew it would be hard. I even thought it could take a couple months, but I never thought that I wouldn’t find him. Every former friend I found was never really a friend and the ex-girlfriends where one night stands. Everybody knew somebody who knew him, but he was a name from the region’s past. My father’s trail was only as hot as my desire was strong to weed through the rumor and lore surrounding him. I never even saw myself living outside that first motel room when I planned my search. I definitely never saw myself living with a girlfriend in her two-bedroom income based apartment that sat above the home of a woman who beat her boyfriends. My girlfriend was Amber. Amber had a kid. The kid was Faith. Faith’s father was Nicky. Nicky knew people.

About a week after being in Springfield, which was the only city my parents mentioned, my search had led me more than a hundred miles away, so I bought this little green pick-up truck from the first car lot I saw. I kept the same motel room and made the drive. I needed the distance between were I searched and were I lived. Sometimes my father’s name conjured up some pretty sore memories for people. Twice now being related to Freeman had gotten me kicked out of a bar. My money was drying up fast so for extra money I would still hit the occasional arcade machine. People were more trusting out here compared to Californians so when I stumbled upon a chance to take advantage, I did. Three weeks in, I walked into a bowling ally to hit a machine, and staring me right in the face was this small cardboard box full of those blue zip-up deposit bags just sitting on the counter by the door. You could see them bulging. I picked them up and went right back out the door. I could hardly wait to get back to the motel and count it. $7,323.23. With what I already had I was operating with over ten thousand dollars again. Throwing the bills around the motel room and making money angels on the bed can only occupy you for so long, next you want to spend it.

I had driven past a strip club everyday since I had been here, my teenage curiosity never getting the better of me. After replenishing my fund, my maturity yielded to celebration and I went in. The single stage club boasted a rotation of seven girls. The DJ played mostly rock music, but mixed in the occasional commercial hip-hop track. It was a weeknight and there was only a few other patrons, mostly truckers and married guys coming in and out. At seventeen this was my first time in a strip club. I looked every bit of twenty-one, maybe older, but when I paid my cover charge out of the knot I was holding, I could have been in diapers and I was still getting served. No sooner than I sat at the bar with my back to the stage a stripper with short brown hair approached me. Although pretty, there was nothing spectacular about the girl, just an average white girl who was only attractive because she was thin and not ugly. First time in the club, first girl in the club and I couldn’t say no. We had a drink and then she took me in the back for a private dance. She took me to the back corner of the club where there were a few sofas. I sat down as directed. Lightly clad, her bikini was quickly removed while her hips twisted in rhythm. Dancing between my legs as I sat, she pressed her small breast against my face, slowly dragging herself downward against me until her face met my crotch. Reaching up to my chest with both hands, she laid me back. Her mouth’s attention quickly moved to my neck as she straddled me. I touched her as if she was mine, and my touch made her quiver. She showed me a good time, so I tried to pay her, but she refused. I then followed her to the stage. She danced gracefully and I watched in lust, but I only looked in her eyes. She danced her way over towards me and climbed from the stage to my lap. Perspiration cooled her naked body and smoothed my touch. My hands glide smoothly along her curves. As if the club manager could hear her over the music she whispered in my ear. She said she didn’t know me, but she knew that she liked me. She couldn’t stop smiling and she hugged me more than she danced for the rest of the night. Amber took me home from that club, and never wanted me to leave. She was twenty-three years old and vibrant, on or off the cocaine, which she used frequently. Within days she started handing me her money. I never asked her too, it seemed like she was trained, but I guess it landed her a man like she wanted. Like I said, she liked me, but I liked her too, just not enough to mind that she takes her clothes off and grinds on other men for a living.

Rhonda our down-stairs neighbor came from humble beginnings and late into her forties she was dead set on a humble end. An alcoholic mother of five that set the bar so low that her children thought the challenge was limbo. These were the people that poor white trash referred to as poor white trash. Ricky was thirty and locked away for the next fifteen years for stabbing several men in a bar fight. Tina, twenty-eight and a single mother of three boys herself rose leaps and bounds over her big brother. She was a part time waitress at a local bar. This afforded her, her very own income based apartment right across the street from Mom. This also afforded her plenty of time to kick back and drink beer with her too. Jane-Ann, whom Rhonda, with a straight face called her problem child, was sixteen had been impregnated by rape, then she miscarried and barley missed suicide. She didn’t drink nor do any drugs that weren’t prescribed, and Rhonda always had to fight to get her to take them. Jane-Ann’s insanity was her escape. I think being normalized by her medication left her open to the woes of her reality and her reality was riddled by small tragedy. Like her older sister, with fleeting dreams of a G.E.D. she had dropped out of high school to become a mother. She conquered the pain of her rape, just in time to have her heart broken by miscarriage. She tried to escape out deaths back door, but her attempted overdose instead left her trapped inside her mind with one little window. When she was on her meds, she wasn’t very different. The real difference was that she would never be different again. Her mind just stopped growing. She did finally find some solace in playing mother full-time to her baby brother Austin and part time to his three elder nephews.

The night after I moved in with Amber, my neighbors introduced their selves by having a knock down drag out fight in the front yard at midnight. Rhonda must have knocked him down and drug him out. A small crowd of neighbors formed around the squabbling couple, mostly family of course. The man gripped a gym bag that was more important than having another hand to fight with. He pitifully tried to use it as a shield. She was shoeless which I came to see was normal for her, but from the grass to the gravel she moved quickly around her opponent as if the broken beer bottles were a mirage. Landing every blow she threw, it only took around a minute for the hundred fifteen pound woman dispatch her opponent. The guy takes off through the crowd and down the street. That Rhonda had spit. When the poor guy sneaks back to get his car, she’s waiting on him with the water hose, soaked him and his interior. I never saw him again, but that wasn’t the last guy who made the mistake of sharing sheets with Rhonda.

I had been living with Amber for more than a year when her ex, Nicky Petronelli, comes busting into my apartment without knocking. Without looking up from my video game I reply. “Jane-Ann baby sits your kid when Amber’s at work.”

Sporting the typical mid-western white boy look he was baldheaded and had tattooed forearms but Nicky Petronelli was no typical white boy. Most white boys out here see a young black dude that talks a little street and they assume he’s a bad muthafucka. Nicky had needed to know for sure. He claimed that he knew people, so he couldn’t have his kid’s mom with just anybody. That was how he explained it while he sat humbly after having too much to drink and punching me. Even though he was drunk I still humored him by whipping his ass in Rhonda’s front yard arena.

The reason for his untimely visit was money. Nicky needed twenty-five thousand dollars. He said he was buying his way into the heist of the year. He came by hoping to get few hundred off of me. He knew I knew he was good for it. Nicky already had ten thousand, after some coaxing he gave me a few details, I showed him my ten thousand and we became partners. All we needed was five thousand more and we were in.

The job was stealing cars, six cars. The six were a small, but very beautiful automobile collection that had belonged to a wealthy and retired government contractor. He had aged past his years of being able to truly enjoy his cars. All work and no play left him with no children to pass the cars on to. The closer he got to the end the more generous he became. He was donating all the cars to charity. Somebody was determined not to let this happen and had put the money in play to prevent it. Twenty-five thousand bought you a pair of keys and a place in a caravan heading to a place where that very same pair of keys would be worth seventy-five thousand. What’s the catch? I knew there had to be catches