The Glamorous Life (3 page)

Although they moved to the suburbs of the 7-4-6, they couldn’t escape the drama that came with the ’hood. Many times Bambi was awakened in the dead of night by Reggie’s pager or his cell phone ringing with somebody who wanted to purchase heroin and had the major paper to make it worthwhile for Reggie to get up from next to Bambi’s warm body. Lying awake worried that something could happen to him, she would wait for him to call her to confirm that everything was okay. Just when she’d think that something must have gone wrong, he’d call. Losing sleep was one of the prices she paid for dating a high roller!

Bambi couldn’t be absolutely sure Reggie was being faithful to her, but apart from some late unexplained nights and rumpled clothing, she never saw any direct evidence linking some gold digger to his dick, nor did she ever hear any ghetto rumors about her man running around with this or that woman. Until
she did, she was going to keep all suspicions between herself and Egypt, who was her best friend since middle school.

But there were other issues closer to home causing her pain. For one, her mother was hot as fish grease when it came to Reggie. She did not like the hold that Reggie had on Bambi. Early in the relationship Bambi had left home to go shack up with Reggie in a hotel, abandoning her college dreams without hesitation. Her mother, of course, was outraged.

“This nigga can’t even get an apartment for you. He got you living with him in a hotel. Baby, it’s not like he got you living in the Trump Plaza. This monkey got a nerve to have you in the Econo Lodge. Baby, it ain’t no dick that good in the world.”

Reggie was an easy one to profile for an old pro like Tricia. She peeped him for what he was immediately, exactly the kind of no-class-having, straight-from-the-gutter, thug nigga that she had been trying to protect her daughter from for so many years.

Tricia’s feelings on the subject of men like Reggie ran deep as the Dead Sea. Having clawed herself up from nothing to something, Tricia had given her only child the finer things that life had to offer, including private school and enrollment in a charm school. Tricia was sure that her daughter would bring home, if not a politician like her father, maybe an astronaut, a surgeon, a lawyer—a true provider and gentleman. But never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined a thug.

When it came to men, Tricia knew what she was talking about and could lecture like any Ivy League university professor. She was thirty-nine years old, but she was an old-school playerette to the highest degree, if the East Coast had ever seen one. She used her exotic looks and charm to get the best out of life. But she hated to be called a gold digger. Gold digging was beneath her, and she was insulted if anyone ever referred
to her as one. According to Tricia, gold digging was something strippers and groupies did. Tricia’s beauty—her stock in trade—always hooked the wealthiest men, the certified big fishes. Somehow the richest and most powerful men became powerless when they came under the spell of her bewitching laughter. Although the men treated her like a queen, wining her and dining her with nothing less than the best, the only men she
ever
truly loved were the dead presidents on their currency.

Bambi’s father, Bob, was one of the men who had been hypnotized by Tricia’s high cheekbones, caramel complexion, and bright eyes. He had fallen victim to her wiles. In the midst of his courtship, he’d neglected to mention the fact that he was married and had been for ten years, with two small children. She found this out when she told him she was pregnant. When he demanded that she have an abortion, Tricia had spit in his face. “You dirty motherfucker, you want me to get rid of my baby? Did you tell your wife to get rid of those two little crumb snatchers she had for you?”

She’d been young, but the experience had hardened her and taught her a very valuable lesson. By this time Bob had revealed too much of his life to Tricia, not to mention he was a politician with an upcoming election and didn’t need the scandal. To keep Tricia quiet he made sure she never wanted for a thing. Tricia moved out of her mother’s house when she was seven months pregnant, but she didn’t move into a low-income government-subsidized apartment or a small one- or two-bedroom apartment, like most of her friends. No, at nineteen years old, she moved from her mother’s fifty-year-old house in the middle of the ’hood into her own four-bedroom home. The car, house, and everything in it were all paid for by Bob.

In the years that followed, Tricia had accepted money from
some of Richmond’s finest, consisting of rich men and even richer men! Men who should have known better, but simply could not deny her, they let lust blind their vision. Tricia knew that Reggie was definitely an imposter when it came to having money, and he was nothing she wanted her daughter even looking at. Seeing her daughter falling victim to Reggie turned her stomach. She had to do something to snap her daughter out of the spell of a nickel-and-dimer like him.

Soon after Bambi and Reggie moved into a one-room efficiency apartment, Tricia decided that if Bambi was going to keep the company of, and shack up with, some uneducated, no-good hoodlum, then she was going to have to do without her mother’s support.

“I love you, Bambi,” Tricia said, “but I’m not about to stand by and watch you throw your life away on trash. If you want me to reappear in your life, then you do a Houdini and make his ass disappear.”

Bambi was hurt when her mother washed her hands of her. If it had not been for Ms. Dot, Reggie’s mother, who embraced her like her very own daughter, Bambi might have had a nervous breakdown. After Bambi’s mother rejected her, Bambi couldn’t sleep, and often she cried for no reason at all. But Ms. Dot took care of her, often bringing her soup and brownies, sometimes talking and sitting with her or just watching the stories on television. Finally, Bambi would be able to sleep again, but she continued to hope her mother would change her mind about Reggie.

But the biggest drama-filled episode occurred one morning with a knock on the door at 6 a.m. Bambi awoke to find their house surrounded by Richmond’s “finest”: the county deputies and city police. They were very familiar with Reggie’s reputation,
so they showed up with more than enough backup when they came to arrest Reggie on an outstanding warrant: a petty trespassing charge.

“I can’t believe you motherfuckers got the damn nerve to run up in here for some bullshit-ass trespassing charge. I’m sure it’s a child molester somewhere out there that you needs to be running up on,” Reggie screamed as they put him in the police car.

Once free on bond, Reggie told Bambi that he was sure he was going to have to do about thirty days because this was his third trespassing charge.

“Baby, it don’t matter how much time you gotta do, I’m going to be right here for you, holding it down like only I can,” she told him.

Reggie had underestimated the authority of the judge, who gave him ninety days in the Richmond City Jail. Reggie would call every day, and Bambi would sit by the phone accepting the collect calls; and when the twenty minutes was up, she demanded that he call right back. Every Thursday she visited Reggie, a thick glass separated them.

At first, the whole jailhouse visit had her on pins and needles. The clanking doors, the surly guards, the ugly peeling paint on the walls—all of it turned her stomach. It especially made her sad when she observed the women who brought their kids to see their fathers. One time a little girl was crying, begging her daddy to come and leave with them as visiting time came to an end. The guard showed no emotion as the little girl begged for more time with her father to say good-bye.

Sometimes she waited for an hour and a half just to get in for the twenty-minute visits, which annoyed her. She still was there every visiting day enduring the frustrating wait, from the babies crying at the tops of their lungs, to the musty smells and
not to mention the eyeing of the guards looking down on her as if she was nothing because she was visiting her man in jail.

Reggie knew he had two sure things to come home to: First and foremost, he needed his money and his Boo. He told Bambi that he would listen to so many dudes in the jail whine about their girl running around wild, fucking anything and everything moving because they had not prepared them for the possibility of having to do time. Reggie said that 85 percent of the chicks moved on to another dude solely for money. On the streets their men lived for the moment and never planned for the future. They left the females, who were so accustomed to the street lifestyle, no other choice really but to move on to the next hustler. So Reggie made sure his money was together. Besides, he didn’t want to start from the bottom with a hundred dollars like he had the last time he came home from doing a bit.

So he took care of some things from the inside. He got Bambi to call his supplier Big D on the three-way and make arrangements to meet him. He instructed Bambi to go into the stash and give Big D the money in exchange for a kilo of crack cocaine. During the prison visits Reggie would walk her through how to weigh it out. He even sent her a chart as to what the scale needed to say to get an ounce, big eight, and so forth. After it was bagged up into ounces, he called three of his homeboys to let them know to call Bambi for the weight. At the price he paid for the kilo, he was able to sell cheaper than almost anyone else in town and make a profit. He only allowed Bambi to deal with the three dudes directly.

Every day she sat in the house at the mahogany wood table, feeling her heart beat as she bagged the coke up, knowing at any minute the police could kick up in there. She thought about how proud Reggie must be of her, the way she was holding
it down. In the middle of the night when the dudes wanted to re-up, she just grabbed Reggie’s nine millimeter and headed to the gas station to meet them. Although she knew she was doing wrong, as soon as she left out of the house, she prayed and asked God to take care of her anyway.

Even though Bambi didn’t like it and Reggie knew it, not once did she complain. Instead she handled her business like a seasoned pro.

One day while on a visit, he looked into her eyes. “Boo, I’m sorry I got you all caught up in this. This is only till I get up out here.”

“Baby, you were out in those projects trespassing, hustling, selling drugs for us, for us to survive and have the best that life has to offer. You made sure both of us benefited to the fullest. So it’s not even a question for me to hold this down while you’re gone. It’s my duty to keep your books stacked and take care of whatever needs to be taken care of while I’m out here and you’re in there. It’s done, and if it ain’t, baby, you can lay down and do that time and bet that I got you on this end.”

Reggie smiled a big Joker smile.

“Without a doubt, I know I got a soldier right by my side.” But dealing drugs wasn’t the only indignity Bambi had to face. All the guards admired Bambi. She always looked her very best when she came through the jailhouse’s double doors. One guard at the prison saw her submission and love for Reggie as a weakness and said, “Look, show me some ‘PG’ and I’ll get you a visit every visiting day, instead of once a week.”

“What’s PG?”

“Personal Growth.”

“What? Mothafucka, are you crazy? Have you bumped your head?”

She strolled right into the visitation room and told Reggie
exactly what he’d said. She was even more shocked by his response: “Shit, I’m trying to see you every visiting day, let that ma’fucker pat yo ass or something. Don’t you want to see me?”

Bambi did a lot of soul-searching after that. She’d been shocked that Reggie would willingly allow another man to touch her.
Damn, do he really love me? I know he’s under a lot of stress, misses me and wants to see me as much as I want to see him. This has got to be hard on him. He saw me every day, and now all of a sudden he can’t see me. But I can’t let another man touch me. Why would he want another man to touch what’s his? I know pimps do it all the time for the money. I guess with Reggie, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Bambi felt horrible, but she thought it through and allowed the guard to look down her shirt to get to see Reggie every visiting day for the next few days.

Although it was only ninety days that they were separated, Bambi had lots of time to think—time for reality to sink in. Bambi loved the lavish lifestyle that they lived, but all good things had to come to an end. She knew that no fairy tale lasts forever. Bambi hoped Reggie would decide to quit while they were ahead, but three months after he was released from jail, he kept right on dealing, never slowed up. Finally, Bambi couldn’t hold her tongue any longer and said something. “I can’t stand the thought of you going to jail again—and one of these days, some envious hater is going to send five-oh our way.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to get out of the game.”

“Okay,” he said with a smile. “I’m out, but I need about another month to be on the grind so I can tie all my loose ends up.”

That had been a month ago, and as far as she could tell, Reggie was still slaying more bricks than a little bit one hundred
miles and running. So now the clock was ticking. Hopefully after the engagement party there would be no more hustling for Reggie.

As she pulled up to the restaurant and prepared to say goodbye to the crazy life and embrace her destiny, Bambi couldn’t help but think how lucky she was.

CHAPTER 3

What’s Done in the Dark …
Will Come to the Light!