Sweet St. Louis Page 2

  So Ant headed on back to work with plenty on his mind, in search of some kind of fulfillment and the real meaning of life, something that Tone didn’t seem to give two shits about. In the meantime, they were both just counting the days as they slipped on by. However, for Tone, those days seemed filled with any and every thing. But for Ant, they were more like a glass jar of emptiness.

  Emptiness described the feeling that Sharron Francis had on her day off from work at the St. Louis International Airport. She had far too much time on her hands. And misguided idle time can be a sure invitation to entertaining preconceived notions of naughtiness. Had she visited the man she planned to see downtown at the Hampton Inn, that naughtiness would have been filled to the rim with sweaty twisting, twirling, and running out of breath to hotel sheet music. Nevertheless, she considered it pointless. Pointless and cheap, like the plain white sheets that they did it on. Besides, she knew better. The man was married. And in her right mind, it was wrong. But girrrl did it feeel so right!

  RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  … RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  … RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  It was probably Mr. Married Man himself, calling from a hotel pay phone, and covering his tracks as usual, just in case his wife would question the phone calls made from his room. But Sharron refused to answer.

  For what? she quizzed herself. I can find good sex anywhere.

  What she really wanted was reliable companionship. Not a long-distance married man. The fact that he treated her so well and offered her money was not a substitute for the closeness that she wanted. In fact, the money made her feel more like a whore. A paid-for mistress. A sex toy. So she had never taken a dime from him.

  … RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  … RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  She sat on the sofa and shook her head, disappointed with herself, and disappointed with the fate of her gender, as the phone continued its tempting and desperate rings.

  But she fought it off. She fought it off. She fought it … OFF while continuing to shake her head and ponder the relations between men and women.

  No matter what we do, it always seems like we’re on the bottom of things whether we’re married or single, she thought to herself. So I guess Celena was right: You use them like they use you.

  Thinking of the advice from her best friend and roommate, who also worked at the St. Louis airport, Sharron decided to go ahead and page her as soon as Mr. Married Man would get the message and leave her the hell alone. After all, he didn’t want her to get attached, right? So why should he be?

  Find yourself some other mistress to play with, because I have feelings, needs, desires, and everything else that real people have. Real people like your wife and your kids.

  When the phone stopped ringing, Sharron paged Celena immediately and took the first call following, praying to be right.

  “What’s up now, girl?” Celena’s tempered tone rushed over the line from the pay phone at the airport. “You know when my break is. I’m busy as hell right now. And why you wait so long to answer the damn phone? You decided not to go, didn’t you?”

  Sharron smiled, relieved that it was her girl. “Yeah, I decided not to go. I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Mmm-hmm, I knew you couldn’t do it,” Celena hummed.

  “Do what?”

  “Parade around with a married man.”

  Sharron smiled even wider, an honest girl caught sneaking her way out through the back door.

  “You wasn’t raised that way,” her friend told her. “You was just trying your best to be like me.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be like you. It just happened.”

  “Yeah, sure it did, after you asked me a million questions about it. ‘Do married men really do it better?’” she teased.

  “I did not ask you that,” Sharron responded, appalled by the insinuation.

  “Yes you did ask me. Girl, you ask me shit, then you just up and forget about it. Maybe it’s that Memphis air that you grew up in,” Celena suggested. “You think you’re such a damn saint. You screwed this married man, didn’t you?”

  “Why you gotta be all loud about it?” Sharron asked her. “Where are you calling me from? People might be listening to you.”

  “Girl, they don’t know who the hell I’m talkin’ to, Sharron Francis.”

  All Sharron could do was shake her head and grin it off. “You are so foul. You know that, right? And why do you keep comparing everything that I do to Memphis? I am my own person. If you took the time to visit Memphis with me, you would see that.”

  Celena snapped, “I got no time for playing horseshoes in Tennessee. Okay?”

  They broke out laughing, thinking of the fifteen-minutes-of-fame group Arrested Development and their popular song and references to Sharron’s home state.

  Sharron decided to change the subject, right as Celena was announcing her need, and desire, to return to work. There was a young man involved in Sharron’s day who had inadvertently helped her make the final decision not to be naughty with Mr. Married Man.

  “Do you know what this guy said to me today?”

  “What?” Celena asked. She was all ears and anxious. “Hurry up. I gotta go.”

  “Don’t rush me.”

  “Well, come on. I gotta go already.”

  “If you’re all in a rush, I’ll tell you later then.”

  Celena became hesitant and annoyed. “How are you gonna start to tell me something and not finish? God, I hate when people do that! Just tell me what he said already!”

  “Please deposit ten cents for the next two minutes!”

  “See that? Damn! Hold on, girl.”

  Celena slid another quarter into the pay phone.

  “You have to get back to work, remember,” Sharron reminded her.

  “Sharron, if you don’t tell me what you started, I’m gonna ring your damn neck when I get home! Don’t you know you could mess up my whole day like that?”

  Sharron couldn’t believe it. Everything was so urgent to Celena; so right now, right here, right this minute or I’ll die!

  “Do you need to know that bad? Dag!” Sharron changed her mind, deciding to keep it to herself. Celena didn’t need to know all of her business. She sure didn’t know all of Celena’s. It was nowhere near being a two-way street. It was more like a free-flowing one-way street on Sharron’s end, but a jam-packed four-lane expressway on Celena’s.

  “You should have never started to tell me then,” her friend pouted.

  Sharron thought quickly of a believable lie, just to get off the phone with her.

  “I was walking down Kingshighway to catch the bus, and this guy rides up next to me and asks, ‘Are you Naomi Campbell’s cousin? You got the same high cheekbones and long legs.’”

  Celena waited for more. That can’t be it! Then she complained. “Is that it? Girl, you made me waste my damn quarter! You don’t look nothing like Naomi Campbell. What, you’re both chocolate brown and tall? I think she’s five nine anyway. You’re only five six and a half. Call me when you got something better than that. Okay? God!

  “Maybe I do need to visit Memphis,” she continued. “Because the things that impress you are so … so average. I can’t believe you.”

  “Well, bye,” Sharron said, faking offense.

  “Well, bye to you, too!”

  When they hung up, Sharron thought of the real line that was expressed to her on Kingshighway that afternoon, and wondered how Celena would have responded to that one.

  “A piece of me for a piece of you,” she repeated to herself with a grin.

  She couldn’t help but chuckle out loud, tickled by it, like a feather stroking the romantic side of her mind. Was it because she was from Memphis? Or was it simply a good line? One thing was for sure, it made her reconsider her date with Mr. Married Man. Was she really getting a piece of him, or just a piece, period? What exactly did “a piece of yourself” mean anyway? Was it all physical? Or could it also be mental, spiritual, and emotional?
>
  It was a perfect line. And he probably had no idea how perfect it was. “A piece of me for a piece of you.” Or maybe he needed to make a major adjustment and change it to “All of me for all of you.” Because she needed more than just a piece. Humans all needed more. Then again, maybe humans had somehow gotten greedy, and pieces of one another were all that we could realistically get, because we were all connected to other important parts: extended family, business associates, and longtime friends. Nevertheless, all of those thoughts running through Sharron’s mind made her wonder about the man. By the way:

  “He wasn’t no ugly fish out the water, either. Maybe I would like a piece,” she told herself.

  As for Celena, the girl thought she was the living definition of “hip” just because she was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, while Sharron was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. Celena acted as if St. Louis was Chicago, New York, and L.A. all rolled up into one. But who could blame her with all of the attention that she created for herself. Maybe it was because she was the middle sister of the three Myers girls. And not having the distinctive recognition of being the oldest or the baby, Celena made do as a rough-and-tumble tomboy and a real dynamo when it came to enjoying herself, especially while with men. Any man!

  Yet she was still a tomboy to Sharron. Celena even worked as an airline caterer instead of at the gift shop, a food stand, or as a luggage monitor like most of the other women who worked at St. Louis International. And although she made more money as a caterer, you could hardly tell with the way that she spent it. You would think that the word “sale” had been erased, or had never been part of her vocabulary. So she was always broke; broke and borrowing to pay off steadily increasing credit card bills.

  Sharron, through the hands of fate, had been forced to live as an only child, losing an older brother to crib death and a younger sister to a stillborn birth. At age nineteen, Sharron lost her mother to breast cancer. Yet, she never seemed glum about it, or at least not on the outside. She just learned to take life as it was given to her, while adding whatever she could along the way to make it better. Like the addition of Celena as her friend, a friend whom Sharron had met just six years ago when she had first moved to St. Louis, a wide-eyed teen, attending college away from home, “to grow up and experience the world,” her mother had told her, less than two years before dying. “And never let my health stop you.”

  But her mother’s health and death did stop her. It stopped Sharron from having faith in her own future. It stopped her from focusing on school. And it often stopped her from finishing what she started, school included. Sharron would go cold turkey and just quit, tired of it all. Tired of struggling for or against something as uncontrollable as life, and as uncontrollable as love.

  She loved Celena Myers though. Loved her like a sister. A sister who had helped her to reach for a new day and for new adventures to liven each day. And as misguided as she could be in her attempts to make life hold more substance than work, food, sleep, and sex, Celena was the truth. She was real, as real as they were opposites as friends, like so many other sister friends of the world. They were opposite but complementary. For as much as Sharron needed Celena for adventure, hope, and energy, Celena needed Sharron for stability, morality, and warmth. They were soul sisters like Ant and Tone were soul brothers, all just finding their way, however they could, to make it in life.

  RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  … RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  … RRRIIINNNNGGG! …

  As tempting as he still was, Mr. Married Man that is, the truth was that there was much more out there. There was always something, or some one who would be more fulfilling than naughty candy that eventually rotted you.

  Convinced of it, Sharron simply walked away from the phone and returned to her room. She kicked off her shoes, plopped down on her perfect orthopedic bed, and picked up on page 132 of Lolita Files’s Scenes from a Sistah, where she had left off the night before. She realized that there were real meals out there. Pieces of something else to hold on to. And pieces of something else to love.

  Hate was the opposite of love. And Anthony Poole hated standing in lines! He hated the entire institution of it. Mainly he hated standing in lines because some people never had to go through the humiliation. However, he and Tone usually did. Yet, Ant refused to think of himself as unimportant. He was simply unconnected. Who said these ugly muscleheads are better than me just because they play for the Rams anyway? he posed to himself.

  He and his friend Tone watched as the beefy, well-dressed football players waltzed right into the club ahead of them and the chatty, scantily dressed women, who all waited patiently on Martin Luther King Drive as the line moved ahead slower than a bottle of Heinz ketchup.

  “That’s Derek Rand and Steve Tinsley,” Tone noted with a smile. He was pleased—gold-toothed, green leather shoes, and all—to even enter the same club with the Rams players. Tone considered it a pleasure. That’s why he spent nearly two hundred dollars on his shoes, to make sure he could hold up against important people, whether those dark green shoes matched the majority of his multicolored wardrobe or not.

  Ant was dressed in all black, like an unmasked ninja, right on down to his Giorgio Brutini shoes. He could care the hell less who was in the club with him, as long as he was able to receive the respect that he felt he deserved.

  “Who are all those other guys?” he asked rhetorically. He knew the answer to that before he even asked.

  Tone hunched his shoulders and guessed. “Bodyguards, friends, cousins. You know how that shit goes; everybody they know gets in.”

  “You think they paying?”

  Tone had to think a little harder for that one. “I’ on know. But if they ain’t, that’s a whole lot of people to be gettin’ in for free.” Then he got a little pissed at the idea. “Matter of fact, if they ain’t paying, then I’m keepin’ my ten dollars, too. Shit, I need these ten dollars much more than they need it!”

  Ant just smiled, knowing damn well that Tone was blowing a bunch of hot-ass air. He knew like the bulge in his pants that his boy Tone was going to cough up those ten dollars faster than an eight-year-old at the corner store for candy. It was ladies-get-in-free-before-eleven night. That meant there would be plenty of cheap women inside. Cheap women were easier to handle. But at those twenty-dollar, limited-space clubs, with the snotty women in those places, Tone sometimes felt as if he’d tossed his money to a street junkie who was feigning for that next hit. Wasted. But Ant? Ant loved that kind of challenge.

  “IDs,” the security asked them as they reached the front door.

  I bet they didn’t ask for their IDs, Ant thought to himself, still ranting at the disrespect. It was thoughts like those that ruined his nights out before he even tried to enjoy them.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tone asked his partner. He could feel the hesitation. No words were needed. He frowned and said, “Look, man, if you’re in one of them damn moods of yours again, then as soon as we get in this club, you do your thing, and I’ll do mine.”

  “I don’t want girls asking me why you got a gold tooth in your damn mouth anyway,” Ant cracked, attempting to lighten his posture.

  “You tell ‘em ‘cause it makes ‘em feel like gold when I’m eatin’ ‘em,” Tone countered.

  Ant’s smile was more a cringe of distaste. “You tell ‘em that shit your damn self.”

  “Aw, man, you know you wit’ it. You just embarrassed to talk about it,” Tone suggested with a wide-open smile of his own. “You can talk about it with me, dawg. I’m your boy.”

  Ant couldn’t wait to get the hell away from him. He walked clear across the blue-lit dance floor like a man on a mission, and headed straight for the men’s room to check himself out, and to prepare himself for the competition.

  Ain’t nobody in here got shit on me! I don’t care if they play for the Rams, the St. Louis Cardinals, or the Dallas Cowboys for that matter! My game is tight! he told himself, while staring through himself in the
mirror. He was looking more inside of himself then at himself. He knew that the real deal was how strong each man felt, regardless of what he had, how he dressed, or how many people knew him. Ant felt that he could rule the world if ever given a chance. A chance would be all the help he needed to shine, like the gold around his neck and around his wrist.

  “You got the time, brother?” he asked a lesser competitor in a purple suit. What is it, Punce and the Revolution night up in here? he asked himself, with an inside chuckle. This guy looks like the Black Joker.

  The oversized brother flipped his wrist and said, “It’s eleven thirty-five.”

  Ant looked down at his own gold-plated watch that read eleven-forty, five minutes ahead, just like he liked it. “Thanks, man. I was just checking.” By the way, lay off them barbecue ribs for a minute. Or do some push-ups or something! Damn!

  The purple-suit-wearing brother smiled, but he had no idea what Ant was thinking. Ant was five minutes ahead of his game, and on a whole different page.

  “And good luck out there, man,” he advised, like a snake to a rabbit. “Some of these girls got some long-ass nails.”

  Even the brother stinking up the restroom from behind the stall laughed.

  “And don’t let them feed you that shit no more, man!” Ant advised him, raising his voice above the black stall door. “’Cause whoever cooked you that meal, you need to leave her ass alone! That shit smell like poison!”

  Back out from the restroom to join the party, Ant’s testosterone level was at its highest. If he didn’t know any better, he’d up and snatch the arm of the finest woman in the place, and tell her she’d be his company for the rest of the night, and for as long as he wanted her next to him.

  Then there was Tone, right in the middle of the dance floor, already getting sweaty with some average-looking girl. Typical. Tone would take anything that was willing to be taken. But Ant? He searched the room like the sharpest young recruit of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. His mission: spot the five finest women in the club, and narrow down his mark.