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“Street! I just gotta know about that sex scene in Bulletproof! You know, the one where Monty and his woman make up after that big fight. I could just feel the passion. It was so hot, it had me squirming and stuff. Did you write that from real life experience? I mean…” The woman smiled as she shifted her weight on her feet in the middle of the packed room. “Are you that passionate and intense when you make love?”
Damn, these women were getting bolder by the second! You’d think they’d never seen a fine man before. Sitting off to the side at the front of the small room crammed full of forty or fifty readers who’d won the coveted prize of this intimate time with Lorenzo through some online contest, I was beginning to get a little heated about all this flirting. I mean, Lorenzo had introduced me as his lady, but that hadn’t stopped a thing. These women were shameless.
With a grin, Lorenzo said, “Let’s just say most of my writing comes from personal experience, especially in that department.”
“Oooo, that must mean he can eat it good, because Monty ate his woman like she was a plate of neck bones!” some woman in the crowd shouted, to which most of the room burst into laughter.
Another woman yelled, “And that must mean he can knock you out with his sex like Monty, too. Had his woman calling him Nyquil!”
There was louder laughter as Lorenzo just shrugged and smiled, then turned and winked at me. Even I had to smile, because they were both right on the money. Lorenzo was good at many things, but as Nicky had put it, his cunnilingus skills were at the top of the list in a tie with his mind-numbing stroke game, which had knocked me out on several occasions. I adjusted in my seat and thought to myself how I couldn’t wait to get his big sexy ass back to the hotel.
“I have a question?” a young woman said loudly, standing from her chair on the far-right side of the room.
Lorenzo nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Okay, my name is Cheryl Pointer, and first of all, no disrespect to your lady here, but Street, I have been in love with you and your pen game since I first picked up a copy of Bulletproof. I remember turning the last page of that story and thinking it was the most heartbreaking, intense, emotional thing I’d ever read. It was so different from a lot of the other books like it, because you could feel Monty’s emotion. He did some bad stuff, but you still wanted him to win, because you understood why he was doing what he was doing.”
Several nods and murmurs of agreement filled the room, and she had definitely echoed my thoughts about that book.
“So my question is, how did you come up with Bulletproof, and how did you make it feel so real?” Cheryl concluded.
The room was small enough that Lorenzo didn’t have to use the microphone that was provided, plus, when he projected his voice, it boomed within those four walls, commanding everyone’s attention. Well, I’m pretty sure his looks had something to do with that, too.
He was still standing before the room in relaxed-fit jeans and his own Street’s Team t-shirt as he began to speak. “I’m sure some of you familiar faces have heard this story before, but I don’t mind sharing it again. I lost my father when I was young. He was deep in the drug game in my hometown, Romey, Tennessee. Romey isn’t a metropolis, but it does have a population of about sixty thousand people, and it’s surrounded by a lot of smaller communities. There’s a lot of wealth there, but a lot of poverty, too. And poverty-stricken areas are breeding grounds for drug users and drug dealers.
“When I was young, I lived in the projects. My father wasn’t an educated man, and I truly believe he sold drugs as a last resort to take care of me and my mom. He made a lot of money, was able to get us a little house and move us out of the projects. No more food stamps. Nice clothes, nice cars. Shit, we were living so good, my daddy became my hero. We spent a lot of time together, too. I know this is gonna sound strange, but every second my daddy wasn’t out in the streets selling drugs, he spent at home with me and my mom. He was a good man. He really was.
“My father worked for this guy they called Jaywalk. Jaywalk was a legend in the drug game. From what I know, he was ruthless, would do anything to anyone he thought disrespected him. A real asshole.”
“Like Cali in Bulletproof?” someone in the crowd asked. Cali was the villain, the man who’d killed Monty’s mother.
Lorenzo nodded. “Exactly like Cali. So one night, my dad is helping me with my homework and our phone rings. My mom hands him the phone and tells him it’s Jaywalk. My daddy left a few minutes later, and was found dead the next morning.”
From my seat, I could see his face change and the energy in the room shifted, became charged, electrified. At first, I thought this little story was going to be a work of fiction, something he created in his brilliant mind, but at that moment, I knew this story was true, because he was emitting pure rage.
Lorenzo shook his head a little as if shaking something off of him. “Umph, it’s still hard for me to talk about this, but anyway, my hero was gone. I got uprooted, had to move to Chicago, and my mom? She was in shambles without him. In Chicago, she got a job, but we had to move back to the projects. We struggled, and all of that? Losing my dad and the comfort he provided? Watching my mom fall apart and date all these sorry men? Well, that made me an angry little boy who grew into a furious man. I got in a lot of trouble, got in the drug game myself. Back then, all I cared about was money, pussy, and making my way back to Romey so I could kill Jaywalk. I was obsessed with killing him. It pretty much consumed me. It was all I thought about.
“So about eight years ago, I moved back home with a lot of money and the goal of finding him and killing him. The problem was, I didn’t know his real name, had never even seen him. There was one picture of him and my father, but he was wearing shades. And whatever my mother might have known about him, she refused to share. Plus, he was a drug dealer, years had passed, and he most likely was dead anyway, and I didn’t know the real names of any of the folks that were in the game with them back then. Shit, they were probably dead, too, because no one lasts forever in the drug game. That’s why I got out of it. Didn’t want my mom to lose me like she did my dad. So I had to let it go. I could’ve tried harder to find him, but I knew I had to move on. I also had to do something with the rage that was eating me up inside. That’s when I picked up a pen and started writing. Monty’s story is how I wanted my own story to play out. So I kept writing, and with every story, a little more of the rage left, until I was able to become a different person. I wasn’t filled with anger. I stopped thinking about revenge. And then…” He paused and turned to face me. There was this look on his face, a combination of pain, gratitude, and love.
“And then I met this woman over here. And what little anger was left in me, she loved it away.”
I sat there with my hand on my chest, blinking back tears as I mouthed, “I love you.”
He smiled and then returned his attention to the crowd, most of whom were on their feet applauding him.
*****
We were both silent when we entered our room as a heaviness still cloaked Lorenzo, and from the way he collapsed onto the side of the bed and just stared into space, he was totally spent.
Sitting next to him, I rested a hand on his thigh. “You okay?” I asked.
He looked at me, giving me a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah, just tired.”
I looked him in the eye. “No, that’s not it. That story, your dad. That’s still with you right now, isn’t it? You’re still thinking about it? Feeling it?”
He sighed and dropped his eyes.
