Read Online Power & Beauty by David Ritz, Tip "t.i." Harris - Free Book Online Page B

and Daddy provided the money. And when she wanted a nice-looking brotha, her father introduced her to me. Remembering how Irv said that Judy’s mother had a thing against blacks, I wondered if I was his way to shaft his former wife. I wondered a lot of things about Irv Wasserman.
    When Judy drove me over to the loft and showed me around, I was impressed. The room was large and clean. A huge floor-to-ceiling window overlooked Lake Michigan. The furniture was black leather. The walls were painted mint green and the island kitchen had marble countertops colored cobalt blue.
    Judy had brought a bottle of tequila and right away started doing shots. I wasn’t in the mood. She also had grass and a little coke. I told her that I wasn’t into drugs. “Great,” she said, “that means more for me.”
    Within thirty or forty minutes, she got blasted and made a move on me. I was hesitant. “Hold on, girl,” I said. “I can’t afford to get crossways with your daddy. I want to work for the man.”
    “Daddy wants us all working together, Power. Can’t you see that he loves you for what you did for him? I’m the reward. I’m here to say thank you. I’m here with his full approval. You saw that with your own eyes. Now there’s something else I want you to see with your own eyes.”
    With that, she brought that tight black top over her head, unhooked her brassiere, and slightly—very slightly—arched her back. I was gone.
    When I woke up in the morning, Judy was gone. There was a note on the kitchen counter that said, “Call me when you’re ready . . .” She wrote down her cell number and that was it. I stretched and yawned and remembered how long it had taken me to cum. Judy had loved that; she said she’d never seen anyone go so long, but what she didn’t know is that I was fighting my imagination. I didn’t want to imagine Beauty. For everything that was amazing about Judy’s body—and believe me, amazing is an understatement—I still couldn’t bust a nut with my eyes open, no matter how hard I tried. Finally, though, when she started digging her nails into my back and screaming that it was time, I shut my eyes, saw my sister, and exploded.
    Turned out that Judy, like her dad, was a talker. After we fucked, she started telling me how she hated the private school her mother had made her attend. Her mother had remarried a guy named Harvey, who owned a car dealership. Harvey never said a bad word about Judy’s father, but Judy’s mother did. Six years ago she discovered that Irv was keeping a former Miss Venezuela in an apartment on Chicago’s Gold Coast. When Judy told me the story, she laughed. She sounded glad that her dad was cheating on her mom. She had wanted to live with her dad, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. That got Judy even angrier. But, as far as I could tell, Judy liked being angry. The angrier she became, the more she talked.
    She told me that the only blacks in her private school were two gay guys and three girls. The girls were her best friends. According to Judy, they were the smartest girls in school. One of the girls had a father who manufactured hair products for black women. That’s how Judy got the idea of opening a hair salon in a South Side Chicago neighborhood recently gone upscale.
    “Black people treat hair like art,” she said.
    I rubbed my head, just to remind myself I did nothing with my hair except keep it short.
    “Not you,” said Judy. “The women. Black women have the coolest sense of hair style. Haven’t you noticed?”
    “I guess I have,” I said.
    “They just don’t do what everyone else does,” she said. “They invent. They’re not afraid of stepping out there. They’re daring. I’ve been going around hiring stylists. It’s like I’m forming a band, only it’s a band of hairstylists. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    “Sure.”
    “And with these stylists and location and this interior designer I found to trick out the space, I can’t