Queen of the City 3: The Life of a Female Rapper, page 14
“Lyric, it’s time now, sweetheart. The Good Lord has seen fit for you to have a chance to repent, even in the condition you are in now. If the thieves that were crucified with our Lord had an opportunity to repent on their death beds, then it is possible for you to get the same opportunity.”
Big Mama sat on a chair in the hospital in all white while doctors moved around me anxiously.
“Lyric, Baby? You hear me? Now is not the time to delay anything. You have done much wrong in your life, but the blood of the Lord is enough to change everything. Just repent, Lyric. Just repent.”
“Lord, I’m…”
I blacked out again before I could finish what I was saying. The next time I woke up, Stacey, Serena, and Prince were in the hospital room. I could hear everything they said, but I was barely able to open my eyes. “Hey Mama,” Prince said as clear as day. He looked much older this time around, and I couldn’t understand what was going on. Stacey put her arm around him, “Hey, Lyric. We just wanted to stop by and say hi. We know that you can’t really talk back to us, but we are praying for your recovery, ok? Doctors say the one bullet pierced through a lot of your organs at once, and it’s going to be a while before they know how things are going to go for you.” Serena walked up to the bed, and her stomach extended just a bit from her waist. It seemed as if she was pregnant. “Hey Lyric. I miss you, girl, okay? Please come back to us. It won’t be the same if you don’t.” I glared at Prince as he walked closer to me. While he leaned in to kiss me on my cheek, I saw the struggle in his eyes. The eternal battle that seemed to wage between me and Nas took place inside of his soul—the fight to see which one of us he would emulate the most, but honestly, I didn’t want him to copy either of us. It pained me to think that he would go through anything me or Nas did in our lives. Nobody wants their child to copy their mistakes, but now, I felt the pain my mother did when she came to me in my dreams to urge me not to be who she was or wanted to be. I didn’t know what Big Mama did in her younger days, but I knew she was always trying to keep me on the right path. -He pressed his lips against my cheek, and I closed my eyes.
Chapter 21
I had to learn how to walk and everything all over again. The doctors said I slipped into a coma ten years ago, and when I woke up everything was different. They told me that Stacey came in and took care of me, cutting my hair and making sure my fingernails were trimmed. The most recent time she came in, she told me that Prince was on the verge of becoming out of control. She became his legal guardian when I went into the coma, and she did the best she could, but she was getting older, and Serena moved away after she had gotten married. “I tried my best to keep tabs on him, but that boy does what he wants. He is nothing like Junie was,” Stacey said, clearly discouraged with how he was turning out. “That is because he is not Junie, Mom. No matter how much you want him to be, that is not his son. That is Nas’s son, and he is going to act just like his father.”
I sighed at the thought, knowing that if he was just half of what Nas was it was already trouble. He hadn’t stopped into the hospital since I’d awakened from the coma. Stacey said that he told her, “I’ll see her when I see her.” She also said that word on the streett was that I killed Nas or had something to do with it. If that is what was going around, then I’m sure he heard it by now. It took a few months for me to get my strength back and walk again. It was unbelievable to me how my body kept working when nothing else was. Something kept ticking, and I knew there was a reason behind it. I felt like I had a second chance at life and I didn’t want to blow it. Maybe the only way to keep me alive was to put me to sleep for that amount of time. The doctor’s told me that the HIV that was in my body had somehow disappeared. They said they can’t even explain it but when I went in, I was positive, and after I woke up from the coma, they tested me again, and it was gone. I’m didn’t even question it though because I couldn’t care less how it happened, I was just happy that it did.
I asked Stacey to drive me past Big Mama’s house. She tried to talk me out of it, but I wasn’t trying to hear it at all. I wanted to see what happened to her house in the last ten years. The neighborhood was in absolute shambles, and it was surprising that it all happened in so little time. Houses on each side of the block were boarded up, and when we got to Big Mama’s, hers was no different. I stepped outside to get a better look at it. The grass was out of control, and the bushes were gone. At some point, they were chopped down from in front of the porch. When I walked up the stairs, grass grew in the middle of the cracks of the steps and the porch itself felt as if it was going to fall apart if I put too much weight on it. The front door was boarded up, and I put the palm of my hand against it as if I was trying to feel its heartbeat but there was nothing there. I glanced at the area me, Vinny, and Shaunie used to sit after school. Suddenly, I remembered how Vinny died, and it brought tears to my eyes. I imagined us both being in our mid-thirties with families of our own. That was something I thought would be reality right now, but things never turn out the way you think they should go. I wiped a tear from my eye as Stacey called out to me, “Lyric? You alright?” I cleared the tears out of my throat, “Yes, I’m good.”
I used my cane to help walk down the stairs and back into the car. “You sure you’re alright?” she said, looking directly at me. I took a deep breath, “Yeah, I'll be all right, Mama. Let’s go.” We drove to her home out in Mequon, a suburb of Milwaukee. Her house was huge. “Mama, what are you doing for a living?” She smiled, “Well, let’s just say I know how to invest. You know, let my money make money. Allen had written a book before he passed away about tips in the stock business and things of that nature. Well, I got that book published and took the advice myself, and it became a best-seller.” It was a two-story house with a big ass front yard and a fence that stretched around the property.
“It’s just you that lives here?” I asked.
“Yeah, just me but Serena usually comes up here with her kids on the weekend.”
“Kids?”
“Yeah. That girl has two kids now.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. They’ll be here this weekend, and you’ll be able to meet them all.”
“Cool. I would love to do that.”
She got out of the car, and I tried to get out before she had to come over and help me like I did when we stopped at Big Mama’s house. I was almost out by the time she got there, “Girl, you are going to have to stop trying to do all this on your own. Let your strength build up first, okay? There is nothing wrong with a little help.” I sighed, “Yeah, I hear you. Is Prince in here?” She shook her head, “he should be, but you never know with that boy. He is just…I don’t know, Lyric. Maybe you can help him because I’m about ready to let him stay in Juvie next time.”
We walked through the front room and went straight into the kitchen to find Prince looking into the refrigerator with his pants sagging below his ass and headphones over his ears. Stacey came and pulled one side of his headphones up, then let it fall back down and smack him in his head. “Mama, chill!” he yelled as he spun around. That’s when I saw him. He was 100% Nas, from facial expressions to attitude. I saw the blank look on his face as he glared at me. Moments later, he nodded, “Whassup Lyric,” and put his headphones back on as he continued looking through the refrigerator. Stacey pulled his earphones off and smacked him again,
“What I tell you about calling her that!? That is your mother, and you will call her that!”
“I think I’ma call her whatever I feel like calling her. Thanks, though.”
He grabbed a soda and went upstairs. Stacey started to go after him, but I stopped her, “Nah, leave him alone, Mama. I’ll take care of it.” It took me a little while, but I made my way up the stairs into his room. I twisted the handle and walked in as his back was turned to me and his earphones blasting loud enough to be heard from the door. I walked over to him and snatched them completely off his head. “Mama! Why you keep bugging me!?” he said as he spun around to me. His eyes lowered, and he reached for the headphones that I took from him. “Can I get my stuff back?” he said with an attitude. I gripped them in my hand tight enough to crush them, but I relaxed and focused my attention on him,
“Have you lost your mind?”
“What?”
“I don’t know who you think you are, but I know this for sure, you will respect me while I’m here.”
“Oh, what?”
“You think you’re hard or something? Don’t let these little boys you are running around here with getting you in some stuff you can’t handle. You must not know what type of chick I was back in the day.”
“You was the kind of chick to kill my father, that’s what kind of chick you were. I’m living in his name and for him. The streets told me who he was.”
“The streets told you half the story then, Prince.”
“Yeah, okay. Everybody is telling me half the story. My pop was a street legend, and you couldn’t take it because he chose another chick over you and you had to kill him for it?”
“What? Look—”
I felt myself getting angry beyond belief, but I knew that this was my son standing in front of me. I didn’t want to hurt him or do anything to him that would damage our relationship more than what it was already. He had something against me and right now, neither of us was in the right frame of mind to talk about it. I swallowed my pride and handed his headphones back to him then walked out of the room. “Close my door behind you,” he said as I headed out. I saw every bit of Nas’s attitude and my hard-headed mentality inside of him. It seemed as if he had gotten the worse traits of both of us. When I got downstairs, Stacey was in the kitchen cooking dinner.
“What I tell you, Lyric? That boy is something else. I don’t know what’s going to happen with him.”
“Just let me get my strength up. I’ll take care of him.”
The doorbell rang just as I sat down on the couch. Stacey walked to the front door and with a smile, she let the guest in. “What’s up, girl?” Quandra said with a bouquet of flowers in her hand. “Oh my God, Quandra!” I said out loud as she walked over to me. She put her arms around me and kissed me on my cheek, “Damn, girl! I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up! I’m glad you did, though, and you still look good! I mean, you lost a little weight or whatever but you still cute in the face.” She sat the flowers on the table and Stacey picked them right up to place them inside of a vase. “I came to the hospital to see yo’ ass a few times, but you were still out cold. I kept hope, though, you know? I didn’t want to see you die.”
As she spoke, my mind replayed the last night before I was rushed to the hospital. “Quandra, what happened that night?” She sat back on the couch and smiled, “I was waiting for you to ask that.” She went over the scene, step by step. “It was something up with that chick Malley. I mean, she was so fixated on getting to Milwaukee and getting back in touch with Nas. I noticed it, but you know, this was around the time you were still iffy with me, so I didn’t even want to bring that shit to your attention.” She went on and described how she knew that we were robbing a stash house. “Malley told me that y’all were robbing them houses, but she didn’t want to go on the last run because she liked the money too much. That shit didn’t make sense to me, though, like, stuff just wasn’t adding up. So, Block said you weren’t calling him back and he called Shaunie and Shaunie, in turn, called me and put me in touch with Block and that’s when I told him the deal. Luckily, his ass was already out here, so it wasn’t shit to move in, especially since I knew they weren’t expecting either of us.”
Out of every person I thought would be the one to come through and have my back, Quandra was the very last person I expected to see. All the times I accused her of dumb shit and she was still right there for me. She either completely changed or what she did to me back in Chicago was a complete mistake. Either way, Quandra was there for me, and I knew she had my back, regardless of anything else that may happen in the future.
“Thank you, Quandra. Even through all the bullshit, thank you.”
“Shit, girl, it’s all good. Honestly, I didn’t like that bitch anyway. For real. I was kind of hoping you would come through and move her out that spot she was in when we were doing that Rockwall shit.”
“Yeah, I feel you. How is Shaunie though? She still around?”
“She moved to Cali like two weeks before you got shot.”
“Right, I remember that now.”
“Yeah. I haven’t heard from her since that night she got me in touch with Block. You know we weren’t that cool.”
“What about Block?”
“Nigga still in Atlanta doing his thang. He does security for the Atlanta Falcons now.”
“Big time.”
“Hell yeah, he thinks he flies and shit.”
She spent a while over there with me as Stacey brought our food out from the kitchen. Fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, greens, and jiffy mix cornbread. “Stacey, girl, if you are cooking like this on a regular, I’ma have to move back here!” I paused,
“Move back?”
“Yeah. I live in Chicago now. It got too hot for me in Milwaukee after, um, after you got shot. I mean, it was just a bad time, and I didn’t feel safe, you know?”
I could tell she was speaking in codes since Stacey was around but she laughed, “Girl, look. I don’t care what you did or what you had to do for Lyric, all right? I know I’m old, but I’m not slow!” Quandra laughed at her, and moments later, Stacey prayed over the food.
“Dear Father, I want to thank you for bringing Lyric home safely and for keeping her body functioning while she was under your care. I pray that we become tighter as a family and help us to love each other as you loved us. Thank you for this food, and I pray for those who are less fortunate, that you would send them help today in any way, shape or form. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
Just then, Prince came down the stairs with his book bag on. We all looked in his direction as he rapped out loud, searching through the closet, “Suzie bedrock the Mic, flow dirty like flint stone toes, su-Suzie rock the mic.” I thought I heard things, and I paused just so I could listen closer, “I am the master of this ink penitentiary, words strong enough to wake the dead from the cemetery with my vernacular artillery, you silly if you think you can keep up with the king.” I put my plate down and walked over to the closet as he finally pulled his jacket out. This time, I didn’t touch his headphones, and he turned around to look me in my eyes. His face was Nas’s, but I saw parts of my soul in Big Mama’s gray eyes, “Yeah?” he said, removing his earphones.
“Suzie Rock, huh? What you know about her?”
“She was dope from what I heard. I was just listening to a mixtape with some of her songs on there.”
“Suzie Rock? You know her real name?”
“Nah, why?”
I smiled and turned to Quandra, “Aye, Quan, Prince said he don’t know Suzie Rocks’ real name.”
“Whaaaat?” she said, laughing out loud.
Prince looked between us just as confused as he could’ve ever been. “What’s so funny?” he asked. “Boy, Suzie Rock is yo’ mama!” Quandra said with glee. He wrinkled his eyebrows, “Yeah right. I don’t believe that.” Just then, I spit a verse from one of my first songs and edited out the curse words.
“Suzy bedrock the mic/flow dirty like flint stone toes/dope lines out my mouth niggas get high when they hear me like they blowin’ dro/cats hear me rap, and they swear I ain’t write it/so I commit suicide and tell them I’m the ghostwriter.”
He stood, his mouth hung open as if he seen a ghost. “I told you,” Quandra yelled out from her seat as she stuffed her mouth with macaroni. Maybe this would be the way I could get to him. I could use rap to get his attention and build from there. I know I hadn’t been the mother he needed, and it was strictly because I made dumb choices in my life that kept me away from him, but if I was going to make up for lost time, I had to start somewhere. Prince was fifteen now and a freshman in high school so I had to do everything I could to keep him from going down the path I went down. I laughed because it was at that moment that I felt like I was turning into Big Mama.
“Yo mama can flow a little bit,” I said as he stood in front of me motionless.
“Man, Suzie was like my favorite rapper, no lie. Do… do you remember any more of your verses?”
“Do I remember? Some stuff you never forget, and I definitely remember my verses.”
He looked over at Stacey and then back towards me as he removed his coat and hung it back in the closet. “Mama,” he said, “is there some food for me in there?” Stacey took a drink of water and then answered him, “Boy, go in there and get you a plate and stop acting crazy.” He smiled at me and then walked past Stacey and Quandra into the kitchen. I took my seat back on the couch next to them, “I got him,” I said as I winked at both of them. Big Mama had her way of steering me clear of danger, and it worked to an extent but what used to work for her doesn’t mean it was going to work for me. If I was going to reach Prince and keep him on the path I went down, I would have to do it my way and my way was purely through rap. I would have never guessed that my life would end up this way. That Quandra, of all people, would be the one out of all my friends to hold me down to the end. Stacey ended up being the mother that I never had, and the bridge between me and the future would be Prince Nasir Jones. This life was wild, and as I sat with my family, eating, I just had to stop and thank God for replacing what he took away. I lost Junie, Big Mama, Mama, and Vinny but in return, I got Stacey, Quandra, Prince, and Serena, not to mention the little ones she gave birth to that I hadn’t met yet. It could have turned out a lot worse than what it did, but I was just grateful that, even in my stubbornness, I still had a chance. After all the failures, I was still breathing, and that was the only thing I needed to keep going. Prince came and sat down on the floor, “Aight, Mama, after this, you wanna battle? I got bars, and I know I can eat you up like I’m about to do this plate right in front of me.” I laughed, “Boy, please. Your arms are too short to box with the god.”
