“Fill me in,” I told him.
“About what?”
“About this party. I’mma lay low. Still, I wanna know if you got beef, who you got beef with, and what the fuck is a ‘sweet sixteen party,’ anyway?” I asked.
“It’s something the girls get all hyped about. It’s like they young, but they really are women at sixteen. So on their sixteenth birthday they like to flash out,” he said.
“Flash out?”
“Yeah, you know, like dress up and be the center of attention, and get gifts. It’s like they could be bullshit the day before and bullshit the day after but for that one night, their sixteenth birthday, they in the spotlight center stage and shit.”
“So how did you get involved?” I asked him.
“You asking if I’m fucking her and if that’s the reason her mother hired me? You think I couldn’t get my own business started up on the strength of my skills? I was practicing every day for two months, on the low. I got up a nice vinyl collection, one-third from my mom, another from pops, and the last third from Mitzie.”
“Mitzie?” I had not heard him call her name even once before.
“She’s the one turning sixteen. She got certain records she requested me to play for her birthday. I didn’t have them. She gave me hers.” Then he admitted, “Well yeah, I fucked her. Not really, though. I was supposed to, but something happened. Why does it matter anyway? I got the gig. Money is money, right?”
“I’m asking for one simple reason. Is there some nigga whose gonna be at this party gunning for you ’cause you fucked his girl? You gonna be cutting, scratching, and mixing records, watching the turntables, taking requests. I’ll be on the lookout, holding you down,” I said, and I meant it. He smiled.
“Good looking out, but this is my building. I got this. Word to mother,” he said confidently. He sounded sincere.
“A lot of dudes do wanna get at Mitzie, though. She’s a little sweet on me. I didn’t even know until one day she invited me to check her, but asked me to come through at one a.m. when her moms and them would be asleep. So I’m like hell yeah, I know what she wants to do. I’m with it. So I comes through at one a.m. She opened the door and it was all dark and quiet. She had one finger over her lips like for me not to make no noise. Then she locked her fingers around mines so I could follow her. I never had been in her crib before. I couldn’t see shit. I stepped on some toy that one of them little motherfuckers in her house left on the floor. The thing started screeching and lighting up. She pulled me into a room. It was dark in there too and there was two beds. Someone was asleep in the other bed. So she was like sshh, whispering in my ear and shit to be quiet. But then she starts doing all this sexy shit to me with her tongue. She’s taking off my buckle, pulls me under her covers. Her titties is like warm water balloons. My hands is everywhere. I felt the nappy dug out and she was ready. Now I’m in my pockets trying to pull out the condom and shit. She jumps on top of me but we’re still beneath the blankets. She starts crawling backwards over me. Next thing I know, she’s giving me head. I mean like the juiciest, thickest lips ever. Shit felt so good she had me sounding like a bitch. I was making so much noise she put her hand over my mouth. I didn’t give a fuck long as she didn’t stop sucking. This girl fucked with me all night. Her pussy was crazy,” Ameer said, seeming like he was trapped and dead set on going back for a few more rounds with her.
“I thought you said you didn’t fuck her,” I reminded him.
“I didn’t fuck Mitzie. It was her sister who answered the door.” I didn’t say shit after he said that. In my mind, I had to regroup. Couldn’t believe the backwards shit that happens right in front of me each time I come to East New York, or the crazy shit he’s telling me that happened before I got there.
“The freaky fourteen-year-old sister named Mimi wore me out. I fell asleep in her bed and shit in the raw like it was her own apartment, not her momma’s house.
“The one who invited me was standing over the bed early that morning. She looked mad. But I wasn’t fully woke. So I’m tryn’a see her, you know, look at her and figure out who she is and where I was. Then I remembered. It was Mitzie. I wondered what she was doing standing out there in the cold when I had a warm body laying right next to me. I turned and looked and realized it was Mimi, the fourteen-year-old—not the fifteen-year-old sister who had invited me in the first place. I was like ‘oh shit, my bad.’ Mitzie took off her slipper and started hitting me with it,” he said, ducking down like it was happening right then.
“She cried later on that night when she saw me outside. Soon as she felt her own tears she got mad at herself for crying and flipped it all into a mean act. Said she was gonna let me pop her cherry, but that I had fucked up. I apologized for making her feel bad, but man, her sister’s pussy was good. So like I said, the one who’s turning sixteen, Mitzie, whose party I’m doing, I didn’t fuck her.” Ameer’s giving me a serious look now like there was anything right or good about the shit he just said.
“What about her father?” I asked. “You wasn’t worried about him when you went creeping in her place at one in the morning?”
“Don’t waste your time asking about people’s father. She ain’t got one. It’s her, her moms Minerva, Mitzie, and her three sisters. Mimi, Mina, and Misha, five girls. Her moms looks like one of the daughters, though, definitely not a mother, so a nigga could easily get confused or tempted or say fuck it, I’ll bend either one of you.” He paused as though he was asking if I understood what he was meaning.
“So what made Mitzie ask you to do her party after you did all that?” I asked.
“C’mon, man. You know she still want it. I’m not sure if she still truly likes me like that, but I am sure that she just wants me to want her more than she wants me. And, she wants me to choose her over her mom and her three sisters so she could feel good about it. So she could feel she’s better than them. You know girls compete like that, even if they blood-related.” He said it like it was all strategy and game to him, no emotion, no love.
“Last round of questions,” I said. “Does Mitzie have a man who wants to fight you?”
“Nah, it’s nothing like that, I told you. She’s a sixteen-year-old virgin. Or at least she was a fifteen-year-old virgin two months ago when she invited me up. So cats in the building got a wager going on who gonna get her cherry because she be playing high post and hard to get even though Mimi, Mina, and Misha and her moms is all slutted out,” he said.
* * *
“You two get the crates—they in the back. You take one case. You take the other. You need to eat some food. Look like you can’t carry nothing. Just grab my mixer, the headphones and wires. If you five little motherfuckers get robbed on the way to the center you know what’s up. You gon’ be broke and get fucked up and you’ll still owe me! You’ll be my slaves for the whole summer,” Ameer threatened as he gave out the orders to his five-man crew of eleven- and twelve-year-olds. If I was listening without watching, I could’ve easily thought he was a sergeant in the army, but they were just a crew of boys who I’m sure had no other way to work themselves inside of the teen party without doing Ameer’s bidding.
* * *
DJ Red Romeo on the wheels of steel was warming up the crowd. I don’t know where Ameer pulled that name from. I figured it was because he was playing on the red team in the Hustler’s Junior League, and because a lot of girls sweat him, he dubbed himself Romeo.
The cuts he selected was his way of introducing himself. That’s the way it sounded to me. He led off with “Looking for the Perfect Beat” by Afrika Bambaataa, only let it play for seven seconds, then cut to the hook “Something Like a Phenomenon,” from Grandmaster Flash’s joint titled “White Lines.” Then he killed it with The 20th Century Steel Band’s joint titled “Heaven & Hell Is On Earth.” He turned up the intensity in the community center dance hall with throwbacks like “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and then “The Body Rock” by Treacherous Three and then “Rocking It” b
y the Fearless Four. I was watching the room fill up with dudes just like Chris predicted. All fifty of them was watching Ameer mixing, and all too cool to dance. Four or five cats pulled up too close to the side of the DJ table. Me and Ameer’s father stood up to let them know to move the fuck back. Meanwhile on the sidelines, there were MCs try’na get the mic. Ameer saw, just smiled and flagged his father over. When he came back he told me, “He wants to charge ten dollars for every man who wants to rock the mic.”
I told his father I didn’t think it was a good idea security-wise. His father said, “Yeah, I told him that, but he said I could keep five off each head.” I moved out of the way so his father could manage the money. Soon as they saw the first MC pay ten dollars, half of them fell back. Now the first MC was free-styling and the all-male crowd hung on the way he maneuvered his words. It was kind of dope the way the crowd was judging him on what he was saying and how he was saying it, instead of what gear and jewels he was rocking.
Thick beats in the cut titled “Apache” yanked one cool guy out of his spot and he began break-dancing in the center of the floor. He was the first dancer. Less than a second after him another break-dancer stepped out, and now this girls’ “sweet sixteen party” was underway with only males. Mitzie wasn’t even here. A couple of cats was moonwalking. The sausage party was under way.
The MCs who thought free-styling is supposed to be free, and who didn’t want to pay up the ten dollars, looked like they was plotting something. The other tens of cats who were too cool to dance started getting restless and looking around, like, “Where the fuck the girls at?” Some of them started pacing around. My eyes were on them. Ameer peeped the vibe and answered them by throwing on “My Nine Millimeter Goes Bang,” by KRS-One. The party tone and mood flipped to rowdy.
I got my nine. I’m sure I’m not the only one, I thought. This was a Brooklyn party.
Again, Ameer maneuvered the mood when it grew too hostile, and threw on “La Di Da Di” by Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick to throw it back into a playful mood. It worked.
“Women are always late,” Ameer’s pops said calmly. “They somewhere getting ready for us.” I heard him, but I was watching these dudes.
Two front doors flew open and a gang of girls bum-rushed in. There were more girls than could fit through the doors at one time and the line buckled behind them, leading all the way outside. One girl had the crown on her head; it must be her party, I said to myself. Soon as Ameer clocked her he threw on “Ring the Alarm” by Tenor Saw and faded into “Nuff Respect,” by Lady G. She started dancing in her pale blue chiffon mini and heels. Her body rock was mild and conservative as she wound to the Jamaican rhythm. I saw it was all for Ameer, but he was looking down at the turntables, watching his own fingers moving the switches on his mixer. A next girl stepped in front of her in a black chiffon dress, looking like she was wearing the same style—nah the exact same dress as the birthday girl, but the color was black. She started dancing a fuck-me slow wiggle like a caterpillar movement. Then all the girls beside and behind her began to dance too. The males closed in around them. Some girls had three males pushing up on them in the dance at the same time. Other girls had two. Everybody had somebody and the Carribbean rhythms changed what had been an explosive mood-swinging, all hip-hop party into a young sexual grind-out.
The sweet sixteener clawed her way out of the grinding mob and made a beeline towards the DJ table. She snatched the mic from the short stand on the table. She started saying something, but before she could get two syllables out her mouth, Ameer moved a switch that deaded the volume on the mic she was holding. She turned around and shot him a mean look. She came around to the back of the table, brushing by me and his father. She was close up on him, them exchanging words, lips separated by only a few inches. Her body language saying to him, “This is my birthday party.”
She must’ve gotten her way and wanted to emphasize it. The whole sexual feeling got washed away like someone threw a bucket of cold water, and now Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately” was spinning uninterrupted by looping or scratching. She gripped the mic like she had rocked it before. Ameer eased up the volume.
“Happy Birthday to me,” she said calmly, smiling. “If I know you, you can stay. If I don’t know you, you can step. If you didn’t bring me a gift, you can get the fuck out. ’Cause I know everybody I invited brought me something, is that right?” She asked without yelling but with a thick, feminine Brooklyn-girl attitude. Then she began to laugh. “No, psych—we all came out here to celebrate me and to have fun, right? So we gon’ get up a game of musical chairs. And the first-prize winner for the girls gets a date with the first-prize winner for the fellas, and we have a coupon for two for Red Lobster for him and her, a’ight? Let’s have some fun. This ain’t no party for the dead-heads and wallflowers. This is my night to remember.”
I didn’t know the game musical chairs, but I watched as they helped each other set up a line of thirteen chairs, every other one facing in the opposite direction. The girls in their minidresses and some in their skirts and some in just jeans began walking around the chairs as all the males watched. Each one of them put on her own version of a strut.
Ameer was spinning “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper, as all the males watched. Suddenly he switched the music off and each of the fourteen girls tried to sit in an empty chair before any other girl could get in it. But there were only thirteen chairs so one girl was left standing, as the others laughed at her. “You’re out!” one of them told her. But she already knew and walked away into the crowd.
By the time there were only nine chairs remaining and ten girls, I was caught up in watching the game like all of the guys in the room. It was kind of funny. It sucked a lot of the hate and suspicion and fronting out of the air and out of the room.
“Word Up!” by Cameo was playing now and there were only four girls left. They were serious about these musical chairs and each kept darting their eyes towards Ameer ’cause he was controlling the music. Therefore he was controlling the game. He wasn’t watching them, though; he would just cut the music when he wanted to. Sometimes immediately, and sometimes he’d let the jam play all the way out towards the end.
When the music stopped suddenly, two girls tried to sit in one chair. They were side to side in the seat. Hard to tell who was the loser, but then they both saw there was one open chair at the same time the fourth girl standing saw it. They all three dashed for the open chair. One of them lifted it up and the other two dashed back to the open chair they had both abandoned, and one of ’em got there first. The odd girl out stamped her foot hard and caught a tantrum.
“Move, bitch,” one of the seated girls said, and then the crowd of girls who weren’t playing in the game started chanting, “Move, bitch, move, bitch, move, bitch!” until she left. Now there were two chairs remaining and three girls. Ameer threw on “Bass Game” by Groove B Chill, featuring Finesse & Synquis. The crowd jerked, appreciating the return to hip-hop after a string of R&B joints. Each of the three girls were revolving around the two chairs, doing something they weren’t doing before, touching the top of the chair the whole way around. When the music stopped, shorty—“the Black Caterpillar”—in the black chiffon dress was on the wrong side of the chair but she had her hand on it and flipped it around and jumped in it.
“Uh-un, uh-un . . . that’s cheating,” the girl still standing said.
“Move, bitch!” the crowd chanted until she went away.
One chair and two girls, both with crazy bodies and short minidresses, bare legs, and heels. The Black Caterpillar kicked off her heels, which amped up the crowd and had the men calling out. The one in the yellow chiffon mini kept her high heels on and walked around like she was on the runway in Milan.
Ameer threw on Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” and the whole crowd got hyped. The two competing girls started dancing around the chairs and everybody cheered for their moves. Ameer cut the music almost immediately. The one in the
yellow was directly in front of the seat. She jumped on the chair, standing up and claiming victory. The Black Caterpillar pulled the chair out from under the yellow-dress girl. The girl lost her balance and crashed to the floor, twisting her right ankle in her heels. The Black Caterpillar sat in the chair, crossing her legs, and her little dress crept up her thighs. “You supposed to sit, not stand,” she told the yellow dress. The crowd started saying, “Move, bitch” repeatedly to the yellow-dress girl as soon as she pulled herself up from the floor.
The birthday girl in the pale blue chiffon mini jumped back on the mic. “Who you calling ‘bitch’?” She had been watching the whole competition quietly, but now she was yelling at the people who came to her party. “That’s my mother! Y’all better get civilized and show her some respect on my birthday! Come here, Mommy!” Her mother limped over in the yellow chiffon dress, took the mic from her daughter, and said “Happy Birthday, baby!” The crowd started singing “Happy Birthday” with the Stevie Wonder melody.
I couldn’t believe it.
The Black Caterpillar didn’t like the shift in attention. She stormed up and grabbed the mic, interrupting the birthday song, saying, “I won. I get to pick who I want to go to Red Lobster with.”
“No you don’t! It’s my birthday, not yours,” the birthday girl said, snatching back the mic. The one in the yellow tried to step in between their fight, but in seconds Ameer’s pops touched her wrist and put his arm around her waist to help her walk, and she followed him off to the side. Pops dropped down and removed her heels and was massaging her foot.
Ameer threw “Push It” back on and let it rock since the crowd favored it. The Black Caterpillar dropped down and crawled underneath the DJ table and popped up beside Ameer. This wasn’t the kind of attack I was set up to put down. The birthday girl walked around and stood on his other side. He took the mic from her, lowered the volume on the Salt-N-Pepa joint, and turned MC.
“Go Brooklyn, Go Brooklyn, Go Brooklyn!” he called out confidently, and the crowd joined as the whole place rocked to the chant. Moving the attention completely off of the girls that were on him to his left and his right, he was ruling and rocking the crowd.