It was a nasty break up with Sonya. As he drove, Tone replayed in his mind all the spiteful things that she had said. There was so much malice in her words that Tone felt like he could never recover from. He still couldn’t believe that she wished death on him. At the moment she wasn’t fighting fair. Anything she could say that was disrespectful, she said. Anything she could say to get a rise out of him, she said that too. Tone knew Sonya was in an extremely volatile state, but that didn’t excuse her from saying those crazy things. If the shoe was on the other foot, he would have never gone that far. Sure, he deserved to be cursed out and maybe disrespected, but death? There was no coming back from that. Now Tone was in his feelings too. Yet he remained respectful, never calling Sonya out of her name. He could never forgive her for this. Not that she cared.
For Sonya, things didn’t work out like she thought. So she was bitter. She had envisioned marrying Tone, but now it looked like that day wouldn’t come. In her mind she refused to accept the fact that it was over. No matter how bright her future was, Sonya had a hard time imagining it without Tone in the picture.
Walking away from this relationship unscathed was virtually impossible now. Sonya had taken things too far, to a dark place were they didn’t need to go. He had hoped that they could at least be civil.
The couple used to say, “If anything was to ever happen to their relationship, albeit a fallout or break up, that they would always be cool.” Needless to say, that was just talk, that wasn’t the case now. Sonya would never honor such an agreement.
Tone just hoped his choice to leave didn’t cost him someday. He thought he left a good thing for an even more promising one.
14
“....Please take your ass out to that damn hospital to see about Netta,” Ms. Tina yelled into the phone. “Don’t you do that girl like that....”
As Mimi drove through the streets of East Baltimore, she thought the world was ganging up on her, she was hearing about herself on both ends, all because she hadn’t gone to see Netta in the hospital. The Pussy Pound wasn’t talking to her and her mother had verbally chastised her on several different occasions. Well, today would not be the day that she paid Netta a visit either. She had better things to do, like get high. She had no excuse for her failure to appear at her friend’s bedside, but she made up every excuse in the book not to.
In her mind her and Netta weren’t friends. They were merely friendly. There was a difference, a big difference. Netta didn’t give a fuck about anyone but herself. She had proven that time and time again by what she said and how she treated her so-called friends. So why should she care about Netta’s ignorant ass. To Mimi, they had been more like rivals than friends. Vying for the same hustlers, the same money, the same street fame had indirectly put them in direct competition with each other. Oftentimes Mimi got the short end of the stick. Which made her envious and jealous of Netta. Netta was always one tough act to follow, she had more personality, more swagger, and was more intelligence. Too bad Mimi never saw it that way. All she knew was she despised being relegated to her shadows.
Her jealousy stopped just short of seeing her friend dead. She was glad Black had whipped her ass for stealing his money, that someone finally knocked Netta off her high horse.
Mimi wasn’t in her right mind, her thoughts and opinions were too clouded by her drug use to understand that her issues with Netta were one-sided. Netta didn’t express those same sentiments toward her.
Fuck Netta, she thought, as she drove to a new dope shop she had heard about earlier in the day, somewhere her credit might be good but her body might be better.
Mimi turned on 21st Street and Barclay. She slowly drove down the block. She was anxious to find the right dope boy to talk to. Someone who was authorized to play let’s make a deal with her. Someone who would willingly exchange some dope for some sex.
Every day Mimi’s habit was getting worst. Her drug consumption had grown to a bundle a day. Ms. Tina, her mother, had tried to hide it the best she could, checking her daughter into drug rehabilitation centers, which Mimi promptly walked away from after a day or two. Now there was no hiding it, Mimi was a full-blown junkie. She exposed herself to the world for friends and family to see. Reports filtered in to her parents and friends alike, about how they had seen her here and there, on notorious drug blocks across the city and how bad she looked.
This shamed both her mother and father. Dollar would prefer his daughter have a life threatening illness than her to be stricken down by the same poison he sold. He thought he had taught her better than that.
“....You need to leave that shit alone so you can stick around and see your future grandbabies,” he once told her. “Don’t you wanna do that?”
There was nothing malicious about her father’s words. They came from a good place, deep in his heart. Dealing dope was the life that he had chosen to make a better way for his family. Dollar had profited handsomely off of other people’s afflictions. He was one of the biggest heroin distributors in Baltimore City. It was ironic how the same drug that had gotten him rich, had ensnared his three children.
Still, it seemed like his involvement in drugs was coming back to haunt him in the form of his children. First his twin boys Tommy and Timmy. One was violently
