New York's Finest

WARNING: PUT THE CHILDREN TO BED BEFORE READING

In my 3rd year at UVA I lived with three other guys. One of them, who we’ll call T-Unit, happened to be one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. T-Unit is a 29-year-old who grew up in low-income areas and went to some of the worst public schools in New York. Yet, he still managed to graduate from the second ranked undergraduate business program in the nation (UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce).

We lived together when my academic laziness was nearly at its peak, so I spent much of my time in the living room watching TV. T-Unit had a sick ability to study and watch TV at the same time, so he often hung out with me. We’d have long conversations about everything, from politics to sports. From the outside it wouldn’t seem like we had anything in common: I’m white, he’s black, I’m short, he’s tall, I grew-up in the suburbs and he grew-up in the city. Maybe it was what I had gone through that allowed us to connect. He once gave me the ultimate props, saying, “I guess you had it pretty rough too, huh?”

My life story got interesting when I was 16, while his life’s always been out of the ordinary. “Alright T-Unit,” I said to him late one night, “Tell me some crazy shit about your life that I’ve never heard before.”

“Oh Rubenstein, this you can’t handle, son.”

“Come on,” I said laughing. “Lay it on me.”

“You asked for it. Let’s see, where do I start…I used to skip school a lot and play Street Fighter II Championship Edition. I was very good and talked a lot of shit. People at the mall got mad and wanted to fight for real.”

“I used to play Street Fighter. I was pretty good, too. Go on.”

“I got my first blowjob when I was eight, from the neighborhood whore. I was also eight the first time I got drunk off orange flavored Cisco; I was sick all night.”

“What the hell is Cisco? And eight years old? What is that, like 3rd grade or something?”

“It’s like wine, and yeah I was young. Aight, this is some crazy shit Rubenstein – I been held at knifepoint and robbed in Queens 1992, held at gunpoint and pistol-whipped in Queens 1997, chased by angry transvestites after spraying them with a fire extinguisher in Manhattan 1998, and shot at in Richmond 2002. I unknowingly smoked weed laced with PCP in my first semester of college at SUNY-Old Westbury.”

“What is that?”

“PCP?”

“No man, SUNY?”

“State University of New York. Yo, I got more…I was in a real bad car accident in Queens 1998 on our way back to the crack house I lived in, after picking up these girls.”

“You were living in a crack house? That’s not good, buddy.”

“Well, I didn’t know the owner of the house was a crackhead, nor did I know he had these crackheads comin’ over. My head went through the glass of the SUV and a tiny fiber of it stuck in my left eye. Man, that shit’s never been the same. The police there accused us of murdering somebody nearby a few weeks before, told us, ‘We know what’s going on.’ Whenever you hear a cop say that, you know he don’t know shit. The NYPD’s success is achieved through intimidation, brutality, and unlawful searches. Anyways, a stripper who rented a room in the crack house was always tryin’ to grab or touch my cock. Man, I could be sittin’ down next to her and she’d just go for it, or I could be peeing in the bathroom and she’d kick the door in to look. Maybe if she wasn’t so crazy with her approach I might have let her.”

“So you got a lot of girls when you were younger, huh?”

“Oh yeah. When I transferred to an alternative high school in the city I met this nasty bitch in chemistry from the Bronx. She was always writin’ me notes, sayin’ how handsome I was, and then she invited me to her house. She had dildos and shit on her dresser and gave me the ass on the second visit. Rubenstein, I was jugglin’ as many as 10 girls at once. It was hard work, hard damn work brotha. But it works out great. See, you may not bone ‘em all, but you’ll get at least half your rotation in the sack. And when you have one that has sex rules, it all works itself out.”

“What kind of sex rules?”

“Like you have a chick that says you have to wait three months or six months or even nine months to get them draws, no sweat. See, you got 10 all together; 5 are gonna give some butt, 3 are gonna make you wait varying times, but 2,” he said laughing, “they gonna fuck you either immediately or within a matter of days. This makes you look patient with the other ‘self-respecting’ chicks who make you wait to hit it, but all the while you’re getting your dick wet elsewhere. You see, it’s all a game – you just gotta know how to play. See what I’m sayin’?”

“Oh, I got you.”

“So, I first went to college when I was 17 and I had this big afro. I mean this thing was fucking huge. SUNY was an odd experience and I didn’t really like anyone there except my cousin and her suitemate. Cats didn’t like me ‘cause I kept it real. I am kind of a weird dude, always have been, but I always got along with the real n****s. All the cats in my suite was mad fake except for this Asian dude, but they sonned him anyway. I don’t like to be forced to do shit, even if it’s something I like. Case in point, they convinced me to let this chick who needed a place stay in my room. But then, they was pushing me to slip her the salami. See, I’m not that type of guy, I don’t know if you know that, Rubenstein.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that out. I don’t like to be forced to do things, either.”

“I looked at her as if I’m doin’ her a favor. If she wants the salami I’ll give it to her, but the light has to be green. Now this chick is in my bed with no bottom on, just a top. You see, that’s not a green light. That shit’s yellow. If the bitch wanna give me the ass, she gotta throw that shit at me. If she want it, I make her say she want it and then she can have it. See, it’s part of breakin’ a chick down. Once she throws herself at you, you got complete control. She’s thirsty for the dick, now you keep your cool and act like it’s no big deal. That lets her know that, ‘Hey bitches, throw me the pussy all day, you’re just another one.’ You know, I should have lost my virginity very young. At this party in my apartment I had cornered this cute chick who was a little older than me and I started creepin’ toward her while she smilin’ and whatnot, when what the fuck happens? I stepped on a fuckin’ big ass safety pin that was on the floor. Went right through my foot ‘bout three or four inches deep. I cried like the child I was. Oh well.”

“When you say young, do you mean like eight?”

“Yeah…or maybe seven, I can’t remember.”

“Holy shit.”

“Now, South Jersey is the place to go for girls, man. You can get there with little money, and there are plenty of big city-lovin’ girls. This girl that used to live next to me when we were in grade school moved to South Jersey, we had a little thing back in the day. I heard that some boyfriend of hers took exception to our relationship. He rang the doorbell with one of his boys one day – what an idiot. Little did he know that I’d just phoned my boys from the block to come help me deal with a little ‘problem’. Man, I’ll never forget that scene, it was like out of Gladiator, or something. This group of dudes runnin’, some on bikes, waving bats and sticks full speed toward my house. My crew was just two or three minutes too slow, which might have been a good thing, cause we mighta killed them n****s. You following me?”

“No, not at all, but please continue, this is fascinating.”

“Where was I? Oh yeah…life was cool in the mid to late ‘90s. I was a ghetto superstar. I had money for weed, liquor, and Chinese food. And I had hoes – pretty, voluptuous, busted, fat, smart, stupid, white, black, it don’t matter. They all have a purpose. My man Goo kept me with the new shit like kicks, fitteds, jerseys. I had the first two-way and Motorola flip that ever came out. The cutest available chick wanted to get with me. It was a beautiful time. I’d ride in my man’s whip jonesin’ on the cellular wit my Columbia chick, drunk on the way South. I’d give out food to people on the block. I can’t front, it felt real good to be me back then.”

“You seriously had the first flip phone?”

“Das right…Richmond,” he said after a long pause, “If you young and single and don’t mind the occasional gunfire, there’s no fuckin’ way you couldn’t love this place. If you like to fuck you better have an assload of condoms because you gonna get some ass in Richmond. It seems like bitches was comin’ to class just to show off they thongs and flirt with me. Not all of them, but enough. My proficiency in class only made things iller there. Bitches want you to tutor them, but you gotta wonder how true that is when they come to your house to study drinkin’, leanin’ over on your couch and exclaiming, ‘Oh, is my thong showing?’ Bad bitches, too. The thing that was most fun wasn’t fuckin’ though, it was NOT fuckin’.”

“Stop right there. You’re telling me that you got so much ass that you’d prefer to not?”

“See, at a certain point fuckin’ gets lame. I mean the shit becomes too fuckin’ easy, especially coming from NYC to the South. I used to fuck wit ‘em mentally, lead ‘em on kinda. I’d play the bullshit friend role that they like to play with n****s. That was even more fun than bonin’ a bunch of hoes because the moment you slide your meat in them, the challenge is over. I like to bust nuts, but I need a challenge. This is a true story, Rubenstein – this one bitch, who was the girl of this cat I used to work with, actually asked her boyfriend to ask me, ‘What was up with me and her.’ I looked at him oddly and asked him what she meant, which he did, and she replied through him, ‘You know what she means.’ I was like this shit is bugged out. How is this dude passin’ openly flirtatious messages from his girlfriend to me like he doesn’t care? It was like them dudes down South expected and accepted the fact that NY n****s was supposed to get ass from they girls and there wasn’t much they could do about it.”

“That’s insane.”

“I had to try and convince people at school that I wasn’t fuckin’ the baddest bitch in that muhfucka because she was always following me around school feedin’ in class.”

“What do you mean ‘feeding’?”

“Yo, I mean literally putting morsels of food in my mouth.”

“Wow.”

“Yep…not your typical story, huh?”

“No T-Unit, not at all.”

When the school year was over, T-Unit graduated and moved up north to live with his wife and newborn son. I sure miss that guy and our conversations.