Why you walking like that?
This isn't a happy or funny story. Be forewarned.
My first semester of college I was fukking with a chick named Shaniqua. Black semi-hood broad from Homestead, a burned out industrial town outside of Pittsburgh. She listened to a lot of Bone Thugs and was always rockin' Homestead Grays Negro League gear to rep her town. Claimed to have some kind of bamma ass bumpkin ass gang ties. I was 17 and from New York City - everything was bamma and bumpkin to me, I was afflicted by that narrow perspective that a lot of New Yorkers mistake for cool arrogance back then. Grew out of it quickly. Some New York nikkas never do.
College overwhelmed my senses at first. Anyone who tells you otherwise either went to a really dull ass, nothing ass college or is a fukking liar. Like the bulk of 17 and 18 year olds, I was full of insecurities and ignorance and awkward enthusiasm. It's pure comedy to look back at that time in my life - I rocked a gold bracelet, had the ill Karl Kani denim suit, sported a gold chain. I was from NYC, tall, lightskinned, and from the street - at a big ass university in the south, those characteristics kept a healthy stream of ladies flowing in my direction. Linked up with this nikka from North Carolina named Rome who drove a lowrider and schooled me on some of the southern cultural shyt I was clueless about; in exchange I hipped him to underground rap he never knew about (back then there was still a real underground), and gave him a couple of huge albums before they were officially released (one of my cousins was a sound engineer back home and used to hook me up - I had Ready to die
way before it came out, for instance). I have great, vivid memories of me and Rome cruising campus in his lowriding truck, blasting music that nobody else had yet, being young and stupid and hollerin' at sexy southern shorties with funny accents.
Shaniqua had a thing for lightskinned nikkas and street nikkas, so we started fukking almost immediately. Back then I played my background up heavy for certain chicks, even though the truth is I was just a genuinely good dude who happened to grow up in the projects - In it but not of it, you know how that is. Niqua had a man back home who was in some gang, so our shyt wasn't anything serious and was hush hush. The way the dorm she lived in was set up there were like 8 suites on each floor - you entered the suites from a common balcony, and in each suite there would be 4 rooms and a bathroom for the 8 people living in the 4 rooms to share. We would kick it in her suite with her other friends, cracking jokes and drinking. That's how I met Cindy.
Cindy was out of her element like a motherfukker. She was so light she could've passed, and to this day I suspect in high school she actually did. She was from a mad small town in the south, and she said hers was the only black family in it. She was naive, sheltered, goofy, corny. she wasn't fine or anything, but she was pretty in a generic way, and she was light, which made a lot of basic nikkas thirst after her. You could tell she had never hung with black people before - she was slow on jokes and cultural references, that sort of thing. I could see from jump that hanging with Shaniqua was not going to end well for her - Niqua liked to drink, smoke, fukk, and talk shyt. Niqua would make Cindy feel inadequate because Cindy was sexually inexperienced. Cindy had only fukked one dude in high school, after her senior prom. Corny ass Dawson Creek type broad.
Big schools with big time athletics and a serious frat presence drive people crazy - there are so many issues of identity and status and gossip and cliques... I can honestly say I saw a bunch of people quite literally unravel in the mind from all that shyt. Cindy got caught up - she started trying to get in touch with her blackness. As she saw it, Niqua represented what it meant to be a cool black chick. So Cindy started smoking, drinking, clumsily using slang, etc. She started developing an interest in black dudes who other black chicks were sweatin. One nikka on the football team named O showed her a little attention, so she kicked it with him a couple times, watched a movie in his room, that type of shyt. Dude had a roster of hos, but Cindy was thinking shyt was going to blossom as romance. Like I said, she was naive as fukk.
Niqua stepped to me one day and was like "yo, can you do Cindy a favor?" Sure, what? "She's nervous about having sex with O." shyt, I would be too, nikka done fukked half of campus. "Nah, she's nervous as in she got stage fright. She's only fukked once in her life, she's afraid she's going to embarrass herself." Say what? "She wants to know - since you're cool and won't judge her - if you'll help her practice. Plus she needs to get used to having a dikk inside her. she's worried it's going to hurt because she's so tight. So you would have to be gentle."
That's on Christ, that conversation really went down exactly like that. I was like nah, that shyt is weird. First off, I've been hitting you off here and there, so you don't feel weird about this? Second, I don't want to be having "practice" sex with a woman I'm not all that attracted to, just to get her prepped for the next nikka, like I'm some kind of vagina sous chef. Third, this is a preposterous ass scenario. So nah, I gotta pass.
After we fukked a handful of times (
), Cindy decided she was ready to have sex with O. I remember it was a Thursday night, because I had it hooked up where I had no Friday classes at the time, so I would kick it heavy in her suite with Niqua on Thursday nights. Cindy was mad nervous, doing her makeup and picking out her outfit, stressing like she was about to get married or something. It was kind of painful to watch, because it was obvious to anyone with sense that she just didn't get the social dynamic at work. I remember she gave hugs to all her homegirls before leaving to go meet O, and I remember how fragile she looked, both physically and emotionally. I already felt a sort of dread, a sense of inevitability.
I ran into her the next morning: she was getting off the elevator in our dorm, and I was heading toward it to leave. She had a look of anguish on her face and it seemed like she was on the brink of collapsing with every step. I asked her "Why you walking like that?" When she looked at me to answer the words couldn't make it our of her mouth; shorty started bawling uncontrollably. I walked over to her and she sunk into my arms. she was a wreck, b. I figured she wouldn't want people to see her like that, so I took her back to my room. She truly couldn't make it on her own because of the pain, so I ended up carrying her. I can never forget that shyt, nor will I ever forget what she told me when we got to my room.
First of all, O knew she didn't have much experience sexually, but when they started fukking, apparently he was going harder in the paint than Flocka. when she asked him to take it easy, son went harder. Cindy was like 5'4, 100 pounds. O was 6'5, 240. She showed me the bruises all over her things, her ass, and her back. They weren't all from O, turns out. 10 minutes after they started fukking, 4 or 5 (I can't remember how many, but it was definitely either 4 or 5) of his teammates walked into the room. Son had left the door open on purpose, but played it off like it was an accident. The detail I recall most clearly from what shorty told me was that one of his teammates was looking at her on the bed getting fukked with a big ass grin, singing this song that went "at night, I think of you... if your game is on, give me a call boo." to this day I feel kind of sick if I hear that shyt playing.
Anyway, O was like "I'm sorry I forgot to lock the door. But now that my nikkas are here, can they live? We share everything. We're like brothers." Mind you, from the time the door opened he never even pulled out of her. She was on her back mad compromised, a naive, corny ass, tiny chick with a dikk inside her and a gang of big ass football nikkas starting to undo their pants. And mind you it took her at least a full hour to get this whole story out to me through tears. She was convulsing from crying and shyt. I told her to report that shyt. She was like "but I said it was okay." Why? "I was scared. I was scared they would do it even if I said no. When I said yes it felt like I at least had some say in it." I feel sick in my heart even remembering this shyt right now.
Her friends weren't sympathetic at all, by the way. And the nikkas who did the shyt would smile right in her face whenever they saw her, they'd go out of their way to be like "What up, Cindy?" Mad heartless, mad twisted. I stepped to O about it and not only did dude tell me she was lying and I needed to mind my business, he showed up at my room a week later with at least a dozen other nikkas to beat the shyt out of me. The only shyt that saved me was a little cornerback on the team (who ended up in the NFL) somehow defusing the shyt because we were mad cool at the time. Otherwise I would've gotten beaten to a fukking pulp, no doubt. and no doubt in my mind it would've been covered up.
Cindy refused to tell anyone in a position of authority about what happened, and she told me if I said anything to anyone she would just deny it happened. By the next semester Cindy got a room change, and went back to hanging exclusively with white people. After a while, she wouldn't even acknowledge me when we crossed paths in the dining hall or the bookstore or on the main strip. My knowledge of her shame made her feel weak and self-loathing, I'm sure. And I have no doubt she has gone through a lot of therapy in the years that passed.
The very last time I saw her was inside a popular sub shop on the main strip. She was sitting at a table with 3 white dudes, one of whom was clearly her boyfriend. He was the cheesiest, safest looking white dude you can imagine - plaid shorts, neat blonde hair, sandals. She was excitedly telling them a story about something, and when me and my homie passed by looking for a place to sit, she saw us, went dead silent mid-story, dropped her eyes and grabbed her boyfriend's hand. Rome and I sat down for a minute, looked at each other, got right back up, and took our burgers to go. Got in his truck and drove around for a good hour before either of us said a fukking word.
I can honestly say all of the shyt I witnessed at that particular college and especially the shyt with Cindy changed the way I dealt with women overall, because I could see that the way a man treats women is essentially a reflection of his estimation of himself; for those nikkas to do shorty that foul meant they had such a warped sense of who they were and who they could be in the world that it was chilling to contemplate.
All of what I just recounted haunts me to this day.