I watched my father kill a man when I was ten years old.
Puddin was wearing high heel shoes and a short denim skirt when he did it, and he choked the life outta that cat with nothing but his two bare hands.
The state of Alabama was poor and hardscrabble, and there was little tolerance for niggas in general, let alone a long-legged rusty nigga who dressed in skirts. Puddin had moved there when Mama started fooling around with her old boyfriend again, and although he wrote a few letters here and there, I hadn’t seen him since.
But he had rushed up to New York when Mama Stanfield called him to come save me, and once we were back down south my father got it set in his mind that no matter what life threw at us I was gonna get a good education. In our piss-poor neck of the woods that shit was almost impossible because we moved around a lot and I drifted from one lousy schoolhouse to the next.
Somehow Puddin came to know a flashy pimp called Skully Powers who lived in a good school district, and whether my father liked it or not, I ended up getting way more education than he had hoped for.
Skully was an ex-boxer who had made a gwap of money in the ring and then came back to his hometown and put together a stable of the sexiest hoes in the county.
Skully specialized in tricking out beautiful bitches, but he allowed Puddin to work outta his whorehouse for those rare, but profitable occasions when “that type” of customer came along.
As a kid I was fascinated by the happenings in the whorehouse, but as a schoolboy I couldn’t stand living there.
Puddin didn’t give a damn either way.
“I know them lil bastards in school be making fun of you ’cause of where we live, but don’t you give so much as a damn about what them lil fools say, Gerald! You got just as much right to be up at that schoolhouse as they do, you hear me? Stand up tall, dammit! You’s a McKay and you gots to get yourself a good education boy!”
The shit hit the fan early one morning while we were outside on Skully’s stoop. I was sitting on a milk crate watching Puddin cornrow a hoe’s hair when an old white trick stumbled outta the door holding his dick and hock-spit right in my father’s face.
“Get the fuck away from here you dirty faggot!” The old man hollered.
Puddin jumped up cussing and reached down in his stocking for his switchblade.
“Uh-uh, don’t you go starting no shit in my place!” Skully bust out the door and checked him as Puddin wiped the slimy spit outta his eyes. “You fuck around and run my customers off and you and Gerald gone have to pack it up and move it along. Fuck all that ‘good education’ shit you be talking.”
Puddin stayed mad as hell all day, and he was still mad when I convinced him to take me to the movie show later that night. We sat way up in the top seats and watched a black and white karate flick, and when we were leaving the theater damn if we didn’t run right into that old white trick again. But this time he was with two of his old white friends.
“You know what, Mister,” Puddin said, posting up his six-feet-seven inches and two hundred and sixty-five pounds of pure muscle in a flared denim skirt with yellow frills on the hem. “That was real disrespectful what you did to me earlier today in front of my son, you know. I didn’t appreciate that shit not one bit.”
That old cracker puckered his pink lips up to spit on my daddy for the second time that day but this time Puddin was ready for him. He caught that fucker by his throat before he could hawk up his spitball and he squeezed the shit outta the old man while raging quietly in his ear.
“You ain’t gone never spit on another long-dick black bitch like me never again, you old cracker bastard,” Puddin growled, standing gap-legged and steady in his high heels as he strong-armed the white man down to his knees.
“Poppa stop!” I yelled.
Beads of sweat formed on my father’s bare arms as his huge triceps and forearm muscles rippled and bulged with rage and power.
“Gerald,” Puddin said quietly as he kept right on choking, “When another man throws something in your face, whether it’s a piece of tissue or a hock of spit, then one of y’all oughtta be ready to die.”
“Poppa, no!”
“Get off him, nigga!” The man’s two friends jumped on Puddin’s back and started pounding at his head and shoulders and swinging wild blows, but no matter what they did he refused to turn that old fucker loose.
“Poppa!”
Blood ran into Puddin’s eye from where they busted him all upside his head, but he pinched his lips and tightened his grip and still refused to let go.
“Disrespecting me like that in front of my boy?” Puddin muttered with his nostrils flaring madly. “Cracker, I will snap your scrawny neckbone in two raggedy fuckin pieces!”
Them two old men swarmed all over my daddy but their frantic strength was no match for his fury. They tried to grab him in a head yoke but his chin was dug into his chest. They clawed at his eyes, but he closed them tight and snapped his teeth like a wild dog trying to rip off their fingers. They gave up fighting and tried to yank and pull their friend outta his grasp but Puddin had him locked down in a death grip.
I grabbed at my father’s arm and his rocked-up muscle felt like a truck tire. He put his knee in the man’s stomach and pressed all his weight down onto his choking hands. I cried out for him to stop, but Puddin was in a kill zone and he didn’t even hear me.
The old white man was turning blue now. I was close enough to smell the hot fear coming off him, and terror gripped me even harder when a hard stream of piss whooshed down his leg and his whole body started jerking and quivering.
His skin turned purple and a drop of blood slipped from his left nostril. His eyes rolled up in his head. His mouth went slack, and then he went into a slump.
The other two men were still fighting Puddin. Punching him and clawing at him.
But it was a useless fight because Puddin had already won.
Puddin went to prison and I was left in the care of a pimp named Skully Powers who ran a cathouse full of prime-pussied hoes. I was ten years old and a hopeless orphan. My good education had officially begun.
From B4 The G-Spot: THE LEGEND OF GRANITE MCKAY
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