twelve-step classes say the first step is admitting your addiction, so I’ve just accomplished Step One. Where’s my chip? This ain’t a cop-out, nor is it an excuse I came up with for making bad choices in women. I’m being real. The same way people get addicted to drugs or gambling by doing it once and enjoying the shit too much, that’s how I got addicted to hoes. My addiction didn’t just start when I met Savannah, either. On reflecting, I’ve always had this addiction. I just didn’t recognize it for what it was until now.
Thinking back, it started when I got my first piece of the forbidden fruit. I had chosen a chick whose fruit had rotted and been damaged from excessive handling. In other words, I lost my virginity to a chick that had been run through by every high school-aged boy in Nashville’s city limits. The list of handlers included a few of my close homeboys and a few niggas I didn’t like. I knew she was letting everybody have it, but at sixteen years old, I didn’t care. All I cared about was what I had heard about her, which was that she was a thick-legged cheerleading freak, and after a few hits of the blunt, she’d let you kill her throat and beat her cat. As a weed- and dope-selling virgin, I couldn’t wait to get sentenced for murder one on her esophagus and a cruelty to animals’ charge. I’d happily plead guilty to both crimes.
My closest partner back then and to this day, Mike had invited me to come flip her with him. He had been using his cousin’s apartment on the eastside to hang out during school hours whenever the pressures of eleventh-grade schooling became too much. For Mike, this seemed to be every day. He went to Stratford High School with the chick, and they had been ditching school all week to start Mike’s new side hustle.
Mike had always been an entrepreneur with a get-rich-quick scheme, so it didn’t surprise me when he decided to make her his new hustle. Mike saw her spreading her legs for free and thought about all the money he could be making as her manager. He didn’t like the word “pimp.” It made him feel like a Memphis nigga, and everyone knew Nashville and Memphis niggas didn’t get along. He started charging virgins and anybody else with items to barter, like Nintendo and Sega games, to have sex with her.
Being supportive of my friend’s endeavors, I hopped the gate at Pearl-Cohn High School out west with my condom and twenty dollars in hand, ready to lose my virginity like all the other virgins my age had done. I had to catch two city buses and walk three miles just to get to her. I remember walking those three miles nervous as fuck, dick already hard, and thinking, she’d better be worth it.
When I saw the girl, my love for hoes was born as I instantly started plotting on getting her away from my boys to clean her off and shine her up to keep for myself. She was beautiful. She had her long hair pushed back out of her face so that you could know that hands down, her face was her best asset. I’m not knocking her body, but at sixteen years old, girls were either pretty or ugly. There was no in between, and that was judged from the neck up. Her skin was the color of roasted almonds, which went perfectly with her big, dark brown eyes. She did have a pig-shaped nose, but it was cute and made you want to pinch it if her lips would release your attention long enough. Everything about her mouth said, “Kiss me and fall in love.” That’s why her heart-shaped lips fit perfectly above her rounded chin. To top it all off, she had the Lexus car emblem on a charm around her neck, a true sign of luxury. I had never seen a bitch so bad in my life, and I knew I was going to step to her and make her mine. I don’t have to tell you how it turned out in the end. Some folks are just comfortable in their own skin, no matter how funky and foul it is.
It’s been fifteen years since I made that mistake, and I haven’t learned my lesson yet. I’m sure you were hoping I’d leave Savannah’s ass alone when I found out she gave my daughter away, and I was planning to. To be honest, I was done with her after she gave the police the letter I wrote her with my plans of turning myself in. Even though I wanted her to snitch on me so it could buy me a couple of days of freedom to get my affairs in order, there was a piece of me hoping Savannah would prove me wrong and hold on to the letter. But she didn’t, so I said, fuck her and her good pussy.
Being in jail without a piece of mail coming in besides updates on my son from my mama made me think about her. Thoughts of her began to help me get though the day, so I sent my nigga, Ryan, lurking for me... and look at what he found out. Savannah was pregnant and hiding her pregnancy from the world. I wasn’t sure if it was mine or not because baby girl was a freak, but she was ordering my favorite foods daily. I wanted to know and sent a letter to find out.
She wrote me back in her own fucked-up way to let me know that she had given birth to my daughter and given her away to the highest bidder like a car being auctioned. I read that part of the letter at least ten times a day until I was released, and although it’s been years since I received it, I remember verbatim what she wrote. It said:
I am not a caring person. My only concern is me and what’s best for me. Your beautiful eight-pound daughter, who looked just like you, will never know either one of us. I hired an out-of-country adoption agency to ship her off to her new parents two days after she was born. I know you don’t believe me and will play a detective again, and that’s fine, but the next time one of your goons finds me, they will see me alone without a child. I have destroyed all the records of the birth and my pregnancy to prevent you from trying to get her. You told me how you would have tried to get custody of your son, so I had to make sure I didn’t leave you the option of getting her. If you still don’t understand what I’m saying to you yet, let me make it simple. I am well paid and only use men for sex. Fuck a relationship, love, marriage, the white picket fence, and fuck the dog too. That shit ain’t for me, and neither are you or your child.
Man, Savannah is hell for that one! She lied about the out-of-country shit, but she did find a way to make it damn near impossible to track my daughter down. How I allow her the right to have life in her worthless body amazes me too. Even after all of the blood, sweat, and tears she’s caused me to shed, my hands still couldn’t cause her pain. After snooping some more for signs of the whereabouts of my daughter, I realized Savannah was hurt and living with pain from her past. She wasn’t born to be the bitch that she is. The life she was dished made her that way. And being the save-a-ho nigga that I am, I made getting my daughter and healing her heart my number one priority.
That’s why I’m in the situation I’m in now. Since I haven’t slapped the shit out of Savannah or snatched my daughter up and bounced, I’m out here looking like a pushover. What did y’all expect me to do, beat on her? Well, I can’t. Hitting a woman ain’t me. I’ve had a thought or two about wrapping my hands around her neck and not letting go, but that just means I’m human. I’ve even thought about snatching her scandalous ass up and shaking the shit out of her, but where would that get me besides back in jail? After all the bullshit I’ve allowed this woman to put me through, I still got hope I can make her change her ways, which is a true sign of my addiction.
You see, there is some meaning behind the shit I do and take from Savannah, so it isn’t the addiction alone that has me biting my tongue. Please believe that I’d break a nigga’s jaw for half the shit I’ve let Savannah fix her mouth to say to me. And if it were any other bitch, I’d have been gone, but there’s something about Savannah’s wretchedness that I can’t shake. I’m stuck to her in a fucked-up way like a therapist to a seriously hurt patient. In the beginning, it was her looks that caught my eyes, her fast words that kept my attention, but above all, that goodness she got in between her legs with the vacuum suction head sealed the deal. I’ve never felt nothing like it.
I don’t know why I’m always listening to my dick. It’s the worst influence in my life. It always leads me in the wrong direction, like it’s got a “nothing-ass bitch” GPS attached to it. When the head on my shoulders tells me, “Aye, Dre, she’s a ho,” the one in my pants says, “So what? Don’t kiss her in the mouth and strap up, my nigga.”
That’s bad, and I know it is. The shit ain’t safe, and that’s sloppy living on my part, but I can’t get my dick to listen. Hoes make it too easy. I don’t have to wine, dine, or court anymore. I don’t even have to spend cash on or time with them. All it takes is a show of interest, whether it’s real or fake, and them legs go flying open. I ain’t no mentor, so I’m not passing out self-esteem speeches. If it makes you feel better to hear