Black Coffee

SANDERELLA'S SONG may be a supersoldier, but I sure as hell ain't no Superwoman. Yes, it's true my hand is steady, I have the eye of a marksman, and I can hit a moving target dead center at four hundred meters, but when it comes to making clever love decisions, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. While I look pretty lofty in my spit-shined combat boots and razor-sharp battle dress uniform, like a lot of young sisters from the 'hood, I've taken a few wrong turns down the back alleys of life. I've tooted my share of reefer, popped the ring on many a cold brewI've even dropped a tab of acid during a brief moment of insanity, but I must have been out of my mother-scrunching mind the moment I let crackhead Sonja Reed talk me into reaching for that twenty-dollar heart attack wrapped in tinfoil. "Damn, Sandie!" Sonja poked me in the ribs with her pointy elbow. "Why you always so uptight, gurlfren'? Here." She passed me a tightly wrapped silver package. "Have a treat. It'll help your square ass fit inyou know, relax!" Sonja and I were sitting at the vinyl-covered bar of the Sugah Shack, a smoky blue-lighted hole-in-the-wall for the local indigents. Neon strobe lights blinked intermittently from far corners of the room before ricocheting off a shiny silver ball that dangled from the wood-beamed ceiling. Outside, Jack Frost was busy duking it out with Jay Hawk, but inside it was moist and warm, courtesy of the one hundred or so of "us" crammed into the tiny joint. I'd just completed my final-semester exams and decided to check out the party scene, a luxury I seldom enjoyed since enrolling in night classes at City College. The house music pumped with a thunderous beat, and although I was feeling pretty mellow, shaking my bones and jitterbugging with the fellows, I still flirted along on the fringes of the real action. "C'mon, chile," Sonja coaxed. She curled her tongue around the tip of a white plastic straw as the metallic disco lights rearranged her features into an erratic jigsaw puzzle. "Come on over here and get your head right so you can relax!" Relax? I was twenty-two years old with a three-year-old daughter, a part-time job, and a full college load! Relax just wasn't in my vocabulary. But Sonja had one thing right. When it came down to drugs, the sistah was a straight-up parallelogram with four equal sides. Aside from social stimulants like marijuana and that dumb encounter with acid, I'd never really been tempted. Real drugs cost real money, real pride, and real self-respect, and with no hope for a return on my investment, I was real slow to give up any of those treasures. But on this particular winter night I was feeling my Wheaties. Mama Ceal had offered to baby-sit, I'd studied like crazy and would graduate with straight A's, and my boyfriend had just dumped me for my best friend's sister. Relaxation was just what I craved. So when prompted by Sonja with a sure nod and a half smile, I lowered my head to the shiny black counter and did as I'd seen her do. I inhaled two thick lines of prime white ghost straight into my malfunctioning brain. "Yeahhh." Sonja giggled as I puckered up my face. "That's it. Now relax." I relaxed all right. Kicked back so far you would've sworn I was in a coma! Slouching all over the barstool, my body went limper than Michael Jackson's wrist! For a moment. Suddenly my heart started pounding like a funky bass drum and my hands got to trembling like a set of wayward brass cymbals. Then I got hot. Real hot. Like I was beingPrice-Thompson, Tracy is the author of 'Black Coffee ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780345490377 and ISBN 0345490371.