BOUNDLESS (Mama's Story) by Lexie Ray Page B

I loathed it.
    “Everything was going about as well as it could until one of the other girl’s pimps finally caught wind of me,” I said. “There were plenty of pimps in that area, and they had plenty of girls to keep track of. But there’d been rumors about a girl working on her own, managing herself, and that just didn’t sit well with the pimps. When one of them tracked me down and told me that I was working for him, I laughed in his face. I was drunk. I was always drunk, and I didn’t understand the danger I was in. Alcohol made me not care about anything.”
    He’d beaten the shit out of me. Just for laughing. He told me that as soon as my face healed, I was working for him. I wanted to tell him like hell I was, but my mouth was so swollen I couldn’t say anything at all. Even Marshall hadn’t recognized me when I finally found my way home. He cried and cried for his Mama even though I was right there, holding him in one arm and a cold bottle of vodka in the other, using it to ice my bruises and cuts.
    As soon as my face healed, I decided to go deeper into the city and start something new. When I told the other girls, they just laughed at me. Nobody had ever had a female pimp before, but I thought it made sense. I could still turn tricks if I felt like it, but I’d manage girls a better way. I wouldn’t beat them, and I’d have the understanding of working on the streets to light my path, influence my decisions. That was the problem with pimps, I decided. They didn’t understand what it was to hustle out there. They could be much better—be better managers, for one—if they understood what we went through.
    “I decided that I wanted to make more money and open a brothel, basically,” I said. “Back then, I just wanted to recruit a bunch of girls and act as their pimp. The brothel idea wasn’t all the way formulated yet. But I wanted to move deeper into the heart of New York City, and I had to get out of the neighborhood unless I wanted to work for the pimp—which I didn’t. All I packed was a handful of slutty outfits, what booze I hadn’t gulped down, and my makeup. I convinced one of the prostitutes in my apartment to watch over my son. I told her I’d send her money for him. Just like that, I left him. I didn’t think anything of it. He was five, by then. He was five and I was barely twenty.”
    My last memory of him was of him weeping, holding his arms up to me like he’d done when he was still a baby. It should’ve melted my heart, but it didn’t. I’d been drinking, as usual, and it only irritated me. Why the fuck did he cry all the time? I wasn’t that special. He needed to grow the fuck up. Those thoughts filled my mind at the time, and I left without so much as a hug.
    I had more than enough money for a bus ride downtown, and I walked the streets. Men knew what I was and stared. I eyed them back, looking them up and down, inviting them to look. I turned three tricks right away in alleys, marveling at the way my cash was stacking up, when I saw it. The nightclub.
    “I saw this building and fell in love with it,” I said. “It was the second thing I’d ever loved. The first was the bottle. My son—I didn’t even love my son. He was just a bother. That’s how I felt about it then. God, I feel like shit admitting it. But I up and left him with practically a stranger. I didn’t even know her last name. But all thought of Marshall left me when I saw that building, if I’d even been thinking of him to begin with. I saw nothing but possibility. I could really make something out of that building, make a legitimate business that would shield my pimping from the authorities. It was for sale, so I found a payphone right away and dialed the number listed.”
    That had been a strange conversation, and my first contact with Don Costa. He’d been younger back then, of course, and not yet the Don.
    “Costa,” is how he answered the phone, breezily, like he didn’t give a shit who was on