5 Minutes and 42 Seconds Read Free

Detroit,” said Yolanda.
    â€œYeah, there are,” said Leronda.
    â€œThank you,” said Yolanda.
    â€œAnd they all gay,” continued Leronda.
    The room went into a chaos of laughter and refute. It was the perfect time for Dream to slide in as inconspicuously as possible. She heard what she heard, but it didn’t change a thing. She didn’t speak a sentence the entire day.

SMOKEY
    W elcome back to BET’s 106 and Park. This next cat is bananas. He’s number one on everything: MTV, BET, radio. Y’all know him, y’all feel him—give it up for Smokey, ‘The Gladiator.’”
    Smokey jogs out and slaps hands with the fans like a sports star. A girl holds up a sign asking him to marry her; another woman screams and claws at her breasts in ecstasy. A boy shouts out: “Smokey! Smokey!” while his friend holds a demo tape, begging Smokey to make him a star too. A girl rushes the stage asking Smokey to make a child with her. She clasps on to his long light-brown braids and has to be pried away from him, but not before a valliant fight with the security on set.
    Smokey shakes his head. “Just another day in the life,” he says, raising the bottom of the platinum Fubu shirt that’s hanging down to his knees, before sitting down onthe studio sofa. “What up, AJ?” He turns, nods his head, then winks seductively at AJ’s cohost, Free. She coos and bats her eyes.
    â€œSmokey Cloud,” she says, breathing into each word as if she’s on the brink of an orgasm. “How’d you end up with that name?”
    Smokey laughs nervously. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he says.
    â€œCome on. What you got to lose?” she asks. Smokey stops and thinks about it. He looks into the crowd. No longer was he Smokey from Twenty-second Street. He was a new man, an icon. This new man overshadowed the boy he was in Detroit. He now knew love internally and externally. What could he possibly do to compromise that? For the first time in his twenty-year-old life he knew complete satisfaction.
    â€œIt’s like this,” says Smokey, the weight of his platinum chain and diamond-studded “S” charm propelling him forward as he spoke. “In the hood everybody got a nickname. Sometimes we call it like we see it—if somebody look like a cat, we might call him Garfield. Other times we don’t call it like we see it. Sometimes we see shit and call it everything else but what it really is. It’s like that in the hood. A spade could be a spade, but then again it could be a diamond. Depends on who you ask, when you ask them, and why you askin’. You can call a kid who stinks Flowers, or a brilliant girl Blondie. It’s crazy like that. That’s how I got my name—they call me Smokey ’cause Smoke is black and they said I was everything but.”
    â€œThat’s deep,” says AJ.
    â€œIt’s just real,” says Smokey.
    â€œNow that you mention it, Smokey, a lot of our viewers out there are probably wondering, and I know you probably want to set the record straight, what exactly is your racial background?” says AJ.
    Smokey pauses; if AJ had asked that question on the street six months ago it would have been his last. But this was far from a street in Detroit. It was the big time. Smokey had made it. He left his belligerence right beside his boredom, angst, and anger back home in the middle of nowhere.
    â€œI never knew my daddy,” he said, trying to sound as detached and unfazed as possible. “My mom never talked about him. I know for a fact he was black, though; he left the state so he wouldn’t have to pay child support. My mother’s white, but that ain’t got shit to do with me.”
    The audience laughs, but Smokey isn’t joking.
    â€œSmokey, your rhymes are so real. Where do you get your inspiration?” asks AJ.
    â€œWell, from the streets, man. I’m