Shortly after Charles and his legal team left, a C.O. (Corrections Officer) made a call after Charles left.

"Yo, DA. I have some info that might be of use to you. Your office still handling that Marcus Johnson case? Good. His lawyer just left. They are trying to get him exonerated..."

The C.O. smiled inwardly.

Dime's Backstory Pt 1:

I was raised to never have nothing and nothing was worth achieving. I was born by a river running perpendicular by the ghetto.

I was a secret, bought up as my auntie's kid. Because my daddy ran the streets and Mama, Kitty, four years younger than my aunt couldn't have kids or my grandparents would throw her out.

And even though my aunt cared for me, lived in her own home, college educated but dumb as hell, I felt Mama abandoned me.

I was named Dime West because Mama bought a dime bag of weed from my daddy and she didn't have the money.

She paid with sex and nine months later, hiding her pregnancy, Mama pushed me out and my aunt set the fake prosthetic baby bump on fire in a dumpster behind an abandoned warehouse.

My grandmother Alice was even fooled. Never suspected that Mama was pregnant because she laid low at my father's trap house.

Cutting up dope. Cooking crack. Thank God she didn't smoke up his supply. She started back up the day she gave birth to me.

Or so the legend goes...

Before my mother was pregnant with me, she lived in a filthy room in the back of my grandparent's filthy apartment in the heart of the Projects. She was a fifteen year old hoodrat.

By the time I turned two years old, she was a Boss Bitch. She drove a Benz. Sold coke and crack from her trunk.

If a nigga couldn't afford her products, she let the front seat back and let the customer eat her nookie till she squirted. If it was a female they had to eat the booty.

She lowkey ran the Projects without that hood bitch mentality. She treated everybody with respect till a hoe name Wigz tried to rob her.

Mama pistol whipped her till she stopped breathing and paid three crackheads to dump her body in Alligator alley.

She always had money. Her seductive body was once Africa. Being a secret stripper at seventeen years stripped her body of its luster after men with empty promises used her as a highly paid cum dump. Left her a blood diamond, even though she chose the cash over quality and quantity.

Mama had a two story house and three cars before her nineteenth birthday. Paid in full from a doctor that fell in love with her, groomed her and turned her into a respectable housewife...

Until Mama found out that he married another woman behind her back and kept their affair a secret.

The second wife was Mama's gynecologist.

Strip club

I knew at the time that Mama was a stripper. My aunt told me when I turn six years old and my peers talked about it in my Kindergarten class.

"His Mama shake it fast."

"That's what my Daddy said."

"He's a trap king's son."

"I heard his auntie is his Mama."

The rumors were endles, but I had thick skin. As I grew older those same gosipping bitches became my loyal hood friends.

But when I was seven years old and my auntie told me that, I didn't know what a stripper was. When I inquired about it, she put me in her beautiful SUV (smelled of potpourri--auntie was a farting bitch. She loved Popeyes red beans and rice) and she drove me to the Klittasaurus Club. It was off of 123rd and 200th Street, outside of Historic Overtown.

Auntie knew the bouncer, Big Yoke, so the gigantic man let us in briefly. She made up a lie about she couldn't find a babysitter, and she just wanted to see was her baby daddy up in there because he needed to give her some money to help raise his child.

Everyone knew the trap king was my biological daddy, Moanyay, but Big Yoke played along because rumor had it that she had that good head game. Which brought him back every night to her house long after I was asleep.

She chose a man she could suck on, vs. a good man that would help take care of her and pull his weight around the house.

"I'm too lazy to have a relationship," Auntie Katt once told me over Pop Tarts and skim milk. " I don't have the time to be cleaning up behind no man, chasing no man, going through his shit, none of that. I am a very strong-willed woman. I'm not going to be going through his pants pockets, searching for phone numbers, questioning his female friends, acting like an ass around his family, or acting like I'm jealous that he has his close relationship with with his mother."

"Do you ever get tired of that life, Auntie Katt?"

"Its Mama. Gotta keep up the smokescreen, okay?"

I smiled. "Okay." She did take good care of me.

Pouring a glass of wine laced with coke, she continued, "I love my life. He can just come, make me come, take his ass home, until he comes back again. I'm being real with you. You're gonna learn about the birds and the bees anyway. Oh, and ain't nothing going on but the rent. So best believe he's paying my rent, my lights and the water and sewer bill. And I didn't even have to come out the coochie."

She didn't have to work so hard. Once we were inside the strip club, I could not take my eyes off the opulent place. Yes it was big and beautiful, but it was near dead. Maybe fifteen men sat arond the stage.

My mother was on the pole. She didn't look happy at all. A pole that accommodated a thousand twats before hers was even born from my grandmother's womb.

She sprayed the pole with water and bleach and used a clean rag to wipe it down. She wore a big Patti LaBelle wig, a halter top, too many necklaces, sweating like a pig.

She had on a short skirt and high heels as she walked up to the boss man.

She didn't even see me and my auntie off in the corner of the room...