I smiled at his words, and he leaned his head down, so that I wouldn’t have to lift up. He kissed me on my lips. He slipped his tongue in my mouth, and I slowly sucked on it, sensually making out with him with my eyes closed, and then I broke the kiss. He pulled his head back up, but he kept his eyes on me.
“You know that shit not going to be easy, right? Shit is never easy when you dealing with a bunch of women. They shit going to become your shit. Your life been real peaceful these days, Uzi. Running your businesses, raising our kids, and being a phenomenal wife. This going to shake it up a little bit in your life. I just hope that this don’t turn into some shit where the old Uzi gotta come out, which forces the old Loco to come out of retirement,” he said.
“It shouldn’t. We gotta hope for the best,” I let him know.
“I like it though. I fuck with what your trying to do. What you going to call that shit?” he asked me.
I took a moment to think. I hadn’t gotten that far along yet. I thought about the goal that I had in mind for this business venture. This program was going to be something that was ran using authority, discipline, and structure. I was getting ready to teach women how to stay alive. Wesson used to have my sisters and I in the woods shedding tears because his teachings were so structured, and damn near military style. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t soft, and that’s what I wanted my program to mirror.
“Shit, Uzi’s Gurlz,” it didn’t take me long to come up with that.
“I like it mami. I like it,” and that was all that I needed to hear.
I was getting ready to start up an entire movement. I was going to fuck the whole Miami up with this one.
“Wesson made sure that me, and my sisters knew how to survive. I think he was able to leave this earth peacefully because he knew that even though he wouldn’t be here with us anymore, that we had the skills to stay alive. Put a gun in my hand when I was only four, and he made sure that I knew how to shoot. He made sure I knew how to think. Because of his teachings, I was able to maneuver through life the right way. Ima teach these women the same thing. The same code that Wesson gave to me,Ima pass it along,” I finished, leaving it at that, not going to do too much talking because the work that I was getting ready to put in was going to speak for itself.
Chapter 1
Riot St. James
FOUR MONTHS LATER
“Idon’t see the purpose in you collecting your shit. You going to be right back in here. I give it another month. It’s no way you going to stay out of trouble once you get back on the outside,” one of the older guards said to me. His name was Officer Randall. He was standing on the side of me, as I was at the property window, waiting to collect my items.
I was released from jail this morning. I served approximately 365 days at TGK, and honestly, I hated everything about this shit. It wasn’t my first time getting locked up. My track record dates back to adolescence, but this was the longest that I’ve ever had to spend incarcerated. I was angry with myself for getting locked up this time.
I got locked up on some shit that could have easily been avoided. I went out one night to the club with my cousins. Literally, minding my own business. I went to use the restroom and got into it with a bitch that was waiting in line. It was her turn to use the empty stall, but she was too busy running her mouth in the line with one of her home girls, so me being me, of course, I said something. She started talking to me crazy, calling me all kinds of bitches and hoes, telling me that she would gouse the restroom when she was ready. I mean, you would have thought that we had beef prior to that incident from the way that she was talking to me.
I’ve never been the type to stand there, and argue with a bitch, so I did what I knew best, and I beat the fuck out of that girl right there in the restroom.
I’m talking, I damn near killed that bitch with just my two fist, and she was twice my size. Because of the damages, I was arrested that night. The girl ended up needing stitches, and dental work done, so she pressed charges against me. I was hit with an aggravated battery charge, where they sentenced me to a year in the county jail. Along with that, I was required to take some kind of anger management courses, so now that I was getting released, I was going to have to look into that because if I didn’t do it, the judge already told me that my ass was going to be back in jail.
Before I start rambling, let me introduce myself. My name is Riot. Riot St. James.
Riot wasn’t a nickname. It was my real name. My government name. The official name that was on my birth certificate, and I.D. My daddy named me Riot. It’s a long story behind the name, but I have time to tell it. My daddy was heavy in the streets before I was born. Shit, he was heavy in the streets even after I was born. The night that I was born, there was a shootout outside of the hospital. This is the story that my mom told me, once I was old enough to ask her why I had been named Riot.
The hospital that my mom delivered me at was right across the street from a popular lounge. Apparently, some dudes were beefing, and when my mom tells the story, she goes into full detail, saying how you could hear the gun shots right outside the window, and how scared she was that night, thinking that one of the bullets were going to come flying into her hospital room. Iwas born right in the middle of that shit, and because of that, my daddy switched my name at the last moment, asking my mom if she was cool with the name Riot. Originally, I was supposed to have been named Regan. The way I moved, the shit that I was always involved in, Regan wasn’t a good fit. Riot was perfect. My daddy knew what the fuck he was doing when he named me Riot.
My dad’s name is Maverick St. James. They knew him in the streets as Grim. Literally, everyone called him Grim. My father was murdered when I was three years old, but till this day, when people speak about him, they refer to him as Grim.
I had a nickname too. It wasn’t as gangsta as my daddy’s nickname, but I had one. All my family, and the one friend that I had called me Bean. My papa, which was my mom’s dad gave me the nickname when I was just a baby. He said that I was as little as a bean, so he had everyone calling me that. Till this day, the name was fitting because I was little as hell for my age. I’m twenty-one years old, and my current weight is 97 pounds. I stood exactly 5’2. I’ve been small my entire life, inheriting my size from my mom because she was small as well.
As little as I was, I wasn’t to be fucked with. These hands on me were deadly. Every fight that I’ve ever been involved in, it’s always been against bitches that were much taller, and bigger than me, but I’ve never been a scary bitch, so I would get in the field quickly, and handle my business.
I was born and raised right here in Miami, Florida. I was a product of a hood, ghetto love story. I don’t have social media, but according to what the people around me say, people do story times on social media, speaking about Miami couples from back in the day, that they consider legends, and my mama, and daddy would always get brought up. If my daddy was still here, I just knew that he would have had the streets on lock, and all these drug organizations that were popping right now, they wouldn’thave been able to come up because my daddy would have still been holding shit down.
I knew my history when it came to my dad. I knew that even as a young man, only in his twenties, he had a powerful crew, and them niggas had the drug game on lock. My parents got together when they were in high school. In high school, my daddy was already doing his thing in the streets, moving weight for a popular king pin in Miami named Willis, but everybody called him Willy. My dad wasn’t the man yet. He just had the hustle in him that Willy could smell, so over time, his spot in the organization would slowly increase.
By the time my parents got out of high school, my mama was pregnant with my brother, Roman. She had him at nineteen years old, and their first child put a hunger in my dad like never before, so Willy put him in a position to get a small crew, where he fronted my dad a few bricks, wanting to see how quickly him, and his crew could push it out on the streets. Once my dad showed that he was like that, and it was nothing for him to move that amount of weight, he only went up in the drug business.
With the money that my dad was making, him and my mom became hood famous. He used his drug money to buy a building for my mom, so that she could get the hair salon that she’s always wanted. My mom was a beast when it came to doing hair. Although she was with a drug dealer, and had a baby by him, she still wanted to have her own hustle, which is why my dad got the shop for her.
By the time my brother was one years old, my parents had a quick, shotgun wedding. My mama likes to tell everyone that she was so in love, and she didn’t care if she had to marry Grim in the middle of the street. I came around two years later. My mama likes to say that I was the best thing that ever happened to her, and my dad. She said that my daddy used to have me spoiled rotten. I loved to hear stories about him, but I would also findmyself getting upset because I didn’t have any memories of him. I was only three years old when he was taken away from us, so I have no memory of anything that I ever shared with him.
My daddy was murdered by police officers during a traffic stop. He was pulled over initially because of the dark tints that he was riding around with, and the loud music that he was playing, driving in traffic. By this point in my dad’s life, cops knew who he was. He was on their radar, waiting to catch him slipping, needing to find enough evidence against him, so that they could lock him, and his entire crew up.
He was only twenty- five years old, but he was pushing a nice, Bentley Continental GT. My daddy was flashy, always wearing big chains around his neck, big diamonds in his ear, and nobody was fuckin with him when it came to the way he dressed. He had a thing for Ralph Lauren, Burberry, and Tommy Hilfiger. The day he was pulled over by the cops, he was dripped from head to toe in Burberry, rocking his jewelry like he always does, and I was in the back seat, in my car seat. He was heading to take me to my mom’s hair salon, so that she could braid my hair.
