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and snort it into his nostrils. It was very good coke, and Emmett no longer had to wonder why his man was smiling.

They'd been sitting inside the air-conditioned boat of a car, rapping and listening to music, when it suddenly came over the radio that there was "a riot erupting in Newark," an incredibly corrupt, deadbeat city where everyone is shortchanged, particularly blacks. Both men looked at each other, and Mercer turned the radio up louder to catch the news they were reporting. Then he started the engine and pulled the car away, swinging it toward the West Side Highway. When Emmett asked him where they were heading, Mercer McKay told him straight. "We're goin' t' Newark! I got my woman's there, 'n she ain't good for much, but what she's good for's plenty 'nough for me, 'n I don' want t' lose her in no goddamn police riot! This here car'll get me through, all right. You don' wanna come, you just say so, 'n I'll drop you off at your hotel. Well, what's it gonna be?"

They were in Newark a little more than half an hour later. The city was an explosion of flashing lights, flickering flames and fast moving silhouettes. The sound of running, laughing, screaming, glass-breaking, bottle- and brick-throwing young black bloods was a constant uproar. The gunfire, crisp commands and crackling radios of the police were scattered, but pervasive. The noise was overwhelming and the scene visually surreal.

Mercer drove into an alley where everything else seemed very far away, and he honked the horn twice. The bottom-floor door of a twostory wooden frame house opened cautiously, and out ran a fantastically beautiful black woman in a gold lame mini-dress. Her name was Lucille, and she was around twenty years old and Mercer McKay's old lady. She hugged him and kissed at his face through the open window of the car, until he stopped her and said that things were getting too hot for them to waste time. "So go back inside 'n get the others, 'n let's get outta here!"

The others were Lucille's four equally beautiful sisters and her mother who wasn't bad looking herself. Emmett was literally dragged into the back seat by the four sisters, leaving the front seat to Mercer, Lucille and mama. The jug of coke also found its way into the rear of the car, and the fun really began, with the girls giggling and howling and grabbing at Emmett's body and him running his hands all over their legs, until he found the one who wasn't wearing any panties. Then he put his fingers to work, and Mercer [end page 437]