WILD THANGZ by Winston Chapman (An Essence Magazine National Best Seller)

Chapter 14

It was mid-March when I got my first break in the music biz.

Of all things, working at R e f l e x had led to meeting Brandon Winwood, a music producer that was a client of mine.

After giving him one of my better hand jobs, he'd informed me that he was looking for a lead singer for one of the groups he was producing that had a sound similar to the Black Eyed Peas band.

Brandon was a Ludacris look-alike, with the afro and everything that he sometimes wore braided.

I was no fool. I could tell that there was something a little strange about his music company, Twisted Records, from my first visit to the Stone Mountain studios.

The receptionist was a gum-popping, brickhouse hoochie that wore shirts so small that they had her clearly augmented-breasts were in jeopardy of spilling out at any moment. Besides that and the ever-present smell of marijuana, some of the management he'd chosen to employ looked like they'd responded to a for-hire ad placed in the Penitentiary- Times newspaper. And on Pay-Day, I watched him pay them all in cash.

It seemed that the studio might've been funded by some drug money because of all the cash that floated around.

But I guess I can't automatically say that with certainty, as Hung sometimes paid me with cash out of enormous stacks of money he had stored in the vault. My guess was Hung and Sumy had at least $150,000 in cash in the vault that they were obviously hiding from the IRS. A lot of clients chose to pay that way for secrecy purposes, not wanting traceable transaction receipts.

All in all, I was still dead-set on taking this opportunity because I'd already learned my lesson about being picky.

I really had no other options and Brandon had the juice in the business. His label was starting to become the talk of the nation, as some of the artists he produced were featured on some major artists' CDs, though none as of yet had a mega-success CD of their own.

My thought was that I could become his first full-fledged break-out star.

Brea had been kicked-off the Atlanta Hawks Cheerleading team for missing rehearsals. But she didn't give a damn because she'd only used it as a way to get to affluent men and for the attention, which she was getting plenty of at the strip-club. And between R e f l e x and Slick-N-Thick, spending money wasn't a problem either.

It was Brea's never-ending appetite for the good-life that helped her spend it just as fast as she got it. She even purchased a portable closet for her room to accommodate the amount of clothes she'd bought that overwhelmed her built-in closet.

But what was her most extravagant purchase was a brand-new Mercedes convertible she obtained only through some creative financing techniques, made solely possible by one of the men she'd met at the club that worked for a Mercedes dealership.

I always expected that I'd one day see the Repo-man towing her car down the street, once it was discovered that the paperwork had been forged, should she ever miss a single payment.

Her latest hobby, or at least that's what I called it, was another scheme for attention and a way to meet more ballers – auditioning to dance in music videos.

I think she was trying to become the new Melyssa Ford or something. But not quite as serious about the career move as her. It was more about the challenge that fueled Brea.

Brea had taken some shots with a famous ATL photographer, Charles A. Brown and appeared on several party-fliers, local artists' CD covers, calendars and even some best- selling book-covers.

The shoot was done TFP, which is an industry term that meant Trade For Portfolio, so it was unpaid. But the benefit was that she got to keep the incredible-looking professionally- done photos to use in a portfolio to show to talent-managers whenever she was auditioning for videos or modeling gigs.