plaintiff: jamila from houston, texas. you know who else is from houston? my dear friend michael arceneaux, whose new book you should order from your favorite retailer immediately. jamila’s outfit is fucking cute, man, an dark caramel sweater-coat over a black turtleneck dress with hoop earrings. she’s walking into the courtroom like someone is chasing her, and i appreciate the eagerness!
defendant: selithia from dallas, texas. now this is what the fuck we came here for, baby! selithia is wearing: a a poufy-sleeved cherry red off-the-shoulder blouse, a red leather and sliver ringed belt, the tightest red pencil skirt i have ever seen, enough black eyebrow pencil for three people, impeccable smoky eye makeup, and long, glorious locs. A GODDESS, YOU HEAR ME??? i gasped when i saw her! is she, like, every single one of my televised court dreams come true? you better believe it.
the complaint: jamila claims she and selithia got into a fight after a night out and she’s suing her former friend for damaged property.
what does she want: $1741, for the property. a countersuit, because god always provides: selithia would like $550 for “a ruined wig.” i am in heaven!
how it went down: jamila begins by saying she met selithia a year ago at a mutual friend’s party, and she noticed that she “loves attention.” jamila says selithia doesn’t want her male friends paying attention to other women and you know what? same! if you’re my friend you gotta pay attention to me and act like everyone else in the room is dead. jamila says that selithia came over to her place on labor day weekend and her boyfriend offered to take the two of them out to the club. fuck, i miss the club! i miss sitting in a dark, sweaty room like a fucking creep, watching people trying to meet each other while deafening house music threatens to blow my skull apart. one day, when we are all free, i’m gonna throw a party at the hideout and get my favorite DJ of all time the hood internet to play the tunes and i’m going to sip a whiskey in the corner and watch everyone making out. it’s going to be great. you’re all invited.
selithia contends that jamila’s “boyfriend” is actually her “sugar daddy,” and says she’d seen jamila getting naked on facetime and then receiving $5000 or $10,000 from him in exchange. that sounds like an incredible set up. your honor, i would do that. “he’s an older guy?” greg asks, looking for his wallet. “he’s older,” says selithia. “not that much older,” retorts jamila. um, this is the best. we love to see beautiful young women running game on an old man!
they went to the club and when it came time to leave jamila and the sugar daddy got in their car while selithia went and got in a stranger’s car because she “needed some attention,” according to jamila. selithia keeps trying to interrupt her to dispute, but jamila barges ahead saying that she told selithia that she shouldn’t have gotten in a car with this man she didn’t know but, since she insisted on doing it, the two of them should follow jamila and the sugar daddy to the next club. selithia says that the real story is that jamila and her man abandoned her at the club and she was forced to get a ride home with some random.
selithia fast forwards past who drove what where and says that the plan had been for her to spend the night at jamila’s house, where she would sleep in the bed with her because jamila just moved and didn’t have any furniture. she says when they arrived at her place jamila handed her a blanket and told her she could sleep on the living room floor with jamila’s dog while jamila and sugar daddy made grass sandwiches in the bed. greg is irate. “what kind of sugar daddy is he if he can’t even buy her furniture???” he yells, and SERIOUSLY WHAT KIND IS HE. $5000 for some titties but can’t get one of those styrofoam ikea couches for your woman’s friend to sleep on?? “you’re playing the game backwards,” says pimp greg, and i agree!
selithia says at that point she left the apartment and went to sleep in her car, then woke up and drove around for a few hours after she discovered jamila and the sugar daddy were still cuddled up in bed, then she left again and went to church. jasmila disagrees, and this timeline is so confusing i feel like i’m on bath salts. jamila’s story is that after she and the sugar daddy left the strip club, they arrived at her apartment to find selithia already asleep out front in her car??? how can these stories be so wildly different! are they talking about two entirely different days?
okay so we’re going back to the beginning of the story again, i think: selithia says that the night they went to the club at one point she and jamila got separated and, over the course of this unspecified amount of time they were apart, selithia saw a guy with a very nice jeep wrangler outside and asked him to show her the car. excuse me??? am i misremembering exactly what the FUCK a jeep wrangler looks like?????? i drove one for most of 1999-2000 when i was working for mel and it was his “fun midlife crisis off-roading dad” car, and if my memory serves me correctly it was a compact black metal box with big tires that was so tight you had to origami yourself into its backseat, i can’t imagine a tour of its interior would take more than three seconds. four if you opened the glove box.
selithia is saying that during this clown car mini-tour jamila was nowhere to be found, then all of a sudden she popped up screaming “bitch, where you been??” they go back to jamila’s and jamila got in selithia’s face and yelled at her “bitch, you don’t get in the car with strange men” and as a club etiquette expert i concur! maybe the delivery left something to be desired but this is absolutely correct: if you go out with your homegirl everyone should stick together and nobody should be getting in any weirdo’s car, especially if that car is just your average, run-of-the-mill teeny jeep.
so selithia got mad that jamila was all up in her face so she muffed her which, to black people, is the equivalent of taking your glove off and slapping a person with it at the outset of a duel. now greg is telling a story about how women love a nice car and how recently he was working in atlanta and he went to a restaurant and afterward he came out and all these dudes were posted up out front standing next to their ferraris and maseratis and women were just walking up to them and checking them out. theoretically, i understand this behavior, but i also understand that sometimes a person just has money for the one nice car and doesn’t have any left over to give to a sugar baby or have a nice crib with extra pillows and a top sheet? maybe selithia was onto something talking to the dude with the factory-issued speaker system and reasonable car note.
the ruling: jamila claims it was selithia who confronted her and got in her face and i’m sorry but is the sugar daddy available to testify? how can these stories be so profoundly different? but they agree that selithia muffed jamila and that caused them to start fighting. jamila says that selithia threw her 50" television on the floor and swept all of her expensive perfume bottles off the top of her dresser, then she picked up her tiny 8-lb. dog and threw him. jamila screamed at selithia to leave her house but she wouldn’t, so jamila says she was finally “forced” to go to the kitchen and get a knife to pull on her. they both called the police and the police came and took note of all the damages, the proof of which jamila pulls of her handy accordion of truth™. plus she has pictures of all the shit selithia wrecked, too. greg asks jamila why she didn’t press charges on selithia and jamila says she didn’t see the need to because she knew she was gonna just sue her. lmao and that’s that on that!
selithia tells an opposite version of the same story and you know what this is like? this is like when two kids are fighting and their parents are downstairs and then someone’s head gets busted open or they go crashing through the fish tank and mom comes in like “WHO STARTED IT” and each kid tries to make a case for their innocence when the real answer is “WE BOTH DID.” like, jamila says selithia “picked up the dog and threw him” but then selithia says “the dog jumped on the bed when we were fighting and i brushed him off” and the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. it’s obvious that they both need to be grounded and sent to their rooms without dinner so they can think about what they did. the night of the fight the police wrote down that jamila and selithia were involved in “mutual combat,” and greg says he believes that, too, so everybody is to blame. verdict for sugar daddy, who gets to be rich as fuck and fuck this beautiful woman in a cozy bed and not embarrass himself on my tv.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “y’all don’t think i know what’s happening out there. i ain’t as square as y’all think. the judge knows A LOT.”
*bangs gavel*
some banging hood internet tunes to fuck to, linked:
digital underground x st vincent
usher x toro y moi
king louie x divine fits
azealia banks x YACHT
wiz khalifa x phantogram
TLC x holy ghost x michael mcdonald
sisqo x the rapture x a-trak
the dream x panda bear
amerie x the dismemberment plan
gorilla zoe x the meters