The Inspiration behind 🎶 "Ex Bitch" 🎶 ✍️🏾
Ex Bitch is the second single from BL Shirelle’s album Assata Troi. It was actually shot at the beginning of the pandemic, but with the world at a standstill, its future became uncertain. We're glad to get this out to y'all FINALLY 💪🏾💯
Starring BL's wife, as well as her former roommate while incarcerated (@just_peachyduh), Ex Bitch is a classic story of honesty, insecurity, and the reinforcement of love.
Here’s BL’s story time on the inspiration behind this record. Tea will be spilled 🍵 🤫
The year was 2003. I was 15 years old and sitting in a placement called Vision Quest. I was only there as a pit stop, which I was grateful for because it's in my bottom three placements of ALL TIME. The fact that you had to sleep in a teepee was probably the best part. I hated the pink t-shirt they made the girls wear, I absolutely loathed tucking it into those tight ass sweatpants with no pockets (which you HAD to do), and we weren't allowed to wear sneakers, only the peanut butter shower shoes. The fashion choices available were hideous. 😌
A huge case was taking over the city of Philadelphia. It was on the news everyday, the staff was speaking about it, when I called home they wanted to talk about it; the whole city was obsessed with it. A 16 year old white teenager took a 15 year old white girl on a date. After the date, the girl lured him to a wooded area, with the promise of sex, where he was ambushed by three other teens and beat to death for his $500 paycheck. It was all a set up. The date, the walk, everything. They beat him with hammers and hatchets until he was unrecognizable, and even then they smashed his skull with a huge boulder before spending his check on drugs and "partying beyond redemption" (their words, not mine). Prior to the murder they listened to Helter Skelter over 40 times in a row while planning the execution.
I met the young lady (let's call her Jay) who was the center of the media frenzy briefly in 2003. We landed in booking together for a few days. She was a little skinny brunette white girl with long hair, glasses, and very sad eyes upon contact. I remember trying to look into her soul that day, trying to see if I could identify what made her do something so horrific. It felt like… she was also trying to look into mine. They sent Jay to the women’s jail to be charged as an adult for that murder. Eventually she was sentenced to 17-35 years in prison while the rest of her co-defendants were sentenced to LIFE.
A few years later (2006), a few crimes later; I too had worked my way to prison. Serving 6-12 years for a police shooting, state prison was a different experience. It sat on acres of land, it was much prettier than any jail I'd ever seen. Every unit had a big flower bed in front of it where lifers and long termers planted flowers to bloom in the shape and colors of gaudy, flamboyant butterflies, ostriches, rainbows… anything beautiful. The chow hall was nothing but glass windows, the Chapel was beautiful and equipped with drums, piano, and a full choir. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this. I lived in a building named "C" or "Charlie;” we called it the Carter due to its resemblance to a project building. Third floor, so my unit was C3. It was six hallways, 4-person cubes, and each hallway shared a bathroom. One day I was in the bathroom smoking a cigarette talking shit and in walks Jay… she is now drop dead gorgeous. She has this rock star short cut with spiky hair (that no one can figure out how she keeps spiked with the bullshit products), full pouty lips, and a beautiful body. A little hips and ass with a cute little 4-pack, she still has on her glasses. She looks into my soul again. I feel naked, but this time it feels familiar. She walks right up to me: "I know you…"
For the next three years we were inseparable. I wouldn't deem her a good person yet at this time – it was still pretty early in her bid – but I will say she was definitely trying to figure some shit out. She was smart, funny, beautiful and an outcast. An outcast because of the crime she committed. While her story is not mine to tell I'll say this: She felt like her intense, desperate desire to be accepted by someone was the main reason she committed such a heinous act; so she went out of her way to not give a fuck what people thought about her. In her mind it was the least she could do for her victim. We learned to play guitar together, we wrote poems four words at a time together; she would write four words then I would and so on… we had some of the most dramatic teenage love scenes in history.
Due to her being 15 when she was arrested, there were a lot of things she had never done before. She would say stuff like "You know I never had a smore before?" I executed an ambush of the staff kitchen to get some marshmallows and planned a picnic in my closet where we ate smores and watched Sons of Anarchy.
I used to hand wash my clothes with Irish Spring soap and that soap reminded her of a man who (Trigger warning ⚠️ ) used to sexually abuse her. She begged me to stop using it. One day I walked in the shower and asked her to let me wash her up with the Irish Spring. She hesitantly said yes, and as I washed her up with it she sobbed the whole time. She claimed it was one of the most healing moments she'd ever experienced.
We were in the stall making out once and she was kissing me on my neck and I felt an aggressive yet delicate sensation. I opened my eyes and hers was glazed over with a dark seduction, her lips spread with a razor in her mouth, my blood dripping off them. Seeing blood made me panic. I kicked and punched my way out the stall- my heart beating faster than I thought possible. I told all my friends what she did to me in horror and disgust… but deep down, it was exhilarating.
We were pushing each other's boundaries in a sometimes unhealthy way; young adults obsessed with sex, drugs, and music as the backdrop to us becoming women. Though we loved hard, we did one thing even harder. CHEAT.
Eventually we got moved off the same floor because Jay would put a dummy in her bed (made out of yarn and sheets, she would throw a sock on a fake foot and a headscarf on the yarn for hair and spend the night in my cell). Though they couldn't prove it, somehow they knew what we were up to after a while. It seemed that neither of us wanted to get cheated on first because we didn't have physical access to each other anymore, so we both did things we shouldn't have in a "relationship." We still made every yard time we could, freezing in 10° weather. The guards begged us to go in, but speaking for myself, when I went into my unit it was a whole different world….
There was a girl in my new hallway who was sooo fine – not to mention fascinating. Let's call her Tee. She had long legs with the most graceful, sexiest walk ever. The thickest thighs and fattest ass on campus, her waist to hip ratio was against physics. She was THEE OG STALLION. Her lips looked soft, and she had a freckle in her eye which I would later deem the gold in her heart. She was very no nonsense, a nerd, and she didn't fuck with everybody. She was a BOSS; indicted by the Feds for drugs; she used to tell me all the time "you aint no hustla, you just a crack dealer." That slight really opened my mind to other potential income streams.
I wanted her. But one problem: she didn't want me lol 😩 She called me ugly TO MY FACE and said she didn't see what all these girls saw in me. She may have thought I took that as a diss, but I was all the more enamored by her. So I started watching her. I noticed she always watched CNN in her cell so when I saw her in the bathroom I would display my political chops, "That was a big hit the Republicans took with the Colin Powell endorsement of Barack Obama… As long as the cities show up to the polls we'll have our first Black president." "Do you think the Second Chance Act is the Republicans pandering for Black votes?" After awhile she would come meet me in the bathroom to get her political takes off until one day she looked at me and said, "You're not as dumb as you look," and walked away. HA! I got her! I knew then I had her. 😏
We began flirting. "If you can't make me cum with your hands, it's nothing to discuss further," she said to me defiantly. 😌 So one night around 3AM we went into the bathroom stall and I popped her until the toilet broke. Laying on the top bunk with a huge grin and her juices running down my arm, I thought "I'm never washing this hand again." 😭
While Jay made me feel like I was on the edge of a cliff all the time – which was a thrill in itself – Tee made me feel safe. When we first had sex she decided that we wouldn't kiss because I had a girlfriend. She didn't kiss me for the first six months of our affair. I spent all my time in the unit with her; reading books, doing 5,000 piece puzzles (she was a master at those), playing cards, reading the encyclopedia and dictionary while incorporating new information into our daily verbiage. All she wanted was a career where she could wear fancy suits. We loved playing word association, talking about places we wanted to travel, looking up said places and debating hypothetical events taking place in our imaginary free world together. "So if we lived together I couldn't spend the night out sometime?" I would ask her stupid shit to see how far she would entertain because again, unlike Jay, I could actually see a future with this girl. I could be honest with her. She challenged me in a way I'd never been challenged. Everyday we learned new things, and she loved to cook exotic foreign-inspired prison cuisine for me and talk about different cultures and ethnic practices. She pushed me to be a better and more worldly person. She inspired me.
The truth was I fell in love with Tee. One day we were having sex in her closet and we made eye contact and I asked her "Can I kiss you?" She paused a half second and said yes… I've never yearned for a kiss more than that moment. The first time I told her I loved her it was an accident. A pure, honest moment of instinctual vulnerability. Just talking, smiling, I headed to my cell and it just slipped out, "I love you." 😳 She just looked at me like "Huh?," like I was crazy, but I didn't feel embarrassed because I knew she loved me too, whether she said it or not.
I don't know why I couldn't cut Jay off at the time, but a lot of it was that I felt a sense of loyalty. I didn't want to be yet another person in her life who let her down. I loved her dearly, but she had over a decade left to serve, not to mention much more life to live after all those youthful years inside. My freedom was coming up in only a couple years and I couldn’t make a clean break. So I lied. I lied and hid this relationship that I desperately wanted. Not only did I want it, I deserved it. Tee loved me fully and wholeheartedly. So much so that she never got bitter and divulged our affair, but in reality, the whole campus knew except one person. The person I owed the truth to.
The end of Tee's bid was tumultuous. You could feel the tension anytime all three of us would end up in a room together. You could see the stares and whispers, but Tee was prideful. She knew I had a girlfriend going into it. She didn't want to look like she couldn't handle it. We had some pretty brutal fights at the end, one in which she cut me up a few times and scraped a vein which caused excess bleeding. As crazy as that sounds, I was the problem. I was an emotionally, mentally abusive, selfish person. No matter how many times Tee begged me to leave her alone I wouldn't. I couldn't. So much happened but I'll save it for my book. ✍️🏾 😏
Tee left prison nine months earlier than me. Originally from Illinois, she decided to get a fresh start in my hometown of Philadelphia. I had so many women come and go and talk about what they were going to do. Some stuck around for a little while, one even got a tramp stamp of "Mo's Dyke" on her lower back before getting pregnant and never writing me again. Tee lived up to her word. I got mail at least three times a week, pictures of her in those fancy suits she always wanted to wear, money that I didn't need. She was consistent, showing me better than she could tell me that she not only wanted our relationship to work, but she was also laser focused on being successful. It was a bit intimidating if I'm being honest. Was I ready? She had two kids. What if they hate me? What about her kids' fathers? She's not even gay foreal, what if she's sneak dicking on me? Only time would tell.
In 2011 when I finally went home it was a rough day for Jay and I. She walked me to the gate crying. I told all my friends to look out for her and she would be hearing from me soon. It was eerily sad, but also happy, feeling butterflies in my stomach whenever I thought about Tee, but then seeing the grief when I looked at Jay, then feeling bad for feeling so good. I held up my word though. I wrote her a lot. For her 23rd birthday I sent her 23 cards. I always wanted her to feel loved, even if it was from a friend. Tee found the receipt from the 23 cards and confronted me about it. I didn't understand what the big deal was, she was inside, we were out here, living life, happy. From Tee's angle it was the same; she didn't understand what the big deal was, WE WERE OUT HERE, SHE WAS INSIDE, WE WERE LIVING LIFE... HAPPY.
Over the years I began to hide and limit my communication with Jay out of fear and respect for my partner. I also hadn't divulged the truth about Tee and I being in a full blown relationship. Jay never knew until Tee and I ended up back in prison together – but that’s an entirely different essay. By then though, I was fully dedicated to my partner and I felt if the truth was enough to lose a friendship over, then maybe the friendship wasn't something that was sustainable. Of course she was blindsided and hurt from finding out. Someone took pictures of our name tatts from our Facebook and met her in the yard with them. I didn't feel as bad as I thought I would. I was more relieved than anything. In my opinion I held it down for Jay as a true friend. I never forgot about her, I checked in on her and her family, I was a support system for many years after leaving prison. For Jay, time stopped when I walked out of those gates, but for me life was happening on life's terms which was something she couldn't relate to yet.
I can't give it all to you guys because then you won't get my book 😭 so I'll jump ahead. The year was 2020 and Jay was finally being released from prison after 18 years. I was extremely happy for my friend. Excited for her to be free and experience the simplicity of domain over her own body. I also wanted her to have a real chance at integrating into society successfully. I knew the challenges that lay ahead for her, so anything within my power and my BOUNDARIES – I was willing to do. That was of course WITH the blessing of my now wife Tee, whom I married in 2018 after 10 years together.
We were on vacation in our future retirement town Rehoboth, Delaware, and I took her out to dine at our favorite Malaysian restaurant; my plan was to open her mind up a little bit. I told her Jay was coming home and I wanted to possibly kick it with her from time to time and assist where I could, since I help everyone I can in my circle coming home from prison. I thought it would be weird and wrong for me to not extend resources to her. My wife was kind of stunned that after all these years we were still having these conversations around this person. She made it clear that due to my dishonesty in the past in terms of communication, she did not feel comfortable with me meeting up with Jay. I was offended because I honestly couldn't fathom why she would think at this point I would risk my marriage for someone who'd been in prison since they were 15 years old. I wasn't the same kid who played all those toxic games, but I still had a little toxicity left in me. So I fought back. I said, "All this is paranoia. You're paranoid because you took her girlfriend. It's okay to admit that."
Before it left my mouth I began to understand. In truth, it didn't matter why she didn't want me to talk to Jay: SHE DON'T WANT ME TO TALK TO THE BITCH ‼️ PERIOD 💯. That's it and that's all. Every time I fought against it, it would make my wife feel like the pull was stronger than our relationship, which wasn't true. I felt confused and untrusted by the love of my life, and I wanted to sort out my feelings. So I did what I do best… I pulled out my pen and pad and created my final manifesto on the topic. 🎶EX BITCH 🎶
Me and my wife in 2022.