“DON’T PLAY WITH ME, BOY!” It took me a minute to gather my thoughts, but I wanted William to feel that I was disrespecting him in the most egregious way. I was shaking uncontrollably. Then, without any warning, I ripped the covers off our waterbed. My hands were swift and levered by a madness that flipped my whole body around.
“HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?!” William screamed.
I didn’t answer him. My madness was refueling.
The woman cowered and kept her eyes down. Then she scooted slowly to the rail on the right side of my bed. Her covers were gone and she was bared before me. But it was strange because she somehow seemed less exposed than when she had all her clothes on— those I had seen on her when she was trolling the streets. She was trolling for men, and the night I was away from my home, she found mine.
As the universe shrunk in around me, I stopped feeling the breath in my lungs, the love in my heart, and my peace— the little I did have—was being erased with each passing moment.
THERE WAS A GUN AT THE TOP OF OUR OPEN CLOSET; I reached for it. The madness working on me held me tighter.
“…DAMN BABY…IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK!” William was pleading. He was looking at my hand and trying to cover himself.
“I’M NOT YOUR BABY! You think I’m a ninny or what?”
“Alice…ALICE just please put the gun down.”
I felt instantly powerful. “WHAT IS IT THENYOU SONOFABITCH?!”
“It’s nothing I—.”
“SHUT UP!” I moved away from William and toward the woman who looked like an over grown baby doll with a big curly wig.
“Get out of my bed BITCH!” The words coming out of my mouth were good and strong and seasoned with enough anger to be taken seriously. I was Bonnie without motherfuckin’ Clyde.
The woman started screaming more than hysterically and William tried to shush her with his pointing finger. He was the manager of our apartment building and I knew where he was coming from. If the incident got out— Well, I didn’t give a damn. I pointed the gun at her. I was an urban gunslinger with a reputation for never missing. I hoped she saw that in my eyes. Everything in my head and in my view was moving in slow motion. I saw the woman getting ready to make her escape out of the bedroom.
I turned to keep my aim.
She kept screaming.
William looked like he was about to crack up, frozen in his own daze—like he was only a thumping distance from becoming a gazillion shattered pieces.
“MOVE AGAIN AND I’LL KILL YOU!” I warned them both.
“…please…Mam…I’m sorry…I’m so sorry.”
I looked at the babywoman and then at William. “WHY-IS-SHE-HERE?” I wanted a real answer from my fiancé, the infidelhoeman.
“SHE WAS ONLY GIVINGMESOMEHEAD!” William shouted as if it was with his last breath.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So…I asked again. Same answer. “You…you do this for SOME GODDAMNEDFUCKIN’ HEAD?!” I lost my breath for a moment.
“It don’t mean nothing,” William sniffled.
I was incensed. He thought I was stupid. “Oh… then…THEN WHY IS HER DAMNED PANTIES OFF?!?!”
FADE TO BLACK.
…
Blackness was all around me after William tried his “I’m so innocent” spiel on me. He wanted me to accept that he wasn’t doing anything wrong by having a woman in our bed because she was merely sucking his d**k and if it wasn’t for her asking if she could suck his d**k before he left the party from across the hall, he would have just gone home and fallen asleep after having too much alcohol.
It was unequivocally her fault. But I couldn’t swallow that— no pun intended. “FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” I was screaming as hard as I could.
Everybody was screaming. We could have had a scream party.
The baby doll woman/the I JUST GOT TOSUCKAMAN’SD**KWOMAN ran past me. She was buck-naked with the lights on. DAMN!
I laid the gun down and grabbed the sheets off the bed and ran to the back of the apartment to throw them and the covers over the balcony. I watched them fall slowly down three stories until they hit a red car in the parking lot. The sheets were filled with the filth and sin of betrayal and I didn’t want them in the place I knew I would abandon before morning.
ALL OF THAT MADNESS WAS A SIGN.
It should have been the last incident preceding my split with William forever. I had never been so humiliated in my whole life; my grief was palpable, non-fragmented and I knew I had to pull myself together before I picked my daughter up from my mother’s. I wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened and the imposition of silence upon me (by me) would endure for years.
The baby doll left.
William cried after I explained to him what he had done to me. I told him he was not worthy to be a father to our child, that he had violated the boundaries of our relationship by bringing a stray woman into the same bed that I shared with him. I told him that he was poison and no real black man could stoop as low as he did.
‘YOU’RE A FUCKING IMPOSTER’, I said to him. I wanted him to become undone right in front of me. I wanted to see his white bones bleed with regret. I wanted him to feel the pain that possessed me inside and out.
Truth was— I wanted to take my child and run away. I seriously thought about it. The one mitigating factor in my mind was that I didn’t want to raise my child alone or with another man who might come into my life. It’s so interesting that I could try and perceive my future and that of my daughter’s at such a vulnerable and excruciatingly painful moment. If I left William, then what?
The other truth was that the gun that I brandished in front William and the woman was broken. William knew it because he had demonstrated it to me when I discovered it months earlier. I didn’t want a gun in the house, but he assured me that it was incapable of being fired. He explained that if someone broke into our apartment, the sight of the gun would be a deterrent. That’s why it made things seem so strange when he cowered and shuddered as I waved it around and made threats I couldn’t execute if I wanted to.
Damn! Maybe the gun wasn’t broken after all.
16
Who in the Hell Did I Marry? April 1978
WILLIAM AND I MARRIED JUST ELEVEN DAYS SHORT OF OUR DAUGHTER’S SECOND birthday. We drove up to Reno, Nevada on a turnaround trip that lasted less than ten hours. We secured a marriage license and I can’t even recall the particulars of the little funky rug chapel where we exchanged our vows. The whole process of uniting my life with a man, presumably for the rest of my life, felt like I was just going through the motions.
In the backdrop, a brick wall of doubt kept appearing inside my head. All I wanted to do was “the right thing”. But I think what William really wanted was to get his mother off his back. As far as I could tell, she wanted to be able to present her first grandchild with the religious seal that only marriage could provide. This fact let me know how important appearance was to her. It also showed me that William needed her approval.
My foremost concern was that our daughter might someday find out that she was born out of wedlock. And although I partially subscribed to the social freedoms offered up by the somewhat revolutionary 70s, I was by no means abundantly willing to put my daughter in a position where she might have had to wonder why her mother and father never married. It was a worry and a stigma I didn’t want for her. How other people perceived my life as an individual wasn’t important at all.
And so life would change very quickly for the new Mr. and Mrs. William Jennings Choyce.
THEN—
Less than a week after our unceremonious union, William made a special request of me in exchange for a “FAVOR”— that should have never been characterized as such. I had come home tired one night after work, but I was thinking it would be good for William and me to have a night together. I wanted him to come to a party one of my co-workers was giving in Oakland. At first he agreed, and later, he retracted, offering instead that he would baby-sit Crystal so t
hat I could go—if…
“IF WHAT? …I want you to go too!” I felt desperate. “My mother can watch Crystal and she can even spend the night so that we can have some time alone.”
William looked at me. His eyes were empty. “I don’t want to go!”
“Why?” I asked as I took the curlers out of my hair.
“Because—”
“Because what—.” I wanted him to finish the sentence.
“Well,” he said as he stirred underneath the covers of our bed. “If you give me some “HEAD”, I’ll stay home and watch Crystal.”
There was that word again. HEAD.
EVERYTHING WENT BLACK IN MY HEAD.
That word…I had heard it before and it had nothing to do with the brain or thinking. HEAD. The tradeoff my husband was proposing left me spinning. And in one moment, flashes of regret were upon me. I regretted so many things related to William. I regretted that I ever went out with him, that I let him take me to a strip club without slapping his face for treating me like a slut. I regretted forgiving him for betraying me in our own home. I regretted marrying him.
“You going?” William wanted an answer.
“Are you saying that I need to suck your d**k before you’ll baby-sit your own child?” My body stiffened up as I ‘tried to turn and see the expression on William’s face. Was he serious?
He laughed. “Don’t be so dramatic!”
“ARE YOU SERIOUS?” I let the question out.
“Don’t be so stuck up, girl.” He laughed again. “We- are- married.”
“So— what the hell does that mean?” I wondered if William saw my disdain for him.
He looked at me sideways— the way he always did when he wanted to concentrate on my words. Sometimes I felt like we were speaking two different languages.
“I’ll bet anything all your friends are doing it!”
“Doing what?” I snapped in spite of the fact that I knew exactly what he meant.
“You’re too intelligent to…”
“STOP!” I had to cut William off because he was trying to make sense out of something that was never going to make sense to me. “That’s neither here nor there!” I tried to check my temper. “I don’t care what my friends may or may not be doing…I’m not turning my mouth into your personal toilet.” I felt my breath oozing out with wisps of steam.
William left the house without another word. He was good at that.
There was so much that I wanted to talk to my new husband about before he disappeared out our door with a lot of seemingly unjustified anger. Most of our relationship, I did all the talking— philosophical, emotional, metaphorical, psychological and yet, nothing ever moved him. He would just sit still to listen, but he never offered even an ounce of what was going on in his mind. He was always quiet as a mouse. NO, QUIETER. I kept trying to get him to talk to me. I wanted to know what he was thinking. I wanted to know what he was feeling.
After that night, I just kept waiting and waiting and waiting for life to feel normal. Things started to change when we purchased our first home. Hallelujah!
17
When times were Normal
WILLIAM, LIKE MANY OF THE SERIAL RAPISTS AND MURDERERS I’ve read about, appeared to be just as normal as the as anyone could imagine. He wasn’t the mid-twenties redneck next door with a big, sloppy bomb in the basement, nor was he the over-privileged white man with the high I.Q. who was intent on rebelling against “the establishment” that had harmed him in one abstract way or another.
Au contraire!
He was the quietest menace to society who could fly under the radar of law enforcement and well below the suspicions of people who saw him as the “good husband and father”. And if Lee Malvo and John Mohammed are the anomalistic poster men for society’s vision of what the world should be afraid of, then the whole science of criminal forensics and classification by racial exclusivity, should be thoroughly reexamined. By now, more and more men of color are committing crimes once thought to be unique to Caucasian males with very specific backgrounds. Clearly, times are changing and more and more women and their children are being murdered by those who appear to be “normal” or by those who could not possibly fall into the category of serial rapists or serial murderers.
THE “NORMAL” WILLIAM was handsome, loved music, cars and he maintained connections with family and friends that seemed, at times, so integral to him. I came to believe that William really loved both me and our daughter and wanted the best for us as we moved farther inside our lives together. Maybe he was a little more perfect than most men because he never complained about going shopping with me, sometimes for hour and hours.
THE ENTERTAINER: William loved entertaining—in the beginning of our marriage. It wasn’t anything for us to purchase 2-3 full cases of ribs to barbeque. We would invite people to come over and enjoy them with us. Part of the tradition in his childhood home revolved around food; it seemed to be the only quintessential bonding agent, most likely because love didn’t seem to live there. And, no rib meal was complete without collards, corn bread, potato salad, yams, macaroni and cheese, homemade cakes, pies and chitterlings.
WILLIAM, THE FATHER:
When our daughter reached school age, William wanted nothing but a superior education for his child. He insisted that she attend private school. He had no problems paying the costly tuitions as well as the fees for daycare.
&
Christmastime had always been a special in our home. William engaged me each year as we went about trying to cultivate the myth of Santa Claus for our daughter. He was eager to go out and buy gifts fit for a princess. It was always absolutely necessary to wrap the gifts and place them strategically under the elaborate Christmas tree.
On the eve of seemingly the best day of the year, by William’s standards, he would awake early in the morning, stand outside Crystal’s window with jingle bells. He would render his version of St Nick’s call—‘ho-ho-ho.’ It was the cutest thing I had ever seen.
&
It was imperative, William offered, that we made sure Crystal got to visit Disneyland before her fifth birthday. He planned the trip with care and precision. I didn’t have to worry about anything and everything came together with William’s touch. He had so much joy in seeing Crystal in the purest state of awe and wonder and it was as though he was trying to see through her eyes and feel with her heart. When our vacation was over, Crystal walked out of the theme park with every kind of toy and trinket she put her little finger on. There was always a gleam in William’s eye when he saw his daughter’s glee or wonderment. Those were the (few) days!
THE PROVIDER: And after his two year stint with unemployment, William became fully employed by the former Oakland Scavenger Company. He managed and invested both our incomes so that we could have a good life. I was very pleased with our progress. Everything seemed so normal for a while or so I thought. I think William was feeling safe inside of his Mr. Nice guy’s cocoon. I can only characterize his behavior as such now because I discovered, much too late, the method to his madness.
We purchased our first home in 1982. It was brand new. It seemed that we had a new lease on life. William kept himself busy working overtime at work and with decorating our home. This seemed to displace some of the vicious anger he felt about “my betrayal.” I HAD MY TUBES TIED AGAINST HIS WISHES. I was twenty-five. It was strange because I didn’t want any more children. EVER! People kept telling me that I would change my mind.
Another strange thing was the way William approached home decorating; it was so interestingly methodical and almost obsessive. Of course, he was excited but it seemed that everything had to be perfect. Maybe this was the normal way it should have been with a person who came from a two-parent home. Every item in our house, from the furniture to the art pieces to the pots and pans, seemed to replicate some aspect of physical living in his childhood home. It was an uncanny preoccupation from my vantage point, but I went along with it. I tried hard to minimize my disappointmen
t by claiming that I would be in charge of putting my touch on the next house we purchased. Good Times.
WILLIAM, THE HUSBAND:
My thirtieth birthday, especially designed by my former spouse, was one that I will never forget. He employed his magnificent skills at party planning to create an atmosphere of joy and celebration for what he called, “My Big Day.” I wasn’t too particular about having a party, but William desired it enough to ensconce himself in the details for at least a month. I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but then I began to think it was the best thing going to happen in my life since the birth of my daughter. It was. Good Times.
THE FAMILY MAN:
And almost without fail, William made sure that we went out as a family for dining at least once a week. There were few restaurants in the Bay Area whose tables we hadn’t sat. He loved Chinese food at the Silver Dragon in Oakland and Italian food at Giovanni’s in Berkeley. For Mexican food, he favored Mexicali Rose and Tia Maria’s, formerly an establishment on the Berkeley Marina. We went to all the hot night club spots on those occasions when we wanted to spend time alone.
Good Times…and then…
18
The Loss of His Beloved
His depression— I kept telling myself that William would snap out of it.
WHEN FIONA DUTTON, WILLIAM’S MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER DIED, I saw him cry. It was only the second time in our life together where he showed great emotional pain. The first time was when I threatened to leave him. I caught him in our bed with a woman off the streets. But the pain he let loose at his grandmother’s funeral was more intense. It was as if William was drenched with pain. He was near drowning.
He was very fond of his grandmother and although she was stern, it was clear that she loved William unconditionally. With her, he seemed to be calm, entertained, happy and sometimes in awe of her commanding presence. I thought it refreshingly hilarious when once she called him a “big-headed boy” and then pointed him into the direction of the garbage can to do a chore. She couldn’t do it herself because she had suffered a stroke. They both got a hearty laugh as he picked up the load and started out the back door like a little boy. Yes- there was something dynamically special between them.
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