by Mary Monroe
I sat up straight on my bed and crossed my legs. I kicked off my stilettos and was massaging my feet when Rockelle wobbled back into my bedroom. There was a bucket of cold Kentucky Fried Chicken in her hand.
“Oh. That girl,” I mumbled, giving Rockelle a look of pity as she chomped on a chicken wing. Ester had told me the night before how she’d witnessed the brother walking into that store and getting shot, and I’d felt bad about it. Death had already claimed most of my family, so it was one subject that was always on my mind. “Where is she now?” I asked, waving Rockelle to the wing chair facing my bed. She ignored me and left the room again hugging that chicken container against her chest like it was a baby.
“She’s right here with me. Believe me, you gonna like this girl. Uh, everybody gonna like her…”
“I’ll be there in a little while,” I said, sighing.
My apartment was the only place I felt comfortable in anymore. There was nothing in it to indicate what my life had become. I had tried to decorate my bedroom so that it would look as much like my old room back in Georgia. So many years ago. Plain, cheap items from stores like Wal-Mart and Target were everywhere. Thin, stiff plastic drapes covered my bedroom windows. Large, gaudy plants, not as green as they were when they were new, leaned out of crooked planters. My bed was a mattress on the floor with a vomit-colored bedspread and pillows so flat I had to use two at a time. Pictures of Mama and all four of my dead siblings, and my dead daddy, sat on my bedroom dresser in frames that I’d picked up at a yard sale.
I didn’t want to be like Rockelle. She went out of her way to hide what she really was: a Black American Princess wannabe. Everything for her and her kids had to come from the most expensive stores in town, and she tried her best to buy herself some class and intelligence. But she was too stupid to realize just how stupid she really was. Her bear-claw nails, a hair weave that looked like she’d been flying, blue contact lenses, makeup that looked like she’d slapped it on with a spatula, and a bookcase filled with cheap paperbacks in her house said it all.
Rockelle had returned to my bedroom balancing some barbecued ribs on a paper plate in one hand and a paperback copy of Jaws II in the other. Girlfriend wasn’t as highbrow as she wanted folks to believe she was, so I never expected to see her reading Roots or The Grapes of Wrath. But, Jaws II? Hello? California had some strange birds and most of them didn’t have any feathers.
I knew that Rockelle thought I was an odd egg, too, just because I didn’t have a lot of fancy shit in my apartment like she did. She wouldn’t even sit on any of my chairs without covering the seats with some newspaper first. And I didn’t appreciate the fact that she wouldn’t even sit on my toilet seat. She would hover to do her business at my place. And as big as she was, that was a sight to behold. I didn’t care enough about her attitude to put her in her place. She was the one with the problem, not me. But I knew that I could always count on her when I needed her, and that was enough of a reason for her to be my girl.
I could afford to decorate my place like it belonged to a princess, a real one, if I wanted to. Even though I hated having sex with a bunch of strange men, it was hard to turn my back on three hundred dollars to suck dick for a few minutes, or to do whatever else I had to do to get paid. As an escort, I made more money in a week than I used to make in a month at that cashier’s job I had in Detroit. I’d moved there after leaving Georgia. I got homesick all the time for both places, but I preferred to keep those thoughts to myself. I needed to focus my attention on my present situation.
I didn’t rush to go pick up Ester. That hussy was a spoiled-ass bitch and expected too much from everybody. But she was the “baby” of my new “family” so to speak. She expected everybody to cater to her, and everybody usually did.
In some ways, I used to be just like her. But that was a long time ago and a long way from the mean streets of San Francisco.
Chapter 9
LULA HAWKINS
I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling so light-headed and paranoid. The women I’d just met had all been very nice to me, so far. Ester’s friends Rockelle and Rosalee seemed just as nice as Ester. Besides, I’d already lost my husband and almost been raped. What more could happen to me?
We left that damn motel with the suitcases containing everything I owned in the world, including Bo’s clothes and the beloved saxophone he’d never play again, in the trunk of Rockelle’s Honda. During the tense ride to Rosalee’s apartment, the women listened as I poured out my whole story. And I left out nothing. They groaned when I told them about me coming home from school to a dead mama. They cussed when I told them how Larry had played me and agreed that he was a “hound from hell.” They didn’t say anything, but they shook their heads and moaned when I told them about my son dying and me hooking up with Bo then losing him, too, so fast and in such an awful way.
“It seems like a black cloud’s been followin’ me around all my life,” I complained. I glanced out the backseat window, wondering how I could be feeling so miserable in a place as beautiful as San Francisco. We drove through the downtown area. The huge office buildings scraping the sky looked like big toys. But San Francisco was no toy box, and I was not Alice in Wonderland. However, I did believe that things had to get better for me. I was praying that my new “friends” would help make that happen. I just couldn’t bring myself to return to Mississippi. “Things have got to be better for me out here.”
“Honey child, you got to make things get better,” Rosalee said, turning around to look at me from the front passenger seat. “If you can’t do that in this city, you can’t do it nowhere. That thing that happened to your husband, that could have happened to anybody anywhere. This is a nice city as long as you watch your step.”
“I sure hope so,” I muttered. “I sure hope so.”
The first thing I noticed when we entered Rosalee’s living room on the third floor of the cold brick building she lived in, was how cheap everything looked. In the center of a hardwood floor was a faded plaid couch with a brick holding up one leg. There was a matching love seat facing the couch that was just as faded. A coffee table lined with cigarette burns and cluttered with old issues of Cosmopolitan magazine had two end tables that didn’t match. A small television set was on top of a wooden orange crate. There was a hole big enough for a horse’s head to fit through in the wall next to the door. It was hard to believe that a woman like Rosalee, who claimed she made hundreds of dollars per date, lived in such a shabby place.
“Sister, you been in the storm too long,” Rosalee told me. “You need somebody to fall back on…”
There was something conspiratorial about the way the women looked at one another and nodded in agreement.
“Well, I tried that and look how I ended up. I thought Larry Holmes was my soul mate. I don’t want to go back home because if I see his face again too soon, I won’t be responsible. A job and my own place is what I need now,” I said, sharing the couch with Ester and Rockelle.
“How much money you got?” Rosalee asked, handing me a bottle of ice-cold beer. She stood in front of me with her arms folded. She was tall and thin, but she had curves in all the right places. Her body looked better than all the other women’s in the room, including mine. And, she was the prettiest. Her big brown eyes and full lips took the attention away from her long, narrow face.
I clutched my purse. “Uh, maybe enough to last me about a month. A little over a thousand. I sold my car before I left home and Bo had a little money,” I told her. I drank the beer, wishing it was something stronger.
Ester groaned. Rockelle and Rosalee looked at each other then back to me.
“A thousand dollars ain’t gonna get you nowhere in San Francisco,” Ester hollered, waving her hand. “That wouldn’t pay half of my rent.”
“Well, I don’t need a fancy place. And I do plan to get a job,” I said defensively.
“What kind of work can you do?” Rockelle asked in a steely voice. She looked at her watch then gave Ester an
d Rosalee a mysterious shrug.
“Whatever I can find, I guess. I was workin’ on the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles back home.” I shook my head and laughed. “It was the job from hell.” I looked from one woman to another and said, “I want a job now that pays big money, is easy, and involves dealin’ with some fun people.”
Rosalee clicked her teeth and snorted. “Other than a hit man, a star, or a gangster, ain’t too many jobs like that.”
“A pretty woman like you can make a lot of money,” Ester advised, tapping her fingers on the battered coffee table, giving me a strange look. Her eyes were wide and shiny, making her look like a Spanish doll. And she was as pretty as one with her apple cheeks, upturned nose, and long dark hair. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she had a tight, round little body that jiggled when she walked. “I bet you—”
“Shhhh,” Rockelle cut Ester off. Rising and buttoning her jacket, she looked at her watch again. “Uh, you look tired, Lula,” she noticed. “Ester and I’ll haul ass before you pass out.” Rockelle beckoned for Ester to follow, and they strutted out the door.
Rosalee gave me another beer, a blanket, and two flat pillows.
“Try to get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the mornin’,” she predicted, squeezing my shoulder. “You got somethin’ to sleep in?”
“Yeah.” I nodded toward my suitcases sitting on the floor by the door. “I’ll sleep in my clothes tonight, if you don’t mind,” I said, sliding off my shoes. “I appreciate you lettin’ me stay here. I won’t give you no trouble,” I mumbled as I stretched out on the couch.
“Oh, I ain’t worried about you givin’ me no trouble,” Rosalee told me, heading out of the room. “I’ll leave the light on. You can turn it off when you want to.”
I glanced at the suitcases Bo and I had brought with us. Tears rolled down the side of my face. I didn’t sleep at all that night.
Chapter 10
ROSALEE PITTMAN
I didn’t feel comfortable with a strange woman in my place. In this day and age, who would? There seemed to be just as many maniacs outside of the nuthouses as there were inside. It was times like these that I wished I had not watched so many stupid movies with people running around chopping up people for no good reason.
With Lula on my couch, with God only knew what she had in her purse and on her mind, I reminded myself that there was also a lot of mayhem happening every day in real life. I was having some grim thoughts for a woman in my line of work, but that was a whole ’nother story. I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about that, too.
I locked my bedroom door before I crawled into my bed. And I made sure that the baseball bat I kept for protection was close enough for me to grab if I had to.
But something told me I didn’t have to worry about Lula. She seemed like a nice enough person. I liked her because I felt sorry for her and I could relate to her. What she’d been through sounded almost as bad as my situation. I was surprised that she was holding up as well as she was. If some thug had shot and killed my husband, I don’t think I would have been doing as well as Lula seemed to be.
I don’t know what kind of impression I made on her. But I didn’t just drop out of the sky and land in San Francisco on my back, although sometimes it seemed like it had happened that way. If things had been different, I would never have left Georgia in the first place. Because at one time, I had a real good life.
I grew up in Homeworth, Georgia, a sleepy little farm town that wasn’t even on the map. Everybody knew everybody, and all their business, and we didn’t even have to lock our doors. When I was around thirteen, my daddy started managing a popular grocery store in town. We lived about a mile away from the store, down a dirt road with cornfields on both sides. Even before the grocery store, Daddy was already a tired old man. He had worked hard, doing whatever jobs he could find to take care of a wife and five kids. He’d worked on the railroad and cooked in a prison. Before all of that, he’d dug graves. That was the only job he’d ever complained about. He’d done it so long and hard, he had developed a hump on his back.
Daddy didn’t own the store he ran, but you would have thought he did. The real owners, a childless old White couple, liked Daddy so much, they let him run the place like it was his. He made all the rules, and he did all the hiring and firing. After a while, everybody who worked in that place was related to me. My oldest brother, Marvin, was the bookkeeper. My other brother, Tyrone, and my older sister, Maybelline, worked behind the counter. My only other sister, Dorothy—Dot we called her—ordered everything. Daddy’s main job was to keep his eye on us and make sure we didn’t fuck up.
I was the baby of the family, spoiled as hell, so I spent most of my time driving my siblings and Mama and Daddy up the wall. I only hung around the store when I wanted something, and I ran every time they tried to put me to work.
I’d been to Mississippi where Lula came from. I still had a few distant relatives there. My deceased uncle Doobie had lived in Mississippi with a mysterious woman named Pearl Carl during the early nineties. Miss Pearl was this itty-bitty, light-skinned woman with reddish hair and moles on top of moles on her face. Nobody ever told us where she came from, but she had an accent. Somebody said she came from Haiti, another somebody said it was New Orleans. Wherever she came from, she was heavy into voodoo.
By the time Miss Pearl entered our lives, Black folks had already come a long way as far as voodoo was concerned. But there were a lot of Black folks in the south still living in the Dark Ages. They believed in things that science couldn’t explain. Spooky things like spells and ghosts. Back then and, I am sorry to say, to this day.
I had never talked about this subject with anybody else in California but Clyde. I would share this information with the other girls eventually. I had already told Clyde, mainly because he’d come from one of the same types of little southern towns with some of the same kind of people I grew up around. He knew all about this stuff. “I ain’t scared of nothin’,” he told me one time, waving the nine millimeter Glock he carried all the time and slept with under his pillow. “’Less it’s somethin’ I can’t see…”
I never believed in anything I couldn’t see, either. But I experienced something strange after a girl I used to hang with fell off a roof and died when we were fourteen. Her name was Annie Mae Proctor and she had been my best friend. One of the things that Annie Mae had always liked about me was my long braids. Since she’d been practically bald, I could understand why. Every bald-headed Black girl I ever knew had major issues when it came to hair. I felt sorry for Annie Mae, when people would mistake her for a boy because of her smooth head. However, I hated the way she used to sneak up behind me and tug on my hair.
Well, a week after Annie Mae died, I was in the kitchen standing over the sink washing dishes. The kitchen door slammed, but I didn’t look up right away to see who it was. Then somebody yanked on my freshly braided hair. When I turned around, nobody was there! I forgot about it until it happened again, while I was in the bathroom standing in front of the mirror washing my face. And there was Annie Mae in a white gown, standing behind me, grinning with her gapped teeth sparkling like diamonds. But the girl was dead! I’d attended her funeral and watched them plant her in the ground.
Annie Mae came to visit me two and three times a week. She never said anything, and I wasn’t scared the first few times. But after a while I did get scared. I wanted Annie Mae to go back to wherever it was she was supposed to be. So I finally told Mama.
Mama didn’t even look surprised or scared. She just let out a deep breath and shook her head. “Sister Pearl over in Mississippi knows how to deal with these things,” Mama told me, whispering so the rest of the family wouldn’t hear us talking on our back porch. “We better pay her a visit.” Even though almost everybody I knew had some kind of fear or interest in the supernatural and it was no secret, it was something talked about behind closed doors. Even then, it was usually discussed in low voices or whisper
s.
The very next day, Mama drove me to Mississippi to “shoo off the spook” that was harassing me. In Miss Pearl’s kitchen, a congested little room that always smelled like a just-baked cake, Miss Pearl sprinkled some green stuff on my head that looked like green meal. When my head looked like I had on a green cap, Miss Pearl closed her eyes and mumbled some gibberish. After that, she prayed for about five minutes, massaging my head the whole time. Then she had me drink something from a cracked cup. It was a foul-smelling concoction that looked like something you might expect to see in a toilet. When I gagged and threw up on the kitchen floor, Miss Pearl filled the cup again. She poured that slimy mess down my throat like it was a funnel and held my mouth shut until I swallowed every drop. I felt totally ridiculous the whole time.
After Miss Pearl made me mop my puke up off her floor, Mama slapped a few dollars in her hand and we left. That was the one and only time I had to seek Miss Pearl’s “professional” services, because Annie Mae never came back from the dead to bother me again.
When my uncle died, and since Miss Pearl didn’t have anybody else in Mississippi, Daddy encouraged her to move to Georgia so she could be near us. “Pearl ain’t got no family and she gettin’ on in years,” Daddy said in his gruff voice. He’d made a few visits to Miss Pearl himself, and she had literally straightened him out. The hump on his back had been reduced to a slight curve. Another thing that I’d noticed about my father after his visits to Miss Pearl was that he looked so much better. When he was cleaned up, he was one of the most attractive older Black men in town. He was dark and well-built from working so hard for so long. He had gray eyes like a cat, that more than one woman had admired. And now that he could stand up straight, everywhere I went with him, women with roving eyes gave him looks that made me uncomfortable.