I grabbed the first thing I could find, which was some pet spray—stuff for the carpet, for pets, you know? I sprayed that in his face. Apparently, that shit don’t feel good, because he started covering his eyes and screaming.
I didn’t stick around after that, I just wanted to get the fuck out the house.
But as I was running, somehow he caught me and tackled me and sat on me. He closed the door and just sat on me. He sat on me for about forty-five minutes, until I was just not moving or whatever.
He sat on me so long, because I kept fighting. I’d be still for a second, and just like bam, you know, flip out and try to get up out of there.
Ex-Husband: “You need to listen to me. You’re disrespectful. You’re ornery.”
Tiffany: “But you picked me. You married me. You came looking for me. I didn’t come looking for you. If you don’t like who I am, why the fuck you here? Let me up, and I’ll go.”
Ex-Husband: “Just shut the fuck up.”
But I wouldn’t shut up. That ain’t my thing, shutting up. He sat on me and lectured me, telling me how fucked up I was as a person or whatever for like an hour. Finally, he got off me, and he dragged me into the guest room and locked me in the guest room.
Ex-Husband: “You’re not coming out till you’re calm. Bitch, you stay in the holding tank.”
I was a prisoner. In my own home.
Ladies, a quick word of advice: that shit is a felony. I did not know it at the time, but someone locking you away without your consent is straight-up kidnapping. A felony. I should have just called the police, but I didn’t know that.
He kept me in there till the next day.
Ex-Husband: “Are you ready to be a mature adult now? Are you ready to talk up a conversation like a regular adult?”
Tiffany: “Yeah, let’s talk.”
He opened the door, and I walked straight out to the bedroom, got out my suitcase, and I started packing my shit.
Tiffany: “You can talk to me while I pack my shit. I’m leaving. I’m out of here. I’m going go to my grandma’s house.”
Ex-Husband: “Not in my car. You’re not taking my car.”
Tiffany: “That’s okay. I’ll take my Geo Metro.”
That thing was barely working, but I wouldn’t get rid of the Geo.
Tiffany: “I still got my apartment. I’ll go back to my apartment with my ornery ass.”
Ex-Husband: “No. You don’t got to go nowhere. I’m out of here. I’m leaving.”
He just got in the car and left. That was easy. Then his mama called me:
Mama: “Why did you send my son home? What the hell?”
Tiffany: “I didn’t send him nowhere. Your son choked me. Your son sat on me. Your son locked me up. Your son is abusive.”
I took pictures of my throat and stuff and sent them to her.
Mama: “Oh you’re a great actress. You’re a wonderful makeup artist.”
Tiffany: “I ain’t no makeup artist. Did you see my makeup at the wedding? I did that myself, and it was horrible, so knock that shit off.”
I ended up taking him back. He apologized, sort of, and sent me gifts, and I felt terrible about everything, and we got back together.
I felt like maybe it was my fault, because I was intoxicated. Maybe I wasn’t listening. Maybe I was doing too much wrong. So maybe it was my fault. That’s how I felt at the time.
I know, I know. You’re right. I should not have taken him back. It’s easy to sit here now and evaluate this and see I made the wrong decision. I know that.
But it wasn’t easy for me, at the time. A lot of women who suffer physical violence go through this. You get in a bad relationship, and you don’t—or you can’t—find your way out. It’s easy to talk about leaving him. It’s hard to do it. Part of you really thinks it will get better, and he said it would.
Obviously, it didn’t get better.
One night at the Laugh Factory, a bunch of friends from high school came in and saw the show and had a great time. Afterwards, we went next door, and they had drinks. I didn’t have any drinks because I had to drive seventy miles home, I just danced around. I got home about 2:30 a.m. and I hadn’t called him to tell him I was going to be out with them or anything. He was very upset.
Ex-Husband: “Where the fuck was you at?”
Tiffany: “I was with my high school friends, they showed up to the show to surprise me! Man, it would have been so great if you would have been there.”
I was all smiling and happy. He just lifted me up off the ground by my throat.
Ex-Husband: “Don’t be standing here lying to me, smiling in my face, telling me you were dancing with some bitches, you a motherfucking liar.”
Tiffany: “I’m not a liar, you can look on Facebook. The pictures are on Facebook.”
He was choking the shit out of me, my eyes like went red, and I was just looking at him. I didn’t try to hit him back or nothing. I was just like . . . I couldn’t believe it. I thought to myself, This is how I’m going to die. I’m going to die, because I was having fun with my classmates. That’s what I was thinking.
Then he just dropped me.
Ex-Husband: “Anytime you just change your mind about what you’re going to do, when you get sidetracked, you call me and you tell me where the fuck you at, because I need to know. It is my job to protect you, and you have to tell me where you at, and what the fuck you’re doing, because I have to protect you. It’s my job as your husband to protect you.”
Tiffany: “But I was safe. I felt safe. I didn’t need you. I don’t need you to protect me.”
I slept in the guest room for like two weeks after that. I thought I was going to leave, but I didn’t. Once I had taken him back after the first incident, I guess that was it. I accepted that this was part of our relationship.
A few months later, I had to go to Montreal to do the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival. I was scheduled to be there for two weeks. I had a great time the first week. The second week, he came to visit me.
He would not leave my side, and all I wanted to do was hang out with all the comedians down in the lobby. We’d be talking and cracking jokes and stuff, up till like three, four in the morning, just hanging out, laughing, and talking. Dom Irrera was there, and he and Dom were talking, and he basically spent an hour telling Dom how everybody’s fake and phony. Saying stuff like he knows they’re all trying to fuck me and all this stuff.
Tiffany: “What if they are trying to fuck me? I’m not going to fuck them. They would have to like gang rape me to get me. Like, I’m not going to do that.”
Ex-Husband: “Yeah, bullshit, bullshit. You’d probably like it.”
Then Tom Green comes over, and he is talking to me and making me laugh so hard. I was just laughing and laughing, and that shit was making my ex-husband so mad. He grabbed me by my collar, he was like, “It’s time to go to the room now,” in front of everybody. Just snatched me by my shirt, and pulled me to the elevator, and threw me in it.
Jo Koy was in the elevator, and I think Adam Ray was, too.
Jo: “You all right, Tiff? Is everything okay? Are you good? Are you good?”
Ex-Husband: “She’s fine. She’s just fine. You all stop fucking talking to her. Getting tired of everybody talking to her motherfucking ass.”
Tiffany: “I’m okay guys. I’m okay. I’m all right.”
I was just trying to make a silly face, trying to be cool, or whatever. Anything to avoid the mortifying embarrassment I was feeling.
Once we got to our hotel room, he was so quick. He snatched me by the neck and slammed me into the wall.
Ex-Husband: “Don’t you ever fucking embarrass me like that again. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I had a knot on the side of my head from where he slammed me into the wall, and all these marks on my throat, where he had dug in his nails. I’d had enough.
Tiffany: “Look, straight-up you need to leave, or I’m going to call the police on you. You’re going to go to jail
in Canada. I’m going to call the police.”
He refused to leave, so I go to grab the phone, and he rips it out of the wall.
Tiffany: “You really need to leave or I’m going to the police. I haven’t been to the police before, but there’s nail marks on my throat, I’m getting a knot on the side of my head. You need to leave. You really need to go back to California, get the fuck up out of here, because I’m calling the police.”
Ex-Husband: “I ain’t going nowhere. I ain’t going no-motherfucking-where.”
Then I just got really quiet, really calm, like just curled up in the corner, just got really quiet. I let him yell at me. He went into the bathroom, and I bolted out the door, down the stairs, and now I was running around the streets of Montreal.
I was running past the other comedians—full-on running. They were calling out, “Yo Tiff, where are you going? What you running for? What you running from?”
I wasn’t about to stop and talk to them. I was too embarrassed, too scared, too upset, too fucked up to talk to anyone. I needed help, but I wasn’t about to ask for, or take, any.
I roamed the streets of Montreal till about eight o’clock in the morning. Just walking around. Just roaming. Anything I saw that looked like him, I ran down another street. I was tripping. When I got back to the room, about nine o’clock in the morning, he was gone. All his stuff was gone.
During this time in my life, I had dedicated myself to becoming a better wife, so I had started studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses. He liked that.
Ex-Husband: “Yeah, I’ll never be a Jehovah’s Witness, but you should be one, because they know how to be submissive. They’re submissive to their men. They do whatever their men tell them to do, so that’s what you should do.”
The Jehovah’s Witnesses do Bible study on Skype. When I got back to my hotel room at nine in the morning, they hit me up on Skype for our regular Bible study.
JW: “What happened to you?”
I hadn’t even looked at myself, and when I saw myself on the Skype . . . I saw there was a knot on my forehead, there were all these welt marks across my throat.
Tiffany: “Oh man. My husband came out here, we got into it, he choked me.”
Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in divorce. Not for any reason. They were all like:
JW: “You need to get a divorce. You have to get out of this.”
Then the lady leading the Bible study calls her husband. Her husband’s an elder, but she gets him on Skype right away.
JW: “Look at Tiffany. Look at her. She needs to get a divorce. Don’t you think?”
He is an elder, he is big-time. At first, he started off with the normal lines:
Elder: “Nobody gets divorced. We could talk through this. You could work it out.”
JW: “LOOK AT HER FACE!”
He got real quiet. Then he said in a solemn voice:
Elder: “You have to get a divorce. When you come back from Montreal, you’re staying with us. You have to get a divorce. You cannot be in a relationship like this. This is not going to work, Tiffany. This man is not godly.”
They started reading all the Bible scriptures to me about it. I was crying and stuff, and I had a show to do in a few hours.
Tiffany: “I really need to take a nap. I got a show.”
I went to sleep.
I woke up confused about where I was. I had forgotten that I got my ass whipped by my husband. My reflection in the mirror was a shock.
I put makeup on my neck and pulled my bangs over the knot on my forehead.
When I got to the stage, the lights were unexpectedly bright. They were hot. When my makeup started running, everyone there could tell I had been beaten. They could see the marks.
But everybody knew already, they didn’t need to see the marks. Those comedians around the elevator and lobby told everybody.
Everywhere I went, people would ask me, “You all right? We heard you got beat. Are you okay? You need help?”
I told everyone I was good.
But I wasn’t good. I was in a bad way. All those people there wanted to help, but I couldn’t receive their help. All I could do was push them away, and then go back to the dude that was abusing me.
Why?
I ask myself that a lot. I don’t know the answer. Maybe because I didn’t want to be a quitter. I felt like it was my first time making a commitment in front of God, and getting married was a big deal to me. I’d never been baptized or anything like that. So this was the biggest commitment that I’d ever made in my life, and I didn’t want to be a quitter, I wanted to find a way to make it work. I didn’t want to seem like I just gave up.
Even though I got beat up. Even though the Jehovah’s Witnesses were telling me to get out. Even though a different pastor, from the Baptist Church, was also telling me to get out. It was like God was sending me all these messages to get the fuck out, but I still couldn’t.
Maybe it was just that I didn’t know any other way to be loved. Maybe this was the only man that I had ever thought truly loved me. Maybe I just couldn’t leave that, no matter how bad it was.
I don’t know. It’s still hard to think about this.
On some level, I felt like if I loved him enough, I could heal him. I could heal him from being mad, from being so vicious.
It was like those Twilight movies. It was the same thing for me. I can keep him from drinking human blood. I can bring him deer blood, I can heal him. I just have to love him the right way. I just have to figure out his language, learn how to speak his language.
I even went and talked to his mama:
Tiffany: “How did you show him that you loved him?”
Mama: “Girl, once I burned him with a hot comb, because he was messing with my butt.”
Tiffany: “Okay, so I need to burn him with a hot comb?”
Mama: “He was a terrible child. I had to lock him in the house and tell him don’t touch nothing until I get back from work.”
That was not good advice. So how do I do this? I just really wanted to be a great wife.
Really, I wanted to be a better wife than my mom was.
I wanted to be supportive, not a pushover. But actually take care of the kids, actually take care of people. If I say I’m going to do something, to do it, to have it done. Just better than how she was to me. I wanted to clean the house. Make sure my man don’t have no roaches in his house. My mom had roaches in the house. We would never have a roach issue, thank you very much.
So I recommitted. And things got worse at home. He set down new rules for me.
Ex-Husband: “You’re not allowed to get text messages or phone calls after ten o’clock, because that’s disrespecting our marriage. I don’t care if your grandma can’t call you after 10 p.m., I don’t care if somebody died, that’s disrespecting our marriage.”
I went along with that. I made everybody talk to me between nine and five o’clock. Business hours. I legit told that to people.
Even though I’m a comedian, and sometimes clubs would be like, “Hey, can you come and do this spot?” I didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t talk to them. I told them, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. If you don’t call me during business hours, I can’t talk.”
Finally, the tide started to turn. I started to see the light. But it wasn’t because of anything physically abusive he did to me. More abuse did come, but the last straw was something very different.
One night, we were driving away from the Laugh Factory, and he got a text message. His phone was in the center console, and it popped up on the screen.
Lisa: “Why you be lying?”
I saw that and I knew. Before I even knew, I knew.
Tiffany: “Who is Lisa?”
Ex-Husband: “What are you talking about? You’re seeing things.”
Tiffany: “No. No. No. Who is Lisa, and why does she say you’ve been lying?”
Ex-Husband: “You tripping. You seeing things. Something wrong with your eyes.”
Tif
fany: “Oh, now I’m blind?”
Ex-Husband: “You know you can’t read.”
Tiffany: “No, I can read now, and this says Lisa: ‘Why you be lying?’ ”
Ex-Husband: “No. You tripping.”
I grabbed the phone, and I started texting her: “Why?” She texts back in two seconds, like she’s a professional text messager.
Lisa: “Because you said you was giving me some money to get my nails and hair done tonight.”
I texted back, and I read my message out loud, “ ‘Well you know my wife be spending up my money.’ ”
As I texted that back, he got so mad. He grabbed me by the head and pushed my head into the window. He was trying to get the phone, and I was pulling the phone back.
Tiffany: “Nigga, what is wrong with you? Like what the fuck is wrong with you? What did I tell you about putting your motherfucking hands on me? Get your motherfucking hands off of me!”
Then he pulled over, and he took the phone from me.
Tiffany: “Why you don’t want her to know that your wife’s spending your money? What’s up with that? What’s up with that? What’s up with that? What’s up with that?”
When we black women repeat our words, you know shit is bad. Well, shit was bad.
Ex-Husband: “You need to shut the fuck up.”
Tiffany: “No. You need to shut the fuck up. I told you to keep your motherfucking hands off of me, and you put your hands on me, and you know what’s going to happen. When we get where we got to go, somebody’s getting their ass beat, and it ain’t going to be me.”
I poked him in the side of the head. When I poked him in the side of the head, he went ballistic.
Ex-Husband: “I’m not afraid to fight no one, and I’ll pull your ass out the car.”
Tiffany: “Pull me out the car, motherfucker.”
He waited until we got home, and then it was basically an MMA fight. Except he was big and trained in hand-to-hand combat by the police academy, and I was small and fighting for my life.
He choked me a bunch of times. I scratched at him, I ran from him, all of that. I hit him, but my punches didn’t do shit. He’s a big guy. I hit him as hard as I could with a pool stick a few times (I found that in the back of his car). He grabbed me by the throat and threw me into a shelf at one point. It was like being tossed around by the Incredible Hulk. I thought my eye socket was broke. My lip was busted. I was tore up.
The Last Black Unicorn Page 13