“Nigga, why your shoes so tight?” I asked, with my hands on my hips. “Your mama tie them like that so they don’t fall off your feet? You look like you take the short bus to school, like you retarded.” Sweetie, Peaches, and their boyfriends, Crispy and Mike, fell out laughing.
“Yo, your sister can jone,” said Crispy. I could tell he was impressed. Joneing—or what old folks called “the dozens” and white people called “being mean”—was a survival skill I’d recently picked up. I learned that if I could crack a joke—about somebody’s musty clothes, nappy hair, stanky breath, or pretty much anything about their mama—before they had a chance to jone on me, folks would leave me alone. I didn’t know all that when Mercedes, Porsha, and them were coming for me. But by the time I hit sixth grade I’d found my secret talent: I had a lot of mouth.
Fresh didn’t talk much on the way to the dance. He just shuffled beside me looking down at his sneakers, while the rest of them walked ahead smoking Newports and trying to act cool. Maybe everything would have been different if I’d stuck with Fresh and his corny ass. He wasn’t a greasy Jheri-curled bad boy like the type my sister went for. He barely had the nerve to look me in the eye; he was harmless. I would have been okay with a boy like that. Instead I met Derrick.
We were a few blocks away from the dance when I first heard the music.
Freaks come out at night
Freaks come out at night
Somebody was blasting Whodini through the open window of a beat-up Chevy Nova, and they were headed our way. “Yo!” the driver yelled. “Yo, Crispy!” He made a U-turn, pulled up beside us, and stepped out of his car.
Crispy gave his friend a pound then turned to us. “This my boy, Derrick,” he said.
Derrick was short, with a chipped front tooth, and wearing tight-ass jeans with stiff creases down the middle of each leg.
“Where y’all headed?” Derrick asked.
“To the dance,” said Mike.
“Oh yeah?” Derrick leaned back on his car.
I watched his eyes move from Crispy to Sweetie to Peaches, then land on me. He eyeballed me like he was dead broke and I was a pay-what-you-can hooker. He cocked his head to the side and stared harder.
“What you looking at?” I asked.
“At you!” he said. “You got a big ole butt.”
“Fuck you, you dumb-ass,” I shot back. “Your pants is so stiff if you bend down you gonna break both your legs. Robot-looking muthafucka.”
For a second nobody said anything. Then Derrick bust out laughing: “Damn! Girl, you crazy!”
“Yeah,” said Fresh. “Her ass crazy as hell.”
I guess “crazy” was Derrick’s type, because the next thing I knew he was telling us all to get in his car so he could drive us to the dance. “You sit up front,” he said, grabbing my arm. “You gonna ride with me.”
The dance was on fire. It was the summer of 1984, the early days of hip-hop, and the rec center was filled with kids locking, popping, and uprocking. “Candy Girl” came on and Peaches, Sweetie, and all their friends busted out the Cabbage Patch, which they’d been practicing to perfection. I did my signature move, the snake, rolling my body from side to side. But it was Derrick who stole the show. That boy could moonwalk just like Michael and pop the splits better than James Brown. I was checking him out from the corner of my eye when “Purple Rain” came on and suddenly he was grabbing me from behind and humping my ass like a dog in heat.
“Get the fuck off me,” I yelled, peeling his hands off my butt. He just laughed and humped me some more.
“Purple raaaaaaaain,” he sang in my ear, pulling me close.
At the end of the night, Derrick told everybody he was going to drive me home. “She not gonna do nothing,” Sweetie said, leaning her head into the driver’s-side window. “She’s a virgin.” She laughed, grabbed Crispy’s hand, and wrapped his arm over her shoulder. You could tell by the way the two of them were walking down the street, hugged up like they were glued at the hips, that they were on their way to do some very non-virgin activities.
“That true?” Derrick asked, turning to me. “You really a virgin?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “I like that.”
I was proud of my status. In my mind, there were only two ways for a girl to be, a virgin or a ho. Thanks to Mama’s baptism hustle, I had been all over town hearing preachers hollering about the evils of fornication. I knew God didn’t want me to be no ho.
A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of our duplex. I opened the door to get out, but Derrick put his hand on my knee. “Hold up,” he said. “I wanna talk to you.”
“’Bout what?”
“’Bout you.”
He wanted to know what kind of music I liked, what movies I’d seen, and who I lived with. “You smoke reefer?” he asked.
“Nah.”
“Drink beer?”
“I don’t do none of that.”
“What’s your favorite movie?”
“Breakin’.”
“Yeah, that movie’s fresh to death,” he said. “You ever been roller-skating?”
“Nah.”
“I should take you some time. You cute. I like you.”
For a minute I thought I was hearing things. But then he said it again.
“I like you. I’ma take you skating.”
No one in my whole life had ever told me I was cute. And no one had ever said they wanted to take me anywhere, except for Mr. John, but that didn’t count. I sat in Derrick’s car and stared at my hands, trying to stop my heart from beating so loud.
“How old are you?” I asked. I knew Derrick had to be older than me, since he had a car. But I wasn’t expecting the answer he gave. “Twenty,” he answered. He turned to look at me. “How old are you?”
Derrick had eight years on me, but I didn’t want him to think I was a little girl. So I lied. “I’m eighteen.”
He raised his eyebrows. But he didn’t say a thing.
We stayed in his car talking until the sun came up. It was five in the morning when I finally went inside and took my ass to bed. I was so tired I didn’t even remember to put a plastic shower cap on to keep my Jheri curl juice on my hair, where it belonged. When I woke up to the sound of Mama calling my name, there was curl activator grease all over my face.
“Rabbit!” she yelled from the other side of the bedsheet hanging in the kitchen. “Some pea-headed boy here for you.”
“What?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“Some boy at the door say he looking for you.”
I rolled off my mattress, pulled on my jeans shorts, and stepped into the kitchen. Mama was at the counter, cutting up a turkey wing with her big kitchen knife. “Don’t just stand there,” she said, looking at me. “Go see who it is.”
The only boy I could think of who might come to see me was Petey, my friend who lived up the street. Sometimes the two of us would hang out together and talk about football and practice kissing. Petey was two years older than me, in ninth grade. He was short and thick and had big dreams of being a running back for the Georgia Bulldogs. We’d talk football and I’d watch him “pump iron,” which consisted of him doing curls with the one twenty-pound barbell he and his six brothers shared between them. One time when I was at his house, after he finished describing to me the “dope-ass” play he ran in JV practice, he pushed me down in his bed and tried to grab on my titties. I was so mad, I pinned him in a figure four and punched him in the throat. “We just friends, nigga!” I yelled in his face.
But it wasn’t Petey at the door. It was Derrick, dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing the night before, only the crease in his jeans wasn’t as sharp.
“Hey,” I said, letting him into the living room. “What you doing here?”
“I came by to see if you had a good time last night.”
“Why?”
“Because I like you.”
I looked at the floor, feeling
my face getting hot. Mama must have been listening from the kitchen, because she came back into the living room holding her cooking knife.
“Hey,” she said, squinting at Derrick. “You like my baby?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We friends,”
“She tell you how old she is?”
“Yeah, she say she eighteen.”
Mama let out a snort. “Girl, stop lyin’,” she said, heading back to the kitchen. “You know your hot ass only twelve. You hear that, boy? She twelve.”
Derrick shot me a glance. But he didn’t get up to leave. He didn’t do anything except tell me my body didn’t look like no twelve-year-old’s. He reached out and gently pulled me to him, rubbing on my arm. “You got a pretty smile,” he said, real low so Mama couldn’t hear. “And nice lips,” he whispered.
I didn’t know what was happening in my body. It felt like somebody had dumped a cup of baby mice in my belly and they were running around, making me all tingly. Derrick was making me feel good. I wanted that feeling to last forever.
On top of the TV was a pencil and an empty pack of Mama’s Winstons. I ripped open the cigarette box, spread it flat on top of the set, and slowly, in my best penmanship, wrote Derrick a note: “Will you be my boyfriend?” Underneath I made two boxes, one marked yes and the other no.
Derrick gave me a funny look when I handed him the paper.
“Rabbit . . .” he started to say.
Then he stopped himself.
He picked up the pencil and put a check in the box marked yes.
Chapter 7
Love Lesson
Before Mr. John started coming around, messing with me and my sister and buying Mama food, my mother actually had herself a real good man. Mama’s boyfriend Curtis first lived with us at the liquor house. On Sunday mornings while Mama was sleeping off her drunk, he would take me and Sweetie out to Grandma’s Biscuits for breakfast and let us order whatever we wanted. And when Mama was beating us too crazy with her leather belt, he was the one who would step in and tell her to take it easy. “C’mon now, Mildred,” he’d say. “They just being kids.”
Curtis worked out behind the Grey and White Auto Parts, fixing cars in the parking lot, under the shade of a big oak tree out behind the shop. He stood five foot four—his friends called him Shorty—and he had a receding hairline. If you squinted, he kinda looked like George Jefferson, if Mr. Jefferson dressed in grease-stained jeans and work boots instead of three-piece suits. Curtis wasn’t much to look at, but everybody at the liquor house knew he treated Mama right. Aunt Vanessa used to say, “You better hang on to that one, Mildred. You got a good one right there,” which meant Mama had a man willing to take care of a bunch of kids who weren’t even his.
After Granddaddy got locked up for shooting Miss Betty, Curtis moved Mama and all us kids into a little house across town, on Oliver Street, with three bedrooms and a yard out back where Mama planted vegetables and kept a little chicken coop. With Curtis, Mama didn’t have to worry about a thing. He paid the rent and took care of all the bills. He even bought Mama her very own car, a pale pink ‘69 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Mama called her ride the Pink Panther and drove it all over town playing B. B. King on the eight-track and singing at the top of her lungs, Rock me, baby, rock me all night long! But of all the things Curtis did for Mama, the best he ever did was getting her some brand new teeth
For as long as I’d known Mama, she never had any front teeth. Aunt Vanessa told me that when I was a little baby, my daddy had balled up his fists and knocked Mama’s teeth right out her mouth. “That’s when your uncle chased him off with a shotgun,” Aunt Vanessa said. Mama told me my father was a “no-good downtown clown” who never did anything for her except beat her ass and treat her like dirt.
Curtis was Mama’s chance to do things right.
The day Curtis brought Mama home from the dentist, all us kids gathered in the kitchen to stare at Mama’s mouth. She rested her elbows on the table in front of her and put her hands up to her face, fanning out her fingers and smiling wide.
“Oooooweeeee!” said Jeffro. “Mama got her front door fixed.”
“How I look?” she asked, excited. Then she answered her own question. “I look good!”
Actually, she looked crazy. Those dentures were too big for her face. Mama looked like she was wearing a set of donkey teeth. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell her she got the wrong size teeth. “Took Curtis six months to pay off the dentist!” she exclaimed. “Six months!”
She turned to Curtis: “You got a sister looking just like Diana Ross. I’m finna go down to the Grey and White and smile at all the mens!” She let out a giant laugh. That’s when her donkey teeth slid out of her mouth and fell on the table. “Oh!” she said, scooping them up and sticking them back in. “Guess I just gotta get used to them.”
Too bad for Mama, those dentures weren’t as easy to get used to as she thought. She’d wear them for a few hours and then they’d start to hurt, so she’d take them out to rest her mouth. I’d find them on the kitchen counter, or on top of the TV. Once, after they’d been missing for days, I found them in the back of the freezer. Still, Mama loved those teeth. She said they made her feel as sharp as Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless. I didn’t see the similarity, unless you count the fact that the two of them were both drunks. Katherine Chancellor sipped her liquor out of crystal glasses; Mama sucked her gin straight from the bottle.
As much as Mama liked her new look, something changed not long after she got her new teeth. It was like a switch flipped, and Mama got it in her head that the only reason Curtis was being nice to her was because he was up to no good. Suddenly she was angry all the time.
Curtis would come home from work, and she would meet him at the door with her hand on her hip and start interrogating him like she already knew he was guilty: “Where you been all day, Curtis? You think I don’t know what you up to?”
He’d look at her, confused. “I been at work, and you know that.”
But Mama wouldn’t let it go. The drunker she was, the worse it got.
Curtis came home one day looking dog tired and stinking of sweat and motor oil. Mama followed him into the bedroom, a half-empty pint of gin in one hand and a Winston hanging from her mouth.
“Where you been, you short-ass grease monkey?” she demanded. I noticed she was gripping the doorframe to steady herself. That was never a good sign. “I said, Where you muthafuckin’ been?”
Curtis sat down on the edge of the bed to pull off his work boots. He didn’t even look up. “Mildred, you know where I been,” he said wearily.
“Oh, I know where you been all right!” She pointed a finger at his chest. “Out fucking some hos!”
“No, Mildred. The only place I been is at the Grey and White. I put in a transmission, took me all gotdamn day.”
“You a muthafuckin’ lie!” Mama shrieked. “You ain’t nothin’ but a low-down sawed-off little nigga!”
It was hard not to feel sorry for Curtis. Even though he’d spent eight years in the military and could probably kill a man if he had to, he was the quiet type. Most times he didn’t even make a sound when he laughed. The only way you could tell he thought something was funny was by his shoulders shaking up and down. It was like his number one mission in life was not to get noticed. But Mama wouldn’t get out of his face.
“You gonna hit me, Curtis?” Mama hollered. “That what you gonna do? Try me, nigga! Just try me!”
Mama’s veins were popping out of her neck. Curtis looked up at her and let out a loud sigh. It was the kind of sigh that said, How the hell did I end up with this crazy-ass bitch? Then he lay back on the bed and pulled a pillow over his face. That’s what really set her off.
“Oh, hell nah!” she screamed. “Hell to the muthafuckin’ nah!”
She stomped into the kitchen, grabbed her dentures off the counter, and stormed out of the house. “You ain’t gonna play me for a fool, you Gary Coleman little-dic
k-having somabitch!” she yelled. “Think you know me? I’ma show you.” She kept up her hollering as the screen door slammed behind her: “I’MA SHOW YOU!!!”
Dre, Sweetie, and I ran to the front window to see where she was headed. Curtis was right behind us. Outside we could see Mama, dressed in her faded pink housecoat and no shoes, marching through the yard toward the Pink Panther. We all watched as she bent down and put her dentures on the road, right by the front tire of her car.
“Jesus!” yelled Curtis as he ran out of the house after her. “Mildred, you done lost your damn mind!”
Mama looked over at Curtis running toward her and stepped into the car. She revved the engine just as he reached out to grab the door handle. But he was too late. The Pink Panther lurched forward and rolled right over those fake teeth. Mama leaned out her window and screamed, “Fuck you!” before she backed up and drove over her teeth again.
“Daaaaaaaamn!” said Dre, as we watched from the living room window. “Mama’s cold-blooded.” He sounded impressed. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Curtis.
Outside on the curb, he put his hands on top of his head like he was trying to keep it from exploding off his body. Then he turned his back on Mama, and walked slowly toward the house.
He left us after that. He said, “I can’t take this shit no more,” packed up his work boots, his oil-stained jeans, all his tools, and moved out. Mama must have known it was her own crazy ass that ran him off, but she still seemed surprised to see him go. “Why?” she wailed, as he walked out the door. “How you gonna leave me with all these damn kids?” Nothing she said made a difference. Curtis was done.
Things got real bad after that. Mama went from being a regular alcoholic to one of those drunks who didn’t do anything but cry. She’d cry and drink her gin and cry and whoop us kids. She’d sit at the kitchen table all night long howling about how nobody loved her. Sometimes Mama got so in her feelings about Curtis being gone that she’d put me and Sweetie in the back of the Pink Panther, drive over to the Grey and White, and raise Cain in front of all his friends.
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