I was starting to feel sluggish and woozy as she talked. So she was Devon’s damn surprise. Ugh. He had the worst taste in surprises; I didn’t want or need a woman in our relationship.
“Honey? If it’s even you. Why would you hurt him, he hasn’t done anything to you?”
She didn’t answer me, she slowly backed away, taking enough bubbles with her to cover her body. She was staring at me the entire time. My eyes were starting to feel lazy. Not sleepy, just lazy.
“Michelle? I’m not gonna kill you. You’ll wish you were dead by the time I’m finished though. When you an’ Larissa decided how and what would happen to everybody around you, it was like playin’ God and shit right? You ever tried china white? I think we gonna stay here until you love china white more than you love life.”
What the fuck is china white? I tried to think of every damn drug I’d ever heard of or seen Ris do or deal with. Honey climbed out of the Jacuzzi, gracing me with a view of her full bare ass. She had a stripper’s ass, and then, there they were on her left shoulder, the letters Honey. It was definitely her. A new surge of adrenaline and fear coursed through me, and I tried to get up off the seat before she came back from wherever she was. Devon was laid out across the bed, I could barely see his chest rising and falling. There wasn’t anything close that I could use for a weapon except . . .
Grabbing the champagne flute, I slipped it into the water and snapped the cup off the stem against the edge. I ran my thumb across the jagged glass pick I’d created. It could work. Honey came sashaying back from the direction of the bathroom.
“Just in case you wanna’ try some sneaky shit, I brought my l’il friend,” she announced with a fake accent and a giggle waving a small gun. “Now, come here.”
I refused to let the only weapon I had go, it was no match for a gun, but she wouldn’t have that gun in her hand forever. My legs felt like rubber as I tried to stand up. I used my imbalance as a reason to turn my back to her, and I slid the washcloth over my glass shank. She walked over just as I managed to climb up and sit on the edge of the tub, guess I was moving too slow for her.
“Look at me, Michelle. It’s time to start your new life,” she instructed.
I refused, scared she was about to stick the barrel of the gun to my forehead or in between my lips. I sat there, naked and shivering, shaking my head no. She pointed the gun at me and my nostrils flared as I weighed my options. Reluctantly, I did as told and she blew some kind of powder into my face. I coughed and gasped for air, rubbing my eyes and blinking. She started speaking but her voice sounded like she was in a different room, and it was strange but I felt happy as fuck. Like there was nothing wrong at all. I couldn’t remember where I was or why, but I honestly didn’t care, everything was good.
“That was scopolamine, or devil’s breath. You won’t remember none of this. Now, we are going to have ourselves some fun.”
I watched everything from somewhere inside my body. It was like I wasn’t in control of what I was doing; I just gladly did as I was told. Honey scampered away and came back. She laid out all these syringes, pills and powders in front of me and I smiled down at them. She laughed at me and I laughed with her.
“We are gonna play a game. We’ll start with the pills and you’ll work your way up until you get to the syringes. There’s one for you and your boo, Krokodile. It’s paint thinner, kinda like heroin, tears your skin to shit, so we’ll save it for last. Um, this should be heroin, or it’s morphine, I don’t remember. But, when your man wakes up, you’ll pick a needle, walk over like nothing’s wrong, and give him a shot. Okay?” she asked.
“Alrighty. But, what do I win?” I asked.
“You win a fucked up drug habit, and we’ll ride to your bank and you’ll withdraw some money for me after that you’ll go get your son so I can take him with me. He won’t want to be with your broke drugged up ass now will he? Isn’t that how everyone thought about me?”
“Yes, that is how we thought.” I giggled like we were discussing an episode of Love and Hip Hop and not my son.
“Okay, let’s do some pills or something, my ass gettin’ bored as fuck.”
Honey took two and handed me two; I did what she did and swallowed them, drinking from the moscato bottle nearby. She threw a robe at me and I slid it over my body, enjoying the feel of the cotton gliding over my skin. Devon moaned over on the bed, so I did as instructed and reached down, picking up a syringe filled with this brownish tinged fluid. I watched him in the setting sun and waited, excited to have a mission. Honey swayed on her feet and I giggled at her. Devon shifted and I rushed toward him smiling, he was waking up and Honey took off in the direction of the bathroom.
“Don’t worry. I think this one is the cracker bill . . . crocodile. . . heroin. This one is heroin.” I called out to her, straddling Devon.
He opened his eyes as the needle jabbed into the skin of his neck, I started to press the end of the syringe, smiling brightly all the while.
“Nothing’s wrong.” I told him, just as I was instructed.
Frowning, he swatted me off of him with a growl.
“What the hell are you doing?” He touched his fingers to his neck.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, it was as if I needed a script.
Devon rushed past me, toward the bathroom, and I followed behind him.
“Aww, what the fuck?” he cursed.
I looked around him, Honey was on her knees in front of the toilet. Well, more like her head was in the toilet. From the looks of it the pills she’d taken didn’t mix well with whatever was in the bottle of moscato. She went to vomit, passed out, hitting her head on the way down, she drowned with her face in the toilet bowl.
I had the worst headache of my life the next day. We didn’t say anything to the police about her drugging me. Devon carefully put everything in her bag, and luckily for her, they didn’t mention any of that in their reports to the media. It looked like an accident and they left it at that. I remembered bits and pieces of what she’d said and I’d laid him out decent for finding a random female to come through in the first place.
As an apology, Devon finally let me have my way and he agreed to let me do teeniest bit of redecorating in his “asylum” portion of the hospital. I told him that after having firsthand experience as an actual guest and an actual million-dollar broker, I was beyond qualified to help make the place a little more antidepressant.
“Devon, I’m not even crazy and I wanted to kill myself after only a week up in here.” I laughed.
“That is sea-foam green and it’s statistically relaxing,” he retorted.
“Mmm hmm, just like your ‘statistically dramatic’ date that almost put you in the ER? Humph, relaxing my ass.”
My first order of business was repainting and redoing the floors. No more of that putrid green, period. We were putting lounge chairs and couches in the visiting areas; no more of that sitting in the cafeteria shit. You treat people like children in a mess hall and they’d act that way. Plain and simple. I’d found some nice landscape portraits of fields and flowers, dreamy stuff that depressed people would feel uplifted looking at. Overseeing the process was a headache as always. I had to keep the patients quarantined to one area, work in another, and keep Devon calm.
“Ms. Michelle?” one of the painters called out. “All this needs to be redone; the wall is chipping.”
I wouldn’t be able to get that kind of job past Devon. He’d have a fit. Maybe if we did it in pieces. This old place should have been redecorated and primped ages ago. I gave the painter the go-ahead, telling Devon’s ass take the day off; his pacing combined with the spot and corner checking was getting on every last one of our nerves. I was pretty sure I caught him with a leveler over a picture.
We’d found a nice place that would take Reena and we decided to split the cost of her stay equally. On nicer days they let their patients go outdoors for a few hours, and I’d decided to personally see if she was settling in okay before we le
ft her in their care. Devon walked with me. Reena was sitting on one of the cement benches beside the rosebushes this place had. I wanted to nudge or punch him and say “see, they have rosebushes.” Men don’t know anything about what the hell would cheer up a depressed anybody.
“Reena, it’s your lucky day,” one of the nurses called out from the hospital entrance waving. “Your sister is here to see you.”
She approached us, wearing a dramatically huge black Kentucky Derby straw hat, and I shielded my eyes, smiling brightly. The sun was glimmering off all these gold bangles, bands, rings, and such.
I extended my hand.
Let me find out Mona can clean up?
When she gripped it in a firm handshake I immediately snapped it back as she pulled off that hat.
“What in the hell? What the kind of bullshit is this? What are you doing here?” I huffed at her.
All the patients who were outside, started screaming or skipping and singing at the sound of my outburst. One of them even had the nerve to start skipping around us singing ring around the damn roses.
I grabbed Shiree’s ass around the neck and held her in a straight-up choke hold. All the gold bangles on her wrist clanged in protest as she waved wildly, flaying her arms, trying to grab me. I wasn’t about to get played or taken down by her or anyone else. Not after Honey came and zombie voodoo blasted me in the damn face at the hotel, and especially not after I’d just seen Shiree’s ass cozied up with Big Baby and Honey. Rah said he was in love with her ass, too. Oh, no, we were not having this conversation any other way than how I had her ass.
Devon was telling me to calm down, the orderlies were trying to get me to calm down, Shiree was trying to get out my damn arms.
1. “You had the nerve date him or whatever after me and then show up here? You set Ris up? You probably set Honey up that day at the restaurant didn’t you?”
“I wanted to pay my respects to Ms. White; it ain’t got shit to do with you,” Shiree squeaked from under my arm.
Hearing her name, Reena floated over like the world wasn’t in chaos all around her. “Michelle, where you been, girl? I ever tell you how I met Rasheed daddy?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes and tightened my grip. “Yes, you have,” I snapped. Nobody was trying to hear that mess right now, especially not me.
“No, I always skip the beginning. Let me tell you the beginning, baby.”
Chapter 27
Summer, 1986
“Look, how many times do I have to tell you to leave my damn son alone?”
“But it’s his baby, I swear. I wouldn’t lie about something like this.” I pleaded pathetically, but she wasn’t trying to hear a word I had to say.
This definitely wasn’t what I was hoping for given my circumstances. I’d caught two buses and walked Lord knows how many blocks just to get over here. The sun felt like it was damn near sitting on the back of my neck the entire way, and I only had enough cash on me for bus fare back. I’d stared some poor little Jamaican dude down so hard he’d actually backed up into his shop out of the doorway. Shit, my mind wasn’t even on the cash register; if I stole anything up out of there it’d be beef patties and an ice-cold Ting soda.
“I swear, if your little trifling hoing ass isn’t wobbling off my porch in the next three seconds, I’ll go get Big Bertha. She ain’t as nice, and she’s way louder than I am.”
I hurried up and got my “nine and some change, sweaty, hot, an’ ready to burst” pregnant behind up out of there. Mrs. Tessa did not play when it came to three things: her son, the lottery, or her shotgun, also known as Big Bertha.
I’d met Ray when he was interning up at the free clinic on Twenty-eighth Street. No, I was not up in there for no crazy shit. I was actually volunteering. All the crazy shit happened after that. My sister Mona and I had been on our own for nearly as long as l could remember. Our oldest sister, Mirna, had gotten all sanctified, leaving us to do for ourselves. She’d been putting in overtime turning out this deacon’s son, and once she’d gotten him on lockdown she acted like she ain’t want anything to do with any of us anymore. She packed all her stuff and moved out to be with him, turning her nose up at us like we was beyond God’s reach in the process. Mona did what she had to in order to keep us decent and to keep the roof over our heads. Sometimes that meant doing things that some folk might consider immoral or scandalous, but it made do.
My sister Mona was nineteen and working part time at the shirt factory in between losing her damn mind the winter that I met Ray and I was going on seventeen. He was hell-bent on making something out of his life, and at that point I was just hell-bent.
I was volunteering, or more like “voluntold”, to work at the free clinic as punishment for shoplifting. It was one of those drab gray winter days where the sun sits like a block of ice in the sky, and the wind’s so cold it makes your lips burn. I’d been pissed all week about Mona selling my pea coat at the flea market that Sunday. If I weren’t trying to keep my record clear over that shoplifting shit, I would’ve whooped her ass and gotten myself a new one off that five-finger discount.
Inside the clinic I took up my usual position behind the reception counter, ready to read and reread the articles in my Ebony magazine. It must have been too much for me to ask for a peaceful day. Glancing up, I cringed as a woman staggered in through the door toward the front desk where I sat. Before I could even open my mouth to ask her what she needed, he walked, no, let me rephrase that, he glided in not far behind her. I’d heard about pimps bringing in their girls for the free STD treatments, but I’d never actually seen or dealt with one. The entire concept of giving up hard-earned money to someone else for no reason completely baffled me anyway.
His floor-length mink fluttered around him in a fur cloud as he sauntered toward me with a smirk on his face. There were so many diamonds on him I damn near had to squint as the lights shimmered off of them in various directions.
He leaned onto the receptionist desk like he owned it, a tea-tree stick hanging out from the corner of his mouth. He was so close my eyes started to water from the pungent minty scent as he chewed it casually.
“Let me tell you how you’re doing today.” His voice was smoother than a baby’s ass, and equally as soft as he continued. “You finer than fine china, eating off paper plates every night. I already know I’m right, because wrong ain’t an option. You been misguided, because somebody sold you a blank map to life, when all you really need is someone to map your life out. Let me get you off this road to nowhere and into show-where. Ho-where. Ho territory making that prime ho fare.”
This fool couldn’t be serious. “I think your lady friend over there needs help.” Frowning, I gave a quick nod toward her. She was leaning against the wall looking worse by the minute.
He didn’t even glance in her direction. “Business first, ass last. That’s rule number one.”
“Well, I don’t think she’s interested in doing any kind of business, so you can check in or leave.” Ray’s voice was a deep road block in Frankie’s map.
“You know you’re addressing Frankie the Ambassador Diamonds, young blood?” Frankie straightened slowly, his jaw flexing around the chew stick.
“I know who I’m talking to, but your title doesn’t mean anything to anyone outside of the broken women you exploit.”
Frankie Diamonds stared straight past Ray as if he didn’t even exist. He flung the lapels of his coat behind him and marched toward the door, angrily yanking the girl up by the arm on his way out.
Up until that point, Ray had all but ignored me anytime we were stuck working together. He was quiet and stayed lost in his head, but there was always something about him that stood out from all the idiots who catcalled at me all day. He was a Venus flytrap in a garden of geraniums, and I just had to know if I put my finger next to him . . . near him . . . on him . . . would he snap. And, snap he did.
It was as if I’d been sleepwalking through life ever since the day Momma left us, and being with Ray was ele
ctrifying. He was that feeling you get when you dream you’re falling and you jerk yourself awake. I wasn’t about to tell him that though, couldn’t have him thinking he had me all wrapped around his little, middle, and index fingers. Even though he did. Truth was I didn’t have to tell him anything. Anyone looking at us could see it written all over our faces and in our body language. Our souls were mirrors of the other, and it was seen and felt no matter what we did. You’d think working in a damn clinic with mounds of birth control at our disposal we’d use it, and we did. But it only takes that one time to get caught up in the moment, and it’s a wrap.
His parents eventually found out through the gossip grapevine of nosey-ass neighbors and store owners that we were seeing each other, and they had him moved into a new intern position. They’d been molding him to follow in their footsteps and they damn sure weren’t about to let him get mixed up with anyone that might get him off track; especially not with someone like me. Ray managed to sneak across town to see me throughout my entire pregnancy. He was probably more excited about the baby than I was.
The problem with young, stupid love is that you never realize you’re being young and stupid while you’re in it.
When I finally went into labor, it was a muggy summer day in August. Mona was in jail for breaking and entering, and my damn water broke while I was on a bus of all places. When Ray got to the hospital I’d already put his name on the paperwork and dozed off. Not long after he’d arrived, a roar started in the hospital lobby that burst into my hospital room in the form of two angry parents.
“What the hell is this, Ray?” his momma fumed; her face was damn near bright red she was so mad.
Ray was seated in a chair in the corner, holding an ice pack to his neck.
“Son? Answer your damn mother. How could you go against what we said? We forbade you to deal with this girl, and now look at the mess you’re in.” Ray’s daddy was pacing back and forth, his long legs covering the length of the entire room in three steps before he was turning to repeat the process.
Baby Momma Saga, Part 2 Page 20