I Ain't Me No More (11 page)

Dub couldn't really talk, so he just looked at me with teary eyes. His eyes were thanking me so much for being there. His eyes were thanking me so much for taking him back in his time of need. For being there by his side, for being his girlfriend.

I gave a half smile. How could I do it now? How could I leave him now? Dub and his mother sat there as if it was me, not God or the doctors, but me who had his fate in my hands. How could I walk away now? Walking away from my son's father right now would make me the cold-blooded monster. Looked like the door God had once again opened for me just got slammed in my face before I could even walk through it.

Somehow, one and a half weeks after being shot, Dub was released from the hospital and allowed to go home under my care. Not under his mother's care. But under my care. After all, I was his girlfriend. He was my man. I'd put everything behind us and came running to him the night he got shot, or at least that was how it all went down if I let Ms. Daniels tell it.

Speaking of Dub getting shot, to this day I didn't know the real reason why Dub was shot. I did know the guy who did it was arrested and put in jail. At first I assumed Dub was out there doing his little hustle thing and someone probably tried to rob him. He told his mom and me, though, that he was just walking down the street. He claimed the shooter shot him when he refused to give him the leather Troop jacket he was trying to rob him of.

When the cops came to Dub's hospital room to interview him, he made me and Ms. Daniels leave, so we never really got to hear exactly what he told the police. I had a strong feeling that whatever it was he'd told the police was a far cry from the song and dance he had serenaded his mother and me with. All I knew was that wearing his guts outside of his body and having a near-death experience didn't change Dub one bit. He was still as mean and as cruel as ever.

Because he couldn't physically hurt me the way he wanted to, Dub made sure he assassinated me with his put-downs and insults. There were so many times when I just visualized snatching that colostomy bag right off of him and watching him die a slow, agonizing death. I could get him right where I wanted him if I was just that cruel. If only I had the same caliber of cruelty as the girl in
Diary of a Mad Black Woman.
But I didn't. Any dignity I had and any chance I had at being a strong black woman had been crushed by Dub. And there was something else that having the colostomy bag hanging from him didn't change about Dub . . . his sex drive.

“Dub, I really don't want to. What if I hurt you?” I said squeamishly as I lay next to him in bed.

“I ain't in the mood to play with you, girl,” Dub said firmly as he slowly removed his pajamas.

I could hear the contents of the bag squishing. I gagged just thinking about it. I mean, it was disgusting. Every time he had a bowel movement, it would just begin to fill the bag up. That was all I could think about as he tugged on me, and his request soon became an order.

At least someone even wants to have sex with me,
I told myself as I pleased Dub sexually. My mind traveled back to that insecure, ugly little black girl whose own father didn't want her. The little girl who thought no one would ever want her. Well, someone wanted her now. I simply closed my eyes and pretended that it wasn't Dub.

“Quit being a crybaby!” I scolded Baby D, who wasn't that much of a baby anymore. He was now four years old and was in preschool.

“Oh, don't fuss at the baby,” Nana said as she walked over to Baby D and hugged him.

“You wouldn't let us cry and whine when we were little,” my mother reminded Nana as she sat next to me on Nana's flowery patterned couch.

Three generations of women were in Nana's living room as we prepared to go yard saling. Lynn didn't come around much these days. She worked and went on trips with her girlfriends. Baby D was having a fit that I was trying to make him go to the bathroom before we left after he'd made several declarations that he didn't have to go.

“I did the best I knew how with what I knew then,” Nana told my mother with a hint of regret in her tone. “If I could go back and do things differently, I would.”

I could see the sadness Nana was trying to hide behind her eyes. And I knew why too. I remembered growing up in Nana's house while she was a single mother, trying to raise six kids. Even though Nana was as sweet as cotton candy now, back in those days, she was a mean mama jama.

It was my aunt Angel, the baby girl, who had always seemed to get the brunt of Nana's wrath. I remember one time Nana was beating Aunt Angel so bad with a broom that she cracked the broom right in half over Aunt Angel's back. Then there was that time Nana beat Aunt Angel with a Pepsi bottle, back when Pepsi came in tall, sixteen-ounce glass bottles. Aunt Angel was getting beat so bad, she couldn't catch her breath in between licks. It got to the point where her face turned beet red as she gasped for air. In between her gasping, I remember her yelling, “I can't breathe. Please stop!” But Nana kept on swinging.

And now here Nana was, all compassionate to Baby D, who wasn't getting anything more than a fussing out.

“Well, ain't nothing wrong with that boy,” I told Nana. “He cries over every little thing. All he does is cry.”

Out of nowhere Baby D stopped his fake sniffling and said, “You cry too. You cry when Daddy slaps you.” He said it with such malice. As little as he was, he knew his words would embarrass me. He knew he was telling a secret. My secret. I'd sworn to my mother that Dub treated me well, that Dub hadn't put his hands on me again. And now Baby D had gone and opened his mouth. I couldn't describe the anger that rose up in me. I wanted to go over and yank Baby D up, take him in the bathroom, and beat him down good for running his mouth.

It was a comment that I was certain did not go unnoticed. It was a comment that I knew my mother and grandmother would want me to respond to. How was I going to explain myself now?

There was literally five seconds of dead silence in the room after Baby D's comment. Then, all of a sudden, his words became the large pink elephant in the room that everyone walked around and walked right by on their way out the door to go yard saling.

Neither my mother nor Nana ever questioned me about what Baby D had said. Maybe they wanted to spare me the embarrassment and humiliation that they could see was covering my face. Maybe they just didn't want to discuss it in front of Baby D. Whatever their reasons, neither chose to speak about Baby D's comment. I was almost certain, though, that once they got Baby D alone, they would pick his little four-year-old brain. Perhaps they did, but I never knew about it. But what I did know was that Baby D would pay for the humiliation he'd just forced me to endure.

“Bastard!” I yelled at him. “Stupid idiot!”

We couldn't have gotten back home from those yard sales fast enough. As soon as we did, I lit into Baby D. Aside from the few and far between spankings Baby D might have gotten through his diapers, I'd never hit him. But today all the anger inside of me, all the rage, all the hurt and pain—no matter who had been the original source of it—just released itself. Unfortunately, Baby D was the only one around to receive it. The only person around who I could lash out at and know that they couldn't do anything to hurt me back.

When my hand slapped Baby D right across his little brown face, he didn't know what had hit him. He looked at me with such shock, sort of the same way I had looked at Dub the first time he hit me. I hit him again, this time with a closed fist. A cry came out of Baby D's mouth like I'd never heard before. It was this piercing cry from deep within. I realized that he was crying out in excruciating pain. It wasn't from the pain that I had inflicted on his flesh. It was a pain I had inflicted on his soul. A pain that, as his mother, I knew I could never assuage. Healing a soul was something only God could do.

So as it turned out, I'd found a new source to direct my hurt and anger at. The only person around that I could be angry at and have control over. Baby D, the product of the monster. The product of the monster that I felt I had created. The product of the monster who had now created the monster in me.

Poor Baby D. He had had four and a half years with only one monster for a parent, but now he had two. He'd need God's hand on him to help him survive all the demons he was locked up with in that duplex.

Dub, Baby D, and I were sitting in the living room. Dub and Baby D were watching television, while I was reading an assigned book from one of my college courses. Dub had gotten the colostomy bag removed by this time and was back to his mean, horrible self again.

There was a knock on our back door that sounded like the po-po.

“Dang, who is knocking on the door all crazy?” Dub said as he got up and went to answer the door.

“What's up, man?” Dub greeted the visitor, his boy Boyd, all cool, calm, and collected. He even held his hand out to give Boyd some dap. Boyd dapped him, all right. Right upside his head.

Dub turned around and said to me with a look of embarrassment on his face, “Helen, let me holler at Boyd for a minute.” His expression couldn't have matched the look of shock on my face.

Dub hadn't hit Boyd back. All those years he'd been beating my tail, I thought this man was a true fighter. But he hadn't even attempted to return the blow.

I took Baby D up to my bedroom, where I stood in the doorway and listened intently to the brewing explosion. Baby D was almost five years out of the womb and was already listening to drama go down. He wasn't the least bit fazed by the commotion going on in our downstairs living room as he sat in front of the television. After all, he'd witnessed fights firsthand. Hearing one had no effect on him.

“Where's my money?” It was Boyd's voice. Then there was a thump.

“Man, I . . . I . . . I . . .” Dub stuttered. Then there was a smack. “Come on, man. I got you.”

Dub was whining like a baby. I couldn't believe it. His pleas were falling on deaf ears, though. The next thing I heard was what sounded like a chair being thrown. I heard tussling and Dub pleading, which meant he was getting the bad end of the fight.

“Man, come on! Please stop!”

“Boyd, man, please!”

There was so much commotion going on down there, a part of me honestly thought that if somebody didn't get Boyd off of Dub, he would kill him. I was not going to be that somebody. Needless to say, I was not that down chick willing to ride or die for her man . . . not for Dub, anyway. Not the man who ran a close second to Ike Turner. I didn't care if he was weaker than another man; he was still stronger than me.

I closed the door and went and sat down next to Baby D, and we enjoyed the show on the television. The fight going on beneath us started to get louder and louder, so loud that I had to turn up the television.

As I sat there next to my son, a smile stretched across my face that was a mile wide. Vengeance was God's. I'd never clobbered Dub upside his head, no matter how many times I'd thought about it. God had sent someone else to do it for me. Maybe God wasn't so bad, after all.

 

 

Lately, Dub hadn't been around much. Once he'd gotten that colostomy bag removed, he'd been back on the streets. He was what I called a tennis shoe hustler. He made just enough money every night to buy a pair of shoes. For all the hours he stayed on the streets, he still never seemed to be able to pay a bill. At first I'd argued with him about spending all that time in the streets but never having money to contribute toward our home. Heck, even when he got shot, I had to buy all those stupid colostomy bags and stuff to cover his guts up. Talk about not having a pot to piss in. That tired negro couldn't even afford a plastic bag, let alone a pot. One time he ran out of bags and I didn't get paid until the next day, so he had to wear a plastic grocery bag. Disgusting. It was just as bad as a baby running out of diapers and having to wear a paper towel instead.

My arguing and complaining about Dub's absence from the home and meager contributions to the home quickly ceased once I realized that as long as he was out there on the streets, then he wasn't at home, making my life hell on earth. Eventually, Dub got to the point where he wouldn't even come home for a couple of days at a time. I thought he was probably out there living a double life with some other girl. But soon enough Konnie, who had always managed to have her ear to the street, would let me know the new love of Dub's life.

“Crack,” Konnie said through the phone receiver. “Boyd told me that's why he had to go upside Dub's head a couple days ago, 'cause Dub was spending all the money on crack for his own personal use, instead of giving my man his share.”

“What?” I'd heard her, but had I really heard her correctly? Was she sitting on my phone, trying to tell me that Dub was using crack?

“Dub spent all the money. Boyd is riding on E,” Konnie spat. I could tell Konnie had an attitude about it. To her, Dub not only played her dude, but at the same time took food from the mouth of the baby Konnie and Boyd had just had.

I could understand her bitterness, if that was in fact the truth. I mean, yeah, I could see Dub not giving Boyd what was owed to him, but what I couldn't see was him spending the money to buy crack for himself.

“Yep. He supposed to be taking their cut to re-up,” Konnie explained, as if she was the middle man, “but Dub be spending it right back on drugs for himself... little by little. Or he just uses the product he's supposed to be out there selling.”

Dub on crack. My mind couldn't consume that. Dub was a lot of things, but a crackhead? It was the early nineties, and I personally didn't know a whole lot about the drug that was dominating the drug game at the time, but I knew it was the worst and most addictive drug of them all.

“That's just talk,” I told Konnie.

“Girl, what I'm doing is talking. What Dub is doing is smoking crack!” Konnie continued her mission of being the bearer of bad news. I couldn't help but hear a hint of delight in her voice, though. “He called himself testing out his product one day. Now he's hooked.”

I was silent, still trying to pick up everything Konnie was putting down.

With a newfound tone of sympathy, Konnie said, “Girl, I'm not telling you in order to try to start no mess. I'm only telling you so that you can start watching your stuff. Go to the hardware store and buy you some chains and locks or something. Start chaining your stuff down. 'Cause I hear it only gets worse.”

Konnie was right. Things only did get worse. It started with a so-called break-in at our place, during which all my jewelry was stolen. I had collected some sterling silver jewelry over the years and kept it in a special velvet box I'd picked up at a yard sale. The thieves took only the contents of that box and a fancy corvette-shaped VHS tape rewinder that I'd purchased brand-new at a yard sale. This was easy stuff, a couple days of high. But then other stuff started to come up missing, and Dub, who'd recently been staying out on the streets, now seemed to be hiding from the streets. He'd stay cooped up in our place, acting weird.

We'd fight over money, bill money. Not about him not giving me any, but about him forcing me to give him the bill money.

“The gas bill is already overdue,” I said to Dub as he ransacked our bedroom, looking for my hidden purse. “If I give you the money, they are going to shut it off. Then what are we going to do?”

“Boil water to take baths,” Dub spat back. He literally spat out those words, as spittle flew about my face.

There was this desperate look of rage in his eyes. Now, I'd seen Dub angry before, but this was different. It was intense life-or-death desperation.

“Dub, no. I can't,” I said, shaking my head, trying to brace myself as I noticed him ball his fist.

“Mom, I want to color this,” I heard Baby D say as he entered our bedroom. He was holding a work sheet he'd gotten from preschool and a box of crayons.

“Baby D, get out of here!” Dub said, keeping his eyes on me.

“But I got some coloring homework. I have to stay in the lines,” Baby D said.

“Baby D, go!” Dub pointed to the door. “Mommy and Daddy are talking.”

“I just need help staying in the lines.” Baby D was being as relentless with his homework inquiry as Dub was being with his money inquiry.

Baby D walked up on Dub and tugged his shirt. “Daddy, please. I just want—”

The next thing I saw was Dub's open hand slamming against Baby D's face and then blood pouring out of Baby D's nose. Baby D was in shock, and so was I. I moved to go comfort him, but Dub blocked me, giving me a threatening look, letting me know that I needed to stay there and finish our business at hand.

Baby D ran out of the room, crying. It had happened again; someone whom Baby D loved and trusted, someone who was supposed to take care of him and protect him had hurt him. Now everybody in the house was hurting, and like the saying went, hurt people hurt people.
Let the pain begin....