When All Hell Breaks Loose (31 page)

As I sit and hold the phone, realizing how hurt my mother is, I begin to see the hurt she has carried and hidden all these years. I understand her hurt. I also feel guilty. She hurt before any of us and now, we must help repair her life as well as our own.

T
hree years have passed since my parents moved to France. They call every Thursday to talk to me and Shreese. Before they left, we got a chance to sit down as a family and have a long heart-to-heart about anything and everything. Mom admitted to the family how much she regretted leaving, and me, Pops, and Shreese comforted her. On my thirtieth birthday two months ago, my parents released their first CD together. The title is
Wishful Thinking
. They are blowing up over there, and I’m glad for them. I spent my birthday listening to the CD and thinking about how proud of my parents I have become. I didn’t mind spending my birthday alone. We are led to believe we have to party or be with the person or persons we love to celebrate our existence on this planet. In a way I did party, because I spent my birthday with someone I love. Me.

Shreese did move into the house on Rivermoon Drive. She’s still in the church, but she doesn’t attend Mount Cannon any longer. After the scene with the news people, she and Louise spent some time together, and ever since, my sister has been a different woman. She goes to a small church near the house in the old neighborhood.
I’ve visited with her several times and I liked it. It’s a big change from what she was used to. The members are nice and they have a professional counselor on staff, who Shreese has sessions with three times a month. She’s come a long way.

She will turn twenty-seven soon and I’m proud of her. She’s met a nice group of sisters from her job. They are all in a reading club together called Page Turners. They read everything from Tina McElroy Ansa to Connie Briscoe to E. Lynn Harris. She was shocked when she read one of E. Lynn’s books, but she said it helped her understand and not get involved with the private lives of others. It was funny, because Shreese didn’t burn the book like she has so many others in her heyday. She was the reason my
Message to the Blackman
got roasted when I was in college. Her favorite phrase now is “That’s between them and their God.” She says it all the time, whenever some kind of conflict occurs that doesn’t involve her. She’s also been reading a lot of self-help books from black women like Pearl Cleage, Iyanla Vanzant, and Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant. The ladies from her job took her out to her first club set and she still talks about the good time she had. It’s good to see her enjoying all of life’s offerings. She even bought some secular music. I laughed because it was all dated. Stuff like Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Temptations, Natalie Cole, and George Benson. Sometimes, she will sing the songs and if you’ve ever heard Carmen McRae or Oleta Adams sing seventies soul music, then you’ve heard my sister in there somewhere. It’s a nice flavor. By the way, Ulan Dixon went from Lew Sterrett jail to Huntsville Prison, where I heard that he was doing a minimum of twenty years. He’s still ministering.

As for my homeboys, they’re all holding their own. After his experience with Carla, Tim stopped dating altogether. He went back to school to get his Ph.D., in business finance. He plans to open his own business. He wants to be a financial counselor to people who have trouble with money management. He no longer professes to be the Supreme Mack Daddy, either. He says women have soured him. He’s taken a “vacation away from the poo-nanny,” as he put it. He hasn’t dated a woman since Carla. The incident left him mad at every woman in the world. To top it off, one of his many women from back
in the day called him up and announced that she was pregnant by him. Tim denied it at first, but once the baby was born, there was no way he could deny the child. He still took a blood test, but we all told him he wasted his money because the chocolate little girl he carries pictures of and pays child support for is his spitting image. Don’t get me wrong, Tim still plays the field, but he’s a lot slower getting to home plate than he used to be. And yup, he’s still the Supreme Mack Daddy, whether he believes it or not.

Jamal and Freedom married and now are expecting their first set of twins, which will make three. Their first child, Jobari, is one year old, and he is already trying to say big words like “Kwanzaa” and “Caucasoid.” It’s fun to see him morph into a mini version of his father. Jamal is making more money than ever, and Freedom has opted to stay home and teach the kids. They’ve become my closest family since Mom and Pops left. I eat dinner over there almost every Sunday and Tuesday. I even baby-sit Jobari when J and Freedom want to get out of the house.

Eric is leaving Data Tech at the end of this year. He got a job teaching finance at the University of Maryland. We’ve already planned to send him out in style. I’m going to miss him. The coolest white boy I know. He is taking his girl, Darcell McElroy, with him. Yes, she’s the Indian-Thai chick he brought to the New Year’s party a few years ago. They’ve been together three years and are expecting their first little one, but no plans to marry anytime soon. See, he’s just like a stereotypical brother! I’m just kidding. Eric wants to marry her after they move. He said he’ll let us know. So when I know, you’ll know.

Phillip is still with the company and still dating anything and everything he can get his hands on. I don’t know if this brother is ever going to change. His Christmas gift to himself last year was a gold tooth with the initial “P” in the middle of it. No surprise to the rest of us. He also purchased a Sony Playstation. We all get together every Sunday now and play like teenage boys with no life. Right now, Phil is getting ready to buy his first home. It’s in the suburbs and that’s going to be a treat, hearing the stories of Phil in the ’burbs. He’s going to be like a fish out of water.

As for me, I’m doing good. The house is holding up great and I enjoy coming home to the quiet and the peace. I even enjoy mowing my own lawn. I’m still working at Data Tech and have been upped two notches as executive over the entire database division. This has put me in a position to expose the communities to what Data Tech does. Through some heavy numbers crunching with my bosses, I was able to donate all of our old computers and software to the black arts building downtown and to one of the cultural centers in the heavily populated Hispanic area in Dallas. I go to the cultural center on weekends now and spend my free time with the kids. Although our office never went virtual, we did get everyone pagers and laptops, so we can pretty much come and go as we please. Jamal and I are working on an after-school project for young black males, but it’s so hard to get them motivated about anything. Hopefully, our idea about a classical study in music lyric writing will go over well. We got it set up with some major hip-hop artists and others in the music business, so I think it will be successful.

I know you’re waiting to hear about my love life, right? Well, Lisa Carter and I dated for about five months, but I broke it off because I wasn’t ready to commit to her the way she needed me to. We’re still friends and she’s still at Data Tech. We never had sex or anything, and she was down with that. I don’t know what kind of experiences she’s been through with men, but she stated up front that sleeping together was not an option, and that was cool with me. I never could bring myself to go to that level, even after five months. As a matter of fact, I haven’t slept with anyone since Adrian. It was hard at first, until I realized that my love and bedside manner isn’t for every woman I meet, I don’t care how special she appears to be. I’ve gambled with my dick and my heart long enough. Now it’s time to gamble with my mind; that way the stakes may be high but I will always come out a winner.

I’ve dated other women off and on, but sometimes it gets scary knowing what I’ve been through. I don’t know whether or not some of these sisters are coming or going.

I’d even met this one sister I thought I could really vibe with, turned out to be a palm reader by profession. She said she made good
money, but when she read my palm, she read me wrong. She said I was a doctor with lots of money and three kids. I politely took my palm and my wallet and got the hell out of her past life. Then there was this sister Tina, who criticized everything I said. Whatever I liked, she took the opposite opinion. I don’t think her self-esteem was up to par or something, because when I broke it off with her, she wrote me a seven-page letter apologizing and talking about her broken childhood.

Now, a woman has to be on point with me. Any slight idea that she is something other than what I think she should be and she is out the door. Others came and went but at this point, I’m just trying to be the best man I can be. I’m looking for a woman who’s responsible. A woman who is honest and who can solve her problems and not just talk about them all the time. I want a woman who gets along with her family. That’s the problem with a whole lot of black folk, if you really want to break it down to a science. Family just has no value anymore when picking out a mate. It’s important to me and I want it to be important to my woman. That should have been a warning sign to me when I saw how Adrian treated her mother. But I was concentrating on something else. My next woman also needs to be assertive, spiritual, a thinker, and most of all, a one-man woman. One-man and
one-man-only
woman! Some of you may be looking for a person with variety, but it’s not for me. Since I’ve been hanging with Jamal and his family, I’ve learned a lot about roles and responsibility. I realized that maybe I was a bit anxious with Adrian and I never paid any attention to what she wanted. I think it’s important for a man and woman each to stay in his or her own space until it’s time to move to higher ground as a couple. I’m learning to be more patient with myself. Women are women, and some are so out of touch with themselves that I worry about the future of black America and strong black families. Women don’t want to raise their children; they don’t want to cook or clean. All they seem to want nowadays is independence with no responsibilities. They want to brag about how they are living without the assistance of a man. Yet they scratch and claw at one another with no thought to the damage they do to themselves. I want a woman in my life. I know I can’t live
without one. We need each other. God meant for me to have a helpmate, and once I get myself together, a strong woman will come my way and she won’t mind staying at home, with or without me. I’m willing to raise children, cook, and clean and I want someone who is willing to do the same.

And to be honest, if I could do it all over again with Adrian Jenkins as a straight woman, then I would. I would have fought a man for her. I miss her. I miss her smile, her laughter, the way she felt at night … I miss all of that. She was a good woman and her being gay didn’t make her any less. But what man can compete with a woman’s love for another woman? I remember telling Jamal one night that my mother was the kind of woman who used people, then left. I never associated the same with Adrian, but in many ways they are alike. Strong. Strong-willed. Women with wings. Kind of like my mother leaving us didn’t make her any less of a mother after all those years. She still had that mother instinct, just like Adrian still knew how to make a man feel like a man and nothing less. That’s a reality I had to come into during my depression.

I just wish I hadn’t been the one Adrian chose to shit on. That shit was fucked up. Like I told my sister, sometimes bad things happen to really good people. Life is a motherfucker and it’s a game you have to play to win. Make decisions wisely. Pray. Anticipate. And that’s what I’m doing now, playing to win! Forget everything else! Now I’m back on track and ready for the next love.

H
ey. I know I’m probably the last person you want to hear from after I took Greg through so much. His mother said I would return with the need to explain and I guess she was right. She never liked me anyway. She knew about me even though she never said anything, she knew. I could see it in her eyes the first time we met.

I have been gay, or at least thought I was gay, since I was seventeen. I was never raped, molested, or promiscuous as a child. I don’t believe in the chemical-in-the-brain theory either. It’s just a preference for me. Plain and simple. I’ve always found women very attractive. Always. When I was an adolescent, my mother caught me leafing through a
Playboy
magazine and she whipped me. I hated her after that, and I guess I rebelled by speeding up the process. I stopped wearing dresses and started hanging out on the gay side of town. Stuff like that. After I graduated high school and enrolled in beauty college I began to explore the club scene. Some girlfriends and I went to a hair show in Chicago, and that’s where I met Carla. She was a model for one of the hairdressers. We were immediately attracted
to one another. She introduced herself and invited me to her hotel room later that night. We were supposed to go out, but one thing led to another and we ended up in bed together. Confirmation for me at nineteen years of age. Carla was the first woman I slept with in a sexual way. She was very aggressive and I liked that at first, but she was so obvious and butch at the time that she wasn’t good for my in-the-closet image. I tried to fight it and keep my desires for women on the down-low, but working in the beauty-shop industry only made it worse. Once I opened my shop, I had to go deep cover because my parents were on me to settle. Get married. Have babies. I broke down and told them about my sexual preference and they’ve been in denial ever since. Now that Greg is out of my life, they don’t even speak to me. Took back their house keys.

Thinking back on my experience with Greg, if I hadn’t allowed Carla back into my life, I would have still married him. I did love Greg, because he made me feel wanted. He cared about me and cared for me. But Carla makes me feel safe, and I knew I couldn’t have the best of both worlds for too long.

I saw Gregory about two years ago. He was with a woman. Pretty. Hazel eyes against dark skin. She saw me, but she didn’t know who I was. She wasn’t gay, either. We know our own. I wonder if he’s still with her. They made a cute couple and I was glad to see him back on his feet. I heard that he had given up on women altogether. Or was that Tim Johnson I heard about?