The Ugly Side of Me
Nikita Lynnette Nichols
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Table of Contents
Title Page
The Ugly Side of Me
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other titles by
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
Book Club Discussion Questions
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What We Believe:
Copyright Page
The Ugly Side of Me
by
Nikita Lynnette Nichols
Dedication
I always have so much on my plate. I work a full-time job, have so many deadlines to meet, and write full-time, and still I’m always on the grind for my favorite people. So, to all my readers, Facebook fans, book club members and supporters, this book is for you. Y’all keep me busy, and for that I’m forever grateful.
Acknowledgments
I have to give credit where it is due. I must send a shout-out to Deborah Pearson for the lovely photo she shot of my book-cover model, Yolunda Rena Cooper.
Other titles by
Nikita Lynnette Nichols
None but the Righteous
A Man’s Worth
A Woman’s Worth
Amaryllis
Lady Elect
Lady Elect 2-Arykah Reigns
Crossroads
Damsels in Distress
She’s No Angel (with E.N. Joy)
Angel On the Front Pew (with E.N. Joy)
California Angel (with E.N. Joy)
You can reach the author at:
[email protected]
Facebook . . . Nikita Lynnette Nichols
Twitter . . . @nikitalynnette
Prologue
My best girlfriend, Anastasia Baker, aka Stacy, left about twenty minutes ago. It was good seein’ her, but then again, it’s always good to see Anastasia, because she makes me laugh even when I don’t really feel like it. And lately, I haven’t felt like laughin’ about a darn thang. But leave it to Anastasia to tell those lame jokes of hers to bring a smile to my lips.
It felt good to laugh since I haven’t done it since the last time she was here, which was about a week and a half ago. Anastasia had told me on many occasions that my behavior sometimes made her want to deny that she knew me. And she’d been telling me that for the past six years, but it wasn’t until I got to this place that I fully understood what she meant. And now that I’m here, I’m almost ashamed to tell you my name. But it’s all good. We all do dumb things in life that cause us a little embarrassment from time to time.
In my case it was ignorant things, stupid things, horrible things that put me here. But to be honest with you, I really don’t understand just how I got to this place. The past few weeks of my life are a blur. I mean, how does a thirty-four-year-old graduate from Spelman, with her master’s degree in business displayed on her mantelpiece, inside a frame made of fourteen-karat gold, behave the way that I did? I don’t even remember half the things the prosecutor said that I had done.
Anastasia claims I’m a few ribs short of a full slab, and I’m starting to believe that. Maybe I am crazy. I must be. In order to do the silly crap that I did, I must have lost my ever-loving mind. With any luck, I’ll be found innocent by reason of insanity.
I see women on television, in soap operas and reality shows, who put themselves out there with no self-respect whatsoever, and I always yell at them, “You dumb broad. What are you? Stupid or something?” And today I feel like one of those dumb, stupid broads from TV. I know you’re asking yourselves, How can she talk about herself like that? But, hey, call a spade a spade. I’m a big girl. I can take it. Once they put you in here and slam those bars shut, you grow the heck up real quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Yeah, that’s right. I got locked up for doin’ some silly stuff I ain’t had no business doin’. I think the lyrics to the theme song from Baretta say it best: “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” I’m guilty as sin, though. Yeah, I did the crime. I showed my natural black behind, and because of that, I’m lookin’ at eighteen to twenty easily.
Y’all wanna know what I did? I know you do, and I’m gonna tell you too. I really don’t wanna put my business out there, but women need to know, especially black women. If you’re sprung out over a dangalang like I was, I advise you to get unsprung before you end up in the cell next to mine. I had to learn the hard way that no man’s dangalang is dipped in platinum.
My name is Rhapsody Blue, and this is my sorry story.
Chapter 1
Mid-morning on a Saturday in June, I lay on the sofa in Dr. Janet Buckles’s office. I was there for my routine biweekly chat with her. I inserted a Charms Blow Pop lollipop in my mouth and withdrew it. It was lime green, the same color as my blouse. Lime green was the color that represented mental illness.
“I see you got your green on,” Dr. Buckles said to me.
I glanced down at my blouse, then looked at her. I sucked on my lollipop again, swallowed the sweet and sour taste before I spoke. “I wear lime green only when I come here. I don’t wear this color in my everyday life.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Why? It’s such a pretty color on you. It kinda makes your dark skin glow.” Dr. Buckles moved her shoulder-length hair away from her right ear and turned it toward me. I saw that she wore green studs in her lobes. “The emerald is my birthstone.”
I sucked on my lollipop. “You wore those for me?”
She nodded her head and smiled. “I noticed that you always wear green when you come for your sessions.”
“Only here, though,” I reiterated. “Nowhere else.”
“Why?” Dr. Buckles asked me again.
I had been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome when I was six years old. I’d never forget getting my butt whupped each time I yelled an offensive slur. Finally, my parents had marched me into Bishop T. A. Clark, Jr.’s office at the church and had laid me over his desk.
My mother had been fit to be tied. “You better lay hands on her, Bishop, ’cause if she yells out and calls me a dirty fart bag one more time, I’ma kill her.”
“Can’t you perform an exorcism on her?” my father had asked the bishop.
I distinctly remembered Bishop Clark picking me up from his desk and holding me tight in his arms. That man prayed for my soul and my deliverance from whatever was attacking me and making me shout out nasty things. Well, after that di
dn’t work, my folks took me to see a psychiatrist, and that was when Dr. Buckles broke the news that I was crazy and would be that way forever.
“I don’t want to be pitied,” I said, snapping out of my thoughts of the past.
“For wearing the color green? You don’t have to be ashamed of your illness, Rhapsody. Tourette’s syndrome is not uncommon. Have you had any episodes in the past two weeks?”
I sucked on my lollipop. “Nope.”
Dr. Buckles smiled slightly. “That’s good, right? No tics or anything at all?”
I shook my head from side to side. “Nobody made me mad in the past two weeks. The ugly side of me comes out only when I get pissed off.”
Dr. Buckles nodded her head and wrote something on the notepad she had in her hand. “I still don’t think you need to take any medication, Rhapsody. You seem to be managing your TS just fine.”
Tourette’s syndrome is a neurological disorder characterized by repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalizations, called tics. Tics that involve involuntary movements include rapid eye blinking, facial grimacing, shoulder shrugging, and head or shoulder jerking. The most dramatic tics are those with the element of self-harm, such as punching oneself in the face, and vocal tics, such as uttering socially inappropriate words. Because tic symptoms often do not cause impairment, most people with Tourette’s syndrome require no medication for tic suppression.
Tourette’s syndrome occurs in people from all ethnic groups; males are affected about three to four times more often than females. It is estimated that two hundred thousand African Americans have the most severe form of Tourette’s syndrome, and as many as one hundred thousand exhibit milder and less complex symptoms, such as chronic motor or vocal tics.
Dr. Buckles stopped writing on her notepad and looked at me. “You’re doing so well, Rhapsody, that I think we can start to schedule your visits for only once a month, rather than keeping them at twice monthly. What do you think?”
“I think so too, Dr. Buckles.”
“Okay, well, I think we’re done for now. Is there anything else you wanna talk about or share with me?”
I sucked on my lollipop some more. “Nope. I’m good.”
Dr. Buckles stood, and so did I. “Then I’ll see you in a month.”
Chapter 2
On Monday evening I was driving home from work in my copper-colored, late-model Mercedes-Benz, heading toward my duplex in Oakbrook Terrace, a rich community west of Chicago. Yeah, I said “Mercedes-Benz” and “Oakbrook Terrace.” That’s right. I was living large, if I do say so myself. I was thirty-four years old, manless, and childless. I didn’t have any dependents. It was only me in my household. When I ate, my whole family ate, so I had plenty of money. I wasn’t loaded, but I made a nice living working as a traffic director for the Chicago Transit Authority. So was there any reason why I shouldn’t have been living where I lived or driving what I drove?
My best friend, Stacy, said I was boojee, but she talked outta the side of her neck sometimes. I had the right to be sitting on top of the world. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was raised on Drake Street, right off of Fifteenth Street, in the heart of the West Side of Chicago. It was common for crackheads to stand on every corner all day, every day. I didn’t need my mother or an alarm clock to wake me up for school in the morning because I had the police siren, which was right on time each and every day. And the siren always meant that someone had been shot or stabbed or had gotten raped during the night. I remembered how my girlfriends and I would play in the park around the corner from my house when we were growing up. We sometimes used the chalk outline from a dead body to play hopscotch.
Forget teenage pregnancy. Back in the day it was adolescent pregnancy. One of my hopscotch friends was pregnant at the age of eleven. Her name was Phoebe, and she hadn’t even gotten her period yet. Me neither. Phoebe was a pretty girl with soft, long black hair, and she wore it like Pocahontas. It was parted down the middle and woven into two long braids that came way past her shoulders. Phoebe’s parents weren’t of the same race. Her mother was black, and her father was a Puerto Rican man. Phoebe was so pretty that not only did the boys stare at her, but the girls would stare at her too and wish they could look just like her. I was one of those girls who envied Phoebe. But she was the one girl in the neighborhood whom all the other young girls our age were warned to stay away from, because she was hot to trot.
I knew Phoebe was messing around with fifteen-year-old Derrick Holmes, aka Skeet, because every time the kids on the block played “Catch a girl, kiss a girl,” Skeet always made sure he caught Phoebe. Eventually, time told that they were doing more than just kissin’. Skeet was her baby daddy.
One thing I can say about my mama, Lerlean Blue, was that when it came to me, she didn’t play that. I was Lerlean’s only girl and the youngest in a family with two boys, and my mama was on my behind like stink on poop when it came to my period. I’d never forget the day I first got my period. I was in gym class, jumping double Dutch, wearing the required red school shirt and white shorts. The night before, Lerlean had washed and pressed my hair the old-school way. I’m talkin’ about sittin’ at the kitchen table, next to the stove, as the hot comb lay in the fire while my mama talked on the telephone. She held the receiver in the crook of her neck, with her left shoulder hunched up to press the telephone to her ear. She never did this without a cigarette dangling from her lips.
Lerlean was the only woman I knew who could smoke a cigarette all the way up to the butt and talk on the telephone without any of the ashes falling off. I remembered the crackling sound the hot comb made when it came into contact with the green Ultra Sheen hair grease Lerlean had piled on my scalp. Every time I heard that crackling sound, I would slump down in the chair to keep that hot comb from touching my forehead, my ears, or the nape of my neck.
“Girl, sit your tail up in this chair. I’m tryin’ to get to this kitchen,” my mama would fuss, and then she’d go right back to laughin’ and talkin’ to whomever she was on the telephone with. Of course, we all knew “kitchen” referred to “naps,” and I had plenty of them.
After she pressed my hair, my mother would part it down the middle, then part it across from ear to ear to make four shiny braids. Then she would put a pair of my clean panties, which we called bloomers, on my head and send me into her and my father’s bedroom to kiss Daddy good night before tucking me into my bed. I loved my daddy. He was the only father I knew who let his little girl decorate his hair and beard with pink and yellow barrettes.
Anyway, back to gym class and jumping double Dutch. I thought I was cute, especially since Sherman Douglas, the cutest boy in my class, was watching. When I knew I had his undivided attention, I really showed off as my teammates sang, “D-i-s-h. D-i-s-h. D is for double Dutch. I is for Irish. S is for single. H is for hop. D-i-s-h. D-i-s-h. D is for double Dutch. I is for Irish. S is for single. H is for hop.”
After I impressed Sherman Douglas, since no other girl could beat my score in double Dutch, we moved on to Chinese jump rope. We used to connect the ends of rubber bands by intertwining them with one another to make a long rope. Two girls would stand facing each other about five feet apart, with the Chinese jump rope down around their ankles.
“Jump in. Jump out. Jump side to side. Jump on. Jump in. Jump out,” everyone would chorus.
The girls standing with the rope around their ankles would move it up to their knees, then up to their thighs. Just like with double Dutch, I was the master at Chinese jump rope.
On that particular day, I was getting down, showing off for Sherman, when I heard, “Ooh, Rhapsody, you bleedin’.” It came from one of the girls holding the Chinese rope.
Wouldn’t you know it? Just when I had Sherman right where I wanted him, my period came for the first time, right through my white gym shorts. That I felt embarrassed was an understatement. I literally wanted to lie down right there on the gymnasium floor and die.
Now back to w
hat I said about my mama not taking any crap when it came to my period. Lerlean kept a calendar hanging on the wall in her bedroom, and she marked the days of my period every month. Every twenty-eight days, like clockwork, she was on top of me.
“Did you get your period, Rhapsody?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I’d answer.
See, in Lerlean’s household—notice that I didn’t say, “In my father’s household,” and that I said, “In Lerlean’s household”—my daddy didn’t run nothin’. And my brothers and I couldn’t answer a question and leave it at that. We had to put a “ma’am” after it.
“Let me see,” she would say to me.
It didn’t matter if we were in the living room or outside in the backyard. I had to pull down my panties and show the color red on a maxi pad to prove to my mama that I was on my period. I used to think Lerlean was crazy and strict as heck for doing that to me, but guess what? That kept me in line, and to this day, I thank God that my mama was on me the way she was, because although I was a fast-tailed li’l girl, in my neighborhood I was one of the few, and I mean very few, girls to graduate from high school without getting pregnant or having an abortion.
During my freshman year I gave my number to a boy named Tyreek Avery, who was a junior at my school. When he called my house for the first time, Lerlean answered the telephone. I didn’t know what she said to Tyreek, but I wasn’t allowed to talk to him on the telephone that night and he never called again and he avoided me in school from then on. After she hung up on him, my mama stormed into my bedroom and told me a thing or two.
“Why you got these li’l nappy-headed fools callin’ my house?”
“Tyreek just wanted to talk, Mama.”
“Talk my behind!” she scolded me. “That ain’t all he wanna do. He wants to get in your panties, Rhapsody.” Then she cocked her head to the side and glared at me. “Are you messin’?”
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