by Mary Monroe
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, sitting up. I made sure that the covers were still up around my chin. “I wish you had done that yesterday when you called him.” I dragged my fingers through my matted hair and slid my tongue around inside and outside of my mouth. The taste of my gums, teeth, and lips was enough to make me sick. But I didn’t want any coffee, any of the beaten-up bear claws, or anything else in my mouth except some mouthwash or toothpaste, which I didn’t have. But more than anything, I wanted this episode to be over and done with. “What about those pictures we took yesterday?” I said, looking from Wade to Jason.
“What about them pictures?” Wade asked, talking with his mouth full.
“What are you going to do with them?” I wanted to know.
“We are going to use them. What did you think I took ’em for, woman?” Jason snapped.
“Jason, I wasn’t talking to you,” I said, shaking a finger at him. “I was talking to Wade.”
“Well, I’m talking to you. And while I’m doing it, I want to tell you that you got one hell of a mouth on you, girl. No wonder you couldn’t keep your husband happy,” Jason sneered, talking and chewing at the same time. A hard look crossed his face, and he stared at me with so much contempt, I felt a sharp pain shoot up my back.
“I didn’t want you involved in this in the first place. And if it was up to me, you wouldn’t be here now,” I reminded. “This is my”—I paused and tapped my chest with my finger—“my game. If you don’t want to play it by my rules, you can take your fucking bear claws and get the hell up out of here. And, with your lovely record, I know I don’t have to worry about you blabbing about any of this.”
Jason was still chewing, but the look on his face had softened. He blinked and swallowed hard. “We ain’t going to use them pictures unless we have to,” he muttered, looking at Wade.
“Jason, I’m in the room, and I’m the one talking now. I asked the question about the pictures, not Wade. You can address me,” I said, with a smirk. “After we get the money, you won’t ever have to see me again.”
“Woman, I don’t know why you be tripping. We are all on the same side,” Jason said, speaking to me but still looking at Wade. Then he slurped from his coffee cup like a hog at a trough.
“Both of y’all need to chill out. We got business to take care of,” Wade said, shaking his fist in Jason’s face but looking at me. “Baby, you better stay in the room while we’re gone. I seen a pay phone about two blocks down the way.”
“What are you going to say to my husband this time?” I asked, still glaring at the side of Jason’s face. I flinched when he let out a loud belch.
“First, we need to find out where my man’s head is right about now. If things are going our way, I’ll tell him when and where to drop off the money.” Wade paused and gave me a thoughtful look. “Once we get our money, well, it’s over. You do what you got to do. I do what I got to do. Any questions?” He looked from me to Jason.
“Hell, yeah! I got a question! When do I get paid?” Jason asked in an anxious voice, moving toward the bed. Crumbs decorated his chin and lips. It was only then that I noticed that Jason looked cleaner and neater than he’d looked the day before. He wore a nice crisp plaid shirt and a pair of jeans that somebody had taken the time to iron. The creases in the legs were razor sharp. Whatever he was doing to the women in his life was working. Or, if he was as lucky as Wade, one of the women taking such good care of him was his mama.
“Calm down, brother. You’ll get your money when old J.R. gives me my money,” Wade said firmly, giving Jason a hot look.
“I think you mean my money,” I said, ignoring the ominous feeling that suddenly came over me. The feeling that I had was one thing, and that was bad enough. But the way that Wade looked at me gave me a chill that went all the way down to my bones.
CHAPTER 9
I didn’t know how long Wade and Jason would be gone this time. And even though I was nervous and on edge, I was glad to be alone so that I could have some time to myself.
I had no appetite. The way my stomach was feeling, I didn’t think I’d eat again until I knew for sure what Jesse Ray was going to do. My throat was dry, but by now the coffee that Jason had brought was too cold to drink. I emptied one of the cups and used it to get some water from the faucet in the bathroom. I was only able to swallow a few sips, and I almost threw it back up. The water was cloudy and tasted like metal.
I tried to get some sleep as I crawled back into the bed and curled up under the covers, still naked. Maury Povich was on the TV screen, with some trashy-looking, big-footed woman screaming at the married man she’d been having an affair with.
But no matter how tired I was or how hard I tried to doze off, all I could do was lie there and think. There were a lot of things on my mind that I needed to sort through. My future was the most important. But I couldn’t ignore my past and the things that had happened to me then that had driven me to my present point of desperation.
I had spent most of my childhood looking for love, but in all the wrong places. And I had tried just about every trick in the book to get it. I didn’t have any family other than Daddy and Mama. At least none to speak of. But from the vague stories that both my parents had told me, usually in whispered voices, I had a few family members left somewhere in some little rural village in Guatemala occupied mostly by blacks and Indians.
After enduring forty-eight hours of the worst labor any woman had ever experienced, according to Mama, she had given birth to me. “And you was such a homely little beast. You had eyes like a dead fish, hair like barbed wire, and a snout like a pig,” she often told me, adding, with a mysterious smirk, “Praise the Lord, your face eventually settled in the right direction.” That was as close as my mother ever came to telling me I was good-looking. And coming from her that was quite a compliment.
My untimely, unplanned, and unwanted birth had occurred at home, in the two-bedroom apartment that my parents had lived in at the time, on a dead-end street in North Berkeley, California. We moved from that place when I was eight, but I will remember it until the day I die. Eight other people, from the same oppressed Central American country as my parents, had lived with us. They slept on the living-room floor, on cardboard pallets lined up like corpses. And that was literally the case with one man. One night, as I stumbled through the living room to get to the bathroom, I stepped on the man’s head. He was an ugly old creature that we called Abuelo Pato, Spanish for Grandpa Duck. He looked more like a frog than a duck to me, and the one time that I mentioned that to my mother, she slapped me halfway across the living room. When he didn’t move or say anything, I knew something was wrong. But I didn’t say or do anything. After I did my business in the bathroom, I stumbled back to bed.
The next morning, when I found out that the man I’d stepped on was dead, I thought I’d killed him. I was the only child in the house, so I didn’t have a high position. I stayed in a child’s place. I spoke when I was spoken to, and nobody bothered to ask me anything about the dead man. I walked around in a daze for the next few days, convinced that I’d caused a man’s death. Each time somebody knocked on our front door, I almost jumped out of my skin, terrified that it might be the cops coming to haul me off to jail. I was just about ready to pass out at the funeral when the preacher saved me by muttering something about the old man dying from a heart attack in his sleep. My life returned to normal, which was not saying much.
There was not much in my life for me to be happy about. I had no friends or real toys to play with. The television that we had only got two stations: One was a home shopping channel, which was useless because nobody in our house was interested in costume jewelry or Ginsu knives. The other channel was in Korean.
It was no wonder I was always doing or saying something to upset Mama. Like the time I walked into the bedroom I shared with her and Daddy and saw another man with her on the bed. They didn’t see me, but as soon as Daddy got back home from his janitor’s job at a nearby office bu
ilding, I met him at the front door, yelling at the top of my lungs, “Daddy, Mama was sitting on a man’s face!” Daddy didn’t respond, so I assumed he didn’t hear me. But Mama heard me all the way from the kitchen. She flew into the living room and batted my head with a spatula. For the next two days, she reminded me about the long labor she’d survived on account of me and how ugly she thought I was when I was born.
Just before I turned nine, Daddy got a job driving for some shady-looking white man who owned a restaurant with a bar that a lot of rich people went to. I thought that he was shady because every time I saw him, he had on dark glasses, even at night, and a black hat and dark clothes, which made him look more like a bandit than a businessman. Mr. Bloom lived in a big beige mansion in the Berkeley Hills. Up until then, the only work that Daddy and Mama had ever done in the States was farm or janitorial work.
Right after Daddy started driving for the shady businessman, he talked him into hiring Mama as a nanny for his three children. Like gypsies, we moved from one miserable old building after another. Moving around so much was the only way we could eventually get rid of all our “roommates.” Each time we relocated to another apartment, it was always one that was smaller than the one before, so Daddy had a good excuse not to drag all of his rootless countrymen along with us. By the time we found a one-room studio apartment that was so small, it looked and felt like a doll-house, it was just Mama, Daddy, and me.
With the long hours that my parents worked, I pretty much had to raise myself. During that time, I felt that I didn’t belong anywhere. The days that my parents would leave the house before I got up and would come home after I’d gone to bed, I felt like an orphan. I roamed the streets like a stray dog. I started smoking when I was ten and drinking a year later. When I couldn’t steal any of Daddy’s cigars and when there was no alcohol in the house, I stole what I wanted from convenience stores. Sometimes I stole from the parents of some of the unsupervised kids I ran amok with. Nobody ever told me not to do it or that it was wrong. So I kept doing it.
About a year later, the restaurant owner bought up a bunch of old apartment buildings throughout the Bay Area. He made Daddy the manager and maintenance man of one in Berkeley. The neighborhood was fairly rough, but Daddy didn’t have to pay rent as long as he managed the building. My folks didn’t like to spend money, so I knew that as long as we could live rent free, we would be in this place. And I was glad.
It didn’t take long for me to make some new friends. Across the street from us lived a Mexican family with nine kids. The only girl, Maria Cortez, was my age. We hit it off right away and before I knew it I was hanging out with Maria and some of her friends. Like me, they were not really bad kids. But I was glad to see that they were not as confused and impulsive as I was. Our conversations almost always included sex. I was the only virgin in the crowd so I tried to absorb as much information as I could. I couldn’t wait to have my first sexual experience so that I could see what all the fuss was about.
Maria had to look after her younger siblings so she didn’t have too much free time on her hands. “Christine, be glad you are an only child. You can do whatever you want and not have to worry about changing diapers, cleaning toilets, helping cook dinner, doing laundry and all the rest of the bullshit I have to do,” Maria told me. “You can have all your time to yourself. You a lucky girl.” Compared to Maria I guess I was. I had time to spare.
After school I would go home and watch television and eat whatever I wanted to eat. It was a good thing I enjoyed healthy things, like fruits and vegetables, as much as I did candy and soda pop. I was as healthy as I was supposed to be. But there were other things around me that were not healthy. The lack of guidance was one. Because there was nobody around too much to tell me what to do and what not to do, I did whatever I wanted, and I didn’t have to worry about any consequences.
I was so hungry for attention that I put myself in a situation that cost me my virginity on my thirteenth birthday. Nobody raped me or took advantage of me like with so many of the other girls in my neighborhood. I initiated my first sexual encounter myself.
He was one of the many boys in our neighborhood that a lot of the parents had warned their daughters to stay away from. But that only made him more appealing. My parents had not warned me to avoid this boy or any other boy, so their interference was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. Almost every time I saw him, some girl was up in his face, trying to get his attention.
Not only was this boy cute, but he was popular. By the time he caught my roving eyes, he’d already been with just about every black, Asian, Latino, and white girl I knew. He was already in high school, and even though I’d seen him looking at me long and hard, he had not approached me yet. But in the Bay Area, life was too short for some people. I didn’t know how much time I had left, so it made sense for me to speed things up. I trotted over to his house the Friday after Thanksgiving to return a roasting pan that Mama had borrowed to cook our turkey in and to bring the twenty dollars that his mama, Miss Louise, was borrowing from Daddy. But my real purpose for going to his house was to claim what I thought should have been mine a long time ago.
As soon as I realized that the boy was home alone, I backed him from behind into a corner in his mama’s kitchen, wrapped my arms around his waist, and kissed him on the back of his neck. I still had the twenty-dollar bill clutched in my hand. Even though the house that he and his mama lived alone in was large, the kitchen was small. There was barely enough room in it to accommodate the appliances and the large table in the middle of the floor. But it was neat, and the floor looked like it had just been waxed.
Not only did Miss Louise have a handsome son, but she was a clean woman. She kept such a clean house, you could eat off the floors. But she was also a materialistic woman with extravagant tastes. A lot of people didn’t like her, because she borrowed money from everybody she knew to support her expensive habits. She even borrowed from me the pocket change that I made running errands for old people.
“Girl, what’s gotten in you?” he laughed, pushing me away. He grabbed my wrists and turned around to face me. He had eyes like a cat. They were gray and shiny and so mysterious that when I looked into them, it seemed like I was looking into his soul. I felt something that I had never in my life felt before, and it was something I would never forget or stop searching for: passion. I would have settled for some kind of affection from just about anybody, but I only wanted to experience passion for the first time with this particular boy. I was getting signals from places on my body that I had never paid any attention to before. My crotch alone felt like it was on fire, so I wanted to get this over with as soon possible so I could cool off and move on to something else. In addition to having sex, there were a lot of other things that I wanted to do while I was still young enough to do them.
I started rubbing his dick with both of my hands as hard as I could.
CHAPTER 10
“Talk to me, Christine. I asked you what done got in you, girl.”
“It could be you, in me, if you want it to be,” I said, trying to imitate a look I’d just seen on HBO the night before, on Kathleen Turner’s face in Body Heat.
“What are you up to? Could be me what?” he asked, with a dumb look on his face. My hands were still on his dick, and it was as hard as a rock.
It disappointed me to see that this boy was not as smart as I thought he was. Couldn’t he tell what I was up to? Did I have to come straight out and tell him I wanted him to fuck me? Or just go ahead and get naked and start the job myself! I didn’t think that I could make myself more obvious. “It could be you in me,” I offered, pushing myself up against him and grinding. He was several inches taller than me, so I was grinding against his thigh. “I’ve been asking around about you, and I hear that you are going to be an actor,” I added. I wanted him to know that he was already on my agenda. “Going to be in the movies and on television and stuff. Just like John Travolta.” I spoke in a firm and serious tone of voice. I wanted
him to know off the bat that I was not just trying to be funny. “But you are way cuter than John Travolta, so you’ll be more rich and famous than he is.”
That got his attention real fast. His eyes got big, and his lips curled up at both ends into the biggest smile I’d ever seen on a boy. “Uh, I sure hope so. It’s all I ever wanted to do,” he said hopefully, turning his head so I could see his profile. “I’m going down to Hollywood as soon as I get out of school,” he announced, with a sniff and a glazed look on his face. He was no longer looking at me; he was looking over my shoulder at the wall. When I cleared my throat and pressed against him a little harder, he returned his attention to me. He shook his head and looked at me, blinking a few times before he spoke again. “I figured I’d do a little television first. You know, so I can get my feet wet. I cut my teeth on Cheers, but I think I’ll concentrate on the serious shows when I get down there. There are too many black clowns out there already. They should have stopped with Eddie Murphy.” He paused and gave me a sideways look. “You really think I can do it?”
I nodded. “Uh-huh. I was kind of thinking about doing that same thing myself,” I lied. “You seen Body Heat? It’s my all-time favorite movie. I am going to do movies like that.”
His smile faded, and he gave me a harsh look. “Yeah, right.” The sarcasm in his voice was so thick, you could stir it with a spoon. Then a sad look crossed his face, and he attempted to move away from me. But I still had my arms around his waist and his back was against the counter. “I really am going down to Hollywood. I will show you. I will show everybody. And, I don’t appreciate you coming up in my mama’s house, making fun of me! Gimme that money!” he snarled, snatching out of my hand the money that I had come to deliver to his mama.
