by Mary Monroe
“Well, I noticed it a long time ago myself,” I replied. He propped himself up with two pillows and looked at me with curiosity. “What’s up? Don’t y’all get along?”
“Oh, we get along all right. I go my way; they go theirs.” I sighed. “In some ways, I am used to my parents’ indifference. In some ways, I’m not. I feel like a puppy that nobody wants.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better, I’m the kid that always got stuck with the puppies that nobody else wanted,” Wade said, with a dry laugh.
I shrugged. “Anyway, every now and then, and I do mean every now and then, one of my parents looks at me like they care. But it’s always during one of their rare weak moments. Like a few months ago, when Daddy was laid up with some kind of intestinal infection so severe, it almost killed him. I hugged him, and for the first and only time, he hugged me back. And, now that I look back on that moment, I think he only did it because he thought he was dying. The only other times they show me some love is when … is when they think I’m asleep. One of them will creep into my room in the dark, pull the covers up to my neck, and either rub my cheek or kiss me on it.”
Wade gave me a thoughtful look and caressed his chin. “Well, that’s better than them showing you no love at all. Look at it this way, they kept you. Some folks throw their babies in the trash as soon as they are born or kill them before they are born. You got a place to sleep, food, clothes. A lot of kids would love to trade places with you,” Wade said, making a sweeping gesture with his hand as he looked around my neatly arranged room.
“I wish my mama was more like yours,” I said, getting misty-eyed.
“No, you don’t,” Wade said in a low voice. He looked away when I glanced at him, talking, with his eyes on the floor. “My mama thinks I’m some kind of prince that can’t do no wrong. You don’t know what I have to do for her to keep on thinking that way.” Then the strangest look appeared on his face. It was a look that I rarely saw on a man. For about five seconds, he looked unbearably sad. “Do you mind if I take a nap now?”
Wade didn’t wait for me to reply. He curled up and turned his back to me. And, he stayed that way for the rest of the night.
I got slightly depressed when Wade tiptoed out of the apartment the next morning, a few minutes before my folks got up to get ready for work. I didn’t even bother to go to school that morning, but later in the day, I wished I had. At least I would have been distracted. At home by myself, all I could think about was Wade and how I couldn’t wait to see him again.
After two days had gone by and he had not called or come back to the apartment, I took it upon myself to go to his house. I armed myself with a crisp ten-dollar bill in case I encountered Miss Louise. I got there just in time to see Wade crawling into a cab with his two battered suitcases and his backpack. His mama was hanging on to his arm like he was going to the moon. He was halfway into the cab when she pulled him back out.
I stumbled over a dog stretched out on the sidewalk as I ran up to Wade and started tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. “Wade, are you leaving?” I asked, feeling stupid because it was so obvious that that was exactly what he was doing.
Just thinking about how he had made love to me in my bed made me tingle all over. He had learned a lot over the years about how to please a woman, so it had been a totally different experience from our first encounter. And, after all the boys I had been involved with since Wade had helped himself to my virginity, my body had adjusted to all that poking and pumping, so sex wasn’t so painful anymore. I wanted to throw myself to the ground and take Wade down with me and fuck his brains out. And if Miss Louise and that cabdriver hadn’t been in the way, that’s probably just what I would have done.
“Oh, Christine,” he muttered. I didn’t know how to interpret the look on his face. He was either annoyed or surprised. “I been meaning to call you,” he said, his arm around his weeping mama. “My agent called me last night. I need to get back down to L.A. to read for two very important parts,” he said, glowing like a firefly.
“They are just commercials, but that’s better than nothing,” Wade’s mama said through her tears. From the look on Wade’s face, I knew that this was a piece of information that he was not that excited about sharing.
“Can I call you sometime?” I said as fast as I could, his mama and I playing tug-of-war with his body. She had a hand clamped around one of his arms, I had my hand clamped around the other, and we were both pulling him in the opposite direction.
“Yeah, yeah, sure you can. That’s cool,” Wade said, looking embarrassed and talking fast. He gently pulled away from me and his mama. “Uh, I am going to miss you, and I really wish that you could come with me.” He gave me a brief hug and a cold, quick peck on the cheek. Then he slid into the backseat of the cab and slammed the door shut. He didn’t even look back, but I stood there until the cab was out of sight.
I didn’t realize Miss Louise was still standing there, too, until I heard her voice.
“How come you ain’t in school today?” she asked in a gruff voice. She blew her nose into a piece of tissue and looked at me with red, swollen eyes.
“I wasn’t feeling too good,” I lied, adding a fake cough. But now that I knew Wade was leaving, I did feel sick. A knot had formed in my stomach, and I was more confused than ever. Not just about Wade and the way he seemed to slide in and out of my life. I was also confused about what I wanted to do with my life from this point on. “Miss Louise, can you give me Wade’s address so I can write him a letter sometime?”
“Just a fan letter, I hope,” Miss Louise said, with a smirk.
“Huh? Oh yeah. I just want to write him a fan letter.”
“Good. The boy just getting started, and he don’t need a lot of distractions in his life right now.”
“I know. I won’t distract him,” I insisted, nodding my head for emphasis. “I’d appreciate it if you’d give me his, uh, phone number, too.”
“I guess I could,” Miss Louise said, looking puzzled. “But you are the only girl I’m giving it to. My baby already got too many girls on his back, riding him like he some kind of mule.”
I followed Miss Louise into her house, where she scribbled the information I’d requested on the back of a TV Guide. Then I left her house, running.
That night, as soon as I heard Daddy snoring, I eased out of my room and tiptoed out the front door. I hung out at Tina’s house until the next Greyhound bus was ready to leave for L.A. I climbed aboard that bus, with Wade’s address on the back of a matchbook in my backpack.
CHAPTER 28
I hated buses. Other than the local buses, which were bad enough, I had never been on any other kind. The Greyhound bus was a nightmare on wheels. For almost ten hours, I had to look at and smell some of the most desperate-looking people I’d ever seen before in my life. The big, bull-faced man in the seat next to me smelled like an unwashed ass, but that didn’t bother me as much as his hand landing right on my thigh every time he dozed off. The woman in the seat in front of me had a stout baby in her arms that squealed like a pig for most of the ten hours. A large, shabbily dressed group of people speaking a language I didn’t recognize occupied almost half of the side of the bus opposite me. One of the males had a large, bloody knot on the side of his face, and one of the kids had only one eye. Three of the females were pregnant; one looked to be about twelve. Behind this miserable family sat a snaggletoothed redneck with a limp ponytail. Every few minutes he would mumble under his breath about how America was being taken over by “all them nasty gypsies.”
I was afraid to go in the bathroom. But when I had to go, I had to go. The stench was unholy, and there was no toilet paper or toilet seat protectors. Not only did I have to hover over the seat to keep from sitting in somebody else’s waste, once I finished doing what I had to do, I had to shake my bottom parts dry like a dog.
I couldn’t believe that I was still sane by the time the bus finally pulled into Los Angeles. My feelings were a combination of relief, exci
tement, and impatience.
The inside of the bus station looked more like the lobby of a flophouse. Wild-eyed, foul-smelling people wandered around, with dazed expressions on their faces. I could not believe that I was in the same city that the media called “one of the most glamorous locations in the world.”
Nobody paid much attention to me, and after I caught my reflection in a window near the ticket counter, I understood why. I looked just as dazed and confused as some of the other people.
I scurried around like a drunken squirrel for twenty minutes, until I found a pay phone that worked. Before I could dial Wade’s telephone number, a homeless man with old newspapers wrapped around his feet popped up out of nowhere. He started mumbling and waving an empty tin can in my face. I was not too far from being homeless myself, so I was in no position to part with any of my money. Between what I had and what I had borrowed from Tina, I didn’t have much. I slapped the man’s hand, and for a minute, I thought he was going to slap me back. After he gave me a dirty look and mumbled obscenities under his breath, he shuffled on to the next person. I held my breath, dialed Wade’s phone number, and prayed that the boy was at home.
“Yo,” he muttered, answering on the fourth ring.
“Hello? Wade, is that you?” I asked, breathing a sigh of relief. I smiled for the first time since I’d boarded the bus. My face was so dry, it felt like it was going to crack. I rubbed my cheek and sucked in some stale air. But the air around me was so stale, it made me cough. “Thank the Lord you’re home,” I wailed, patting my matted hair. I had not slept much on the bus, and my eyes were so heavy, I could barely keep them open. I blinked and sucked in some more air, coughing again. “It’s so good to hear your voice, Wade.”
“Christine? Girl, what’s wrong with you? It’s after midnight. What’s going on? Who gave you this number?” He didn’t sound that happy to be hearing from me, and for the life of me, I could not understand why.
“I just got here,” I said, wondering why he was so concerned about me calling him after midnight when I could hear what sounded like a party going on in the background on his end. I hated using pay phones. Especially in areas like where the L.A. Greyhound bus station was located. Another homeless man staggered up to me, with his empty hand held out, babbling some shit I couldn’t understand. As soon as I shooed that sucker away, another one replaced him and was standing a few feet away, sizing me up.
There was a pause before Wade responded. “You … you just got where? What the fuck is this all about?”
“I’m in L.A. I’m at the bus terminal, and let me tell you, this is not a place where I want to be too long. Three bums have already tried to get money from me,” I complained.
“What the hell are you doing at the bus station in L.A.?” Wade asked. His question surprised and depressed me at the same time.
I didn’t know how to respond at first. I sniffed and cleared my throat so that I could speak clearly. I wanted to make sure he heard everything I had to say. “Wade, didn’t you tell me you wished I could be down here with you?” I didn’t even give him the chance to answer. “Well, here I am.”
“Fuck!” His response stunned me. And, he’d said it in such a loud, angry voice, it hurt my ear. It was not what I wanted to hear. But I would hear a lot of things from Wade during the next few days that I didn’t want to hear.
“Does that mean you’re not glad I came down here to be with you?” I whined. “Are you not going to come pick me up?” I held my breath and waited for him to speak. He took so long, I thought he’d left the phone. “Wade, are you still there?”
“Shit! You just stay right where you are at, girl. I’ll be there as soon as I can get there! Shit!” he yelled.
I was twice as dazed and confused now. Wade had just put me in a position where I didn’t know where I stood with him, again. I got dizzy, and it felt like the floor was moving beneath my feet. I had already done a lot of stupid things in my life. But running away to L.A. to be with a man took the cake.
Two hours after I’d called Wade, he showed up. He saw me before I saw him. When he came up behind me and touched my shoulder, I whirled around with my fist raised, expecting to see another aggressive homeless person.
“Thank God it’s only you,” I blurted, wrapping my arms around his waist. He turned away when I attempted to kiss him. “Where did you park?” I asked. Wade rolled his eyes and looked at me like I was speaking Greek. He grabbed my backpack and started to lead me toward the exit. “You don’t have a car to get around with?”
“A car? Girl, I ain’t even got a skateboard to get around with,” he told me in an impatient and tired voice. I looked down and saw that he had on a pair of thin house shoes with holes on every side. “Come on. The next bus is coming in five minutes. There ain’t no more express buses to my place, so it’s going to take us a while to get there,” he said, almost spitting out the words. He talked without looking at me, and I had to run to keep up with him as we rushed to a nearby bus stop.
Two city buses and an hour and a half later, we arrived at Wade’s place. I was horrified when I saw the building he lived in. It was a three-story gray stucco decorated with obscene graffiti and gang signs. Some of the windows were covered with old newspapers; some were not covered at all. At least not with curtains. One window, propped open with a beer bottle, had a dingy sheet for a curtain. An old car with no wheels was parked in front of the building. Next to two over-flowing trash cans on the sidewalk was a pee-stained mattress. There was a hole where a lock should have been in the door at the entrance to the building.
It looked like some of the same derelicts from the bus station area had followed me. A man squatted on the floor right inside the door, holding out his hand as we passed him, mumbling through brown teeth.
Wade lived in this dump with two other aspiring actors, in a studio apartment that was slightly larger than a closet. The fact that this was the best that the three of them could do together said a lot. There were three sleeping bags on the floor, with rolled-up blankets for pillows. The only seats were a red beanbag and an empty crate with a flat pillow strapped on top. Other than a tiny gas stove next to a sink with one faucet, a mini-refrigerator, and a shit box of a radio, there was not much else in the apartment.
“I thought you were doing so well,” I whispered to Wade.
“Huh? Oh … um … I am doing well … when I work,” Wade replied. “But L.A. is like San Francisco, real expensive.” He acted like he didn’t even want to look at me. His roommates, two white boys named Bob and Nick, looked even younger than me. “You can sleep over there by the stove with me,” he said, pointing to one of the sleeping bags. “You hungry? We got some buffalo wings left over from last night.”
“I had some Doritos on the bus,” I said, looking around the bleak room. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I saw an albino roach crawl up the wall a few feet in front of me. Wade saw it, too. He lunged across the floor and smashed it with his fist. Then he swiped his hand on the leg of his pants. I didn’t get too upset, because I had seen worse things than albino roaches. Back in Berkeley, Tina had flying roaches in the house that she shared with her mama.
The boy named Bob crawled into his sleeping bag, with a copy of Rolling Stone. When Wade reluctantly introduced me as “a friend from his old ’hood,” Bob glanced up and gave me a weak wave. The other boy, Nick, was already in his sleeping bag in the middle of the floor, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a tape player in the other, which explained the music I’d heard in the background when I’d called Wade from the bus station. All Nick did was look at me and blink. He didn’t even speak. But from the look on his face, and on the other boy’s, too, they were just as annoyed to see me as Wade was.
The room had an overwhelming stench, which made me think that the bathroom was not too far away. But I didn’t see it. As a matter of fact, other than the door leading out of the apartment, I didn’t see any other doors. And, the biggest window in the room was about the size of a po
rthole. “Where is the bathroom?” I asked, rubbing my nose.
“It’s next door, but you need a key to get in it. We keep the key on top of the refrigerator. When you use the john, don’t forget to flush, and make sure you lock the door back up. We have problems with the homeless people coming up in here to do their business and sleeping on the bathroom floor,” Wade told me. He opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of beer, which he popped open with a bent fork.
I set my backpack down and took the bathroom door key. The closer I got to the bathroom, the more potent the stench got. Once I got inside, I could see why. There was just a toilet. No sink, no shower, no bathtub. It looked like the bathroom had not been cleaned in days. The last person had not even flushed the toilet. To make matters worse, I discovered that my period had started. I had “packed” in such a hurry, I’d forgotten to bring something to sleep in. Wade gave me one of his big T-shirts to sleep in as soon as I returned from the bathroom.
As soon as he turned out the light and pulled me into his sleeping bag with him, his hands started roaming all over my body, tugging on my panties and patting my crotch. His hand froze when he felt my tampon string hanging out of my pussy. I knew that most boys didn’t like to have sex with a girl when she was on her period. Wade was no different.
“Shit! You better keep yourself plugged up real good so you won’t drip no blood on my shit, like you did that time on my mama’s sheets, or on Nick’s floor. He just mopped this morning,” Wade said, with a groan. I was glad it was dark, so I couldn’t see his face. “Uh, look you can stay here tonight. But in the morning you gots to find yourself someplace else to stay.”
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled. “I was planning on doing just that.” Like I said, traveling to L.A. the way I did was the worst thing I’d ever done. I had no money for an apartment, and I didn’t even have enough money to go back home.
CHAPTER 29
