by Miasha
“Mom, you think that slap hurt me? Please, you’ve done worse shit to me.” I chuckled. “I’m out.”
I walked out my mom’s house and up the street. My heart was torn to pieces and my mind wasn’t functioning properly. I felt like I was outside of myself. I was walking like a zombie, staggering and aimless.
Like deja vu, the guy who lived in the crack house was sitting on his porch.
“Yo, you all right?” he asked.
I shook my head no and asked him if he had some weed.
“No, but I got somethin’ better,” he told me.
I walked up on the porch and he led me in his house.
It was kind of dark inside for it to be so sunny outside. All the shades were down. There were people everywhere. A guy and a girl were on the couch. They both looked asleep. Another guy was on the loveseat with an open can of Budweiser in his hand. There was a lady sitting on the floor with her head pressed against the wall. It looked like she was asleep, too, but she wasn’ t—because she was mumbling to herself.
“You stay upset about somethin’,” the guy said leading me to the dining room. “But that’s all right. I got somethin’ that’ll fix all ya problems.”
We walked through the curtain that separated the living room from the dining room, and even more people were in there. But they all were awake, gettin’ blasted. A lady and a man were sitting at the table sharing a crack pipe. A guy across from them was shootin’ up. Different types of drugs and paraphernalia were placed in front of each of them as if they were place settings. The smell in the air was strong. I figured it was the crack, since that was the only thing being smoked. I couldn’t compare it to anything, but it was a smell I would never forget.
“Sit down,” the guy who had brought me in the house told me as he kept on into the kitchen.
I sat in the last empty chair in the dining room.
“Angel?” the lady next to me said.
I turned to her, and it was the lady who was in the Chinese store talkin’ about she used to baby-sit me and my brother. I didn’t know whether to speak or not. I mean, she was in there smoking a pipe and I was in there waiting to smoke something.
“Hi.”
“What you doin’ in here?” she asked while her companion sucked on the glass. “You smoke, now?”
“Weed,” I replied.
She shook her head. “Ain’t no weed jumpin’ off in here.”
“He got somethin’ for me,” I told her, tears forming in my eyes.
“What’s wronnng?” she sang, looking me in my eyes.
I couldn’t answer her. Images of my baby were running through my mind. I just started to cry.
“Aww, Angel, what’s the matter? You know what, Squat takin’ too long,” she said as she retrieved the pipe from the guy she was with. “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “Smoke it like you smoke weed. But don’t take long puffs. Take short ones. Like this,” she instructed as she hit the pipe.
I took it out of her hands to try it. I put it up to my mouth the way I saw her do it and sucked. The guy, whose name I found out was Squat, walked out the kitchen.
“Damn, you couldn’t wait? I had some zanies for you. You don’t need crack if you used to smokin’ weed. You need something to put you down not get you up. Crack goin’ have you goin’.”
“You was taking too long, Squat. Shit. Plus she needed more than some damn pills. And this is my family. I used to change her diapers. I’ ma look out for her,” the lady told Squat.
“Well, that’s on y’ all,” he said and left the dining room.
I sucked on the pipe some more, and slowly I started to feel in control. My senses seemed to heighten. I was more coherent and my mind started to clear. I was feeling refreshed.
Motherly Love
I finished up the lady and the guy’s pipe, and the lady copped us another bag. She said she had just got her income tax check so she was treatin’. The pipe was in rotation and I was about to get my turn when I heard my mom’s voice in the living room.
“Squat, gimme a nickel of juice.”
“This ain’t enough.”
“This is all I got until I get my money in two weeks.”
“Well come back then, Carmina. You always do this shit.”
“Carmina?” the lady I was smokin’ with shouted. She must have been listening in like I was.
“Squat, give ‘er what she asked for, it’s on me!” she yelled.
I passed her back the pipe even though I didn’t want to. The fact of the matter was I still had respect for my mom. I didn’t want her to see me smokin’ crack. I didn’t want her to see me in that house.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why you ain’t hit it?”
I shook my head and wrinkled my face. “My mom comin’.”
“Oh, please, girl. That’s that crack that got you paranoid already. Ya mom is cool as shit. I grew up with ya motha. I know,” she said, putting the pipe back in front of me.
After a few moments my mom walked through the curtain. Her eyes went to the other people in there first. And before they got to me, the lady stood up and grabbed my mom in a bear hug.
“Carmina! What’s up, girl?”
My mom stepped back to see who she was. “Ne-Ne?” my mom had a slight smile on her face.
“Yeah! I got ya daughter over here!”
“My daughter?” my mom asked with attitude.
My mom looked past Nina, and her eyes landed on me.
“Angel! What the fuck is you doin’?” I never seen my mom look at me the way she did that day.
“Don’t worry, I took care of her,” Nina told my mom.
My mom wasn’t trying to hear that. She threw a fit.
“Ne-Ne, that is my daughter! You don’t take care of her like this! She is a child! She don’t need to be in here!”
Nina sucked her teeth, “Carmina, it’s me! Come on now. Ease up. We used to do our thing back in the day, too. What, you forgot?”
“You are not understanding me, Ne-Ne. That is my child you got over there,” my mom said, as she glanced over at me and then onto the table in front of me. “And she smokin’ crack?!” My mom flipped out. She immediately started to cry. “Angel, what the fuck? Do you know what you doin? Baby, you are gonna fuck ya whole life up!” Then she turned to Nina. “Ne-Ne, you really crossed the line. I ain’t seen you in over ten years and you bring my daughter in a crack house and introduce her to this shit! You used to watch her. She was like ya child. Would you have ya child up in here smokin’ a fuckin’ pipe?”
Nina’s happy attitude turned mad. “My child do smoke crack,” she said, pointing to the guy she was with. “So what you sayin’? Just like you shoot dope and ya daughter smoke crack! It’s a cycle, Carmina! What you expect?”
“Ne-Ne, you got five seconds, Ne-Ne. I swear to God I will fuckin’ jam this loaded needle in ya neck! You better get the fuck out my face right now! I swear you got five fuckin’ seconds.”
Nina started gathering her stuff. “You like my sister, Carmina, and I got a lot of love for you. That’s the only reason I’m leavin’ without kickin’ ya ass. Come on, Tee,” she said, leaving with her son.
“And you!” my mom walked over to me. She shook her head. “I guess I did this, right?”
“Mommy, not right now, okay. Just go ’head and shoot up and let me be,” I finally spoke. Just because she showed some concern for me didn’t mean anything. I was still mad at her. All the stuff she had done up until that point outweighed that one time she acted like she cared.
“Let you be? For what? So you can smoke the rest of that pipe?”
“Mom,” I whined. “It’s not the time. It’s really not,” I brushed her off. She was right, though. I did want to get back to the pipe. It was calling me. But somehow I still had enough respect for my mom not to pick it up and smoke it right there in front of her.
My mom sat down in the chair next to mine and put her hands on my knees. “Angel, listen. I know I haven’t been the
re for you these last two years, and I may have caused all this. But you don’t have any idea how that situation with your brother affected me.”
“I do now,” I snapped. “Now that I know that you had something to do with it!”
My mom started shaking her head. “No, no, no. It was not like that at all. All I did was tell the guys where he would be. They was not supposed to shoot my son. You hear me? They was not supposed to shoot my firstborn!” My mom’s tears came plunging out her eyes like water from a busted pipe. “I fucked up with Curtis. I’m not sayin’ I didn’t. But I don’t want to fuck up with you.”
I butted in, “Well, it’s too late ‘cause you already did.”
“I know. I know. But none of that other stuff you did made me realize how bad I fucked up with you like seeing that fuckin’ crack pipe in front of you. When you was makin’ money however you was makin’ it, runnin’ away from home, gettin’ locked up, gettin’ pregnant, none of that opened my eyes. That was just the way shit went as far as I was concerned. But, Angel, I can’t tell you how I feel seeing that crack pipe in front of you.” My mom broke down.
I looked away from my mom, uninterested. I wasn’t in the mood for all the mushy shit. When I needed her a few minutes ago it was all about Marvin. Now she wanted to tell me how she felt and all that. Well, she was too late.
“What can I do to convince you to get up and leave that pipe?” my mom asked, still holding on to my knees.
“Mom, why are you buggin’ out? You came in here to get high, didn’t you? Talkin’ about you clean. Clean, my ass.”
“Angel, I was clean. I was doing good, too, even when Marvin came back, I was doin’ good.”
“No, you wasn’t. Don’t even lie. Naja told me y’all stayed out all night.”
“When? Last night? Nooo. We wasn’t out gettin’ high. I took Marvin down to the detox center, and my friend was on duty. She let me stay there with him for support, that’s all. That’s why when you came in earlier, we was both so happy. And it caught me off guard, when you started talkin’ like that. ’Cause I felt like we had finally beat our demons, and we had planned to start all over. And then…”
“Well, I didn’t know that!” I finally unleashed my tears.
“Of course you didn’t. And I didn’t know that Marvin had hurt you! I was so messed up all the time. My mind was never in the right place. I was either high or thinking about gettin’ high. I can’t remember one time that my mind was on anything else. And I’m so sorry. But I know now, and I want to be your mother and do what a mother is supposed to do. I want to get you out of here and I wanna get you some help,” my mom cried.
I shook my head no. “You didn’t come in here lookin’ for me. You came in here to stick that needle in ya arm.”
“I know. I did. After you told me about your baby and then you brought up Curtis, I couldn’t take it. I was gonna use my last three dollars on a hit and say fuck it. But, look what happened. God intervened, Angel. God brought us together, mother and daughter, both with our fuckin’ addictions, and he wants us to stop together.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You say all that now like I’m supposed to just forget about all the stuff I been through because of you. Like I’m supposed to just take ya hand and walk out of here with you like everything is peaches and cream.”
“I don’t expect that. I know I messed things up for you. I know it’s goin’ take time to fix it all, but just give it a try. I’m tellin’ you, you don’t want to keep up no addiction. You don’t wanna be no fuckin’ crack-head. Ya whole life will be wasted. And I’m speaking from experience, Angel. Two years of my life just passed me by like that. And I know the rest of it will do the same thing if I keep shootin’ dope. And if you start a crack habit now, at only fifteen, you know what the next twenty, thirty years is goin’ be like? Hell. Pure hell.”
“That’s goin’ be whether I smoke crack or not, living with you,” I told my mom spitefully.
My mom gave me a look. I must have hit a nerve. She picked up the needle that she had put on the table when she first sat down and looked like she was going to put it in her arm.
And since she had the audacity to shoot up in front of me, I was going to smoke in front of her. I picked up the pipe and put it in my mouth. Then I felt a sharp pain shoot across my chest. The pipe dropped from my lips and onto the table. I went to clutch my heart and my mom’s hand was in the way. I fell over somewhat and my mom caught me in her arms. She pulled the needle out my chest and cradled me. She started rocking me back and forth and sobbing over me. My vision got blurry to the point that I could hardly see. I felt my body shaking, and I was going in and out of consciousness. I heard echoes of somebody screaming. Then I felt my eyes roll to the back of my head and I saw blackness. My body stopped shaking and the screams turned to silence.
I thought my mom was about to get high when she picked up that needle. I thought she was going to let me smoke the rest of the crack. I thought we were going to get high together like Nina and her son. She was so desperate and so hurt, I just knew she was going to shoot her dope and not care about me being there. She could have easily given up and said to hell with you, Angel, go ahead and spend ya life in turmoil. But she didn’t. She finally stepped up to the plate and protected me as a mother should. She stopped me from spending my life as a crack-head and used her last three dollars to do it. Now, you might think that’s nothing, but having done drugs before myself, I know that must have been hard. She wanted that dope so bad. It was in her eyes. But she used her last hit on me and put me out of my misery. I guessed she figured she had given me enough of hell and maybe it was time for her to give me heaven. Now, that was love. She finally showed some motherly love.
We come from troubled wombs.
Our homes resemble tombs.
We come from polluted souls.
Our lives resemble holes;
empty and devalued, longing for the close.
While you’re taught monsters don’t exist,
we’re feeding from their breasts
forced to carry the weight of their fate upon our
malnourished chests.
Our role models are zombies
whom we refer to as our mommies
in love with vampires that suck the lived out of
their bodies.
We live amongst the dead
who walk around with empty heads,
numbing their brains just to feel sane,
revealing skeletal remains.
We come from troubled wombs.
Our homes resemble tombs.
We come from polluted souls.
Our lived resemble holes;
empty and devalued, longing for the close.
Acknowledgments
Thank you Allah for allowing me to get this one written. It gave me a hard way to go at times, but it was worth the struggle.
Rich and Amir, you two already know what it is. My sincerest thank yous go to you both.
To my family and dear friends, thanks for all you do. The part you all play in my success is exceptional.
And to everybody who had a hand in getting this book to the masses—Liza Dawson, Simon & Schuster, Cherise Davis, Martha Schwartz, Dawn Michelle, distributors, retailers, vendors, etc. along with everybody who picks it up, recommends it, or supports it in any way, thanks much and I appreciate you the most.
See you again in a few months.
Ya girl,
Miasha
Table of Contents
Cover
Praise
Colophon
Also by Miasha
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
R.I.P Curtis
Home Sweet Home
Somebody Has to Feed Us
Ain’t No Turning Back
Home for the Holidays
The Difference a Day Makes
No Place Like Home
Long Ways from Home
Love the One you’re With<
br />
Home Is Where the Heart Is
Same Shit, Different Toilet
When It Rains, It Pours
Motherly Love
Acknowledgments
