The Last Black Unicorn

by Tiffany Haddish

  Then Ex-Husband came up to me at the end of the cruise, with Titus standing right there:

  Ex-Husband: “Maybe we can exchange numbers or something. I live in Georgia, but you know, I’ll call you.”

  Then Titus be over here talking shit. TO ME! He pulled me aside, yelling at me.

  Tiffany: “Why you bitching at me? You don’t even say, ‘Hey man, that’s my girl.’ Or whatever, and you want to cuss me out, like yelling at me?”

  Titus: “No, you talk to this motherfucker. I’ve been avoiding them, you tell them. That’s your job.”

  Tiffany: “Fuck you. You acting like a bitch.”

  I pulled away and gave the dude my number. Titus was pissed off, but you know what, I was pretty much done with him.

  Besides, he lived in Georgia. I wasn’t never going to see this dude, anyway. I gave him my number mainly because Titus was being such a pussy. We ended up talking on the phone maybe once a month or so. One day I was just like, “Man, you’re old.” He was like thirty-two. I was like, “You’re too old for me,” and I hung up.

  I ended up changing my number, and I moved and all this stuff, and I didn’t even think about him enough to update him. So then he couldn’t find me, and I forgot about him mostly.

  Five years later, he calls me up out of nowhere. I remembered who he was immediately. We talked for a second, but I was curious how he found me.

  Ex-Husband: “Tiffany, I been looking for you for five years. I’m so excited to talk to you again.”

  Tiffany: “Well if you wanted to talk to me, why didn’t you look me up sooner?”

  Ex-Husband: “I couldn’t spell your last name. Then I saw you on Bill Bellamy’s Who’s Got Jokes? and I saw I was spelling your name wrong.”

  Tiffany: “Yeah, but my number ain’t listed.”

  Ex-Husband: “Yeah, I know. I got your phone number from a dude I know who works at Sprint. I’m police, that’s easy.”

  After he told me everything he did to find me, I asked him:

  Tiffany: “If you could find me, maybe you could find my dad?”

  Ex-Husband: “Oh, I’ll find your daddy for you, but it’s going to cost you.”

  Tiffany: “I’ll pay you whatever you want. Whatever you want, I’ll pay you.”

  In my mind, I’m thinking I’ll give him a couple hundred dollars, maybe a couple of dates or something. That’s it. Then he’s like:

  Ex-Husband: “Well, I want you to marry me.”

  I just start busting up laughing, but he was serious.

  Ex-Husband: “Tiffany, I’m telling you, I want you to marry me. I’ve been watching this video I found, you know, when we was on the boat. Every time I’m sad, I watch you. You make me happy. I don’t even really know you, but you’ve made me happy over the years. When I’ve had arguments with my girlfriends, I put in our little cruise video, and it just, you know, it makes me happy. I know we weren’t on the cruise together, but you were my whole cruise.”

  I thought it was so cute, but I still wanted to see if he was serious.

  Tiffany: “Well, I don’t know. If you find my dad, then maybe we could talk about that.”

  Ex-Husband: “I’m going to find your dad.”

  I know what you’re saying right now, because it’s what everyone says at this point in the story:

  “That didn’t creep you out?”

  No motherfucker, it did not!

  Now you’re probably asking, “Why not?”

  That’s how you know I’m crazy. Because I literally thought that this call was a sign from God. I thought God had answered my prayers. Just two months before, I was praying to God every day:

  “Please send me a man that love me. That care about me. That want to see me flourish. That want to just be there for me, and support me, and do what I want to do. Like just really want me to be happy. Please send me somebody like that.”

  Then boom, I get this phone call. I was like, What? Damn God, you work fast. And he gonna find my dad? You awesome, God, I’m in.

  I didn’t tell him much about my dad, because I don’t know much. I just knew my dad’s name, his birthday, and where he came from.

  Three weeks went by . . . and my dad called me.

  For like ten years, I had been trying to reach him. I’d been looking for him since I was sixteen. I did not think he would find him. And this dude straight found my daddy in three weeks.

  I was crying, because I recognized the voice immediately. He started telling me stuff about my family, that only the family would know.

  After the call, my mind went racing. God or not, I thought to myself, Damn, I’m not really going to honor this. I can’t really marry this dude. I don’t even remember what he looks like.

  He had a Myspace page, and his picture on his Myspace page was so damn little, you couldn’t see what this motherfucker looked like. I called him up, still crying after talking to my dad.

  Tiffany: “Man I’m so grateful. You found him. I don’t know if I can honor our agreement. I don’t even remember what you really look like. The pictures you got online is wack.”

  Ex-Husband: “We going to see each other. We going to see each other.”

  I didn’t believe him. He was across the country from me.

  We still kept talking on the phone. I booked a movie in New Orleans like the next day, and two weeks after that I was in New Orleans.

  I always talked to him on the phone, but I never told him where I was in New Orleans. I never told him what hotel, the name of the movie, or anything.

  At that point in time, I was very superstitious. It was mainly because of Kevin Hart. He gave me this advice as I started to get going:

  Kevin Hart: “Don’t be telling people everything that you’re doing, because motherfuckers will try to make you fail. Just do your shit. You ain’t gotta tell everybody you got a movie. Just do the fucking movie, Tiffany. Like don’t tell people where you’re at, because they’re going to come for you. They’re going to come for you. Because people will be trying to do bad stuff. They think bad thoughts, and they jealous, and they will try to fuck you up.”

  So I never told him what the name of the movie was, what kind of part I was playing, nothing. I just said “I’m working,” that’s it. “I’m working. I’m in New Orleans working.”

  One night, I was out drinking at the Cats Meow all tipsy, and he called my phone.

  Tiffany: “When are you coming to see me?”

  Ex-Husband: “I’ll come see you right now.”

  Tiffany: “Yeah, right. You ain’t coming to see me.”

  We got off the phone, and I went back to drinking and didn’t think nothing of it. I woke up at five in the morning to start getting ready for the movie. I was hungover and getting ready to go to set. I was braiding my hair in these little crackhead braids, so I could play this drug addict in the movie. I got a knock on my door. I thought, I didn’t order no food.

  I opened the door, and there was a chubby, plain-looking guy in a polo shirt, just staring at me like he was expecting me to say something.

  Tiffany: “Who are you?”

  Ex-Husband: “It’s me. It’s Ex-Husband.”

  Tiffany: “How do you know what room I’m in? How did you know to come here?”

  Ex-Husband: “I just looked you up. It’s not hard. I called the front desk, they said what room you’re in. Here I am.”

  That motherfucker drove seven hours. He drove all the way from Atlanta for me. And all I’m thinking to myself is, This motherfucker is ugly. He’s fat. He is not hot, and he is just not very attractive.

  Later, he said the same thing to me. He said, “When I first saw you at the door, I was thinking, This bitch has got skinny. She looks like she on drugs. She wore the fuck out. I’m not feeling this at all.”

  Yeah, but I was TRYING to dress like a crackhead, for the movie. He wasn’t trying to be fat and ugly, he just was.

  Tiffany: “Well, you can stay in the living room part. You can sleep on the couch. It folds out,
if you want to go to sleep. I’m about to go to work.”

  I went to work, came back to the room. He’d cleaned up the room, bought flowers and stuff. He took me out to a really nice restaurant. The next day, he took me shopping.

  He didn’t try to fuck me, he didn’t try to kiss me or nothing. So I started thinking he was gay, because why you buying me stuff, and taking me to nice restaurants, and not trying to fuck me?

  Then he went back to Georgia. The next weekend, I drunk-dialed him, and he showed right back up the next day, and he took me out again. That’s when Harry Potter was hot, so I got him to buy me the whole Harry Potter book series. I got him to buy me some stuff from Victoria’s Secret. I was like, If he’s gay, he can just buy me everything. Fuck it.

  I don’t mind hanging out with gay dudes. I just really thought he was gay. Then the following weekend, it was his birthday.

  Ex-Husband: “I’m going to fly you to Atlanta so you can see my house.”

  Tiffany: “I don’t need to see your house. I’m not going to care about your house.”

  Ex-Husband: “No, I’m going to fly you Sunday. It’s my birthday.”

  He flew me to Atlanta, and that was the first time a man flew me somewhere, so I was feeling super-special, even if he was gay.

  At this point, I’d been talking to him seriously for a few weeks, and he’d been buying me stuff and being so nice and flying me places and he even found my daddy. Yeah, he wasn’t all that hot, but damn—no man had ever been this good to me.

  After he picked me up from the airport, we pulled up to his house. In my little pea-brain, I thought this was the most beautiful house in the whole wide fucking world. I was telling myself, I don’t care if he is gay, I am fucking the shit out of him. He’s going to get the business. I don’t care if he’s gay and ugly and fat, I’m going to fuck him.

  So I did fuck him, and he wasn’t gay. It was like my soul had left my body. It was like, This is your husband, girl. You need to lock this in. He knows what he’s doing. He was all cool.

  Then when we were done, I was like:

  Tiffany: “So where my ring at? Ain’t you supposed to be giving me a ring or something?”

  Ex-Husband: “What? You really want to get married? We can do that. We can do that shit today.”

  Tiffany: “Yeah, I want to get married. I want my ring. It better be pretty and stuff, too.”

  That day, he drove me up to Virginia to meet my dad. I met my dad in person, and he filmed all that. After I met my dad, we drove back down to Atlanta.

  Don’t get me wrong—there were signs of craziness during all of this, but I didn’t think much of it. I know what you’re thinking, MORE signs of craziness? As in, more than what you’ve told me?

  Yeah, there were. This is when I confirmed that he wasn’t really filming his vacation on that cruise ship. He was just filming me. I only got to see the cruise video one time, but yeah, it was real stalkerish. It’s creepy. He was hiding the camera under a jacket, following me around. The camera was pointed at my booty a lot. It was crazy.

  But you gotta understand my mind at the time. I’m thinking this is God’s work. Like this is exactly what I asked God for, even if he is not all that physically attractive, I can live without that. What’s important is his soul, and to me, his soul seemed like it cared about and cherished me a lot.

  After that, I flew back to California. He told me:

  Ex-Husband: “I’m going to come to California, and we’re going to have the best—you’re gonna have the best life, the best everything.”

  The next week, he came out to LA, and he brought me a Dodge Charger.

  Ex-Husband: “You can’t be driving in no Geo Metro, you drive this.”

  Tiffany: “Great, cool. I can live with this sort of life.”

  He drove a Dodge Charger from Atlanta to LA. For me.

  Honestly, part of the reason I was looking past the craziness was my own arrogance, in a way. I had started thinking I had the best cootchie in the world. I was thinking, My pussy is the best pussy ever. There must be midgets in my pussy doing magic tricks on his dick or some shit. Like, no man had ever brought me cars from other states, so it MUST be something about me.

  Turns out, he had a tracking device on that car. He was tracking everywhere I went. He was just watching me, that’s why he brought it. He also had one of his former police partners, one of his buddies who lived in LA, watching me. So that dude was following me around when he wasn’t in town.

  I didn’t know any of this, I found all this out later on. Just checking to see what I was doing is what he said. He said he was doing it to keep me safe, but really he was a stalker.

  I could have seen the signs then, if I wanted to. For example, one day I didn’t answer the phone at all, I just didn’t feel like talking, and he just popped up in my house. I thought that was . . . unusual.

  I kept telling myself that he did this because he cared about me. But really, he was controlling me. That’s what it was about. Not love, not caring, it was about control.

  But I either didn’t know any better, or I wasn’t willing to see it. I looked past his issues, so I could have a man in my life who did things for me.

  Even though we were “engaged,” he formally proposed to me at a comedy club. I was onstage, and he was going to come up to the stage and give me the ring, but then he got scared for some reason. When the show was over, when nobody was around, he was like:

  Ex-Husband: “Will you marry me?”

  Tiffany: “Yeah, but why did you wait till nobody was around?”

  All my friends was like, “He’s ugly, Tiffany, you can do better. Like, he fat. He’s ugly. Yeah, he really love you and stuff, but he’s wack. Like, you could do better.”

  I thought they were all haters. I just thought they were jealous or whatever. Because he drove a car out for me, he gave me a ring, and he was giving me an allowance, too. I thought that was super-dope. That’s how you know I was stupid. He was giving me like $100 a week, and I thought that was so fucking awesome. I thought that was the shit.

  Not that I needed it, but it meant a lot to me. Because to me, if a man cares about you, he gives you money. He works hard for his money, so if he gives it to you, he cares.

  So even though all my friends hated him, I just thought they were jealous. And none of them knew all the crazy stuff. At least not yet. But crazy can’t hide forever.

  He moved out to LA soon after that. And he had a son with him. He told me he had three kids, and he brought his son with him, the eight-year-old.

  So now we are living in my one-bedroom apartment. Me, him, and his eight-year-old. I did not like that at all. We only lived there for a month, and then he got this house, and the house was great, but it was far. It was like seventy miles outside LA, in Wildomar.

  I thought he was doing it for me. He wasn’t. It was to keep me away from everybody and make me feel like I didn’t want to do comedy anymore.

  But I still kept doing comedy, I just did it in Wildomar. I just found places out there, did the casinos and stuff like that, did shows in San Diego. That shit used to piss him off.

  Ex-Husband: “You don’t need to do this comedy stuff. I’m making money, you don’t need it.”

  Then as soon as he was saying that, he would lose his job (he was doing private detective work), or get laid off, and so then I had to be supplementing everything. So I started booking movies and all these other really good-paying gigs.

  Then as soon as we got married, he had all kinds of demands on me around taking care of his son.

  Ex-Husband: “You need to go to the PTA meetings. You need to pick up the kid and take him to soccer.”

  Tiffany: “Can he go home to his mom for six months, so I can learn how to just be a wife for a little bit? Can I just learn how to do that part for a little bit? Then he can come back, and then I can assume the mommy role? Because this is stressful.”

  I loved the little boy, but I was instantly being thrown into this mommy rol
e. And honestly, it made me feel like I was nine years old again, taking care of somebody, trying to do my thing, too. I was trying to learn how to be a wife and be a loving partner and all this also.

  I was confused as fuck. That was a lot for me, because I was also trying to do my comedy. I was trying to do this for real. And then he told me he don’t want me talking about his son onstage, but his son is funny as hell. He’s doing really crazy, funny stuff, and I really want to talk about it, and he tells me don’t talk about him? Then he tried to tell me not to talk about him, either. But my whole world was those two. What else am I going to talk about?

  There was all kinds of stress like that. Basically, he was trying to shrink my world down, until it was nothing but him and his needs. But I wasn’t about to let that happen, and I didn’t see what he was doing at the time.

  Then the relationship got violent.

  I was drunk one night, and I just kept saying over and over:

  Tiffany: “I want to eat. I want to eat. I want to eat when we get to the house. I can’t wait till we get to the house. I’m going to eat that cabbage that you cooked. Oh man, it’s going to be so good. I’m about to tear that cabbage up.”

  Only a drunk person could be excited about eating cabbage, so you know I was drunk as shit.

  I honestly don’t remember how it happened, but we were in the kitchen, and I was trying to heat up the cabbage, and he choked the shit out of me. He told me I needed to shut up and listen, I talked too motherfucking much, and he choked me.

  Now look—we’ve all been around drunk people we wanted to choke the fuck out of. And if I was raving about eating cabbage, then I was probably in that category. But still, it’s different to want to choke a drunk person, and to do it to your wife.

  When he was choking me, at first I was just like, What the hell? Like, I could not even believe I was being choked.

  Then my survival instincts kicked in.

  I grabbed the pan on the stove next to me, and I hit him with it. He dropped his hands, and staggered a bit.

  Now that I had my senses, and I could breathe, the rage came.

  I threw a vicious right hand and punched him in the eye. That staggered him more, I guess he didn’t expect me to fight back.