I Ain't Me No More (13 page)

Now that I finally had my car back, I was so happy. Dub didn't even think twice about asking to use it. Whatever mess he was getting into, he was getting into it on foot. For almost six years, nothing had been able to keep him away from me. He'd be hounding me constantly to see what I was up to. And now it would be days before I would even hear from him. I was the last thing on his mind. Most girlfriends would have had a problem with that, but not me. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, I was free at last.

Four days straight had passed since I'd last heard from Dub. During those four days I thought that any minute he'd show up, demanding the car, threatening me with bodily harm or something. But that never happened.

On day five, after still not hearing from Dub, I felt confident that my car was mine again. It was a Saturday afternoon in May, about one week before the swimming pools would officially open. I pulled out the water hose and put Baby D in his swimming trunks and a T-shirt, and we washed down my car while the radio played inside it.

I felt like I'd just gotten a new car for my sixteenth birthday and I was proud to be shining it up. Baby D splished and splashed in the water puddles in the driveway. He looked so cute. He was getting so big that he made regular trips to the barber shop now. His little fade was perfect for his little chocolate self.

I pulled out Nana's old orange vac, which everyone had used over the years to clean the inside of their car out. I wore a smile as I sang along to what I called a happy song on the radio, one of those songs that just made a person smile when it came on. Like Janet Jackson's “When I Think of You.”

After unraveling the cord from around the sweeper and plugging it in inside the house with an extension cord, I started with the backseat, but not before stepping back and taking a minute to admire my shiny car.

There was so much trash and dirt under and down in between those seats, it was disgusting. In the past four days I hadn't gotten all up under and in between the seats, so I hadn't noticed. There had been a couple of fast-food bags and soda bottles I'd had to pitch, but what I was now finding growing in between my seats was stomach turning. Dub must have had everybody under the sun back there in my car.

“Baby D, go inside the house and get Mommy a brown paper bag from the basement stairwell so I can put all this trash in it,” I ordered my only son.

While Baby D went inside to get me a trash bag, I let a string of expletives fly from my mouth regarding how I felt about Dub's treatment of my vehicle.

“Hurry up, Baby D,” I shouted in frustration as I threw all the stuff out onto the driveway. Baby D was taking so long that I decided to just go ahead and start vacuuming off and down in between the seats. I turned on the vacuum and started moving the vac head up and down the seats. Burn holes decorated the entire backseat. There were some burns where cigarette ashes had fallen and burned a hole through the seat, but the majority of the burns were from hot seeds spit out of a joint that had settled onto my seats.

“Son of a . . .” I spat. I was so disgusted. That feeling of delight I'd had less than five minutes ago was gone. I didn't feel like I had a new car anymore. I felt like I had something old, abused, and broken down. Something that nobody wanted, something like me. Looking at that car was almost like looking at a reflection of myself. I'd let Dub do the same thing to me that he'd done to my car. Had I really expected him to treat my vehicle any better than he had treated me?

So much anger boiled up inside of me that by the time Baby D made it back outside with the trash bag, I was on fire.

“Here's the bag, Mommy. I—”

“What took you so long?” I screamed as I snatched the bag from him. “How long does it take somebody to go in the house and get a bag, stupid? You blind or something?”

I could tell by the look on Baby D's face, in his dark brown eyes, that he thought he'd just entered the twilight zone. A minute ago he'd left a sweet, kind mommy outside who looked like she was enjoying life more than ever before. He'd returned to find some unrecognizable beast. But he just kept that innocent, loving smile on his face.

“I can't stand you sometimes,” I shouted.

Still he just smiled.

No matter what I did to Baby D, he loved me. No matter what I said to Baby D, he still loved me. He would cling to me as if I was the only person he had in this world, me, the person who was hurting him. The person who was calling him names and words that he didn't even know the meaning of. The person who was hurting so much inside that she wanted to make sure everyone around her hurt. It just so happened that Baby D was pretty much the only one around. Would I take that young, sweet, loving, and innocent boy and turn him into a monster too? Would he become me? Would he become his father? The answers to those questions were something I would fear the most.

“You have a collect call from—” the operator began after I answered the ringing phone.

“Dub,” I heard a male voice interrupt.

After that I received instructions from the operator about which prompt would accept the call and which prompt would refuse it.

“Dub, what's going on?” I asked after accepting the call. I had talked to Dub only a couple of times in the last two weeks. I had had the pleasure of not seeing him at all during those two weeks.

“I'm locked up,” he answered.

“That I know, but why? What for? What did you do?” I shot off question after question, giving the impression that I was genuinely concerned about the fact that my man was locked up, when, in all actuality, what I really was feeling was excitement.

“Me and TJ got into it. He called the police on me, and they arrested me.”

“You beat up TJ?” I questioned. “But why . . .” My words seemed to trail off. This was the first time Dub had beaten anybody up besides a girl. For the first time he'd manned up enough to fight another man. Thing was, though, the man he'd beaten up was wheelchair bound.

Just some months prior, TJ had been shot. The bullet hit him in the spine, and unfortunately, he was now paralyzed from the waist down. God had showed him enough favor in his upper body so that he could still use his hands to grip the crack pipe and his arms to lift the crack pipe to his lips.

“Anyway . . . ,” Dub said, changing the subject so that I wouldn't dwell on the fact that he was incarcerated for beating up a paralyzed man, an offense that surely wasn't gaining him any street cred behind the jailhouse walls. “I need you to get with my mom so y'all can figure out how to get me out of here.”

“Excuse me?” I was quick to say, all the while thinking,
Me and your mom didn't figure out how to get you in there, so why we gotta figure out how to get you out?

“I told her I was going to have you call her. So y'all call the courts and all and see what's what. I gotta get outta here.”

“I'll call her,” I said in a tone that let him know that I was calling her only because he had asked me to, not because I planned on playing any part in getting him out of there. I knew if I didn't call her, he would blow Nana's phone up, trying to get at me.

After ending the call with Dub, I kept my promise and phoned Ms. Daniels. “Hi, Ms. Daniels. It's Helen. I just got a call from Dub.”

“Yeah, me too,” she informed me. “His arraignment is tomorrow, at nine o'clock. I figure you can come pick me up and we can go see what his bail is set at.”

“Sure,” I agreed. I didn't even put up a fight about going. I didn't have but two dollars and fifty cents in my back account. Ms. Daniels lived paycheck to paycheck. I knew this because she borrowed money from me on occasion. I was certain she didn't have any extra money lying around to bail Dub out of jail. Couldn't get blood from a turnip. So I was actually eager to go to court the next morning. I wouldn't have missed going to that courthouse and watching with my own two eyes someone finally take Dub's freedom from him.

The next morning, after calling the job to let them know I'd be in late, I got Baby D off to school and headed over to Ms. Daniels's apartment. We arrived at the courthouse at about 9:15 that morning, but Dub's case wasn't even called until about 10:00 a.m.

When the deputies led Dub into the courtroom, I gasped. I didn't even recognize him. Even though it had been only a couple of weeks since the last time I laid eyes on him, it looked like he'd been living on the streets since then. He had had a nice slim build before, but now he looked like a skeleton, like he hadn't eaten since God knows when. He looked like he hadn't shaved or gotten a haircut. He looked like he probably hadn't even bathed. He looked like . . . he looked like . . . Who was I kidding? That wasn't what my baby's daddy, my boyfriend, looked like. He looked like what he was . . . a crackhead.

I looked over at Ms. Daniels, who didn't even seem fazed by her son's appearance. She had a look of expectancy in her eyes, like that was what she figured he was supposed to look like. That was her baby, and she was looking at him with as much pride as she probably had the day he was born. There was no shame on her face whatsoever. I guess that was what a mother's love was all about.

I, on the other hand, was appalled, embarrassed, humiliated, as if he'd come out of my own womb. As if I was responsible for raising him into the man who stood before us in the courtroom.

“Hey,” Dub turned around and mouthed, his eyes going to me first, then to his mother. He then turned his attention to the judge, who within seconds set a bail of fifty thousand dollars and a future court date. “See what you can do,” was the next thing Dub turned around and mouthed to us as he was escorted out of the courtroom.

“How much you got?” his mother asked me as we exited the courtroom while the next case was called.

“I don't have a dime,” I said, trying not to sound so excited about being broke.

“I don't know what we're going to do.” Ms. Daniels sounded so exasperated. “I bet his bond would have been set lower if you hadn't called the police on him that one time.”

I felt like I'd been hit with a bolt of lightning. For one, I'd forgotten all about that one time, out of hundreds, Dub had beaten me up and I'd actually gotten up the courage to go downtown and press charges against his butt. Secondly, he deserved to go to jail. He could have blinded me that night. How dare Ms. Daniels try to put the blame for her son's violent temper on me?

Chills ran through my body as I thought back to that night. Dub himself had had to rush me to the emergency room. I'd had to lie to the doctors about how I'd come about my injuries so that Dub wouldn't go to jail right there on the spot. I'd lied only because Dub had stayed by my side the entire time, his presence intimidating me.

Dub's uncle's girlfriend, Nique, had moved next door to us before I moved into Nana's. One evening she and I had sat out on the stoop, watching our two boys play together while she gave me a piece of her mind about what she thought about Dub's uncle and his family.

“They all ain't really nothing but white trash,” Nique had said, with her chubby brown cheeks and pouty lips. Her skin was so clear and smooth. She was going to be an example of black don't crack. “Or should I say some white and some gray,” Nique added, taking a shot at the fact that all the women in Dub's family had babies with black men or biracial men. “My man too. And all the men don't do nothing but beat on the women.” She let out a harrumph. “But that don't include my man. He knows better than to try that mess with me.”

Nique reminded me of Sofia from
The Color Purple
. I imagined her boyfriend would have the same hard time trying to beat on her as Harpo had trying to beat on Sofia.

“And even though all the women don't date nothing but black men,” Nique continued, “I still think they lightweight prejudiced. I even heard Dub and Kelice's mom talking about you one time. Called you a black witch, or something like that. I was saying to myself, ‘Why she got to be a black witch? Why can't she just be a plain witch?' That's how I know they prejudiced.”

I had to admit, I was hurt when I found out that Ms. Daniels had been talking smack about me. All this time I had thought that she and I were back on good terms. She never came across as racist or prejudiced. How could she when she, a white woman, had married a black man and had had two children with him, two children that were, according to their birth certificates, black?

“Black witch?” I said, mocking the name Nique had said Ms. Daniels had called me, still in disbelief.

About two weeks after Nique's and my little chat on the stoop, I confronted Ms. Daniels with a couple things that were mentioned in our conversation. It didn't take her long to figure out where I'd gotten the information. A couple days after that, Nique came charging over to me like Miss Sofia, accusing me of lying about her. Well, I came to find out that Ms. Daniels had added some yeast to the things I'd said. She had put words in my mouth about Nique that Nique had never really said, or maybe she did say them. I didn't know. I guess I had no business revealing what somebody had told me in confidence in the first place.

Nonetheless, I was so mad that I took on the role of Miss Sofia and stormed over to Ms. Daniels's apartment, where I let her know that I didn't appreciate one bit the fact that she'd put my name in her mouth. I kindly asked her to keep my name out of her mouth in the future before I retreated to my place. I thought that was the end of all the confusion until Dub came storming into the house a few hours later.

“Tramp, don't you ever go over my mama's house acting like you ain't got no sense,” he said as he punched me upside the head. “Disrespect her again, you hear?” A slap across the face followed.

Baby D just sat there, engaged in whatever it was he was watching on television. “Ah, ha-ha.” He even laughed at something one of the characters was doing, as if it was the funniest thing in the world. Baby D pointed at the television screen, laughing, as if his dad and I weren't even in the room, raising hell.

I supposed it was safe to say that the beatings, the yelling, and the fighting were nothing new to him. He had stopped paying attention. It had become normal . . . for all of us.

I was way caught off guard by Dub's attitude. Since when did he care about his mother being disrespected? This was the same Dub who, I found out through the grapevine, had stolen the television out of the room he was staying in at his mother's house. I'd also been told that he'd stolen the stereo system too. And one day he left her apartment with some other appliances tucked in his jacket while someone waited for him in a car parked outside. His mother noticed the bulge and went after him.

I didn't witness the incident personally, but as I listened in sheer astonishment, I felt as if I was there. From what I was told, Dub managed to jump in the backseat of the waiting car and told the driver to hurry up and leave. The driver hurriedly backed up but couldn't pull out of the parking lot, because he had to pull onto a main street and traffic was coming both ways. Ms. Daniels managed to get the back door open while Dub tried to shield whatever it was he had taken from the house.

As Ms. Daniels reached into the backseat to retrieve what she knew was her property, Dub, who was wearing black leather hiking boots, kicked Ms. Daniels right out of the car and onto the pavement. He kicked her the same way he'd kicked me in the stomach that day, knocking the wind out of me, only he kicked her dead smack in her face . . . his own mother. She lay in the parking lot with a busted-up face as the car, its wheels screeching, drove away. Her boyfriend was coming up the street and caught the tail end of the altercation. He was the one who had shared the incident with me. It was something I never, ever mentioned to either Ms. Daniels or Dub.

Dub kicking his mother dead in the face while wearing a pair of boots was the ultimate in disrespect, and yet there he stood, having the nerve to be mad at me for getting lippy with her. Not only that, but he demanded I go apologize to her. “Now, take your tail right on back over there the same way you marched over there earlier and tell her you are sorry.”

Now I was really Miss Sofia. “Heck, naw,” I was quick to say. Seconds later I saw stars after Dub clobbered me upside my head.

Holding back all my tears, I calmly said, “Baby D, come on. Let's go to the car.”

“But I'm watching—”

“Baby D, now!” I scolded. And with that, he was by my side. I grabbed my purse, and we were on our way out the door.

“And fix me something to eat when you get back!” Dub said before slamming the door behind Baby D and me.

I buckled Baby D into the back of the car, and then I climbed into the front seat. I started the car and pulled off. I had no intention of going over to Ms. Daniels's to apologize. Where exactly I planned on going, I didn't know, but it was going to be far away from Dub.

I thought about driving to Nana's, but after Dub figured out I hadn't gone to his mother's and probably wasn't coming back home, that would be the first place he'd go to look for me. I could have gone to my mom's, I supposed, but she would have shot and killed him if he brought drama to her house, and then I'd have a mother in jail and it would be all my fault. I couldn't do that. I thought about going to Lynn's, but she now had a two-year-old child of her own and was staying with her fiancé, the baby's father. Visions of Dub finding me there and killing us all played in my head. It wasn't just about me anymore. I couldn't risk endangering the lives of the people I loved.

I'd finally mustered up the courage to leave Dub, and now there I was, with nowhere to go, nowhere I felt safe. So after driving around, passing everyone's house that I considered taking refuge at, I ended up just driving to this shopping mall strip, Northern Lights, where I sat for hours. How many hours, I can't recall. But when I finally looked in the backseat and saw Baby D sound asleep, I knew I couldn't stay there. I knew I couldn't let my child sleep on the backseat of a car in a parking lot in the middle of the night. That didn't feel safe, either. So if we weren't going to be safe, then I reasoned that it might as well be in the discomfort of our own home.

When I drove up to the rocky driveway, I could tell Dub wasn't home. The house was pitch black, still, and silent. I knew he was out hunting me down, getting angrier each minute he couldn't find me. The entire drive there I'd envisioned him coming out of nowhere in the darkness of the night, snatching me up, and beating me to death right there in front of my son.