Red Light Wives (15 page)

Nobody came forward to claim me. Like what woman crazy enough to dump a baby in the trash would be crazy enough to admit it? Shit like that happened only in the Bible. So, I never knew nothing for sure about myself. Like my race. San Francisco being the kind of place it is, I could be just about anything. My skin is beige, almost the exact same shade as that fat Rockelle (except she calls the color high yellow…), my hair is shiny black and wavy. With my face looking the way it looks, I could tell people I was Black, Filipino, Latino, even Indian, and nobody would doubt me because I could be any one. Maybe even all of them at the same time. Whatever.

But because I was found in the Mission District, which is almost all Latino people, and because the social worker who took me over was Mexican, and she'd named me after herself, I went with being Mexican. I spent a lot of years in foster homes run by people who spoke Spanish. And me speaking Spanish, much better than I speak English, helped me choose to claim a Latin background over the others.

I was a lot of trouble to my foster families. I regret that now. I got in trouble at school, I lined the streets with the gangs, and we done all kinds of crazy shit. Even snatching purses from little old ladies. I even seen people get killed on the street by people I knew. That was a lot to see before I even got to my teens. But when you trying to “find” yourself, like I was, you gonna see things you don't need or want to see. Living a crazy life meant a lot of bad surprises.

Most of the foster homes I got sent to was in the Mission District. I didn't go too far away from that part of town unless I had to. Until I was fourteen, the only other place I'd ever been outside San Francisco was that freak-ass Berkeley, across the Bay, right next door to Oakland. I had never been to Oakland, and that was where Clyde Brooks was all that time since he found my little body in that Dumpster.

I can only believe that it was God who brought me back to Clyde after all that time. I was staying with the Rios family on Cesar Chavez Street. I felt like I was living in a zoo because they had hella chickens in the backyard, strutting in and out of the house, waiting to end up in a Crock-Pot. Them chickens and the man of the house, an old mule from Mexico City, his whale of a wife, and five pig-faced foster kids, was what I had to deal with.

The old man had an even older brother who lived in Oakland with his
morena
lady friend. A Black lady. Her grandson lived with her. The first few times that lady and her grandson came to our house didn't mean nothing to me. Now remember, I still didn't know who I was, where I came from, or what race I was at the time. And, for the record, to this day I don't know. All of that was unknown to everybody but God.

Since I didn't even know for sure what my race was, I figured it wouldn't do me no good to dog people out from a race that I could be part of. Señor Rios having him a Black American lady friend wasn't no big deal. Anyway, me and that lady friend's grandson got along real good right off the bat. But most of the time, Clyde went his way, and I went mine.

I'd been told by several people about how I'd been thrown to the garbage right after I got born but it wasn't something to be conversating about with nobody. I never brought it up anyway. I was fourteen and Clyde was like thirty-something. We didn't have a lot of things to talk about. He didn't waste much time with me when he came around. Besides, he had a teenage daughter, and she took up a lot of his time.

One day out of the clear blue sky, when Clyde was at the Rios house, he started talking to me about his teenage years. I'd had some trouble with some girls down the street, and there had been some bloodshed. Not my blood, so I wasn't feeling too bad myself. But I cooled off long enough to hear what Clyde had to say. Being older and trying to do better hisself, he shifted into that position that OGs go into when they trying to get a younger person to do the right thing before it's too late.

When he got to the part about going to rob that man in the alley that morning, but finding a baby in a Dumpster first, I got real stiff and started crying. Clyde had to scoop me up off the floor like the pile of dog poop that I felt like. That's when it all came out. I still had some of the newspaper clips the lady from Social Services (the one they named me for) saved for me, and I showed them to Clyde that day. He got tears in his eyes. There it was in headlines in black and white:
OAKLAND YOUTH FINDS NEWBORN IN TRASH
. Right up under the headlines was a picture of Clyde standing between two cops. He was grinning like he had won the lottery. Clyde didn't have on no shirt in that picture because he had used it to wrap me in it. The person I owed my life to had come back, and this time I wasn't going to let him get away. It was the spookiest thing in the world. Nobody could tell me that this wasn't God working in His mysterious way.

From that day on, I didn't want Clyde out of my sight. I followed him around like the puppy he never got. But he didn't feel me. He was a grown-up man with girlfriends up the ying yang, and that daughter I mentioned. He was also working at this place selling used cars in Oakland, and he had a lot of friends his age who he wanted to hang out with.

I dropped out of school because it interfered with my social life. I led a real busy life with my homies, and it drove the foster folks crazy. Then I moved into this place with three of my girls when I was seventeen. We took turns letting the landlord feel us up so we wouldn't have to pay the rent when we didn't want to. I was going nowhere real fast.

When we needed money for weed and other necessities like makeup, beer, and hot clothes, we went up to old men on the street and took them in the alleys to give them blow jobs or hand jobs. I couldn't believe how easy it was to make the money. But it was scary. Especially when the man wanted something other than a blow job or a hand job. I sold my virginity for forty dollars and three fresh-baked bear claws to the man who delivered stuff before daylight to a bakery on Mission Street.

A lot of times I got jumped by other girls, or their men, and they took my money. Oh, my life was so cold and lonely and dangerous. I never knew if I would see the next day. I had nightmares about somebody jacking me up and throwing my dead body back in the same trash can I came from. That made me cry a lot.

The only times I was really happy and warm was when I went with Señor Rios's brother to visit his lady friend in Oakland. Because that's how I got to see Clyde. When Señor Rios died, Clyde's grandmother took it real hard. She encouraged me to keep coming to her house anyway. She said me being around kept her from forgetting about Señor Rios. I was a “woman” by now and a hot-looking one, too, I am proud to say. Clyde, loving the ladies the way he did, really started feeling me then.

When I tell people I was Clyde's first “wife,” they think he turned me out, wooed me into the sex business. Especially some of his ex-wives. Them ungrateful bitches, they thought that shit because they couldn't get along with Clyde. They made up their minds that he was the one calling the shots. Nuh-uh.
I turned Clyde out
. I was the one to get us both in business.

Clyde needed money more than I did with that daughter of his to take care of. She got run over by a fast car when she was a little baby. To see that poor girl with so many things wrong with her broke my heart. Jesus would weep if He seen her. Now, I never knew nothing about medicine and doctors and stuff like that. Them things remind me of sickness and dying, which I came so close to, so I don't like to think about that shit if I don't have to. That's why I never asked Clyde a lot of questions about his daughter. But he talked about her like she was a gift from God, like people say every baby is. Even though God didn't stop her from getting run over.

Anyway, from what I was told, the girl was normal up until she was around two or three. Clyde's relatives was supposed to be looking after her but obviously, they wasn't if she got run over right in a church parking lot. Clyde didn't have much money in them days, so there wasn't much he could do to get her put back together again.

One of the reasons I get so pissed off with the world is, if you ain't got money, you ain't got no chance if somebody run you over and break your legs and smash your face like they done Clyde's daughter. Poor Clyde. He told me how he started doing some of everything to get paid—washing cars, driving rich and famous people around in limos, waiting tables, and skycapping at the airport. He was even low-down enough to rob folks, like he was on his way to do the morning he found me.

Clyde said that he needed so much money to take his daughter from one specialist to another. The girl went through hella surgeries and still ended up looking like a nightmare. Words cannot describe that girl. When I tried to tell people who never seen Keisha how she looked in the face, I told them to go rent that old movie
The Elephant Man
. They thought I said that to make a joke, but it was the honest-to-God truth.

It broke my heart in two when Clyde told me how them doctors told him that Keisha would probably not live past age twelve and that he should prepare hisself for it, and her. Because of the injuries to her head, Keisha had to deal with fluid always moving around and settling in part of her brain. Something about the vessels getting messed up. The blood, and whatever else we human beings got up in our heads, it couldn't circulate the way it was supposed to. If Keisha wasn't lucky and too much fluid settled in one place for too long, infection would kill her. Clyde said that doctors told him that the older Keisha got, the more the fluid would fuck with her brain. All Clyde could do was make Keisha as happy as he could while she was alive. And let me tell you, that man would have shot the president if it would have made Keisha happy.

But there was a bright side to Keisha's mess, if you wanted to call it that. Keisha's mind was sharp as a tack, so she was a very smart girl. Me, I called it part of God's plan, which to me, had got even more mysterious by now.

As Lula said when she talked about her baby dying right after being born, God was the biggest pig in a poke the world would ever see. He had hella surprises. The good ones was nice, but with so many bad things happening to good and innocent people, I didn't know what the world was coming to.

Clyde and his grandmother, they really was off into church, and the Bible, and all that other holy stuff. They couldn't make no sense out of what happened to Keisha. But they never gave up on God.

Keisha was such a smart and holy girl. She knew she was probably going to be with God a lot sooner than the rest of us, but that didn't even faze her.

I seen a lot of myself in that girl, and I think Clyde did, too. It got easy for me to see why he liked me so much. Me and Keisha kept that “daddy love” thing in Clyde going.

Even with all of the bad habits I had, I had some good in me. And I hoped I always would. I made up my mind a long time ago that if me and Clyde break up our friendship one day, I would always be there for Keisha.

 

Instead of Keisha dying as a young kid like the doctors said she probably would, she reached her teens and kept on ticking. But Clyde said it was hard on him because for every year Keisha lived, he felt like it was “borrowed” time, so he made the best of it. He got more and more attached to her. He knew it was going to be hard to let her go when her time ran out.

Keisha's legs was so weak, she had to start walking with
two
canes. By the time I met her, she couldn't even lay down for more than a couple of hours at a time because that fluid was settling faster. She had to sleep propped up in a chair because if she laid her head down, she would wake up with a granddaddy of a headache. It made me cry when Clyde told me how him and his grandmother had to get up umpteen times during the night to turn the girl over and make sure she hadn't slid off the chair she slept in. When Clyde moved into an apartment by hisself, he hired a nurse woman to go help his grandmother with Keisha a few days a week. That meant Clyde needed even more money…

Clyde told everybody he would do whatever it took to make his daughter's life as enjoyable as possible. That was probably Clyde's biggest challenge. See, Keisha being the smart girl she was, she liked the same things other young people liked—nice clothes, all the latest CDs, her own big-screen TV, eating out. Even though some ignorant people pointed at and ran from Keisha in public, that didn't bother Clyde or Keisha. He still took her out all the time. When he was around ignorant ghetto people, he made sure them motherfuckers all seen that Glock in his waistband. You wouldn't believe how fast they stopped pointing and laughing at Keisha then.

Being treated like a freak didn't never bother Keisha. “Daddy says I'm just as good as anybody,” she bragged, grinning out that hole on the side of her face that used to be a mouth. “And even better than some people.”

“And he's right,” I agreed. I prayed that one day I would have a child as happy and well-adjusted as Keisha.

Even with that face of hers, Clyde took the girl to an expensive beauty parlor and the women kept Keisha's hair looking fly. One month it was cornrows. Another month the girl wanted a weave like Diana Ross.

For her sweet sixteen birthday party, Clyde invited a bunch of kids from the 'hood to come, and every single one of them little devils said no! So Clyde paid them to come, and of course they all came then. I was there, for free, and I was glad to be there. I never seen Keisha so happy than I did that day. Tears came to my eyes when a boy asked her to dance. Even though Clyde had paid him, the boy looked like he was having a good time. And so did Keisha.

“Look at me, Ester! I can dance, too,” she yelled, her feet going every which way as that poor boy dragged her across the floor.

Once that girl got the hang of it, she almost danced everybody off the floor. Them useless legs of hers didn't slow her down. And let me tell you, you ain't seen nothing 'til you seen that girl dance the salsa the way I taught her—dragging one leg one way, dragging the other leg the other way, hips bouncing like jumping beans. When Keisha danced, her head looked like a big dented rock, and her eyes rolled back in her head like somebody having good sex. It was such a sight, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.