Duck and I started serving on Baldwin in August of 1988. By that winter, we were easily making five or six thousand dollars in profit a day. I had so much cash, I asked Duck to hold most of it for safekeeping. He hid it in the back of his closet, at the bottom of his laundry hamper, in the bedroom of the apartment he lived in over in Macon with his girlfriend and their two kids. I guess he figured if someone was desperate enough to dig through his dirty drawers they could keep the money.
But even with everything I gave Duck, I still had more money then I knew what to do with. I dropped a lot of cash on Derrick, buying him dozens of pairs of sneakers and thick herringbone chains. And I spent it on clothes for myself and the kids, filling my apartment with piles of Nautica, Polo, and Tommy Hilfiger gear.
After a while, I couldn’t take the clutter, so I moved to a bigger place, a three-bedroom apartment in a complex on Cleveland Avenue. I bought all brand-new furniture from Wolfman Furniture Warehouse, including a white-on-white living room set, a sound system with six-disc CD player, and bedroom suites for the kids. I did Ashley’s room in pink and gray and Nikia’s in navy blue, red, and white. I did all that and still had money to spare. That’s when I decided to buy a car.
“But you don’t even have a license,” Derrick said when I asked him to go with me to the car auction to pick out a ride.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. All I really wanted was a place to sit when the weather was bad. I settled for an ’83 Chevette hatchback. I handed Derrick six hundred dollars in a wad of small bills. The car sold for four-fifty; Derrick kept the change.
The minute I bought that car, I was itching to drive. I was fifteen, old enough for a learner’s permit, but I didn’t have a mama or a daddy to teach me. I couldn’t call my brothers because Andre and Jeffro were in jail and Dre was busy running his own business, breaking into houses. So instead, I asked Freddy Jack. One of my high-functioning customers, he was the most clean cut and professional looking. By day he worked in a car dealership. At night, he gave me driving lessons. All I had to do was keep him high.
We practiced for hours, circling the block over and over. “Girl, you handling that car like a getaway driver,” Freddy Jack said, taking a hit off his pipe and blowing the smoke out his open window. A few nights later, he coached me onto the expressway. “You doing good,” he said. “Now eeeeeeease into the lane.”
In the backseat Ashley bounced up and down. “Mama driving!” she yelled, clapping her hands. “Mama driving!” I gripped the steering wheel with one hand and flicked on the radio with the other. Bobby Brown was singing “My Prerogative,” but I had to turn it down when Freddy Jack got too excited doing choreography in his seat.
By two o’clock in the morning, the kids were sound asleep and the roads were clear. Freddy Jack was high as a kite beside me, but I was the one who felt like I was flying.
Chapter 16
Mama on the Block
“Hey, baby . . . Heeeey!” I could hear Mama calling me from halfway up Baldwin Street. She was rolling toward me in her wheelchair, holding a big black umbrella against the blazing sun. From far away, she looked like a handicapped Mary Poppins.
The wheelchair was a new addition to Mama’s life, but her health had been sliding downhill for years. She drank morning, noon, and night, and smoked a pack of Winstons and a nickel bag of weed every day. The only thing she had going for her is she wasn’t fat. But somehow she got the diabetes anyway. What put her in a wheelchair was that one day, drunk as a skunk, she tripped on the front walk and punched a hole in her foot. When that foot hole got infected and started oozing pus, Mama tried all her home remedies to heal the wound: hydrogen peroxide, Mercurochrome, Vaseline. She even put Vicks in it, which burned like a muthafucka. But nothing helped. Eventually the infection got so bad the doctors had to chop off her right leg, just above her knee.
At the hospital they gave Mama a fake leg and told her she could walk again. But she never got the hang of it. The most I ever saw her take was a couple of shaky steps, clinging to the wall. “Look at me go!” she said one day when I stopped by her place for a visit.
“That’s real good,” I said. “Keep it up and you’ll be doing the robot down the Soul Train line in no time.”
After she lost that leg, Mama’s only transportation was her wheelchair. Lucky for her, Al, her drinking partner, was homeless. He would roll her all over town in exchange for a place to lay his head.
“Hey, Rabbit!” she called again, waving at me as she made her way down the block.
“Hey, Mama, how you been?”
Al pushed her wheelchair to a stop, the two of them grinning at me like we were having a social visit, even though we all knew why they were there. “Baby,” Mama began, looking up at me with her hand in front of her face to block the sun from her eyes. “You think you can gimme a little somethin’? I ain’t ate nothin’ all day. Not one damn thing.”
“Mama, you gotta eat everyday.”
“Who you tellin’! Just gimme enough for one chicken leg and a biscuit from Church’s. And a little extra,” she added. “For a couple of bags of reefer, two quarts of beer, and my cigarettes. And somethin’ for Al. That’s all I need and we’ll be straight.”
I couldn’t believe how things had changed. It was only a few years before that Mama showed me how to diaper my baby with a T-shirt. Now she was coming to me for help. I paid to get her gas turned back on, I helped her with her rent, I made sure she always had enough to eat. I didn’t mind giving Mama money. In fact, I liked seeing how it cheered her up. For as long as I could remember, all my mother had to look forward to in life was the thrill she got when she guessed the exact retail price of a dinette set on The Price Is Right. But once I started paying her bills, she smiled more and stopped calling me nasty names. That money was like a ray of sunshine in her fucked-up life.
Of course, she still had her moods. One afternoon I went by her place and needed to make a phone call. Mama had one of the welfare phones that President Ronald Reagan gave to extra poor folks. I picked it up, dialed Derrick’s number, and Mama hit the roof. “Get the fuck off!” she hollered. “It’s my muthafucking phone. It’s for emergencies!”
She was making such a racket, I told Derrick to hold on, then I lifted her out of her wheelchair and laid her down on the bathroom floor. “I’m talking to my baby daddy,” I said. “You making too much noise.” A few minutes later, I felt a bullet fly right past my head. Mama had crawled out of the bathroom on her stomach, military style, and was shooting her .22 in my direction. But other than that one time, I had to admit Mama had gotten a whole lot easier to be around.
Standing on Baldwin, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a knot of bills. “Those new tennis shoes you got on?” Mama asked as I counted out my money. “They sharp to the bone! And you got your hair done?” she continued. “Look at you lookin’ just like that singer El DeBarge!”
Al looked up, confused. “DeBarge?” he repeated. “You talkin’ about that light-skinned nigga?”