I turned to Cindi, whose eyes were bugging out of her head, then back to Jimmy Carter, who looked almost as shocked. I couldn’t help myself, I bust out laughing. “I knew I recognized your ass!” I said. “I’ma give you your cheeseburger for free!”
A few weeks later, after my manager told me to wipe down some tables that were already clean, and I told her she must be out of her damn mind, I got fired from McDonald’s, too.
In less than a year, I’d had five jobs and lost all of them. It was getting hard to stay positive. Sometimes, I got to thinking that maybe it was me. Maybe I just wasn’t built for legal employment. Michael tried to make me feel better. Whenever I got fired—or, as I explained it to him, “I quit”—he always gave me the same pep talk: “Nobody in your family ever had a regular job. You just gotta get used to the lifestyle!” Even so, I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever be able to hold it down.
It seems like every time I’m at my lowest, somebody comes along to pull me back up. Miss Troup, Brenda and Eva, Hubert Hood, all of them were like my personal cheerleading squad telling me to keep up the fight when I thought I was losing the game. In 1997 Miss Campbell came into my life like a star cheerleader doing back flips down the field. She was a caseworker for the city of Riverdale’s Positive Employment and Community Help. The program, called PEACH for short, was part of President Bill Clinton’s Welfare-to-Work plan, which was supposed to get folks off welfare. The way Miss Campbell described it made it sound like a prize.
“What are you interested in, Patricia?” Miss Campbell asked at our first meeting. She had a warm smile and was full of enthusiasm. Whatever I wanted to do, she said, there was job training to get me there. She riffled through a stack of papers on her desk: “Are you interested in training to become an office administrator? Or perhaps a cosmetologist? Or how about this . . .” She pulled out a folder and flipped it open. “A medical assistant? It says here you’d be qualified to work in a doctor’s office, health clinic, or hospital.”
How did Miss Campbell know I’d always dreamed of having the kind of job where you got to wear scrubs to work every day? Even after I quit forging checks, I still kept my fake “Grady Hospital Staff” ID in my wallet. I really liked the idea of helping people.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Medical assistant, I want to do that.”
It turns out that getting a medical assistant certificate is not easy. First I had to get my GED, which meant learning all the stuff—eighth grade all the way through high school—I’d missed while I was slinging dope and raising kids. That took six and a half months. Then I had to enroll in a nine-month medical assistant program at a night school located in an office in the back of a strip mall. When I went to sign up, the lady at the front desk handed me a stack of papers to fill out so I could get the seven-thousand-dollar student loan I’d need to pay for the class. Nowhere on the forms did it say it was going to take me almost twenty years to pay off the loan.
I went to Medical Assistant School five days a week, and learned how to draw blood, weigh babies, give vaccinations, and take blood pressure. On February 11, 1997, the school held a little graduation ceremony. Michael and our six kids all cheered when the program director called my name. Even Miss Campbell came to the ceremony. “I’m so proud of you,” she said, giving me a hug. “You’ve worked so hard!”
After Medical Assistant School all I had left was a four-week class at the PEACH office, called Job Readiness. I joined a group of other unemployed “ladies and gentlemen,” as the instructor liked to call us, to learn important skills, like “dress for success,” which, lucky for me, turned out to be the exact same outfit as the one I wore passing bad checks at the mall. It took the girl with the giant pawprint tattoos across her bosom three separate tries to get the look of “appropriate office attire” right. One day she showed up in four-inch heels like she was hittin’ the club; the next day she came in a yellow satin church hat, which I’m guessing she got by jumping an old lady on Sunday morning.
I’d taken three Job Readiness classes when I realized I was already ready. I started searching help-wanted ads in the back of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and found what I was looking for in the Monday paper, right at the bottom of the page. A doctor’s office out in Sugar Hill was looking for an assistant. I knew the area; I’d driven through it with Lamont. It’s what he called “quality.”
“This is it,” I said to Michael, showing him the ad. “This is the perfect job for me.”
I pulled up to the doctor’s office twenty minutes early for my interview, my stomach doing flips. At five to nine, I slipped out of the car, smoothed the front of my black slacks, and walked inside.
The office manager, Miss Shelly, sat behind her desk and asked me all the questions I’d already practiced in Job Readiness: What’s your greatest strength? I’m a quick learner! Where do you see yourself in five years? Working here, I hope! What’s your greatest weakness? Sometimes I just care too much!
She asked if I had any children. When I told her I was raising six kids, her face lit up. She had four of her own, she said, and proceeded to tell me all about them while I nodded and smiled. On her desk was a picture of her four-year-old daughter, Christy, dressed in cowboy boots and a Dolly Parton wig, looking like she was next in line for JonBenet Ramsey’s killer.
“My baby girl got second place prize in the Miss Precious Baby Peach Pageant,” said Miss Shelly, with pride, when she saw me glance at the photo. To me, her baby looked like a miniature hooker. But I said, “She’s real pretty, ma’am. She should have won first place!”
I guess complimenting Christy was part of the interview, because Miss Shelly offered me the job. “Hon,” she said, “you have such a sunny disposition, I’d love to bring you on board!” I was going be making twelve dollars an hour, plus benefits; Michael was going to be so proud.
Miss Shelly stood up and walked around her desk to give me a hug. “There’s just one more thing,” she said. Then she dropped the bomb.
She wanted me to go to the police station down the road and ask the officer at the front desk to run a criminal background check. “It’s nothing,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Just a formality. After you bring back the paperwork, we’ll sit down and look at the schedule. I want to get you started right away.”
It had been seven years since Officer Harris had busted me on Ashby Grove. I’d done my jail time, cleaned up my act, and gone back to school. As far as I was concerned, I’d put the criminal part of my life behind me. It was history I wanted to bury. But I guess there are some things the world won’t ever let you forget.