I Ain't Me No More Page 13

  I began to feel sorry for Dub. I didn’t want to. After all he’d done to me, how could I? But there those feelings sat, doggy paddling in my heart. But I’d never seen him this hurt and vulnerable in my life. If pain could be seen and not just felt, it would look like Dub looked at that very moment.

  “What is it, Dub?” Not only did I feel sorry for him, but my curiosity was piqued as well. It was clear that something heavy was on Dub’s mind. He wasn’t the dominating warrior I’d grown to fear over the years. He was now a man who couldn’t even look me in the eyes as he sat there with his leg doing a nervous bounce. It was apparent he was holding so much inside that he wanted to explode. Every time he opened his mouth, on the verge of telling me his truth, he would slam it shut and would then shake his head.

  “I can’t,” he said as his eyes became moist.

  This was deep. It was driving me crazy. I needed to know what was going on inside that head of his. “You can tell me,” I said patronizingly.

  “No, I can’t!” he was quick to say, standing to his feet. “You won’t understand.” He paced. “I got a serious problem going on, and I can’t tell you about it. It’s a problem that’s making me do stuff I never imagined me doing.”

  It was at that very moment that I knew exactly what he wanted to tell me. It was something that deep down inside I already knew, but still, I wanted him to confirm it. I wanted him to confirm what Konnie had already told me months ago. That was why I’d never mentioned the rumors to him. I just wanted to hear him say it. I wanted it to be from the horse’s mouth, so I pressed, trying to sound more convincing.

  “What’s the problem, Dub? What’s so bad that you cut yourself up?”

  I ended up hearing what I wanted to hear, not from Dub’s mouth, but from his body language. I watched him agonize over whether or not to tell me he was addicted to crack cocaine.

  Without him saying a word, I came to my own conclusion that the night he showed up at Nana’s house, he’d just done something so humiliating for a crack rock that he could no longer live with himself. I knew that if I sat there and pressed long enough, I could probably get to the bottom of everything. I could probably even get him to confess exactly what it was that he had done that night that made him not want to live. I didn’t, though. And I was glad I didn’t.

  Some things only God needed to know. Some things were just too much for a person to be able to handle. I knew picking at Dub that night would have been like picking fruit from the tree of knowledge. I wouldn’t have been able to handle knowing what Dub kept submerged within. Deep down inside, I knew that I didn’t want to know. To this day I still had no idea what it was. I could only imagine.

  “Is Dub there?” I asked Ms. Daniels through the phone receiver.

  “He’s still not here,” she replied.

  I had been calling him all night long, and now it was early morning. I hadn’t heard from him since he picked me up from work in my car the day before. His possessiveness still had him checking in on me often, even though he had my car and knew I couldn’t get around town. But when he hadn’t checked in, something told me that when it came time for me to go to work in the morning, I’d have to hunt him down.

  “Did he happen to say where he was going when he left yesterday?” I asked.

  “He borrowed twenty dollars from me before he left. Said he was going to lunch with TJ.”

  Two things about what she’d just said didn’t sit well with me. One, he’d asked to borrow twenty dollars. We had enough drug addicts on both sides of the family to know that when a person constantly borrowed twenty dollars, it wasn’t a good sign. Secondly, I recalled Dub mentioning when he and Boyd first started their hustle, that TJ, an old classmate of ours, was on crack. He’d learned that from being on the streets. As a matter of fact, he’d even stooped so low as to sell his friend crack to support his growing habit. So why would he all of a sudden want to start hanging out with a crackhead?

  “Thanks, Ms. Daniels,” I said, defeated. “If you hear from him . . .” My words trailed off, because just then there was a knock at the door. With phone in hand, I looked out to see who it was. Lo and behold, it was Dub. “Never mind, Ms. Daniels. He just got here.”

  I let out a sigh of relief and ended the call.

  “Dude, I’m going to be late,” I said as I opened the door. “Where have you . . .” Once again, my words trailed off. Something was wrong with this picture. Something was missing. I looked over Dub’s shoulders in an attempt to find what I was looking for. Dub was standing on the porch in front of me, but my car was nowhere in sight. “Dude, where’s my car?”

  “They stole it. They stole it.” Dub charged past me and into the house. He began pacing nervously.

  That was not what I was trying to hear. Tell me it got a flat or that it ran out of gas or something. But not that it had been stolen.

  “What do you mean, they stole it?” I panicked. “Who stole it? What’s going on?”

  “Man, they stole it,” was all he kept repeating, and the more he repeated it, the angrier I got. That wasn’t telling me anything. I wanted to know who, when, where, how, and why.

  “Well, we need to call the police.” The phone was still in my hand, so I raised it to my ear.

  “No, wait!” he shouted, snatching the phone from my hand. “Let me think.”

  “Think about what? What is there to think about? My car has been stolen, and we need to call the police.” I snatched the phone back from him, and then the next thing I knew, we are both tussling over the phone.

  I couldn’t believe this guy. It was as if he wanted to protect this criminal who was rolling around in my wheels, making me late for work.

  “Just hold up,” Dub finally said, causing me to cease hyperactively jumping to my own conclusions about the situation at hand. “Let me go check into something.” And with that, Dub was gone, leaving me standing there, dressed for work, but with no ride.

  “What’s going on, Mommy?” Baby D asked as he came down the stairs, rubbing his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  I usually allowed him to sleep right up until we were about to walk out the door. All I’d have to do was wash his face and make him brush his teeth. Nana had taught me a trick that had saved me, a single mother, lots of time. I’d bathe Baby D the night before and dress him for the next day, usually in something cotton and comfy so that it wouldn’t wrinkle, like a fleece sweat suit or something. Not have to fuss around with dressing Baby D really helped me save time in the mornings. He ate breakfast at school, so I didn’t have to worry about that task, either. But who knew that this morning I’d have to deal with explaining to him that Mommy’s car had been stolen?

  “Nothing, baby,” I told Baby D, even though it clearly showed on my face that something was wrong. “You go on back to bed.”

  “But what about school?”

  Every time I dropped him off at school, he would whine and sometimes cry his eyes out. He hated school. Now, all of a sudden, when we had no transportation, he was worried about going.

  “It’s not time yet, Baby D. Go on back to bed.” I ushered him up the steps.

  After getting Baby D nice and settled back in bed, I went and called my job. “My car has been stolen,” was what I should have told them when citing my reason for not being able to make it in that day. But something inside of me knew that wasn’t the full truth. I might not have known exactly where it was at the moment, but something told me my car hadn’t been stolen—not in the ordinary sense, anyway. I could just feel it. Dub wasn’t telling me the whole story. There was a missing link, otherwise known as the truth. So until Dub told me the truth, all I could relay to my job was a lie. “My son is sick.”

  After hanging up the phone, I just flopped on the couch and cried my eyes out. Nana had gone walking around Northland Mall with a girlfriend of hers. It was something the senior citizens did. Mall security opened the doors to the mall two hours early just for them. The Northland Walkers was what they were called. After walk
ing, they’d usually go to breakfast too, so I knew having her take me to work would be out of the question.

  I couldn’t understand why things in my life just kept going from bad to worse. Even though I was no longer living with Dub, he still seemed to cause havoc in my life.

  After I sat on the couch for an hour, crying not just about the loss of my car, but also about the loss of my soul, my life, my identity, there was another knock on the door. It was Dub, with car keys in hand. This time when I looked over his shoulder, I saw my car parked in the driveway.

  I looked Dub dead in his eyes, not even asking a single question while snatching my keys from him. “Never again,” was all I said. He knew exactly what it meant; never again would he drive my car. “I don’t have time to take you home. I’m running late,” was all I said before leaving him standing on the doorstep while I went to get Baby D.

  I rehearsed in my head what I would tell my job once I showed up at work in spite of having called in. He threw up and is feeling better, I thought. My grandmother is staying home with him. One of those two lies would work for sure.

  Dub must have walked home, because when I came back downstairs with Baby D, ready to go, he was nowhere in sight. Surprisingly, he hadn’t even put up a fight. How could he? He knew and I knew he’d done what was becoming very popular for crackheads: they’d rent their car out for a hit of crack. Only, he’d rented my car out. Lord only knows what he had to do to get it back. But he got it back. For that I was relieved, but still, this was only a sign that even though I thought moving away from Dub would make things better, they were bad. I thought maybe me being out of his sight would mean that eventually I’d be out of his mind, ultimately leading him to find another girlfriend to live with and terrorize. Dub had found someone else, all right. Her name was crack. I knew that sooner or later he’d be so caught up in his new chick that he wouldn’t even remember my name. But could I wait it out that long?

  Stone Number Twenty-one

  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.

  Stone Number Twenty-two

  “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 bu
llet 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.