Handbook for an Unpredictable Life: How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother, and Still Came Out Smiling (with Great Hair) (28 page)

“
Ay
, you’re so stupid, even. You don’t have to thank me—for what? Loving you?… You promise to go to college?”

“Yes.”

My last day—all packed and ready to go—I walked out of the apartment. It seemed like half the block was waiting to send me off. Tears. By the time everyone got in the gypsy cab, Cookie, Millie, Tia, and a couple of grandkids, the body weight made the muffler drag and spark all the way to JFK. Tears and kisses at the terminal, nonstop. Every time I went to hand in my ticket, Tia would start wailing.

As the plane took off, my desire to leave Brooklyn instantly began to fade. I thought of all the loving moments I’d had with Tia and my cousins. All the fun I’d had with Jeanette and the rest of our nerdy clan. I thought of summers in Coney Island, the trips to the Museum of Natural History, walks to Clinton Hill and over the Brooklyn Bridge. I felt a panic inside, questioning if I was making the right choice.

•   •   •

Titi had never kicked the shit, in fact it had gotten worse. And the neighborhood was not “fly.” She lived on the edge of the Crenshaw/Adams District. Her broken-down, cheap apartment was always
dimly lit, filled with questionable characters, either dropping off drugs or getting high with her, and muscle men coming by looking for late payments on drugs purchased. Her sweet kids who used to listen to me had become brats. Didn’t blame them, though. I understood they were acting out, growing up with a drug-addicted mother.

They tested my nerves to the limits, but I had learned patience from babysitting Millie’s and Cookie’s kids. One afternoon, while watching Millie’s three kids, one of them had kicked me in the shin. My hand acted on instinct, popping her in the mouth hard to the point of blood, just like my mother would do with me. I couldn’t believe I did that, and shame and regret instantly flushed out of every pore, along with immediate empathy. I held her begging for forgiveness as I tried to erase the pain and humiliation. I told Tia when she got home. She just nodded in a grave and slow manner. I fell into an instant depression—I couldn’t speak the rest of the night, woke up silent, and couldn’t look Tia in the eye when she smiled good-morning. Two days later, as we were watching WABC’s Saturday 4:30 movie, Tia said I reacted that way because that was what I’d been taught, but that I didn’t have to be like that. I never hit a child ever again.

•   •   •

I hated Los Angeles—hated it to its core. I hated the pretentious people there. I hated that it was always the same temperature outside. The musical taste and mostly everything else was limited and segregated. I hated the suffocating smog. I hated the fact that you needed a car to get anywhere. The transportation system sucked. I walked back and forth to high school, which was about three miles, to the point where my three cheap-ass pairs of Knickerbocker Avenue shoes had holes in them by the end of the first month.

And walking in Titi’s neighborhood was very dangerous. I was
on constant high alert every day. At school, which sucked, kids made fun of me, and they weren’t just mocking my attire. Los Angeles was the first place other than upstate New York where my accent was pointed out and ridiculed. I had not realized how much Tia’s accent had become a part of my own. Even Titi commented on how Brooklyn I sounded and how much I sounded like Mommie. I didn’t care, kind of. I was used to people pointing at me, gossiping about me. I did my best to disregard most of it and stayed focused on my goals of going to college, having a career, and finding my own apartment.

Going to school, applying to colleges, filling out financial-aid forms, working part-time at an insurance company as a secretary and file clerk and at McDonald’s as a cashier, and caring for two bratty kids was nothing compared to dealing with a heroin addict. The strain of that alone got to me. Although my GPA was fairly decent, I kept scoring low on the SATs. The emotional stress didn’t make room for any concentration, and I would blank out during the exam. I didn’t understand why I kept blanking out at the time; all I understood was that I kept scoring low, and as a result I kept feeling like I was a failure. But I pressed on.

I never ratted on Titi about the drugs and stuff that were going on, but Tia knew something was wrong, she could hear it in my voice over the phone. She convinced me to come home for a visit. I saved up enough money to go back to Brooklyn to spend Christmas with her and Dad, who was coming a day after … and to see my mother and half-siblings. I know. What can I say—I missed them.

Touching down at JFK, I got all choked up seeing the New York skyline. The smell of roasted pork permeating the building as I rushed upstairs made my heart pound. Even though I had stopped eating it since Miguel was butchered, the aroma was too synonymous with Tia and Suydam Street. Homemade
pasteles
tightly wrapped in wax paper with string boiled on the stove while the
pernil
roasted below in the oven. “Don’t worry, Rosie. I made
de
turkey
too. You won’t have to eat Miguel tonight, ga, ga, ga, ga, ga, ga!”
Arroz y gandules
, boiled yucca with
mojo de ajo
, candied
yamas, platanos maduro
—the works just flowed everywhere! Heaven!

I felt all grown-up and proud when I gave Tia a hundred dollars, cash. She refused it. I was heartbroken. “Why? I worked so hard to give you this money!”

“No, you work hard for yourself and save your money. I have my life. I’ve made my decisions. It’s not your job to worry about me.”

I hid part of the money in her purse and the rest in the jar above the stove where she kept her emergency fund.

The next morning I headed to my mother’s house. I had three hundred dollars and bags filled with Christmas presents. Lydia’s extended cheek was replaced with open arms. Say what? It felt awkward, scary, and good. I gave her eighty dollars, leaving me two hundred and twenty. A part of me felt guilty that I didn’t give her the same amount I gave Tia. Was I still angry about everything that went down? Whatever it was, it bothered me like crazy. “Oh, Ma, here. I thought I gave you an even hundred. Sorry.”

One of my younger half-siblings, Kathy, had moved upstairs into her own apartment. She had just given birth to a son and was living there with the baby’s daddy. It was exciting and weird to me how easily we were clicking since we were never close, I’d never really known her as a person. I saw Terry too, who everyone was calling Tiara now, her birth name, and her little son, Eddie Albert. He was a couple of years old now. I loved Eddie. Loved him the moment I met him at a couple of months old. And he loved me. Tiara always said that Eddie took to me like no one else.

My half-brother, the one who tried to molest me, came upstairs along with Tiara’s new boyfriend, this asshole, to say hello. I acted like I was happy to see him because he seemed so guilt-ridden. Jokes were told, along with crazy funny stories that had me dying with laughter. I kept thinking to myself,
Are these the same people I left just a little under a year ago?

Kathy asked me if I wanted to go up on the roof while she smoked a joint. We went up, and after we came back down my half-brother and Tiara’s boyfriend were gone. So was my money, all of it—and my return plane ticket. Shocked and upset, I went off. So did Kathy. “Fucking drug addicts! I know they took your money!” She bolted downstairs to our mother’s apartment and returned with both in tow.

“What? Oh my God! I didn’t take it,” my brother said, feigning shock and dismay.

“Me either!” said the stupid asshole coke/heroin addict boyfriend.

“Who do you think took it?” my brother continued, shooting accusatory looks at Kathy.

She exploded. “What, motherfucker? Don’t even be looking at me! I’m not the fucking cokehead/heroin addict over here!”

My mother came to the defense of both my brother and the asshole boyfriend, of course, feigning shock as well. “He wouldn’t do something like that. You shouldn’t have left your money lying around like that anyway. That’s what you get.” Pop went my balloon.

Back at Tia’s, I quietly went into the bathroom and sat on top of the toilet seat for over thirty minutes. I felt so stupid. Tia knocked on the door. I told her I was robbed on the subway, all my money and my plane ticket back to Los Angeles.

“Oh my goodness. I’m calling your father.”

“No! Why?”

“ ’Cause he’s your father,” she angrily snapped back, “so let him start acting like he is!”

Whoa! Where did that come from? Tia went into her emergency fund.

“Lemme give you some money until your father gets here tomorrow.”

Oh snap! Busted.

“
Ay
, Rosie. I told you. This is for you, not for me!”

She gave me back the forty dollars and told me my father would give me the rest when he arrived. I kept hoping she didn’t see the other sixty in her purse and try to give me back that as well. When she went across the hall to Doña Ponchi’s house to use the phone to call Dad, I sneaked into her purse, retrieved the sixty, and put it in the emergency jar.

My father bought me a new ticket back to Los Angeles and gave me a fifty in addition to the many Christmas presents he brought for everyone. I hadn’t seen him in months, since he’d been away on a ship, and thought I’d need the usual minute to get reacquainted, but no. We simply picked up where we’d left off, sitting in the living room all day listening to jazz records while he told stories of his womanizing adventures during World War II. I know, weird father-and-daughter bonding tactics, but it worked. In fact, I felt so wounded from the incident that it was the first time my body, my being, unconsciously slumped against his for emotional support as we listened to Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. I remember my dad not making a big deal out of it as he gently held my hand while the record played out.

I WENT back and worked like crazy. I studied like hell for the SATs. I think I got a half-decent score after my third attempt, but not good enough for a full scholarship like I was banking on. It bothered me tremendously, especially since I knew I only had a shot at community colleges now. But whatever, I couldn’t afford to dwell on it.

Conversations on the phone with Tia were less frequent and even shorter. She became so worried that she came out to Los Angeles with Millie, Cookie, and Lorraine to visit “temporarily” after I graduated from high school to stay close to me. I pleaded with her to go home, told her it wouldn’t be good for any of them to live there. She wasn’t having it. She worried day and night about me, and now that she saw with her own eyes what was going on with Titi, she wasn’t going back until I finished college.

Millie had found a place in South Central Los Angeles in Watts because the rent was so low and it seemed like a nice neighborhood with its ranch-style houses and palm tree—lined blocks—she didn’t know about the Nickerson Garden projects nearby. We had no idea about the gang culture out there; it was a horrible discovery. I decided to stay with my heroin-addicted cousin because it was a much shorter trek to West Los Angeles and Los Angeles Community Colleges (I was going to both at the same time because LACC had better science classes), and to my new job at a law firm as a file clerk, and sadly, it was safer than South Central.

I came home from school one day to find Titi’s apartment completely
emptied out. She had left without telling me. She owed some dangerous drug dealers a lot of money, and she just jetted, leaving me behind with nothing more than my suitcase and a mattress on the floor with a note on top: “Go over to Millie’s if you need a place to stay.” All of my money that I had saved up to move into my own apartment was gone too.

I didn’t freak out, I couldn’t afford to. I had gotten used to drama, and I felt that I had to stay on course and not get distracted. I continued to walk to my jobs, coming home to an empty apartment, scared out of my wits, thinking one of the hoodlums would come looking for Titi and kill me instead. It was stupid to stay there, but the alternative, living in Watts, seemed much worse to me. At night I was in constant fear of the drug dealers coming back. I eventually went to Millie’s.

I continued to go to college, started working again—two jobs, plus doing hair on the side—saved my money, and found my own apartment, unfortunately in the Crenshaw area again. One of my jobs was working part-time at the main office of Golden Bird Fried Chicken—an African American family-run business—as the vice president’s assistant, who was the president’s youngest son, Michael Stennis. I also worked part-time as a waitress at Sizzler’s, but was fired. Only later did I find out that the manager did so because he liked me and there was a policy against management dating employees. At first I was pissed, but I got over it after he took me to Lake Tahoe for a week—I know, but Tahoe was off the hook!

The Stennises looked out for me and got me a one-bedroom apartment in one of the apartment buildings they owned in the “Jungle” for only $300 a month. It was still in the Crenshaw district but far away from Watts! It was lovely, with all of the palm trees sprouting out of its courtyards, but to my surprise I discovered that the Jungle was the Bloods’ territory. First day, this kid comes up to me: “What set you from, cuz?”

“Oh? Excuse me, are we related?”

“No! Fool! What set? You a Blood or a Crip?”

Great.

I had to get out, so I took another part-time job at a record store near the Jungle, just blocks from my apartment. The assistant manager, who I knew liked me and who knew I didn’t like him, offered me a ride home after we did inventory till one in the morning. “Oh, come on, Rosie, don’t flatter yourself. I can’t have you walk home by yourself through the damn Jungle!”

We pulled up. He asked if he could use the bathroom, he’d be quick. I went into my small kitchen to get a glass of water. When I turned around, he was lying on the ugly dark-colored living room carpet butt naked, stroking his erect penis up and down—no lie!

“What the fuck!” I screamed.

“Calm down, Rosie! Shh! Come here. It’s okay!”

Then this ass sits up and makes the mistake of pulling me down on top of his naked disgusting body. I jumped up so fast, like on some Bruce Lee shit, screaming my head off. He grabbed my foot. “Shh! It’s okay.” Okay? Oh hell no! I quickly wiggled it loose and started stomping the shit out of this motherfucker. While he was curling up trying to avoid my blows, my next-door neighbor, Eric, from Chicago, who always looked after me, ran into my apartment and started to beat the crap out of the pervert. He grabbed his clothes and rushed out before the cops came (which didn’t happen until twenty minutes later).