MYRICK
July, Summer, 1991
It was one of the hottest days in Tallahassee that month. The air conditioner was broken, so Mama set two fans out in the living room to keep cool, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good but blow hot air. I sat around trying to keep cool by running my head over the shower when I wasn’t lying up with a cold washcloth of ice on my forehead trying to keep the heat at bay. One-hundred and ten degrees, I think it was. So hot I could have walked around booty-naked and still would have been hot. I remember old people and pets were dying from heat stroke and shit that summer. There was an incident where a lady left her baby in the car in the parking lot of Big Lots. The dumb bitch said she had the window cracked and was only going to be gone for a minute. It was all over the news, some poor hick from Crawfordville. Needless to say, they put her baby killing-ass under the jail. Should have done worse than that. They find out in prison that she killed her baby, they’re going to shank that bitch.
“What kind of world is this we live in?” Mama had said.
“The kind where mothers leave their babies in hot cars.” As soon as I said that, Mama backhanded me across the face. “Why’d you hit me?”
“For being slick at the mouth.”
“I wasn’t being slick.”
“Don’tchu talk back to me, boy.”
I attempted to rub the sting away with my hand. Mama was always hitting me for something. She didn’t give a shit if it was my fault or not. Of course she never laid a finger on Rashawn. He used to piss in the bed, spill cereal on the table, step out of his nasty drawers and leave them on the bathroom floor; it didn’t matter. It was all right by her, but if I did it, I got beat within an inch of my life. She would beat me with whatever she could get her hands on: a shoe, an extension cord, a fly swatter, a wire hanger. Even when she knew Rashawn was in the wrong, she would beat me for his fuck-ups. I knew a lot of that shit had something to do with the fact that Rashawn and I came from different daddies. Rashawn was always praised for his good looks, light skin and soft hair while I was shunned and picked on for being brown-skinned with nappy hair. Mama told me once that every time she looked at me, I reminded her of my daddy and how he ran out on her with a white woman after he found out Mama was pregnant with me. Rashawn’s daddy got shot and killed over some money two years after he was born, but she never talked about that, but always went on about how good he was in bed. What mother tells her fifteen-year-old son that kind of shit?
I never knew my daddy, but I’ve seen pictures of him Mama used to keep in a shoebox that sat in the closet on the shelf above the water heater. I’m a splitting image of him. She constantly reminded me how no-good he was.
“Wasn’t worth the skin his black ass was printed on,” she would say. I understood why he’d left her for somebody else. Who the fuck would want to stay with a witch like her? She was a shitty mother and would have made an even shittier wife. I would have left her too. I think about him sometimes, wondering what kind of daddy he would have been had he stuck around to know me. I bet he would have done all kinds of things with me like taken me fishing, or to the park to play football. I betcha he would have been the best daddy ever and I would have been the son he would have been proud of. He wouldn’t call me a black monkey, or an ugly ape either like Mama does. My daddy wouldn’t have beat me with hangers or burned me with cigarettes ’cause he couldn’t stand the sight of me. I thought about running away to find him. Some guys who knew him said he was living in Jacksonville somewhere. I used to think sometimes what I would say to the man if we came face to face. I would throw my arms around him probably. That, or kick his ass for leaving me with such a bitch of a mother. I thought about him all the time when I was locked up, about how different things might have been had he raised me over her. But what the fuck is the point of thinking about what might have been? That shit is just wasted emotion. I am where he is and he can stay wherever the hell he’s at.
Rashawn and I aren’t close now because of the wedge she drove in between us. He didn’t write or come see me one single time the whole time I was locked up. Girls flocked around Rashawn like he pushed golden eggs out of his ass, while I was the darker-skinned, less attractive brother who often got called an African Booty Scratcher in school. Women wanted to fuck Rashawn because they thought he was mixed, while I repelled women, often called a black cockroach. I would hear her talk of how Rashawn was meant to do big things, change the world and shit, while I wouldn’t amount to nothing because I hung out on the street with gangs. He was the flower in Mama’s hair while I was the shit stain in her underwear. I despised Rashawn about as much as Mama despised me. I was always thinking about killing Mama, thinking of creative ways to do it. Put a pillow over her head and smother her in her sleep, douse her with kerosene and set her on fire, maybe put a snake in her bed, but I was scared shitless.
The night that I finally got up the nerve to end her, Rashawn was spending the night over at Seandre’s house. What kind of pussy-ass, faggot-ass name is Seandre anyway?
Me and Mama were the only ones home. I was dog-tired from running with my crew, so I showered, ate the cheeseburger Hamburger Helper, which was Rashawn’s favorite, and conked out on the sofa. I had forgotten that I had left my dirty plate and glass on the kitchen table. I woke up just as Mama had come down on my head with a glass ashtray.
“Ow, what I do?”
“Get your ass in there and get your plate off that table.”
My head instantly began to throb with pain. I felt blood run down the side of my face.
“Look at me, Ma; I’m bleeding.”
“I don’t give a damn. You better not get none of that blood on my floor. Here I am spent all day cleaning up and cooking, and you bring your black ass in here and start making a mess.”
I had never been as mad as the day she hit me with that ashtray. She had graduated from hitting me with belts and fly swatters to hitting me in the head with ashtrays. I went in the kitchen and put my plate and glass in the sink. “Boy, where you goin’?”
“What?”
“Wash that goddamn plate and glass, and you had better not have ate up all the Hamburger Helper from Rashawn. That’s his favorite and I want him to have some when he comes home.”
I didn’t say shit, but just washed the plate.
I was fed up; sick of her hitting me and treating me like I was dog shit under her shoe. It wasn’t my fault Daddy ran off with someone else. If she didn’t want me, then she should have kept her legs closed. Don’t put it on me because you had a miserable, sorry-ass life.
“Boy, don’t you eyeball me. I’ll give you something to roll your damn eyes at. I have better shit to do than to clean up after your narrow ass. You just like your damn daddy. I should have sent you to Jacksonville to go live with him and his white bitch.”
I dried the plate and glass and put them away. I took a paper towel and wiped the blood from my face.
“And cut off all these goddamn lights. That’s why the light bill so high now. I’m going upstairs to take a bath. Don’t bother me about nothing.” I was too pissed to hear what she was saying. “You understand me, Myrick?”
“Yes.”
“You know how I hate to be disturbed when I’m taking my bubble bath.”
That was the last straw. I knew if she could hit her own child in the head with an ashtray, then she was capable of worse, capable of killing the child she never wanted. I was feeling slightly dizzy from the blow to my head. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, fists clenched tight, staring angrily up at the bedroom, pissed still. I stared angrily at the top of the stairs as beads of blood dripped onto my shirt. The stairs creaked to my weight as I made my way up. It was then that I had to kill her before she killed me.
I watched her as she pinned her hair up in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. She turned, faced the bathtub, undid her powder-pink satin robe, letting it drop to the bathroom floor to her feet. Mama was the first woman I had ever seen naked, but I had seen enough of her pudgy ass and sand bag-saggy titties, to last me a lifetime. Candles filled the bathroom: candles around the sink, and the perimeter of the tub. Mama eased herself into the water as she hummed. Without hesitation, I rushed in, grabbed Rashawn’s radio, held it over my head and said, “Burn in hell, bitch,” and dropped the radio into the tub of water. I watched her body shake and convulse uncontrollably, her eyes rolled back into her head and then silence. I thought after I did it, I would feel remorse, but instead, I was relieved like a ten-ton anvil had been lifted off my shoulders. Any love I had for her had shriveled up and died long ago. There was water everywhere. I stared at her for an hour before I walked downstairs and dialed 9-1-1.
“Help, please help me! Something’s happened to my mama!”
The driveway was littered with cop cars, fire trucks and ambulances, blue, red and white lights illuminating the hot, July sky. Rashawn cried like a baby, screaming like a little bitch for his mama. The pathetic little fuck was upset he wouldn’t be able to suckle from our mama’s teat anymore. I cried, but not for her, but because I had watched the movie, Steel Magnolias, two nights before. I needed to show that I was upset. When the coroners rolled her out of the house, I put on an Oscar-winning performance that would have made Denzel Washington’s ass look like a chump. I cried to keep from laughing, rejoiced that the evil bitch was out of my life. Mama was my first kill, and as I grew older, so did my hunger to kill more.