I didn’t feel comfortable with a strange woman in my place. In this day and age, who would? There seemed to be just as many maniacs outside of the nuthouses as there were inside. It was times like these that I wished I had not watched so many stupid movies with people running around chopping up people for no good reason.
With Lula on my couch, with God only knew what she had in her purse and on her mind, I reminded myself that there was also a lot of mayhem happening every day in real life. I was having some grim thoughts for a woman in my line of work, but that was a whole ’nother story. I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about that, too.
I locked my bedroom door before I crawled into my bed. And I made sure that the baseball bat I kept for protection was close enough for me to grab if I had to.
But something told me I didn’t have to worry about Lula. She seemed like a nice enough person. I liked her because I felt sorry for her and I could relate to her. What she’d been through sounded almost as bad as my situation. I was surprised that she was holding up as well as she was. If some thug had shot and killed my husband, I don’t think I would have been doing as well as Lula seemed to be.
I don’t know what kind of impression I made on her. But I didn’t just drop out of the sky and land in San Francisco on my back, although sometimes it seemed like it had happened that way. If things had been different, I would never have left Georgia in the first place. Because at one time, I had a real good life.
I grew up in Homeworth, Georgia, a sleepy little farm town that wasn’t even on the map. Everybody knew everybody, and all their business, and we didn’t even have to lock our doors. When I was around thirteen, my daddy started managing a popular grocery store in town. We lived about a mile away from the store, down a dirt road with cornfields on both sides. Even before the grocery store, Daddy was already a tired old man. He had worked hard, doing whatever jobs he could find to take care of a wife and five kids. He’d worked on the railroad and cooked in a prison. Before all of that, he’d dug graves. That was the only job he’d ever complained about. He’d done it so long and hard, he had developed a hump on his back.
Daddy didn’t own the store he ran, but you would have thought he did. The real owners, a childless old White couple, liked Daddy so much, they let him run the place like it was his. He made all the rules, and he did all the hiring and firing. After a while, everybody who worked in that place was related to me. My oldest brother, Marvin, was the bookkeeper. My other brother, Tyrone, and my older sister, Maybelline, worked behind the counter. My only other sister, Dorothy—Dot we called her—ordered everything. Daddy’s main job was to keep his eye on us and make sure we didn’t fuck up.
I was the baby of the family, spoiled as hell, so I spent most of my time driving my siblings and Mama and Daddy up the wall. I only hung around the store when I wanted something, and I ran every time they tried to put me to work.
I’d been to Mississippi where Lula came from. I still had a few distant relatives there. My deceased uncle Doobie had lived in Mississippi with a mysterious woman named Pearl Carl during the early nineties. Miss Pearl was this itty-bitty, light-skinned woman with reddish hair and moles on top of moles on her face. Nobody ever told us where she came from, but she had an accent. Somebody said she came from Haiti, another somebody said it was New Orleans. Wherever she came from, she was heavy into voodoo.
By the time Miss Pearl entered our lives, Black folks had already come a long way as far as voodoo was concerned. But there were a lot of Black folks in the south still living in the Dark Ages. They believed in things that science couldn’t explain. Spooky things like spells and ghosts. Back then and, I am sorry to say, to this day.
I had never talked about this subject with anybody else in California but Clyde. I would share this information with the other girls eventually. I had already told Clyde, mainly because he’d come from one of the same types of little southern towns with some of the same kind of people I grew up around. He knew all about this stuff. “I ain’t scared of nothin’,” he told me one time, waving the nine millimeter Glock he carried all the time and slept with under his pillow. “’Less it’s somethin’ I can’t see…”
I never believed in anything I couldn’t see, either. But I experienced something strange after a girl I used to hang with fell off a roof and died when we were fourteen. Her name was Annie Mae Proctor and she had been my best friend. One of the things that Annie Mae had always liked about me was my long braids. Since she’d been practically bald, I could understand why. Every bald-headed Black girl I ever knew had major issues when it came to hair. I felt sorry for Annie Mae, when people would mistake her for a boy because of her smooth head. However, I hated the way she used to sneak up behind me and tug on my hair.
Well, a week after Annie Mae died, I was in the kitchen standing over the sink washing dishes. The kitchen door slammed, but I didn’t look up right away to see who it was. Then somebody yanked on my freshly braided hair. When I turned around, nobody was there! I forgot about it until it happened again, while I was in the bathroom standing in front of the mirror washing my face. And there was Annie Mae in a white gown, standing behind me, grinning with her gapped teeth sparkling like diamonds. But the girl was dead! I’d attended her funeral and watched them plant her in the ground.
Annie Mae came to visit me two and three times a week. She never said anything, and I wasn’t scared the first few times. But after a while I did get scared. I wanted Annie Mae to go back to wherever it was she was supposed to be. So I finally told Mama.
Mama didn’t even look surprised or scared. She just let out a deep breath and shook her head. “Sister Pearl over in Mississippi knows how to deal with these things,” Mama told me, whispering so the rest of the family wouldn’t hear us talking on our back porch. “We better pay her a visit.” Even though almost everybody I knew had some kind of fear or interest in the supernatural and it was no secret, it was something talked about behind closed doors. Even then, it was usually discussed in low voices or whispers.
The very next day, Mama drove me to Mississippi to “shoo off the spook” that was harassing me. In Miss Pearl’s kitchen, a congested little room that always smelled like a just-baked cake, Miss Pearl sprinkled some green stuff on my head that looked like green meal. When my head looked like I had on a green cap, Miss Pearl closed her eyes and mumbled some gibberish. After that, she prayed for about five minutes, massaging my head the whole time. Then she had me drink something from a cracked cup. It was a foul-smelling concoction that looked like something you might expect to see in a toilet. When I gagged and threw up on the kitchen floor, Miss Pearl filled the cup again. She poured that slimy mess down my throat like it was a funnel and held my mouth shut until I swallowed every drop. I felt totally ridiculous the whole time.
After Miss Pearl made me mop my puke up off her floor, Mama slapped a few dollars in her hand and we left. That was the one and only time I had to seek Miss Pearl’s “professional” services, because Annie Mae never came back from the dead to bother me again.
When my uncle died, and since Miss Pearl didn’t have anybody else in Mississippi, Daddy encouraged her to move to Georgia so she could be near us. “Pearl ain’t got no family and she gettin’ on in years,” Daddy said in his gruff voice. He’d made a few visits to Miss Pearl himself, and she had literally straightened him out. The hump on his back had been reduced to a slight curve. Another thing that I’d noticed about my father after his visits to Miss Pearl was that he looked so much better. When he was cleaned up, he was one of the most attractive older Black men in town. He was dark and well-built from working so hard for so long. He had gray eyes like a cat, that more than one woman had admired. And now that he could stand up straight, everywhere I went with him, women with roving eyes gave him looks that made me uncomfortable.
A lot of people we knew took to Miss Pearl right away. She didn’t work and she didn’t have a check coming in the mail like a lot of the older Black folks I knew back then. But Miss Pearl didn’t need a measly check from Uncle Sam or anybody else. She made good money “helping” folks, the same way she had helped me. It seemed like every time I eavesdropped on a conversation between my mama and one of her friends, they were talking about some divine thing that Miss Pearl had done for somebody. She had located a beloved dog that had been missing for a month, and she even helped a childless woman get pregnant. I don’t know if Miss Pearl really had any divine powers, but she solved a lot of people’s problems. That had put her in a very high position in our little town.
Eventually, things took a sinister turn as far as Miss Pearl was concerned. It didn’t take me long to figure out that supernatural power was a double-edge sword and could cut both ways.
I started hearing rumors about people going to Miss Pearl to put spells on somebody. Now, as ridiculous as it sounded, I was real skeptical about all that shit (even though I’d had my own experience with something that couldn’t be explained), and it scared the hell out of me. Especially when healthy people suddenly got sick, or somebody lost a job they’d had for umpteen years.
Mama and Miss Pearl were good friends so Miss Pearl “helped” us a lot. She even took credit for getting Mama through menopause in one piece. Then things went in an ugly and frightening direction. People started calling our house leaving messages for Mama saying Miss Pearl was fooling around with Daddy. When Mama confronted Daddy and Miss Pearl, they both denied that they were having an affair. But a few nights later, my brother Tyrone caught Daddy fucking the hell out of Miss Pearl on a desk in a back room in the store. Daddy was supposed to be at choir practice and Miss Pearl was supposed to be at home in bed with a severe case of grippe.
All hell broke loose. That same night, with me and all the rest of my siblings riding shotgun, Mama drove Daddy’s truck to Miss Pearl’s fancy red-brick house. Mama had come from a long line of feisty country women. When she got angry, even voodoo didn’t scare her. Her own mother had spent the rest of her life in prison for burning down some racist man’s house after he’d raped her.
Anyway, Mama cussed Miss Pearl out and batted her head a few times with a two-by-four plank. She told Miss Pearl, “Heifer, I ain’t scared of nothin’ you think you can do. I got Jesus on my side! He got a whole lot more power than you got!”
Before we left Miss Pearl’s place, my brother Tyrone punched Miss Pearl in the chest so hard, her wig and glasses flew off. My sister Dot crushed Miss Pearl’s glasses with her foot. Then she kicked Miss Pearl in the side while she was already on the floor of her kitchen squawking like a chicken. “Bitch, you don’t fuck with my family,” Dot hollered. “I don’t care what kind of power you think you got, you can die like anybody else.”
Mama didn’t waste any time turning a lot of people against Miss Pearl. The people who were too scared to piss off Miss Pearl stayed out of the mess. But Mama had a lot of friends, and when they stopped going to Miss Pearl to locate a lost ring or to get a child’s ringworm cured, Miss Pearl’s generous income went way down. She had to get a job cleaning houses. She also lost her brick house and had to move into a trailer.
I’ll never forget the day Miss Pearl called our house while we were having dinner. She left an ominous message on our answering machine. And it was a warning that chilled me to the bone: “You block-ass neegers’ll weel be sorry you evere fucked weed me.”
“That crazy bitch don’t scare me,” Mama snapped, spooning more greens onto my plate. She gave Daddy one of the meanest looks she could come up with. “Alex, I hope you happy with the mess you done stirred up.”
All Daddy did was bow his head and keep chewing.
I was eighteen. I had a lot of other things on my mind, like finishing school and marrying Sammy Pittman. He was the cutest boy I’d ever seen. I was so damn crazy about that boy, with his big brown eyes and neat little Afro, I didn’t have time to be worrying about some old witch’s threat.
A month after our attack on Miss Pearl, Daddy had a heart attack and died while he was taking a bath. We found him floating in our claw-foot bathtub. There was nothing strange about Daddy having a heart attack because he’d smoked five packs of cigarettes a day most of his life and had always had trouble with his heart.
Then my sister Maybelline died a week later. That morning she had complained about a severe pain in her stomach and by noon she was in the hospital. She died that night. The doctor couldn’t figure out what had killed her, so all we ever heard was “unknown causes.” Tyrone was next. A month later he got into a fight with somebody in a card game over ten dollars. He got stabbed in the neck and died on the spot.
A week after my graduation, which Mama was too nervous to attend, Sammy and I got married. We moved Mama in with us in a little house on a hill behind the church we went to. My sister Dot moved in with her boyfriend and a year later, they got into a fight. He beat her to death with a brick.
Mama didn’t mention Miss Pearl’s curse until after Dot’s funeral.
“We got to get out of this town away from that crazy woman,” Mama told me. The fear in her voice was so thick, I could have sliced it with a knife.
“Mama, you are the one actin’ crazy. Miss Pearl didn’t kill Daddy, Maybelline, Dot, or Tyrone.”
Mama gasped and shot me a look full of contempt and disappointment. “How many other folks lose so much family in so little time, girl?”
“What about the Hardy family? Nine of them died in that church bus crash last year. Miss Pearl responsible for that, too?”
“I ain’t worried about no other family but my own. I know more about these things than you do. I seen all kinds of shit when I was growin’ up. Them roots women can do just about anything they set out to do.”
“If you think Miss Pearl did somethin’ evil, you need to go see her and set things straight,” I insisted.
Mama did try to talk to Miss Pearl, but it was too late. Miss Pearl had put the word out that she would never forgive Mama for ruining her life and that Mama would pay for it. A year later my brother Marvin caught pneumonia and died. Mama seemed to turn into a dried-up old hag overnight. Her soft light brown skin looked like leather. Her delicate features looked like they had melted and slid halfway down her face. And she rarely smiled anymore. A slight noise would make her jump up like a rabbit and she lost so much weight, none of her clothes fit.
I didn’t get really nervous until I ran into Miss Pearl at the Laundromat one night. She gave me a look that was so cold, I shivered. Then, as she was walking out, she told me with a smirk, “You and your mommee, y’all ain’t nevere goin’ to have no peace. I weel see to eet.”
I didn’t tell Mama about my run-in with Miss Pearl until a month after we’d buried my last brother. The fact that I’d waited so long to tell her upset Mama almost as much as Miss Pearl’s threat. By now my mother already looked so grief-stricken and old, what I told her didn’t make her look any worse. But I knew she was scared and she couldn’t hide it. She started going to church more, she burned candles, and, she even went to see another woman in Fayette, who also practiced voodoo.
Every time Mama heard me cough or complain about cramps or any other ailment, she started watching me like a hawk. Then she rubbed me with some greasy red oil that the other voodoo woman had given her. She made me promise that I wouldn’t eat anywhere but at home. And she insisted that I sleep with a Bible under my pillow and wear a cross around my neck at all times. I wasn’t surprised when Mama started talking about us moving away.
Mama had a friend in San Francisco, a retired schoolteacher who used to go to our church. Sister Curry had tried to get Mama to move to California to live with her right after Daddy died but Mama had refused. Now Mama was begging that old lady to extend the invitation again. But by that time Sister Curry was sick herself and hinting that she would eventually move to Arizona for her health.
Mama decided to try Detroit where she had a distant cousin. Sammy had relatives in Detroit, too, so we went with her. Sammy didn’t want to quit his job supervising workers at a peach orchard, and he wasn’t that wild about moving to another state. But after I begged and pleaded with him, threatening to go whether he went or not, he gave in. One of the things I loved about Sammy was the fact that he had always let me have my way. I had told him before we got married that my mama would always come before him in my life. He’d accepted that and married me anyway.
Detroit didn’t work out for any of us. Sammy couldn’t find a decent job, and it made him cranky. He had dropped out of school in the tenth grade and worked on farms most of his life. There was not much farm work in Detroit. I took whatever jobs I could, but we were still having a hard time making ends meet. We couldn’t even afford our own place and had to live in Mama’s cousin’s basement.
In addition to all of that, the cold weather was bad for Mama’s health. Mama and I insisted on staying in Detroit anyway, but Sammy wanted to move back to Georgia. His former boss was still holding his old job open, hoping Sammy would return. Because Sammy had accepted me under my conditions, he wouldn’t argue too much with me when it came to my mama. He shut up about moving back to Georgia real quick.
Less than six months after the move to Detroit, Mama decided it was time for us to move on again! After begging and pleading with her friend in California, her friend said that we could stay with her. My mama was old and so scared, I thought she’d keel over from a heart attack or a stroke if she got any more upset. She was the only close relative I had left. I knew I would never forgive myself if she went off to some strange state and died alone. I had to do what I had to do. I told Sammy we were going with Mama. His reaction shocked the hell out of me.
“Rosalee, I done had enough of this foolishness. If you leave Detroit, you’ll be leavin’ here without me. I finally got a job, and I ain’t about to leave it,” Sammy told me, whispering in bed that night because Mama was on the other side of the room on a rollaway bed. With Mama so close by every night, we couldn’t even make love. We had to sneak and do it in the bathroom or on the garage floor. Every now and then we went to a cheap motel. It was a young married couple’s worst nightmare. Especially a couple who liked to make love as loud and often as Sammy and I did. And, I could no longer admire my man walking around naked in front of me. “I ain’t goin’ to spend the rest of my life runnin’ from a goddamn witch’s curse,” Sammy said, not even trying to hide his anger. I was horrified. He had never talked in such a bold way to me before.
Like me, Sammy didn’t really believe in that voodoo shit. But he’d grown up with family members who did, too. He just went along with it because he knew how serious it was with some people.
I sat up in the weak bed and glared at my husband. The glow from the lamp on the crate we used for a nightstand was dim, but I could still see the pain in my husband’s eyes. I decided that I was in more pain than he was. Sammy still had all of his siblings and a healthy mother who didn’t need anybody to look after her. Besides, I was spoiled and used to getting my way with everybody except Mama.
“Now you see here, I’m your wife,” I hissed. “You came to Detroit with me so we could both look after my mama.”
Sammy sat up, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath. “I married you, Rosalee. I didn’t marry your mama. It’s supposed to be me and you, not me, you, and Mama.”
I heard the springs on Mama’s bed squeak. “Shhhh!” I covered Sammy’s mouth with my hand. In a dry whisper, I continued. “If that’s the way it’s goin’ to be, that’s the way it’s goin’ to be. I’m all my mama’s got now and she needs me more than you do,” I insisted, hoping that Sammy would see things my way. He used to!
“Rosalee, I have been more than patient with you. I have tried to make you happy. As long as you feel that you should put your mama ahead of me, we ain’t never goin’ to be happy. If you don’t grow up, you goin’ to be a miserable woman for a long time. And, you’ll be miserable by yourself, because ain’t no other man in his right mind goin’ to put up with what I done already put up with.”
For the first time in our relationship, Sammy Pittman had stood up to me. He refused to quit another job and run away with me and Mama. The strange thing about that was, I was glad he did. It gave me hope that someday I would be strong enough to refuse my mother’s unreasonable demands, too. As much as I loved my husband, and as proud as I was of him, I couldn’t choose him over my mother. It would have killed her, and I knew I’d never be able to live with that. And, I would probably hold Sammy responsible for it until the day he died. I didn’t feel good about the way I treated my husband. But it made me feel a little better when I reminded myself that a woman could only have one mother; a husband could be replaced like a pair of shoes.
When Mama packed up and climbed on a train to California, I was right behind her. We stayed with the retired schoolteacher, Sister Curry, until she moved on to Arizona to live with her son.
“Mama, I’m tired of runnin’. If you want to go off somewhere else, you’ll be goin’ without me. I’m stayin’ in California,” I told her when she started dropping hints about following Sister Curry to Arizona.
“I’m tired, too,” Mama told me. “And you ain’t got to stay out here with me. You can go on back to that husband of yours. I’ll be fine.” Mama knew which buttons to push on me. “I got enough money to last me for a while and enough to bury me…”
After Sister Curry moved away, we stayed on in her apartment. But she had been living there on some kind of agreement where she didn’t have to pay but a hundred dollars a month. The apartment owner wouldn’t let us take over that same agreement, so the rent went up to a thousand dollars a month! I took whatever temp jobs I could get, but even with Mama’s pension, we couldn’t make it. Bill collectors started calling, we couldn’t keep our utilities paid, and we ate a lot of Spam and peanut butter.
Then I answered a newspaper ad. Within two months after moving to California, I landed a job answering telephones for an escort service. The cramped little office was on the first floor in a big brick building on Howard Street, in downtown San Francisco. That’s where I met Carlene Thompson. As a go-between for the man who owned the service, she was the one who’d interviewed me for the job. I didn’t need any experience, but I was told to my face in no uncertain terms that I had to be discrete and dependable. My job was to take names and numbers, not to set up dates and certainly not to quote prices. If a caller brought up sex, I was supposed to play dumb, tell him it was an escort service, not a brothel. A lot of teenage boys called up acting the fool. If the caller sounded too young, I was to hang up. If the man was not a regular, Carlene had to check him out by calling his place of business and in some cases, going to visit him there.
There were two other women, alcoholic hags who couldn’t get work anywhere else, who helped me take the calls. But when they were too wasted or hungover to work, Carlene helped when she wasn’t going on dates herself.
“Rosalee, you can expect just about anything to happen in this line of work. One customer who’s into watchin’ a woman do crazy shit called up and asked me to come to his mansion, get out of my car, go into his backyard and masturbate for ten minutes. Then I was supposed to knock on his back door so he could pay me. I did everything I was supposed to do—but at the wrong house!” Carlene laughed until she cried.
There was never a dull moment. Between calls, Carlene entertained me with one off-the-wall story after another. Some were funny, but then there were a few that were downright scary. Like the story about the man who’d hog-tied her, then passed out for three hours before he turned her loose.
I didn’t like what I was doing, but it was the first job I had been able to get that had flexible hours and paid good money. And, I got paid under the table so Uncle Sam couldn’t get his pound of flesh from me. I was able to afford to do nice things for Mama, and that kept her happy.
Carlene seemed to enjoy telling me about all the years she had slept with men for money. “Girl, back in Ohio, I lived with this old madam we all called Scary Mary. That sister taught me most of everything I know about men and their money and how to get it. It ain’t that hard. Especially for a pretty woman like me,” Carlene bragged. She was in her late thirties, and looked it, even with her long dyed black hair and petite body. Being light-skinned, and always boasting about it, she thought mighty highly of herself. “Me, even at my age, I can still make as much money as a girl your age.”
I rolled my eyes and yawned, knowing it would irritate Carlene. “I know I need money real bad, but I don’t think I want to start walkin’ the streets yet,” I told her. “I think more of myself than that,” I added with a sneer. I’d enjoyed such good sex with my husband, every time I saw a man now who looked like him, my crotch itched. I couldn’t imagine getting that close to any other man. Even for money.
Carlene’s eyes flashed and she shot me a hot look. “Who said anything about walkin’ a damn street?” she said, huffing. Carlene swatted the top of my head with a folded newspaper. “The women we set up on dates, don’t do none of that, if they don’t want to. Ain’t you learned nothin’ by workin’ here? These women we send out get three hundred dollars just to go have dinner with some lonely man from out of town.” The telephone rang and Carlene’s voice suddenly seemed like it was coming from another woman. She sounded sweet and soft, purring and giggling as she processed the call. “No problem, sweetie. How’s your back? Uh-huh. Well, I’m sure Ester will be glad to hear she didn’t hurt you too much last week. You better start takin’ better care of yourself before you get hurt even more. Yes, baby. I’ll pay you a visit myself next week.” As soon as Carlene completed the call, she turned to me again and said harshly, “You better get the spirit, sister. That call just now,” she tapped the telephone, “that old goat is good for five hundred dollars. He’s fat as fuck and comes like that,” she giggled, snapping her fingers.
“Five hundred dollars?” I almost choked on the words. “What-what would I have to do to get that kind of money?”
Carlene shrugged, blew on her long nails, and spoke in the same sweet voice she used when she took calls from the tricks. “That’s up to you.”
“Well, I’m not stupid. I know enough about men to know that they are not goin’ to be handin’ over no hundreds of dollars just to have somebody keep ’em company durin’ dinner. Is talkin’ all you do when you go out with these men?”
Carlene shrugged again. “Sometimes. But it don’t matter to me because I love to fuck anyway.” I was stunned that a woman who hardly knew me shared so much intimate information about herself.
“Well, I’m not that desperate.” I paused and looked around the office. “Yet.”
For the rest of that day, the telephones rang off the hook. One regular trick called from his cell phone. He was parked in his Mercedes in the alley behind us. In a desperate voice, he claimed he was so horny, he had to see a woman “at once.” Carlene literally ran out the door and was back within twenty minutes, waving three hundred dollars in my face.
It seemed like every month my bills got bigger. Mama needed more medicine and better clothes. Then she wanted a big-screen color television set. Our apartment in the shabby neighborhood we lived in got broken into so many times I stopped counting. One day while I was at work, a bold burglar broke into our place while Mama was taking a nap and made off with a clock radio I had just bought. I knew I had to do something drastic to get us into a safer place.
It didn’t take long for me to get desperate enough to go out on a few dates that Carlene set up. She made me agree to give her a thirty percent cut. At first, it was easy. Almost fun. Carlene and I didn’t tell Clyde Brooks, the man who was behind the escort service, about me going on dates, too. I had not met him in person yet, but he sounded pretty scary over the telephone so I didn’t want to piss him off. Besides, Carlene went out on a few dates herself that she didn’t report to this Clyde, so she had my back and I had hers.
I was twenty-four and the only man I’d ever had sex with was my husband. Sammy had never asked for anything too extreme or out of the ordinary in bed. I had a lot to learn about what men wanted. And because the ones I was dating were paying for it, they expected to get whatever they wanted. Even something as outlandish as me pissing on them! I was surprised, and pleased, to occasionally run into a man who was happy just to have me give him a hand job in the front seat of his car on his lunch hour in the alley behind our building.
I’d been dating strange men for about a month before I actually had to fuck one. And he made it worth my while: four hundred dollars and some new clothes from the boutique he owned. I just didn’t like all the lies I told Mama about where all the money was coming from.
“Baby, I am so proud of you. A thousand dollars in one day just for modelin’. I always knew your good looks would pay off,” Mama told me, admiring the new furnished apartment we’d just moved into. We even had a view of the San Francisco Bay, a fireplace, and an alarm system. “That Naomi Campbell better be watchin’ her back.” Mama grinned, running her brand-new vacuum cleaner over the thick carpet on our living room floor.
I smiled and agreed with Mama.
“Rosie, I want to go to Vegas. Book me a suite at that Mirage this time. I might run into Gladys Knight. Besides, them drinks at that Bellagio place was too weak, and I didn’t see nary celebrity.”
The more extravagant Mama got with her demands, the more dates I had to go on. “Mama, I just sent you to Vegas last week. You lost more than three thousand dollars playin’ those slot machines.”
“So what! I wanna go again. We rich. What good is it for me to have a supermodel for a daughter if I can’t enjoy it!” Mama roared. Then her voice got real low. She coughed and rubbed her chest. “I mean, how many more times will you be able to do nice things for me?”
I sent Mama to Vegas the very next day and she lost another two thousand dollars.
When the building we lived in was sold a month later, I started looking for us a new place. It was Carlene’s idea for me to put Mama in an apartment complex for seniors and get a place of my own.
“You’d make even more money if you had a place where you could take tricks,” Carlene advised. “You wanna share my place with me? I live in the same neighborhood as Robin Williams.”
I declined Carlene’s offer to be roommates, but I did move into my own apartment on Silver Street. No movie stars lived on this block, but it was a nice, quiet, and safe place for a single woman. However, I couldn’t bring myself to bring tricks to it. Fucking in the same place I lived in didn’t appeal to me.
I furnished my apartment with odds and ends that I picked up secondhand, because I didn’t plan to stay in it long. For some reason I believed that eventually Mama and I would return to Detroit. I missed Sammy, and it was so painful I couldn’t even bring myself to call him up. But I did send him notes every now and then, with no return address. I just prayed that he would still be there for me when I straightened my life out.
I don’t know who tipped that Clyde man off about Carlene and me going on dates with some of his wealthy tricks and keeping all the money. One of the drunken women, Carlene assumed.
Clyde stormed the office on Howard Street cussing a blue streak. Carlene just laughed and told Clyde to lick her pussy, but she promised to give him all the money she made on her next five dates. After he cooled off, he started raving about how pretty I was. Instead of firing me, he “offered” to “manage” my “career” for a third of my trick money. Since I had already wet my feet, it wasn’t hard for me to accept his offer. Especially since I was already giving Carlene thirty percent of the money I made.
“And just to show you what kind of man I am, I ain’t goin’ to ask you for none of the money back that you got from my clients,” Clyde told me with a cheeky grin. He followed that with a mysterious threat. “If you decide you wanna work as a outlaw, you just might get yourself into all kinds of the trouble with the man. I play cards with everybody on vice.” Turning to Carlene, he said, “Don’t I, Carly?”
“He sure do, ’cause I seen him do it.” Carlene nodded, blowing on her nails.
To this day, I don’t know if Carlene had set me up so that I would feel I had to work for Clyde. She didn’t seem too upset with him and was acting mighty casual about Clyde finding out our dirty little secret.
I went on my first date for Clyde that very night. To make sure I had a good time, he sent me to Mr. Bob, the easiest trick in San Francisco and one of the wealthiest. He spent thousands of dollars each month on women. And since he preferred Black women, Clyde took full advantage of that. Once a month, he would let this Mr. Bob have the woman of his choice for free. But the joke was on Clyde. Carlene told me that even when Clyde sent Mr. Bob his freebie, Mr. Bob paid the woman anyway. “And Clyde don’t see nary penny of that money,” Carlene told me. “See, it’s all good.”
It was hard to dislike Clyde, even though he had cussed me out and called me a crook. But he had a sense of humor, and he was generous. He would let me borrow his Range Rover to haul Mama back and forth to the expensive stores she liked to shop at. I found out he was also a sensitive man when I told him about losing most of my family. He pretended he had something in his eye, but I had already seen the tears. Also, Clyde resembled my late brother Tyrone. The minute Mama met him, she started treating him like one of the family. Not only did Mama start inviting him to dinner and church, she encouraged him to get me as many “modeling” assignments as he could.
But when Clyde came around too often, Mama got suspicious. “Rosie, you ain’t tryin’ to date that man, are you? Is he doin’ more than managin’ your modelin’ career?”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about me and Clyde gettin’ together like that. He only likes White women.”
Mama sniffed and smiled. “I figured that. He seems like the type. Tell him to come have dinner with us this Sunday.”
Clyde showed up the following Sunday evening with a bottle of Mama’s favorite wine. I couldn’t tell which one did the most grinning: him or her.
“Sister Vaughn, you ain’t got to worry about your baby girl. Modelin’ is a cutthroat business, but I ain’t goin’ to let nobody take advantage of her,” Clyde told Mama, his eyes on me as he smacked on some of Mama’s honey-dipped fried chicken. “She’s in good hands now.”
“Thank you, son,” Mama purred. Then she turned to me with a scowl on her face. “And I don’t care what he do to you, you better stay with him.”
Clyde had been managing me for more than a year when Ester brought Lula to him.