I could fill a book with all the stupid shit I did in California. For instance, I didn’t believe in ghosts, voodoo, and other things that went “bump in the night.” But I still had the nerve to spend money on a psychic. Why? Because I couldn’t think of any other way for me to get the insight or guidance I felt I needed to get my life in order. Maybe my only hope was a psychic. What else did I have to work with?
There was one thing I could not ignore. Every time I thought about all of the ghoulish things that I didn’t believe in, I had to think about the times that the ghost of my dead playmate had visited me and pulled my hair.
No matter what I did or didn’t believe in, the psychic I’d been going to had not done me too much good so far. She’d given me some lucky numbers once, and I’d won a couple hundred dollars playing the lottery, but that could have been a coincidence. However, I figured I had nothing else to lose but something to gain, if I was lucky.
I’d made several trips to the Mission District to see Conchita Diaz, a card reader in her seventies from Cuba. Lula had once visited this particular psychic, a bug-eyed, mole-faced old crone, with a cat named Paco, who Ester had hooked her up with. And even though Lula and Ester had admitted that they didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in this woman, that still didn’t stop me from making an appointment.
On one of my visits to Conchita, I had to dodge bullets from a drive-by shooting in progress. Another time I had to step over a drunk man covered in piss, lying on the cracked sidewalk in front of Conchita’s tagged building. I’d even been chased by a pit bull.
Common sense should have told me that Conchita’s psychic powers weren’t that potent if she hadn’t foreseen all of the mess I had to dodge to get to and from her apartment each time. She lived on Valencia, a street littered with sleazy bars and restaurants that should have been closed down a long time ago.
I’d entered Conchita’s jungle three times in the last six months. I kept going because she needed the money, and I liked her. And, she made me laugh. That was something I hadn’t done much of since moving to California. “The spirits told me you was comin’ today and that you’d be bringin’ me a bottle of Wild Turkey and a burrito,” Conchita told me on my last visit. Before she even brought out her cards, she suggested I trot across the street to a liquor store to pick her up the bottle and some lunch, just to get her in the mood. I ended up getting drunker than she did that day, so I forgot half of everything she told me. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had remembered everything anyway. Her predictions were either not very accurate or a long way down the road.
So far, none of Conchita’s predictions had come true: I had not moved into a big beautiful house with a man who “smooched” my feet, my mama had not gotten any better, and I had not stopped sleeping with strange men for money. The one prediction that stood out in my mind, the same one that Conchita and a faceless woman on a psychic hot line had revealed to me was that I would return to my husband. It was probably the most far-fetched of all the predictions. I had not spoken to my husband, Sammy, since Mama and I took off. However, I had written him a few letters during my first few weeks in California. When that got to be too painful I stopped. But if I did return to Sammy, then all of the other predictions that Conchita had made would become true by default. Because when I was with him, he didn’t exactly smooch my feet, but he did worship the ground I walked on. In my book that was close enough.
Sammy was going to inherit and move into a big house in Detroit that his grandmother had promised to leave to him when she passed on. So if Sammy eventually took me back, I’d be living with him in a big beautiful house.
The thing that I wanted the most was for Mama to “get better” so that I could make plans for my future. No matter how much Mama coughed and moaned when she was around me, I knew that she was not as physically sick as she claimed to be. She would often be on her couch moaning when I went to visit her. But she would leap up like a frog as soon as one of her friends invited her to go play bingo or something—while I was still present. Her most serious ailments were all in her mind. The worst being her belief in Miss Pearl’s curse.
I’d asked Conchita on my second visit, “What can you tell me about the curse on my mama?” Conchita had lit a candle for me during my first visit. It was supposed to strengthen her ability to conjure up an effective way for me to make Mama get over her fear of Miss Pearl’s curse. Conchita gave me a clueless look, so I asked again. “Remember that curse I told you my mama was so scared of? You lit a candle about it. What can you tell me about that now?”
Conchita’s big bosom heaved, and she blinked real hard. “Nothin’,” she told me, munching on a burrito. “A evil spirit blew out your candle.”
I paid Conchita extra to light a stronger candle, but she still couldn’t tell me anything about Mama and the so-called curse that had practically ruined my life. She explained, with tears streaming down her face, that the power and interference of the opposing spirits were too strong for an unsophisticated peasant like her.
I didn’t want to think about the fact that Mama was taking advantage of me. I loved my mother more than I loved life itself, and I was willing to do just about anything to keep her happy. She’d lost her husband and all but one of her children. She was in a very desperate position. But then, so was I.
I was not proud of the fact that I’d allowed Mama to make me choose between her and my husband. However, one of the few things that kept me going was the fact that Sammy and I were still very young compared to Mama. We had more of a chance for a long, happy life than she did.
It was hard paying rent on two apartments. Especially Mama’s. Her rent was almost twice as much as mine, and her expenses cost a lot more to cover. I couldn’t really make any plans about my future because my life was more like a merry-go-round that I couldn’t get off.
I hated visiting Mama at the senior citizen’s apartment complex where she lived. Being around a lot of sick, fussy old people made me sick myself. Sometimes before I could even make it up to Mama’s apartment on the third floor, several people stopped me along the way to update me on their health and to complain about every other thing of which they could think. But Mama could outwhine all of her sad friends. She was convinced that she was dying from some unidentified ailment. I just went along with her, telling her that she was going to “get better.”
Even as depressing as it was, I still went to visit Mama at least once a week—unless I was out of town on a date or humping local tricks back to back, like I did when Ester, Lula, and Rockelle weren’t available. Sometimes I couldn’t decide who was profiting off me the most: Mama or Clyde.
I didn’t like the level of my position in Clyde’s life. Even though Rockelle complained all the time to me that she felt like the lowest one on the totem pole, I didn’t agree. And I didn’t feel any sympathy for her. I knew that Clyde would always put Ester above me, but I’d known him before Lula and she already outranked me. Clyde wasn’t one to give out explanations or answer too many questions. And all he would say about the way he sometimes isolated me from the other girls—like when he made Lula move from my apartment to Ester’s—was something like: “I think it’ll be better for everybody.”
Being the gullible fool that Clyde was, in my opinion, he was too stupid to realize that women like us did kick back together and share information. By “trusting” the wrong women, Clyde was cooking his own goose. He had Lula handle our finances when he wasn’t able to, and I knew for a fact that she was robbing him blind. She doled out money to Ester and Rockelle every time they asked her to. And even me, when I needed extra money because of Mama, so I didn’t really care about her being in so good with Clyde. I was glad that she was playing him because if it had been me, I would have done the same thing.
Sometimes when an out-of-town regular couldn’t get to San Francisco, Clyde sent us to him. The trick had to pay all of our travel expenses in addition to the usual fee. That’s how desperate some of them were.
There was a forty-year-old Chinese man in San Diego who would walk through a firestorm to get to a woman. But when he couldn’t, he had her come to him. He was a jewelry salesman, and he came up to San Francisco a couple of times a month. And he was one of the nastiest things on two legs. Of all the outlandish things for a man to ask a woman to do, this one wanted his butt hole licked! I figured Daniel Wong had a hard time finding a woman in San Diego crazy enough to do that shit. Every time he got a hard-on, he called up Clyde. And when he didn’t have business in the Bay Area, he sent for one of us, usually me, to hop on a plane and come to him. Somehow, with plastic covering Mr. Wong’s dried, ashy crack, I managed to get him off. And I deserved every dime of the five hundred bucks he paid. Especially the times that sucker farted in my face when he came. Shit!
Every time I had to fly to San Diego to do Mr. Wong, I’d laugh off and on all the way down there and back, wondering what my friends in Georgia would think if they knew how far I’d slid into hell. Especially a snob like Shirley Reese, a law student now, who’d looked down her nose at me all through high school, all the while claiming to be my best friend.
I could imagine how Shirley would stop me on the street, tilt her head back and say, “So, Rosalee, what kind of work do you do out there in earthquake country?” And I’d tell her the truth, leaving no stone unturned. She’d stare at me for a long time, shaking her head. Then she’d probably say something like, “Well, we can’t all be lawyers.” That bitch was on my mind more than any other person from my past. Including Miss Pearl and her spells and threats, and my husband. Poor Sammy. As much as I still loved him, I tried to think about him as little as possible.
Well, I had to go down to San Diego yesterday to pay Mr. Wong a visit. It didn’t take me long to get him off, so I was in and out of his house within an hour and on my way back to San Francisco. But I got delayed because of a security incident at the San Diego airport. Because of the September 11 mess, every time a man with an accent and a swarthy complexion started acting suspicious, people working the airports got crazy. This time it was a well-dressed man screaming in a foreign language about lost luggage, then making threats in broken English to “blow up all.” The airport was evacuated, and it was three hours later before I could board my plane back to San Francisco.
I had promised Mama that I would come by and take her and one of her friends to lunch. But when I showed up after dinner, she was sitting in her front window, already in her bedclothes, dabbing tears off her face with a napkin.
When I strolled in, bracing myself for her verbal attack, her eyes got wide, and she started blinking real hard.
“Rosie, where you been? I been waitin’ on you all day.” Mama sniffled like a scolded two-year-old. Her nose looked like a red ball. “I’m all out of my pills. My plants ain’t been watered, my carpets ain’t been vacuumed. This place is a wreck,” Mama complained, waving her arm around the room. No matter how often I stopped by to clean up for Mama, it was never enough. Empty plates and cups were on the coffee table, old newspapers and magazines littered the plaid couch and love seat, and something red had spilled on the carpet, leaving a sticky trail all the way across the floor. The huge TV that I had bought for Mama had clothes draped across the top, held in place by one of her orthopedic shoes.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said contritely, kicking trash aside. “I, uh, had to work this mornin’ and there was a lot of unnecessary confusion that slowed things down,” I lied. Well, it wasn’t really a complete lie.
Mama stopped sniffling and gave me a guarded look. That soon shifted to a look of suspicion, and it made me nervous. I was as close to being a real model as Mama was. I never told anybody, but I had attempted to get work as a model a few weeks ago. But according to the agent I’d approached who’d looked me up and down with a critical eye and a frown, I wasn’t the type they were looking for. Being tall and thin, and looking like a combination of Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell didn’t do me much good unless a trick was looking for that type. “Oh? Modelin’ bathin’ suits for Macy’s again? I hope you remembered to put some lotion all over on your ashy self, girl. I can’t have you up there modelin’ with your skin lookin’ like a gator’s.” Mama smiled broadly as she gave my hands a quick inspection. I was pleased to see that Mama had perked up. “See how blessed it is to be so pretty. Us dainty women got to stay on top of nature, ain’t we?”
“Yes, ma’am.” When I leaned over Mama to give her a hug, she lifted her head and attempted to kiss me on the lips. She gasped when I turned my head. The last thing I wanted was for mama’s lips to touch mine so soon after I’d licked Mr. Wong’s butt. “Uh, I have a slight cold, Mama,” I explained, kissing her sweaty forehead.
“It ain’t never stopped you before,” she reminded, giving me a hard look. “What’s that on your neck?”
“Just a rash. I brushed against some, uh, poison ivy the other day when I was out bein’ photographed in Golden Gate Park.” Damn that Mr. Wong! I had meant to button my jacket all the way up to hide the sucker bite he had caused below my chin.
Mama’s face froze and she gasped. “It sure don’t look like no rash to me. It look like somethin’ else,” Mama accused. “You got a boyfriend, ain’t you?” Mama could curl her lips into the most extreme frowns I’d even seen. When she did that, her eyes looked like the target dot on a bull’s-eye.
“Now, Mama, you know I don’t date. That’s the one thing I promised Sammy I wouldn’t do, until…until me and him decide whether or not we’re goin’ to stay married.” My voice cracked. “Do you still want to go out to eat? I got Ester’s car outside.”
“I done already ate. Lunch and dinner. If I was to sit around waitin’ on you, I’m liable to starve to death. Come on. Clara’s in the kitchen.” Mama groaned as she struggled to get out of her seat. I grabbed her arm, helped her up, and led her to the kitchen just a few feet down the hall.
Before we even got into the neat, sweet-smelling kitchen, Mama started bragging to Clara, her White friend from across the hall. Clara was hunched over the stove fishing string beans out of a pot with a fork.
“Clara, this is my girl, the model,” Mama said proudly. “Ain’t she pretty?”
The woman, her eyes half closed, her blue wig on backward, snatched a pair of glasses out of her housecoat pocket, held them up to her eyes, and looked me up and down. A sour look formed on her plain face, making her look even plainer.
“She’s not that pretty,” the woman said, chewing and shaking her head.
Mama motioned me to lean closer. “That Clara. She just jealous ’cause you look better than that flat-ass girl of hers. It’d kill her to admit a Black girl is pretty,” Mama whispered with a conspiratorial sneer. “Now, Rosie, when you goin’ to move me out of this place?”
“Move you? I just moved you in here a few months ago. I can’t afford to move you again. And what’s wrong with this place?” I hollered, almost choking on the air I sucked in.
Mama ignored her friend and led me back to the living room. “I’m the only Black woman up in here, that’s what’s wrong with this place.” Mama snorted, rolling her eyes at me, as I eased her down on the couch. “Me and you can get us a real nice place together. I can help you get ready to go out on your model jobs. I can iron your clothes, carry your things to and from your jobs, and help you beat off them randy photographers. I read in the People magazine—or was it the National Enquirer—that when Brooke Shields was modelin’, her mama went with her everywhere she went.”
I let out a painful breath, cursing myself for weaving such a web of lies and deceit. “Mama, my work is too hectic for a woman in your condition. You know you need round-the-clock care. The doctor said so. I can’t take care of you and work, too. You have to stay in here until…until you get better.” I sat down next to Mama. “How would you like to go shoppin’ tomorrow?”
Mama’s face lit up like a flamethrower. “That’ll work. I told that lady at the Neiman Marcus that I would come back down there soon. She the same one who used to wait on the Pointer Sisters. She used to workin’ with celebrities like you. Strange thing though, she keep tellin’ me she don’t know you. I guess all models look alike to her, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” I groaned. I could not understand why a woman like my mother, who had spent her whole life shopping in stores like Wal-Mart, Goodwill, and the dollar stores, now only wanted to shop at the most expensive stores in town. But I guess I was to blame for that. It was my lie about how I’d once modeled swimsuits for Neiman Marcus. “I’ll take you to the mall.”
Mama gasped so hard she had to cough. “The mall? What mall? Why would I wanna go to a mall? Girl, you got a image to keep up. Respectable models don’t be shoppin’ at no Payless or Kmart!”
“It’s a lot cheaper.”
“Cheaper?” Mama roared. “I bet Cindy Crawford wouldn’t never fix her lips to pronounce such a word—”
“Mama, we can’t keep spendin’ money the way we’ve been doin’,” I insisted. “I don’t make the kind of money Cindy Crawford makes yet.”
“All right then,” Mama snapped. “Don’t worry about takin’ me nowhere. Clara’s girl said she’d take me to Neiman Marcus herself if she had to.” Mama turned her head toward the kitchen and yelled, “Clara, tell your girl I wanna go with y’all tomorrow. My girl done got too busy to be bothered.”
“I didn’t say that, Mama. Look, I spend a lot of money on you. You got everything you need and then some,” I hissed, looking around the room. Clara was in the doorway, a smug look on her face. “Mama, I can’t afford to do no more than I’m already doin’. Be patient. Be happy you are in a nice safe place. Enjoy what you already have and be happy. I promise you, you only have to stay here until you get better.”
Mama’s teeth clicked and clacked like castanets. She started fanning her face with a rolled-up Ebony magazine. The loose skin under her arm flapped like a sleeve on an oversized shirt. “Girl, you know I ain’t never gwine to get no better than I am now. That Pearl made sure of that.”
It had been a while since Miss Pearl’s name had come up, but she was always on my mind. Like I said, I had convinced myself that Miss Pearl didn’t really have anything to do with all the tragedies my family had suffered, but I knew that Mama still thought so.
“Mama, if Miss Pearl had really done somethin’ to our family, we wouldn’t be livin’ as good as we are now. We’d probably both be dead by now.”
Mama gave me an exasperated look and shook her head.
“Well, I ain’t far from death. It’s gettin’ closer and closer. Every time I look up, they haulin’ somebody out of here to the morgue.” Mama shifted her eyes, like she was trying to think up more things to say that would strengthen her position. “Just last night I had a real sharp pain cut through my belly like a sword. I hope it ain’t cancer. That’s what killed Mr. Lang next door.”
“Mama, this is an old folks’ complex, not a youth camp. Most of the people in here were already half dead when they checked in. They know they won’t be leavin’ this place alive.” I immediately wished that I could take my words back.
Mama’s face looked like it wanted to slide into her lap.
“Oh, you really know how to make a dyin’ woman feel good. I bet you can’t wait to bury me,” Mama said, rotating her neck.
“I didn’t come over here to argue with you, Mama.” I draped my arm around her rounded shoulder.
Mama sniffed, leaned her head back, and shot me an anxious look that was almost childlike. Without warning, she changed the course of our tense conversation. “Rosie, honey, I need me a new color television!”
I moaned and snatched my arm away from Mama’s shoulder like I’d been burned. “What’s wrong with the one you got now? The warranty hasn’t even worn off.”
Mama waved her hands high above her head and sucked in her breath, making a face that made it seem like she really was in pain. “Horse feathers. The color ain’t no good. I can’t be sittin’ up in here lookin’ at no little green men. And even with my glasses on, I can’t tell the Black folks from the White folks on that thing sittin’ there,” Mama hollered, shaking her finger at the huge television facing us in the living room.
“Yes, ma’am.” I sighed. “I’ll bring you one the next time I come to visit.”
I spent two more hours listening to Mama’s list of complaints: her neighbors were racists, her hip hurt, her neck hurt, her back hurt, the quack nurse who came to look in on her had touched her inappropriately and had to be a lesbian, and nightmares kept her from sleeping at night. By the time I left, all I wanted to do was go home and crawl into my own bed.
And that’s where I was, hugging a bottle of wine and sucking on a joint, when Clyde called me up around nine.
“Rosalee, if you there, pick up the telephone,” he ordered. He was silent a few moments, but I could hear him breathing hard and cussing under his breath. “I ain’t playin’ with you, girl! Pick up that phone if you there!” I ignored Clyde and turned down the volume on my answering machine, but not low enough. His voice was ringing in my ears. “Mr. Bob’s got a hard-on for you, girl. Tonight. Eleven P.M. sharp. Be there. And, I got you, Rocky, and Lula lined up for a foursome with Fat Freddie over in Sausalito tomorrow night. Rocky’ll pick you up at nine so y’all can have time to go have a drink first. You better have your juicy, priceless butt on the ball, and you better not be late, girl. Do you hear me? Shit.”
I turned off the machine and the telephone and slid down under my covers.