They call me Sugar Child.
I was three years old when my mother took me to a campaign rally in Pioneer Park to see Senator Robert F. Kennedy. It was late May 1968. He showed up in a hurry, just himself and some harried aides. The crowd was a mix of black folks, Mexicans, poor whites like us. The wind was still, the air warm.
Senator Kennedy talked about how everyone was going to get a piece of the pie. Not in heaven. But here on earth. One day our hunger would abate. He reached for people’s hands to shake. My mom squirmed to his side. She held me up to him. I was inches away from his tanned face, the auburn hair barricading his forehead. I looked into his resolute and weary blue eyes, his sinewy forearms in rolled-up shirtsleeves. I was colicky, miserable. A fussy little child with food allergies. Days later Senator Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. It was another year before I could eat solid food without throwing up.
SWAT carted me from the halfway house to General Hospital. I was handcuffed to a gurney while a doctor put fourteen stitches in my chin with no anesthetic. Then away I went, down a hallway, through a long white tunnel into hell. In the lockdown unit a shrink asked: “Sugar Child? Are you hearing voices? Are you hallucinating?”
“No,” I told her. “But I’ve got this other problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m in a bad relationship. It’s fucking me up.”
“Who is this person?”
“A cop.”
“Really? Does he reside here in town?”
“No.”
“Colton?”
“No.”
“Redlands?”
“Nah.”
“Then where?”
“He lives inside me.”
“Inside you? A policeman?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Sure does. It’s Don.”
“Don the policeman?”
“You got it.”
“I see. What does he look like?”
“He’s a white guy with a razor-thin mustache.”
“Do you talk to Don?”
“Night and day. He never shuts up.”
“What does he say?”
“Don? He thinks I’m an assbite. But why should I tell you?”
“Sugar Child . . . this is delusional.”
“Not at all. Don is real. Too real. The shit he says is just sick.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“My relationship with him?”
“Yes.”
“We just had our tenth anniversary.”
That’s when they hit me with Prolixin. A triple dose.
Now I’m doing the Prolixin shuffle in Pioneer Park. Doing the tango of the damned. I’ve got legs that don’t work. Arms that won’t move. A mind that can’t think. Prolixin reduces everything to static. The only thing I remember about the halfway house—other than meeting daddy—is losing my wig to the SWAT cops.
I’m not proud of that.
The lockdown unit shrink said: “When you feel unsafe, point a finger at the sky. Point a finger at the ground. Point a finger at yourself. Now you’re centered. You feel safe.”
I don’t feel anything, courtesy of Prolixin.
I’m not worried—I have a secret weapon nobody knows about. Not the shrinks, the cops, not Don the policeman, not even the Prolixin knows I command an invisible force field that automatically repels assholes—they just bounce off me.
And look at daddy. Better yet, don’t. He’s over there on E Street, playing his tambourine for Christmas shoppers.
But they don’t care about him—there’s no money in his bucket. Daddy is having a bad time today. That makes two of us.