Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [4]
Wander across the street to play with Curtis. Like me, Curtis followed Knight Rider on TV. I didn’t know about Sesame Street or Electric Company, but I sure knew about Knight Rider, the show where the star was KITT, a black customized Pontiac Trans-Am. I wanted KITT because KITT could ride through fire. Nothing could stop KITT and nothing could destroy KITT. I had dreams about being in the world of the Knight Rider like I had dreams about being with the Smurfs. In my Knight Rider dreams, when I was commanding that car, nothing could stop me.
You can imagine how happy I was when I got me a toy version of the Knight Rider car.
“How come you don’t play with dolls?” asked Curtis.
“How come you don’t play with dolls?” I asked him.
“I’m a boy. My people say you a butch.”
“What’s a butch?” I wanted to know.
“That means you ain’t right.”
“But I got the right Knight Rider, don’t I?” I said, holding the car up to the sun and watching the light bounce off it.
“Let me see that thing.”
He grabbed the little car from me and let it fly down the street until it knocked into a light pole so hard that black paint chipped off the right door. That got me seeing red. I lost it. I took a swing at Curtis that caught him upside his head. I nearly took his head off. He came back at me, but I was too strong for me. I kept slamming him.
“You a butch,” he kept screaming at me.
I slammed him so hard that people passing by had to break it up.
Curtis never fucked with me again.
Back in the crib, Mama used to scold me when she learned I was fighting. After my eye operation I wore glasses for two years. I broke many a pair due to squabbles. I knew Mama wanted me in dresses and ribbons, but Mama was also wise enough to know that wasn’t me. Mama knew to accept people the way they are.
Pop got a kick out of having a tomboy. He was a handyman who ran his own little business. He could fix anything mechanical and he liked teaching me. I’d go up on the roof where he taught me to lay tar. Taught me to fix the pipes. When I got a bike—a red-and-black boy’s style with the bar under the seat—Pop taught me to take that sucker apart and put it together again. I’d put an empty juice carton on the spokes of the back tire to make that rat-rat-rat-rat noise. Me and the boys would call ’em our dirt bikes. At age eight, that’s how we rolled.
Pop would watch me roll down Oliver on my Huffy and smile.
“Girl,” he said, “you got an extra dose of get-up-and-go.”
Pop had a good dose himself. He’d get up and go visit girlfriends behind Mama’s back. Found this out the hard way:
One day we were in the pawnshop where he picked out a gold necklace. He wrote a little card and put it in a box. Because I was looking at all the pistols behind the counter, Pop didn’t think I was noticing him. But I noticed everything.
Get home and get ready for dinner. Dinner’s always an event at Mama’s ’cause you never know who’ll show up at the table. Fact is, you never know at any given moment who’s living in the house. Mama’s grandchildren are always around, not to mention cousins of all ages.
Tonight’s macaroni and cheese. Mama puts a hurting on mac and cheese.
“Hey, Mama,” I say. “Pop bought you a beautiful necklace.”
Pop looks at me like he wants to kick me in the head.
“That’s lovely,” she says. “Let me see it, Levi.”
Pop starts stuttering. “Not sure—not sure where I put it.”
“You put it right in your pocket,” I say, running over and digging it out for Mama to see.
“There’s a card and everything,” Mama says.
When she reads the card, though, her eyes turn red as fire. Just like that, she puts Pop’s ass out the house. Poor Pop’s in the doghouse for weeks. He finally pleads his way back in, but the beautiful thing about the man is that he’s not mad at me.
“Give her a whupping for what she done to you,” says a cousin