Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [45]
It was like that for a while.
Then one morning he came by all worked up.
“This is it,” he said. “Your time’s up.”
I just smiled, shrugged, and walked on.
Half hour later the dickhead’s back. He runs his car up on the curb and pins me against the building, charges out, and cuffs me. Meanwhile, his partner comes out the alley with ten pills of ready-rock.
“These yours?” asks Dickhead.
“Hell, no,” I say.
“I’m sayin’ they are.”
“I’m sayin’ you’re full of shit. You just puttin’ this shit on me.”
He smiled and said, “I told you I’d get you.”
We go downtown. I know this is a setup. I know I’m getting out of this.
I’m feeling okay until the judge looks at my record, sighs, then closes his eyes, and then slaps on a seventy-five-thousand-dollar bail.
That means to stay free I gotta cough up three stacks (three thousand dollars) for the bail.
Here comes the lawyer talkin’ ’bout another two and a half stacks.
Here comes all that pretrial stuff.
Here comes all the accusations, all the phony charges.
Here comes the pressure.
Here comes the knowledge that if this shit goes against me, my ass is back in the Cut for fifteen years.
Here comes the report saying I had drugs stashed in the alley.
But here comes my lawyer showing that if I was selling drugs I wouldn’t stash them that far away. That’s not how we do. He makes this logical and beautiful argument about how the case makes no sense. He chews up their shit and spits it back in their face.
Case dismissed.
I’m off. I’m out.
But, in addition to the five and a half stacks I had to pay for bail and lawyers, I’m out another fifteen stacks because my stash got hit while all this legal crap was coming down.
Dickhead costs me over twenty stacks.
But I’m cool.
Or am I?
“I’LL BUST YOU
WITH THIS BRICK!”
That’s what I’m screaming at the bitch. And I mean it.
I’m ready to go upside her head.
She’s a relative of Mama’s. I call her Aunt, but right now I’m calling her evil ’cause she’s calling me a “little dyke-ass bitch.” She’s saying, “Mama ain’t even your real mama. You don’t deserve no real mama. You born in garbage and you is garbage.”
I’m walking down the street, on my way pick up Chinese food for Mama, while she’s slinging these insults at me. She’s screaming ’cause I put her out of Mama’s house. I put her out the house ’cause she’s high all the time. High as a motherfucker and making Mama crazy. I put her out the house to protect Mama.
Now she’s coming after me. And she done brought the police with her. She lied and told the police that Mama’s house is her house. Well, it ain’t. She don’t got no house, which is why she’s living off Mama.
She keeps yelling at me. I’m trying to walk away but the words keep flying and the cop wants to talk to me.
She prods the cops. She tells them, “Ask this dyke bull how many other dyke bulls she fucked down in prison. They let her out by mistake. She should be back there with all them other bull dykes.”
The cop starts asking me questions, but this evil bitch keeps on screaming until I pick up the cinder block and say, “I’m gonna kill this bitch! Gonna kill her right now.”
“You ain’t killing no one,” says the cop.
That’s when they straight lock me up and hustle me downtown.
Just what I need.
Another charge against me. Another night in jail. Another reason for the judge to send me back to the Cut.
Another long hard night. Another jail cell with another window with another full moon reminding me of all the moons I saw from the little window at Grandma’s House.
In the morning I’m scheduled to go before the judge where charges will be pressed.
I got a lot on my mind.
Takes a long time to fall asleep.
When I do, I dream of my dead mother. She’s alive in the dream and we’re back together. We’re walking down the street, about to go in a pawn shop where she’s going to buy me a nine-millimeter to protect myself, when someone comes up from behind her and shoots her dead in the head. I wake up and remember I’m back in jail.
God knows what’ll happen to me.
Does God even care?
Do I even care?