M.E. - My experience (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

After living in Milwaukee a few years, my mom moved us back to San Antonio. I was in the second grade and we lived on a street with exactly four houses on it. Across the street was a Mrs. Baird’s bakery. Every morning we would wake up to the smell of fresh bread. My mom would send us to the bakery to pick up milk and bread occasionally. Because the store workers knew us, we’d leave with bags of “day old” pastries, bread and rolls. Sometimes when we were outside playing with the other kids we would sneak off to the bakery knowing they would send us off with plenty of goodies.

Before we left Milwaukee my mom married Clarence, Tyrone’s father. Clarence was real cool. I cannot remember Clarence ever giving us any whooping, but if he did, it wasn’t anything serious because I have had some horrible whoopings! Clarence was a big kid who liked to sit in front of the Nintendo and play Super Mario Brothers for hours. Sometimes he would even let us play with him, but most of the time we would just sit and watch. My dad would come by and pick us up all the time. He would either take us to my grandmother’s or my great-grandparents’ house. My great-grandmother, “Nan-Nan,” was a saint! She used to spoil us crazy. When we went to her house we would all sit with her and play Keno for pennies. She always put dollars to our pennies and we played for hours. After letting us win the money she was going to give us anyway, we would sit and watch television and/or crochet. My great-grandfather, “Granddaddy,” really was a character. He was a World War II vet. After being discharged from the military he became a chef on the Southern Pacific Railroad. He did this for forty years. This man could cook. He loved cooking so much that if he asked if you were hungry and you told him no, he would curse you out. I mean he did not care who you were or how old you were. He would curse you out as if you stole something from him. After he finally calmed down and stopped cursing for about ten minutes, he’d ask if you were hungry again, as if you didn’t say no the first time. This might have been a part of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from the war and the cooking probably was therapy to him. This time when you answered you already knew the consequences of saying no, so the best thing to say was yes and let him do his thing. This started a whole round of other questions. He asked what you wanted to eat and you had better think of something or suffer his next flurry of verbal blows again. The best thing about his meals was that he spared not one ingredient in his recipes. If he made you some gumbo you would have the whole sea in the pot and it was all finger-licking good. Plus, you would lick the bowl without a care in the world even if someone was watching.

The only person he would bow down to was Nan-Nan. My Nan-Nan was in some type of accident in her younger days that left her paralyzed from the waist down and confined her to bed. This took nothing from her but her ability to walk. I’ve seen this woman conduct business from that bed that will make any corporate CEO of a Fortune 500 company envious. I remember when my Nan-Nan and Granddaddy used to argue. Usually Granddaddy would get tipsy from the Schaeffer’s beer that they used to drink and say something to us about running around the house. Once Nan-Nan would hear that she would say something to him and they would start cursing at each other. Granddaddy never won! We’d sit in the room with her while she would go off on him and we would laugh. She laughed right along with us. Eventually, Granddaddy would shut up. They were a lovely couple. Looking back on them, I know that my Granddaddy loved her dearly. I wish I would have learned love on that level when I was in the world.

A few months after I turned eight, it was Martin Luther King’s birthday. The Martin Luther King march in San Antonio was the largest march in America. It was a major event in San Antonio. Later in life, I would spend most of the year getting ready for the march, painting my car and making sure I had rims on it like other individuals would. My dad planned to pick us up early and take us to Nan-Nan and Granddaddy’s house because the march would pass in front of their home. He watched the march and then dad would take us where the march ended and the festivals began. The first part of the day went as planned. Dad came and picked us up and we watched the march pass in front of our great-grandparents’ yard. Then my dad took us home and said he would be right back to pick us up to head to where the march ended and the festivals began. I protested. I wanted to go everywhere with my father. Usually, he would take me. This day, he said he would be right back. Dad never came back to pick us up. I was pissed. I wasn’t mad that I missed the Martin Luther King festivities. I was mad because I felt like my dad lied to me, something he never did.

We waited all day for him to come back for us. He never returned. When night fell, the police showed up at our house. They talked to my mom for a moment and I saw her break down crying. At that time, I still did not know what was going on. When the police left, my mom sat me down and told me what happened. I don’t remember if I cried or not, but I do know a huge part of me died that day. The next day, mama told me I did not have to go to school. I went anyway. I refused to sit around all day and do nothing. That would have left me too much time to think about my dad. School was the closet I went to hide in. On the day of my dad’s wake I saw his body for the last time. I remember walking inside the funeral home up to the casket. I seen him laying there made up from the make-up the mortician caked on him. I turned around and walked out of the funeral home. I sat on the steps for the rest of the procession. I couldn’t see my father like that. It was too much of a realization that he was dead. I think I wanted myself to believe that he was still alive. The next day was his funeral. I went to school instead. A few months later, my mom found out that my sister Tasha was pregnant. My sister was only 12 years old, so I could only imagine what was going through my mother’s head at the time. I would think that she was furious, that is, until my sister dropped a bomb on her. Clarence, my mom’s husband, had been raping my sister and had impregnated her. I was too young to understand at the time but I remember us moving again, and Clarence going to jail. It seemed like life was going downhill. Too much was happening at one time. When my dad was murdered, I didn’t talk to anyone. I would bottle up my feelings and walk around like his death didn’t bother me. Everybody could see it in my face, but in my mind I was hiding it.

I spent weeks at a time at my Aunt Velina’s house. She had four children at the time and I enjoyed being around family. I remember I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming out for my daddy. All of the emotions I was repressing would manifest themselves in my dreams and hunt me like the fictional character Freddie Kruger did to his victims.

There was this videotape that I used to watch. It was the reenactment of my dad’s murder that the news station played on the night of his death. The tape showed four actors in the car arguing. The actor directly behind the driver pulled out a gun and shot the driver in the back of the head, blowing his brains all over the windshield. Then, the actors pulled the driver out of the car and laid him on the side of the street. They drove off in the driver’s car. The driver was supposed to be my father. I watched that tape so many times that to this day I still remember every detail, every sound and every voice as vividly as if I watched it yesterday.

Aunt Velina lived in the projects called Olive Park East located on the east side of San Antonio. The projects were full of kids and everyone knew each other. We were like one huge family. These projects were also gang infested and gang controlled. It was a well-known Blood neighborhood. The Blood Stone Villains controlled Olive Park and its sister projects located directly behind them called Village East. I lived over there.

The other place I enjoyed to escape to was my great-grandparents’ house. My dad used to live with them and they were really close to him. My great-grandparents treated me and my siblings as if we were their children. Nan-Nan was heartbroken when my father was murdered. Granddaddy was also, but like me, he kept his feelings bottled inside.

She died not too long after my father did. I cannot remember the reason for her passing, but I think it was old age and a broken heart. Granddaddy didn’t last long either. After Nan-Nan died, I watched Granddaddy rapidly deteriorate. He couldn’t function without his wife. He died months after she did. I knew he died of a broken heart. Nan-Nan was his world and although she was confined to a bed, she ran the household.

After their deaths I felt lost. Everyone I loved was dying back to back. I felt I didn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to turn to. Of course, I still went to my aunt’s house but it felt different. I felt I had a huge hole in my heart that was widening from all the loss. I did not understand death at the time, so these experiences were new to me and I didn’t know how to deal with them.

My mom and I never had a close relationship. There were times I wanted to talk to her, but I couldn’t. She was just a kid herself and I think she was dealing with the deaths in...