“How much is an apartment in your building?” I asked him one day out of the blue.
“Who said I own a building?” Mr. Sharp asked.
“People talk. . . .” I smiled. He laughed a short laugh, the way strong men who don’t overdo it do.
“Depends on the size,” he said. “Why do you ask? Thinking about moving in?” He stared into me for truth.
“How could I think about moving my aunt over there when I’ve never even seen it?” I asked, setting him up for the offer.
“I’ll show you around, c’mon,” he said.
He tapped Linda to follow us and turned The Golden Needle store sign to be right back.
It was hard to believe that Mr. Sharp was a tailor. He was bigger than Big Johnnie, who he called just “Johnnie.” I looked at his hands and tried to picture them threading a needle. His fingers seemed too thick to steady a tiny needle and thin thread. But he said himself that he was the tailor who made all those clothes for Poppa, and that he had only ever made one dress for Momma, the one she was wearing in the photo on the wall. Maybe that’s why he had her pose in so many stances. He said he used the photos to show new clients and potential clients the detail and level of his skill.
I asked Mr. Sharp why I never saw him actually sewing. He said, “I’m comfortable. Styles change, not only styles, but people change, too. I keep this store open out of habit. It’s not my main moneymaker. It was fun when our people had an eye for decency and elegance.”
Mr. Sharp told me that these days Linda does mostly alterations and repairs. He added that if any old customer came along, he would gladly serve them, or he would willingly outfit a lavish wedding, debutante’s ball, or graduation.
“Debutante’s ball?” I repeated. I never heard of that.
“Wealthy families had this tradition. Fathers would introduce their daughters to society at a grand ballroom affair. Everybody who was anybody would be there. There would be dinner, music, and dancing but most of all the fashions were ‘immaculate.’ It was a competition of dressmaking, suit tailoring, and a mean, mean shoe game. If a man had a feminine beauty for a daughter, man his chest would swell with pride. She would walk gracefully down the aisle arm in arm with her father. He would take her to the platform. She would lift her beautiful gown and walk up the stairs. On the platform she would bow to the audience while the master of ceremonies announced her full name, the name of her father and mother, as well as her education, talents, and accomplishments. Eligible bachelors would battle over the young debutantes. It was the ideal place for them to select a wife from the moneyed, connected, and unbroken families.” He smiled, remembering. “That was one thing. Also, the bachelors were battling over the ‘head turners,’ the greatest beauties. But they had to get approval of the fathers first.” I could tell he preferred those times and kinds of affairs.
Mr. Sharp seemed to like me a lot and I noticed certain things about him, like that he always made Linda sit nearby when he was talking to me. Or he would have her come along if we went anywhere outside of the shop. I could tell she wasn’t his wife and didn’t seem like a girlfriend, but I guess he had his reasons. I was always upbeat when I was with him for one hour, but he had no idea about Ivory’s, aka Porsche L. Santiaga’s nights.
By the third night that Momma didn’t show, I was out dressed in Riot’s boy clothes, jeans, a jacket and a fitted searching for her in Bed-Stuy. Because of the 3 Fs, I was nervous: fear, family, fugitive. I was not afraid of the Bed-Stuy neighborhood, family, or friends. I was more fearful of what I might find, but not afraid enough not to look. I didn’t ask nobody nothing. I just roamed the streets each night and kept going back to check the colored round caves.
By the eighth night I was crazy red. I couldn’t understand what was so important that Momma would choose it over me. I considered that she could be sleeping at any one of our relative’s apartments. But I doubted it based on what she had said about them, and what my cousin had accused Poppa of. I wouldn’t approach no one in my family for fear that they might turn me in to the police. Momma had made me believe that things had gotten that hateful. Maybe Momma forgot me, again.
I had two buckets from the dollar store. I filled one with Momma’s opened mail and one with her unopened mail. I sat staring. I didn’t like feeling like I was the same as the authorities who searched through our stuff in prison. They would do it any time they liked, but mostly while we were away in classes, or rec, or work. At the same time, it seemed if I didn’t read Momma’s mail I’d be a young fool with no answers to the many questions that marched through my mind. I compromised. I began reading only her opened letters, and left Momma and Winter’s sealed letters alone. First I checked the addresses. I would write them down and go into the night and see if Momma was there. It turned out most of the addresses were the same. I knew because when we lived in the Brooklyn projects, for most of my young life, we had the same address as the ones on these envelopes. Only the apartment numbers were different. So these letters had been sent to Momma’s sisters’ and brothers’ apartments. When I matched the dates up I discovered that for two and a half years the mail went to my mom’s brothers and sisters. Maybe she had lived with each of them for a while. After that pile, all of her letters were addressed to an unfamiliar Brooklyn address. I jotted it down. I noticed that none of the letters were addressed to our Long Island mansion, or to the underground apartment beneath Big Johnnie’s, where I was. On the ninth night I went to the one unfamiliar address in a cab.
“Okay, son,” the driver said, when we arrived. I paid him and got out. It was dark-dark, an autumn night, but there were swarms of people outside of where I was about to enter. When I reached the door my body jumped. Blocking the entrance was some type of security guard. The last thing I wanted to see was anybody official, or anybody wearing a uniform. I didn’t want to start running away and cause suspicion.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said in my boy voice.
“This is a women’s shelter facility for single women,” the guard said. I was about to say something back but remembered I was dressed as a boy. Some girl came up behind me. She showed a pass and got in, no questions asked. I left and went to the side of the huge building. I removed my fitted, crushed it into my back pocket. I pulled out the ten long cornrows that Siri had braided for me. I combed my hair with my fingers. Then, I tucked my T-shirt so my little hips would show their feminine curves. For five dollars I rented a lady’s pass who was outside begging for change. “Stay right here if you want it back,” I told her.
Smiling, I reapproached the guard as a young woman, flashed the pass, and went inside.
A football field filled with women, more women than the C-dorm and all the juvy dorms and cells put together; more women than I ever seen on the yard. There were rows and rows of them, sitting, standing, leaning, and laying on beds. They talked, cried, laughed, shouted, argued, packed, unpacked, and slept. I stood still, stupid, with my mouth open and in shock.
What the fuck had happened? Were all of these women the same as Momma? Were all of their husbands and daughters and sons locked up while they were left to fall to pieces? I counted twenty rows across, and couldn’t see any further down. I started walking up row one. Stupidly, I called out “Momma,” and a thousand heads turned to answer my call. So I changed. I started saying Lana halfway up the aisles, and then switched to saying, “Santiaga,” hoping Momma would jump up and be happy to see me. After I told her how I had made her place clean and fresh and pretty, we would go back to the apartment I prepared for her beneath the floor.
On the last and twentieth row now, I began to accept that Momma wasn’t in here. I finished it off anyway. I left outside to return the pass.
“You found her?” the lady who rented me the pass asked.
“No,” was all I answered.
“Is she an addict?” the lady asked me. It felt like she had stabbed me in my chest. I didn’t want to say Momma was no type of “addict.” I didn’t even like the word.
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“What’s she using? Drink? Pills? Heroine? Crack?” she asked me. “Where she from in Brooklyn? Cause everybody here is from Brooklyn. You have to be from Brooklyn to stay in here.” I listened to her fast-talk and I looked at her thinking to myself, You look like the fucking addict! Then my mind switched. Maybe that’s why she could help me. I began thinking.
“The lady I’m looking for is from Bed-Stuy,” I said.
“Okay, stand right here,” she said and ran off like a rabbit on the reservation.
“She can help you,” she said when she returned. She had a woman with her who was definitely an addict. “She smoking that rock, right?” the second lady asked me. She was sweating and jittery. “Give me a yard, I’ll take you right to her,” she said.
I walked off without saying nothing back. I definitely wasn’t giving her no one-hundred dollars! She looked like she’d do anything for half of a glazed doughnut.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,” she ran behind me. She kept touching my shoulder with her filthy fingers.
“I know where she’s at!” she screamed.
“You don’t even know her name!” I said through tightened lips and gritted teeth.
“I know where the area crack house is in Bed-Stuy. That’s where I’m from. That’s why she came and got me. I’ll take you there,” she said with full attitude and confidence as though it was the only thing in life she was sure about.
“I won’t give you a penny if she’s not there,” I said.
“Un-un nah that ain’t right,” she said still jumping around, her lips more ashy than her knuckles. “Twenty if she dere. Ten if she not,” the lady offered me.
“You went too low,” the lady who rented me her pass complained.
“Deal,” I said. We three walked off. I followed them. I might look like a lost sweet little girl to them, I thought. Used to being driven around by Poppa, it was true that I didn’t learn my way around the Brooklyn or New York train system yet. But, I would know for sure when I was on my blocks in Bed-Stuy.
• • •
As low and awful, cruel and cold, empty and upside-down as my last three years of lockdown had been, I couldn’t say what I saw in a language that anyone else besides Siri could understand. I thought of regular words like horror and terror, shame and embarrassment, guilt and disgust, insane and fucked-up. But when I uttered those out loud they were whack-overused words that couldn’t capture my true feelings or the real life images that my eyes saw.
I flashed back to a time when Winter made me go inside of the haunted house at an amusement park. She was stuck babysitting me. Her and her friends were complaining that I was with them, so they acted like I wasn’t and went everywhere that I shouldn’t, with me. Crooked staircases and demons in cosmetics, hands without bodies and necks without heads, couldn’t compare to the crack house. Even though back then at six years old I was afraid, at least I knew that it was all make-believe.
No one was pretending in the crack house. No one was black, white, or Latino. Everyone was the color of ash. Eyeballs multiplied in size by three, knuckles, fingertips, lips all burnt up. Everyone was sucking on something. Their hair was hard like straw. Everyone was in their own corner of their own foot of space, or plopped down dead in the middle of the floor. Each of ’em got nervous when anyone approached them, even a kid, a little girl. There were no welcomes, smiles, hellos, or even questions asked or answered. Sounds of sucking and inhaling, angry dogs chained and barking, old wood cracking, and collapsed plumbing pipes leaking; a stink-stank, foul odor. Every face I looked at in the damn darkness looked exactly the same.
I put my jacket over the naked body of someone shaking, nothing left but bones and a pipe. Still, he, she, it was still smoking.
“Don’t give her your jacket. She’ll sell it,” the crack-house tour guide said to me. I ignored her, wouldn’t take it back.
Eight floors of searching, now we were headed down. A skeleton with one layer of gray skin left, brushed by me on the stairs, hand in front of its face, fingers spread like arrested people who don’t want to be seen on the news, wool hat pulled down. It was running like it believed it was being chased. But there was no one on the stairwell but me and the crack tour guide and the bag of bones that sped ahead of us.
“Here you go. Your ten dollars,” I told the crack-house tour guide when we met back up with her friend, the one who first rented me her shelter pass. She had stayed outside the crack building, playing lookout.
“We can show you some more places,” the guide said. “This is the biggest, but it ain’t the only one,” she pushed.
“It’s late. I seen enough,” I said.
“If you ever need anything ask us two. We’ll give you a good price,” the pass renter said. “We always be somewhere outside the shelter at night,” she pitched. “Next time bring a picture of your mother. I’ll find her for you. You don’t even have to come. Door-to-door service. Just tell me where you want her,” the crack guide said. I stopped walking.
“Cash on delivery,” she joked.
“I didn’t say it was my mother,” I turned and told her, feeling red. The two of them giggled nervously.
“Our bad, we all somebody’s mother. Make sure you check us!” they called behind me as though they were real businesswomen. As I headed down the subway stairs, leaving the same way I came, it dawned on me that they weren’t following behind me. I had supplied them with crack money for the night, and the crack house had plenty of rocks for sale.
When I reached the underground, Momma was back. She had thrown on a dress that was hanging up when I left earlier to go look for her. I guess she thought I was still six. I had seen my ruined Air Maxes, just a flash of fluorescent green running down the Bed-Stuy crack building stairs. Besides, me and Momma both stunk. The smell of the place I couldn’t describe was in my hair, on my clothes, and making my skin crawl.
We showered together. Momma was just standing there in the warm water as I cleaned her body, her butt, vagina, underarms, and hair. It was better in the shower. You couldn’t tell our tears from the drops of water.
We weren’t saying nothing. I turned on some music to make Momma feel better. Oddly, in a frightening way, the first cut that came on was “Dear Mamma,” by Tupac Shakur. It was September 13, 1996, the exact day the bullets finally killed him. I wondered if he felt relieved. Can being dead be a relief? Is there is a possibility that even after death, there would be more pain?
Tupac believed that a crack fiend could still be a black queen. I looked at Momma, hoping his words could possibly be true.
I don’t know if Momma, the music lover, was listening. I don’t know what Momma was thinking. She looked as small as a kindergartner and held her legs with her burnt hands and hung her head to her knees. She was sitting on her bed. It was made up with new sheets and blankets, real pillows and decorative ones. I had not used her bed in eleven nights. I thought she should be the first to enjoy my gifts to her.
She didn’t even notice. She didn’t say nothing. I looked at the roses I had purchased for her almost two weeks ago. They were like me and Momma, I thought: stuck in one pose, one position, dry and dead.
Chapter 31
I had cooked and served eleven organic recipes to Big Johnnie. Each night, I’d have one whole meal left over from mine and Siri’s. It was meant for Momma. Big Johnnie received Momma’s portion every early morning after I was done doing Momma’s job at his store, and before he arrived at 6:06 a.m. After the first meal I left for him he began paying Momma one hundred thirty dollars per week, instead of the one hundred dollars he had agreed to pay Momma when I first met him. I wasn’t sure if it was because he knew it was really me doing Momma’s job, or because he loved my cooking, or because he noticed that I worked weekends even though I wasn’t scheduled and didn’t have to. Thirty extra dollars, humph yeah I’ll take it. I wasn’t spending any of the money I was earning. I was still surviving on the money I earned at NanaAnna’s and the seven hundred
dollars I kept from my money tree. Plus, I was still walking around wearing my “handwashed in the bathroom sink clothes.”
• • •
“You was touching my stuff,” Momma said to me when I returned from upstairs doing her job.
“Momma, I was trying to figure out where you were for all those days and what happened to you,” I defended.
“What for?” Momma asked strangely.
“I was worried about you. You were gone for a long time,” I explained.
“So,” she said. Silence fell on both of us.
“So I wanted to be sure you were okay,” I said.
“You see me, right?” she asked, as though nothing had happened. But more than that, she talked like she thought that we weren’t even related. Or she sounded like she thought I was the mother putting too much pressure on her, and she was the daughter who had to make excuses.
“I see you Momma, and I’m so happy to see you. Please don’t leave me again,” I asked her with no trace of bossiness or disrespect.
“We can’t go everywhere together,” she said.
“I know. But we can spend some time together, can’t we? I want to cook a meal for you. Wait till you taste it! Big Johnnie tasted my cooking and every time I clean up, his bowl is empty.”
“Did he bring his big ass down in here?” Momma said, suddenly alarmed.
“No, Momma, after I was done working up there I would leave him the food I had cooked for you, since you weren’t home.”
“That means you got some money,” she said. “You worked. Did he pay you?”