Fraudulent Glamour

1. Tahli

Carefully, I placed the last deviled egg into an aluminum pan and secured the plastic lid on top.

My nose scrunched at the rank scent of stale cigarettes wafting into the kitchen.

The stench entered the room before my mother did, and I resisted the urge to suck my teeth.

I absolutely loathed the smell of cigarette smoke, but I was in my mother’s house, and she could do what she wanted in her house.

That included chain smoking cigarettes and drinking beer all day. Her two favorite past times.

“You been in here making noise since early this morning. What you cooking all that food for?” she strained her neck trying to see what was inside the pans lining the kitchen counter. Her raspy voice was courtesy of the fact that she’d picked up her first cigarette at the age of sixteen.

“Sheniah is having a cookout. I only made deviled eggs and pasta salad.”

“Oh,” my mother walked over to the refrigerator. Her appetite for coffee, cigarettes, and beer suppressed her desire for food most of the time, and my mother who barely weighed one hundred twenty pounds could go majority of the day before she ate once.

“I left some in there in case you want something to eat later.”

“I’ll get some eventually.” Behind me, the tab was popped on a beer can, and I rolled my eyes upward.

It was only noon, and my mother was on drink number one.

By five p.m. she would have drunk an entire six pack.

Usually, she started her mornings with coffee.

This day, she went straight for the malt liquor.

I had to be around twelve when my mother started drinking every other day.

I was currently twenty-six, and it had been many many years since I’d seen my mother go days without a cup of liquor or a can of beer in her hand.

Her drinking was nothing new. In fact, it seemed as if the stench of cigarettes and beer were embedded into her skin.

Monet Ross used to be so pretty. It would be generous to say that life beat her down.

If I was keeping it all the way real, it wasn’t life.

She beat herself down. Of course, she’d been through some things.

What person hadn’t? I personally didn’t think that my mother had been through anything that warranted her being an alcoholic for the past fourteen years or so.

“What time you leaving?” my mother inquired after fishing a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her tattered pink robe.

“Around two. I’m about to go upstairs to shower and get dressed.”

“Alright. I might stay with Earl tonight if he doesn’t piss me off.”

My only reply was a curt nod as my mother opened the back door.

She liked smoking and drinking her coffee or beer on the back porch.

When it wasn’t too hot or too cold, my mother could sit on the porch for hours either talking on the phone or just sitting in silence.

My father was a one hit wonder rapper with ten kids.

I was the second oldest. Young Dread had a hit song a year before I was born.

He actually met my mother at one of his shows.

They had a one-night stand, and she got pregnant.

Before she could tell him that she was with child, she saw him in a magazine with a photo of his wife, and she was pregnant too. I was born six months after my sister.

My father’s first album did okay, but it wasn’t what the label expected especially after his single did so well.

They tried again with a second album, and it flopped so bad, they dropped him immediately.

My father was from Harlem, New York and after the label dropped him, he went back to the streets.

One thing he’d done right when he started making money was buy a house for him and his wife.

His wife found out about me when I was five months old.

Two days before that she found out he had a one-week-old son.

Two outside babies were more than she was willing to forgive.

She left him, and my father continued spreading his seed all over New York and New Jersey.

I was the only child living in North Carolina, and he made no effort to visit me.

In my entire life, I’d seen him around ten times.

He was the worst kind of deadbeat. The kind that wouldn’t stop procreating.

Add in abortions and miscarriages, he more than likely would have had more than fifteen children.

Before my mother decided to use alcohol as a means to cope, she was a very pretty woman.

Getting a man had never been an issue for her and over the years, I’d seen plenty of men come and go.

The longest boyfriend she had was E. He was around from the time I was ten until I was fourteen.

When I was sixteen, she met Mike. They were together for two years, and then she met, Charles.

They broke up after three years, and she met Earl.

Over the years, my mother kept mediocre jobs.

Just enough to provide for me and keep her hair and nails done while whatever man she was with took care of the house.

No matter what a person could say bad about my mother, they couldn’t say she fucked with broke men. Well aside from my father.

Every man after him paid the rent and utilities wherever my mother laid her head.

They always made sure she had cars to drive too.

Monet was the true definition of a kept woman.

She wasn’t the worst person in the world, but I wanted more for her than sitting on the porch or in the living room drinking her life away all day every day.

My grandparents had been gone for a year.

They died two months apart. Now, my mother lived in their house since her brother lived in Maryland.

When the lease was up on my apartment two months ago, I decided to move in with her.

I had goals I was trying to reach, and I could reach them faster by not paying over a thousand dollars a month for rent.

There wasn’t much I could say about my mother because I was too close to thirty not to have my life in order.

After high school, I tried community college, but it wasn’t for me.

I quit going after two semesters. From there, it was working various dead-end jobs with mediocre wages and workloads worth way more than the hourly pay.

One month, I was close to getting evicted, and a guy that I was dealing with, Kobie, taught me how to buy information from people to apply for credit cards with.

In my opinion, going to jail for fraud or being homeless were about the same, so I felt I didn’t have much to lose.

My mouth hit the floor when I applied for a card and was approved with a $25,000 credit limit.

I tore the malls down. The entire card was maxed out in about three days and with the exception of one purse, I sold everything that I purchased.

That was two years ago, and I’d done it about ten more times.

Each time that I told myself I was doing it for the last time, I’d last three or four months then go right back and do something fraudulent.

If I didn’t apply for credit cards, I deposited fake checks into bank accounts.

I would even use fake ID’s to go to various cell phone stores, get approved for multiple phone lines, get the new phones, then go sell them.

Two months ago, I was able to land a part-time job at a bank.

Part-time pay wasn’t even going to pay half my bills, so I decided to move in with my mother while I waited on a full-time position to become available at the bank.

A week after I moved in with my mother, something amazing happened.

A wig company reached out to me and offered to send me a free wig and pay me $300 to install the unit and promote the hair.

I started making Tik Tok videos of myself practicing learning to do my own installs.

In the six months since I’d started, I had gotten much better.

It was just something I was determined to teach myself.

Never once did I expect my videos to go viral.

People used to comment telling me how pretty I was and to keep practicing because I was doing good.

One day, I woke up and had gone from three hundred followers to one thousand.

When the wig company reached out to me, I had around twenty-five hundred followers.

Since then, three more wig companies had reached out.

Not only was I getting free hair, but I was earning a few hundred bucks to advertise the wigs.

My followers had since grown to around ten thousand, and I had my first check from social media coming which was $1,211.

I was praying that between a full-time job at the bank and extra coins from social media, I could leave fraud in the past and start over the right way.

With funds in the bank and a decent job that I didn’t absolutely loathe.

Life was super expensive for no reason. Rent was high, food high, gas high, everything freakin’ high.

Navigating into adulthood without a solid plan and a good job was a recipe for disaster.

I tried to take a page out of my mother’s book and deal with men that were providers, but the new breed of niggas were different.

Some of them would rather stunt for social media than pay bills.

At the club every weekend but sleeping on someone’s couch.

The scammers and dope boys had community dick, hella kids, and too many women. I was good on that.