Chapter 7
GOON
Recommendation: Blueprint (Momma Loves Me) by Jay-Z
It had been a few days since I had seen my moms, so I pulled my bike onto the block and rested my helmet on the seat. When I was staying under her roof, I woke up to breakfast and coffee every morning.
We shared our mornings together before I had to handle business, and she went to the supermarket. She never missed making me breakfast, even if she had something to do that same morning. After I finished my run, I could always count on having a warm breakfast and a hot cup of coffee waiting on me.
When my mother lost her leg, it was tough on all of us.
I was locked up, and hearing my brother tell me what happened broke me.
It broke me because there wasn’t shit that I could do.
The fuck did they mean they had to take her leg from her?
I’ve only known a mother with two legs, and she got around perfectly fine.
Moms was very independent and never wanted any pity or help. She was used to doing it on her own, making a way out of nothing. Seeing her in a wheelchair when I came home was an adjustment.
She would never admit it, but she went through a depression from the loss of her leg. I could tell she wasn’t the same woman that I had left before going to serve my time. It changed her and forced her to depend on people.
My moms was the type that would be ninety and still getting around without help. She was still independent, but she also had to depend on people, which was something she hated.
Required help.
I could tell whenever an aid came to assist her with a shower, or helping her around the house, it felt like poison was being injected into her veins.
An independent woman’s worse fear was receiving help. She had done it on her own for so long that this was foreign territory for her.
Before she agreed to let an aid help her, Khaos would come over and help her bathe. She refused to have him help her, so all he could do was move her into the shower chair, and she would slam the door, so she could get undressed.
We would do anything for our mother, so the shit was no sweat off our backs. It was for our mother. She had bathed us once upon a time and raised us up into men. She didn’t want us seeing her that way.
In her words, weak.
“Sharon! Where yuh at?” I hollered, the minute I came through the door.
It was silent.
“She’s not here, and stop hollering,” Inez’s soft voice greeted me instead.
I hadn’t spoken to Nez since I left the house that day, and she made sure she stayed from around me. Nez loved to push shit under the rug, and act like the shit never fucking happened.
That was the reason she was suffering now.
Trying to get high and pretend that she didn’t lose her son. The shit was a toxic cycle because my mother and aunt made that shit okay. They babied her, when they needed to be honest instead.
“Where she went?”
I rounded the corner, and she was sitting on the couch Indian style with her bible in her lap. “Said she was going to get groceries… cooking tonight.”
“And you didn’t go with her?”
Inez shut her bible and looked over at me, quickly diverting eye contact. “She said she didn’t want my help, and she went with her new aid.”
“Hmm.”
“Goo, say what the fuck you really wanna say.”
I laughed, going into the kitchen. “Nez, you don’t want me to say shit to you.”
“You think I’m some weak junkie bitch.” She continued to try and get a response out of me.
When we were younger, Inez always tried to get a reaction out of Khaos whenever they argued. She was good at getting what she wanted, so he always fell right into the trap.
“You’re only weak because you’ve been given every chance to get clean and stay clean… but you want to continue to get high, then open that bible like it’s gonna save you.”
“God can save me,” she snorted.
“Not when you out there sucking dick to get high. Then wanna be calling on God with that same mouth you wrapping around random dicks… make it make sense, Inez.” I guzzled the water, tossing the bottle into the trash.
“You don’t know shit about what I’m going through.”
“We’re all fucking going through it… we’re fucking hurt behind Ramelle… been hurt. You think you doing this shit makes it easier on us?”
Inez remained on the couch with tears slowly sliding down her face. “None of you know what this is like… none of you know what it feels like to bury a child. All of you sit in my face like you feel bad and talk shit behind my back.”
“I talk that shit in your face. How many times have I had to climb out my bed to come pull you out a trap house? How many times? Don’t sit in my face and tell me that we don’t know what it feels like.”
“None of you fucking do! Life continued for you all, leaving Melle behind… I don’t see none of you hurting.”
I could feel the anger rising up my neck, becoming hotter with each passing second. Inez was talking out her ass and felt like she could do that since she was the only one hurting. As if we all weren’t hurting when Ramelle was killed.
“Life fucking moves on, Inez!” I roared, and she jumped. “Even if you don’t want to believe it, life has to fucking move. Getting high and living the way you have been, isn’t going to bring him back.”
“I was supposed to protect him, Goo. Be his mama and I failed,” she sniffled, looking down at her hands.
This was the Inez that I missed. She didn’t have on clothes from three days ago, her hair wasn’t unkempt. She was clean, her hair washed and brushed into a bun, and she didn’t have that spaced out look in her eyes that she usually had.
My chest tightened as I sat in one of the kitchen chairs. Just like she felt guilt, I felt the same thing. “I was supposed to protect him. I’m his big cousin, and I was fucking locked away in a cage. I can never forgive myself for that shit, Inez.”
I took pride in protecting my family and would always take the blame because I wasn’t here to protect them.
Since I had been old enough, I had always been here for Khaos and Inez. I remember when my aunt had to work nights, so Inez would stay the night over our house. My moms always made sure she had porridge on the stove before she had to leave out to catch her bus.
It was up to me to get both Khaos and Inez up and walk them to school before I got on the bus and headed to school too. After a while, I stopped going and it was my uncle that knew about it first.
He knew he couldn’t stop me from doing what I needed to do. The same shit that called him to get into the streets was now calling me. I was a man way before I should have been, and that feeling alone made me want to make the load easier on my mother.
She shouldn’t have been working two or three jobs just to make ends meet. If she had her way, she would have taken on more jobs to make sure that me and Khaos remained in school and went to college.
That was the life she wanted for us, and in a perfect world, we probably would have accomplished those things. A degree hanging on the wall was the least of my worries. I was concerned about taking care of my family.
When Inez came into my room at fifteen, holding a positive pregnancy test, I knew I couldn’t play it small anymore.
Even before my uncle was locked up, my mother refused his money. She was scared that his way of living would rub off on me and Khaos. I always saw my uncle and admired that shit. The gold grills, gold chains hanging from his neck and the foreign cars.
He hung with niggas that had the same shit going for them. Anytime he came to visit, he would be getting out a different whip and had a new chain around his neck. Soon as he smirked, his mouth was full of gold too.
I wanted that shit.
He’d pull out a knot of cash and peel off some bills, and hand them to me, making me promise not to tell my mother. I would go behind her back and pay some bills. Hand some extra money to the landlord, go and pay her tab at the corner store. Small shit that I knew would make a difference.
Once my uncle put me onto hustling, I couldn’t be stopped. The money touching my hands and being able to make the load lighter for my moms was worth it to me. I had the landlord lying for me, making it seem like he had received grants from the city to lower the rent.
As I was staring at Inez with that positive pregnancy test, I knew what I had to do. I had to take care of us and make sure my little cousin had everything she needed for the baby that was coming.
Both my aunt and mother were livid with her. Inez was stuck in her decision to have the baby and raise him. My aunt put her out because she couldn’t bear to stare at the mistake she was making.
Inez was supposed to graduate and go to college. She was supposed to be the family’s success story. Chef taught Inez how to play basketball, and she fell in love with the game. When he was home, they would watch the WNBA games together.
She ended up joining the basketball team in school, and she was good. Inez was 5’7, and she dominated the court, always the point guard. Outside of school, you could find her playing in the park, taking money from the hustlers who were betting against the game.
It was when she met her boyfriend that shit went left. School wasn’t important to her, and basketball fell by the wayside.She was no longer interested in going away to college to play ball.
That nigga Rylan was all she was concerned with.
Inez started smelling herself. Acting like niggas ain’t did shit, and Rylan was her ticket out the hood. Forgetting that her mother put her out, and four people were sleeping in a one-bedroom apartment.
I gave up my bed for Inez and slept in the living room with my mother. None of that shit mattered because she was so caught up in a nigga that wasn’t no good for her. He had her skipping school and practice to ride around in his whip.
Rylan was nineteen and fucking around with a fifteen-year-old.
“He’s my boyfriend, Goo. You either deal with it or don’t… I’m having his baby and I’m not breaking up with him.”