God Don’t Like Ugly (24 page)

“What secret?” I mouthed.

“You know…Buttwright?”

I looked away and spoke like I was talking to myself. “Poor Mr. Boatwright…died in his sleep.”

I
spent the next week mildly depressed. Not counting her trip to the Bahamas with her family, this was the first time Rhoda and I had been separated since we had become friends. Even though I was feeling strangely independent, I had no idea that I was going to miss her as much as I did. Then she called me from Florida. As soon as I heard her voice, I broke down and cried like a baby.

“Why can’t you live up here?” I sobbed.

“I have to go where my husband goes, girl. I love him. And besides, we can’t grow oranges in Ohio.” She laughed.

We talked for twenty minutes, but I was still a little depressed after we got off the phone. We had not discussed anything profound. She told me all about her new location and what it was like being a married woman. I was happy for her on one hand but jealous and bitter on the other. It didn’t seem fair that a girl like Rhoda, who had everything going for her, always got what she wanted, whether she deserved it or not.

I missed going to her house. I missed sitting on that lush couch in her living room watching her sophisticated parents parade in and out with their equally sophisticated friends. I was sorry that school was out. I had no job and very little to do with myself. As much as I enjoyed reading, watching movies, and eating, there was a limit. There was more to life, but whatever it was, it wasn’t going to come to me; I had to go out and find it. I had the whole house all to myself when Muh’Dear was at work, but I still spent a great deal of time in my bedroom trying to put Mr. Boatwright and the horrible way he died out of my mind. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for him to have that pillow pressed down on his face cutting off his air until he died. Nobody deserved to die the way he did. On more than one occasion I had been tempted to ask Rhoda if he had suffered, but I’d stopped myself.

To make matters even worse, Pee Wee joined the army the first week in July. Before he left he told me it was to prove that he was a real man. The rumors about him liking boys had reached him years earlier. Though he laughed it off, it clearly hurt him. I missed him immediately. Then Florence moved to Toledo to go to a school for the handicapped, then on to teach blind kids. I felt truly abandoned. Rhoda, Pee Wee, and Florence were the only close friends my age I had ever had in my whole life, and now they were all gone. I knew that if and when we all got back together to sit around and gossip and hang out, things would never be the same.

I hid my depression from Muh’Dear. As a matter of fact, I don’t think she ever knew I was ever depressed in my life. I pitied my mama, but in some ways I envied her ignorance.

A few days after my conversation with Rhoda I started my first real job as a telephone operator. I was still depressed but I pretended to be excited about it. Even though I was going to dress up and take the bus and or a cab to one of the nicest areas in town to get to the phone company five days a week, my life seemed like it was going nowhere without Rhoda around to share it.

I hated the job at the phone company immediately. It was boring, and the pay was low. I couldn’t save much money because I spent most of my paycheck on a new wardrobe, transportation expenses, and expensive lunches. I was the only Black operator, and though there were a few other big-boned women, I was the only one that weighed 244 pounds. I was too self-conscious to try and make friends with any of my coworkers. None of the other operators invited me to lunch or talked to me during our breaks, unless it was work-related. I blamed that on the way I looked. Muh’Dear didn’t agree with my theory when I told her what I thought. “Annette, one thing I know is, you can’t blame everythin’ on them two factors, being fat and Black. In some cases yeah, but not in all cases. With God you can override the devil. With Him all you need is the right attitude. That’s the key to success, not what you look like. Change your attitude, go after what you want, and if you don’t get it, make a detour and go after somethin’ else you want. With the right attitude, you’ll eventually get all the rest of it anyway. Look at me. Me and you done been through so much since your daddy run off. And buhlieve me, God ain’t through with us yet!”

Sometimes some of the things Muh’Dear said made a lot of sense. Even before she told me, I knew that I would have to make an attitude adjustment before I could find happiness. I was smart, and I knew it. But there’s a certain level of stupidity in everybody. So that’s why to this day, I believe it was pure stupidity that made me go to Scary Mary thinking she was my only hope.

T
he bottom had dropped out of my precarious world, and I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth. As much as I hated men, or as much as I
thought
I hated them, I was willing to sleep with them for money.

A few weeks earlier I would never have considered prostitution. Lord knows I was too timid, and my self-esteem was too low for me to approach men on most levels. But Mr. Boatwright’s murder had elevated my desperation level to an all-time high. I needed money, and I was ready to do whatever I had to do to get it.

With Rhoda gone, I was on my own. The first step was to move away from the environment that had robbed me of my innocence in the first place. Turning tricks seemed to be the quickest and easiest way for me to put my clumsy plan in motion.

It took me an hour of practicing what I was going to say before I went to Scary Mary’s house. I was nervous and unsure of myself. I had no other options to consider. If she rejected me, I would be right back where I started. From there I didn’t know which direction I’d go.

“Look, Scary Mary, I need some serious money, and I need it fast, like by the end of next week. I need at least a thousand dollars to move out on my own with,” I told the madam.

“What’s that got to do with me?” Scary Mary was wearing a red-silk housecoat and already drinking whiskey from a coffee cup at 8
A.M
. on a Saturday morning.

“I want to work for you,” I explained. I was standing in her kitchen doorway. She and her daughter Mott were sitting at the table. Mott was wrestling with a big plate of assorted breakfast items. She threw her spoon at me. Scary Mary never tried to discipline her retarded daughter. She didn’t even react to Mott throwing the spoon and getting grits all over my clean dress. I picked up the spoon and gave it back to Mott.

“WAH!” Mott yelled at me.

I moved farther away from the table and returned my attention to the madam. I just looked at her real hard through narrowed eyes with my heart racing a mile a minute, waiting for her to respond to my proposal.

“You want to work for me? Doin’ what? Dustin’, mop-pin’, sweepin’, and or cookin’?” Scary Mary laughed, cackling like a hen. “You want to leave the phone company to do all that?”

“No, Ma’am,” I said, shaking my head.

She raised both eyebrows and whispered, “What then?”

“Turning tricks,” I announced boldly. “I know enough about the business, and I’m old enough now,” I said, unable to conceal my impatience.

Scary Mary looked me up and down, in a mean, critical way that made me feel like less than nothing. I certainly felt like nothing the way her eyes were blinking and her head bobbing up and down. I got a lump in my throat just recalling that day when Mr. Boatwright was on top of me, and I told myself that if I reached adulthood I would share my life only with women and cats. Well, my life had taken an odd turn. I never truly developed my lesbian tendencies, and Muh’Dear had never let me own a cat.

Scary Mary laughed like a hyena for two minutes. “I don’t know who you been talkin’ to, girl. What makes you think
you
can make a thousand dollars in a week turnin’ tricks? Even
I
couldn’t make that kind of money turnin’ tricks in no one week. And what do you know about…um…the um…
my
business?”

“Well I…might be a lot of things, but I am not stupid and I am not blind, Scary Mary. Muh’Dear and I used to live with you. Remember?”

The old crow gave me a long, hard look. “All that don’t mean nothin’. What I meant was, what you know about pleasin’ a man?”

I looked at her just as long and just as hard as she looked at me. “I’ve had a lot of experience. I know what men like,” I said seriously. Our eyes locked, and her bottom lip trembled.

Scary Mary drank from her cup before responding. Then she laughed again. “In the first place, you ain’t no Liz Taylor,” she informed me, shaking her head.

“I know that. Like I said, I am not blind,” I mumbled. I had never tried to fool myself. I knew that I was not beautiful. But fucking was not about beauty. Besides, I had seen Scary Mary’s girls over the years. She had never had any you could call beautiful. When I was around eight she even had one who was almost as retarded as Mott, but who knew how to get what she wanted from men. And then there was the one with polio. The one I liked most was Lula, the crazy one. Lula had worked for Scary Mary for just a few weeks, like most of her girls, when I was eleven. Lula looked and even acted normal most of the time. But when she didn’t take her medication, she ran out of the house naked. Two or three times a week Lula would run out of the house naked, pluck a switch from one of Scary Mary’s trees, and run until she found a school playground, where she’d beat and chase the kids. Scary Mary and some of her other girls would have to chase her and throw a sheet over her. Scary Mary currently had five women working for her. Two were over forty, one weighed fifty pounds more than I did, and the other two were just average.

No matter how I begged and pleaded, Scary Mary would not let me work for her as a prostitute. She said I could look after Mott, run errands, and do a little cleaning around the house. I agreed to do all that; I just didn’t tell anybody.

I quit the telephone operator job and started working for Scary Mary the next day without telling Muh’Dear.

A week after I started working for her, Scary Mary moved five blocks away to an even larger and grander house. Her new place, a five-bedroom, red-shingled building, had a birdbath and a flower bed in the front yard. It was right around the corner from Antonosanti’s, where most of her prosperous customers dined. “Now the menfolk can get here even quicker,” she said to me and Muh’Dear the day after she moved.

I cleaned that big house, emptied funky trash cans filled with used condoms and whiskey bottles, washed and pressed the prostitutes’ work clothes, and performed other duties, like running to the store and going to pay bills. I also babysat Mott.

One day it rained hard and one of the men, a former Black preacher I had run to the store for a few times, offered to give me a ride home. Five minutes after I’d gotten into his car, he propositioned me, and I accepted without hesitation. He paid me fifteen dollars just to masturbate him.

“You be a good little girl and make ‘Daddy’ feel nice…hear?” he slobbered in my ear. He was no worse than Mr. Boatwright. In fact, he was better-looking, and he certainly smelled better. Even though my skin was crawling, I forced myself to smile and promised him I would and I did. He was so hot he couldn’t even make it to a motel just five more minutes away. I did it in his car in an alley behind the city library. It took two minutes.

When I got home I plunged the hand I had jacked the ex-preacher off with into the hottest bowl of Clorox bleach and water I could stand. That night I was in such a state of disbelief over what I had done, I had to sleep with the lights on.

I felt nothing for men so far, so it didn’t faze me one way or the other if I made them pay for me to make them feel good. I justified my actions by telling myself, if I’ve got to do it anyway sooner or later with a husband, if I ever got crazy enough to get married, why not do it now and get paid for it. The money would make up for the times I’d have to do it with a husband for free.

This ex-preacher and several others became my regulars. Before long, I didn’t even need the other odd jobs, the things Scary Mary had me doing. I quit, but I didn’t tell her why.

With Mama still working so much, I was alone most of the time. My tricks just called me up at home and told me what they wanted and where to meet them. Motels, hotels, their cars, alleys; I didn’t care. More and more each day I despised what I had become. I was selling the very thing that had made most of my life so miserable, sex. Like Rhoda’s aunt Lola had told me, it was the best card a woman had to play.

I had always believed that Mr. Boatwright was probably the biggest, weakest motherfucker in the world when it came to sex. Well when I saw the way some of my tricks carried on over a three-minute blow job, I began to see men in an even more disgusting light. Most of them were mature, married, and successful in whatever their business was. But they were subhuman. They had to be! They were risking losing their lives, their families, and their children over an orgasm that lasted only a few moments.

It took me two months of prostituting myself to save enough money to leave home. I went through it all in a mild daze. I didn’t feel a thing and didn’t give it much thought when I was doing it. During that dark period of my life I thought of it as just a job.

Because of a minor stroke, Judge Lawson was now almost exclusively confined to his bed and a wheelchair. He still had his poker parties, but he couldn’t drive anymore, and when he left the house it was in a specially made van driven by a chauffeur. He needed round-the-clock care. Another woman and a driver had been brought in to help Muh’Dear. In a way I was glad. Not glad about the judge’s failing health, but glad because Muh’Dear didn’t have to spend so much time at his house. In addition to all that, Muh’Dear got involved in two things. One, the most important of the two in my opinion, night school! “You the first and only one in my family to graduate from high school. I want to be the second one,” she told me shyly one evening. I had encouraged her and even helped her select the appropriate courses and school.

“I’m so glad you got that telephone-operator job. I can finally cut back on my hours even more,” Muh’Dear told me.

Since the judge was not in the picture as much as he had been, the other thing Muh’Dear involved herself with was another man. I think of my mother as some kind of a magnet. Like Mr. Boatwright, he just showed up at our house one day out of nowhere. I had never seen him around town before even though Muh’Dear told me he had lived in Ohio longer than anybody else she knew.

The whole business just about scared me to death, but I didn’t tell her how I felt. All I wanted was for her to be happy.

“This here is Mr. King,” Muh’Dear introduced him that Sunday night. “He
owns
the Buttercup restaurant.”

I was amazed at how much emphasis she put on the word
own
. Her face lit up like a lamp as she talked. I had just returned from performing three tricks in an alley across town, with almost two hundred dollars inside my bra.

I recalled the day I came home from school when I was six and found out that Muh’Dear had moved Mr. Boatwright in with us. At first, I figured that this Mr. King was going to move in with us, too, and it pissed me off. If that was the case, I’d have to work overtime so I could move out even quicker. There was no way I was going to risk going through another episode like the one with Mr. Boatwright with another man Muh’Dear had moved in with us to help out.

“Where you been all day, girl?” Muh’Dear asked me.

“I was visiting some friends from work,” I lied. I had not bathed yet and could still feel the men’s sweat on my body. I hated it, but my need for money kept me from stopping. I had two more men lined up for the next day. “Is he moving in with us?” I said quickly.

The man gasped.

Mama rolled her eyes at me.

“Naw, he ain’t movin’ in with us. Mr. King got him a big old house all to hisself right next door to his restaurant.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” I mumbled uneasily.

“My girl here is a phone operator,” Muh’Dear told the man. “I’m so glad she such a good girl. Oh now she’s strayed off the track a mite. When she was a young’n, got herself in the family way by mistake. The Lord saw fit to make her miscarry and praise Him, she been on the straight and narrow ever since.”

“Give thanks,” the man nodded. “My girl got herself in the same fix when she was fourteen. Now she twenty-five, married to a serviceman, and I got me two grandbabies runnin’ around somewhere out there on that island of Hawaii.” The man and Muh’Dear groaned at the same time. He was her age, tall and tan and rather handsome. He still had most of his hair and a nice set of pearly white teeth. His thick black mustache was streaked with gray.

“I ate at your restaurant one time, Mr. King,” I said shyly.

“Well I do hope you enjoyed the food and the service!” he told me with great excitement, standing to shake my hand. My hand felt too dirty for anybody to be shaking it. My whole body felt dirty. No matter how many baths I took, I could never wash away the nastiness that went along with being a prostitute.

Muh’Dear’s new friend started babbling on about something, but I wasn’t listening. My mind was on too many other things. Like the men I had spent the last few hours with. I could hardly look in Muh’Dear’s face without wanting to throw up. But every time I felt that way, I justified what I had resorted to by telling myself that after all the times Mr. Boatwright had used me and paid me only a nickel I deserved as much as I could get from other weak men.

I sat with them in the living room and listened to Muh’Dear talk about her schoolwork.

“As soon as I finish school, get my GED, I’m goin’ to start lookin’ for a night college!” she hollered. “I ain’t goin’ to be no simple simon the rest of my life.”

“College?” I mouthed. College was something I had never even considered for myself.

“I want to study business administration. I’d like to have some business know-how, so I will be ready to run my own business.” Muh’Dear paused and looked directly at Mr. King, sitting next to her on the couch. “My girl is goin’ to get her a fancy office job and make lots of money. She goin’ to finance me a restaurant when she make her first million.” She paused again and this time, she turned to face me. “Ain’t you?”

“Uh-huh. A restaurant and that long-overdue trip to the Bahamas,” I added.