When
mother and I lived in the townhouse, we had a neighbor named Clifton. He had a badass mullet and a tattoo of some
kind of a falcon across his nipples. He
never wore a shirt and he always had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He was one of those people that bounces when
they walk because they think it makes them look threatening. It’s like they’re saying, “Fuck with me and
I’ll bounce your ass right out of town just like I bounce across this street to
buy my cigarettes.” Every bounce is a
threat. And with hair jumping around
like that and flying nipples, no one was going to mess with him. Except for maybe my mother.
For
some reason, I was drawn to him. He was always asking me questions about myself
and my mom. I interpreted being nosey as actually giving a shit. One day, he was giving me the third degree
about my mother. “Does she do drugs?” he
asked.
“I
don’t know. I think so,” I mumbled.
“How
much? Does she do them everyday?”
“Probably,”
I answered. As the words were escaping,
I didn’t know whether or not they were true, but I knew that I shouldn’t be
having this conversation with Wing-nippled Falcon Bouncing Man.
After
a Say No to Drugs rally at school, I had asked my mom if she had ever done
drugs and to my astonishment, she said yes.
I remember burying my head in to my pillow and crying. We had just been told how damaging drugs are
and here was my own mother saying that she had smoked pot with my aunt.
So
when Clifton was questioning me about my mother, the words spilled out of my
mouth. I suppose in the deepest part of
me, I wanted to confide in someone—to have someone make sense of why my mom
would do something that was so bad for her. But Clifton was not that someone.
Next
thing I knew, my mother came flying in to my room barking, “Why the hell would
you tell the neighbors that I do drugs? Junie,
why the hell would you say something like that?”
“Because
you said you did,” I stammered out looking like a deer in headlights.
“I
said I TRIED it!” she screamed.
Without
hesitation, she tore a sheet out of a notebook she kept for making grocery
lists. With the skill of an artist, she
drew an 8 x 10 sized penis. Then she
grabbed her scotch tape and secured that picture to the kitchen window so that
it was facing Clifton’s set of stairs.
Later
that night, Clifton said with all the coolness of John Wayne, “Did’ya see that
picture of a penis your mom drew?” I
looked at the window.
“Yeah,”
I said, heat burning my cheeks and my stomach swelling up with shame.
“Real
fuckin’ nice,” he managed to say with a cigarette hanging between
his lips, the falcon staring at me all the while.
