BOTTOM

A woman struggles to find her way back home.

         One day, she drank a half gallon of Seagram’s gin or bumpy face as they call it in the hood.  Popping one pill after another, surprisingly, she remained strangely semi conscious.  Alcohol and drugs now became her voracious creditor bleeding her of all self sufficiency, yet served as a protective shield and trusted companion, deadening any thoughts of blackness and self hatred while numbing any dreadful and vile feelings of powerlessness.  Her shame and maudlin guilt accompanied by her wrath and resentment kept her trapped in a dark dungeon of fear as if shrouded in denial, (don’t even know I’m lying). She became a caricature of oppression amid her helplessness and despair as there was no one to make all of her problems  disappear.   She lost the ability to find her way back from this dark, murky hole of isolation.  Hell, she couldn’t shut her brain off as life was too hard to bear with the daunting and racing thoughts echoing loudly, Don’t wake up, don’t wake up, nobody really cares, you’re worthless, just an ugly, black, abnormal, dumb girl. 

 

            Lying in her queen size bed in a drunken stupor, feeling dizzy and light headed, she dialed the white and gold rotary phone on her nightstand.  She mumbled some gibberish to a soft spoken lady at a suicide crisis center.  Moments later, several police officers were knocking at her door.  “Open up! Open up!” They ordered.  She wearily asked, Who is it?  Angrily, they demanded, “Miss open the door or we’ll break it down!” She managed to crawl out of bed and make it to the door.  Who is it?  She angrily asked.   Standing in front her hallucinogenic state were some SS in uniforms armed with guns like Nazis in Germany during World War II waiting to take her away for extermination at a concentration camp in Auschwitz.  She shouted I’m an American; this is not Germany.  She told them, you can’t just haul me away and kill me.

           

            She suffered a mental and emotional meltdown, completely coming undone, slowly spiraling into nothingness as her brilliant mind and caramel body eventually separated from her discordant soul during the peak of her stellar professional career.   She collapsed like the twin towers after the 911 terrorist attacks in New York in spring 2001.  She had lost the power to fix her two alcoholic husbands imprisoned in the madness of their disease accompanied by gross infidelity. Her first husband had become everything to her, father, brother, friend, and lover.  She often thought if she drank like him he would love her more. Her second husband made her feel like a blow up doll because sex, gambling, and drugs often preoccupied his time.  She was swamped with indigent clients pulling and tugging for her attention at every turn like a toddler yet to be weaned from his or her mother’s breast.

 

            In a culture not of her own, she found herself trapped  in a judicial war of attrition in  limbo armed with only affidavits describing herself and legal motions spelling out the material facts surrounding her cause of action. She soon discovered that her hope in the 4th and 14th Amendments embodied in the U.S. Constitution slowly dissolved as unrequited  rejection  surfaced every step of the way.  

           

            She woke up a few days later; naturally realizing that she was now in a State mental institution where they put puzzles together.  She was placed in a strait jacket among other feeble minded and crazy people, drooling from their meds and talking to themselves. Oh s**t!!  She exclaimed. How did I get here?   What the hell happened?  She asked herself.

           

            Shacked to the bed in chains on a grayish sordid gurney like inmates after a prison revolt, she remembered what her brother told her about her biological father, a bitter, violent, and resentful  black man who hated American people and was eventually deported for failing to report to immigration.  He said, “I saw him hit Mommy and I hated him for that.  You were too little and probably don’t remember, but I do.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        Glued to the unsavory memory of her father, she hastens to recall when she was eight years old and asked him to buy her a pair of white skates over the phone in our attic apartment.  When he arrived, she grudgingly opened the door to greet him.  Suddenly, a brown fist came rushing through the door.  Whew!  Her head went spinning around for a moment and all she could think about was running away from him.  But where?   He knocked her glasses off and blood began to drip from her hands.  She ran outside and found herself frantically running to hide behind a big tall tree for shelter in front of their apartment. 

 

 

       She was so nervous and scared.  Who’s going to save me?  She asked herself while standing behind this tree and shaking like a leaf, whipping her mouth then stared down at her bloody hands. Shockingly, she realized that he had punched her in her mouth.  Fueled in utter disbelief, her anger accelerated as if from zero to rage, sweat oozing from every pore of her rupture body. She felt so betrayed and mistreated.  “All I wanted was a pair of skates.”  She pondered.  How could my own father do this to me?  She asked.  “You a*****e.  I’ll never ask you for anything else ever again in life.”  She angrily decried. 

 

            Those dark and murky memories of him left an indelible impression in her mind for many years.  A deep seated hatred against the world ensued within her.  One day, they will pay.  She often ruminated.  Constant thoughts of inferiority entertained her mind while she was growing up.  It may have been a beautiful day outside, but the skin she inhabited felt dirty, bad, black  and deformed because she believed that black was bad and ugly in contrast white was good and pretty.  In front of her now strapped to a gurney, she saw in the mirror affixed to the wall in the psyche ward a resemblance of her father, a Negro man with a scarred face. Then her voice resonated with a deafening silence.