I got my first matching bedroom furniture set living with my father. It was an off white four poster bed that I thought was really cool and a matching dresser with a pretty large mirror. Along with it I had a tv set that I liked to watch Sailor Moon on before school and BET after dark a little past bed time.. a lot of bit. Later I accumulated a computer that had the Snoopy theme which got spammed with porn after a one time visit.
The housing we lived in had 2 bedrooms. You had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to what was our main level which held the living room and kitchen. The second floor contained a bathroom and two bedrooms. I occupied my father’s room until my bedroom was furnished. My father has always made a habit of sleeping downstairs on couches even with the second place we moved to so it had a stale feel to it. My father didn’t care to have many clothes so his room lay bare for the most part and could’ve acted as a guest bedroom except we never had any guest. I didn’t know that people had guest rooms until I was older so it was a strange thing to know. It seemed like a thing only afforded to the rich but now I have two.
Growing up, I’d been accustomed to someone having to give up their bedroom to make space for guests or putting together a pallets on the floor with odd things that could soften it enough. One time I fell asleep on the bare floor and couldn’t move when I woke up. It was the worst pain ever and my father had to lift me off of the ground and place me in a tub of water until I could move without crying. Moral of the story: always make a pallet if you plan on falling asleep on a bare floor. My friends rarely stayed over but we all lived walking distance to each other anyway. Sade would stay over sometimes if her mother said it was OK after my father called her. We would make up dances to my Diana Ross and the Supremes CD or get on the computer to talk in chat rooms, pretending to be older.
I’d kept my rooms cleaned for the most part growing up but there would be occasions when I would have to yell out or the top floor window to tell friends that I couldn’t come out until it was cleaned. Having to clean your room as a kid was always a slow process. Another thing that I thought was foreign was when kids would say that their parents cleaned their rooms for them and also did their laundry. My dad taught me how to do laundry when I was in elementary school and he never did it again after that. The most he would do was buy the laundry detergent. The laundry mat for our part of the housing unit was in the building behind ours, which was directly across from Sade’s. It contained about 6 washers and 6 dryers. It took up half of the building that held more apartments similar to ours. I was in charge of washing all of my clothing and uniforms as well as any ironing. Whenever I did laundry I wasn’t allowed to leave because someone might steal the clothes. Luckily that never happened.
One of my close friends was a girl named Johanna who lived in the building next to mine on the right. She was two years older than me but that doesn’t matter when you’re neighborhood friends. It’s not like when you go to school together and there’s a 6th grader hanging out with a 4th grader at recess. Johanna had a single father just like I did but I’m not sure whatever happened with her mother: Just like I don’t remember whatever happened with Sade’s father.
BET after dark was cool because you would see provocative videos of girls “Pussy Popping On a Handstand,” which was a song by Juicy J. This was a time back before you would even hear curse words on the radio. This was also around the time that I saw porn for the first time. One weekend I had tagged along with Johanna and her dad for a fishing trip in their van. In this time some people had box TVs in the middle console area facing the back row with VCR players. Johanna’s dad had a VHS tape of porn and she snuck and showed it to me while he was by the pond fishing. I had never seen anything like this before. I didn’t even know what sex was. Cherry Popper (not literally). In that moment, Pussy Popping On a Handstand began to make sense.
Johanna was friends with a group of sisters that lived in the building in front of her’s. (I hope that by now you’ve figured out that there were a ton of buildings jigsawed to place as many units as possible on one block). I only remember the name of one of the girl’s, which was September. I always thought that September and her sisters were odd and so did other kids in the neighborhood. September and her sisters were also being raised by a single father. Even when the girls came out, they weren’t allowed to leave from in front of their home. Years later when I ran into Sade as an adult she told me that all three girls had been being molested by their father for years and it began to make sense to me. Their dad was weird too and obviously disgusting
This was also around the time that I had my first pet. I had a yellow colored parakeet with a blue beak. I was told that the blue part meant that it was male. I was the only person that I knew who had a pet. Dogs and cats were uncommon to come across since they weren’t allowed in our housing. I was terrified of dogs until I was older even if it was one that was familiar to me. Shannon and Jasmine had moved from Chicago to Kentuckiana (Kentucky/Indiana) a year after my father and I did with their parents. They would come over and let my parakeet out of his cage to let it perch on their finger and fly around the room. I would frantically scream and peak through the partially closed door as they played with it. These were the only times my parakeet would come out of his cage up until it flew out of the window after accidentally being let loose by Sade. I ended up getting another bird but it died not long after when I brought its cage out in the fall to watch me rollerblade. It slowly passed in my father’s room through the night. It was traumatizing. I think it died from hypothermia because it just laid on the bottom of the cage until my dad finally told me it had died. I would see the yellow parakeet that flew out the window flying around in the trees for a couple of years after that if that’s any consolation.
My beta fish died out of neglect because of my fear of it. Someone told me that if I put a mirror next to its bowl, it would think it was another fish and try to attack it. My beautiful purple and blue fish would ram itself into the bowl to “attack.” (Yes, I know that was cruel in hindsight but I didn’t do it many times). I was afraid of the poor fish for this reason and would be cautious to clean the bowl. Sade would come over to clean it for me when it needed it but I think the poor maintenance on my part led to its demise. Pets were not my thing during these years.
Cheerleading was my thing though. I joined the cheerleading team that practiced across the street at the park where I met Sade. There was a tennis court and a large open, playing field there. The girls would practice cheers in the tennis court area that wasn’t used for anything other than play. Tennis was another thing I had never seen played until I was older. The only sport my dad watched was horse racing. I was good at cheerleading, even the toe touches. I wasn’t a flyer though. I have a fear of falling so I panicked when I was told that I needed to stand in for a girl who had broke her ankle during one of our practices. Two girls were positioned on both sides of me, along with a a third person behind me. I went up.. and grabbed hair to pull myself down.. I was never made to be a flyer after that.
I began running with the wrong group of girls that I met on the cheerleading team. They were mean and they were fighters. There were two sisters that were known for fighting in the neighborhood. Somehow “bad girls” have always took hold to me. They didn’t smoke or do anything illegal but they did stuff that elementary and middle school girls were not supposed to be doing. The group had befriended a biracial girl that lived in the neighborhood. The issue was that none of these girls liked her and would talk about her behind her back often. I think she knew this but stuck around out of fear or something.
One time the group decided to come up with a bunch of lies to fight her over. One time they told her that they had heard that she had been talking about them so that they could fight her. Another time they told her that someone told them that she was trying to talk to one of their boyfriends and fought her because of that. One by one everyone in the group had fought this poor girl except for me. I was the only one who hadn’t so they told me that if I didn’t fight her then they would all fight me.
My “friends” made me go to her house to fight her. The girl and I didn’t want to fight each other. We didn’t have any issues with one other and had always been polite to each other. One of the girls in the group put something on the girl’s shoulder and told me to knock it off to get the fight going. I don’t know how the fight started and I also don’t know how the fight ended. The whole thing was a blur and I ended up with a ripped sleeve. The girl’s poor mother tried to stop it and the girls fought her too. I was told that it was a tie and my brother still jokes to this day that I lost my only fight and my friends just didn’t want to say it.
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