I’m No Good in a Mugging, Part Two

Shavon and I (yes, that same Shavon) have just turned off Pitkin Avenue (yes, that same Pitkin Avenue), walking to a train station to pick up this guy that I liked.  He was coming to my mother’s house to visit me and wasn’t sure where to go so we just told him what train stop to get off at and that we’d meet him there.

Some quick backstory on this guy:  We’d actually first met him and his friend on the train near our school.  I was a brazen little something back then and struck up a convo with them cause he was cute.  We got their names, figured out we went to the same school and invited them to a party at Shavon’s (this is before I moved in with her).  Moon remembers this party.  It was one of those “invite even number of girls/guys and play stupid games like Truth or Dare” type parties.  When we met them, we staked our claims.  I liked A and she liked B.  The lines in the sand were drawn.  Problem was, I had mixed up the names.  So when I told her the one I thought was cute, I had actually meant the other one.  Got it?

At the party, my mistake became clear when they walked in and we’re trying to do introductions.  Then it got even worse when we’re playing Truth or Dare (told you) and no one will dare him (the guy we both liked) to even look her way.  (Cause girls, you know the guys got together beforehand and drew their own lines in the sand.) So it was very obvious that he liked me and not her and at one point she pulls me in the room near tears, “I thought you said you liked the other one!”  All I could do was shrug and offer up the lame excuse, “I got their names mixed up!!” Why this girl remained my friend for as long as she did is beyond me.   Anyway, this is the guy we’re going to meet at the train station.

It’s a bright Sunday afternoon and the streets are literally deserted as all the stores have closed.  Directly across the street, this guy is walking towards us.  He crosses the street and kind of makes a motion towards Shavon.  The best way I can ever describe this to anyone is…you know how when you’re in the mall or supermarket or something and someone that you know sees you before you see them and they do that little thing where they make a move towards you to scare you?  Well, that’s what I thought happened.  I thought it was some guy she knew from school, trying to get her attention.

She stops walking for like two seconds and he trots off and she is still standing there with her hand to her neck.  I’m still walking a few seconds before I realize that they’re not engaging in that whole, “Hey, long time no see! You scared me!” convo.

“He just snatched my chain!”

“He just did what?”

I look up the block and this guy is still jogging away, no real sense of urgency.  He looks back at us briefly and turns the corner out of sight.

Do you guys know what I did next?

You ready?

Wait for it.

“Well, we need to go before we miss Mario’s train.”

I’m No Good in a Mugging, Part One

So years ago, I worked at this modeling agency in NYC.  Another girl that worked there, Amber, became my friend.  Amber was white and brave.  All blue eyed and dirty blonde hair, she lived in Flatbush and traveled all over the toughest Brooklyn neighborhoods like it wasn’t a thang.  Brownsville, Bed Stuy, she didn’t care.  Amber was a good friend ’cause she only dated black guys so we never argued over men ’cause I only dated white ones.
Then there was my roommate Shavon, who was the exact opposite.  She wanted everyone I dated and everyone she wanted, dated me.  It was a vicious cycle.

So, the three of us are going to this big celebrity filled party hosted by the agency and held in The Limelight.  For you unsophisticated cats, The Limelight was this popular nightclub in the city that took up residence in an abandoned church, complete with steeples and stained glass windows.  Many people protested that only sinners would party in an old house of the Lord’s.  I had my ass up in there any chance my underage ass could get, crossing my fingers doing tequila shots that the Lord was too otherwise occupied to notice.

The three of us are all tarted up and waiting for the J train to take us into Manhattan, on the elevated platform.  We are about midway down the platform, chatting and wondering what celebrities we would meet when this black guy walks by and is checking us out.  I remember having the most vainest of thoughts (Mike, I don’t even wanna hear it from you), “How sad, he’s checking us out (and by us I meant me and Amber) and he could never stand a chance.”

He walks to the end of the platform and starts to come back.  As he gets close to us, I notice he’s about to say something and I’m thinking, “This nigga tryna holla!”  Actually, I didn’t think that cause nobody knew nothin’ bout hollerin’ back then.  What I might have actually thought was, “This nigga tryna kick it!”  Then I realize he wasn’t interested in me or Amber, he was interested in Shavon.

For her gold!  He grabbed her and ripped one earring out of her ear.  Amber immediately grabs Shavon’s other arm and for about five seconds it’s like some interracial ghetto wishbone tug-o-war thing going on.

“Bitch, I’ll kill you!”

“Leave her alone!” This from Amber, in the whitest of white girl voices to ever come out a white girl’s mouth.

Meanwhile, I’m frozen, mouth open, shocked as shit.

At some point in the struggle, Shavon’s other earring goes flying on the tracks and down to the street below.  The mugger runs off realizing he is only going to get one earring.  Either that or he went down to street level in search of the other earring.  As he reaches the end of platform, he tries to take an old lady’s purse but she beats him with it and starts cussing him out.  (I swear, I’m not making this up)

The train pulls into the station and I’m like, “Yall ready?”  We board the train and take our seats and Shavon is cool as a cucumber.  I on the otherhand, lose it and start crying.  Why?  We’ll soon find out.

These four Puerto Rican guys are sitting across from us, see me crying and ask,

“Mami, why you cryin’?”

Amber explains that Shavon got mugged and they all struggled and now I’m in shock.  One of the guys goes,

“Mami, you jus’ feel bad you didn’ help yo friend when she needed you.”

I immediately stop crying and shoot him a dirty look. Shavon looks at him and goes, “Who are you?  Ceasar Freud?”  Kudos to Shavon to defending me even though I left her to die at the hands of a mugger.
And yes, the moral of this story is that 1) nothing comes beteween me and a good party at a club and 2) I’m a punk.

Did I Tell You Guys About The Time…

… I wore a Victoria’s Secret nightgown to the club?

Ok, so it’s a little before my 18th birthday and I’m flipping through a Victoria’s Secret catalog and I see it…on the back cover page, Stephanie Seymour wearing a black gown with slits up to her waist damn near.  I had to have it.

The problem was, you couldn’t tell if it was a nightgown or a gown-gown.  This was when VS had recently started selling clothes in their catalog and from the description, it just said, “Gown”.  The price was about $70 which could either be a semi-pricey nightgown or a reasonably priced party dress.  I showed the picture to my Dad who reasoned, “They don’t sell the clothes in stores, if you go to the store and it’s there, then you know it’s a gown.”  Bet.

So off to the mall I go and there it is…as soon as you walk in…in three colors.  !@#$%

I pick it up…look it over…imagine myself in it….come up with reasons….and I buy it.

I show it to my Dad who holds it up to the light.

“Hmm, you can’t really see through it.  With some stockings and shoes, it could be fine.”

WHAT?!

Let me explain something to you people.  If you present an idea or plan for something you want to do to my Dad and he doesn’t make you feel like a complete jackass for opening your mouth, that’s saying something.  But to agree and not only agree but agree without offering suggestions on how to make your plan better?  Well, that’s just golden.  You take that shit and run.

And I did just that.  Took my nightgown and carried my happy ass back to my place as fast as my skinny little legs could carry me. I think I even avoided him until my actual birthday lest he change his mind.

Flash forward to the actual night of my birthday.  My friends are taking me out to a reggae club.  I wasn’t thrilled about where we were going, I was just happy to be going out with my friends and that I would get to wear my night…er…dress.

For some reason, still a mystery to me, Moon and I used to hang out in a video store, on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn, owned by these two guys.  There were always neighborhood people hanging out in there. We were a motley crew.  It was fun though, we’d eat pizza and Chinese food and get free movies.  Anyway, it was those guys plus some people that hung there, Moon, and my roommate Shavon that were going out that night.
We decided to meet outside the video store after closing and take two cabs to the club since it was so many of us.  So, I’m standing there in my nightgown (it’s August, dont worry bout me freezing my little ta-tas off) with my cups all spilling over, excited to be going out and wondering where the first cab was.

(I would tell you what Moon was wearing but she would kill me and then raise my child to never remember my existence.  But, I don’t know Shavon’s ass no mo’ – SHE was wearing these tiny little spandex shorts with stockings and a see-thru top.  Remember the see-thru tops?  Ah, good times.)

This guy Nelson, who I think fancied himself a DJ, was standing there on the corner, holding his boombox (hey, this was like 1993) and had all his gold jewelry on full display.  So, I’m looking up the block for the cab and running my mouth with Moon when I realize that somewhere outside of my “Nina’s night out tunnel vision”, there’s a commotion going on.  I look to see a guy holding a gun to Nelson’s head, demanding his jewelry.  I guess he had no use for the raggedy ass boombox.  Nelson looked like he was gonna resist for all of two seconds and the guy must have seen it too cause he said something like, “I’ll blow yo head off!”  Nelson gives it up and the guy walks, yes walks, away.

Everybody is all, “Nelson, are you okay?” And I’m all, “Where is this damn cab?”  I wasn’t tryna hear it.  We were still going out.

So we get to the club and have fun and drink too much and my dress is a hit.  Afterwards, we go across the street to this Dunkin’ Donuts and we’re drunk and acting silly and thanks to my dress, getting free food.

One Sick Raccoon

As most of you know by now, I’m from Brooklyn, NY.  Growing up around the drug dealers and shoot-outs never bothered me because I’d seen it so much, it was familiar.  It wasn’t until I would go to my Dad’s in Queens for the weekend or vacations that I would be scared to be home alone.

I guess it’s fear of the unknown that’s the greatest.  In Brooklyn, I knew where the trouble was.  I’d waken up one Saturday to find crime scene tape in the halls after the Jamaican family next door were all shot execution style, my parents came thisclose to getting shot as someone fired into our living room window thinking it was someone else’s apartment, my best friend and I hauled ass up Grafton Street after, for some stupid reason, we decided to go out to get chinese food and ginger ale at some ungodly hour and heard gunshots literally around the corner from where we were walking.

(Side note: chinese restaurants in Brooklyn back then were the kind that sold fried chicken wings and french fries and served the food from behind thick ass plexiglass.  it was always filled with brothers talking bout, “Yo shorty, what’s your name?”  Shorty?  I’ve been 5’11 since I was 17 or maybe younger)

In Brooklyn, you knew that the stairwells in the projects might as well be called rapewells and that the elevators reeked of piss so you were screwed either way.  You knew where the drug spots were and you avoided them.  Unless you wanted drugs.

When I was in Queens, as a young girl, I was terrified.  You see, Queens was the suburbs.  Queens was houses with front doors, side doors, back doors…too many doors for a rapist to choose from, too many doors for my eyes and ears to stay tuned to. There were first floors, second floors and basements, lots of trees and quiet nights.  The stuff horror movies were made of.

So in a nutshell, the hood I could handle and the suburbs scared the shit out of me.  On with the story.

Flash forward to Fall 1998 and I’m living in this big ass house in Waterville, ME with a girl we shall call K.  K. was cool. K was smart and funny and K. looked like Cameron Diaz.  K. and I would drive into Augusta via back roads because I didn’t have my glasses or contacts and couldn’t see worth shit and she wasn’t supposed to be driving.  Something about her license being taken away for underage drinking at a college party.  K. was almost killed with me on a back Maine road by six deer (that too, for another blog).  K. never made me feel like a jackass for getting pregnant by a club DJ and was actually very excited about the baby.  K. was cool people.  I miss K.

K. was also a drama queen like me.  And so it became that we convinced ourselves that our landlady’s son, an older gentlemen who lived on the other side of this very huge house we lived in, was going to kill us.  And not just kill us.  He was going to first rape our young bodies.  I managed to give myself some relief, to K’s dismay, that he wouldn’t rape me.  Though not really showing, I’d convince him of my pregnancy and he’d spare me the rape and just kill me quickly.

K: He’ll just rape me more.

Me: Sucks to be you.  Shoulda got knocked up like me.

Why would we think this way?  Well, there’s the aforementioned drama queen factor.  And K. had explained to me, after I commented that there didn’t seem to be that much crime in Maine, that they may not have had the daily car-jackings, robberies, rapes, murders and arsons like I was used to, but that when something bad happened it was always big and very, very bad.

Some psycho goes into a church and rapes and murders a few nuns.

While his wife and children are out of town, a man picks up a woman at a bar, takes her to his house, has sex with her and then kills her.  He then stuffs her body in the crawl space in his bedroom closet.  Wife and kids return two weeks later….what’s that smell?

Then you have my fear of suburbs, big houses and quiet streets.

And then when we heard that our house mate had once been a respected lawyer about town with a wife and children but had fallen on hard times due to alcohol and gambling and became a recluse, we convinced ourselves that he was a headache away from snapping and taking us out.  To be fair, I’d never seen them, but K. swore that she’d seen “ladies of the night” coming and going from his separate entrance.

It’s around Halloween in 1998 and we’re each in our respective bedrooms.  I hear about six gunshots.  I call out.

Me: K?  Did you hear that?

I barely had “that” out of my mouth before K. was in my bed and under the covers.

K: Was that…

Me: Gunshots?  Yes.

K: You sure?

Me: Girl, I’m from Brooklyn.

That’s all I had to say, she was scrambling for the phone.

K: Do you think he finally snapped?  A woman went up there a while ago.

We spent the next minute absolutely believing that the guy upstairs had just shot and killed a hooker and had either killed himself or was on his way to kill us.  I was hoping for the former.  Now it was time to make the police believe it.  After being on hold with 911 (???  What the fuck were the cops in Waterville, ME doing at 10 o’clock on a random weekday evening?  I would soon find out) I finally got through.

911:  911, what’s your emergency?

Me: I live at _________________  (address withheld cause K. may still live there and I don’t want yall stalking her) and I just heard gunshots.

911: You live at__________________?

Me:  Yes.  And. I. Just. Heard. Gunshots!

911:  Hold, please.

I’m holding the phone with my right hand and K. is crushing the bones in my left.  And if my memory serves me correctly, she was saying the Lord’s Prayer.  Which in itself is weird cause K. was an aethiest.

911: Miss, that was one of our sheriff deputies disposing of a sick raccoon.

Me: He shot it six times?

911: It was a very sick, very big raccoon.

I moved two months later.

School Supplies

What was I thinking?

First of all, why are books so fucking expensive? I could put Kali through a semester of college with what these books are costing me. It’s like every class requires two books, a study guide and a kidney. Not to mention the calculator that better make coffee and rub my back at night for as much as it costs.

Second of all, why did it not occur to me that I’d actually have to purchase school supplies? You know, notebooks, pens, paper, scantron sheets, backpack, etc.

Third of all, what the hell is a scantron sheet?

I really don’t know what I was expecting. Wait, I know what I was expecting…I had a whole montage playing in my head when I applied for school. It starts with me studying in a library at a table covered in books, looking studious and dedicated, cut to me getting a paper from a beaming professor, close up of the paper shows I got an A+, shot of me and Kali doing our homework together at the kitchen table, then ends with Donny waking me up to come to bed as I’ve fallen asleep with my head resting on a mound of textbooks, glasses askew. (’cause in my montage, I wear glasses)

I wonder if they still make Trapper Keepers….if so, can you get one with Brad Pitt on it?

Bad, Bad Nina

So a few days ago I’m on the phone with my mother-in-law and she mentions having her own Myspace page and that she has seen mine.  I was a little taken aback.  Not that she had a page.  Nothing wrong with that.  And not that she had even seen mine.  Nothing wrong with my page, right?  Right?

But my first thought was about my blog.  I love bloggin’.  Mostly because I love hearing myself speak…and watching myself type apparently.  But what I really love about it is the ability to share my experiences, thoughts and questions with people I know and people I don’t.  I truly believe that all people want to feel validated, loved, and heard.  And I guess there’s something about the possibility of being heard several times a day, everyday that really does it for me.

That said, I tend to be pretty honest in my blogs.  It’s not that I would be afraid that my mother-in-law would read something negative in my blog about her, there’s nothing to post, but that rather she’d maybe take offense to what I like to call my “potty mouth”.  Now everyone who knows me and knows me well, knows that I have a trash mouth, that I pepper my sentences with F-bombs like it aint no thang.

I talk like that to all my friends, my parents….well, not TO my parents.  I would wake up on the floor missing some teeth if I did but when relaying stories and such, I speak to them like I speak to everyone else.  My father and I were just talking about this the other day and I asked if it bothered him or my stepmother.  He said it didn’t.  I think it’s fair to point out at this point that my parents have been known to drop their own F, MF, A, and B-bombs.

But to my knowledge, I’ve never really let loose like that around my mother-in-law.  How would she react to my foul-mouthed blog?  How would she react to me calling her son “white boy crazy”?  Not sure I wanted to find out.  The more I thought about it, the more vexed I became.  As a writer, I have a big problem with censoring myself.

These blogs are supposed to my honest and true thoughts and observations.  What’s the use in doing it if I can’t be open, honest and free?  Should I change who I am and what I think because someone I know may read it and not like it?  Well, it’s funny that I should be asking myself those questions because today my father posed similiar ones to me.

I’m on the phone with him, telling him all about registration and feeling good and collegiate when the blog comes up and he goes, “Oh yeah, I was looking at your page and I think you made a critical error but we can talk about that later.”

Uh-oh.  I hate when my father says shit like that because 1. I hate criticism and 2. he’s usually right.  Turns out, while visiting my sister in Jersey this Christmas, he saw one of my older blogs.  (Note to self:  remind sister to activate a password protected screensaver)  He didn’t have a problem with what I wrote specifically.  His exact words were, “I thought it was very funny and well written.”

His concern was that the person it was about, though never mentioned by name, would easily recognize him/herself and be very offended and that if I cared about that person’s feelings and what it would be like to see that person again, I might consider removing that particular entry.  My first reaction was, “Fuck so-and-so and so-and so’s feelings and the horse that so-and-so rode in on”.  See, potty mouth.  But the more we talked about it, the more I realized that though I really didn’t give a shit what that person thought, (because nothing in my entry was a lie) for all my bravado I’m really a nice girl (sometimes) and it’s never nice to intentionally hurt someone’s feelings.

I’m not removing it.  At the end of the day, it’s my blog, my feelings, my stories to share, my truths.  My father was fine with that and he had done what he had intended to do which was make sure I was aware of the consequences of such honesty especially when it pertains to people I care about.  Like my mother-in-law.  The aforementioned person in the older blog entry however, I could give a rat’s ass about.  Sorry, Daddy but it’s true and you know why.

I’ve written a few screenplays, novels, short stories, etc. All fiction.  But I will tell you that for every three characters created from my imagination, there is one based on someone I know or a mixture of several people I know.  And inevitably, the few people close enough to me to read my rough drafts, will ask, “Is that supposed to be me?”  And I reply the same way.

“Gurl, that ain’t you.”  Even if it is.

All I can do is be me and write from my heart and not worry that every friend (there are a few that read this blog), ex-boyfriends (a few of those too) or relative that reads this might recognize themselves and take offense. All I can do is promise that I will never post anything personal and private that would embarrass someone I care about. The people who read this, that I care about, know who they are.  But I cannot promise that you will not someday read something that will make you blush, or something that may reveal a part of me you never knew.

It’s my weblog, my journal.  Read at your own risk.  Or better yet, I think my best friend came up with a better disclaimer that I just might start using:

Disclaimer: If you know me, I’m sure you’ve somehow pissed me off at some point in time. This is a blog about the shit that happens to ME. If you live in my world, prepare to read some shit about YOU that you might not like. Holla!

A Blogging It Out Bitch

Writing this blog everyday has become more than a habit. It’s downright addictive. I think that’s because it has proven to be a form of therapy for me. All the things that I can’t, or won’t, say in real life are poured out on the pages of this blog. I can blog it out, put it out there, and not have to worry about all my emotions overloading my system because I don’t have an outlet for them.

Oddly enough when I blog and when I don’t blog both leave me with the same feeling: as if I’m that man on the board game Operation. When I blog I feel all open and exposed as he is – my insides laid out for all to see and pick over. When I don’t blog I feel like the slightest touch, the smallest bump in the road of life, will cause me to react as if anything would set off an electrical charge throughout my body. Given that, I choose to go with the lesser of two evils. I’d rather put it all out there and be free, and scrutinized, than to walk around a ball of nerves.

When I started blogging in November of 2005, I had no idea that it would evolve to such a level. Back then the only people reading my blog were those related to me and family friends. This totaled about 8 people. Seemingly out of nowhere, people began to find my blog and leave comments. A dialogue, and an addiction, began.

Of all the hyphenates attached to me; mother-wife-student-blogger, blogger is the most surprising. I thought bloggers had to be incredibly tech-savvy people who wrote about things of great importance. As it turns out, a blogger can be anyone with internet access and the delusional notion that people are actually interested in anything they have to say – important or otherwise.

Lucky for me there are people out there, at least 2000 at last count, who consider my mostly normal, but sometimes crazy, life interesting. They log on everyday to read about my latest adventures in motherhood, matrimony, and college life in my 30′s. That kind of attention can also be addictive. Now, I am known as the blogger in my family. I’m the one that people feel the need to preface their conversations with the warning, “Don’t blog about this…” I find it hilarious.

One person who isn’t laughing, well, maybe on the inside he is… a little, is Donny. For some bizarre reason he takes exception with me writing about our sex life, his tendency to sometimes rock a very scumbag looking mustache, and our wacky conversations. I tell him to lighten up. How sad would life be if we couldn’t laugh at ourselves… and share it with others who are, more often than not, going through the same bullshit? Blogging has given me a connection with people all over the world I would never otherwise meet. I couldn’t stop now if I tried… sad, but true.

I knew my blogging addiction was spiraling out of control when one night the plan was to work out and then join Donny in bed. After exercising I decided to log on, really quickly I told myself, to see what comments had been posted on my latest blog. One thing turned into another and I found myself online for hours engaging in conversations with my readers as I sat ruminating in my own funky sweat. By the time I realized the time and tippy-toed upstairs Scooby-Doo style, Donny was already asleep. I quietly made my way to the master bath and turned on the shower. Why not just quietly slip into bed and go to sleep? Why run the risk of waking him up to call me out on my late night addiction?

Because you just don’t crawl into bed with your husband smelling like gang bang.

School Days Are Here Again

I am officially matriculated.  That is pronounced MA-TRICK-KEW-LATED for all of you perverts.

So let me start by telling you what the plan was.  The plan was to get up a little before 5am, go to gym and work out for an hour, shower and change at gym, get to school a little after 7am and get a good spot in line for 9am registration.

Let me tell you what actually happened.

2:30-3am – Went to bed.

3-3:30am – Fell asleep

5am – Tried to beat the alarm clock into a plastic pulp.

5:45am – Went downstairs to discover that my lovely, loving, considerate, thoughtful, wonderful, adoring husband had set the coffee pot’s automatic timer to brew a pot for me.

5:50am – Did a little happy dance up the stairs with my coffee and a box of Life Vanilla Yogurt cereal.

6am – Watched a 48 Hours Mystery on the TiVo, as I sipped my coffee and munched on cereal, about a woman who killed her husband with a hatchet.  Guess he didn’t program the coffee pot for her.

7am – Finally dragged my ass to school.

8am-9am – Sat in a room with a bunch of people wondering if I was really going to be taking classes with some of them.  I felt so old.  I wouldn’t let some of them in my house.  Most looked like rappers. I was pretty sure my parents had arrested some of them at one point.  (Another blog for another day is the story of how my best friend and I visited my Dad’s office one day and was flipping through mug shot photos only to see my junior high school boyfriend in there.  Goodnight.)

9am-11am – Thought about asking my friends who refer to me as, “The baddest bitch I know”, to change it to, “Nina don’t play.” as I whizzed through orientation, advisement, registration, financial aid and took a student ID picture that would have made Tyra and Beyonce proud.  What?

Classes start next Monday but my first class of the week is Tuesday.  I’m so excited.