A dark place, p.3
A Dark Place, page 3
Rozon was the quarterback of the football team, as well the campus’s top party promoter. According to the buzz around school, the students had already pegged him as the next Sean Combs, the famous entertainment mogul who once roamed the yards at Howard University. Like most upperclassmen, Rozon was always on the prowl for a gullible freshman to add to his harem. He didn’t have to look far to find a wide-eyed country girl who was totally enamored with city life. Jamillah was perfect for the picking.
Rozon epitomized city life. He wore the finest clothes, drove a nice BMW 6 Series convertible, and had damn near every girl on campus changing panties twice a day. Jamillah felt like she had hit the lottery when he took an interest in her. Rozon had his own apartment, which made him seem more like a real man as opposed to the boys who were piled up in the dorms. And she floated on cloud nine when he strolled across the campus just to walk her to her class. All the girls envied her. Many of them gave her hateful and sly looks, but most of them wanted to know what Rozon was like in bed.
That was a question she couldn’t answer. She had no one to compare him to. Rozon was Jamillah’s first sexual encounter, which made her fall even harder for him. She couldn’t keep her mind off him. The sex was amazing, and all she wanted to do was be with him. Things were great her first year, but then, after the summer break, Rozon returned to school a different person. He stopped doing the parties and started hanging around a different set of friends. He quit the football team, and a few weeks later, he dropped out of school altogether.
That should’ve been a big, fat stop sign for Jamillah, but by then, she had fallen head over heels for the slickster. Rozon still maintained his apartment and kept up his top-model appearance, so she wasn’t too put off or overly concerned about his sudden change in direction. But his new association with the roughnecks of Southeast D.C. raised her eyebrows.
Jamillah thought she needed to save her man from himself, and she wasn’t about to bail out on him. After all, going through the rough times was all a part of being in love. She decided to go all out for him. Soon she found herself competing for his attention. He seemed to love her, but it was clear that something else was distracting him. Rather than confronting him about this, Jamillah slowly but surely started fitting into his world, which meant she started doing whatever he was doing. All her life she had stayed far away from alcohol and drugs, but now she found herself taking sips of wine coolers, then mixed drinks, and then she starting puffing on a little weed.
Jamillah’s track coach was the first to notice the change in her. One afternoon she pulled Jamillah into her office and made her take a drug test. She failed it, earning a big F. One month later, she failed another one, and that was the final straw. She was kicked off the team for the remainder of the year. By that time, try as she might, she couldn’t shake the urge to get high. She started acting strange and lost interest in school. She would stay with Rozon all day, and all they would do was get high. Little did she know, her weed wasn’t all-natural, unadulterated cannabis; it was laced with cocaine. She knew something was wrong when she smoked weed with other people and didn’t get the same high she experienced when she smoked with Rozon. She approached him about it, and he just smiled.
“They smoke straight weed. That straight weed is for lames. That shit is a waste of money. My stuff has coke mixed in, and it’s so much better,” he told her.
“But don’t you think you should tell someone before you go mixing their stuff with coke?” Jamillah retorted, stunned that he hadn’t told her this before.
“Baby, if you don’t like it, you can leave.”
Those words were always so hurtful to her, and no matter what they were arguing about, the conversation normally ended when he went there. She loved him, and now that she was no longer on the track team and no longer staying in the athletic dorm, she really didn’t have anywhere else to rest her head. Sure, she could’ve called Urban, and he would’ve fixed her living situation, but then he would’ve wanted some answers as to why and how she had got to where she was, and she wasn’t ready to go there. No, she would hang in there with her man and his laced weed.
It didn’t take long for the money to run out, and when the powder cocaine became too expensive, they downgraded. They needed the same high for less money, so they found themselves running around Southeast D.C., looking for the rock man.
Jamillah wished that back then, she had known the crackhead’s anthem: “One hit is too many, and a thousand is not enough!”
Crack was euphoric.
Jamillah had never felt such a rush. The high was the best she had ever felt in her entire nineteen years on this earth. For the first time since she was a little girl, nothing mattered. There were no more haunting dreams stealing away her peace, no more worries about how she was going to tell her brother that she wasn’t in school, no more concerns about what people thought of her. No more longing for her parents to return from their graves to love and raise her. The only things that mattered were getting that potent crack smoke into her lungs and experiencing the wonderful feeling that followed. But little did she know the feeling would take her down a path of destruction that only God could alter.
Jamillah had long forgotten about school. And she had moved in with Rozon. Before long, she was doing all sorts of crazy things for money to feed her crack addiction. What was worst of all was that her body became their only source of income. Men and women had their way with her, and she didn’t care. Her mind was fixed on the feeling she would experience once the money exchanged hands after she’d done whatever deed they’d agreed upon. Sometimes she would think about how fast life came at you and how quickly her life had changed from one that was filled with potential to one that was so low she felt as if she had already decomposed.
But then sex wasn’t enough for some. Some fools wanted to get deviant. Her addiction trumped her morals, and she became a slave to their desires. Some of the favors she did bothered her long after the high had evaporated, and as exhilarating as the crack smoke was, she still felt cheated. Slowly but surely, Jamillah started to feel less than human. One night, a nameless and faceless man gave her one hundred dollars to allow his German shepherd to urinate on her. That was the night she sold her soul to the devil. Before crack, Jamillah used to attend church every Sunday and considered herself a child of God. But after crack, and after allowing herself to endure such humiliation, she didn’t feel worthy enough ever to talk to God again. She was now one of Satan’s angels.
Why me? she asked herself whenever she contemplated her abysmal fate.
The question haunted her like an old evil spirit. Every time she thought she was on track to beat the crack monkey, something or someone came along and knocked her back down, forcing her to wonder why God was so mad at her that He was determined to keep her in the valley of the wicked.
Chapter 4
Jamillah heard a rat scurry across the floor and didn’t even bother to budge. She had gotten so used to living with lowlifes that the sound or sight of a rodent no longer affected her. The place she was sitting in had been home for the past week. It would be only another week or two, she estimated, before someone came creeping around and forced her to move to a different location. That was what all her promise and potential had come to.
But lately she had been thinking more and more about getting her life back together. In an effort to get sober, she had tried numerous rehabilitation centers, but they had all been a joke. However, she knew the life she was living couldn’t be all there was for her. Something had to change, and the years that she had spent living from pillar to post, robbing Peter to pay Paul the crack man, proved to her that nothing was going to change unless she changed it.
Damn you, Urban.
Urban had ruined everything. She’d had guaranteed money, and she’d been well on the way to making her plan a reality, but no, he had to come along and mess it all up.
She hoped he felt good about himself, because he’d helped only to send her into a deeper hell than the one she was already living in. If she could, she would kill him. She thought seriously about killing her brother and wondered if she could really go through with it. After a few minutes of seeing his lifeless body in her mind, she quickly tossed the thought away. She loved him, even if he didn’t love her anymore. But Mama Winnie was a bitch. She was being mean just for the sake of being mean, and Jamillah would get even with her for that. All that praying and crying and carrying on with her Bible was a put-on. Always down on her knees, telling Jesus how messed up black folks were, and she was just as messed up. Jamillah would get even with her if it was the last thing she did.
But Urban . . . Even though she wasn’t going to kill him, he would also feel her wrath. It was because of him that she was broke, owed two different dealers, and would more than likely end up dead in an alley somewhere. The thought sent a streak of fear down her spine.
“Shut up, Jamillah. You ain’t gonna do shit to Urban or Mama,” she said aloud to herself. “You need to get your act together. Look at you.”
“You shut up,” she answered back to herself. “I am getting it together. I’m tired of everybody telling me to get it together, including you, damn it.”
This little back-and-forth happened a lot when she was high and out of her right mind.
And where the hell is Marcus? she wondered. He’d better not be out there smoking.
Before she could finish her thought, she heard a loud bump at the front of the house.
Jamillah tensed up. After all these years on the streets, she still was afraid to be alone.
Someone was coming into the house, and they weren’t being quiet about it. There was a loud banging sound, as if someone was trying to knock down the front door. She hoped it was Marcus, but why would he carry on like that? Something wasn’t right. Marcus was a loner. She heard a voice, then a different one, but still nothing from Marcus.
She wanted to call out to him, but her intuition—or maybe it was her survival instincts, maybe both—was telling her to be quiet. She followed her inner voice.
“Why didn’t you bring a flashlight?” said the first voice she heard.
“How was I supposed to know? Keep it down,” the second voice said. “Okay, man, where is she?”
“I don’t know if she’s here yet, man,” said another voice. It belonged to Marcus. “I told y’all that already, man.”
“Call her name,” said the first voice, and it became clear it belonged to the one in charge.
“Millah,” Marcus called out. “Millah, it’s me. Where ya at, girl?”
Millah!
Was that a sign? Marcus had never called her that. He was one of the few people who still called her by her given name. The folks in the hood shortened it, because one more syllable obviously was too much work to pronounce. She could also hear the stress in his voice.
Jamillah froze in place. She wasn’t sure if she was even breathing. Something deep in her body was telling her that she was in a life-or-death situation. She wished Marcus would run away. For the first time in almost ten years, she prayed.
God, please let that fool run, and whoever is with him, let them leave. If you help me, God, I will be at church on Sunday morning, and I will stay until they kick me out. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m for real this time.
Jamillah had always had a very good feel for when things were going to go bad. She knew her parents were going to die on the day they died, and right now, she felt as if death was around the corner from where she was sitting.
“She ain’t here, man,” Marcus said with a high-pitched voice.
“Well, let’s wait outside for her,” said the first voice. “It stinks in this place, man.”
“You mind if I have my package now?” Marcus asked.
“Here,” the first man said. “Don’t you know smoking crack is bad for your health?”
Jamillah could hear one of the two men laughing. He seemed evil.
“Yeah, but it’s sure good to me,” Marcus said. “And if I didn’t tell you before, thank you very much for the smoke.”
Jamillah wanted to smoke too. She was tempted to come out and ask Marcus to pass the pipe, but her fear overruled her jones, so she stayed still.
“Let’s get out of here, man,” the second man said.
“Shut your mouth, man. You just make sure you don’t come with me again. You’re more of a pain in the ass than these niggers,” the first man muttered.
“Hey,” Marcus said. “White boys can’t say ‘nigger.’”
“Oh yeah?” the first man said. “Where is that written? And more importantly, what are you going to do to make me stop?”
There was the sound of metal on metal moving and clicking. Jamillah knew the sound of a gun when she heard one. She tensed up even more. Then she heard Marcus say, “Hey, man, whatchu doing? I helped you, like I said I would.”
“No, you didn’t. You said you were taking me to the baby. I don’t see any baby. You hustled me, and there is a heavy price to pay for doing that,” the first man snarled.
“Man, go ahead with all that. She ain’t here yet. That’s all. She’s coming. We live here,” Marcus said nervously.
“Yeah, I bet. Smoke up, nigger. Your presence and services are no longer needed,” the first man replied.
“Come on, bro!” Marcus said. Jamillah could hear him sucking on the pipe.
“I’m not your brother, unless my father had jungle fever, and I highly doubt that,” the first man said. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will let you die high. So hurry up and finish your damn crack, loser.”
“Please, man. Don’t kill me,” Marcus pleaded.
An evil grin spread across the first man’s face. “Smoke up.”
There was silence for several minutes; then a loud bang made the house vibrate.
Jamillah couldn’t control her scream.
She jumped up and ran like she had never left the track field. She planted both feet and went straight through the glass window in the rear bedroom. She landed her hands and knees on the hard concrete outside the window. Somehow, she made it to her feet, dazed and confused and covered in cuts from the broken glass. She could feel blood easing down her face as she staggered down the alley.
The men up front heard the screams. “Go get her,” said the one in charge, the one with the evil voice.
“No,” the second one said. “Screw you.”
Dazed, but still moving, Jamillah could feel her face swelling and blood oozing down her neck. Then a big hand grabbed her from behind and tossed her around. She looked up into the freckled face of an orange-haired white man.
“Now, is that any way to treat your house guest?” he said. Then he hit her on the top of her head with the butt of his gun.
Chapter 5
Urban made it home at around five thirty in the morning. After leaving the land where the addicts roamed, he went to the twenty-four-hour Super Target in Buckhead. In the blink of an eye, he found himself fully submerged in parenthood. He carried his nephew in one arm while pushing the shopping cart with the other. Even though the little fellow couldn’t have weighed more than twenty pounds, he got heavy real quick.
He made a bee line for the infants’ department. All he planned to buy were a few items, like diapers and milk. He ended up with a bassinet, a crib, a swing set, enough Pampers to last for months, about ten little onesie outfits, a car seat, baby wipes, a pacifier, and a case of Similac formula. Once the oversized orange cart was overflowing, he smiled. “You’re already in your uncle’s pockets, little man. How in the world are we gonna work this out?”
His little nephew looked up at him with sleepy eyes as Urban laid him on a display bed, cleaned him with a baby wipe, and changed him into a real diaper. He found a little outfit and slipped it on him too. Might as well do it all the way, he thought.
A lady wearing a red vest with TARGET CUSTOMER SERVICE on the back approached him. “May I help you, sir?” she as she eyed him suspiciously.
“I’m going to pay for these things,” he said. “It’s a long story, but my sister is on drugs and I had to go get him . . .”
The lady waved him off. “Been there and done that. You go ahead and do what you have to do,” she said, glancing down at the baby. “He’s a cute one.”
“Thanks,” Urban said and continued dressing his nephew. “Where are your coats that would fit him?”
The lady disappeared and returned with a little blue flannel outfit that had a hood attached. “This is all we have. They don’t make coats that small.”
“This will do. Thanks.”
“No problem. See you at the register.”
“I’m going to make it all better, little buddy,” Urban said to his nephew after the woman had left. He looked to his left and saw the coolest little blue and white race car comforter for the baby’s crib. He had to get it, so he tossed it atop all the other items in the cart. “That’s it, dude. You will not send me to the poor house.”
* * *
Hours later on that same morning, Urban was sitting in his living room and assembling the baby’s swing set when he heard the front door open. He jerked his head in the direction of the noise and felt his heart jump.
“Hey, babe,” his fiancée, Sierra, called as she placed her suitcase down near the door.
He relaxed and jumped to his feet. He walked into the foyer and gave her a big hug.
“Hey, sexy lady,” he returned.
Sierra had moved in two weeks ago, and for the past week, she had been on the road for her job. Urban was still trying to get used to her coming in the house unannounced.
