After Grandma died, everybody in the family went haywire. I never realized that Mom wasn’t really around that much, because I loved Grandma so much that it didn’t matter to me one way or another. Aunt G started drinking really bad. Aunt Mary started shooting Heroine. My favorite cousin Velt became a pimp. And me, well I guess I was left to the wolves.
Mom got heavy into the church. I hated the church. This had to be the most corrupt place with the meanest people in the world in it. All everybody did was talk bad about each other and put each other down. The kids at church were more prejudiced than the ones at school. The pastors were all screwing all the women in the congregation and damn that shit lasted all day long. I thought if there was a hell, this had to be it. The only good thing about it was the bake sale down in the basement afterwards. Well, after you starved to death for 8 hours. We would get there at 8am and get out at 3:00pm. And all everybody did was try to see who was wearing the best hat. Then sometimes we would be there all damn day and come right back that same night. Night service was when they cast out the demons. Well at least that was interesting to a little kid. It was like an exorcist show – the lights going on and off and people howling and screaming and shit. I was never scared. I just thought they were all nuts and faking it.
I did like one other thing about church. That was the music. My church was a Holiness church and boy did they know how to jam. The music was great. And I liked to see the people get the holy ghosts and speak in tongues. I also liked when the people would line up for prayer and he would slap them in the forehead so hard that they would pass out. I always thought to myself, “Damn, if they slapped me in the forehead that head, hell, I would hit the floor too”. It was like a circus act. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have killed myself sitting there for 8 hours listening to somebody tell everybody else what’s right and what’s wrong when you know they’re doing all the “what’s wrong”. And here we were again the “sore thumb family”. My sister, my mom, and me looked like a bunch of white people in a place we didn’t belong. Not to mention the fact that my sister’s father, the one who used to pistol-whip my mom (the man married to another women) was one of the preachers at this same church.
And last but not least. I never could understand why on earth when it was your birthday you had to give the church money. Our church had this old, plastic, white cake with pink flowers on it. It was like a piggy bank in the shape of a cake with a hole in the top of it for you to put change into. And whenever it was your birthday the entire church would sing a church birthday song and make you go up in front of everyone and put pennies in the cake, according to your age. I never did understand that. I always thought they should be giving you something.
Mom and Doris Wood became friends. Sister Wood was an usher in the church. Ms. Holy bible herself. This lady went to church at least 4 days a week. One of the main things I can remember about her is that she always had halitosis (bad breath), because she was always fasting for Jesus. Every time she would come over and talk to my mother or me I wanted to gag.
I don’t remember how this came to past, but somehow mom ended up having a nervous breakdown and was put in a mental hospital. Great for me! Not! Well I ended up living with Doris Magwood. Not only was she Ms. Holy she was strict as hell. And she had the biggest black ants in her house you would ever see.
She didn’t have a husband, but she had a 17-year-old son named Johnny Wood. He was really involved in the church. He was in the choir and he was a junior usher and all. Well one day when I was asleep on Sister Wood’s couch, Johnny’s fingers digging around in my vagina awakened me. I was just seven years old at the time and this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to me. When he saw me wake up, he stopped and tried to act like he wasn’t doing anything. When I spoke to my mom I told her that I wanted to get out of there, but she said that there wasn’t anything she could do about it. I didn’t tell her why. I just told her that Sister Wood was really mean, hoping this would get me out of there.
After that day, I slept with one eye open, literally.