Читать книгу God Still Don't Like Ugly - Mary Monroe - Страница 22

So much happened to me during the years I lived in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was hard for me to keep the events in order when I allowed myself to think about them. I slid in and out of meaningless relationships with meaningless men and had a fairly active social life, but I continued to have nightmares about Mr. Boatwright. Some mornings I woke up on the floor, tangled up in my bedcovers from trying to hide from Mr. Boatwright’s ghost.

I joined a church and I got a job working on an assembly line in a factory, but I was not happy. I still missed Rhoda and Pee Wee. They had saved me in so many ways, so many times. In fact, it was a telephone call from Rhoda that had stopped me from throwing myself out of the window of a dingy hotel, during one of my many moments of despair.

Pee Wee was special in other ways. He had been the only boy that Mr. Boatwright had felt was sexless and harmless enough to be around me, not that any other boys had tried to get into my pants. The nights that Pee Wee had been allowed to sleep over at my house during our early teens, volunteering to sleep on our living room floor in his sleeping bag, Mr. Boatwright had insisted that Pee Wee sleep on a pallet on my bedroom floor instead.

Unlike some of the other boys from Richland who had been snatched up by Uncle Sam and dispatched to go fight a senseless war in a place a lot of us had never even heard of before, Pee Wee returned from Vietnam intact. I was pleasantly surprised when he paid me a surprise visit one night when he came to Pennsylvania to visit relatives.

I had several reasons for climbing into my bed with Pee Wee. His appearance was one. The army had recycled him. He was no longer the skinny, loud-mouthed, sissified little boy I had grown up with. He was at least four inches taller and had packed on more than sixty pounds. His long, narrow face had filled out and he had a sexy mustache. A pair of slightly slanted black eyes that I had never paid much attention to before now sparkled like diamonds. He was gorgeous. Especially naked.

He stood over me as I lay on my bed, naked, too, feeling as big as a banana boat. But my size didn’t bother him, so I didn’t care what I looked like as long as he liked what he saw.

I didn’t jump up and shout like I wanted to, though. I just gasped. When Pee Wee gave me an amused look, I pretended like I was reacting to the scorpion tattoo on his chest. I was already weak, so even without that bottle of wine we consumed, I couldn’t help myself.

After all the unfulfilling sex I had had with Mr. Boatwright and the other men, I never expected to know any physical pleasure, other than feeding my face. But Pee Wee was a wonderful lover. He even taught me a few tricks that he had picked up from the whores he had spent time with in Vietnamese brothels that he claimed he’d been “dragged” to.

Sex was such a mystery to me. It seemed strange that something that good could also be bad if done with the wrong person. Despite old Mr. Boatwright’s belief that I enjoyed his lovemaking, it had felt like hell to me. Here I was doing the same thing with Pee Wee, but it felt like heaven. Especially when I had an orgasm. It was the first one in my life and that made Pee Wee even more special to me. It was almost as sacred as sharing my virginity, a prize that Mr. Boatwright had helped himself to.

I felt like a big fool doing some of the things I did with Pee Wee that night. And I knew I probably looked like a big ox in some of the positions I let myself get coaxed into. I was like a dope fiend, devouring Pee Wee for the next few hours like he was a drug. I licked and humped like I was getting paid to do it. He laughed when I humped him with so much vigor he fell off the bed.

“Just relax, girl,” he told me, jumping back on top of me, stabbing deep inside of me with his finger. We spent a whole night wallowing in each other’s arms.

By the time Pee Wee rolled off me, I was practically delirious. But my rapture was temporary. He left the next morning before I even woke up. I was alone again, except for the bruises on my body and the fear of Mr. Boatwright’s ghost coming back to haunt me some more.

Not long after my passionate rendezvous with Pee Wee, another man eased his way into my bed, one I thought was just as ready to get married and settle down as I was. I was half right. Levi Hardy up and married another woman while he was still involved with me. I was devastated. I felt like the woman men avoided in public, but could tolerate enough to use for their own selfish needs. I felt like a urinal, just another place for men to dangle their dicks. I didn’t know what was so wrong with me that only Rhoda could see the beauty in me on an ongoing basis. That’s why it had always been so easy for her to control me.

During a visit to Florida to comfort Rhoda when the younger of her two sons died, I found myself missing my father more than ever before. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was in Florida, just a few miles away from Rhoda’s house. If I had reunited with him then, I know now that I would have avoided some of the other pain that was waiting to consume me.

I cried until I almost lost my voice during the very next telephone conversation with Rhoda. Not over Pee Wee running out on me or that other man dumping me for another woman, but over a royal mess that Rhoda’s older brother Jock had slid into.

Jock Nelson, his mind half gone after injuries he had sustained in Vietnam, had impregnated the teenage daughter of a Klansman. The girl wanted Jock to marry her and she wanted money for her and Jock to run away with. If she didn’t get her way, she threatened to go to her daddy and claim that Jock had raped her.

Rhoda was on fire and predicted what she called a “bloodbath” if the girl carried out her threat. I had not witnessed that level of anger from Rhoda since I told her about Mr. Boatwright. That anger didn’t last long because a few weeks later that white girl died in a freak bathtub accident and Rhoda was her old self again.

“See, God really don’t like ugly,” Rhoda told me in an unusually calm voice. “That white bitch got what she had comin’.”

I didn’t know why, but I sat looking at the telephone, long after Rhoda had hung up. I suddenly became profoundly uneasy. Something that I could not even bring myself to think about kept trying to creep into my mind, but I wouldn’t let it. I knew in my heart that there was more to the story involving that white girl than Rhoda had told me. I told myself that if it was meant for me to hear the whole story, someday I would.

With the news of the white girl’s death, the stunt that Pee Wee had pulled on me, and the fact that I had not gotten over Levi dumping me to marry another woman, I decided it was time to run away from my problems again.

During a brief visit to my aunt Berniece in New Jersey, I learned from her that my father was in Miami and that I had two half-sisters and a half-brother. At that point, my desire to “find” myself took on a new meaning.

When I returned to Pennsylvania I was too restless to remain there much longer. Even though Ohio had once repelled me like a snakepit, without giving it much thought, I decided it was time for me go back there to deal with the demons that had tormented me throughout my youth.