“Let me hold that eighty dollars,” Aunt Carla said, “and on Friday, I’ll give you three hundred dollars and we’ll go to Red Lobster.”
“Sure,” I said, handing her the money. It was Monday, and I knew I’d have another eighty dollars the next week, so it wasn’t a big deal.
Wednesday my aunt came over again. “Give me your sizes,” she said. “I wanna get you some back-to-school clothes.”
“I want Guess jeans,” I said, and then reeled off my sizes along with a list of additional asks.
Lo and behold, Friday came and Aunt Carla showed up in a limo, carrying shopping bags full of clothes for Kenyatta and me.
“Now let’s go to Red Lobster,” she said, handing me my three hundred dollars.
It was my first time in a limo. Kenyatta and I opened the windows and waved to everyone we passed on the ride to dinner. At the restaurant, we feasted—ordering the lobster and shrimp combo and eating every Cheddar Bay biscuit in sight. When we emerged rubbing our stomachs, the limo was gone.
“I only had it for the way over,” Aunt Carla said, slotting a coin in the nearby pay phone as she took a drag on a cigarette. Her friend eventually showed up in a Buick, and as we started the drive home, she said, “I need to stop at Kmart. Stay in the car,” she told us.
She went inside to write a few bad checks while we waited.
“You girls doing good?” said the driver.
We both nodded.
He proceeded to pull out a crack pipe and smoke up. The windows were closed, so we couldn’t help but be hotboxed. We didn’t feel any secondhand effects, but I would always immediately recognize that smell as an adult, traveling the country and going to clubs.
We were familiar with crack already, because our friends were dealers. We’d seen plenty of crack pipes and even watched people weigh it for parceling. North Omaha was rapidly changing, and every summer, the changes escalated. The L.A.-based dealers had begun to spread out across the country to get a piece of the local drug trade everywhere. Gang members came to North Omaha, selling a lifestyle as if they were setting up franchises. But it was all so bizarre to watch. North Omaha is made up of a bunch of families that have been there for generations. You walk down the street and somebody can identify what family you belong to by your facial features. All of a sudden here come these powerful gangs, splitting up families as kids randomly chose different gang sets.
A lot of my cousins and neighborhood kids that I’d grown up with during my summer visits, boys and girls, began to claim allegiance to L.A. gangs that they didn’t know anything about. It started as a saccharine, almost Disney-like version of gang life. When I returned at fourteen, every young person was touched by some sort of criminal enterprise, with varying degrees of success. Some kids got one rock of cocaine and announced, “I’m a drug dealer.” Then there were kids who as teenagers were doing, in terms of drug dealing, very well for themselves. They had their own apartments and flaunted their wealth.
At the end of the day, I didn’t look at crack so negatively, because I saw our little friends making money off it. Drug dealing felt like any other job to me. I only knew young dealers and the random ones that my aunt knew. I didn’t see the underbelly. The violence, the desperation, the addiction. All I knew was, I gave my aunt eighty dollars and she gave me three hundred dollars back. That was integrity. I later found out Aunt Carla asked her friend who was a booster—a shoplifter by profession, thank you—to get those school clothes for me at the mall. I didn’t think less of her or those clothes. I thought Aunt Carla was smart. And I went to Red Lobster in a limo. If someone smoked crack on the way home, that was a small price to pay for the adventure. A footnote, really. What remains is that she kept her word. In retrospect, I guess it’s naïve to think this would all end well, but I saw honor among thieves.
In the midst of this, I was still Nickie, trying to get boys to like me, specifically Kevin Marshall. The summer I was fourteen, Kenyatta and I invited two boys over to my grandmother’s with the promise of alcohol. Andy Easterbrook and beautiful Kevin. I was truly, madly, deeply, over the moon in love with Kevin. He was caramel colored, with green eyes, and a great athlete. He wasn’t supposed to like a chocolate girl like me. And he liked me.
First order of business: coming through on that promised alcohol. Kenyatta and I decided to steal my aunt Joanne’s wine coolers. This was the biggest mistake of the summer! God, if there was anybody who counted their wine coolers it was Aunt Joanne. But when you’re a kid and you see two four-packs and there are boys to impress, you take one or two and say, “There’s still some left.” Boy, did we pay for that.
Next, we had to sneak Andy and Kevin into the house without Grandma knowing. Now, Grandma was always in her rocking chair, and she had to get out of it in order to see the door. So we knew that we would have a fighting chance to sneak the boys up the stairs while Grandma was working up enough momentum to propel her ass out of the chair. Even better, we knew she couldn’t go upstairs because of her knees.
But as the wine cooler situation makes clear, Kenyatta and I were dumb as fuck. We ran in, pushing the boys in front of us and yelling, “Hi, Grandma! Bye, Grandma!” as we raced up the stairs. My grandma was slow and her knees were shit, but she wasn’t deaf. She kept yelling, “Who all is in here?” because you can surely tell the difference between two sets of feet and four heading up the stairs. Especially boys racing to get alcohol.
So, Grandma simply refused to go to sleep. She got up from her chair and she sat in the couch next to the front door. She knew whoever we’d snuck in eventually had to come down because there was no bathroom upstairs. Somebody’s gotta pee. Someone’s gotta leave. And she was gonna be there to see it.
Of course, she also knew we were smoking weed up there. We were making this big attempt to hide it, blowing the smoke through the window screens. But you couldn’t open the screens, and the mesh was so small that the smoke just stayed in the room. So our play to hide our business didn’t work at all.
Between the wine coolers and the Mickey’s big mouth they gallantly brought, the boys had to pee soon enough. They filled the empty bottles, but then had to go again. So then they had the bright idea to pour the bottled pee out through the screen. All that weed smoke not making it through the tiny mesh should have shown us that this was not a good idea. Between kid logic and the weed, it made perfect sense at the time. The piss just pooled in the gutter of the window. Hot urine in the windowsill—ah, the romance and brilliance of the teenage years.
When Grandma finally relented and went to bed in what felt like nine hours, the boys left.
“I know you had boys up there,” she said to us the next morning. “I know you were smoking that weed.”
“No we didn’t,” I said.
Aunt Joanne kept saying, “And I know you took my wine coolers!”
“No, we didn’t,” I said.
“Did Grandma take them?” offered Kenyatta.
“You know,” I said, “other people come over here.”
It’s one of my greatest shames that some of my last memories of my grandmother when she was cognizant were just bald-faced lies. In a short while, she would have dementia and not know who I was. But I have to tell you, I would have done anything for Kevin Marshall. My parents let me go back to Omaha that Christmas, and the only reason I went was to have a chance to see Kevin Marshall and get a real kiss.