ADDICTIONS

The day after I turned ten my mother took me to my first horse race at Aqueduct so that she could play the horses. Hitting the regular numbers didn’t pay as well and sometimes Mama had an itch to go gamble instead of waiting on the number’s man, Mr. Sheyanne, to come around and bring her money when she won. Waiting got on Mama’s last nerves. Besides which, she whispered one time as he walked out the door, “Gotta give him a tip every time I win. The more you win, the more tip. Downright shame.” Now generally speaking, at that point, I would’ve asked her what a ‘tip’ was but this time I shushed my mouth. I was good at figuring I’d learn about something on down the line. And, of course I did.

A tip is for service. Mr. Sheyanne took the bet, placed the bet, collected the money and brought the money to the winner, all secret like because playing the numbers can get a body locked up. So, since Mr. Sheyanne did the work, somebody had to pay him. Sometimes it was Maggie Mae, my mama, and sometimes it was someone else. But each time somebody was supposed to pay the number’s man. When I found that out, I thought Mr. Sheyanne was a pretty smart man being that he got money from almost everybody on Ashford Street where we lived. Numbers were a big deal on our block. People paid their bills with the winnings, brought school clothes in the fall and sometimes they got a Christmas miracle so their kids got presents under the tree, all behind hitting the number.

I started to pay close attention when Sheyanne came around when I found out about tips and such. Checking out his clothes got me no information. They were generally torn and dirty and the way his hands shook when he counted folding money made me want to reach out and do the counting for him, kinda like when somebody stutters. You want finish their sentences but know inside that’s rude so you let them struggle and pretend you don’t mind waiting till they get done. And you don’t really. Well, after a while you don’t anymore. But he didn’t seem no different than the other five or so men that lived on the block. He had a little apartment by himself in Miz Bettina’s basement, he was prone to drink a bit on Saturday night and wander through the block singing but that was all I could pick up from looking and listening to the adults who talked about him.

There was a mystery to Mr. Sheyanne. He didn’t look like the type of man who got tips all over the place. He was old and stinky with a belly that hung over his waistband and a big hole in the front of his mouth where a tooth should have been. Mind you, he always had a cigarette hanging from his upper lip that plugged up the hole and sometimes got stuck if he wasn’t paying attention but other than that, he didn’t look nothing like I expected a rich man to look like. Maybe he saved his money and hid it somewhere like in a mattress or under his bed? I wasn’t exactly sure but I figured again, I’d find out by and by. An answer would creep up and I’d snatch it and hold on. Nobody gets answers like me.

So on February 12, I didn’t feel like going to the racetrack but Mama did, and when Mama got a notion to do a thing it was best to go along. She said I didn’t have to go to school and that skipping school every once in a while wouldn’t hurt me because I was so smart. I knew she was lying but at nine I was hip to her ways. In my head, I saw myself zipping my lips shut. Because I am smart, just like Mama said.

One time, when we were playing cards with my Aunt Dee-Dee and my brothers, I let it slip that Mama wasn’t exactly telling the truth about the cards she was holding. Well really, I out and out said she was lying. She was sitting right next to me and without even a warning, her hand snaked out and smacked me, right in the kisser. I almost peed myself. Everyone was quiet while I picked up my cards from the floor.

I didn’t know what to do so I dealt the cards out again. All the while tears stood in my eyes and I wanted somebody to rub my cheek or say something but nobody looked at me. Mama had corrected me for calling her a liar, only I hadn’t really called her that. I got carried away by the fun we were having and forgot that I wasn’t supposed to say certain things. I wished hard that she would forget that it was her job to correct me, especially in front of people. But that wasn’t possible. My mama always knew what she had to do with me and with my brothers. Raising us right, she said, was her number one job.

Everyone in the room had to pretend that nothing happened and keep on playing. I didn’t want another smack and Aunt Dee-Dee wanted to be polite. So we played until it was time to stop and I got over being hurt and embarrassed since I had to sit there for so long afterwards. My heart only pinched when Mama looked in my direction. Then the tears would feel like they wanted to come but I’d bite my lower lip hard, almost until it felt like blood, then I wouldn’t want to cry anymore.

I was proud of myself for being so tough and mad at Mama for the way she took everything so seriously. But I did learn a good lesson that night. I stopped thinking of Mama as somebody I could play around with even when she played with us. I learned to be quiet until I was able to know her mood. That one smack saved me getting a whole lot more and from then on I was a quiet child. That’s why I say I’m smart. I know when to keep it buttoned up. Not a lot of kids my age know that.

I started to practice stuff like looking Mama dead in the face, saying “yes m’am” and “no m’am” with my lips and cussing her like a sailor in my head when she got on my nerves. I was excited when I finally understood that she could not read my mind and that I could call her anything in my head. But I didn’t do it often. It made me feel bad inside if I did it too much. I saved it for those special occasions like when she called me from the front room to get her a glass of water when she was two feet away from the kitchen sink. Or to come change the television when she did not feel like getting up and turning the knob. It burned me inside that she would laugh sometimes and say “That’s what kids are for, to serve their parents.” But it just had to burn because there was nothing for it.

We rode the subway to the horse track. It was cold, even for February, and I remember wearing my fake blue fur coat with white mittens and a white wool cap. Mama fussed about the wool cap because, she said, wool breaks your hair off. But it was the only one I had. She pulled the collar of my fur coat up to the point where my ears were covered, reached in the back of her closet for a raggedy scarf, and wound it around the bottom half of my face. When she finished dressing me, she pulled on her knee high black boots, her overcoat and a hat. We headed into the wind, walking the six blocks to the A train on Shepherd Avenue.