WASTED

I searched the closet where my family stored our luggage, looking for the bag where I'd hidden my last stash of weed. There was nothing special about the luggage, but the bag contained everything that I coveted. Included with the weed were rolling papers, lighters, pipes, even a water bong. It was everything a light-skinned black girl from south Minneapolis needed.

For any number of reasons, the girls at my high school teased me about my appearance. I had medium blonde wavy hair, cut just below the ear, and I had light skin. They'd say, "You know, for a black chick you sure got us fooled- Princess." I walked away head hanging, chin dragging on the floor. I never understood why they didn't like me; they didn't even try to get to know me.

When I got high, I could be indifferent to those who judged me. When I was high, I could chill out, blend in, attract the men I wanted, or I could be no one. I could just be alone. I was living with my parents, and wasn't always the best at hiding my drug use, but thankfully, Momma and Daddy worked too hard to catch on. They never discovered my hiding place.

I chose to get high or drunk away from home. I didn't want to use at home; something about it just didn't seem right. So I used at a friend's house, in the car, or sitting on a bench at a park, down by the Mississippi River bluffs. I planned it so that by the time I went home I was sobering up. Sometimes, I used at school or after school. I wasn't out there doing drugs to be found, I was there to hide and chill.

In 1984, I was lost. I was only sixteen when I first fixed eyes on Ty. It was during our sophomore year when this statue of a man walked into my world by way of the bleachers. I'd taken to smoking under them during football games. The cool fall winds helped disseminate the fruity smoke I exhaled.

He approached me with a smile and said, "Hey, gotta light?"

I fumbled in my jeans pocket and pulled out my lime green bic. "Yeah, here." "Thanks," he said, lighting a Marlboro cigarette from a red box. "My name is Ty, you?"

Looking down, I said, "My name is Jemma."

"Hey, Jemma."

"You play football?" I asked.

"Sometimes, if the coach decides to let me play; otherwise, I just sit on the bench."

"What, you play?"

"Running back," he said.

I looked at him realizing I had asked a question for which I didn't really understand the answer. So I said, "Offense or defense?"

He laughed at that and said, "You know football, huh?"

"Yeah, some."

"Well, Jemma, running back is offense," he smiled at me and handed over the lighter.

"OK, cool. I like to watch the offense," I said.

"Yeah. How you see anything from under here?" He looked about him, noting that under the bleachers when the seats were full of fans, there was a completely obstructed view.

"Yeah," I said, "So, got any more smokes?"

"Nah, that was the last one, didn't get to the gas station today. I got another joint though, wanna share?" After he retrieved the last joint that was hiding in his red Marlboro box, he crumpled the empty box, threw it under the first row of seats, and then sat down on the ground.

I knew I would like this guy; tall, dark skinned, high cheekbones, athletic, and willing to share with an almost complete stranger. "Yeah, thanks." I sat down and lit his last joint.

By the end of the tied game, I had learned that he didn't live far from my neighborhood. He asked to walk me home and I decided to let him. We talked about school and where to score the best drugs. He promised to look for me at school the next day. He kissed me when we were at the last corner before my house. I knew I would like him. Maybe too much.

I always thought Ty blended in with the typical high school students better than I did. He only had to flirt with me once before I took the line. I tried to stop him from flirting with the other girls, not secure enough that he was mine.

I wasn't comfortable in school. There were too many things to do outside of school that were more interesting—like Ty and me under the bleachers, high on weed, and him pushing up my sweater trying to get to second base.

I liked hanging with Ty, and soon we were a steady couple. Momma and Daddy were too busy working to worry that I wasn't behavin'. I was behavin' all right—misbehavin'.

Ty and I never got caught. Lucky, I guess. It's a perspective one doesn't dwell on when you're high or drunk, or both.

I wasn't too well known in my classes either. To most teachers, I was just another African American girl, but unlike some of the girls, I didn't have nappy hair or dark skin. My parents were both mixed race.

Howard, that's my daddy, was a combination of cultures from the southern parts of Mississippi: Choctaw Indian, white, and slave. My daddy had short jet black hair that grew curlier in humid weather, a high-bridged nose and cheekbones, long black eyelashes, and red-bone skin. Outdoor work would seriously darken his complexion.

My daddy moved up North to Minnesota from the Deep South. He'd been working as a dishwasher and a porter for the railroad. All the black folks were movin' north. He worked the Chicago line as a porter after a few months of dishwashing on the Memphis route.

Daddy was never able to pass for white. Sometimes when I was really young, and we were visiting Mississippi, he'd pretend to be the houseman and we'd walk the streets of Hattiesburg—black man minding a white girl. No one thought differently. My light complexion often allowed me to pass for white among whites, but I wasn't black enough among blacks.

The colored girls at school picked fights with me or made me do nasty things, like drink out of the toilet. I received my fair share of trouble for my skin color no matter where I was, north, south, east, or west. The whites didn't trust me because I wasn't all white, the blacks didn't trust me because I wasn't dark enough. No culture accepted a mixed race girl wholeheartedly; each made me feel less than whole.

During one of these city walks in Hattiesburg, my daddy told me, "Jemma, if you could pass for white when I was in school, you know, back in the '50's during the civil rights movement in Mississippi, that was a good thing. You know, I wasn't trying to fool nobody, it was about surviving. That's the real deal, you knows its importan' like."

"Yeah," I replied, unappreciative of the message and his lesson about race.

He stopped walking and stood there looking at me, expecting his point to be made.

I said, "Yes, I remember, Daddy."

"Before I met Mamie, your momma, I would keep my head down and just mutter along looking for work, not wanting to look any white folk in the eye, oh no. I'm so glad I moved up north and met yo' Momma."

"Yeah," I said.

"I looked for work along the Mississippi gulf shore, but they didn't want more coloreds. You know southern whites didn't really trust any coloreds, light skinned or not. You'd think it be different with me being a mix and no one sure what to do with me. So instead of waiting to find out what could happen I decided it was better to leave and never know."

So that's how my daddy ended up in Minnesota looking for work, and for folk to accept him, mixed race and all. Unlike Daddy, Momma wasn't so lucky. She lived in south Minneapolis where gangs, guns, and drugs ran the streets. She was raised by a single mother; my granddaddy was killed in a car accident when Momma was a little girl.

Momma flunked out of Minneapolis Southwest High School for truancy. By 10th grade, she had to work to help feed the family, and my grandmomma, Jante, didn't know how to get her excused from school. Jante was from Chicago and moved to Minneapolis for a housekeeper job at the Curtis Hotel. Over the summer, Momma would try to take classes because jobs were harder to find when all the black girls were out of school.

Momma got caught up in her classes, and Jante persuaded the principal at St. Paul Central High School to let her attend school the next year. I remember Jante telling me the story about how she got Momma back in school, a lesson I think she wanted me to learn.

Jante said to me, "If your mother worked hard in her lessons, and was willing to stay after to help clean classrooms, the principal would allow her to be a student at the school."

The principal warned my momma saying, "If it ain't clean, you might as well not come back."

When Momma wasn't in school or working, she ran with kids from her neighborhood. She could share a piece of the money they got from selling drugs or from stuff they stole.

Momma always told me, "I knew when I needed to be workin' at the school cuz sometimes I knew the small stuff the gang had their eyes on was a one way ticket to prison. I didn't want that. I just wanted to go to school."

Momma wasn't the popular girl in the gang, but she didn't care. Her time filled up with work at the school and completing her assignments. There was a sense of safety at school that Jante had worked out with the principal. By remaining in school to do her work, Jante and the principal ensured her a few more hours of safety from the streets.

My daddy was working at the Curtis Hotel when he met my momma, she was vacuuming the lobby carpet.

Daddy always said to me, "Yo Momma's been my best friend ever since I met her at the Curtis Hotel. Her high yella skin made my insides quiver like they was a churnin' butta. T'would melt like butta too, in this here Minneapolis summer sun."

My parents were married in early 1967—only 14 months after meeting—and soon momma was pregnant with me. By their wedding day, she was 19 years old, and had just finished high school. Daddy was 23. They lived in reduced rent housing furnished by the hotel for essential workers.

When I was old enough for kindergarten, Momma took a job in housekeeping, where she was responsible for cleaning patient rooms at General Hospital in Minneapolis. Howard stayed with the railroad and worked the Chicago run most of my childhood. As he gained seniority, and the attention of regular patrons, he was tapped for other jobs that paid better and were less work than being a porter.

So here I am a light-skinned, mixed race, black girl with medium blonde curly hair, not especially athletic, not especially smart, but not dumb neither; running with the gangs to keep myself from getting hurt, raped, or worse on my way to school. Ty was the first boy who said he liked me for more than just drugs or sex.

Back beneath the bleachers we'd meet, or in the hall between classes, or he'd come to hang out on my stoop. I thought we were best when we were together. Ty's dark complexion made me feel less white, and more accepted in our culture. Even Daddy liked him. I knew I liked him when he shared his last joint with me; sharing drugs with me always opened the door.

Ty was a lot taller and heavier than Daddy, which was very attractive to me because I knew next to him I'd be safe. If I couldn't be safe with the next man in my life after my Daddy, I was in trouble.

We started using and drinking together too. Our relationship grew in intensity with the ebbs and flows of our drug use or drinking. Cocaine and marijuana were practically on every street corner in Minneapolis.

Ty would come over in his beat-up 1973 Lincoln Continental. In the day, it had been a sweet ride. Now, it was just a dark chocolate brown car with a black vinyl top. It had graying white wall tires, and a loud engine. I could hear him coming from down the block. We'd go hang out at Lake Calhoun, and walk around the lake; concealing our joints as if they were cigarettes, and no one was the wiser that our Coke cans were filled with rum.

Sometimes we'd have a picnic lunch, eating homemade brownies, with cocaine sprinkled over them like powdered sugar. As long as we were quietly respectful of everyone else around the lake, the cops, and the gangs, wouldn't bother us. No one would have suspected what we were really doing. We were like chameleons, blending into the environment. We were never really paid much never mind.

It was the mid 1980's, a time when adults dressed in warm-up suits, and wearing hats or scarves that concealed their gender, walked baby carriages at midnight along the sidewalks of Chicago Avenue near Lake St. The funny thing was, there were no babies in those carriages. Maybe the police knew about this charade, but to us it was an effective way to know who and where the drugs were.

Sometimes, when Ty was playing football, I would wait for him under the bleachers, and other times, he would skip football practice altogether so we could drink or smoke more weed. Now and again when money was tight we got a lid of pot. We'd smoke it all. Usually I could make it home. A light-skinned girl in the neighborhood, walking with a nice groove didn't draw attention like a drunken white girl would. I got good at walking drunk. Walking high and drunk didn't always work for me; sometimes I'd stop and check out someone's back yard lawn furniture. You know, take a nap. When I was drunk, I'd be asleep in no time. If I was still with Ty when the booze kicked in, that's when he knew we needed a place to chill, or a car, or both.

We'd been together a month or so when I finally agreed to have sex with him. We parked his Lincoln by the boathouse below the Lake St. Bridge. Joggers would keep to the trails up by River Road so down by the boathouse was usually private.

Like most teenagers, we got used to having quick sex. The art of making love wouldn't come until much later. After hitting it by the boathouse, we'd go see where the parties were that night. Sometimes, we'd hang at Lake Harriet after dark, but the cops patrolled differently then, so we mostly stuck to the lakes during the day. The drive-in theatre in Cottage Grove, or hanging out at Southdale, were more interesting anyways. Kids our age were everywhere, and we all smoked weed or drank in public. The cops seemed to leave us alone there.

Because I didn't fit in with any of the girls, no matter what their color, I was in a clique of one; well, one plus Ty. Besides hanging with Momma, I didn't have much use for women anyway. So far, they were just the competition. I didn't always get what I wanted from the women in my life, but I did get some things. I learned from the women I encountered how to get what I wanted: men, sex, drugs, or booze.

But what I coveted, what I chased after was the power I had over men. They were easy targets, easy to outwit, easy to outplay, and easy to enjoy. Sometimes, my relationship with Ty was like that of a hooker and her john. He paid me with the things I wanted, got high or drunk with me, and pretty much did what he was told or I'd walk out. He often said I had the power in our relationship. If I said yes to his requests, I got what I wanted. If I said no, no one got anything.

About mid-way through my freshman year, Daddy caught me coming home still pretty high and mostly incoherent. I'd gotten pretty good at navigating in auto-pilot when I was drunk, but that's not how I was this time. No, I rushed home to make it before curfew. I should have just been late. But this time, I got home before I sobered up. Daddy caught me stumbling in.

When I didn't react, or care too much, about getting a beating or being yelled at, he decided to send me to the first of many residential treatment centers. When Daddy told my high school I'd be gone three to four weeks, for you know, "an extended illness," the guidance counselor helped him find a treatment center for me, and helped him fill out the appropriate paperwork.

I didn't care. So far, for me, except for spending time with Ty getting high or smokin', high school was just a waste of time. I knew that when I came back, Ty would be waiting. He always was.

More than once, I was sent to La Casa Esperanza. It was a Spanish themed board and care residential treatment facility about two hours southwest of Minneapolis. One of the specialties of this facility was working with drug and alcohol addicted teenage girls. I didn't like La Casa; there were too many people with too many problems.

As far as I saw it, I didn't have any problems. All the girls just seemed to talk about hating school or their boyfriends. The counselors focused on educating me about drugs and alcohol. So, I got educated, and wasted, with the new friends I'd made at La Casa.