Murder teased. I was missing Mama. The feeling: drunken anger, irrationally bitter and sharp as broken bottle glass. I questioned if I ever loved her. I supposed I did. Good boys always love their mothers. Yet, I couldn’t imprison the feeling because there was no real evidence and the emotion was slippery, slipping through my hands like baby oil on a voluptuous striper’s thighs. I knew if I went too deep, thinking about her stormy sea, I’d drown. I never learned to swim. I missed her real bad that night -- before the sun or sobriety crept itself back into existence like a cheating husband. And in that dark, I was alone, just me, the liquor, and stickiness of desperation, I could even smell her. She lingered, haunting my memory with that awful perfume-- suffocating and unashamed. I remembered her aching red eyes and wanting to be beautiful face caked with make-up. She used to sing those Billy Holiday songs. She did have a beautiful voice, my mama. I remembered it was heavy and tortured like a mutilated dead body tied to a cotton fan and tossed in a muddy Mississippi river. Her breath was always saturated with Seagram’s’ Gin complimented by a broken hurt, or was it the other way around? She was usually drunk by my bedtime which only animated the pain in her voice. And she felt it deep like a knife that kept twisting. I still remember the agony. I still remember twisted vile lips spitting fire. I still remember weak hands balling themselves into fists and hitting. I still remember the screaming. I still remember my father. He liked to drink as if it was an Olympic sport. He also liked to beat my Mama. He would hit strategically to never leave bruises. His hands were quick and sliced razor sharp but never in the face, but behind knees, armpits, small of the back, bottom of the feet, anywhere hidden. Mama did seem to love to piss him off. She would start the minute he’d get home, barking maniacally like a bitch in heat, driving Daddy out of the house to drink in the streets. Daddy wouldn’t return until late in the morning just before sun, belligerently inebriated and smelling like somebody else’s bloody pussy and perfume. It was a game for them, their tango.
Mama killed Daddy. It was August, the sun was angry and the wind ran off with the moon. In an un-air-conditioned house, I sat on the my Mama's so beloved white carpeted floor in front of the black and white television, tasting the sour miserable sweat that poured profusely from the pores of my forehead. I captured each acerbic drop of melancholy on the bed of my tongue. In the background there was the usual five o'clock screaming and cursing: Mom and Dad making love in the kitchen. The fights were like clockwork and they were never late. I remember the "I Love Lucy Show" that was on and it was one of those episodes where devious Lucy was up to one of her schemes again and poor old Ricardo was about to catch her. Then there was a gunshot. It didn’t come from the television. The sound was so loud that it felt like my ears were bleeding. I sat confused and frozen. Before my eyes could capture enough tears, I watched as my Mother walked before me smiling. She held a cigarette in her left hand in which she inhaled and then exhaled perfect white clouds. The gun was in her right hand and it dragged the smell of burned violence. She sat next to me. She touched my head gently and ran her fingers through my coarse hair. She laughed because Lucy made a comical face. It was an “I love Lucy” marathon that day, and we sat there for two hours, as she insanely laughed at the television as if nothing had happened or the room didn’t smell of murder. When the show finally went off, she touched my head again. I tried not to think or ask any questions. I tried to calm the loudness of my beating heart, the tears that were standing at the edge of my eyes and the lips that wanted to beg "Mama what did you do?" The gun was most visible and it stood before us defiant and monstrous. I tried to think of others things but all I could do was imagine my father dead on the kitchen floor. I never looked directly at her, feeling the weight of the gun breathing down my neck, thinking briefly that she just might turn it on me. I just stared at her reflection displayed on the television between the commercials. Lucy had gone off and my favorite cartoon was now on, the coyote chasing the roadrunner, but I couldn't focus. My mama’s lip was being rude to her favorite yellow sun dress, dripping itself red all over. She began to laugh again but it wasn’t funny. Her laugh was like that song she would always sing when that knife in her heart started twisting. I laughed with her so she wouldn't feel alone. When the laughing stopped, she parted her lips to breath and said," Don't look at me, I don't want you looking at me with those eyes like your blackass daddy. I want you to listen to me hard and I want you to remember and never forget..... I loved yo Daddy ....I did and I tried real hard but he was a sorry ass nigga and you gonna be jus like him...... now get up go to the kitchen to see if he's dead." I removed myself slowly and walked towards the kitchen. I saw him lying on the floor with his head cracked open like a can of spilled tomatoes all over our white marble floor. Mama loved white. It was actually quite thrilling. I never really liked my father much, mostly because he never paid me any special attention, and when he did, he was always cruel. He never had more than couple of words to say to me, “stop acting like a sissy;” “that boy got more sugar in his walk than a field of sugar cane;” or his favorite,“ bring me a beer nigga.” After all of his cruelty, he seemed so small dead. I always thought of him as a giant, something inhuman, impervious and couldn’t be killed and it just seemed so unfair that only one bullet could be so final. "MAMA HE’S DEAD!" I screamed from the kitchen which was quickly followed by a second gunshot as she cracked her head open with the final bullet, splattering her brains silly all over the pearl white carpet she so much loved. Mama loved white. It was the same white carpet that no one could walk across with shoes, nor eat or do anything that was unclean, but still her blood painted it a red wine and a permanent sadness that could never be removed. I was twelve years old and I scrubbed that carpet until the cops came. I scrubbed it after they laid them both down in the dirt in matching blue coffins. I put a black rug over from what leaked from my Mama’s skull but it didn’t stop me from scrubbing. I scrubbed that carpet until the skin from my knuckles remove itself and ran. I scrubbed it with tears, vinegar, bleach, and nothing could get her blood out of it. I scrubbed it until it was a distant yellow mucous piss-like stain. But after too many years of trying to understand, make bloody red turn clean again, I grew tired of scrubbing. I poured diesel unleaded gasoline over unhealed wounds. I lit a match and dance to the rhythm of fire. I watched the past transform to ashes. I'm still scrubbing the blood off my face and hands.
Thirty five years later. I hate. Love. That’s what killed my Mama. Or insanity. I had been thinking about death all that day. I had been thinking about love. I had been thinking about killing. How I wanted to kill the feeling. My mama was half right. I would grow up to be just like my Daddy, empty and devoid of all human feeling, but with a twist of irony, I grew up to be more like her, crazy enough to fall in love with men I knew I couldn’t keep.
