Excerpt from THEMKIDS, a one-act I’ve developed based on my experience teaching special needs students at a high school in THE BRONX.
My moms is fuckin’ sleep all the fuckin’ time. I be knockin on her door tryin to wake her the fuck up, but she don’t usually say nothing, ‘cept maybe “mmmmnnn”.
So, like every morning, here I is trying to get Janeese to wash her ass.
She be perfect in every way, I swear. She go to a regular school, she read and study her homeworks like she a white girl, and she talk like a white girl, plus then she got to wear bright colors cause she got this thing about how wearing too much black put your mind in dark thoughts; but that bitch got issues with washing her ass in the morning. She be saying the bathtub too grimy for her to take a bath.
Her thing is, she wash her important parts in the sink and take a shower at school on the days she got p.e. class. I tell her that some a’her parts, she need to soak. It nasty to be headin’ out the house only half-clean.
Janeese got all kind a’ ways she need things to be.
She don’t watch no tv ‘cause she like say it make your mind freeze. She read instead. She stay with a book in her hand, up in the kitchen with her chocolate milk.
She don’t eat no more meat cause like her school told her the pigs be sufferin’ when they die for us to eat bacon and pork chops. Now who gonna stop eating pork chops—unless you muslim? Everyone eat pork chops!
Anyway, I been like lookin’ out for Janeese since she was born.
I waited for her to come out my moms stomach. No lie, I was really waitin’.
Like, you know, I used to look at my momma’s big stomach and try to figure out what Janeese would look like—was she gonna be a boy or a girl. I wanted to be like another mom to the baby.
Guess I was, too, for a few years. Then like we had to go to the foster homes…
They took Janeese from me and moms and she ended up with some freaks in Harlem—I stood in the Bronx. It was only for like a year, but it seem like we was apart forever.
My moms had fucked up with this drunk bastard she said was like her second husband. They wasn’t married for real cause she never did get no divorce from my daddy, wherever the fuck he is.
To make a long story short, Harold, her like fake husband and my moms used to fight up in our place when they was toasted. Since we in the projects, and you can’t be fightin’ and carryin’ on every day and in the middle of the night, somebody called the police.
The police had been comin over so many times that they had to just finally say it was dangerous for me and Janeese to be living there. The time they took us away, was the time Harold had done punched momma in her ear.
The police found me and Janeese under a blanket hiding in the bath tub. Janeese was only like eight at the time. I was twelve.
Two days later, I was movin in with some freaks they placed me with in the like South Bronx.
My baby sister was so far away --- with some stuck-up fucks in Harlem, I thought “wellp!” I’ll never see her again.
After a year, they gave us back to our moms.