Dope Sick Read Online Free PDF Page B

“He’s supposed to be trying out for the World Games.”
    â€œRasta Jesus? That’s a tough name.”
    Rasta Jesus was smooth and quick and about six seven, maybe even six eight. I wondered why anybody that big would even get into tae kwon do. Me and Maurice were thinking about taking some more lessons, but the guys we saw in the class at St. John’s looked way too good. We’d be doing catch-up for three years.
    â€œYou want to start back?” Maurice asked.
    â€œYeah.”
    We copped the A for the long ride back from Brooklyn, mostly talking about Rasta Jesus and the class we had just seen. I was talking on the tae kwon do, but my mind was on Lauryn and how her mama wouldn’t let me come to the apartment.
    â€œThis is my apartment and I’m going to say whocomes in and who don’t come in and I don’t care who likes it and who don’t!” she said, shaking her fat finger in front of my face and wiggling her ugly head. “You want to see Brian, then you get your own apartment, and if she want to raise him up there, she can. But she ain’t bringing him to your mama’s house, because I don’t like what’s going on, and you know what I mean!”
    I felt like punching her in her face, but I knew that wouldn’t do any good. Really, I thought she wanted me to hit her. A lot of people do that, try to sucker you into doing a hurry-up so you come off looking stupid. I wasn’t going for it, but she had me feeling bad.
    Me and Moms was living in Section 8 housing, and I thought that if Lauryn and me got married, we could get our own place. A week after Lauryn had Brian, we had went down to the welfare office and talked to some punk interviewer who ran us through a lot of garbage about the rules of Section 8 and how I had to be working and earning a minimum wage and all that.
    â€œIf I had all that hooked up, I wouldn’t be down here talking to you,” I said.
    Lauryn said I shouldn’t have lost my temper.
    â€œWhy you getting mad all the time?” she asked me outside the dingy-looking building on 14th Street. “He’s got to say what he’s got to say because that’s his job.”
    â€œHey, girl, this is supposed to be a place where you can catch a break, right?” I answered. “You see all them junkies and guys who just got out of jail and stuff? They running up, signing for their checks, and getting into the wind. We trying to make it as a family and we got to hear his mouth.”
    â€œLil J, you need to have an attitude check, baby,” Lauryn said. “There’s just two things going down. You either walk away when people get into your face or you don’t. If you got the cash to walk away, then you don’t have to take nothing. But if you ain’t got the cash to dash, you got to take their stuff. You know that, so why are you tripping over what he had to say?”
    â€œDon’t go white on me, Lauryn,” I said.
    â€œDon’t do what ?” Lauryn turned and looked at me. “Don’t go white on you?”
    She sucked her teeth and picked up her stride as we walked toward Sixth Avenue. I caught up with her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away.
    â€œHey, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean nothing.”
    â€œIf you didn’t mean nothing , you’d better inform your mouth, because evidently your lips were meaning something !” she said.
    I took Lauryn home, or at least to the door, and that’s when her mama ran the whole thing about how I couldn’t come into her house. Normally, Lauryn would have been in my corner, but she was mad and didn’t speak up.
    What I believed was that Lauryn’s mama was trying to bust us up. The first thing she had done was to get Lauryn to name the baby Brian, after Lauryn’s father. Brian Alexander had died when Lauryn was four years old, and she hardly remembered him at all. I