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was fucking up his image. Once she popped up pregnant with me and wouldn’t stop using, he stopped dealing with her.
    I was born flagpole-high, premature, and super dependent on whatever my mother was using while I was inside of her. Once I stabilized, the social workers released me to my grandmother’s care. My mother was always in and out of rehab or drifting around the city. My grandmother never lied to me about who my parents were. She was the first to tell me my mother was never quite right. She ain’t have to say much about my father because his name rang bells in my neighborhood anyway. He started out just a rip-and-run stickup kid and that’s how he got his nickname “Dicey,” he liked to rob back-alley dice games when he was younger. That’s before he started pimpin’.
    I heard a lot of stories about him from the old heads on the block, about the endless niggas he’d disappeared or broke bones on, for fucking around on his ho-stroll over in CodmanSquare. He was known for driving an all-black tinted-out Buick Electra, the old-timers called it a “Deuce and a Quarter,” his always had hundred-spoke gold rims and whitewall tires. The old-timers would tell me that I looked just like him all the time. It’s hard to say, I’ve never met him face-to-face. He sent money and toys to my grandmother’s house when I was younger. She’s the one who really raised me until she took sick when I was five while still my mother was gone chasing the high.
    I saw my father’s Deuce and a Quarter cruise past me a few times but I couldn’t see through those night-black tints on his windows. I sort of knew his face from the pictures of him on my mother’s dresser, with him and her in front of his car, her poking her ass out, him gripping it, and a gang of his tricks lining both sides of them.
    I think I saw him one time in the flesh while I was taking the bus home from school. He was walking out of a bodega on Blue Hill Avenue. His black Deuce and a Quarter was parked a block up the way and two tall skinny brown-skin cats with long wavy perms and three-piece suits were strolling toward it, they both looked alike, one must’ve been him and the other was probably one of my uncles, but who can tell? The bus turned and I lost sight of them.
    He stopped sending money and presents and disappeared completely when I was six. This was around when my grandmother died and my mother finally came back home. Word on the streets was that he got caught up with some cats from over in Roxbury and he took a few hoes and dipped off somewhere down south, to hide out. After my grandmother died, my mother got clean for a little bit. Her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor encouraged her to go to church and she became a church lady, but I never trusted that shit.
    We heard no word from my father for two years, and then randomly he started sending us envelopes with money stuffed inside a card with a picture of two dice. No words. No return address.
    It was clear as day, he wasn’t really fuckin’ with us, but my mother started praying about him and meanwhile worshipped his memory. She kept all of the cards in a neat stack on the nightstand beside her bed. Every morning when she got dressed, she’d put on a couple dabs of the big bottle of Brut aftershave she had, she said she had it in her purse when he kicked her to the curb.
    She took the money and the envelopes as a sign that he still loved her and that maybe he’d come back. She was a pathetic sight to see in those days. The way she’d talk about him like he’d just been over to our apartment or something. She told me she got clean just for him and for two years she stayed clean, wishing on a star. Rumors started up when I was nine that he was back in town but I never saw him or his car around. The envelopes stopped coming when I was ten and the word on the streets was that old beef had caught up to him and someone shot him while he was sitting in his Deuce and a Quarter, outside Brother’s,