Honey, Honey, Miss Thang

Detra

"1 was in quicksand, and 1found a branch to hold on and pulled myselfout ofit. " Detra I know some people say that drugs allow people to cope with their problems. Not cope, but escape from them. It's not a coping situation 'cause you don't cope with your problems when you're high. You just postpone them until after you're sober up. So really it's just a way oftrying to escape, but it's just like, you know, it's just like they just waiting there for you when you wake up. When I get high, right, I'm able to play those roles better because of it. So when I'm with those customers I can get into the role model better. But I'm still trying to figure out why I continue to use drugs. The time when I was in the hospital for five months was about the only time I've stopped using drugs for a long period oftime. I've signed up for treatment, but I never went. Well, I do have a habit, and from what I hear, these programs take so long to get in. You still have to shoot up while you're put on a waiting list. I do want to stop, 'cause it's getting to the point where the stuff is really garbage. I'm getting tired. I am getting tired. My street name is Detra. When my mother's mad at me or something like that she calls me by my real name. When she feels like playing with me, she calls me Detra. I'm thirty years old. My mother is fifty-five now, and my father died when he was thirty. I guess I was around nine or ten when he was shot. He worked at one ofthose there meat storage, cold storage freezers, 111 11a Honey. Honey. :n.tJ:1ss Tha.ng up there on Seventh Street under the bridge, Hering, Seventh and Pendleton. We used to live at Twenty-third and Hering. King Street was having a gang fight, a gang war with Coaltown, the Barnfield Street gang. My father was coming from work, walking up Hering, and he caught a stray bullet. They caught the fellow and they prosecuted him and all that. My mother made sure ofthat'cause she went to court, you know. Made sure that he got punished. I don't think he did life or anything like that, but he did go to jail. When he died I didn't cry. I was more concerned about my mom and how she was taking it. My mother refused to bury him in the tie, the tradition~, because she said he was young, you know. She didn't want to dress him like that. Well, he had a black silk suit with a white turtleneck and a medallion with a fist on it, which represents strength. And me and my brother we wore black silk suits and white turtlenecks, and my two sisters wore pleated skirts with the black vest and white turtlenecks, you know. And my mom didn't want all these phony relatives that only comes up, she said, "They only come out when someone is dying." So she didn't want all that. So we didn't have the usual thing at the house, you know, when the family comes. She didn't want all the relatives calling, getting into her business about insurance, you know. My mother is very, very ... she just didn't believe in all that because they were phony. And then after the funeral she told me and my brother, "Y'all go out and have fun with your friends. I don't want y'all 'round the house moping and stuff about Dad." So I wound up, you know, going out with my friends, hanging out with them. And then I also think she wanted to be alone, you know, because a couple of night after, I used to hear her crying late at night when everybody was asleep. 'Cause it was like, I think, about seventeen years they, you know, were married. I remember him. Although I'm closer with my mother than I was with my father, he was very ... he was very good. My brother resembles him more than I do, but, you know, I never forget when I was little, some fellow, some boy had hit me and I wouldn't hit him back. And my...