"Boy, I used my best print, handwriting, or whatever it's called!"

"Girl, you can't use a handwritten resume. You have to type it!" He spoke as if he were talking to a dummy. I hated when people took that tone of voice with me-as if I were stupid or something.

"Don't worry," he said, seeing the irritation on my face. "Sharon has a typewriter."

Luckily, Sharon had stolen a typewriter from the same house she'd stolen the resume book. She gladly let me use her typewriter to type the resume. I hadn't used a typewriter since "graduating" from vocational school, though I still remembered the basic finger placements. Because I was high on uppers, I was able to type quite fast, though not accurately. It took me a few hours and an entire bottle of liquid Wite-Out to type the resume. When I was done, it looked horrible. I had inserted the paper into the typewriter crookedly, so all the words slanted to the left. There were huge clumps of Wite-Out all over the paper, which I hadn't waited to dry before retyping. Not realizing I'd had the "Caps Lock" on, some words were typed in all capital letters. Some words were misspelled; others had letters missing; and still others had two letters on top of each other as a result of my forgetting to hit the space bar.

"I can't use this damn thing!" I yelled, frustrated at the mess I'd made.

"Yes, you can," Sharon said as she punched me for cussing. "Just Wite-Out everything that's wrong or messed up. Then, make a copy of it, make corrections and then copy that copy. The final document will look perfect because Wite-Out doesn't show up on copies."

Who said thieves ain't got no sense?

By the time I was done, the resume was almost perfect. Though it still had a few misspelled words, and it still sat on the paper crookedly, I decided it was good enough. So I began looking for a job.

For a couple of months, my search turned up nothing. Meanwhile, I stood in the mirror twice a day, every day, and practiced my speech exercises. I found the "exercises" even more enjoyable when I was high because I could have entire conversations with make-believe people. I began watching "white shows" and then pretended to be speaking to the rich white folks I'd seen on TV: Tom Brokaw, Dr. Ruth, and Barbara Walters. Tommy was right: they never cussed. Never.

The partiers readily agreed to punch me whenever I cussed or spoke street, mainly because they didn't think I could change. They began to take bets on how long it would take before I got frustrated with "trying to be white" and quit altogether. Their doubts made me even more determined to make it. Their punches also helped me in my determination. At first, they were punching me all the time. And, they punched really hard, thinking I'd give up so I wouldn't get punched again. But I was adamant about not quitting. I swore to myself that before three months were up, there'd be no more punches. The more they said I couldn't change, the more I wanted to.

They tried everything to deter me.

"You was born a ghetto nigga. And dat's all you ever gon' be is a ghetto nigga!" one of them would tease. When those comments didn't sway me, they made others.

"Who ever heard of a dope fiend talking properly?" another would ask as they all busted up laughing.

I remembered Candy and Money, a ho and a pimp, both of whom talked properly. I knew it could be done.

The more they laughed, teased, and challenged me, the more persistent I became. I began to practice more and more. Soon, it wasn't just in front of the mirror in the mornings and evenings, but at the grocery store, talking to the gas-station attendant, even talking to the dope man.

"Yes. I would like a ten-dollar container of marijuana," I'd request in the most formal, proper voice I could muster.

The dope man would pause for a moment, give me a funny look, and say, "Girl, why you tryin' to be white?"

Ignoring him, I'd repeat my request. "Yes, I would like a ten-dollar container of your best marijuana, sir." And, I'd give him my white smile, which I'd also been practicing. (My white smile was a kind, gentle, all-teeth smile. My "ghetto" smile was more of an eye-piercing, eyebrows-furrowed and lips-curled, menacing snarl.) Laughing, the dealer would shove the bag into my hand, "Here gurl, wit' yo' crazy ass. Looked at your skin lately?"

"Thank you very much, sir," I'd reply, ignoring his nasty comment and feeling proud of myself for having gone through the whole transaction without using any cusswords or slang.

Tommy was right. The more I practiced, the better I got. I concentrated on completing my words, not cussing, and not using slang. Within a couple of months, the punches reduced from thirty to thirty-five a day, to twenty to twenty-five a day. Within five months, they were less than ten a day.

"I'll be damned," one of the partiers exclaimed in disbelief. I'd been relentlessly practicing my speech for over six months. A bunch of us were sitting around, drinking, talking, and getting high. All night, I'd properly requested to be handed the joint, a drink, the straw, or the pipe. Each time my request was fulfilled, I politely said, "Thank you." And I hadn't said one cussword all night.

"The bitch did it!" the partier continued in disbelief. "The fuckin' bitch done taught herself to talk 'white.' Y'all trippin' off dis?" she asked the others, her eyes wide open as if she'd seen a ghost. I wasn't sure if it was the shock of realizing my successful verbal transformation or the effects of freebasing that made her eyes grow so big. Not waiting for an answer, she continued: "I never thought it could be done. I never thought she'd do it. But, the bitch done fuckin' did it!"

I sat back, hit the pipe, and smiled smugly.

However, I never completely and totally spoke properly. I'd always end up throwing in a "fittin' to" or an "ain't" somewhere in the conversation. And sometimes I had problems "translating" words from slang. But for the most part, my speech had improved so much that a person could no longer tell my ethnicity just from talking to me on the phone.

- While my speech was drastically and speedily improving, my job search wasn't. I'd been searching for over three months, and the results were disappointing. I searched the newspaper daily looking for legal-secretary positions. I called, using my most formal, whitest voice, to schedule an interview. But once I showed up, everyone wanted at least two or more years of legal experience. At least, that's what they said as they looked me up and down, gawking at my halter top, shiny skintight gold disco pants, and five-inch heels. I decided I should shift from the legal-secretary ads. Three weeks later, I found a job.

A title company was advertising for a word processor for its third shift: 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. This was perfect for me because I could stay up until 7:00 A.M., but I couldn't get up at 7:00 A.M. I called and scheduled an interview for the next night.

The title company's word-processing department sat in its own corner of a large building. The "department" was a small, plain room with six computer stations where the processors-the third shift consisted of all women-sat and typed land descriptions for title insurance policies.

I arrived for the interview a half hour late and was met at the door by a tall white woman who introduced herself as Andrea, the shift supervisor. One look at her and I knew we would get along: her form-fitting blouse with its plunging neckline made her large tits exceptionally obvious. She wore a short miniskirt; her black patent-leather stiletto heels called attention to her long, sexy legs.

We sat at one of the workstations and began to chat. Although she had my resume in front of her, she didn't ask me anything about it. Instead, she complimented me on my miniskirt and I complimented her on hers. We spent the next half hour talking about where to buy the sexiest minis and halter tops and who had the best prices on stiletto heels. Then the conversation switched to a lengthy discussion of our mutual contempt for those wimpy women who couldn't sport five-inch heels. By the end of the interview, we were laughing and chatting like old friends.

Andrea told me that she loved my style and my carefree personality. She said that I was "just the type of girl" she'd been looking for, that I would fit into the night shift perfectly, and that if I wanted the job, it was mine.

"Of course, I want it!" I yelped. I couldn't believe my luck-finally, after months of trying, I'd gone on my first interview with a title company and gotten the job, just like that. We agreed I would start the following week.

As I stood to leave, I felt that since she was giving me a chance, I should at least try to be half-assed honest with her.

"Andrea," I said as we walked toward the door, "I like you. I really do, and I really need this job. But I feel like it just wouldn't be right if I'm not honest with you."

She stopped walking, and looked at me, patiently waiting for me to continue.

"I need to tell you that my typing speed is probably a little less than sixty-five words per minute." I had stopped walking and was standing with my head bowed down.

You idiot! I screamed at myself. Who the fuck said it pays to be honest?

I was sure my declaration of truthfulness had just cost me the job. I stood completely still, waiting for her to gruffly inform me that I was not so perfect for the job after all.

Instead, she giggled, gave me a big smile, and looked at me with her big blue eyes.

"Don't worry about it," she said as she gently placed her hand on my back and resumed escorting me to the door. "I like you. That's all that matters. Besides, typing is all you'll be doing here, so your speed will increase fast."

She patted me on my back as I stepped through the door into the cool evening air. I smiled and began to turn and walk away when she tapped me on my shoulder and added: "Anyway, we've got something for that." She gave me a coy little wink and quickly closed the door.

What the hell did she mean by that?

It didn't take long for me to find out.

32.

TOMMY WAS ECSTATIC about my getting a job. My party friends couldn't believe it.

"You the luckiest nigga I ever seen in my life!" one of them exclaimed as he took a swig of Wild Turkey.

"Dey say luck is just God's way of being anonymous," Shelly, a fellow partier, said as she hit the joint.

At the reference to God, the whole room got silent. We never talked about God. It just didn't seem like the appropriate thing to do when getting high-and we were always getting high. Victor broke the uncomfortable silence.

"Where the fuck you learn a big word like 'anonymous'?" he shouted at Shelly.

"She been watching Tom Brokaw!" someone else chimed in. Everyone broke out laughing. Shelly smiled sheepishly, but didn't respond. I was glad they'd changed the subject.

"You serious 'bout this working thing, huh?" Victor asked as he passed me a joint.

I was very serious, especially after I'd summed up the people I hung with. They saw people with jobs as "unique" folks. I didn't know many partiers that had legitimate jobs, but those that did were sort of put in a different category from the rest of us. Working showed dedication and commitment; it somehow made their drug use okay because it wasn't all they did. I noticed that those who had jobs were even viewed as though their drug use was acceptable.

I immediately called Daddy and Jr. to tell them I'd gotten a job. Though I spoke with them regularly by phone, I rarely saw either of them. It wasn't that I didn't love them; it was simply because neither of them partied. All I did was party. Besides, whenever I did see them, their fussing spoiled my fun and ruined my high. So I'd check in with them every once in a while, usually by phone. I kept the physical visits to a minimum. So although they knew I'd been looking for a job, they never believed I had taken the issue seriously.

"Cup," Jr. would say calmly, "you can't go to a job interview in a halter top."

So they were really surprised upon learning the news that I'd finally gotten a job. In fact, I could hear the pride in their voices.

Tommy was right. I thought smugly, satisfied that Daddy and Jr. were sort of proud of me. This job thing is paying off already.

- A few hours before I was to start my first night on the job, Tommy dropped the final "requirement" of his plan: I'd have to change my past.

"What do you mean 'change my past'?" I snapped.

"The same way you got that resume," he snapped back. "Make it up!"

I still didn't get it.

"Cup, white folks are scared of gangbangers. If you tell them about your gang days, they'll think you still have that type of behavior in you. They'll be afraid you might have a flashback on them. They'll be afraid to be around you. If they know about your robbing and thieving, they'll be afraid you'll steal from them."

Tommy continued. "And white folks loathe street people. If you tell them about your homeless days, sleeping in parks and eating out of trash cans, they'll think you're crazy, because only crazy people sleep in parks or eat out of trash cans."

Not just crazy people-what about desperate people?

"White folks are scared of anything that's not nice, prim, and proper," Tommy said. "Your past is anything but nice, prim, OR proper. You've got to change it if you want to make it in the working world, which, like it or not, is the white man's world."

I thought about what he said. I knew a few white folks. "Dirty white trash" is the phrase they once told me their own folks used to refer to them. I never asked why they were called that. I figured it was because their clothes were dirty most of the time, and they were white. Where the "trash" part came from, I didn't know, nor did I care. What I did care about was that they drank, drugged, and partied. None of them knew my past. They'd never asked either, and I never volunteered.

"But what should I say my past is? And how the fuc-I mean, how do I make it up?"

"Listen, think of the life you always wanted and, well, make it yours! Think of how you would have liked your life to be, and say that's how it was!"

"Wow, that's pretty simple."

"Simple as one, two, three."

"So did you make up your life? I mean, is what you told me about your mom, dad, and sister real, or was it a fantasy of how you'd have liked your life to be?"

"No, it's all real, just not complete. I left out the messed-up parts, like how my dad used to drink and fight a lot. Like I said, white folks don't like violence, so I left the violent parts out."

Is it white folks that made you leave out those parts of your past, or is it your own pain in remembering them? Could you be blaming white folks for your own unwillingness or inability to deal with your past?

I didn't give myself time to seriously reflect on these thoughts because, even if Tommy's reticence about his past was really due to his own pain, I understood his point. My past was so fucked up, so full of hurt and things I'd just sooner forget that I figured it would be better for me to create a new and better one too. Again, Tommy was onto something.

But what kind of past should I create?

I kept hearing Tommy say, Think of the life you've always wanted.

It wasn't hard. When I was in Lancaster, I used to wish I was Marcia Brady of The Brady Bunch.

Hey, don't laugh.

Who wouldn't want to be Marcia? She had two loving parents; brothers and sisters who loved and supported her; no one was raping her or beating her; and she could eat as much as she wanted. And from the looks of it, she ate well-not just rice and beans. Alice was always cooking up all kinds of goodies. She lived in a large, beautiful house. She had the cutest, latest clothes. And, on top of all that, she had a dog and a maid! Yup. Marcia Brady had it going on! If I could have been anyone different or have lived life differently, it would have been as Marcia Brady. Except, instead of a white girl, I would have been a light-skinned black girl with long hair so that I'd be pretty. But I knew that no matter how much I pretended, I wasn't ever going to be light-skinned. My skin color wasn't ever going to change.

I decided it would be better to stick with the parts of the past I could change-if only in make-believe. So the Brady story is the story I adopted as my own. But instead of the three brothers and two sisters Marcia had, I told people I had five brothers. I figured that if I really had had five brothers, Pete wouldn't have raped me and Mr. Bassinet wouldn't have forced me into cheerleading practice. And although I would say that my mother had died, I'd leave out the part about finding her. That was still just too painful. And I'd tell them that my daddy, my real daddy-not the sperm donor-raised me and my brothers, and we all lived happily in a huge house that looked just like the Brady house, except in a black neighborhood. I figured saying we had a maid might have been going too far, so I left that part to the TV show.

A little while later, as we were tooting lines, I recited my freshly created past to Tommy. He liked it instantly. He said it was refreshingly devoid of sex, drugs, and violence-an acceptable, normal, ordinary past.

- That night, I started my job as the sixth word processor on the third shift. The other five were white girls ranging from twenty to fifty years old. They all loved miniskirts, tight jeans, sexy blouses, and high heels, though they couldn't wear anything higher than three and a half inches. And, just as Andrea had, they seemed to like me, and I liked them right from the start.

After Andrea introduced me to the girls, she told everyone to "tell a little something about themselves" so we could all get better acquainted. The girls all pretty much told the same story: where they were from (San Diego, Iowa, Ohio, etc.), how many siblings and children they had, what their parents did (doctors, teachers, businessmen, etc.). When my turn came, I recited my newly created history and waited for their reaction. They listened with what seemed to be minor interest and appeared to accept the story without question. I told myself that night that, from then on, if anyone ever asked me about my childhood, that would be the story I'd tell. Diane, the Bassinets, the Eight-Tray Gangstas, the tricks, violence, crimes, and every other part of my miserable, sordid past would be hidden away, never to be mentioned again.

Because we were the third shift, the whole building was absolutely deserted except for us. The entire third shift loved to party, and they loved to talk about it. All night, all we did was type, talk, and laugh. Type, talk, and laugh. We'd type the property descriptions, talk about our partying escapades, and laugh at the comical parts. (Of course, I left out the stories about my getting beaten up or put out of a club in a drunken stupor.) I used these conversations with the girls to practice speaking properly. So I ended up practicing eight hours a night.

The girls weren't aware of it until one night, as we were discussing how men needed to learn to address women in nightclubs, I blurted out that I had been practicing speaking so I would sound "right." I didn't tell them the truth: that I really did it so I could sound "white." That just didn't seem like the appropriate thing to say in a room full of white folks.

"But we think you speak just fine," Tina replied. Tina had been at the title company for a year. She was thin, with dirty-blond hair, and although she was only twenty-years old, she already had three children.

"Yeah, but that's because I've been working on it for a while now, so it's already improved quite a bit. If you'd heard how I talked before this, you'd have been like, 'What the fuc-' I mean, you would not have liked it. Anyway, I can still use improvement so just let me know if you hear me say something that's 'street' or if you hear me cuss."

"What's 'street'?" Tina asked as she cocked her head to the side-like, somehow by holding it in that position, it would help her understand. "I mean, like, how will we know whether something is 'street' or not?"

"Yeah," the others said in unison.

I was amazed at their ignorance.

"I'll tell you what. If you hear a word you don't understand, it's probably street. Just bring it to my attention so that I won't use it again. Okay?"

"Okay," they replied, again in unison.

"But we aren't going to say anything about your cussing, because hell, we all do it," Sandra stated moodily. At fifty, Sandra was the oldest of the group. She was grossly overweight, but she never let her weight stop her from wearing skintight clothes; though she would constantly complain that her pants and skirts were cutting off her circulation. I admired her for not being afraid to dress like she was a size 10 when in reality she was a size 20. Nor did the fact that she wore eyeglasses as thick as Coke bottles deter her from her self-image as a beauty queen. She thought she was hot shit, and had no problem telling you so.

Sandra was right about the cussing, though. Not only was cussing allowed during the third shift, it was expected and regularly used-especially when telling stories of hot and wild party adventures. So though the girls never said anything about my cussing, they would correct me whenever I said something street. Soon, it became almost like a language lesson for both sides. Whenever they did bring a slang word to my attention, I had to explain to them what it meant. Then they'd go around all night saying, "Use it in a sentence!" And once someone did, we'd all crack up laughing. They loved learning the meanings of the slang words, and I appreciated the extra help with practicing the regular use of proper words. It became a game that made the verbal transformation that was transpiring in my life much more pleasurable.

Still, they didn't have to correct me often, since I was practicing on my own regularly. Soon, I could go from talking slang with my friends to using proper speech when at work. I could make the switch at will and without effort, though I never got perfect at proper speech. I had to (and still do) concentrate on what I was saying and constantly remind myself to speak correctly.

I was actually enjoying working-it didn't interfere with my partying, especially since when I was at work I stayed high on coke, meth, black beauties, or other uppers, which provided me with extraordinary energy-that is, when it was good shit. Every so often, I'd cop a "bad batch," which is what happened one night shortly after I'd started working. The blow was so bad, it wasn't keeping me up or giving me energy. In fact, the only indication I'd snorted anything was the fact that it caused my nose to run nonstop. I walked around constantly sniveling and wiping my nose.

"You got a cold?" Sandra asked gruffly. We were in the bathroom. She was coming out of one of the stalls; I was standing over the sink blowing my nose, trying to get it to dry up. She wasn't trying to be gruff; it's just that she was huffing and puffing from the effort of trying to force her fat ass back into her skintight pants that were two sizes too small. Any other time the sight would have been comical, but with snot flowing out of my nose like Niagara Falls, I didn't have time to take pleasure in it. I was so preoccupied with my nose, that her question caught me off guard.

"What?" I asked, irritated that she'd interrupted my concentration with trying to stuff a large piece of twisted tissue up my nose.

"I said, do you have a cold?" she repeated. She'd successfully forced her zipper closed. But her stomach poured out over the top of her pants. Looking at it, it reminded me of how beer foam oozes out over the top of a glass that's been poured too full. She stood there trying to hold in her breath in an effort to relieve some pressure.