Trying my hand at fiction.

This is what I wrote for a Creative Writing class:

They call me Mister Jones. My momma stuck one little bit of respect in my name because she never thought I would earn it on my own. I won’t, either. She left the little note tucked into the folds of my blanket before she put me on the steps of the Presbyterian church, knocked on the door and ran away.

That’s how I got my start, as one big game of ding-dong ditch. Hell, I don’t even know if that note that said “Mister” was supposed to be my name. Maybe that whore that birthed me was just trying to get a man’s attention like she was always doing.

There’s something fun about growing up a whore’s child. All the nuns in the orphanage give you that look where their eyes change shape all together. I swear it’s true. Those eyes turn into teardrops that look like they’re going to fall off the sides of their face when they look at a whore’s child. I was passed around from foster home to foster home, but I figured you could guess as much. That first lady I lived with, Shirley Thompson, I think, man she was a nice lady. But man, I hated living there. She lived in one of those big antebellum houses that folks had died in during the wars and stuff. Once, one of the housekeepers told me that a man had shot himself in the upper room where I slept. You just can’t find any sweet dreams in a room where some soldier blew his brains out. I swear it.

I moved around a lot, but it wasn’t so bad. Nobody ever laid a hand on me, but few God-fearing Baptist women do dare lay a hand on a 6’7 black boy whose mother had to get rid of him before she went out to turn tricks for the night. There was this other lady, Joan something, we called her Miss Joan even though she was married. It takes a special person to take in a foster kid, but I swear sometimes some of them are as crazy as a Bessie bug. So this Miss Joan, she used to pray for the demons to release my poor soul every time I acted up in school. I could hear her through the vents that connected her room to mine. She hadn’t figured out this vent thing, so one day I got bored and decided it was time for those demons to start talking back. I don’t know what demons sound like, but luckily, neither did Miss Joan. Anyways, I started talking in a real low, scary voice and convinced Miss Joan that the demons were actually coming down to earth to talk to her. She must have talked to those demons for more than an hour. Then I had to start wrapping up the conversation because the maid would be calling for dinner soon and I don’t think that demons take the same kind of dinner hours that we do. Maybe they do, but I doubt it. I swear, for almost three months after that, she would try to sprinkle me with a little holy water that she got from a missionary that came to speak at the Little Gethsemane House of Prayer last August.

I always get to this part of the story and people ask me when I started playing football. I have never touched a football in my life and I never plan on it. So they ask me when I started rapping. Rapping? Really? I don’t rap.

What have I done with my life then? (people who have done more always like to ask that question just so they can tell you what they’ve done.)

I survived.





For now.