Booker T: From Prison to Promise: Life Before the Squared Circle (6 page)

I had a sinking feeling. What would become of Bonita and me? The two of us felt like rag dolls in a game of tug-of-war, pulled apart at the seams. Danny and Gayle were gone without much of a trace, and slowly but surely everyone else bailed too. Though Carolyn and Billie Jean had told Aunt T. they would look after us, Bonita and I wound up going back to our house in South Park.

For a while, my nineteen-year-old brother Lash and twenty-five-year-old brother Don were still there.

Don came and went from the house, working odd jobs and not paying attention to Bonita or me, let alone lifting a finger to help out. Maybe he only stayed to avoid paying rent somewhere else. In some ways, I think he had never really adjusted to Texas life after moving from Louisiana. Having no true ties in Houston, Don probably struggled to put the pieces of his uprooted life back together. Ultimately, Don picked up and moved on, leaving us behind.

Lash never said anything about his feelings, but the deterioration of everything around us wreaked havoc on him too. There was no feeling of the family or security everyone had promised.

Bonita and I tried to live as we had before, waking every weekday morning, going to school, and coming home to play or watch television. When we got hungry, though, there was never any dinner and we had to scrape and salvage any canned and dry food left in the kitchen. Dry cornflakes and cans of cold beans now replaced Mom’s delicious cooking. Once in a while, Carolyn or Billie would bring a few things to eat or some fast food, but then they were gone for days in a row.

I truly believe Billie had it in her heart to be a motherly figure. As much as she may have imagined herself to be the one who would step up and champion our cause, she just was not capable. She was not ready to slow down and play house.

Things felt really bleak, and I was becoming more depressed and withdrawn. Our life slowly ran down into a sad state. It never seemed to dawn on anyone that the bills weren’t getting paid. Utilities were shut off one by one, starting with the electricity. Our once-thriving home was now just an empty, dark house with no soul.

One day I came home from school and noticed Lash’s things were gone. His car, his clothes, and even his toothbrush were nowhere to be found.

A night passed, then another, and still there was no sign of my brother. Finally I found out that Lash had decided to lead an entirely new life that didn’t include Bonita or me. He was literally down the street from our house, living with a buddy of his.

I was disappointed to be in the midst of a systematic family desertion. It was not difficult to understand why Lash had disappeared, but I was upset he had not reached out to us, invited us to dinner, or acknowledged us around town and school.

Occasionally I took the initiative to visit him at his friend’s house, which made the whole thing even stranger. Although his friend’s family was really nice, they didn’t ask about Bonita’s and my home life or lack thereof. On one or two occasions, they invited us in when we stopped by to see Lash, but that was the extent of things. I never felt more alone than when I left their house, knowing Lash was inside, apparently trying to forget all about his previous life.

I couldn’t understand why we were alone in a cold, unforgiving house. Things went from bad to worse to hell and beyond. It got to the point that almost every day brought a new obstacle for us to find some way over, under, or around. Without electricity, we depended on candlelight during those cruel nights. Sometimes we would even pray for a full moon to illuminate the darkness.

It was as if we were wishing on a fallen star. In the end, it was our hope that had fallen. We never knew what to expect. One day we would wake up and discover there was no running water. The next we would come home and find the gas had been shut off. Our yard was overgrown. The municipality did not pick up our trash even when we did set it out, so garbage was everywhere. The house was becoming extra creepy with its pungent odor, like some stranger’s shack we had been thrown into after being kidnapped. It was disgusting and terrifying.

I wanted my mom. Our brothers and sisters had sworn to take us in and give us love, protection, and guidance, but they’d failed us. It was all I could do not to sit and cry with Bonita, looking at the spot in the ceiling where our mother had crashed through. I daydreamed about setting the house on fire and running away with Bonita, but we had no place to go. We were stuck.

Some cloudy days had a little silver lining. A guy next door who knew what was happening would use a little street ingenuity to turn our utilities back on, but it was always temporary. The phone and electric companies caught wind of it and shut off their services, but we still appreciated this man’s kind attempt.

Other than that, while all the neighbors in our area knew about the trouble Bonita and I were facing, no one came around to check in on us. It was disheartening. In the movies or on television, I had seen the family with a mother who passed away and left behind an emotionally crippled and helpless widower with his confused children. Then there would be a knock at the door, and in would walk the neighbors with pots and pans of food to help in their time of need. That sure wasn’t the scenario in South Park in 1979.

Left to manage on our own, Bonita and I ate whatever we could find. By now we had no trash bags, so the garbage-ridden house became infested with roaches and pests. Rats crawled at our feet. Still no one showed their faces at our door, and I thought maybe we’d just die there unnoticed.

Day after day, night after night, the two of us fended for ourselves. Now that we were relying on only each other, we effectively forged into one person with two sets of eyes keeping watch. At night, we hid in bed in the shadows, frightened out of our minds at the prospect of someone with insidious intent lurking around the corner. Even though we had nothing worth taking, anyone could have easily broken in. To us, every little sound was a thief, a kidnapper, or a murderer.

We certainly did not go completely without violation in our home. One night, Billie Jean swung by to see how we were. She casually looked around, not seeming too concerned with the dilapidated conditions until she noticed one thing.

“Where’s the television set?” she yelled. “Bonita, Junior, where the hell is the TV set?”

I was startled. I honestly had not noticed it was gone. After all, the electricity had been out for months. Now that Billie brought it up, we quickly realized we had been ripped off. Years before, the television had been a gift from Billie and one of her sugar daddies. He was a great guy who owned a car dealership and lived to please my sister. In all reality, he was just a married sucker Billie was using, like all the other men she had wrapped around her finger.

One day my sister had influenced him to buy my mother a forty-inch television complete with a remote control. We were blown away when he wheeled it in and it glowed for the first time. It would replace our small black-and-white set with its twisted wire-hanger bunny ears and pliers attached to the knobs for changing channels. This new TV was the most valuable possession in our house. Billie was so proud of herself for giving Mom and us something nice to enjoy.

Now Billie stood in our dim living room screaming. “It was Robert Hill!” She looked around frantically. “I’m going out. You two stay put.”

Robert Hill? Up until then, the only thoughts I’d had of my former stepfather were of our good times fishing. Now he’d been tiptoeing around, stealing from us and his deceased ex-wife? The whole thing was disgusting to imagine.

He was in trouble now. The last thing you wanted to do was cross Billie. She was hotheaded and tough as nails, and she always carried her pride and joy, the Dirty Harry Callahan—style .44 Magnum, in her purse.

I later learned she put the word out on the street and did some investigating. When she found out Robert Hill had in fact broken in and stolen the set, she wasted no time tracking him down and confronting him with her .44.

“You motherfucker, you broke into my house and stole the TV I gave Madea? You better run!”

As he tried to flee in his car, she blasted a few shots right through his windshield.

Miraculously, he ducked and swerved out of the way, literally dodging bullets that would have blown his conniving head clean off.

In true Billie style, although the cops came and grabbed her, she ended up with only an assault charge. She was in a holding tank overnight, but nothing could stick to that girl. She casually strolled out of there the next morning, knowing Robert Hill would never, ever come around and mess with the Huffmans again.

Back at the house, life was getting more insane. Things were heating up Texas summer style, and we were completely out of water. Bonita and I thought about it a while and made a plan. We looked around the house and gathered fifteen water bottles to fill at the local gas station.

But there was an issue. The gas station was only a quarter of a mile down the road, but we had too many bottles to carry.
We’re fucked,
I thought. Or were we?

Over the last year or so, our family had come and gone and left us behind, taking everything in the house with them as they went. Interestingly, though, one item remained: my mom’s old Chevy Malibu. I guess my siblings thought it was junk, but I didn’t. I saw it as the last real piece of my mother still standing and ready to help us on our way.

The Malibu had definitely seen better days. Even though it ran, it could not go in reverse. That little detail did not make a bit of difference to me. Bonita and I ran out and loaded the backseat with the bottles, and I cranked up the engine, which backfired so loudly people must have thought there was a shooting. Down the street we went on a wing and a prayer.

The whole way there, I kept thinking,
What am I doing? I’m not old enough to drive, and here I am risking life and limb for the both of us—just to get water!

That rickety old car made good to the station, though, and we bailed out and commenced filling our containers. I felt totally demoralized and wondered what people thought of these two kids jumping out of a car and filling up one bottle after another. In the end, what they might have thought didn’t matter. The important thing was that we now had something to drink and wash ourselves with.

When we had filled every container, we were ready to go. Since the car couldn’t go in reverse, I asked Bonita to get in and steer while I pushed the car backward. She maneuvered a K-turn. Then, out of breath, I jumped in and started it up. We blasted off with that backfire and puttered all the way back to our lifeless hovel.

We made it home unscathed with our cache of gas station tap water. You would’ve thought we’d just scored a full-scale dinner with trimmings and all the soda we could drink.

Even with a success like that to keep us going, our hope faded again. Something had to give. So many mortgage bills had gone unanswered, and the bank had sent dozens of foreclosure and eviction warnings. Finally, after seeing all this, Carolyn stepped in and brought us to her place until she could decide with the family what to do with us.

It was at this point that I realized just how serious everything was. For the first time in my young life, depression started to settle in. I was spinning with confusion. Bonita stayed fairly calm and collected, though like me she probably wanted to break down.

I thought about how my sisters had battled with Aunt T. over our custody, claiming they wanted to keep the family together. If the past year had been any indication of what they meant by keeping us together, I would have rather run away and hopped on a train car or something. At least the hobos probably would have shared their rotten, oily sardines with me.

When my family finally did sit down and figure out what to do with us, their idea was even worse than having us stay at Mom’s abandoned house.

I would go and live with my brother Danny, who had been gone since Mom’s passing, while Bonita would go off to Carolyn’s. I could not believe it. They were splitting up the two closest members of our family. I was sick to my stomach. My emotions were almost completely burned out, and I was barely holding on.

Even though I was brokenhearted to part with Bonita, I really did love the idea of living with Danny. I had always wanted to be just like him. He was the one of us who had gone off to college and gotten himself a nice job. He had a beautiful wife and a great house. In my eyes, Danny had really made it.

Throughout my childhood, I had stayed with Danny’s family some weekends and had fun with them. His neighborhood had a community pool with tons of kids I made friends with. He had always made me feel like a welcome addition. The prospect of living with him was a dream come true.

But like most of the dreams I had around that time, it was shattered into a million pieces. At the last minute, Danny backed out without an explanation. Most likely he did not want an interruption to his routine family life. All I knew was that it just did not happen.

I wanted to die.
Did I do something?
I thought.
Is there something wrong with me?
Inside I crumbled and snapped. All those empty promises had taken their toll, and as far as I was concerned everyone could go to hell. I would not be betrayed anymore. I gave up on everyone, and trust was a complete joke.

When Danny didn’t take me in, Carolyn did, which meant that Bonita and I stayed together after all. However, now Bonita and I were far apart in mind and spirit. Whereas I had cracked and lost interest in school and pretty much everything, she kept herself together and remained a good student, ensuring a good life to come. Arm in arm, we had faced some serious trials and tribulations, but when it came right down to it, a fork divided our path. She took the high road, and I just wandered aimlessly.

It did not help that I was back in Carolyn’s world, which was definitely not the right place for two young teenagers to be. She was a straight-up booster, a hustler who took to the local waterfront where tricks were made, johns were played, and she could’ve been killed any second. Yeah, Carolyn gave me a roof over my head but no positive guidance. School, in particular, was a disaster.