First Love

Chpt. 81

|Z A C H|

"Whattup mama?" I held the phone in my hands as I looked at my mom's face through the screen. She was sitting in her kitchen still wearing the dark clothes she had on at the funeral that took place an hour ago. "How you feelin right now?" I asked, putting the phone down on the table as I continued with this drawing I was doing for a tattoo for one of the hottest rappers in the game right now.

He was from Chicago and wanted a big ass tattoo on his back of his neighborhood growing up. He was real passionate about this neighborhood and spent millions of dollars to repair it, turning it to something completely different from the dump it use to be. I rather put all my money and effort into it to fix it up and make the living better than to have white people kick my people out and gentrify it, he explained to me. Dude was one of the realest people I ever came across and for all of his good deeds I had mad respect for him.

"Not good...not good at all", my mama replied, answering my question. She picked up her cup of tea and took a few sips. "He looked so much older than the last time I saw him", she said sadly as she stared off into space, "so much older. He looked older than 60. I couldn't even believe that was my father."

The nigga was white, what you expect, I wanted to say but moms was hurting right now so I kept that shit to myself.

She cleared her throat and wiped her eyes. "You know. It really disappointed me that you and your brother acted like you couldn't have came down here to your grandfather's funeral."

"Why would I come to his funeral?" I asked her as if she lost her fuckin mind. I know my mama was going through some things because that was her daddy but she was trippin right now. "That nigga didn't like me and wouldn't even speak to you because of me. The only person he really fucked with like that was Jake."

"He was your grandfather Zachary", she said sharply, "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here."

"And you act like I ask to fuckin be here. Like I asked you to get pregnant at 15 by some black dude in his mid 30s. I didn't ask to be the product of that, I ain't ask to be brought up in this world with grandparents that hated me and a father who couldn't even remember my name and don't even know how old I am." I went to see Thomas—my biological father—the day he called me wanting to me up just for him to ask me for money. The man didn't know how old I was—he thought I was 20 when I was 26, and thought my name was Zavier when it was Zachary. "I ask for none of this shit and I'm tellin you right here outta my own mouth, I wouldn't have mind if you aborted me, especially when you knew my childhood was gonna be fucked up as it was. You kept me for your own selfish reasons."

"Zachary!" She yelled at me, she now how tears down her face, which hurt me because the last thing I wanted to do was put more pain on my mama. She wasn't the best mom but she was the only one I got and she did the best she could at the time. I couldn't expect her to know how to be a good parent when she was a child trying to raise a child, which forced me into adulthood because one of us couldn't be the child.

"My bad mama", I said sympathetically, "but the shit I had to go through, no child should have to go through that. The stuff that man was saying about me", I shook my head, "no kid should have to hear that, especially by they own family."

I thought back to the time I use to play over my grandparents house. I always thought my grandparents was some nice people. I would go there and my grandma would always have something baked for me—cookies, cakes, even pretzels. Sometimes she made candy apples cause she knew they were my favorite and on some occasions were even made them together. My grandpa was an Italian restaurant owner who liked to draw and paint on his spare time—-his favorite shit to paint/draw was landscapes and forests. Whenever he was off from work and was in a good enough mood to deal with me, we'd paint together or draw pictures but drawing was what captured my interest in the most. We would be outside on the patio where he kept all his art supplies and just sketch all day.