The Pimp Who Drove Me Home

Feel free to file this under things that shouldn’t have happened.
It’s a normal school day. I say quick goodbyes to my friends as we walk out of school and make my way to the Cadillac down the street. I open the door, cheerfully say good afternoon, sit down, and buckle up. In the driver’s seat, a middle-aged man with a press and curl, silk shirt, and gold dripping from every place possible. It’s Black Diamond, and yes, he’s a pimp.
A real pimp?
Yes, a real pimpin’ pimp.
Why? Why in the absolute hell would I be picked up by a pimp from school?
Well, he was our neighbor. Apparently pimps live in cul-de-sacs with their families and since we had a basketball court in our driveway, it didn’t take long for his sons to frequently come over, hang out, and become our friends.
I would love to tell you my family didn’t know. But we knew his real job and his real job. We knew his “wife” Foxy was his bottom. We knew her real job and her real job. So we didn’t think twice about his extra kids or question why she had another, legal husband. For them, it was all very normal. When someone presents themselves so clearly without explanation, justification, or a need for acceptance, it becomes normal to you too. Even when it shouldn’t.
It’s not as though they were putting on a façade of perfection, the entire neighborhood knew that there was violence. We would hear the fights; the boys were often angry and unable to express themselves without their shouts spilling into the streets. There was broken furniture and holes in the wall. But growing up with just sisters, that seemed to be normal behavior for a house full of angsty teenage boys.
I, of course, know now how outrageous this all sounds, but back then, it was just life. We didn’t immediately reject them because they had a complicated, and often dysfunctional, house. In many ways their lives weren’t that different from ours. Their struggles were just a little more, animated. Their flaws were a little more amplified.
Not once were there any sexual advances or inappropriate behavior from anyone in the house. I was always treated and cared for as a child. I can’t tell you how, or why, my Mom signed off on all this, but they became our family, and we loved them as much as they loved us. Black Diamond didn’t want to put us to work and Foxy wasn’t trying to turn us out. They treated us like we were their own, and in some ways, better than their own, actually
We would spend hours, often unattended, in their house playing Twisted Metal on the Playstation while eating smashed Home Pride Wheat Bread just cause and I never felt uncomfortable, well, until they started fighting. When I needed my hair done for my eighth-grade prom, Foxy did it. She was the only white hairdresser in her shop and was committed to proving she could lay and slay as well as the best of them. And when I say she curled my fake ponytail to perfection, chile, it was so good when she finished, she cried telling me how happy she was that I, her daughter, liked it.
Predictably, eventually one of their sons dated one of my sisters. So even when no longer lived on the same street, we were still connected. I would walk miles with my sister to the other side of town to hang out at their new house. Their youngest son, my first legit bad boy crush, would be there with his much older girlfriend. He told me from day one I was way too young to ever be his girlfriend. I mean, considering he was fourteen dating adult women, I had nothing at prepubescent twelve to offer. Comically, he said he would reconsider when I was at least sixteen.
Alas, it was a whirlwind teenage romance that ultimately did not last. When they no longer dated, it severed the largest connection remaining between our families and we all moved into more permanent phases of our lives. But that is how it would’ve been regardless of his parents. The thought of dating a pimp’s son seems like a terrible idea now, but our everyday lives were so far removed from the logistics of his alternative occupation, it was like it didn’t exist, they were a regular family, and this was a normal break-up.
The week before I left to go to college, I saw the youngest son, my crush, again. He was recently released from jail and came to see me off. It was no surprise that the trajectory of his life included incarceration, but it hurt to see someone I cared for peak and decline as I was ascending to my next level.
We grew up together, but we wouldn’t grow up together.
I couldn’t take him, my love couldn’t take them, where I was going. Knowing that, still hurts.
It’s been almost twenty years since I have seen any of them, yet it feels likes yesterday when we were making plans of how our lives would be today.
Appropriate or not, my Mom authorized their existence in our lives, and it made me a better person. I love without conditions because of my time with them. I never think of whether someone is “deserving” of love. Everything about how I love is based on the experiences I had with people others may count out or look down on. I never had the chance to see myself above or beyond people typically relegated to the outskirts of society, they were my friends and family. While I can only imagine what people thought watching me walk to that car, I knew when I saw that Cadillac, I was going to get home safely.
It’s difficult to reconcile my affection for him with how adamantly I am against everything he was; an exploiter and abuser. I learned early bad people can treat you well, that they love with as much skill as they hurt, and their behaviors have long-lasting impacts that carry long after the abuse had ended. I’m still tied to their trauma. The overlapping of our paths forever intertwined with my own history. And if I never speak to him, never see them again, they’re still my family, and it’s still love.