Otis

Otis, I love you so much and I am so angry that you came up to me that day, wish I could remember the exact day, that you came up to me and started talking to me.  Told me about your wife.  How she was horny and how you would be asleep and she would just jump on you and get your dick up and jump on that and how you felt like you were being raped in your sleep.  It was a stunning thing for a man to say---my husband would give a hell  of a lot if I had ever done that to him---even once.  He would have enjoyed me raping him once in his life!  I thought it was a rather sensitive and rare thing for a man to admit---that he would rather be left to get some sleep and would  much rather be awake and involved in sex, rather than be used as a sex toy.  I got a kick out of it, myself.  I had never heard a man complain of this before---like I said, found this an intriguing turn of events. A man, a man! feeling used and frustrated and wanting to be involved in the sex act---not peripheral to it.

It was in August sometime that we started talking.  He was with Environmental Services, and that is a nice way of saying Housekeeping.  He was not an employee of "Emory at all, but rather a contract worker from Goodwill Services.  I don't want to say that his was like a charity type of job, but in a way, it was.  We had mentally challenged, deaf, autistic, some highly functioning Downs people, all being mainstreamed into different positions at Emory.  In positions of more responsibility I guess we had people coming out of drug rehab, and as I was later to find out, people who had been homeless and were coming out of shelters.

Otis, it is 7:19 am in the morning and you are anxiously awaiting the birth of your son,  your own fourth child, but with hers, your eighth.  And you love them all---and you are the rare black man who has embraced them all and trying so hard to keep it all together and give them all you know kids need.  Otis, goddam it I am so mad at you for approaching me and hitting on me.  I was sitting there minding my own business, fat and fifty and reading my little books.  I didn't want to talk to you.  You came up to me,  You talked to me about your chihuahua, your kids, your wife raping you.  Your wife frustrating you, throwing cans of Raid at you and telling you that the twins weren't yours.  and making  you go out with friends and staying out when you were dead tired and her hitting you, and you hitting her back, and her chasing you down with the van and almost running over you.  And Otis, how you went down and filed for divorce, but you didn't mean it, cuz you love that fat, fuckng bitch for some goddam reason that defies logic.  Because love can never be explained----the workings of the human heart and the human mind---inexplicable.  Why we love the people that we do----why we keep loving people who don't appreciate us, treat us like shit, whty we keep going back, keep hoping, hoping that someday they will love us, like we love them.

Cuz Otis, I love you like that.  Like you love her.  Hoping that you would love me like that.  Like anyone would love me like that.  did Joe, ever,  maybe.  But once again, the inequality of love.  Why can't the two halves ever match up, come together, meld perfectly.  No.  So rare to have the two halves love in perfect unison. 

Otis goddam you.  I didn't ask for you to come up to me and say, I want to take you out on a date, Just come back in the bACK.  Just give me one kiss.  I skeet all over the bathroom door jacking off thinking about you,  Do you do that too?   I didn't ask for any of it.  And then you reeled me in---with your beautiful eyes and your beautiful face and your happy laugh and happy personality.  And then you casually inform me that "she's expecting a baby in the spring, she's four weeks along already." 

And now, Otis, it is spring,  The baby is coming any day, and hour.  And I feel sick about it  Knowing what it is for a black man to make a child,  It is to them like an act of God.  They feel like the kings of the world,  Look at this world, I made a kid.  And according to what I read off Facebook, they all absolutely love the babies.  Otis loves babies.  I love the way babies smell, he said.  And he was obsessed about getting one of those baby slings and carrying his baby around strapped to the front of him,  and the image of that almost killed me  Because I want that to be my baby, his and my baby.  And I can't have any more babies,  And the doctor wants to give me a pill to take away all my estrogen and take away all my woman, too.  And Otis loves his baby, his baby that he made with Amber.  He has never seen one of his chidren be born,and this one, he will see,  And he will love watching this miracle, and it will tie him to that fat, evil black bitch named "Amber---tie her to him even tighter. Bind them. 

Otis, goddam YOU.  You made me love you.  Reeled me in.  Let me spend money on you, even while you had fifteen hundred dollars in your shoe in the closet, and every time you empty your pockets I see some money----and you spend money on lottery tickets and drop a twenty every now and then for cocaine---yet you never ever ever think to treat me to anything,  No, you let me be the sugar mama.  Let me spend my money---so I don' feel like a woman even now,  I don't feel lke your woman,  Your woman you take to Ahley Stewart and buy outfits for,.  Your woman you take to get pedicures and manicures and her hair donem and Jordyn's hair. and me, you just take.  And you tell me we will get together, tomorrow, or
Saturday, or call me in 30 minutes.  And 20 times out of 20, you break your word. 

Love don't love nobody.