Percy

As far back as I can remember, Percy was my father. Percy was from Shreveport, Louisiana and as it turns out, he would be the first Louisianan with whom I would have problems with.
He met my mother in KC when he offered her a ride to the house one day. She told me there was a hole in the floor of his car between the driver and passenger seats. All she saw as they rode was speeding street under her feet. This is the retardedness of Percy; to pick up a chick with a big-assed hole in the bottom of his car as if all was right for a player to be in flight.

Percy lived in KC because he had people there. He dropped momma off at aunt Anna's house, I believe because that's where momma and I was staying when she was still going to school. I had to at least be around 2 or 3.

When Percy met my great-grandmother, Nora, she hated him. She just thought he was stupid and she was right. But for some reason, my other relatives liked him. Anyway, my earliest memories of him where in California. After momma and Percy got married they moved to L.A. This was '71 or '72. My sister was already born but was not Percy's biological daughter. He liked to believe that she was because she was so "pretty" (read: light-skinned). Shaune was born in '69. Maybe about a year or two before momma met Percy.

In LA I just remember Percy fighting with my great-grandma a lot (she would go on to live us for many years until her death in her own apt. in '78) and he would spend a lot of time outside of the house too. Sometimes he would bring his crew home and what a riot they were. One guy, John, never bathed. Nora would just say, "Ahhh here comes that stanky nigger, that stuttering fool, and that mannish woman! Percy's crew were his truck driving coworkers. When the 70's rolled around, being a trucker was the shit. That's why by the mid 70s you saw so many trucking movies and t.v. shows. The stuttering fool was Percy's cousin, Rodney. Percy stuttered too and when they got together Nora would would just throw up her hands and yell, "It's like listening to two idiot-machine guns!" No one knew what the fuck that meant, but I did. Sort of. Nora drank too.
So anyway, in addition to Rod, you had Tony, the "Mannish Woman" my great-grandmother was referring to who was the only one of Percy's crew I liked. She was funny and a Buddhist. She had a shaved head and wore the prayer beads around her wrist. Most of the times she wore a black cowboy hat. They would all come over to the house between jobs or hauls.
Percy was a hustler too. He always tried to make money and it seemed that whatever job he was working it never paid enough for him so his other job or part-time job was to sue people.
When that didn't work, he decided to join the Army Reserve. I'm not sure how much that paid, but it could not have been that much. We had to move to back to KC and we moved into an apartment that was over Percy's sister's laundry and corner store. Irene, I had a big crush on her. She was red and thick and curvy but a workaholic.

Percy was barely home at this time and man was I happy. He was stationed in another part of Missouri and would be there for the next year or so. After that, he quit - and got a job in a plant.
We moved to this mostly white neighborhood December of '74. The new house had a fire place. We thought that was the shit. On Christmas Eve, they were trying to light up fire place. Shaune and I was playing in our room and we hear a scream. The next thing I knew, momma runs in and says we need to leave because there's a fire. Me, Shaune momma and Nora were all together and we got out through the back door. Actually momma had to bust that shit open Starsky and Hutch style which resulted in her falling on the steps and skinning her shoulder. When we came around to the front, the fire trucks were just pulling up and Percy was standing on the front lawn with the garden hose spraying water on the raging inferno that had engulfed the roof by now.
Question: How did the fire start?
Answer: Percy threw gasoline on the logs of the fire place.
I think we rented that house.

For the next few months we lived with aunt Anna again. Percy was not allowed to come to the house.
About a year later, momma finally left Percy. To this day I do not know what the breaking point was, but she woke me up in the middle of the night, grabbed Shaune and we got into a cab that took us to the bus station which took us to Santa Fe New Mexico. It would be another five years before I would see Percy again.

Houston '79

Nora died and my mother binged for a whole year. She got laid off too. She had heard where Percy was living; he was trucking again throughout the south and he was living in Houston. She talked to him on the phone and he arranged to have us move in with him until we got our own place. By this time things were totally platonic with momma and him. Percy did have a girlfriend who had three kids. She lived out in Homestead. When we first got his efficiency out in Cross Timbers, he had a Lindsey Wagner poster in his bathroom next to a straight up beaver shot 36X48 poster of a blonde. There was porn everywhere in the place. Momma got on him and he said that he was barely home, so if she didn't like it she could put away all his 'lifestyle stuff' herself. That's what she did too. Of course, I would later find all the porn and I took one of his novels, Sucking Johnny's Dong for my own 'curiosity'.

We later found our own place in Fifth Ward, then later we moved to Third Ward. Percy was pretty much out of our lives as we lived in Houston. By the time the mid 80's hit, Percy was smoking crack and he lost his rig; the one thing he always worked hard for was to have his own truck so he can be an independent contractor and move stuff. Now he smoked it all up. Momma would tell me these things when he called to borrow a 20 now and then. By the 90s he was strung out bad. He was pretty much living on the street and my mother when she got sick would hire him to do odd jobs around her place. He was diagnosed with diabetes later but never treated it. He lost his leg by '95 and tried to sell his fake one for crack, but that didn't fly. Throughout the last two decades Percy always had women. Shaune always loved him and kept up a relationship with him and even formed an extended family with Percy's ex-wives and girlfriends. But by the time he was strung out he had exhausted all trust and love from all the women in his life including Shaune. For a long time she would drive around with his prosthetic leg in the trunk of her car. Valerie, my oldest niece would say, "That's my grandpa's leg".
The last time I saw him, he was selling meat out of the trunk of his car behind the bus station downtown. He said hi to me. I just said hi back and then went on my way to work.
A year later, he died in a hospital from heart failure.
It took a lot for me to think about Percy. Shaune had just gotten rid of his leg only to replace it with momma's prosthetic in her trunk when momma died.

- b