HYMN
“Saunders you gotbutter on your fingers today, son?!” Coach Brown yelled at my teammate, and I couldn’t hold the laughter in if I wanted to.
We were at practice doing drills, and his ass had definitely dropped the ball too many times.
“Take your head out of your ass and get it in the game! If you’re playing like that on Sunday your ass will be riding the bench longer than a skank in a whorehouse.”
I cut my eyes at Hakeem Saunders and chuckled. Coach said some weird shit. Practice lasted another twenty minutes, and I wasn’t surprised when coach called Hakeem to his office once the rest of us were dismissed.
“Coach talks all that shit on the field. In his office, he’s probably asking that nigga if he needs a hug,” my teammate, Ken laughed.
Coach could be irritating as hell, but he was a good man. I was born and raised in Atlanta. Four years ago, I’d been picked up by the Diamond Cove Cougars, and I’d been rocking ever since. When I first got drafted, I played for a team in Texas, and I hated it there for some reason. When the Cougars offered me a contract four years ago, I hauled ass. I usually lived in DiamondCove from August until February. Then, when I wasn’t traveling, I was in my house in Atlanta. In Atlanta, I lived in a home that had six bedrooms and nine bathrooms. In Diamond Cove, I had a high-rise condo on the beach with two bedrooms and a sick ass view. It was the best of both worlds.
At the age of thirty, I was telling myself to give football two more years, and then I would retire. I was rich as fuck and owned five properties. Two, I lived in. The third one, I bought for my grandparents. Two of them I rented out, but I let my sister, Divine, handle everything. I didn’t want my tenants to know that I was their landlord. For that reason, the houses were in her name since the person that owned a house was public record.
I also had a Burger King franchise that my aunt was the manager of, and I had hella endorsements. I lived off my NFL salary. My endorsement money didn’t get touched. It was there for when I retired. The money I made from renting out my properties was my bullshit money. Whether it was on clothes, shoes, or whatever, that money was like pocket change. However, rent on each house was $4,000 a month. The Burger King money was invested in stocks. My home and all my cars were paid for. Financially, I was more than good. I didn’t even have to play for two more years, but the love of the game had me trying to stick it out.
Football was hell on my body, however. Eight years of hard hits, extensive physical exertion, traveling, and injuries were taking its’ toll. There was no way I’d still be on the field in my mid-thirties. My body was used to the wear and tear, but there were still days that I felt like I’d been run over. During the off season, I rested as much as possible but all the rest in the world during the off season wasn’t enough for me to keep playing at my best for another five or so years.
In the locker room, I checked my cell phone and sighed when I saw that my sister had called me three times. Not only that,but my grandmother had also called me twice. My family knew my schedule better than me sometimes. They knew I was in practice, so all the calling had to mean it was an emergency. And I knew what that emergency more than likely was. My mother. I tossed my phone back in my locker, so I could prepare to leave. Emergency or not, when I was going to talk about or get information on my mom, I had to be mentally prepared. She was a touchy subject for me. My mother had shown me that it was possible to love someone and damn near hate them at the same time.
My mother had been dabbling in drugs and alcohol since she was about sixteen. As a teenager, she would take her grandmother’s prescription pain medication when she had real bad period cramps. After about a year, that led to her becoming addicted. When her grandmother noticed that her pills were coming up missing, she began hiding them from my mother. I guess it was assumed that if she could no longer get the pills from her grandmother that the addiction would suddenly vanish. They underestimated the hell out of my mother.
I was told that once, my mother actually got someone to roll over her foot with a car, so she could go to the ER and get pain medication. Of course, that wasn’t feasible for her to do all the time, so she began trying to get pills off the street. She even got a job at a pharmacy when she was nineteen. My mother got pregnant with me when she was nineteen, and she actually stayed clean during her pregnancy and up until I was about one. She worked at the pharmacy for three years before she was fired for stealing pills. Around the age of twenty-three, it was becoming harder for her to find pain pills, and she started shooting heroin. For the past twenty-five years, my mother had been addicted to heroin. Her caramel-colored arms had so many track marks, sores, and scars, that she wore long sleeved shirts year-round.
I never once offered to send my mother to rehab. I’d blow money on a lot of shit, but I wasn’t wasting money on rehab trying to save someone that didn’t want to be saved. If she came to me and asked me to send her to rehab, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but she had to be the one that brought up going. It couldn’t be forced on her. There was a time when my sister came to North Carolina and stayed during the season. She rented an apartment for six-months, and our mother came to stay. She brought enough heroin to still be able to get high for the first week. After that, she didn’t know where to get drugs from, and she went through withdrawals. My mother went through seven days of hell. Night sweats, throwing up, diarrhea, body aches, headaches, the whole nine. Seven days of absolute torture, and she only stayed clean for three weeks. After that, she was on the first thing smoking back to Atlanta, so she could shoot up.
My mom raised me up until I was about three. She tried to be a good mother. As good as she could be, but how much attention could she pay to a toddler when she was nodding off and high all the time? My grandparents took me full-time when I was three. When I was four, my mother got pregnant with Divine. When she was born addicted to heroin, they wouldn’t let my mother leave the hospital with her. Divine’s father’s sister took Divine and kept her until she was five. When she was diagnosed with lung cancer, she let my grandparents have custody. Then, there was Huncho. Yes, my mother higher than a giraffe pussy looked at her child and named him Huncho because even born addicted to heroin, he weighed nine pounds.
My grandparents were good people, but they simply couldn’t take in another child. My father was dead, but Divine and Huncho had decent fathers, even though they didn’t have the good sense not to hit a drug addict raw and nut in her trifling ass. From the hospital, Huncho went home with his father. He was barely two months old before his father was marrying somewoman, and she was the one that raised Huncho. Even after they broke up when Huncho was five, she continued to be in his life and play the role of mother. Huncho’s parents didn’t let him come around us a lot, but once he was fifteen, and I was twenty-three, we began keeping in touch on our own. He was currently in college in South Carolina on a football scholarship.
In the car, I called Divine back and braced myself for bullshit. “What’s good?”
“I know you won’t be able to come because you have practice and a game, but mommy is in the hospital.”
My jaw muscles clenched as I pushed the button to start the car. Every day of my life, I waited to get the call that my mother had overdosed. “Oh yeah? What happened?” I was trying to sound indifferent. To remain calm, but my heart was racing as I waited for my sister’s answer.
“She was driving a car for someone that robbed a trap house, a person, or something. There were an insane amount of drugs and about $15,000 in the car. I’m not sure what happened, but the car ended up flipped and up against a tree. It’s bad. She might have brain damage.” My sister sounded sad, but she wasn’t hysterical. Our mother had gotten into so much shit over the years that nothing surprised us anymore, and we were always prepared for whatever.
People had put their hands on her more than a few times. When I first got drafted into the league, she was going around bragging to drug dealers that her son was in the NFL. Those idiots would actually give her large amounts of drugs on credit, and she would expect me to pay the shit. After the third time, I wouldn’t do it. I hated that she would have to deal with the consequences, but niggas taxing her and letting her run up crazy tabs that I was expected to pay was next level insanity. My mother was banking on the fact that I had a soft spot for her. Thefirst time I didn’t pay, and she got that ass beat, was the last time she asked anyone for credit on the strength of me.
“She conscious?”
“No. They have her in a medically induced coma. They want to let her stay that way for another day or two. Then, they’re going to take her off the medication and see if she wakes up on her own. Only then, will they know the extent of the damage.”
I didn’t know shit about comas. If she was in a coma, she wasn’t feeling any pain, right? If she wasn’t on strong pain medication, just maybe, while she was out of it, her body would detox from the poison running through her veins. Though, I wasn’t sure how much it would matter if she woke up with brain damage. I pushed out a sigh. There were definitely things that football wasn’t more important than. But my career didn’t just help me. It helped a lot of people. I didn’t need to be stressed, off my game, and getting yelled at by coach during the season. We were 4-0, and I didn’t want to be the reason we lost our winning streak.
“Just keep me posted. There’s no need for me to come while she’s not awake. When she does wake up, I’ll get there.”
“Okay. Is this a bad time to talk business?”
“No, what’s up?”
I paid Divine way more than any other property manager would get paid. She could be set just off her salary alone, but she didn’t just work for me. Divine loved fashion, and she’d gotten into styling. She only had two clients so far, but she was the definition of put that shit on. If she blew up and became too busy to look over my properties, I would love that for her. I didn’t even get a chance to buy my sister a house. She used the money she was making with me and bought her own house. For Christmas that year, I gave her the money to pay her mortgage for a year. She added to it and doubled up on her payments every month. After a year of her making double payments, I paid thehouse off for her. She then began doubling up on her car note and paid off her Range Rover. My sister was smart as hell and responsible. The more she did for herself the more it made me want to do for her. She never felt entitled to my money, and she got up every day in grind mode to earn the money that she did get.
Huncho never asked me for much either. I got him a car, and I gave him money for clothes and shoes and shit. My first year in the league, I found out he was selling drugs, and I put a stop to that shit. I started sending him a monthly allowance. Huncho stopped selling drugs and got a job. I didn’t want him to work. I wanted him to focus on football and school, but he wanted to feel like a man. Despite our mother being a heroin addict, my siblings had their heads on straight. That was all a nigga could ask for.
I talked to Divine the entire drive to my condo. When I arrived, my chef was there. My timing was perfect because he was removing a pan of chicken from the oven. My boy was so cold with it, I never asked him what he was making because whatever it was, I knew it was going to be fye.
