Have you seen the green frog?

“Are you okay?” I get that question more than normal. I never really understood what it meant. It is like “am I on fire motherfucker.” I guess I some days I have that look like a sexual transmitted disease. That something just ain’t right about that boy and it needs to be checked out by a certified doctor, priest and some scientists

It was a very hot July. I was working some dumb temp job for the summer. Everybody in that room were fucking losers. Some girl was getting evicted from her apartment and complained about it every day. Another barely eighteen year old high school dropout was pregnant again with her third child and couldn’t figure out how to tell her boyfriend who was about to be sentenced for aggravated assault and robbery. I told her to tell him at the trail when they have his violent ass in handcuffs. A white guy was there, no story, just liquor in his coffee cups. An older Asian lady who didn’t speak English but somehow understand the joke I made about her being a crack head. She was the most suspicious, my only evidence and argument about her hourly bathroom breaks where she went shaking but came back suddenly refresh and too much damn energy. And the second to last was the church lady. Her only concern was raising money for some new preacher she found on the internet. I consciously ignored her most cuz I didn’t want to buy her crappy cupcakes, homemade jewelry or tickets to a gospel revival. And then there was me. The good news, I was working. I had big plans for my life to turn it all around, again. I figured god gives an idiot as many chances as it takes. I was fucking retarded. We all got the job through a temp agency. It didn’t pay hooker money but enough to keep the lights on in my apartment.

Lunch break. I decided to make friends with people I knew I’d never see again after I decided I didn’t want the paycheck anymore. We decided to eat out side and that’s when I saw her. Why my life was the way it was suddenly came rushing to the forefront when I saw her. It was more like I felt her. When you have as many secrets as I do, you can feel the truth stalking you. It had to be almost 100 degrees in no shade and she was dancing. She was dancing like voodoo princesses around raging fire. She somehow managed to remove all her clothes except so very dirty pink panties and she was dancing. Her middle aged bloated body jiggled like can biscuits left out in the sun- melted and suspiciously sticky. I knew her. I had lived with her. She was a friend. I hoped like hell she didn’t notice me. I hoped like her we didn’t make eye contact and she’d charge my direction, grabbing me into her arms and making me dance with her. Crazy had found again.

Six months earlier, I had turned thirty and just got out of a mental institution. I wasn’t crazy, just desperate. My life had come apart. I was getting evicted from my apartment. It was something about running a prostitution ring from the Landry room. Sorta true, but that’s another rant. I was 2000 miles away from the nearest relative. I had no money--. Checking account was overdrawn and all my credit cards were in collections. I was fucked.

So I took a knife and carved “Help” in the middle of my chest.

I did have health insurance.

I figured I go to the hospital and let them figure my life out.

I got to the hospital after finishing half of liter of rum. I packed an overnight bag. I don’t know why I thought going to a hospital would make me feel safe. I sure as hell was going to show up at the police station. I wonder was it how homelessness started. I had failed. I was thirty years old and I couldn’t make it as an adult. The nurse when I showed her the wound bleeding from underneath a white t-shirt was horrified. I thought she saw Jesus in my blooded stain cuz she keep yelling at the shirt like she knew it. Like my blood soaked wounds had a name and she was performing an exorcism. I wanted to create drama but not have some old woman drop to her knees and beg some guy named “Holy Spirit” to save my alcoholic life. I knew I was in the right place. I had finally found someone to pity me.

It took way over 14 hours laying in the emergency room before they checked me in. I guess they wanted to see what they could do with my insurance. I didn’t know they were checking me into the Psych ward until after the fact. I figured they would give me a referral to a social worker. They said I couldn’t leave. Something called a 72 hours suicide watch which didn’t make any sense. A big security guard grabbed me. Some lady stuck a needle in my arm. When I awoke, I was handcuffed to a bed. The nurse asked me if “I had seen the green frog.” I asked what the fuck that meant.

For three days I tried to escape. I would awake not knowing the time or day and make a futile mistake for the “exit” door. It was always locked. That big security guard was never far away and the lady with the big needle. I would be out again, and every time I awaken was that same stupid question, “Have you seen the green frog?” After three days in basically a coma, I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. I had to prove to them I wasn’t crazy, just a little eccentric. They said I was depressed and a danger to myself. I had every fucking reason to be depressed. I was broke, unemployed, getting evicted, stubborn, arguably some problems with Bacardi rum but everybody was a danger to themselves, that’s why we come into the world as babies.

But for another 12 days, I would have to figure out what is crazy and to see that damn green frog so I could get out of the ghetto version of a “One who flew over the hoodrat nest.” I thought I knew crazy. I thought the homeless man pissing on himself and laughing at the rain was crazy. I have seen so many version of crackhead crazy. I seen crackhead prostitutes try to sell the button off their ragged blouse for more drugs. There is funny crazy like Tracy Morgan.

Inside that place, I realized mental illness was a fucking real deal. I mean there were people who were faking so they didn’t have to work or have a place to sleep for a couple of days. And then there were the real crazy people. There weren’t funny, drunk or depressed. They were fucking crazy. They weren’t dangerous if unprovoked but convinced of a world nobody could see or understand.

There was the scavenger; he had been looking for a key he lost since 1950. I asked him what the key unlocked, he said Keebler house. He had been looking for those cookies for decades. I told him they sold them at the grocery store. He said he wanted the elves.
He would check all the trashcans everyday.

There was Las Vegas girl I called her. She was convinced in another lifetime she was a topless dancer. Every morning meeting with the crazies where we talked about how less crazy we were that day, the same issue came up with Las Vegas to have her keep her top on. She was that crazy bitch I saw outside new job. I wondered how she got out. She predicted my future. She said I had to lose everything in order to gain a sense of balance again. She said I was meant to be a writer and I wasn’t going to get evicted from my apartment but my lover would leave me. She was right. I wrote a book that year and I didn’t get evicted from my apartment. My lover broke up with me for good.

My favorite crazy was the Doctor. He was convinced the real therapists and nurses were the patients. He would wear his white lab coat everyday and go check on the nurses and with every question they asked him, he turned it around. He was brilliant.

So, have you seen the green frog?

Who told you about this green frog?

It’s our way, to measure if your mind subconsciously remembers some form of reality.”
Reality?

I asked you the question

And why does the frog have to be green?

It’s an easier color for your mind to see when you go to sleep.

So the green frog puts you to sleep?

I will ask the questions.

Again who told you about a green frog? Are you seeing green frogs?

No.

So how do you know you’re not crazy if you ask that same stupid question every morning and night?

Funny, I never did see that damn green frog, but one morning I decided to just agree. I was freed that afternoon.

It's over!!!!!

I once got fired from a job because I kept showing up late. I’m not talking about thirty minutes or an hour late more like five or six hours late. My hours were from 9-5, and I’d show up at 2 and then go to lunch. I got away with it for like a month.

I once got fired from a job because I left a bottle of Rum on my desk. My boss asked me if I had been drinking and I offered her a sip from my coffee cup. I thought she was cool.
She wasn’t.

I once got fired from a job because I forgot to book my Boss’s flight back from London. It was a weekend trip. He called me in to his office Monday morning. He complained that he had to sleep on the airport floor for two days and it cost him almost ten thousand dollars to get back. I replied” You’re back, so what’s the problem.” Security escorted me out that afternoon.

Being fired is like saying “You’re dead to me.” How horrible. An aunt once said that to me when she caught me in bed with her boyfriend. I questioned for a second if I should call the police because she may had plans to kill me or put a hit on me. What does it mean for somebody to say, you’re dead to me when in fact I know I’m still alive and breathing. If I’m dead to them, does that make me a ghost and does that give me the right to haunt them?

I’ve also been disowned or renounced for various reason depending on how drunk I got that day. I think I got disowned for being a homosexual and renounced for practicing it. I think disownment is more emotional and renounced is the legal term as in getting kicked out of the family will. Is it truly possibly to disown anyone. I mean daddy can’t go back to that night when he got liquored up and seduced my mother. My mother can’t take back the nine months of pregnancy and 14 hours of labor. IS there paper work involved when you disown someone? I mean after a person turn eighteen years old, the law automically disowns them from their parents. If I’m disowned should I give back my birth certificate and have my next of kin removed. Is disownment like the parent/child messing divorce. Should I hire a lawyer. I mean I was use to a certain lifestyle before the disownment, daddy can take back the last name but I want the vacation house and my childhood allowance until the day I die. Let’s not forget, the faithful, “don’t ever speak to me again.” It’s been used on me often. My sister yelled it into the phone the night I called her a three in the morning blasting Michael Jackson “you wanna be starting something.” I thought she’d be amused. She called me a immature drunk. I called her a fat frigid bitch and I thought those people were supposed to be jolly. She told me to never speak to her again. I wondered if that mean if I saw a grizzly bear charging at her in the grocery store did the rule still apply?

Every time I get fired from a job or disowned, I wonder did the people still think of me? How long did it take for them to think of me as dead? How long did it take from them to wipe away my memory of me trying to bitch slap, break the windows out of their cars, yelling at the top of my lungs in the middle of the street with no clothes on?

“Happy Abandonment Day!”

“Take this nigga cuz I don’t want him no more.” The words of my mother, spoken like death and birth. I’m sure they don’t put that on any Hallmark cards. So every mother’s day I tell myself, why should I be ashamed that my mother decided not to stick around. Humanity is complicated. And if happiness in life is finally learning to love yourself, how you get to it is nobody fucking business.

I often have to be brutally honest with my memory. My mother was never a mother. In my fantasy, I want to repaint her innocent and a victim. Yet, I know I have so little to work with since I barely knew her. I don’t remember her being a mean mother. I do remember some disturbing physical attacks mostly provoked by me. I wasn’t a child that should ever be left alone. I have actually burned down people houses. I was a well known fire starter in the neighborhood. I think I made the papers.

The month of May is the national Foster Care month. It is also the month of Mother’s Day. I decided to make it my own personal “Happy Abandonment Day” to be celebrated with a warm bath, liquor, freaky masterbation and Chinese food.

I guess I was one of those kids that wished I didn’t belong to my family or some rich white people would come and adopt me. I guess it was my nappy headed ghetto kid dream.

I was never in foster care. My mother gave me to my father’s mother. I wish I had gone to foster care. I wished I would’ve gotten the option to be adopted. Yet, I had a very extensive large family. I just didn’t want them. I believe growing up in my grandmother’s house was worse than foster care. It was like being thrown to a pack of ghetto vicious wolves. I grew up with thirty five first cousins all male. It was like a juvenile detention center and me being somewhat effeminate, I had to fight to not constantly get rapped. They always worry about the girls, but effeminate boys are the real prey.

Abandonment is abandonment. It feels no different if you were giving to an orphanage or alcoholic grandmother. Over 500,000 children in the U.S. currently reside in some form of foster care. Black children make up approximately two thirds of the foster care population and remain in care longer. I remember growing up and my grandmother would always yell at us kids who she now had to take care of cuz the parents either got themselves incarcerated, were on drugs or dead that when we turn 18 we were no longer her problem. I feel as if that’s all foster care and orphans dilemma. Yet, I ran away from my grandmother’s house at age 15. I beat her to the punch.

I think the worse part of being a foster care kid is the emancipation. It’s when the kid turns 18 and in the eyes of the law an adult. It’s when that kid graduates high school and no longer has a support system. I always wondered how my grandmother was going to handle my 18th birthday. I wonder if she would wake me with a shotgun and have me pack all my shit and get the fuck out. It would be like, “Happy Homeless Day black ass nigga.”

You are emancipated to the big crazy scary world. The world I still remember when my mother abandon me when I was eight years old. I didn’t think she was for real. I remember being in that hotel and thinking to myself that she had to come back. She had to come back. And a day later she still hadn’t come back. Funny, twenty years later at some therapist's office, I was asked when I knew she wasn’t coming back. It hadn’t settled after all that time that she was never coming back. I never saw her again. I never wanted to. I never loved her. It makes me feel evil. I didn’t. I barely knew her. My father died when I was five years old and I feel as if I knew him better than my own mother.. Yet her abandonment was an extremely harsh blow to my ego. I didn’t realize I was so co-dependent on a woman I barely saw. It was like, how dare you bitch, I should have left you. Probably a reason why I usually break up with people before I give them a chance to walk out on me.

At 33 years after surviving the mental institution, somehow never been incarcerated, still healthy, and not dead, I no longer give a fuck about the mandatory greeting card bullshit. I celebrate me. Yes, I may have a functional alcohol problem, chronic unemployment, trust issues and an inability to be faithful, but I am still here. So mama, happy fucking abandonment day. I am still here.