Pushed Times, Chewing Pepper (the first 13 pp)

PUSHED TIMES, CHEWING PEPPER

Sarah’s Story by Myra Jolivet

“Pushed times make a monkey chew pepper”

(Challenging times inspire unique actions)

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PROLOGUE

Fear makes you count sidewalk cracks like a sugared-up 6 year old. I was filled with it as I walked the brittle sidewalk near 10th Street and University Avenue. It was an area of Berkeley, California that was not the Berkeley the world knew.  There were no signs of social activism or environmental justice. The people who walked these Berkeley streets walked in survival code, head down, witnessing nothing. The streets were trimmed in urban blight and neglect. A microphone intimately taped to my lower body could have been a gun for my tastes, but it wasn’t.  It made the crotch of my pants hang funny. I found the correct address.  It was a crumbling two-story wood-frame house that looked condemned. I took a deep breath and walked up the concrete steps. It wasn’t the kind of place I would ever live and certainly wasn’t where I intended to die. How did I become a police decoy for a crazy woman, like some played out movie plot? This was the clichéd birth of my new life. Problem was,the old life had to pass on and I was the one to bury it. My walk of survival was not in avoiding the truth any longer. I had done that for about a year. My walk now was full-faced into all of the signs and visions I had ignored, into the unsafe spaces of my nightmare.

CHAPTER ONE

If I didn’t think it would make a few bitches in the family happy, I would jump from this damn window. Talking to my cousin Stacy always made me feel like that. But therapists who kill themselves don’t get clever epitaphs, just pity.

I am family therapist to the crazies while my screaming knuckles grip my own sanity, tightly. I am Sarah Doucette Jean-Louis, the face of Louisiana ambiguity in looks and life. I am a California native with Louisiana roots. That part is not unique. I’m like hundreds of thousands of Louisiana black Creoles whose families migrated to California after World War II, the liberal state with plenty of jobs. And they had kids like me, aware of the culture but tired of it. My life is one big gumbo. My family and friends come in all colors and races, and my love life has had a few ingredients added that, like gumbo, should remain secret. The unique thing about me is that I inherited the gift of visions. I see into the future, I guess. It’s difficult for me to accept that mind movies that come to me in a fit of nausea and headspinning hold prophetic value. But as Aunt Cat says, “We Creoles got plenty mystevious gifts, yeah.”  Her word for mysterious. I keep looking for books to help me with this but, at this point, I haven’t found any that are as specific as I would need.

“Jean. Jean?”

Jean, my receptionist-assistant, appeared in the doorway, slender and in her perfectly pressed, every-short-coiffed-hair-in-place way. She was wearing one of her favorite pant suits. I hated pant suits. Too matchy-matchy. I intentionally mixed up the jackets of my suits, even if they were the same color.

“Yes, Dr. Sarah? What is it?” she asked.

 “Talking to Stacy always throws me off my game. She bragged about her husband and offered sympathy that I didn’t have one yet. Is this a contest? She needs to focus on her life. She pretended that she needed to talk about that God-awful family reunion coming up next week, but it was an opportunity to screw with me.” I stopped myself short of the neck-rolling anger that was building in my body. Stacy had been pushing my buttons since childhood.