The Last Black Unicorn(40)

Tiffany: “Great, cool. I can live with this sort of life.”

He drove a Dodge Charger from Atlanta to LA. For me.

Honestly, part of the reason I was looking past the craziness was my own arrogance, in a way. I had started thinking I had the best cootchie in the world. I was thinking, My pussy is the best pussy ever. There must be midgets in my pussy doing magic tricks on his dick or some shit. Like, no man had ever brought me cars from other states, so it MUST be something about me.

Turns out, he had a tracking device on that car. He was tracking everywhere I went. He was just watching me, that’s why he brought it. He also had one of his former police partners, one of his buddies who lived in LA, watching me. So that dude was following me around when he wasn’t in town.

I didn’t know any of this, I found all this out later on. Just checking to see what I was doing is what he said. He said he was doing it to keep me safe, but really he was a stalker.

I could have seen the signs then, if I wanted to. For example, one day I didn’t answer the phone at all, I just didn’t feel like talking, and he just popped up in my house. I thought that was . . . unusual.

I kept telling myself that he did this because he cared about me. But really, he was controlling me. That’s what it was about. Not love, not caring, it was about control.

But I either didn’t know any better, or I wasn’t willing to see it. I looked past his issues, so I could have a man in my life who did things for me.

Even though we were “engaged,” he formally proposed to me at a comedy club. I was onstage, and he was going to come up to the stage and give me the ring, but then he got scared for some reason. When the show was over, when nobody was around, he was like:

Ex-Husband: “Will you marry me?”

Tiffany: “Yeah, but why did you wait till nobody was around?”

All my friends was like, “He’s ugly, Tiffany, you can do better. Like, he fat. He’s ugly. Yeah, he really love you and stuff, but he’s wack. Like, you could do better.”

I thought they were all haters. I just thought they were jealous or whatever. Because he drove a car out for me, he gave me a ring, and he was giving me an allowance, too. I thought that was super-dope. That’s how you know I was stupid. He was giving me like $100 a week, and I thought that was so fucking awesome. I thought that was the shit.

Not that I needed it, but it meant a lot to me. Because to me, if a man cares about you, he gives you money. He works hard for his money, so if he gives it to you, he cares.

So even though all my friends hated him, I just thought they were jealous. And none of them knew all the crazy stuff. At least not yet. But crazy can’t hide forever.

He moved out to LA soon after that. And he had a son with him. He told me he had three kids, and he brought his son with him, the eight-year-old.

So now we are living in my one-bedroom apartment. Me, him, and his eight-year-old. I did not like that at all. We only lived there for a month, and then he got this house, and the house was great, but it was far. It was like seventy miles outside LA, in Wildomar.

I thought he was doing it for me. He wasn’t. It was to keep me away from everybody and make me feel like I didn’t want to do comedy anymore.

But I still kept doing comedy, I just did it in Wildomar. I just found places out there, did the casinos and stuff like that, did shows in San Diego. That shit used to piss him off.

Ex-Husband: “You don’t need to do this comedy stuff. I’m making money, you don’t need it.”

Then as soon as he was saying that, he would lose his job (he was doing private detective work), or get laid off, and so then I had to be supplementing everything. So I started booking movies and all these other really good-paying gigs.

Then as soon as we got married, he had all kinds of demands on me around taking care of his son.

Ex-Husband: “You need to go to the PTA meetings. You need to pick up the kid and take him to soccer.”

Tiffany: “Can he go home to his mom for six months, so I can learn how to just be a wife for a little bit? Can I just learn how to do that part for a little bit? Then he can come back, and then I can assume the mommy role? Because this is stressful.”

I loved the little boy, but I was instantly being thrown into this mommy role. And honestly, it made me feel like I was nine years old again, taking care of somebody, trying to do my thing, too. I was trying to learn how to be a wife and be a loving partner and all this also.

I was confused as fuck. That was a lot for me, because I was also trying to do my comedy. I was trying to do this for real. And then he told me he don’t want me talking about his son onstage, but his son is funny as hell. He’s doing really crazy, funny stuff, and I really want to talk about it, and he tells me don’t talk about him? Then he tried to tell me not to talk about him, either. But my whole world was those two. What else am I going to talk about?

There was all kinds of stress like that. Basically, he was trying to shrink my world down, until it was nothing but him and his needs. But I wasn’t about to let that happen, and I didn’t see what he was doing at the time.

Then the relationship got violent.

I was drunk one night, and I just kept saying over and over:

Tiffany: “I want to eat. I want to eat. I want to eat when we get to the house. I can’t wait till we get to the house. I’m going to eat that cabbage that you cooked. Oh man, it’s going to be so good. I’m about to tear that cabbage up.”