The Last Black Unicorn(43)

The Jehovah’s Witnesses do Bible study on Skype. When I got back to my hotel room at nine in the morning, they hit me up on Skype for our regular Bible study.

JW: “What happened to you?”

I hadn’t even looked at myself, and when I saw myself on the Skype . . . I saw there was a knot on my forehead, there were all these welt marks across my throat.

Tiffany: “Oh man. My husband came out here, we got into it, he choked me.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in divorce. Not for any reason. They were all like:

JW: “You need to get a divorce. You have to get out of this.”

Then the lady leading the Bible study calls her husband. Her husband’s an elder, but she gets him on Skype right away.

JW: “Look at Tiffany. Look at her. She needs to get a divorce. Don’t you think?”

He is an elder, he is big-time. At first, he started off with the normal lines:

Elder: “Nobody gets divorced. We could talk through this. You could work it out.”

JW: “LOOK AT HER FACE!”

He got real quiet. Then he said in a solemn voice:

Elder: “You have to get a divorce. When you come back from Montreal, you’re staying with us. You have to get a divorce. You cannot be in a relationship like this. This is not going to work, Tiffany. This man is not godly.”

They started reading all the Bible scriptures to me about it. I was crying and stuff, and I had a show to do in a few hours.

Tiffany: “I really need to take a nap. I got a show.”

I went to sleep.

I woke up confused about where I was. I had forgotten that I got my ass whipped by my husband. My reflection in the mirror was a shock.

I put makeup on my neck and pulled my bangs over the knot on my forehead.

When I got to the stage, the lights were unexpectedly bright. They were hot. When my makeup started running, everyone there could tell I had been beaten. They could see the marks.

But everybody knew already, they didn’t need to see the marks. Those comedians around the elevator and lobby told everybody.

Everywhere I went, people would ask me, “You all right? We heard you got beat. Are you okay? You need help?”

I told everyone I was good.

But I wasn’t good. I was in a bad way. All those people there wanted to help, but I couldn’t receive their help. All I could do was push them away, and then go back to the dude that was abusing me.

Why?

I ask myself that a lot. I don’t know the answer. Maybe because I didn’t want to be a quitter. I felt like it was my first time making a commitment in front of God, and getting married was a big deal to me. I’d never been baptized or anything like that. So this was the biggest commitment that I’d ever made in my life, and I didn’t want to be a quitter, I wanted to find a way to make it work. I didn’t want to seem like I just gave up.

Even though I got beat up. Even though the Jehovah’s Witnesses were telling me to get out. Even though a different pastor, from the Baptist Church, was also telling me to get out. It was like God was sending me all these messages to get the fuck out, but I still couldn’t.

Maybe it was just that I didn’t know any other way to be loved. Maybe this was the only man that I had ever thought truly loved me. Maybe I just couldn’t leave that, no matter how bad it was.

I don’t know. It’s still hard to think about this.

On some level, I felt like if I loved him enough, I could heal him. I could heal him from being mad, from being so vicious.

It was like those Twilight movies. It was the same thing for me. I can keep him from drinking human blood. I can bring him deer blood, I can heal him. I just have to love him the right way. I just have to figure out his language, learn how to speak his language.

I even went and talked to his mama:

Tiffany: “How did you show him that you loved him?”

Mama: “Girl, once I burned him with a hot comb, because he was messing with my butt.”

Tiffany: “Okay, so I need to burn him with a hot comb?”

Mama: “He was a terrible child. I had to lock him in the house and tell him don’t touch nothing until I get back from work.”

That was not good advice. So how do I do this? I just really wanted to be a great wife.

Really, I wanted to be a better wife than my mom was.

I wanted to be supportive, not a pushover. But actually take care of the kids, actually take care of people. If I say I’m going to do something, to do it, to have it done. Just better than how she was to me. I wanted to clean the house. Make sure my man don’t have no roaches in his house. My mom had roaches in the house. We would never have a roach issue, thank you very much.

So I recommitted. And things got worse at home. He set down new rules for me.

Ex-Husband: “You’re not allowed to get text messages or phone calls after ten o’clock, because that’s disrespecting our marriage. I don’t care if your grandma can’t call you after 10 p.m., I don’t care if somebody died, that’s disrespecting our marriage.”

I went along with that. I made everybody talk to me between nine and five o’clock. Business hours. I legit told that to people.

Even though I’m a comedian, and sometimes clubs would be like, “Hey, can you come and do this spot?” I didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t talk to them. I told them, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. If you don’t call me during business hours, I can’t talk.”