The Sweet Baboo

     Sally called Charlie Brown her Sweet Baboo, but Charlie was enamored of the Pretty Little Redhead.  I composited the strip and called my little redhead The Sweet Baboo.  She was a tall redhead and did not like the Sweet Baboo moniker.  Her name was Babette and everybody called her Bobette.  Her mother called her Bobbie.  F.L. called her Bob.  Kerry called her Bu-bette.  But Bobette was most common for her.  I called her Bette from the get-go.  I was never so infatuated with a female.   Ever, and I'd been through two marriages.  And no woman ever infuriated me more.  For ten years I forced the direction our lives took.
     For me, it totally alienated me from all my blood family.  For her it was recovering from a total rejection by a lover who put her on a plane back to the states after she'd spent three years of a blissful life on a military base on Oahu.  Back to the husband and son she'd abandoned as the boy was about to graduate high school.  Back to Ohio hills from Hawaii night clubs. Back to the mother she'd left in a nursing home.  She was bummed to thoughts of suicide.  I was jobless, homeless and penniless.  And nine years older.  She was forty-three and had been working with a thigh master for months while passing as thirty-five.  Five-feet ten carrying 115 lbs.  Our ages always add up to the same sum.  I was fifty-two.  We were jealous and accusitory, but she had tons of acquaintances and I was no prodigal son, living with my mother.  She was living with a girlfriend who had two teenage sons, walking distance from mom's.
     For the past ten years we battled less, and began a more supportive relationship.  We traded thoughts about our children, which we knew they'd never hear and she called me more than anybody else and I was glad to listen and add a little.  I tried to make her laugh.  She stopped by alot and hired me for every handyman job, even though her ex-husband was her landlord.  I cleaned her house and changed all the venetian blinds for new ones on the 27th of Oct.  The last time I saw her, she was leaving after her live-in boyfriend had dropped off me and my Sears Powermate.  She died of a heart attack on Nov 1, three months after my first ex-wife died.  I had a longer personal relationship with her than I had with either of my official ex-wives.  So I very much consider that I've lost another x.  I'm back to Max (with one x).
     During the first eight years I knew her, Bette sent more drugs through her system than any other one person still living.  For the three years before I met her, she was mostly drug-free, except for pot and the occasional parcel of coke she had sent to her from the mainland. When I met her, her drug of choice was "pills."  She'd free-based cocaine and knew how to cook it down.  I was a strict t'ic, no chemicals.  No lab candy.  Just marijuana.  She was into weed but more as a "best stuff" dealer.  I'd carried that title in the past.
     After we moved in together, my knowledge of her intake was limited, since I never cared to share any.  She was getting 'scripts for her mental disability which was also providing a monthly check.  Then cocaine came already cooked to a solid, smokable form.  Bette got hooked quickly.  Latched on to a nickle-dime dealer who collected in advance from as many people as he could and drove to the black hood, thirty-five miles away to score.  Bette had been married to a brother from that area, so she was always welcomed. She was soon tethered to crack.  All acquaintances were doing it, old and new.  I was doing it with her but I refused to kick down for the shit.  She would beg up on fifty, or so, when it was being done in our apartment. It jacked up my testosterone and dampened her libido.  I hated the shit.  Plus, to come down way late in the early morning, she'd smoke into our stash of ganja.  She would hide in the kitchen closet when really geekin' out.  It was every five days, then every three, and finally all the time.
     I had to leave, moved back in with mom, got a job, bought a house and got a new girlfriend. 
     At one point, we were planning marriage.  But Bette was always in the background.
     For about five years, or so, Bette has been my only female visitor.  She confided she has been doing more drugs than ever before because her live-in has retirement and Vietnam checks totalling $6000 per month and it all goes for crack, powder cocaine, oxycodone, percocet, etc.
     It was a killing recipe for a woman of sixty-three who had ballooned to near 200 lbs. and had no mind to do much of  anything else but hit the stem or crush and snort. She was truly miserable and had no life.  The holidays were coming and she hated them, especially after her mother died.  The Sweet Baboo's death was no disguise, it was a blessing. 
     I mourn alone, again.