Catharsis

As we look back on life there are things that we’ve done that we most regret and people that have taken advantage of us that we regret that we let it happen. Well I am one of those individuals. Last Christmas Holiday while placing a personal ad seeking a long term relationship I met someone lets call him JAMU. He wrote me a note stating that he was a single father with two children, had two successful businesses and had the words “if I do say so myself” behind his profession. This was a Sunday email and he wanted to meet immediately. I was not too keen on meeting him at all because he sounded like he liked men. However he begged and he begged for an immediate date and I said OK. I had children also so I could do a late night date. When he arrived I was pleasantly surprised because he did not look gay at all. As an African American person his voice sounded like he would be a lighter black with a big butt and sort of chubby be he tall or short. What I got was a tall dark slim man. I was attracted to him. So we proceeded on our date. We went to see the lights at centennial park and I thought how cool, we hugged and I thought how soft his sweater felt, anyway he asked me where I wanted to go and I thought about a little place in Midtown that is some sort of cult café that everyone must go to once but I thought OK he looks like he would absolutely hate it because honestly after the first time I went to this 24 hour hell with a friend. I never went back but every time I passed it, I always had a good feeling that yes I had been there, I was a member of some special crowd just like I feel because I ate at the Old Paschals twice “the place where the famous civil rights giants would meet during the sixties” . Anyway instead of bathing this person into this new cult I said OK you decide and he decided on Café Intermezzo which usually bored me to death, I preferred a coffee place further downtown that was two stories and shabby and “funky” but this evening I liked Café Intermezzo with the background sounds of Cirque Du Soleil playing. He told me that he had a successful business, had designed several of the posters and floats for the Olympics in Atlanta, his ex wife had been the architect for the Georgia Dome ,[ which really impressed me because I remember one day looking at the dome after it had been built and having an old homeless man walk up to me excitedly and say, “That DOME was built by a “black Woman a BLACK WOMAN”] “WOW I SAID” he went on to say that he had been an album cover designer for Toni Braxton, and had been one of Shirley’s Boys whatever that meant, and again he had a successful business. At this point he asked do you want to see my house, this should have been a red flag for me for I had met another individual in the parking lot of my local supermarket who had run up to me and said “Hi I was nominated for a Grammy would you come over my house”, of course I said no but we exchanged phone numbers and I eventually said yes because I wanted to see the house but I was very very disappointed. I know this man’s real name but I think he has to go by another name because I have since seen him in a very successful video but at the time I was feeling no attraction to his demands at all, or honestly him, we were friends for months but he eventually ended up literally cursing me out because I would not have sex with him. Anyway back to JAMU he said did I want to see his house, he said house ya’ll. He said he lived in Buckhead so I expected a Buckhead mansion. I was sort of disappointed to drive up to his three story town home but anyway it was a nice place just not what I expected. He gave me the tour and I can’t remember where we settled but we eventually kissed and it was really nice , he wanted more but I eventually told him that I had a rule no sex before marriage because well because I had been treated very badly in the past. For some reason this year had been a good year for dating I was dating an engineer that I had met while waling down the street who was surveying the land and we exchanged phone numbers who understood no sex before marriage that I had not even kissed who wanted to get married and an IT person who wanted to live together that I had not even kissed either. However I liked kissing this guy, but I was not going to have sex with him. So he was cool about it though he kept begging and begging and begging eventually after several dates I would sleep with him, and be told that he was separated from his white wife which when I did the math as to when he had claimed to have met her and when he had claimed to be married to his black wife, it seemed like that it had been some overlap there. I immediately felt distrust for him and ended up thinking that his shenanigans with this white woman is what eventually would leave his black wife paralyzed and unable to work... During the Nichols affair I learned that he was an acquaintance of Brian Nichols and they went to the same gym.

Anyway in the midst of all of this he asked me if I could do some work for him basically pre-prep work for a website he was doing for his cousin. He said that his cousin had done some editing for him while he worked for a dotcom and after she had done all of the work it had gone bust and she had never gotten paid. He told me that her husband needed a website and he would pay me at the end of the month. So I did all of the prepare work for the site which since he told his cousin he was doing all of the work at a discount. His cousin sent him a check for 1500.00 based on my creating and putting documents into pdf format, creating an ad format for placing ads and pricing them, finding a domain, and doing extensive research into the proper methods of doing an online newspaper. This man never paid me. I charged him three-hundred dollars and he never paid me. He told me that he had used the money to pay the rent and had lied he did not have a business and had lost his job as a creative director for AOL. At this point I just wanted to get paid which to this day I never have gotten paid for. For several weeks I received emails from his cousin looking for him, I said I did not know where to find him and that he had not paid me. At this point all I wanted was to be paid. This man had even asked me to do more work but I had refused because I had not been paid. At some point I will be posting a recording where he apologizes for not paying me, but says that he will. I have told him over and over that I would blog this if he did not pay me. It has been ten months and I am still awaiting payment. My usual policy before doing work for anyway is to get paid half up front, and no it was not the relationship that blinded me, it was the story of success that he painted to me that caused me to do work for him, I would have done the work upfront without payment even without the personal relationship because I believed in his success story. This event has caused me to not trust anyone because the accolades were there the success story was there and he knew that I had two children that I needed to support and he took advantage of me so badly. All he had to do is pay me. I have called and explained to him that this incident has set my Karma off balance. Prior to meeting him success was flying my way and I was on a straight path however after this experience every experience that I have had in every aspect of my life has been negative. Webgrrls, relationships with friends, my health, my weight, and my personal appearance. After this experience I was left clueless about anyone and anything.

This has been my cathartic release. Hopefully I will be the woman I once was. Live recordings coming soon.

#### not edited just posted