The Story of Fool and Hopeless

To find out how all this started, go here and scroll down to “The Beginning of a Nightmare.”

You know, I have learned that no matter how much you think it isn’t true, or how much someone tells you that it isn’t so, you never want to know what’s going on in someone else’s house. Not only is it none of your business, but it may just drive you insane.

Such is the story of Hopeless and Fool.

I’m going to take you on a journey that will cover time and space, and over a dozen children. A trip that I had to take, so bare with me, I’ll bring you along.

It’s around 1990 the best I can figure, and we’re in a project on the Southside of Atlanta. It’s a small housing project, with somewhere around 150 or 200 apartments. The grass is dying and brown, what little there is of it. Mostly there’s dirt for as far as the eyes can see. In the summer, when the wind picks up, the air is gritty, dusty and full of hatred and contempt.

This is where Hopeless and Fool meet. He was a maintenance man there, reported to be stealing stuff out of people’s apartments to support his drug habit. I guess she took one look at him and realized her Prince Charming had arrived.

Her mother, Mrs. Debra, said she warned her to “stay away from that man.” Fool was a short, “light-skinned” man, with three children of his own, who lived with his mother (yep, for those of you keeping count at home, that’s 14 children between the two of them). Of course, Hopeless herself had two children at this point, by two different men, who also stayed with her mother. Guess they were a match made…somewhere.

Fool wooed her, taking her into peoples homes, when they weren’t there, showing her the neighbor’s most private things. In fact, that was considered a night out for them. They would sit in his car and wait for someone to leave their apartment and the two would sneak into it, and watch movies and do other things—personal things—in their beds.

That’s when the fighting started. Fool has been known throw Hopeless down the stairs and kick her in the stomach. He’s pulled her down the road by her hair and punched her. Oh, don’t fret, it was never “that hard,” just ask him. But don’t you worry about Hopeless, she can hold her own. She has cut Fool’s face so hard, he’s needed stitches—with a spoon. And once she stabbed him in the back with a stake knife, and left it there for him to pull out.

Ah, a couple in love.

Sometime after this, Hopeless got pregnant—and she didn’t stop for another fifteen years. In fact, we aren’t sure that she’s stopped now. It’s rumored that she’s two months along.

Fool can’t read (M-O-O-N spells Fool). He can’t fill out a job application without having someone go with him, and he can’t even read his children a bed time story. He’s told them that real men don’t need to know how to read. That real men can get what they want.

Fool’s three older children haven’t faired well along the way with that advice. His daughter is the better of the three; she’s only been arrested once. However, she’s been known to shoot up with her father, and prostitutes herself for drug money. One son simply disappeared. No one has seen or heard from him in more than five years. I would congratulate him, but it’s rumored that he owed some drug dealers money when he went on the run. It’s said that they found him, and well, lets just say that…he’s paid in full.

His oldest son is in prison for murder. He shot a man during a robbery with a sawed-off shot gun, and walked away with a whopping fifty-five dollars. Afterward, he said that the man took too long to give him “his” money from the register.

What can you say about family? Can’t live with ‘em; can’t kill ‘em. Well, maybe you can. I wouldn’t put anything pass this family.