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Don’t do what I do, do what I would tell you to do if I wasn’t doing the stupid stuff I did.
My life began with one of the biggest lies men tell women: “I’ll pull out, I promise.” Those were the words that turned into me.
“My nuts done got squashed in a bike accident. I can’t do nothing with them.” That’s really what he told her. I can’t make this up.
My dad wasn’t persistent because he was in love with her. He was a player. He probably had thirty women all over town he was using the same lines on. My mom just held out longer. As my dad always tells me, even though I definitely don’t need to hear it, he had to “con her out of her drawers” because she’d never had sex before.
My life began as a lie. I was unwanted. My mother cried when she found out I existed. And I sat there stewing in her anger for months in the womb.
Life is a story. It’s full of chapters. And the beauty of life is that not only do you get to choose how you interpret each chapter, but your interpretation writes the next chapter. It determines whether it’s comedy or tragedy, fairy tale or horror story, rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags. You can’t control the events that happen to you, but you can control your interpretation of them. So why not choose the story that serves your life the best?
I suppose that was also my first life lesson: What’s here today may be gone later today. Nothing is permanent. Especially my father.
I go in. I think, Hey, the lights are out. I’m half-high. Actually, I’m whole high.
The whole of me is high.
I figure the cop had seen me walk into the building. Now, this cop gave a statement that he looked through the window and saw me having sex with this body I was dragging.
That kind of toned her down with that hammer. But at the same time, it let me know how far we had gone and how unhappy I’d made this woman. Right then and there I knew that this shit was over. So I just said, “To hell with this. We done.” And I go on ’bout my business.
To this day, my brother thinks I got over it so quickly because I was young and he protected me. But I think that I was born with a gift: the shoulder shrug. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the ability to shoulder-shrug things—to just accept them, say “okay,” and get on with my life. The
But for whatever reason, whether it was because my father was matter-of-fact about the heaviest stuff or God put something in me, I’ve been able to take in all kinds of experiences and information and process them without holding on to any negative emotion afterward, even at a young age.
“I wasted two good nuts on ya ass, Nance.”
The only other time I saw him that bloody was after he got hit by that axe. I asked him about it much later, and he explained that he went to the home of someone named Mr. Jimmy. There was a man underneath the refrigerator who’d been struggling to repair it for two hours. My dad said, “Move out the way,” and fixed it. The next thing he knew, the other repairman chopped him with an axe, presumably for taking the job away.
I jumped out of the car. He didn’t wait until I got inside or he saw an adult. He and his long dick just peeled off and sped away.
After all this, I could have gotten angry: What kind of dad lets an eight-year-old drive a motorboat basically unsupervised? What kind of dad sics a dog on his kids after losing at basketball? What kind of dad leaves a kid outside a random church and just takes off, without even checking to make sure it’s the right place? What kind of dad makes so many enemies that people fight him in the streets when he’s with his children? His craziness could have landed me in the hospital or the grave. Fuck him, and fuck anyone else who’s on a power trip like that.
At every moment in life, there is a fork in the path you are on. And you can choose to go right or you can choose to go left. Every right you take leads you closer to your best possible destiny; every left leads you further away from it. These forks are not just decisions that lead to actions, like saying yes to a job offer, but thoughts that lead to beliefs, like blaming your father for ruining your life.
You can be angry at the bad luck that you got struck or grateful for the good luck that you survived.
I’ve never done hard drugs, I’ve never been part of a gang, I’ve never smoked a cigarette. And I’ve only stolen one thing in my life, which cost less than fifty cents. This is not because I didn’t want to do these things. It’s because my mother wouldn’t let me. Growing up, I was terrified of her. She was more intimidating than any gang. So there was never a life of crime in the cards for me.
We lived in an area where anything that wasn’t locked up was stolen, and anything that was locked up was stolen. You had to lock your locks up at night. My brother soon became part of the problem. Any mistake you could make as a teenager, he made. He joined a gang. He robbed people. He dealt drugs.
I would have thought that a fight would escalate things. But the fact that it stopped the bullying taught me a lesson: Defend yourself at all times. Don’t let nobody mess with you. If you don’t stand up to them, they’ll just keep bullying you, and it will get continually worse as they push to the edge of what they can get away with.
However, if you stand up to them, and they feel fear after knowing what you’re capable of, they’ll find someone else to belittle. Even if you lose or get beat up, at least you can go to bed at night knowing you’re not the kind of person who tolerates being pushed around.
Today, I’ve passed my brother’s lesson on to my kids and taught them to stick up for themselves and each other. “If someone is threatening to hurt you, and they’re bigger than you, pick up something and knock them in the head with it. Your problems will be gone.”
That may sound like a violent message, but stopping a bully is different than being a bully. The real message is: You are somebody. You matter. And no one is allowed to take away your right to your property, your right to your safety,
or your right to be yourself. Those are things that s...
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also taught my kids what I learned from my mother: that fighting is a last resort. It’s always better to defuse fights thro...
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Occasionally, however, when I got real worked up, my logic failed me. Once, as I was wheeling my mom’s clothes to the laundromat in a shopping cart, an older kid called me a pussy. I stopped to de-escalate, and when that didn’t work, I informed him that his mother was a pussy. I ended up getting whupped by him and his friends. As I lay on the ground getting kicked, I wondered whether I really needed to stick up for myself every time. When it comes down to choosing between your life and your pride, I’ll keep my life.
The streets will win every time. It’s all there—women, money, drink, drugs, and, most powerful of all, other kids who appear to have the one thing your child wants more than anything: the freedom to do whatever the hell they want.
If I stepped even slightly out of line, I got hit with her open hand, fist, belt, shoe, slipper, even sections of plastic Hot Wheels track. She used to leave those tracks lying around the house just so they’d be convenient to punish any infraction. I have no doubt that all this came from a place of love, but it was a love so controlling that I felt envious of the neglected kids in school.
The schedule she designed didn’t leave room for anything but hustle. That’s where it all began.
It turns out that the things I hated most as a child are the same things that serve me the most as an adult.
Today, I understand why she wouldn’t accept a ride: She didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. Her heart was so big that she’d rather be out in the cold at night for four hours than inconvenience someone for half an hour.
Still. So fucking stupid. Im mad for Kev. It makes no sense to PURPOSELY choose to take the bus at night and in the come when there's people offering a ride. Just irrational and dumb
Even though I’ve seen pictures of my mom’s mother holding me when I was a baby, I don’t remember meeting my grandparents much. So Ms. Davis became my play grandmother. I began thinking of her pets as my own, bringing them down to my clubhouse to hang out. I was a lonely mama’s boy living in an imaginary world created out of boredom and blankets.
People say that when it comes to gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts. Don’t believe them. It’s the gift that counts.
With his apartment’s yellowing walls, stench of body odor, stale cigarette smoke, and animal droppings, it felt like I’d entered the armpit of the world.
There was no middle ground between my parents. I could either choose a comfortable dictatorship or I could choose uncomfortable anarchy.
It’s easy to complain about your life—how tough it is, how unfair it is, how stressful it is, how everyone else has it much better. But if you step into the life of someone you envy for just a day, you’ll discover that everyone has their own problems, and they’re usually worse than yours. Because your problems are designed specifically for you, with the specific purpose of helping you grow.
And logically, no other response to the ups and downs of life makes sense besides gratitude. You are already in your experience. So you can either resent and resist it, and make it that much less enjoyable, or you can accept it and find something positive in it.
I didn’t get pubic hair until I was almost eighteen years old. Being the last person to grow pubic hair in my class was probably the biggest stress I dealt with in my childhood. It was worse than my mom controlling my every movement, worse than my brother getting arrested and joining the military, worse than anything my dad did.
At times, life is random if not downright stupid.
“I’m telling you, we’ll make it,” I elaborated. “We’re both talented, and we got great voices.” The first problem was my premise: We weren’t talented, and we had horrible voices. But we had a great dream, and who’s going to say no to a child’s dream?