I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (32 page)

B
EING
a dad to daughters is very different from being a dad to sons. The dangers are different, and the way they listen to you is different. I’m sure every father feels the same way that I do about his daughters: I love them, but I don’t like them. Who
likes
women? I told my two daughters that if a man could have a face only a mother could love, a woman could have a personality only a father could love. They don’t help. They won’t even open doors. My daughters wait until I open the door for them before they get in the car. They’re always telling
me
what to do! It’s
horrible
. They will get together and know that they are annoying the fuck out of me. Then
they’ll say, “But you have to take care of us until we get married.” They really believe that.

My daughters don’t ever leave me alone. They bother me
all the fucking time
. I can’t even sleep, because one of them will call in the night asking me dumb shit. “Daddy, there’s a mouse here! What am I supposed to do? I’m horrified!” “Here” would be New York or D.C. when I’m in Los Angeles. What could I possibly do to help?

My younger daughter, Tyler, is
certain
that she’s loved, even though I like her the least. She is so confident that I like her the
most
that she’s convinced everyone else. It’s not true! I can tell it to her face. Here I am, putting it in writing. She simply will not fucking accept it. “Oh, Daddy.
Whatever
. You got
them
fooled. That’s some bullshit.” Her sister and my wife are so convinced that Tyler has me wrapped around her little finger that when they want something, they have
her
ask me for it.

My eldest daughter, Ryan, went to Smith and now lives in D.C. working for Senator Boxer. Ryan is smart, worldly, and progressive—and she talks
a lot
. Ryan is into politics because she’s just like me—only, being a woman, she’s scared all the time. She’s the most fragile of my three kids, but from outward appearances you would never know it. She’s the one who
always
needs some kind of affirmation. She needs to hold my hand and to hear how much I love her. Incessantly.
Constantly
.

Both Tyler and Ryan like to come to New York and visit with me whenever they can. I have what amounts to “dates” with them. We spend time together and then go out to dinner. I listen to them talk about their dreams and problems. It’s really kind of a weird exercise for me. Generally, the only reason I’ll listen to a woman is if I’m getting something out of it. If I let their mother talk that much, there’d better be a blowjob about to happen. But nothing’s in it for
me when I spend time with my daughters—except for the fact that they feel better about themselves, so they’ll make better decisions. I always think of it as kind of a hustle on their part, because the girls get to go to a great restaurant and no dude is annoying them about some bullshit. I’m an ideal date, and they’re not expected to put out.

While we’re in New York, we also go shopping or out to some cool events. Even their mother tells them to wait until their father gets to New York, because she knows there’s going to be some fly shit. They don’t have to spend their money; they can spend Dad’s money. They’re
users
, both of them! Of course I love them anyway—but not
because
of that. I can actually do without the using. I would, in fact, love them
more
if they
didn’t
drag me down all the time.

One weekend around the time of the Obamacare debate, Ryan came to New York to stay with me. When I met up with her, instantly I knew something was wrong. She didn’t say much after we had dinner, but I didn’t prod her, either. At the end of the night we came back to my apartment and I went to bed. Ryan changed into her pajamas and lay down next to me to talk. I thought it was the weirdest shit ever, because she was twenty-two years old. But I didn’t say anything about it. When she left the next day, I put her in her car and told her to call me when she got home safe.

I found out later that she had posted as her Facebook status: “Sometimes you need to lay next to your father, put your head on his chest, and know that everything is going to be okay.” I never would have thought that about her. I thought this little broad just wanted to go to dinner and scam me out of a free meal. What happened was, she’d been answering phones for Senator Boxer that week. Everyone knows how answering the phones works, whether it’s at the Senate or the cable company. You cuss out the dude that
picks up at Delta airlines. You never get to yell at Mr. Delta himself. All those Tea Partiers had saved their venom for my daughter and said the meanest shit they could think of. “You’re a nigger bitch that I hope dies of cancer.”

Now imagine being a woman in this world who is that scared, who faces that much animus, but who
doesn’t
have a chest to lay her head on. Imagine not having a relationship where she’s the most important thing. She might think she could approximate that with some dude—but the dude just wants some ass. For a lot of women, that’s where they are. They have no point of reference for how it’s supposed to be, to be in a relationship predicated on love. The first and most resonant love for a woman is her father’s love. Yet over 70 percent of black girls are growing up in households where the father ain’t around. Increasing numbers of young white women are having the same problem.

When I was growing up, most women had a relationship with their father. If it wasn’t their father, there were a lot of positive male role models around. These women had self-esteem, went to a church where everyone watched out for one another, and had many people that they looked up to. They believed that they were valuable. It meant that getting pussy was hard. Having sex with them was almost impossible. No matter what game you spat, the response was the same: “You want me to put that
where
? Sir, I know you’ve got a job to do and I respect you. But I’m not comfortable. You can call my father.”

The way women view relationships and how they feel about themselves, then and now, is all based on how the first man in their lives interacted with them. The way I see it, my gig as a dad is for my daughters to have as few dicks as possible. That’s the
overriding
goal. The more a woman has a relationship with a male role model,
the more it reinforces to her that she’s valuable—and the less inclined she is to give that shit up to just anybody. She becomes that much more selective about her partners.

But so few women have relationships with positive male role models now that they’re always looking for a way to have it happen. They want someone to be that male role model who loves them and gives them some kind of attention. No matter how old they get, they’re still looking for their real father.

I don’t want to be like Laurence Fishburne and wake up one day to find out my daughter has been making a porno. Sometimes I have to suck it up and do things I would not normally do. My daughters will occasionally get mad at me and not call. If this were anyone else in the world, my response would be, “Fuck you! I’m not calling you either.” That would
especially
be the case if it was just some random girl, like I’m going to let a
woman
do that to me. But I always end up being the one to call my daughters first, because I know that I
have
to stay close to them. I’ve got to swallow my pride and call so they know that no matter what they do, somebody loves them. It’s
infuriating
, but I do it.

It turns out that Ryan recently got an apartment. “It’s in a rough neighborhood,” she announced, “so I know that you would want me to have an alarm system.” Now why the hell would anyone
choose
to move somewhere where you need an alarm? She thought that she was going to live wherever she wanted, and I was the motherfucker who was going to take care of it and make it safe for her. It annoyed the hell out of me.

I told her, “Sometimes you want to be my child, when it suits your purposes, and sometimes you want to be a woman.
Pick one
. You can’t ask for my money but not my advice. You can live your life and I’ll just kind of observe it, and it’ll be cool. But if you want the
accoutrements of being my daughter, you have to be my daughter all the time. So which is it going to be?”

“I want to be your daughter.”

Well, I did say that she was smart.

Now, as hard as it is for me sometimes to bite my tongue and play the father role to my daughters, raising my son was that much harder. Every dad sees himself in his son. But when Kyle was born, it brought back some really bad memories of when I was a kid.

We all have moments that, at the time, seem like any other day—but that haunt you for the rest of your life. I’ve had my share of misgivings just like everyone else. But one of those events is so shameful to me that I’ve never mentioned it to anyone or even said out loud. Next door to my elementary school was another school called Benjamin Banneker. Both of them are still there. Benjamin Banneker is a school for retarded kids—and those of us from Avalon Gardens Elementary used to give those kids
hell
. We were
horrible
to them. We just didn’t know that we couldn’t and that we shouldn’t. Of course I know that
now
, but I wish that I had known that
then
.

The worst day—although there are plenty to choose from, believe me—was when a bunch of my friends started messing around with a paraplegic boy. Push came to shove, literally, and they knocked him out of his wheelchair. He looked at me, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Help me.”

I didn’t even pretend that I couldn’t hear him. “No,” I told him. I knew that if I helped him, then my so-called buddies would turn on me next.

That incident and those like it took on a new significance when my son was born. Very early on, I knew something about him just
wasn’t right. My wife, on the other hand, was a separate story. Most women have blinders on when it comes to their children having flaws. With LaDonna, that tendency was exacerbated to the nth degree. For a long while she was in denial, and for an even longer time she was extremely protective of Kyle. But as time went on, even my wife couldn’t deny the signs.

When Kyle would talk, he would keep on talking and talking until he ran out of breath. Not even women talk that much, and he was just a little boy. He never knew how close to stand to another person. He was always in their space and couldn’t seem to grasp that it was rude. Every time there was a loud noise, like an ambulance going by, he would get upset and cover his ears.
Every time
. He would always sit and fiddle with his hands. I didn’t even register that as symptomatic until my mother pointed out that I used to do it myself. I’d just called it playing with my hands. I had no idea what it was, or even that it
was
something. But now I realized that other kids didn’t do that.

By the time Kyle was old enough to go to school, the officials told us that they wanted to evaluate him. Now LaDonna didn’t really have a choice but to face that things were off with Kyle. She knew that there was
something
that we had to do so that he could have a life.
Whatever
was wrong, I just didn’t want the school to have control over that kind of information. I had seen what they did with young black boys who were considered to have something the matter with them. Nothing good ever came of it. I knew they would either give Kyle some medication or put him in some special-needs class. Neither of those options was palatable to me.

If I paid for the test, however, then there wouldn’t be any notes in his official school chart. My son’s educational choices would be made by me and my wife, not by some stranger who didn’t know
him. We took him to UCLA and paid to have him evaluated ourselves, so that we could finally find out what the issue was.

The specialist looked our son over, ran some tests, and finally gave us his diagnosis: Kyle had a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome. It’s a very complicated condition, but effectively it meant his brain was wired a little differently. He would always be a bit
off
. They even had a term for his playing with his hands. It was called “stimming,” because he was “stim”-ulating his psyche with physical activity. At the time, autism was regarded as existing on a spectrum. At one extreme were kids who had virtually no communicative skills whatsoever. At the other extreme were kids like Kyle, who could get by. The specialist told us what kind of resources were available and what kind of exercises we could do. But no matter what we did, Kyle would never be “normal.” His brain was simply wired a different way. When all was said and done, I just didn’t know if he would ever be all right.

I kept a careful eye on him growing up, and LaDonna
completely
monitored his every move. I’d see him in the schoolyard by himself, stimming, and it made me realize that it was my genes that did this. It made me think of the Bible, and how the sins of the father are visited on the son.