Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (2 page)

Panicked I was in cardiac arrest—or worse—because of my eerie silence, they both rushed me off to the hospital. My mother
was questioned by nurses, doctors, and even the police, as they harbored suspicions about her story, but eventually—to her great relief—child abuse was ruled out. A sense of gratitude accompanied the realization that it could have been much worse: I could have been electrocuted. Instead, the jolt of electricity gave me my “superpowers” and the scar I still have on my lower lip.

As I grew up, I loved hearing about my superhero beginnings, and I asked my parents to tell me the story again and again. As they told and retold it, I sometimes imagined I’d been electrocuted and had died in that room. I had visions of God sending angels to bring me back to life because God had determined I was special. Not only that, but I also saw God speaking as the doctors did in the opening titles of my favorite show,
The Six Million Dollar Man:
“I can rebuild him. Make him stronger.” My imagination as a child stayed on overdrive at all times and has remained just as vivid to this day.

The matriarch of our family—my wise, tough-as-nails grand-aunt, Mama Z—put the piece of my lip in a mason jar and kept it on her mantel. Needless to say, my mother was horrified every time she saw it, as it had blackened into a tough jerky, and she was happy when Mama Z finally threw out her macabre souvenir. But for me, this family legend was just more proof that I was special. The story made me feel exceptionally tough because I’d survived something that should have killed me. My quarter-sized keloid scar on my bottom lip has always been a reminder of my strength and survival.

When I was three, the arguments with my father became so unbearable that my mother moved out of our Albert Street apartment and joined Mama Z and her husband, Brother Wright, on their farm just outside Flint. My mother, my older brother, Marcelle, and I lived in their attic for a year. I loved
every minute of our time there, especially running outside among the chickens, pigs, and cornstalks.

Mama Z talked nonstop while Brother Wright sat in the kitchen nodding
yes
or shaking his head
no
. She was an amazing cook and prepared feasts, which I devoured. My hunger embarrassed my mother, and she always told me not to ask for anything. But she also told me not to lie. And Mama Z constantly asked me if I was hungry. I looked at my mother, noticed her angry squint, but still I nodded
yes
. Mama Z fixed me a huge plate of meat, beans, vegetables, and potatoes, as well as peach cobbler packed with ripe peaches she’d picked behind the house. I grinned at my mother until she reluctantly smiled back, knowing she’d been foiled again.

My mother often left us alone with Mama Z, a tough cookie who worked outside every day and introduced me to how real the world could be. In the morning, she stood in her kitchen, declaring there would be chicken for dinner as Brother Wright nodded in agreement. Then she went out back by the barn and looked for a good-sized chicken. I sat on the back stoop, watching as Mama Z tiptoed around with the fowl, almost mimicking their steps.

“Here, chickee, chickee, chickee,” she called out in the sweetest little-old-lady voice imaginable.

Then she violently yanked the bird she wanted out of the crowd and held the neck still while spinning the body around in circles like a jump rope. When she let her victim go, the other chickens scattered and clucked loudly as her chicken—its neck broken, head dangling near its feet—ran around the yard flapping its wings for what was the longest minute of my short life. As the runaway chicken came near me, I recoiled on the stoop, scared to death it might attack me.

“Go on in the house,” she said, waving me inside.

When she carried in the chicken, she promptly dunked it in boiling water, then plucked, gutted, butchered, and fried it. I watched every step, determined that I was never going to eat that bird. But as time went on, I grew hungrier and hungrier, and by the time she placed that same chicken down in front of me, with white rice and corn, I ate every bite. Plus seconds. It was the best chicken I ever tasted.

After a year with Mama Z, my mother and father reconciled, and we moved back in with my father. But not all reunions are happy. Before long, there were plenty of reasons I started feeling the need to be tough, even though I was only in kindergarten. We relocated to a small, ramshackle house on Flint Park Avenue. My father, Big Terry, began getting ready for the birth of my little sister, Michaell, and he and Trish, which is what we called my mother, moved Marcelle and me into the smaller of the two bedrooms.

At sixteen, my mother had given birth to my brother, and then had me at eighteen. I now suspect her youth had something to do with why we never called her Mom. And I believe we didn’t refer to Big Terry as Dad in order to make it easier on Marcelle because he wasn’t Marcelle’s birth father. The fact that we had different fathers was never hidden from Marcelle and me, and I often wondered what Marcelle’s father looked like and what he was doing. I thought about how it would feel to not know or have contact with my birth father, and I was always sensitive to what it must be like for Marcelle.

Once Big Terry and Trish had moved us into the smaller bedroom, they stacked our beds into bunk beds, which my brother and I loved because they now earned our highest compliment. “It’s just like on TV!” we shouted when we ran into the room and saw them for the first time. I prowled around, trying
out amazing feats of strength and showing off for Marcelle. Superhero-style, I lifted dressers and the living room couch and flexed endlessly, imagining electricity still running through my body. I would take the bottom bunk because I had a bad habit of falling out of bed in my sleep. I was also a bed wetter. Until I was fourteen.

Looking back on that time, I realize that my bed-wetting had something to do with how unsafe I sometimes felt in that house. One of the first nights my brother and I were sleeping in our new room, I woke up from a sound sleep to rumbling in the house that felt like thunder.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM
. I lay in the dark, trying to make sense of where I was and what was happening. The whole place was shuddering. Trish was shrieking and screaming. It was pandemonium. I’d never heard anything like that before in our house, but nothing could have prepared me for those sounds anyhow. It felt like war.

Our bedroom door was closed, but light leaked in from the other side. My father had just installed a makeshift divider between our bedroom and the living room. It was uneven and allowed light and sounds to filter through the cracks to where we lay. I heard Big Terry’s booming footsteps and a weird shuffling sound. It felt like an earthquake was shaking everything. I thought of my favorite Godzilla movies and wondered if the house would fall down like when he destroyed a city. I was scared of what was happening, and I stayed in my bed with the covers pulled up over my head. Marcelle did, too.

It became common for me to wake up to these sounds. And soon, there was a night when the chaos spilled into our room as my mother burst through the door.

“I’m going to take the boys and go,” she said.

Big Terry followed close behind her. She had left before, and he knew she was serious. “Don’t, Trish,” he said, his voice pleading.

I blinked against the light, scared, trying not to do anything to make it worse.

“I’m telling you, I’m gonna take them,” she said.

Something in Big Terry seemed to snap.

“You do that, and you’ll be sorry,” he said, his voice growing angry.

Trish yanked me out of bed and held me in her arms, gesturing toward the door. Big Terry’s silhouette hulked over us in the darkness. He was yelling now.

“Calm down, Trish! Calm down.”

She held me closer, my heart beating wildly, scared of what would happen. And then, just like that, she placed me back in bed. I pulled the covers up over me.

“Go to sleep!” she yelled at Marcelle and me.

Trish stormed out of the room, Big Terry close behind her. They slammed the door, but I could hear them continuing their argument in the living room. Sleep was impossible. My nerves were on high alert, and I stayed up for hours until the adrenaline finally wore off, and I fell into an uneasy sleep that left me exhausted.

Eventually, Marcelle and I grew bolder and climbed down out of our beds in our matching onesie pajamas to witness the action in the other room. I was the one to open our bedroom door so we could see what was happening, and we both peeked out. In the living room, Big Terry and Trish were fighting. Her hair was all messed up and crazy, and she looked like she’d already been hit a couple of times. She had something in her hand—a kitchen utensil, maybe.

“You ain’t nothin’!” she screamed. “I’m sick of you. You’re a drunk.”

“Leave me alone!” he screamed back at her, slurring. “Leave me alone, Trish. Don’t make me do something.”

Marcelle and I stood there, wiping the sleep from our eyes, watching it all go down, wondering how it was going to end. She hit him, and when that didn’t make an impact, she started pushing him.

“Don’t make me do something!”

He pushed back, and she slipped a little, and then she hit him again.

“You made me do this!” He hauled off.
POW
. He hit her so hard she fell down and started crying. For a second, it all went quiet except for the sound of her sobs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning down toward her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Get away from me!” she screamed. “I hate you! I hate you!”

These were our parents, and watching them fight was unreal. Big Terry was aptly named, as he seemed like a giant, his hands the size of bowling balls with calluses that looked impenetrable. His every step shook the foundation of the house, and his deep voice filled my little boy heart with fear. My mother was by no means a shrinking violet, though, and she could prod, taunt, and goad without mercy. She called him every name in the book, and I knew even then that a woman could cause violent pain to a man by lancing his pride with a few skillfully aimed obscenities.

Over time, as these fights kept repeating themselves night after night, Marcelle and I started treating them like scenes in a movie. As the shouting and shoving started, he hopped down from the top bunk.

“I got Trish,” he said, already moving to open the door.

“Okay, I got Big Terry,” I said. “Who’s gonna win?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

We weren’t being cold or unfeeling. We were just trying to cope with what we couldn’t understand, and maybe even put a cheery face on a dark moment. The fact that two people who said they were in love—our parents—could hurt each other so much was too difficult to comprehend.

I threw off my blankets and followed Marcelle out into the arch of the living room doorway. Trish pushed Big Terry, and he pushed her back. They were grappling, both trying to get a grip on each other, almost like wrestlers.

Marcelle and I giggled. “Get ’em, get ’em,” we whispered to each other.

We were trying to make this nightly horror into a fun game, hoping the violence would finally stop, and we could be a family, just like on TV. Big Terry pulled back and punched Trish. She went down. We immediately stopped giggling. It wasn’t a game. She was lying on the floor shaking. It was an awful thing to see my mother in pain, and to have my father be the one who had hurt her, but I didn’t feel safe enough to go over and check on her.

I imagined being punched like that and wondered if I could take it. Was I strong enough? When I considered how large and strong Big Terry was, I knew that even this superhero was no match for that supervillain disguised as my father.

“I’m sorry,” Big Terry said.

Even though his voice had grown softer, Trish drew back from him.

“Get away from me!” she yelled. “You hit me. You hit me.”

This is not on TV
, I thought.
This is not the way it’s supposed to be
.

Unless
.

Is this what all men do? Is this what the families on TV are like when no one is watching?

I couldn’t believe it was true. I felt so helpless. I couldn’t stop Big Terry. I couldn’t save Trish. I couldn’t do anything. Where was the electricity I should be able to summon when I needed it, at times like this? I balled up my tiny fists, but there was nothing there. I was little, weak, and scared. I needed more strength, more power, more courage. I could only watch and hope that the violence stopped, wishing someone would take me away from all of this. Trish looked up and saw us standing there. “Go back to bed,” she said.

When we didn’t move, she sternly repeated herself: “Go back to bed!”

We knew she would turn right around on us, and we didn’t want her wrath or one of her legendary whuppings, but we paused before going back to our room.

On other nights, when Big Terry was the first one to notice us, it was a different story. “Go back to bed,” he said.

Although that’s what Trish usually wanted, when
he
said it, she flipped.

“No, they need to see you hit me,” she said. Even when she was in pain, she took revenge on him with continued attacks on his pride.

We froze in the doorway, wanting to make it better, or at least not make it worse. She looked back at where we were huddled together. I stood a little in front of my brother, trying to shield him, although he was two years older than me. He’d just been held back a year in school, and I felt like I had to protect him. In fact, I felt like I was there to protect everybody. That’s what superheroes did.

“No, you all stay right here,” she said to us. “You see him?”

Even at five, I knew this was wrong. We were being used to hurt Big Terry. I didn’t want to be a pawn in this cruel game. I looked over at Marcelle. He was crying. Then I broke. I started to cry, too. As young as I was, I still felt mad at myself for not being able to keep my emotions in check, like I’d done when I’d been shocked.

“See, see what you did to them!” Trish said to Big Terry.

He turned and stormed out the door. She lay there on the floor, weeping. Marcelle looked at me. I nodded at him and led the way back to our room. I heard Marcelle shifting in his bed above me, and then he grew still as he fell asleep. I stared at that top bunk for hours, waiting to crash out, or for the sun to rise, jumpy with adrenaline as I relived the fight scene again and again.