Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (3 page)

We had this little cassette tape player back then. Trish didn’t normally let us listen to secular music. It was either gospel or no music at all. But there was one folk pop group, The Free Design, that she tolerated. They had a breezy, harmless little tune called “Kites Are Fun,” which I probably heard a million times as a kid. It was the kind of song that made it impossible to remain in a bad mood. When I was wide awake and all twisted up after one of their fights, I closed my eyes and sang it again and again, trying to get the visions of what I’d just seen out of my head. Kicking my imagination into overdrive again, I formed a visual of Big Terry, Trish, Marcelle, and me, all flying a kite. I desperately wanted that image to come true. Finally, I fell asleep. When morning arrived, I usually woke up in a wet bed.

Since I couldn’t fly away from our problems like a kite, I decided I would work even harder to be strong like a superhero. I ran around the house, lifting one end of the couch, and then the other, as if my superpowers were about to kick in. The fabric was yellow with a black paisley design, and I used to fight it as if
it were a vicious lion. You know, ghetto games. From the couch, I raced over to the gigantic entertainment console, an enormous solid block of wood and metal that looked like a brown refrigerator lying on its side. The radio was on one end, the record player on the other. On top, my mother kept a heart-shaped box given to her by Big Terry. Its Valentine’s Day chocolates long gone, it remained, a symbol of many things. Although the furniture was impossibly heavy, I’d grab one side and heave it up, just to see how far I could lift it into the air. Something about the voluntary stress and strain of lifting things made my brain calm down. I needed to move things. It was my way of feeling like I was taking control of my situation.

It didn’t take long for me to end up with a sharp pain in my side. When it didn’t go away, Trish took me to the doctor. I’d given myself a hernia. I was five.

As I was pushed down the hallway of Hurley Medical Center on a gurney, I watched the holiday decorations slide by on the walls, and the ceiling tiles pass by above me. I was a kindergartener with a Technicolor imagination, and Christmas was a big deal. Every song, image, or decorated tree had a seasonal story. Even though I was in the hospital, I was happy. I felt special because I was getting extra attention.

I was so small, and everything seemed so big. A man put a plastic mask over my face, and I looked around—like,
what?—
until the anesthesia pulled me under. I was afraid I was going to feel the surgery, but when I opened my eyes again, the procedure was over. It seemed like I’d closed my eyes for only a second and then magically moved from the hallway to a bed in a hospital room in the kids’ ward.

The room smelled familiar, like our kitchen, with its scent of food and Pine-Sol. Toys were scattered on the ground, but I was feeling weird, and in no mood to play. I looked around and saw
I was trapped in a giant crib, its jail-like bars encircling my bed. There was another little boy in a bed across the room near the window. He kept talking and talking and talking. I wanted him to stop, but he wouldn’t. Finally, I couldn’t stand it.

“Hey,” I said.

He just kept right on chattering away. I looked around. Trish was very strict, not only about the music we listened to, but also how we behaved. I wasn’t allowed to swear at all, and even “shut up” was considered a cuss. I didn’t see anyone.

“Hey … shut up,” I said.

For a moment, I experienced the rush of having broken the rules. It felt good to be bad, even if it was only for a second.

“Who are you talking to?” Big Terry’s voice grumbled down from above me.

I was lucky that I was already stretched out, because I had a baby heart attack. I knew I shouldn’t have said it. I was generally a good kid who didn’t break the rules, and not only because I didn’t want to get caught. I really wanted to be good. Here it was, the one time I’d dared to disobey, and now I was going to get it.

I can’t get away with anything
, I thought.

But Big Terry started to laugh. I don’t know if it was because Trish wasn’t around, or because he felt bad I was in pain. He was much more patient with me while I was in the hospital. Up until then, the entire experience had been overwhelming and scary, but now I saw that maybe it had an upside, too. Not to mention that I got to roll Big Wheels in the halls during the week I recovered.

AS FRIGHTENING AS MY SURGERY HAD BEEN, IT DIDN’T
lessen my attempts to prove how strong I could be. One
of my earliest memories of my sister, Michaell, who we called Micki, happened a few years later when she was just learning to walk. I was hanging out on our front porch, showing off for my friends from next door.

“Look, babies are really strong,” I said.

I held out a stick and had Micki put her hands on it. And then I lifted her up.

“Look,” I said.

Of course, I wasn’t really showing them how strong babies were. I was showing them how strong
I
was. And as I found out, babies really aren’t that strong. As soon as she was in the air,
WHOOSH
, she lost her grip and,
BAM
, she hit the ground and started screaming.
Oohh
, I thought, already knowing what came next.

Trish ran out and swooped up Micki, who was still crying.

“What are you doing?” Trish glared at me. “What happened to her?”

“She fell,” I said, backing away. “She fell.”

I admit it, I lied right to Trish’s face. I lied so quickly, even though I knew it was wrong. I wanted to be a good kid, but I had a greater desire not to get a whupping in front of my friends.

That day, I got off easy. But more often, I did not. When things were good, Trish was very playful and sweet, but when things weren’t—and often, they were not—my mother could be extremely cruel. Like the time I yanked the buttons off my new coat, just because I couldn’t believe how easy it was to pull them off, or how magical it felt: the gentle
POP
sound, and the feeling of the smooth round disc in my hand. And then another
POP
, and I’d pulled the next one off, too. Trish saw me sitting there with the buttons in my hand and snapped. I scrambled to my feet.

“Aaaah,” I screamed, running around the house, trying to escape her.

If we had to get a spanking, we always hoped it would be from Big Terry. He never hit us, and he probably only spanked me twice in my entire childhood. He knew Trish would kill him if he put his hands on us. One time he spanked Marcelle a little too hard and left a welt, and Trish just flew at him. He never did that again.

Trish caught me. She always did. She bent me over, pulled her arm back and brought the belt down. Hard.
WHAP
. It hurt, and I screamed in earnest now.

“Be quiet,” she said.

She hit me again, harder, which only made me scream louder.

“I said shut up,” she said, hitting me again.

It didn’t correlate. She was hitting me with a belt and expecting me to remain quiet. I forced myself to stay silent, hoping it would be over sooner if I did what she said, but the whuppings were always long, and drawn out, and horrible. It felt the same way it did when Big Terry and Trish were arguing, and it started to get nasty and violent. I could see her go into a zone, as if it wasn’t about my brother and me anymore, but some war she was having with Big Terry, and Flint, and herself. Looking back, I think there were times she was just so mad she couldn’t help herself. She was mad at herself for having us so young, for not being able to live the way she wanted and for being trapped in her marriage with us kids. Her behavior was also the result of her upbringing. Her mother was very cruel to her, and that’s how the cycle goes until someone stops it, like my siblings and I have done with our kids.

I WAS ALWAYS WATCHING BIG TERRY, WONDERING:
IS
that what a man is? Is that what I’ll be like when I grow up?
It was tricky, though, because he was two different people, and I was never sure which one was going to show up around the house on any given day: Big Terry on his way to work or Big Terry on his time off.

My father was talented with his hands and a very hard worker. He was a foreman at the GM plant in Flint, where he worked the second shift. And so I always watched him leave for work in the afternoons, but I rarely saw him come home. Day after day, I had a visual of my father going one way: out the door. When I woke up in the morning, he was usually asleep. We weren’t supposed to disturb him, but of course we always did. I mostly just wanted to peek in and look at him because he worked a lot, and he slept a lot, and I didn’t get to see him much.

As quietly as I could, I tiptoed over to their room, opened the
door, and just stood there, watching Big Terry sleep, a sheet pulled up over his chest. I was filled with wonder and awe. My father had muscles and was strong. He had huge hands and feet, and they were so rough. I wanted calloused hands like that, hands that seemed capable of doing anything. A loud snore erupted from him, making him sound like a monster, and he rolled over but didn’t wake up.

Is that’s what I’m going to be like?
I wondered. I shut the door gently and hurried back to my room before I did anything to get myself in trouble.

I always knew as soon as Big Terry woke up because I could hear him.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM
. “Trish, Trisha!” he yelled as he came into the kitchen.

I was sitting with Marcelle at Big Terry’s latest creation, a wooden diner booth, which we loved because it made the kitchen resemble a real restaurant. Trish was making Big Terry’s dinner, beans cooked with oxtail, which he ate at noon before work.

Wow, that’s how I’ve got to walk
, I thought. I wanted to be big and strong just like that. I wanted to be able to make things like the wooden clock Big Terry was carrying, which was lined with velvet and could really keep time.

“You made that?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m going to sell these,” he said. “We built the pyramids, boy! You know that, right?”

I sure did. This was his favorite saying. I nodded my head at him.

“That’s how I know we can build anything else, too,” he said.

I nodded again. Just from watching my dad, I learned that if you want more, you have to do more. I know I got my work ethic from him.

Big Terry had enlisted in the Army right after high school, and he always dressed with the extreme precision of a soldier. He was big on clothes.

“If you look like a clown, they’re going to treat you like a clown,” he often said. “But when you look like a man, you’ll always get treated like a man.”

For work, he wore an impeccably ironed shirt with a pocket protector for his pens. When we got older he made us iron everything we wore, even our jeans and T-shirts. He was a stickler for shiny shoes, too, and he always put care into polishing his own. I used to sit and watch him getting ready for work, wanting to be close to him and learn about the ways of the world from him. He held a black leather work shoe in one hand and drew a soft rag over its toe with the other.

“So you got black polish for those?” I asked, hoping to draw him out.

“Yep.”

He kept on buffing. When he was on his way to work, all I could get out of him were these clipped, one-word answers. Still, I hung around, hoping for just a little more from him. But he was in a hurry, and before I knew it, he was out the door.

Marcelle and I learned how to stay out of Trish’s way, and we were happy playing together around the house when Big Terry was at work or out. I could draw for hours, lost in sketches and crayon drawings of people, monsters, and muscled heroes. I’d started drawing when Marcelle was in kindergarten and I was home alone with Trish. To keep me busy, she set out crayons and pencils on our brown wooden coffee table, and I knelt over the blank paper. She grabbed a pencil with her left hand and showed me how to make a few shapes to get me started. I, too, grabbed the pencil with my left hand, and then my imagination took over.

When I finished a picture and held it up, she was obviously impressed. Now, this is the thing: I’ve always been hooked on praise, so when she told me that my drawings were really good, I took to it just like that. I felt like I needed to increase the acceptance and admiration I received around the house because, most of the time, the climate was just the opposite. Drawing was cathartic. I could visualize a different kind of world and control what happened there, at least in my pictures.

I loved to draw but quickly learned there’s nothing that comes naturally to us. We may have interests and desires, but we still have to work hard to improve our abilities. I drew all of the time, and I enjoyed it, but I also found it extremely frustrating. Trish and Marcelle would praise a picture, and I’d be happy with it. But then I would go to sleep, and when I woke up and looked at the same picture, I saw it as a mess. It was a constant fight, trying to get what I visualized to match what I put down on paper. Finally, the struggle became part of the process for me.