Then there was the strangest moment where it flipped. I caught a glimpse of the look of terror in the boy’s face, and I realized that Abel had gone past getting revenge for me. He wasn’t doing this to teach the kid a lesson. He was just beating him. He was a grown man venting his rage on a twelve-year-old boy. In an instant I went from Yes, I got my revenge to No, no, no. Too much. Too much. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Dear God, what have I done?
Once this kid was beat to shit, Abel dragged him over to the car and held him up in front of me. “Say you’re sorry.” The kid was whimpering, trembling. He looked me in the eye, and I had never seen fear in someone’s eyes like I saw in his. He’d been beaten by a stranger in a way I don’t think he’d ever been beaten before. He said he was sorry, but it was like his apology wasn’t for what he’d done to me. It was like he was sorry for every bad thing he’d ever done in his life, because he didn’t know there could be a punishment like this.
Looking in that boy’s eyes, I realized how much he and I had in common. He was a kid. I was a kid. He was crying. I was crying. He was a colored boy in South Africa, taught how to hate and how to hate himself. Who had bullied him that he needed to bully me? He’d made me feel fear, and to get my revenge I’d unleashed my own hell on his world. But I knew I’d done a terrible thing.
Once the kid apologized, Abel shoved him away and kicked him. “Go.” The kid ran off, and we drove back to the house in silence. At home Abel and my mom got in a huge fight. She was always on him about his temper. “You can’t go around hitting other people’s children! You’re not the law! This anger, this is no way to live!”
A couple of hours later this kid’s dad drove over to our house to confront Abel. Abel went out to the gate, and I watched from inside the house. By that point Abel was truly drunk. This kid’s dad had no idea what he was walking into. He was some mild-mannered, middle-aged guy. I don’t remember much about him, because I was watching Abel the whole time. I never took my eyes off him. I knew that’s where the danger was.
Abel didn’t have a gun yet; he bought that later. But Abel didn’t need a gun to put the fear of God in you. I watched as he got right in this guy’s face. I couldn’t hear what the other man was saying, but I heard Abel. “Don’t fuck with me. I will kill you.” The guy turned quickly and got back in his car and drove away. He thought he was coming to defend the honor of his family. He left happy to escape with his life.
When I was growing up, my mom spent a lot of time trying to teach me about women. She was always giving me lessons, little talks, pieces of advice. It was never a full-blown, sit-down lecture about relationships. It was more like tidbits along the way. And I never understood why, because I was a kid. The only women in my life were my mom and my grandmother and my aunt and my cousin. I had no love interest whatsoever, yet my mom insisted. She would go off on a whole range of things.
“Trevor, remember a man is not determined by how much he earns. You can still be the man of the house and earn less than your woman. Being a man is not what you have, it’s who you are. Being more of a man doesn’t mean your woman has to be less than you.”
“Trevor, make sure your woman is the woman in your life. Don’t be one of these men who makes his wife compete with his mother. A man with a wife cannot be beholden to his mother.”
The smallest thing could prompt her. I’d walk through the house on the way to my room and say, “Hey, Mom” without glancing up. She’d say, “No, Trevor! You look at me. You acknowledge me. Show me that I exist to you, because the way you treat me is the way you will treat your woman. Women like to be noticed. Come and acknowledge me and let me know that you see me. Don’t just see me when you need something.”
These little lessons were always about grown-up relationships, funnily enough. She was so preoccupied with teaching me how to be a man that she never taught me how to be a boy. How to talk to a girl or pass a girl a note in class—there was none of that. She only told me about adult things. She would even lecture me about sex. As I was a kid, that would get very awkward.
“Trevor, don’t forget: You’re having sex with a woman in her mind before you’re having sex with her in her vagina.”
“Trevor, foreplay begins during the day. It doesn’t begin in the bedroom.”
I’d be like, “What? What is foreplay? What does that even mean?”
A YOUNG MAN’S LONG, AWKWARD, OCCASIONALLY TRAGIC, AND FREQUENTLY HUMILIATING EDUCATION IN AFFAIRS OF THE HEART, PART I: VALENTINE’S DAY
It was my first year at H. A. Jack, the primary school I transferred to after leaving Maryvale. Valentine’s Day was approaching fast. I was twelve years old, and I’d never done Valentine’s Day before. We didn’t celebrate it in Catholic school. I understood Valentine’s Day, as a concept. The naked baby shoots you with an arrow and you fall in love. I got that part. But this was my first time being introduced to it as an activity. At H. A. Jack, Valentine’s Day was used as a fundraiser. Pupils were going around selling flowers and cards, and I had to go ask a friend what was happening.
“What is this?” I said. “What are we doing?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, “it’s Valentine’s Day. You pick a special person and you tell them that you love them, and they love you back.”
Wow, I thought, that seems intense. But I hadn’t been shot by Cupid’s arrow, and I didn’t know of anyone getting shot on my behalf. I had no clue what was going on. All week, the girls in school kept saying, “Who’s your valentine? Who’s your valentine?” I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Finally one of the girls, a white girl, said, “You should ask Maylene.” The other kids agreed. “Yes, Maylene. You should definitely ask Maylene. You have to ask Maylene. You guys are perfect for each other.”
Maylene was a girl I used to walk home from school with. We lived in the city now, me, my mom and Abel, who was now my stepfather, and my new baby brother, Andrew. We’d sold our house in Eden Park to invest in Abel’s new garage. Then that fell apart, and we ended up moving to a neighborhood called Highlands North, a thirty-minute walk from H. A. Jack. A group of us would leave school together every afternoon, each kid peeling off and going their separate way when we reached their house. Maylene and I lived the farthest, so we’d always be the last two. We’d walk together until we got where we needed to go, and then we’d part ways.
Maylene was cool. She was good at tennis, smart, cute. I liked her. I didn’t have a crush on her; I wasn’t even thinking about girls that way yet. I just liked hanging out with her. Maylene was also the only colored girl in school. I was the only mixed kid in school. We were the only two people who looked like each other. The white girls were insistent about me asking Maylene to be my valentine. They were like, “Trevor, you have to ask her. You’re the only two. It’s your responsibility.” It was like our species was going to die out if we didn’t mate and carry on. Which I’ve learned in life is something that white people do without even realizing it. “You two look the same, therefore we must arrange for you to have sex.”
I honestly hadn’t thought of asking Maylene, but when the girls brought it up, that thing happened where someone plants the idea in your head and it changes your perception.
“Maylene’s totally got a thing for you.”
“Does she?”
“Yeah, you guys are great together!”
“Are we?”
“Totally.”