And my middle school life was saved.
I ended up doing that maneuver so often in the following years, I’m surprised I had any hair left on my head.
“How y’all getting it?” I kept asking friends, trying to be casual about it. “What y’all doing? Putting grease on it or something?”
I tried everything to spark some growth. I put hair oil on the area. I put shaving cream on it. I put fertilizer on it. I prayed to God.
But nothing worked: 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.
And the fucked-up thing is, I waited what seemed like my whole life to get pubic hair, then as soon as I got it, women started saying, “You gotta shave that shit off.”
I guess to be a man, you just gotta be able to prove you can grow it. And once you know you can, you’re supposed to get rid of it. Is there a life lesson in this? Probably not. At times, life is random if not downright stupid.
14
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PACKING THAT MEAT
Eventually, I realized it wasn’t pubic hair that got you the girls. I’d been so na?ve. Girls didn’t care about that. They cared about things that were more important—things that really mattered, things that made a difference. They cared about big dicks.
After hearing two girls talking about the size of Hakim’s dick, I leapt into action: The next day, I came to school in my brother’s old sneakers.
They were two sizes too big for me. But I knew that as soon as the girls saw how big my feet were, they’d think about the monster I was packing higher up.
“Yo, Kev, what’s going on?” my friend Jabbar asked. “Your feet are big as shit.”
“Shhh,” I told him. “I’m dealing with it, you know. What you want me to do?”
I flopped all over school like I was the man that day—except during basketball practice. I couldn’t run in those flippers, so my sneakers on the court looked nothing like the ones I wore during school.
I hoped no one would notice the difference. But I think they did, because pretty soon, everyone started calling me “Flip.”
Fortunately, I have an optimistic disposition. So when fake pubic hair and big shoes didn’t get me anywhere with the ladies, I decided to do the one thing that no teenage girl could resist: join a boy band.
NKOTB, Boyz II Men, New Edition—all these boy bands were poppin’. So I told my friend Jabbar that we should be poppin’ too.
“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?
The second problem was that between school and all the extracurricular programs my mother had enrolled me in, I had no free time to rehearse. I solved that one by practicing with Jabbar in Ms. Davis’s yard. We were there nearly every afternoon for a month, very seriously working on the lyrics and choreography of our first hit single.
It was a song that we were sure would take the teenage girls of the nation by storm. We stood side by side, then shuffled a step to the right, and I sang, “Gonna love you up.” Then we moved back to the center, and he sang, “Gonna love you down.” And finally, we shuffled a step to the left and both sang, “Gonna love you always.”
“Oh man, that’s it!” I clapped him on the back when we completed that song. “We’re gonna do this. Kev and Jabbar: album dropping everywhere this summer.”
“I’m gonna get me my own house with all that money,” Jabbar replied.
We probably spent more time bigging each other up than singing. Our album was going to be called Didn’t Make It. It was a prophetic title.
It seemed like whatever I did to be cool only brought me more ridicule. The problem is that in most cases, what it takes to be cool in middle school is money. And we didn’t have much. We couldn’t afford the Malcolm X jackets that kids were wearing after the movie came out. We couldn’t afford the Air Jordans. We couldn’t afford the nice Starter jackets. All these phases came and went, and I just watched them pass by.
The only thing I had was my personality, and back then, it wasn’t enough. I worked my way down from the most popular girls, who were dating the star quarterback or star point guard or track-and-field star (basically anyone with the word star attached), to the lonely girls who hung out in the library. When I worked up the courage to ask one of the cute but overlooked library girls to a movie, she responded, “No, that’s not really my thing. I’m into books.”
“Of course, I get it,” I said, and slunk away.
So that was it: I’d burned through pretty much the entire female population of school. But fortunately, I lived in the city, so there were other options in the neighborhood. My first big crush was a girl named Tamika. She lived in another neighborhood, but would come to visit someone on my block, so I started talking to her.
One day my dad stopped by and saw me talking to her. I was so proud:
Me: Dad, I want you to meet Tamika.
Dad: I don’t know about this one, Kev. Something about her teeth—
Me: Dad, she’s right here!
Dad: All right, all right. Did you at least get your dick wet yet?
Me: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just stop.
Dad: Naw, you ain’t never had your dick wet.
Me: We’re gonna go.
Dad: Aw, you ain’t gonna be no faggot. Show her that long dick!
Despite my dad’s lack of a filter, I eventually got her phone number and managed to convince her to go on a date with me.
The next problem was my mom: There was no room in her schedule for this date. The only way I could make it work was to play hooky during school.
It took me two weeks to convince Tamika to ditch her classes too. Once I did, we wandered around my neighborhood talking until someone spotted us, called my mom, and asked: “Is your son supposed to be in school today? Because I think I see him walking down the street right here.”
She popped up on me and whupped my ass on the spot, flinging me all over the place in front of Tamika.
The saddest thing is, it wouldn’t be the most embarrassing beating I got from my mom. That would happen the following year, when I started high school.
15
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TIME TRAVELING