Meanwhile, I was just barely passing classes. My academic philosophy was that less is best; my job was to show up and not fail. So I started applying the same philosophy to swimming: I was there to move my arms and legs in the water and get by. At meets, I’d be the last one flailing in the pool. I’d get out, and no one would care. They’d just be waiting for me to finish so they could start the next race.
Of course, my mom responded to this minor act of rebellion perfectly.
“You wanna go and not try, that’s on you,” she said after another one of my shitty meets. “But you’re still gonna go. So you can swim and be good or you can swim and not be good. But either way, you’re still gonna be swimming.”
I stuck with my plan. Around the pool, they had team pictures from different competitions. There were kids diving off starting blocks, holding up gold medals, and celebrating victories. I’d been on the team longer than most of the other kids, and there was just one photo of me, crouching by the side of the pool and adjusting my goggles. I looked awkward and suspicious, like I was cheating by slipping some kind of chemical in my goggles. Everyone used to joke about that picture. I was the joke of the team.
After a while, I started to realize that I wasn’t hurting my mom by not trying. I was only hurting myself. Everything she did always put me in a position to recognize that.
The feeling of being left out—of watching everyone else celebrate and talk about winning—began to outweigh whatever little satisfaction I took in sucking. So I decided to start trying to become a better swimmer and earn some of those gold medals.
Unfortunately, that backfired too. By the end of the season, I started winning races, and my coaches saw potential in me. They moved me up to the highest level they had: the Elites. And now, instead of practicing once a day, I was practicing twice a day because these Elite motherfuckers were going after college scholarships and training for the Junior Olympics.
It was too much swimming. By trying to get out of it, I ended up having to do twice as much of it. Maybe that’s another reason I so rarely rebelled against my mom: After every battle for freedom, I somehow ended up with less of it.
17
* * *
GETTING HARD
My mom’s plan of keeping me busy eventually backfired in a way she never expected: All those extracurricular athletics made me strong.
Eventually, her beatings didn’t hurt anymore. I stopped crying like I used to. The whuppings became more about her—to help her feel as if she was doing her job as parent and disciplinarian. Meanwhile, I was starting to have angry outbursts and explosions of temper. I wasn’t a little boy anymore, and the degree of restriction she imposed wasn’t healthy for a teenager. I had friends on the swim team who were leading responsible lives without parental discipline, and it was time for my mom to let go a little as well.
For the most part, I’d lived by her rules and hadn’t joined a gang or snatched purses. So I began to advocate for my freedom, telling my mom whenever I could that she needed to start relaxing, that I could stay out of trouble without her help, that I could take care of myself.
She didn’t take too kindly to my parenting advice. So when she whupped me or yelled at me, I’d wait a few days until it blew over, then readdress why going in a different direction might be more beneficial for both of us.
Usually, this only set her off again. One day, she was whupping my ass for having the nerve to tell her how to be a parent. When she got tired from hitting me and paused to catch her breath, I said, “You had enough?”
I couldn’t believe the words that had just come out of my mouth. They signified that something was new, something had changed—the power dynamic was shifting. I knew it. She knew it. And it pissed her off.
“Oh, you wanna be a smart-ass?” She gasped the words between huffs and puffs as she mustered the strength to hit me even harder. She didn’t want to show weakness.
A few days later, I complained again about her strict schedule, and she raised her fist and punched me in the arm. Her knuckles cracked against my tricep. When I walked away, I saw her shaking her hand in pain. That’s when the beatings stopped.
She continued to give me verbal beatings, but she knew that short of stabbing, shooting, or Mace-ing me, there was nothing she could physically do anymore to harm me. “As long as you’re under my roof, you’re under my rules,” she reminded me the next time she got upset at me.
“Well, I’m gonna get out from under this roof as soon as I can,” I shot back.
She then made a promise that I held on to like a gold bar for the rest of high school: “When you’re eighteen and you graduate high school, you can do whatever you want.”
“Great!”
“But if you’re still living under my roof at that time, you’re gonna be going to college. You’re not gonna be doing nothing in my house.”
After that, she started to loosen her controls little by little. I knew that each new freedom was a test, and I’d pass it by showing respect for her rules and gratitude for her leniency. Even though some of these freedoms seemed huge to me at the time, they were more like quarter turns of a screw. Instead of picking me up at Ms. Davis’s house, for example, she’d call when she was leaving work and let me walk home on my own to meet her.
When she let me go to a friend’s birthday party one Saturday night, I felt like a prisoner being allowed into the sunshine for the first time in fifteen years. And I made damn sure to get back home on time. I knew if I was late, it might not happen again.
18
* * *
MY POWERS OF OBSERVATION AMAZE EVEN ME
Then, one day, we got robbed.
The weekend before, my mom and I had been out doing something very rare: shopping for school clothes. She took me to Burlington Coat Factory and Marshalls to get discounted jeans, shirts, and sweaters. She even got me my first semi-cool pair of shoes: Eastlands, brown leather boots with nice stitching that everyone was wearing in school. It was one of the greatest days of my teenage life.
That Monday, I left Ms. Davis’s house as usual and walked home. As I was climbing the thirty-one steps, I looked at our door, and it looked back at me. Something seemed off. It was the hinges! They’d been removed. I screamed, “Oh, shit!” I looked around. No one was in sight.
I pulled open the door. Actually, I sort of pulled and lifted; it was more of an obstacle now than a door. I stuck my head in and yelled, “Mom!” Now, I knew my mom wasn’t there, but I figured that would scare the thieves and murderers that I was sure had invaded my house.
After all, nothing scares a grown-ass man more than someone yelling “Mom!” in a whiny voice.
I walked inside, still yelling “Mom!” That was my weapon. I don’t need no gun. I got my mom.
That was when it dawned on me that the apartment only had one door, so where were these criminals gonna run if they heard me and panicked? Straight at me. I stopped yelling.