But that ain’t even possible. How do you see through this piece-of-shit boarded-up window into a totally dark house? I couldn’t even tell myself if it was a man or a woman.
They got this girl in court eighteen months later cause she didn’t wanna come. They had me sitting in the detention center that whole time. When she got there, she told ’em, “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know him. Never seen him before. I don’t even know how I got there. I was drinking.”
There’s no way I should have gone to jail, but I did. I went to jail for a rape that I didn’t commit.
These are straight-up facts, Kev. You know Nancy and her sisters. They wouldn’t be speaking to me if it had happened. They told me they were sitting next to these cops while they was out in the waiting room, and the cops were concocting the story that they wanted to tell.
So I wind up getting four to eight years. Them’s the kind of charges, though they let me go home before my four years were up.
So here I go coming home from the roughest penitentiary in Pennsylvania, and Nancy is expecting me to be one way, but I done changed.
She hoping I’ll be a perfect husband now. She still trying to run my life and pick my friends. She wanting me to get a job when won’t nobody hire me with that jail time. She wanting too many changes too fast. But I had to be as rough as these people in this jail to survive. I got harder, you see. And I couldn’t turn that shit on and off like it’s a lightbulb or something. She didn’t understand.
What you don’t know, Kev, is that one day I come in and I’m trying to talk to her, and I guess she had a lot of pent-up anger in her. She started hollering and cussing and getting in my face. I’m macho, and I’m not gonna let myself be spoken to that way. So I grabbed her and I told her she better listen.
She broke away and ran to the bed. Reached under her side between the mattress and the springs and pulled out a hammer of mine that I hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks.
I think on my feet. I looked at this and I told her, “Now, if you raise that hammer at me, I’mma beat the shit out of you.”
That kind of toned her down with that hammer. But at the same time, it let me know how far we had gone and how unhappy I’d made this woman. Right then and there I knew that this shit was over. So I just said, “To hell with this. We done.” And I go on ’bout my business.
4
* * *
ALL ABOUT MY AMAZING SHOULDERS
When most parents want to break bad news to their kid, they sit them down, place a hand over theirs, get real serious, and have a heart-to-heart talk. My dad never did that.
Instead, he would appear out of nowhere and start laying heavy shit on me in an offhand, matter-of-fact way, like he was talking about what he ate for breakfast.
Dad: Hey, you got a brother and sister. Your brother is the same age as you. Your sister is a little older. They been around for a long time.
Me: Huh?
Dad: You heard me. Go over there and say hi to your brother, and he’ll say hi back.
Me: Who?
Dad: That’s your brother right there on the corner. I forgot to tell you. Just go.
Me: All right.
Dad: Also, me and your mother ain’t together no more. I’m leaving the house.
Me: Wait, what?
Dad: Look, I still want to come by from time to time. I just gotta get out. Nance and I ain’t seeing eye to eye.
Me: Okay. I’m gonna cry, Dad. This one kinda hurts a little bit.
Dad: You’ll be all right. Don’t be a bitch.
Me: Okay.
I held the tears back. I wanted to show my dad that I could handle this information. It still hurt, of course, but I refused to let it hurt for long.
To this day, my brother thinks I got over it so quickly because I was young and he protected me. But I think that I was born with a gift: the shoulder shrug. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the ability to shoulder-shrug things—to just accept them, say “okay,” and get on with my life. The opposite of shoulder-shrugging would be to get depressed or angry and to hold on to those emotions for the rest of my life. But for whatever reason, whether it was because my father was matter-of-fact about the heaviest stuff or God put something in me, I’ve been able to take in all kinds of experiences and information and process them without holding on to any negative emotion afterward, even at a young age.
It upset Kenneth a lot more. He still remembers my mom chasing my dad with a knife after he broke the news—as well as my dad’s last words when he left: “I wasted two good nuts on ya ass, Nance.”
5
* * *
THE SELFLESS LOVE OF A FATHER
When he walked out, my dad promised that I’d still see him. For a while, I did—and I remember every single time, because the scariest and most heart-stopping things in my childhood all happened under the supervision of my father. Nearly every memory of my dad is of him exposing me to a violent or dangerous situation.
He didn’t do it on purpose. It was just the way he lived his life. And by being with him, I lived that life too.
MEMORY #1
For one of our first adventures after he left, Dad picked my brother and me up at Mom’s apartment. We asked where we were going.
His answer: “We’re just going somewhere.”
When you’re a kid, there are a thousand questions that come up at this point: Where’s somewhere? How long will we be there? Who else is going? What are we gonna do?
But my dad never gave us opportunities for questions. He didn’t act or think like any other person I’d ever met, so he could have been taking us anywhere.
And this day, he had something special planned: He took us to what looked like a pond in New Jersey to rent a motorboat so we could go fishing. While we were on the water, I asked if I could drive, and he said, “Go ahead, Kev, I don’t see why not.”
A few reasons why not might have included the fact that I was eight, I’d never been in a boat before in my life, and I’d never driven anything besides a bike. But my dad didn’t live in the world of reason. He was a firm believer in the “go ahead” school of parenting; whatever we asked to do, he’d just say “go ahead.”
He handed me the tiller like I’d been a boat captain my whole life and I started driving. No more than a minute passed before I heard him saying, “Better slow up. You gonna hit that boat.”
He didn’t reach out to grab the tiller from me. He just sat there, cool as can be, repeating, “You better slow up.” “Boy, you ain’t slowing up.”
I was frozen in place with my hand on the throttle, and I couldn’t remember which direction slowed the boat. I guessed and turned the handle to my right. I guessed wrong.
The boat sped up and—bam!—smacked into another boat.
I destroyed both boats. All my dad had to say was, “Dammit, boy, you done did this one bad.”
He didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t even seem pissed off. It was like I’d knocked over a cheap vase. He told the guy we rented the boat from, “My son done fucked the boat up, so we’ll figure it out.”
As best I can tell, what my dad figured out was to never go back there again.
MEMORY #2