The next time I remember being with my dad, my brother and I were walking along a street in our neighborhood with him. I’ll never know where he was taking us, because out of nowhere, a group of guys jumped him.
My brother and I stood there, shocked, as they started pummeling Dad. “Go run home,” my dad told us coolly between punches, as if we were leaving him with friends. “I’ll meet you back there. Go ahead! I’ll be all right.”
So we went home and sat in the kitchen terrified, hoping he’d come back alive. An hour or so later, he strolled in the door covered in blood and casually asked, “You all right? You want something to eat?”
He didn’t even mention the fight. It was as if nothing had happened.
The only other time I saw him that bloody was after he got hit by that axe. I asked him about it much later, and he explained that he went to the home of someone named Mr. Jimmy. There was a man underneath the refrigerator who’d been struggling to repair it for two hours. My dad said, “Move out the way,” and fixed it. The next thing he knew, the other repairman chopped him with an axe, presumably for taking the job away.
This is how my father concluded the story: “Coincidentally, a couple of weeks later, that sucka was found dead. I don’t know nothing about it.”
This is how I responded: “Dad, I don’t want to know nothing about it either.”
MEMORY #3
My mom was out and my cousins Anthony and Darryl were over. They were with my father, who was visiting and watching a video that my mom wouldn’t allow me to see. My father was asleep and snoring, but everyone else was laughing. It sounded like more happiness than I’d ever heard in the house.
I peeked around the corner and saw my cousins losing their shit. I looked to the screen and saw a man dressed in red leather, standing alone and holding a microphone. He was just gesturing and speaking, and my cousins were in hysterics. I didn’t know before that a movie could be just one person speaking—and still be so funny.
I wanted to laugh too. But I had to stay quiet so I could watch. I remember being at school afterward and hearing older kids reciting from that movie, Eddie Murphy Delirious, and feeling good about myself because I knew what they were talking about.
My parents were both big fans of stand-up comedy: Dad loved Redd Foxx, Robin Harris, and Richard Pryor. Mom would only listen to clean comedians, like Sinbad and Bill Cosby. I have vague memories of watching videos of these comics on stage telling jokes. I had no idea back then that my life would come full circle and I’d have a career doing the exact thing that brought my parents so much joy.
THE LAST MEMORIES
One afternoon, my brother and I were in the schoolyard shooting hoops. When my dad met us there, he overheard my brother talking about how good he was at basketball, so Dad challenged him to a game.
The thing is, my dad’s not athletic in any way, shape, or form. But he’s desperate and ruthless, and in a sport with no referee, that’s an advantage. So he started playing jailhouse basketball, fouling my brother hard and elbowing him in the face. My brother, who was confused and angry that Dad was being so aggressive with him, won easily anyway.
After the game, Dad walked off, then returned ten minutes later holding his pit bull on a chain. He looked hard at my brother, said, “Sic ’im, Fats,” and then let go of the chain.
Now, we’d heard of this pit bull because he was legendary in the neighborhood. My dad had taught him to snatch pocketbooks: He’d send Fats after some woman and she’d start running. He’d charge after her, knock her off balance, grab her purse in his fangs, and then follow my dad for a few blocks until the coast was clear, and my dad could take the pocketbook from him and go through it.
As soon as we saw that dog, my brother and I took off running, climbing a nearby fence and clinging to the top while Fats barked and snarled below. This dog was not playing; it was full-on vicious. My dad just stood there and laughed.
“He ain’t gonna bite you,” he yelled up at us. “Stop acting like bitches.”
To this day, I can’t comprehend why he’d sic an attack dog on his own kids just because he lost at basketball. The only reason I can think of is that, in his mind, Dad never loses, so he had to win in some way.
As my mom found out about these adventures, she became more and more reluctant to let my dad pick us up from school or take us pretty much anywhere. He’d beg and plead with my mom: “Yo, I’m sick of not being able to do anything for my kids.”
Eventually, he wore her down, and she let him take me to camp. She would soon regret this.
Instead of asking my mom for information about the camp, my dad picked me up in his car and asked, “You know where you gotta go to camp at?”
Overconfident, even back then, I said, “Yep.”
“All right, let’s go.”
My dad began driving, and at every intersection, he’d ask, “Which way do I turn?”
I’d point very confidently: “That way.”
Eventually, completely by chance, we came upon a school. “This it?”
“Yep.”
He stopped, and before I jumped out of the car, he gave me a pep talk.
“Hey, man, we all got big dicks. So listen, you gonna be cool for the rest of your life.”
“What are you talking about, Dad?”
“Listen, you see this long dick here?” He gestured to the outline in his sweatpants. He never wore drawers, so he was always flowing loose. “You gonna grow one too, so you never gotta worry about nothing.”
“Uh, okay, Dad.”
I jumped out of the car. He didn’t wait until I got inside or he saw an adult. He and his long dick just peeled off and sped away.
I walked in, carrying a brown sack with my lunch in it. A priest came up to me and asked what I was there for. I was in some kind of Catholic summer school.
He brought me to an office, and nobody there could figure out who I was. They kept checking different sheets of paper and records. Time passed. “Just eat your lunch while we figure this out,” one of the priests told me.
Eventually, he figured it out: “Son, you don’t go here.”
They asked who dropped me off, and I said it was my dad.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know his address.”
“What about your mom?”
Unfortunately for my dad, I knew her number at work. They called her, and my mom got in touch with my dad and cussed him out. For some reason, my father couldn’t pick me up, so the priest walked me back to my dad’s house.
As soon as my dad saw us, he said, “Son, you told me that’s where you went to camp. You gotta stop doing that!”
In his mind, he was never at fault; it was always something stupid I did. Maybe that’s how I learned to have a sense of humor about myself.
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