I’ve also taught my kids what I learned from my mother: that fighting is a last resort. It’s always better to defuse fights through reason and humor when possible. After those incidents, I didn’t get bullied much. And when someone wanted to start a fight, I learned to de-escalate it just by asking, “What are you doing? Why do you wanna fight and mess up the day? All that’s gonna happen is we’ll both get punished, so let’s see if we can find a better way to work this out.”
Occasionally, however, when I got real worked up, my logic failed me. Once, as I was wheeling my mom’s clothes to the laundromat in a shopping cart, an older kid called me a pussy. I stopped to de-escalate, and when that didn’t work, I informed him that his mother was a pussy. I ended up getting whupped by him and his friends. As I lay on the ground getting kicked, I wondered whether I really needed to stick up for myself every time. When it comes down to choosing between your life and your pride, I’ll keep my life.
* * *
Soon after this, my brother followed my dad’s footsteps out of the house.
There are many horrible and stupid ways you can fuck up as a kid, but one of the worst is doing anything to people who can’t defend themselves, like babies or senior citizens. One afternoon, my brother tried to snatch a purse from an old lady. When she wouldn’t let go of it, he punched her in the stomach. Even then, she wouldn’t give up the purse. A few people noticed and started chasing my brother. He ran all the way home, which wasn’t too smart, because the cops knew just where to find him and arrest him.
This was the last straw for my mom. She refused to help him after that. The next time she spoke to him, she said she wanted to take him to the library. She took him to court instead and had him emancipated. In my brother’s own hearing afterward, the judge gave him the option of either going to a juvenile detention center or enlisting in the military.
So at age seventeen, just shy of finishing high school, my brother left for Army basic training and, ultimately, Schofield Barracks in Honolulu.
And then there were two.
8
* * *
MAMA’S BOY
Some single mothers put their oldest remaining son in the role of man of the house after Dad leaves. They’ll teach him to take care of everything that their husband used to so there’s no interruption of service.
Not my mom. The way she saw it, she’d been too lenient with my brother. She’d given him too much independence and let him run wild in the streets. As a parent, you can’t compete with the streets. The streets will win every time. It’s all there—women, money, drink, drugs, and, most powerful of all, other kids who appear to have the one thing your child wants more than anything: the freedom to do whatever the hell they want.
So my mom figured that if she could keep me off the streets, then I wouldn’t turn out like my father and brother. She became relentless about making sure I had no free time to snatch purses, deal drugs, join a gang, or think any independent thoughts. I was the last man standing in that house, so this wasn’t just an idea or experiment of hers. This became the first of her three purposes in life.
The second purpose was her job in the IT department of the University of Pennsylvania, and the third was the church. She’d always believed in God, but after my brother left, she became religious. Despite how hard she worked and how little she made, she began tithing to the church, ushering at services, and attending Bible study groups.
You’d think that religion would make someone more gentle and compassionate, because that’s a big message of the Bible. And this may be true for some people when it comes to how they treat their friends. But it doesn’t necessarily apply to how they treat their children, because another message of the Bible is that there are serious consequences for breaking the rules.
Mom was tough to begin with, but now she was righteous and holy. All the stress and anger she used to have about what my brother and father were doing turned into stress and anger about what I was not going to do. She set up a routine of structured, systematic, and supervised movement that she imposed on my life.
If I stepped even slightly out of line, I got hit with her open hand, fist, belt, shoe, slipper, even sections of plastic Hot Wheels track. She used to leave those tracks lying around the house just so they’d be convenient to punish any infraction. I have no doubt that all this came from a place of love, but it was a love so controlling that I felt envious of the neglected kids in school.
Her routine for me went like this: We woke up at six in the morning. I left to catch the school bus at seven o’clock and got to school at eight. When school ended at three, I went straight to an extracurricular activity like basketball. Because my mom was working and couldn’t pick me up until evening, she did some research and found out that the Philadelphia Department of Recreation had a swim team that practiced most weekdays until half past eight. So she signed me up to swim after basketball.
The timing was so tight that if I didn’t catch the bus and the train and make it to swim practice on time, she’d know that I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be. The schedule she designed didn’t leave room for anything but hustle. That’s where it all began.
My mom was particularly proud of having found the swim team, because she couldn’t think of a single swimmer who’d ever been a criminal, which made it that much better in her eyes. I swam and swam and swam until I was over it, and still had to keep swimming until I graduated high school.
After practice every day, my mom picked me up, brought me home, and sat me down to do homework. When I finished, she fed me, checked my work, and made me redo parts that weren’t good enough for her. Then she drew me a bath and put me to bed too exhausted to do anything but sleep.
On weekends, she didn’t let me out of her sight. Either I went to swim meets or I tagged along with her to work, church, shopping, friends’ homes, and Bible study groups. Whatever the events and obligations in her life happened to be, I was the guy who had to do them with her. There was no escape—no hanging out with friends, no room for any error, no nothing on my own. When a friend wanted to go to a movie, or a classmate invited me to his birthday party, or I wanted to watch an afternoon television show, if it didn’t fit into my mom’s plans, it wasn’t happening.
What made this schedule even tougher was that my mom didn’t believe in driving. She was a firm advocate of public transportation. “It’s there for a reason,” she’d always say. “Wherever it is that you want to be, we can get there.”
She could have been a mathematician. She had every weekend planned out according to the bus schedule: “We’re gonna take SEPTA at this time. Then we walk twelve minutes so we can catch the 15, which will come in exactly five minutes. The 15’s gonna take us to the El, the El will take us to the subway, and we’ll be back home by nine o’clock tonight.”