Disappearing into his bedroom every night was Pop’s way of coping, after working a full day, then coming home to face everyday hassles from collection notices to corner winos to family squabbles. I don’t think Pop intentionally planned to wall himself off emotionally, and he probably never realized that over time he became a distant and hands-off dad. I suspect that he was just repeating his silent past. He left most of the parental duties to my mom, which was common for men of the time.
I’m sure he raised us in the same stoic Southern way that defined his own upbringing. To his credit, he never walked away from his family. He wrote the monthly mortgage check until the house was fully paid off. He gave his children the essentials—food, shelter, clothing, the occasional spanking when we got out of line. He came from a time and place where that was all that was expected of a father. In many ways, he did the best he could, and I recognize that. Many of my childhood friends considered me lucky to even have had a father, which was a nearly extinct species in our Newark neighborhood. I have to admit they were right. Had my family ever gotten together to sit for a portrait when I was young, at least my Pop would have been in the picture. It would have been a nice-looking moment captured in time, with Pop, the breadwinner, seated in a chair, and his wife and six kids clustered around him. And we would have cherished such a photograph because, for that one moment, we would have looked every inch the healthy nuclear family, one that could have given the Huxtable crew a run for its money.
But the camera would have missed the unspoken stories, those disappointments and broken dreams that seemed to overwhelm my parents. Since they couldn’t lift themselves out of our poor working-class ghetto, they resorted to blaming each other. “You got all these mouths to feed and can’t even pay the bills,” my mother would sometimes fling at him.
As children, we used to witness more volatility and fireworks than we thought our tiny two-bedroom house could withstand.
“Oh no, here it comes,” I used to think when I’d see an argument between my parents starting to shape up, like storm clouds blowing in to ruin a sunny day. My parents’ fights used to make me quake inside, my heart trembling so hard that it seemed the whole house was shaking. I might be sitting in the kitchen, just chilling with my mom, and then we’d hear Pop’s car in the driveway. Almost without realizing it, I’d brace myself. A fight could start in a flash and was almost always prompted by something laughably trivial.
“Don’t put that water in the refrigerator.”
“Woman, shut the hell up.”
“Dammit, I told you not to put that water there.”
And next thing you know, it’d be on.
Little temper flare-ups were common, and I could easily shake those off. Moms and Pop would spar verbally or lightly shove each other around, then brush themselves off and retreat to their separate rooms. But sometimes there were roaring fights, seismograph-needle-shaking brawls that would pop off at a moment’s notice. Like the time when they were shoving each other around in the kitchen and Moms pushed my father out the door and locked it. This sent Pop into a rage, so he smashed his hand through the kitchen window, cutting his arm pretty badly.
They argued about the same things over and over. Neither one ever cared or dared to change the way they interacted. Sometimes I wondered if they even knew how. As a young boy, I could often see the disconnect between the two of them. We were reminded constantly that it was only because of the kids that they were still together. I used to pray that through some act of nature or an outright miracle, they would somehow find their lost love for each other. But as the years passed and our home became a boxing ring for jabs and uppercuts, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get my wish.
Both my parents wear permanent reminders of their stormy marriage. Pop has a gash across his forehead, and my mom’s smooth brown cheek is marred by slash marks. Both wounds were suffered during the same fight, which happened before I was born, but my sister Fellease was always happy to fill me in on the drama that preceded me. This particular argument was about her: Moms told Pop that Fellease should have gone to school that day, and he apparently disagreed. Moms grabbed a bottle and broke it on his forehead. Pop retaliated by grabbing an ashtray and using it like a razor to slice Moms’s left cheek.
The police came and made sure that Moms and Pop were taken to the hospital since both were bleeding profusely. Both had stitches and came home from the hospital with bandages on their faces. According to Fellease, they actually had the nerve to be lovey-dovey after that. For Fellease, it was proof of our family’s looniness that after the episode was over, our parents were at each other’s side, all cuddled up, taking care of each other’s wounds.
I didn’t see much of this kind of affection between my parents. I never witnessed them hugging or treating each other in a caring way. I’m the fifth of six children, and by the time I reached school age, they weren’t even bothering to create the illusion of love. The master bedroom belonged to Pop, and he would retreat up there as soon as he got home from work, to play his guitar and listen to music. He’d come down for dinner and that was it. Moms created a space for herself in the basement. This arrangement didn’t seem right to me. From what I gathered from watching shows like Cosby, parents were supposed to sleep in the same bed. Clair and Cliff, after all, usually shared a laugh or a kiss as they snuggled.
But my parents didn’t work together as a team. They went their opposite ways most of the time. Pop went to work and brought the money home, and Moms managed the home front. Pop shopped for the food, and Moms cooked it. Moms was the affectionate caretaker of the children, and Pop seemed to be worrying about other things when he was at home. One upside to this approach was that Pop wasn’t the main disciplinarian. Administering punishments fell to Moms, and she would come after us wielding everything from a belt to an electric cord. But my father hit me only once, when I refused to apologize to my brother Carlton after accidentally hitting him in the eye. Pop’s silent demeanor demanded respect and good behavior.
They collaborated best in times of emergency. Then they’d be like Batman and Robin zipping off on a mission, like the day I cut my hand on our white metal blinds. I was about five, and I had been playing with the blinds in our kitchen, running my fingers in and out of the thick slats and cords. I was keeping my mom company while she cooked dinner. Even through the roughest times, she prided herself on having dinner ready when my father came home from work. Minutes before Pop drove up, I grabbed the blinds in my left hand and tore a huge gash in my palm. I was bleeding all over the place when he came in the door. Almost wordlessly, he grabbed me, and Moms grabbed her pocketbook. Andre happened to be walking in the door and nearly had to jump out of the way. Moms and Pop hustled me into the car and backed down the driveway in a huge hurry. “We’re taking your brother to the hospital” was all he heard as we screeched out of sight.
It wasn’t like there was a fight every night. Sometimes our house was peaceful, especially when Moms and Pop stayed out of each other’s way. And on dire occasions, like when I got those ten stitches in my hand after the venetian blinds accident, my parents could be downright nurturing. I noticed that if I hurt myself or got in trouble, Moms and Pop would put their differences aside and rush to help me. Even as a child I began to see a pattern emerging, but I wouldn’t fully understand it until later.
It seemed that Pop had erected a force field around him that I couldn’t penetrate. I wondered whether, when he turned the doorknob to our house every day, something happened that just sapped the joy out of him. Pop didn’t delight in fatherhood. He didn’t reach for me when he came in the house. Every day it was the same. He’d say, “Hi,” and maybe grab something to eat on the way to his room. He’d close the door, and I’d listen as he gently played his guitar. Sometimes he’d join us in the living room, where he might watch TV with us or play his favorite albums, often something mellow from Nat “King” Cole or, his favorite, the Dixie Hummingbirds. Never did he say “How was your day?” much les
s “Wanna go fishing or camping?” Perhaps Pop figured he shouldn’t be too soft with me because reality was waiting just outside our front door and he felt his sons needed to be as tough as possible to deal with it. But whatever the reason, my father made the boundary lines of our relationship clear: I will not hug you. I will not tell you I love you. I will not have idle conversations with you. I will not let my guard down around you. I will always be your father.
WHAT WAS GOING ON in my house wasn’t unusual. All my friends and I scraped by with minimal interaction from our parents. Back then, childhood was a community experience, especially during the summer. We threw our clothes on early in the morning and met one another outside, to hang out all day wherever we wanted. We knew to come back home when the streetlights came on. Our older brothers and sisters, if we had them, were expected to watch us. Our parents were too busy with working and trying to pay the bills and cope with the many hassles of being poor. Frankly, I was grateful I didn’t have a more neglectful set of folks. I ran with a lot of guys whose parents found time for everything but their kids: hanging out, partying, getting high, escaping reality. I had one friend whose father frequently came home drunk. Sometimes I looked down the street to see my friend and his father having a violent fistfight in their front yard, duking it out for the world to see. No one ever thought it was strange or out of place to see the two of them go at it.
Our little corner of Newark was wedged between the city’s airport and a cemetery, and when I was growing up, I couldn’t imagine living in a better place. We didn’t have a lot of money, and it didn’t matter to me that I shared a bed with my two brothers or that my parents couldn’t afford swimming lessons or vacations. All the people I loved were here, and that was good enough for me.
There’s a big age span between the six children in my family. I grew up feeling closest to Andre and Carlton, my brothers who were nearest to my age. Although I looked up to my oldest brother and sister, Kenny and Roselene, our relationships were different. They had been born more than twenty years before I was and were often away from the house. I had one more older sister, Fellease, who got married and lived in Hawaii during my preteen days but moved back to the mainland when I was fourteen. It was then that we bonded, staying up late talking and playing spades, Monopoly, and backgammon. She and my other older siblings moved out once they grew up, but they often returned to the nest, sometimes with spouses in tow. At one time I counted twelve people living in our two-bedroom house. Although it was always crowded, there was always something fun and exciting going on. To make room for our many houseguests, Carlton and I sometimes shared a sleeper sofa in the basement with my mother.
Across the street from our tidy row of tiny houses stood an eight-story public housing development, with hundreds of low-income people stacked on top of one another. It was chaos right across the street, especially after the crack epidemic hit. As a kid, it was nothing for me to see stripped stolen cars on the street, gun-toting pedestrians, or women selling their bodies for a taste of crack. Suddenly, it became common to hear gunshots or walk down the street and see a crime scene marked off with yellow tape. We kids became so desensitized that even murders ceased to shock us. I remember one day I saw a crowd standing in the street and learned that a neighborhood guy had been shot and his body found under a car. I saw his frame lying in a body bag. It was as common as a ninety-degree day in summer.
I remember that day vividly because the dead person happened to be the older brother of one of my friends. He had just come home from serving time in jail on a drug charge. There had been a party to welcome him home in the recreation center across the street in the projects, featuring good food and lots of dancing. The adults partied all night, smoking weed and getting drunk. I was about nine years old. My little friends and I hung out for a while, then headed outside when the sun went down. In the dark, we had a favorite routine of playing chase games like hide-and-seek, which sometimes evolved into a spin-off that we called Catch a Girl, Kiss a Girl. We always started by putting our feet in a circle and chanting a rhyme to decide who would be the person to find the others: My mother and your mother were hanging out the clothes, my mother punched your mother right dead in the nose. What color was the blood? We never gave a thought to the violence depicted in our little rhyme.
I grew used to having friends who stood a few yards away selling drugs while I played baseball with my friend Noody. It was just understood that if the police showed up, they’d grab a bat and pretend to be playing, too—although the streetwise cops usually saw right through it.
Maybe some kids adjust easily to this kind of life, where they’re not a bleep on their parents’ radar, but I wasn’t like that. The older I got, the more I wanted my father’s guidance. I yearned for it. Two doors away lived a friend of mine, Mike, who enjoyed what looked like a great relationship with his father. In warm weather, they would shoot hoops and horse around in the backyard. I would stare at them through the fence as if hypnotized, wanting what they had. If only I could have interested my dad in doing the same. I would have loved to burst into their yard to toss out a challenge: “Me and my dad against you guys.” But I knew the thought was preposterous. My father often saw me playing basketball with friends on his way home from work and he never bothered to even slow down.
I can’t remember a day that Pop glanced at my homework. I built a gokart by myself. I built a basketball hoop in the driveway by myself. On my own, I developed a love of sports, but my father never encouraged it. It was a kind neighbor, Mr. Brown, who noticed my interest in baseball and took Noody and me to my first Major League Baseball game. His church had organized a bus trip to Shea Stadium to see the Mets. Noody and I sat next to each other on the bus ride and at the game. I’ll never forget it. It was a Saturday afternoon in 1986, and the Mets were playing the Dodgers. You should have seen us. Noody and I were thirteen, and we came with our mitts ready to catch a ball off the players’ bats. The Mets lost the game, but they went on to win the World Series that year. I loved seeing my favorite players in person: Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, and Darryl Strawberry. Mr. Brown made sure we were having a good time, supplying us with all the hot dogs and sodas we could consume. It’s a memory I’ll keep for a lifetime.
Pop rarely talked to me about drugs, sex, women, education, or anything like that. Occasionally he might tell me to stay in school, but he delivered this message more like an order, without much conversation or advice.
This approach didn’t meet my needs at all. Being a curious kid, I had a million questions. I was hungry to know how to conduct myself in social situations. What do I say when I meet someone? How should I act? Should I offer a handshake? How much do I reveal about the real me? How much do I keep to myself? I used to mumble and stutter when I was introduced to strangers, not knowing what to say. Nobody ever told me to stand up straight, look someone in the eye, and give them a firm handshake.
I had deeper questions for my dad, but as a child, I didn’t know how to voice them. How do I avoid the path that I see my friends going down? I knew I didn’t want to be like them. I saw them being driven off in police cars and I knew I didn’t want that life. But I couldn’t see any other way. You can’t aim for what you can’t see; I’ve said that countless times since I first wrote those words in The Pact. I firmly believe it’s a problem that has choked the hope out of many talented young people.
WITH POP HOLED UP in his room, I couldn’t really pull the answers out of him that I needed. Luckily, when I was around eight or nine, I found someone willing to give me his full attention, and I latched onto him so tightly that he could barely turn around without seeing me.
My friends and I would flock to Reggie Brown as soon as we saw his beat-up gold Nova pull up every afternoon and park in the cemetery across the street from my house. To spend some time with him, all I had to do was climb the cemetery’s black wrought-iron gate and hoist myself over the top. As soon as I leaped to the other side, it was like landing on a different planet.
His paying job, as a security guard for sprawling Evergreen Cemetery, which reaches into three cities, Hillside, Elizabeth, and Newark, was to lock the gates at four-thirty and stay until midnight to chase out unauthorized visitors. Bad guys often sneaked into the vast graveyard after dark to shoot dope and rob folks who often used the cemetery as a shortcut.
It also fell to him to protect the mourners visiting their loved ones. Growing up inside Building 5 of the Dayton Street projects gave him a distinct advantage in this aspect of his job. Give Reggie a description of the guy who robbed you, and he would immediately stride into the projects, knock on just the right door, and yank the missing pocketbook out of a crackhead’s hands. Muscled and brown, he was like a real-life superhero.
I was thrilled when he took an interest in me. Reggie called me “Little Man” and eventually started to treat me like I was his deputy, letting me ride alongside him on his nightly patrols. He taught me to drive long before I was old enough, and I’d proudly circle his car around the cemetery’s mile-and-a-half-long perimeter road while he kept an eye out for criminal activity. Nobody could tell me I wasn’t the man when I was at Reggie’s side.
The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers Page 9
