by Carl Hart
Although I’d spent years before that playing on the streets and in yards, I began playing organized football when I was nine. I played in the Optimist League, where I was a standout and often one of just a few black guys on the team. We were called the Driftwood Broncos. I loved it—but there was one thing that I found incredibly stressful. It wasn’t on the field. My biggest stress usually came from having to ask my mother for the twenty dollars required to participate. I knew that money was tight and I hated having to push her about it. But while she wouldn’t ever say no, she’d put me off, over and over again. I began to dread both being questioned about it by the coach and having to nag her repeatedly.
The Driftwood Broncos eighty-pound football team. I’m number 22.
This conflict made me feel bad both for her and for myself for having to ask, since we had so little. I resented what seemed to me to be her procrastination; the resulting anger between us was just a tiny illustration of the many, many ways that poverty can put stress on relationships. I sometimes blamed her, even though I knew she was working as hard as she could. Children can’t really understand the reasons behind the choices their parents make; they just experience their results. I remember finding this particularly painful. But I’ll say this: my mother never interfered with my athletic pursuits, and since sports were the main reason I stayed in school, that made a big difference.
And from the start, even though I was one of the youngest boys on the team, I was the fastest runner. Like Mercury, I played running back and I made a lot of touchdowns. I was proud to wear his number: 22. Few experiences in my life have been better than that moment in the huddle when I knew I was going to be running the ball. That anticipation, that moment of exhilarating possibility—well, it was almost as good as the exultation I felt when I made it into the end zone. I lived for those moments.
CHAPTER 4
Sex Education
Abandon the urge to simplify everything . . . appreciate the fact that life is complex.
—M. SCOTT PECK
I was certain that I’d caught some shameful and disgusting disease; terrified that I’d gotten a girl pregnant. At twelve, I was just beginning to understand the mysteries of sex, just starting to get clued in to what all the drama was really about. It wasn’t like I was inexperienced with girls: in fact, the opposite was true. After all, I had five older sisters, so I had plenty of time to observe up close the behavior and desires of the opposite sex. And where I grew up, the girls started chasing you and claiming you even in first and second grade, so each grade from first through seventh, I’d had a “girlfriend.” It was these girls who, strange as it may sound, played a crucial role in keeping me out of trouble.
Paulette Brown, a long-haired girl who lived a few doors down, was my first-grade crush. We’d peck and hug, but not much more than that. In my neighborhood, the girls set the pace: a cool cat would go with the flow. You didn’t want to seem desperate or pushy. A real man made the ladies desperate for him; he didn’t beg or take liberties. That was how the men I looked up to behaved.
And when I was eleven, I distinctly remember walking down the street and overhearing two older girls talking about me. One of them said, “That boy’s going to break a lot of hearts someday,” and the other smiled and nodded in agreement. That stoked my pride and piqued my interest, of course, but I was too nervous to approach them. I didn’t want to undermine my cool image.
By sixth grade, however, I had fooled around with a girl, whom I’ll call Vanessa, in a school closet. She was a year older than me; she’d told me to pull my pants down and showed me what she would let me do, all the while keeping an ear out for teachers and lunch ladies. But it wasn’t until seventh grade that I fully understood what it was all about.
It was the summer of 1979. Five days a week, I participated in a summer camp program in the park for underprivileged kids, one of many such initiatives that would soon fall prey to Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts. They had hired some of the older neighborhood teens to run it, made a few young adults into supervisors, and offered organized sports and activities meant to keep us off the streets. Mostly, it did.
That day, however, I had other plans. A very attractive girl, whom I’ll refer to as Monica, had invited me to her house: her mom wasn’t going to be home. We’d been talking on the phone and she told me to come by when I went to the park. That summer, everyone was listening to Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” on their JVC boom boxes. Much to my chagrin, my mother had recently forced me to cut my Afro into a shag (something like a mullet for black people), an injury to my self-image for which I seriously resented her. But I wore some denim shorts, a football jersey, and Chuck Taylors, kicking it seventies-style.
Monica was a brown-skinned athletic beauty. Her breasts were just starting to bud. Her muscular legs were slightly bowed, which gave her a sexy walk and stance that emphasized her hips. Her brown eyes were a shade lighter than mine. She had a small, delicate nose and wore her hair short, straightened. Monica wasn’t on any sports teams—but boy could she run. I’d watched her fly past many boys on the track in PE class. I knew her from school. She lived in a small bungalow on Eighteenth Street near the park. We started on the couch in the living room and then moved into her bedroom.
Soon we were on her bed. We were grinding and kissing, touching all over. We both had our clothes on; it was summer so she must have been wearing cutoff shorts. I was definitely not at all sorry about missing that day’s basketball drills. Because suddenly, I had the most amazing feeling ever. It overwhelmed me, was completely beyond my control. Scoring a touchdown, making a clutch jump shot: nothing had ever felt like this. But then there was this sticky stuff in my jeans. For a moment, I freaked out. I had no idea what it was. Still, outwardly, I kept my composure; I didn’t want Monica to know about it. It seemed like I had wet my pants. What cool muthafucka wets his pants when he’s alone with a girl? I was mortified.
Then I began to imagine all kinds of even more horrible possibilities. Trying to hide my embarrassment, I got up quickly and I’m sure rather abruptly, hoping she hadn’t noticed what was now a stain on my jeans. I muttered something about having to get back to my friends in the park. With rising anxiety, I went to find my cousin Anthony, who was sixteen. He would know what to do.
While I kept my eye out for him, the more I thought about it, the more worried I became. By the time I found my older cousin, I was sure that I had some scary and probably incurable VD, which was the term I knew for such problems. Or maybe what I’d done was what got a girl pregnant? I just didn’t know.
“Yo, Amp,” I said, using Anthony’s street name. I started anxiously trying to describe what had happened with Monica. I didn’t want to sound like a fool. He let me go on. I looked at him; I suspect my anxiety was visible, despite my efforts. And then with a big smile on his face, Amp proclaimed, “You ain’t got no damn disease.” Soon he was laughing uncontrollably. “You ain’t done shit,” he said, then mercifully filled me in on the facts of life.
Because masturbation was seen as less than manly in our circle and because my parents hadn’t educated me about puberty and what to expect, I’d had my first orgasm in the company of a girl. I had no preparation for what had happened. My first experiences of pleasure and desire had occurred in total ignorance, completely without expectations or even language. But as soon as I knew what was going on, I was immediately on my way to becoming that heartbreaker those girls had predicted I would be. And although many of them would never know it, my girlfriends played a key role in my success, keeping me out of harm’s way and boosting me up when I really needed nurturing.
I had very few conventional people to look up to in my life, male or female, to show me how to have a committed, loving relationship. My parents’ breakup and the fighting that led up to it had been driven largely by infidelity: I still don’t know what caused that but I’d certainly seen it. Most men I knew had women on the side. I didn’t really know anyone who practiced what was preached at church an
d I didn’t know how to navigate this treacherous emotional terrain. Sometimes, I’m not sure that anyone really does.
Although I didn’t know about it until I was an adult, my maternal grandfather had long had a mistress whom he spent early evenings with, returning home to his wife by a certain time. He also had children with other women. And several years after my parents split, my mother herself became involved with a married man. I don’t mention this to judge my family: if you look closely at virtually any family history, there are complex, tangled relationships and secrets everyone wants to keep hidden.
But in the world I grew up in, people had multiple partners and their relationships were just as often sources of conflict as they were of comfort. For me, my sexual relationships also kept me busy, when hanging out with male friends might well have gotten me involved in much riskier activity. Since my sisters and cousins all stressed the importance of using condoms (although I could have used more direct instruction; the first time I tried one I failed to leave enough room at the end), being with girls was actually a much safer situation.
My mother’s boyfriend then was a man named Johnson. Starting when I was about ten or eleven, I worked for his roofing company. Installing and repairing roofs in the relentlessly humid South Florida summer was brutal. But what was almost worse was listening to the guys I worked with talk shit about the boss. They were in their twenties and they’d talk about how if Johnson was in a bad mood, that was because he couldn’t decide who he was going to be with that night. They’d go on and on about all the women he was seeing, in what I now know are extremely misogynistic terms. And even though I knew then that my mom was just one of his many options, I couldn’t say or do anything about it. It was infuriating.
Consequently, much of what I learned about relationships was learned the same way I’d learned about sex: by watching others, by copying the behavior of the men I looked up to, with very little explicit instruction, discussion, or even thought. From the start, one thing was very clear: you didn’t get too attached to women—or if you did catch feelings, you certainly didn’t let anyone else know about it.
Sex was a sport and love was a sucker’s game. You might profess love if it would get you sex and you might even do things girls wanted you to do that represented commitment to them, like giving them teddy bears or your class ring. But you kept your feelings in check no matter what, and the best way to do that was to always have more than one lady. Cool guys didn’t fall in love or limit themselves to just one. They didn’t masturbate; they had girls to take care of their sexual needs—and the cooler you were, the more ladies you had. As a star athlete who was soon to become a popular DJ, I was on my way to becoming very, very cool. In fact, my DJ name would soon be Cool Carl.
I lost my virginity for real when I was fourteen. A friend told me that a friend of hers named Kim liked me, and that her mom wasn’t going to be home that afternoon, so I should stop by. Kim wasn’t really my type, but I thought it might be interesting.
She was clearly experienced. That day, she took the lead. The sex wasn’t anything special. But what was really awkward was afterward, when she told everyone in school that we’d done it. That embarrassed me because she wasn’t the kind of girl I wanted to be with.
There was a clear but complicated distinction in the hood between nice girls and “hos,” one that could devastate girls if they fell afoul of it. Kim, unfortunately, was already heading in the wrong direction. She was already known at age fourteen as the kind of girl you might see secretly but not be seen with. It was okay for guys to sleep with hos, but your rep would suffer if you made one your declared girlfriend rather than a casual “friend-girl.” The consequences were much worse, of course, for the girls who got stuck with that label. Most boys—including me—had no idea how it could ruin a girl’s life, devastating some girls more than even pregnancies did. Although today I am ashamed about and regret my participation in this cycle, it was the reality I faced as a child.
Marcia Billings, on the other hand, was a good girl—but not too good. She was the girl I wanted, with a perfect hourglass figure. She was built and fine. Marcia was about five foot two and weighed around 120 pounds. I first saw her in a McDonald’s, after a basketball game when I was fourteen, a few weeks after I’d been with Kim. I awkwardly propositioned her, but she shot me down. All that took was a look and maybe a few harsh words, something like “Keep stepping” or “Nigga, please.”
I was shocked; because I was skilled at reading girls’ signals, that kind of thing almost never happened to me. But a few months later, my cousin James was dating one of her friends and he reintroduced us. She didn’t remember the earlier incident. Now she was quite happy to meet the young DJ who was part of a crew that had begun tearing up the gyms and skating rinks of South Florida. She became my main girlfriend for most of high school. I gave Marcia my class ring and she was the one I took to the senior prom. As much as I was able to at the time, I loved her.
The more time we spent together, the more her warmth and spirit nurtured me. In fact, I was soon spending most of my nights at her house. We watched the Brooke Shields movie Endless Love together and I’m sure we saw ourselves in the dangerous passion shared by the young couple in the movie. I knew that she had my back and she occupied much of my time.
My mother was suspicious and even resentful of Marcia at first. She even tried to split us up by calling Marcia a ho and attempting to make me question Marcia’s loyalty to me. But when MH finally realized that this was a battle she’d never win—and that she could find out where I was by calling Marcia—she turned around and accepted our relationship. Still, Marcia was never the only girl I was seeing. Soon, in an ironic reversal, she would sometimes call MH to try to locate me when I was on the prowl.
Marcia and me at my senior prom in May 1984.
In our world, the girls knew the score and they, too, competed openly to win the finest man. It was understood implicitly that the popular guys had other women: it certainly wasn’t blindly accepted or preferred and it was often a source of friction, but nonmonogamy was seen as an undeniable reality. Many girls worked it as well as the boys did. This was something that also went unquestioned.
Naomi was another girl I saw in high school—but in this case, one who nearly got me in serious trouble. Light-skinned with a fun-loving but no-nonsense personality, Naomi went by the alias Sweet Red. She was twenty-one but looked and acted much younger. I started seeing her when I was sixteen. One night, we were in the master bedroom of my cousin Betty’s house, which she shared with her husband and two children. Betty and Ernest were in the process of getting divorced. Because their conflict over disposal of the marital property meant that no one was home most of the time, my cousin James and I often took girls there. We even had the keys.
However, when Ernest arrived unexpectedly and found Naomi and me in his bed, I had to very quickly demonstrate that Naomi was not his soon-to-be ex-wife and I was not any kind of rival for her attention. He was seeing red, believing that Betty had dared to bring another man into his own home. Fortunately, I was able to calm him down before he pulled his gun, but I was lucky not to be a victim of mistaken identity in my pursuit of Naomi.
Those are just a few of the girls who stick out most in my mind. There were many others, some one-night stands, some longer-term friend-girls. As I mentioned earlier, the mother of my son Tobias was a girl whom I’d gotten with only once.
In terms of sex, then, my adolescence was not one of deprivation. I certainly don’t say this to brag. Sexual fidelity and infidelity are a matter of conflict in every society. Here I’d just like to make clear that my relationships with women sustained me emotionally and buoyed me up when I wasn’t getting the nurture and encouragement I needed at home.
I will also note parenthetically that my experience shows that you can become a scientist without having been socially inept as a kid. Unlike many of my lab mates, I did not sit at home, fantasizing about unapproachable girls in tight jeans who
were oblivious to my existence. I wasn’t the science geek alone with my books or the dork who couldn’t even talk to a lady. I didn’t spend hours with pornography. Indeed, I was so sexually active that some media “experts” might even have called me a “sex addict.”
But that wasn’t quite what was going on. Instead, my experience illustrates the problems with reducing complex human behavior to simplistic terms like addiction and with trying to blame specific brain chemicals for people’s actions. Doing so fails to consider the context under which the behavior occurs. It also places an unwarranted emphasis on coming up with a brain explanation, when carefully understanding the behavior and its context could be much more useful in explaining and altering it.
My behavior with girls reflected not just biology but context and experience. It was not just pure sex drive (though that was certainly there) but sex drive modulated by my social context, including family expectations and neighborhood norms. It was about my desire to be cool, the local concepts of cool and how I interpreted them. It was about the rules I internalized—such as the idea that masturbation wasn’t manly—as well as the ones that I didn’t. It was frankly, also, about a need for comfort and contact. While science must reduce complexity in order to conduct studies, the interpretation of that data cannot simply then be extrapolated back without recognizing these and other relevant caveats.
As a neuroscientist, however, I didn’t recognize this at first and I think many of my colleagues still have difficulty doing so. When I started my career, there was great excitement around a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which was believed to explain why people got addicted to drugs. It was even seen as driving behaviors like the propensity for sexual variety. Indeed, some people seemed to believe it could account for all forms of desire and pleasure. And at first, I, too, thought dopamine could answer these kinds of questions. Recognizing why it cannot be the sole answer is an important part of developing a more sophisticated and productive way of understanding how drugs affect behavior and consequently, how to develop better ways to treat addiction.
