by Jason Lee
Did I want to raise a kid at the prime time of my life, at 25 years old? Absolutely not. But the uncertainty and abuse that he could have endured in foster care was not something I ever wanted my brother to experience. He was not me. Looking back at all I’d accomplished to date, I can honestly say I defied a lot of odds. I became successful on my own—a self-made entrepreneur. I became a millionaire on my own. I became everything everybody said I couldn’t be. I had everything stacked against me: foster kid, molestation, abuse, the product of a single mother household, victim of drugs, being shot, a victim of violent crime—I experienced everything everybody said would be the reason why somebody like me would not make it. I've overcome that, and I know it’s because of God, right? My brother was not like me—I was always a strong, sharp kid. At six and seven I had a key to the house, and I was coming and going as I pleased. I was watching my younger sister, who was only three years old. I saw somebody get murdered. I was running the streets. I was living around dope. My brothers were dope boys. I grew up very differently than my little brother; he was very isolated and was a mama's boy. He was with her all the time. Not to mention, he had a lot of mental and developmental issues because my mother did drugs while she was pregnant with him. I look at foster care, and I didn't think my brother was strong enough to survive it.
Paul came to live with me, and it was during that time that I discovered that I wasn’t the best parent. I didn’t realize the effect that all the psychological and emotional abuse had on me until I was placed in a parental role. I didn’t know how to be a good parent because I didn’t have good parents. All I knew to do was discipline him when he did something wrong, or whoop his ass if he did something really wrong. If he did something good, I’d give him money or buy him something. I didn’t know how to love him. I don’t think I knew how to love anyone. In some ways, having Paul with me was therapeutic. I didn’t have the time to wallow in grief or lose myself in the bottom of the bottle because I had to be active and present for him each day. I had to be more responsible and level-headed because I was now his only parent.
I did try my best to be as close to a “normal” father for him as I could. I cooked at the house; we watched TV, played games, and rode around together. If any of the other kids tried to fuck with him, I’d be on their asses about it, or if I thought that something wasn’t going right with his teachers, I’d advocate for him. I knew how to protect him because that’s what my brother, Rodney, did for me. That’s how he expressed his love for me, and because I didn’t know many other expressions of love, protecting Paul was my best attempt.
I would pick him up from school or pick him up from my sister's house, who lived around the corner. I initiated awkward conversations about his day and listened to him tell me about things he liked:
“Hey, Jason!”
“Wassup.”
“I was playing ‘Space Rangers III’ and I finally got to the next level!”
“Oh, that’s dope.”
“Yea, remember how Octon always uses his magma razor boom to hit you before you can get to the top of the building?”
“Umm…I think I remember something like that,” I lied.
“I found out that if you press X and O a bunch of times there’s a shield that comes out and it helps you finish the level!”
I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about sometimes, but I tried to listen.
I also didn't understand the challenges of raising a kid who had the issues that Paul had. Even though I put him in a good private school—the best private school that handled behavioral issues like his—and gave him the proper medications, took him to counseling all that, I know I didn't give him love because I didn't know how to do that. Then he just became difficult to care for. He had a lot of psychological issues and behavioral outbursts.
One morning, I was coming home from work, and as I was driving down the freeway, I saw a big cloud of black smoke coming from the area where I lived. At the time, my boyfriend, Josh, also lived with me, so I dialed him through my car’s phone system and asked, “Where is my brother?”
“He's right here.”
“Is there a fire?”
“Yeah, there's a fire outside,” he confirmed.
“Okay. When was my brother outside?” I investigated. I don’t know how, but I knew that Paul had to be involved in some way.
“Oh no,” Josh defended Paul, “he wasn't outside.”
I said, “No. Put him on the phone.”
I waited for a few seconds and then heard Paul’s nervous “Hello.”
“Paul, did you go outside?”
“No, no, I didn't go outside,” he lied.
“Okay, whatever. Put Josh back on the phone.” Josh came back to the phone and he was wondering why I kept asking Paul’s whereabouts. “Josh, did Paul go outside for any amount of time?”
He paused. “Well, he did go outside for about 15 minutes to walk the dog.”
Boom. That’s all I needed. Fifteen minutes was plenty of time for Paul to create chaos. Whatever was on fire, I knew he did it. That's just the type of person he had become. He was always involved in some shit. He was getting progressively worse, and then he started using drugs. When I got home, I was greeted by the police and the fire chief. My brother had been seen lighting a Molotov cocktail and throwing it across the street, onto the freeway. He lit the whole freeway and the palm trees across the street from the freeway on fire. There were helicopters dropping water, fire trucks, police officers, and all that. When I got to the house, I whooped his ass and told him, “You’re on your way out of here. I've done everything I can. We drive in a Mercedes, you have clothes, you have your own room. You go to the best private school. You’re traveling around the country with me. You have a good life.”
The one thing I didn't realize until now is that maybe the lack of nurturing was more responsible for his behavior than his developmental issues. I just couldn’t love him. I've decided not to be a parent because I know that I'm very selfish with my career right now, and I think I'm emotionally incapable of giving real genuine love to somebody. I haven't worked through all the issues that I need to work through to be able to be okay with that. I feel like when people get close to me or try to in a non-romantic way, I will immediately do everything to back away from that. It can be a family member or somebody wanting to be a real genuine friend—somebody who's genuinely just trying to get close to me. My brother never had a chance. I couldn’t give him what he needed, and I wasn’t patient with him.
After the Molotov cocktail incident, I called his social worker and told her, “Yeah, he gotta go.” After Paul overheard the conversation, he jumped out of his bedroom window and went to the park next door. A family was there barbecuing, and he found their keys, went to the parking lot, and found their car. He stole the car, ended up crashing it, got arrested, and went to juvenile hall. I was done after that. I told the social worker again, “He can't come back to my house.” That ended our 10-year relationship as “father” and “son.”
Now that he’s an adult, I rarely talk to him. Sadly, I don’t talk to many of my family members. He'll call me when he needs something, and I'll make sure he's good. That’s the totality of our relationship now—him calling when he needs something, and me helping him out when I can. I helped him get social security and gain a sense of financial security, but I boxed him out.
11Toxic Ass Nigga
Every now and then, I would think about Calvin, but the reality was that we would never be together. We hadn’t talked since the night he asked me to be his baby’s godfather, and it was probably for the best. After Calvin and I broke up, Josh was my next serious relationship. I'll be honest: that relationship was just a good sexual relationship and was one that taught me what a relationship should never be like. It should never be about sex, and there were some things I knew I shouldn’t have ever have tolerated.
I saw Josh on MySpace and we added each other. He was a boxer from the Bay area; I was living in LA at the t
ime, so the distance was okay. We started communicating through MySpace, but I found out that he had a girlfriend. He wasn’t the first guy I dated who had a girlfriend, and it wasn’t an issue for me. If the guys had a girlfriend or a boyfriend, I didn’t care; I was so destructive, that I didn't give a fuck about all that. I didn't give a fuck if you were straight or gay either. If I was interested and they seemed to be down, it went down. Josh and I talked regularly, and then I extended an invitation for us to meet in person.
“Yo, when I come up here, I'm going to meet you.”
He was like, “Okay, cool.”
Shortly after that conversation, I bought a new Mercedes. I didn't even want to go to sleep because it was my first Mercedes. I called Josh and said, “Hey, I'm going to drive up to get you from the Bay area and then I want you to come stay with me for a week.”
He was like, “Okay, cool. Shit, I'm down. Whatever.” At the time he was living with his girl and her kids, but he didn’t give a fuck.
I drove to where he was, and he was spending so much time wondering what he should pack. I was like, “Don't pack shit, we'll get all your clothes and a toothbrush. Just get in the car.” He was feeling that. He got in the car, and then we headed to LA. Within that week's time, we became friendly. We had already been talking, so it wasn't like it was a surprise that there was a sexual interest. What surprised me was that he had actually messed around with men before. Once we got to the house and we started hanging out, we found out really quickly that we were sexually compatible. He was a freak, much to my enjoyment.
Around this time, my job was transferring me to Stockton, so I made a bold suggestion.
“Fuck it, just come move in with me.”
“Fuck it,” Josh agreed. “What about my girl?”
“Man, for real?” I dismissed him. “Just kill that shit. You don’t want her anyway.”
He went home where his woman was living, got all his things, got in the car, and moved in with me. It was the craziest thing, but the spontaneity of it all was exhilarating. I bought a four-bedroom, four-bathroom two-story house and we moved in together, along with my little brother, Paul (before I kicked him out). I bought the house directly across the street from my job just so I could go home and have sex during lunch. We were having sex probably four times a day when we first got together. It was insane.
The relationship was good sexually, but I allowed that to be the determining factor of our overall compatibility. The first conversation I had with him once we decided to be together was very simple but it was the foundation that I needed to establish with him.
“There are three things that I don’t tolerate in a relationship: don't cheat on me, don't lie to me, and don't steal from me. Everything else, we can work through. If there is poor communication, or you don't clean the house, or I don't, or we forget to pay a bill, we can work through that. Even if we get in a crazy argument, that’s workable.”
The longer I was with Josh, the more I realized that he had some cognitive challenges. I don't think he was 100% mentally competent. He presented like he did, but there were times when he would have different types of cognitive breaks. I could tell there were other elements causing his reactions to certain things. Then I found out that his mother tried to drown him when he was a kid, so that did some damage to his brain.
After we were together three months, our first major challenge as a couple presented itself. I was going to purchase a few computers from a lady, but I wouldn’t be in town to do the transaction. I looked to Josh to take care of things while I was away.
“Ok, she's going to sell these computers at $500 dollars each,” I filled him in. “Here's $1500; I’ll just get three of them. I've got to go to Puerto Rico for work, so when I get back, I’ll check the computers out to make sure they’re good.”
I went to Puerto Rico and then returned shortly after. I bought all types of gifts and clothes and was anxious to show Josh what I had. When I inquired about the computer transaction, I noticed that there was only one computer.
“Where's the change?” I inquired. “You know, $1000.”
“Oh, well…” I watched intently as Josh stumbled through his lie. “I lost the money.”
“How did you lose the money? Did you go anywhere this weekend?”
“No, I didn't go anywhere.”
I paused and tried to process what was happening. I just knew he didn’t think I was stupid or that I would be okay with him just “losing” a grand.
“Did anybody come to the house?” I tried to bail him out.
“No.”
At the time, my little brother was still living with me, so I said, “So you were home with Josh and you didn't leave the house?”
“No.”
“And nobody came over?”
“No.”
I could feel my anger erupting. “But you lost the $1000?”
He looked me square in the eye and confirmed, “Yeah.”
“Well, that doesn't even fucking make sense, my nigga. Like, how did you lose the money and you didn't go nowhere? How did somebody not take the money, and you claim nobody came in the house?”
He stood there like I was talking to someone else.
“Look, I'm just going to tell you right now: I'm too smart for this conversation, and $1000 is not worth us continuing to argue. I'm going to go ahead and just chalk it up to the game, but I know this shit is funny. It's going to come out."
So, of course, being the freaks that we were, we got past the argument and had sex. While Josh was in the shower, I went to check my computer. I always kept my desktop organized, so when I turned it on, I immediately noticed a new icon that wasn’t there before. I'm thinking, What the fuck is this? I clicked the box, and it was a video. I played the video, and there was Josh dancing and stripping for somebody while he was in my house. Somebody else was filming him.
He was still in the shower, so I kept my cool. When he finally came back in the room, I light-heartedly said, “Yo, I'm about to show you something. Before I show you, I need you to just remain calm and let me just show you this. Then we're going to talk about it.” I played the video, and he immediately got defensive.
“Oh, so dancing,” he shrugged. I could tell that he was trying hard to make this seem like it was nothing.
“Hold on a minute,” I continued. “So now either, A, my brother was filming you, and that’s a fucking problem, or, B, somebody was in my house filming you, and that's a problem. So ...”
Then he lashed out, “You work too much and I'm home alone! You travel all the time, so what am I supposed to do? I met this girl at the park, and she came over!” He admitted that he had cheated on me with her.
“Okay.” I thought very carefully about how I was going to respond. Instead of saying, “You violated my trust, stole my money, cheated on me, and you lied to me,” I accepted what he did. Instead of saying, “You know what? This relationship is over and you're out,” I stayed in that relationship for another two and a half years. Even though I stayed, the relationship quickly went downhill. I spent the rest of our relationship cheating and sleeping with whoever I wanted. Our relationship had become so disrespectful and toxic that there was one time when I was about to sleep with someone and, I found out that Josh had already slept with him in our bed. Come to find out later, he and Calvin used to mess around, too. They weren't even in a serious dating relationship; it was strictly sexual. I didn't find that out until later, but it was something that made me uneasy.
The relationship was clearly in critical condition, and our move to LA finally gave me what I needed to pull the plug. My job promoted me to director, and that position was in LA. Despite the relationship being toxic, I asked Josh to move with me. Being in LA afforded me the opportunity to be more active in the entertainment industry, and I started to develop relationships with a few celebrities. I could sense that Josh was becoming more and more insecure. While we were out for drinks with a few friends, he got too drunk and spazzed out and left. When he
got home, I got a phone call from my brother telling me to come back to the house.
“Hey, you need to come home. Josh just broke the doorknob, and he just punched the kitchen window. He punched a hole in my bedroom door, too.”
“What? Put him on the phone!” I knew Josh wouldn’t talk, so I left and came home. When I got home, I ran up the stairs and encountered a drunk, belligerent Josh.
“Fuck your motherfuckin’ ass, Jason!” he shouted. Then something hard flew past my face.
“Nigga, you betta calm the fuck down!” I shouted back. “You in here fucking up my house like you ain’t got no goddamn sense! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You ain’t shit!” he retorted.
“Yo, you gotta get out my house.”
He got in my face and yelled, “Make me, motherfucker!” I blacked out. There was more screaming and cursing, and the next thing I knew, we were in a full-on fight. I was on top of him whooping his ass. I was throwing blows and he was giving them back. He reached up to grab my hair, which was a lot longer back then, and there was blood everywhere. Once I saw all the blood, my anger subsided, and I realized what I was doing. I was really hurting him. I had never been in a physically abusive relationship with anybody I was intimate with. I didn’t know how to classify what was happening. Is this domestic violence? Is this just a fight? We were both men, so it could have been seen as just two guys fighting, but this was my partner, so I guess it was domestic violence.
I just blacked the fuck out. I knew that I could not allow my rage to take over me like that, and I knew that I could not be in a relationship that was steeped in violence and betrayal. I knew that the relationship was over. I had to be. I had to end the relationship because he didn’t deserve what happened, and it wasn’t wise for me to remain in a situation where I can't control myself. I know the extent of my rage, and that’s why I don’t own a gun today. I know how I am, and in that relationship, I knew that if I didn’t end it, I could have eventually killed him.
