Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (4 page)

Whenever we heard Big Terry’s car pull up outside of our house, Marcelle and I packed up our fun. We knew to be wary of the person he usually was outside of work.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM
. He banged into the living room, unsteady on his feet, and leaned against the wall, scowling at us. Too late. I was trapped.

“I told you to do the grass,” he said.

Marcelle and I looked at each other and headed upstairs to our room without saying anything. We knew he wouldn’t hurt us, but he had a way of making things so uncomfortable when he was drinking that we didn’t want to be around him.

I didn’t have to be downstairs to know what came next. Big Terry had a regular routine. He went over to the stereo console and put on his favorite record, Bobby Womack’s soulful anthem to lost love, “Woman’s Gotta Have It,” and played it as loud as
he could. If I passed through the living room later in the night, it was hard to even look at him. He’d gone to work neat as a soldier. Now he was collapsed in a heap, a beer in one hand. His hair was mussed, his T-shirt wrinkled and stained. Usually he wanted to be alone in these moments and did his best to ignore us. But there was no way to ignore him, sitting there crying to himself and playing his music. Finally, Trish couldn’t take it anymore, and she stormed into the room.

“Why are you here?” she said. “Why don’t you go somewhere with all that?”

I agreed with her, but I held my breath, hoping he wouldn’t suddenly snap and yell or hit her. He was pulled up too far inside of himself to lash out.

“Ugh, you’re messing with my time,” she said as she walked away.

All I ever wanted from the pre-work Big Terry was for him to slow down long enough to talk to me. But usually, only the drunken Big Terry felt like talking, and I didn’t want to be around him. I didn’t know what to make of the things he told me. All of the secrets from his childhood came spilling out, as he described being raised by his grandmother in Edison, Georgia, and how he never knew his father, and his mother lived down the street, but she didn’t want anything to do with him.

“My mama didn’t love me,” he said. “Your mama loves you.”

I couldn’t understand it at the time, but I always felt like he was envious of Marcelle and me. And he made it abundantly clear that, by his standards, we had nothing to complain about. He judged the love he showed us by what he did for us. His attitude was always:
You guys are eating. You guys have clothes. You’re lucky
.

“You have it good,” he said to us, again and again.

Whenever Big Terry got going like this, I tried to hide out in
my room. But when he’d been drinking and wanted to talk, he came barging in, flipped on the light, and held court. I startled awake and lay in my bed, blinking against the glare, scared because he was big and loud, even though he wasn’t yelling.

“Boy, I love your mother,” he said, looking at me.

I just stared back at him, paralyzed. He came closer to the bed.

“I love you guys,” he said to Marcelle and me, standing by our bunks.

In spite of everything, I puffed up with happiness. This was all I really wanted from him, and I was still smiling when he stumbled out of the room and downstairs.

Not long after that, Big Terry was leaning over a square of newspaper, shining his shoes before work. I strolled up to where he sat and smiled at him.

“Hey, I love you,” I said.

“Mm-hm,” he said, not even looking up.

It was like the moment when he’d been a loving dad had never happened. I was crushed.

Even though I didn’t like being around Big Terry when he was drunk, I wanted so badly to connect with him that I went into the living room one night when he was in his chair, beer in hand, listening to Bobby Womack. I leaned in and kissed him on his cheek. He looked at me like I was crazy. I backed away from him so quickly I nearly tripped over my own feet, and I never made that mistake again. Whether he was sober or drunk, I kept myself apart from him as much as I could.

THE ONE PERSON I COULD COUNT ON WAS MY BROTHER
, Marcelle. We were always paired together. We shared the same socks and underwear and wore the same outfits in different
colors, and we were often asked if we were twins, even though we looked nothing alike, and we couldn’t have been more different. Marcelle was very small and handsome, with lighter skin and softer hair. I was the spitting image of my father and earned the nickname Little Terry. My mother had this singsong way of calling out each of our names around the house: “Mar-SA-yell! Lil TER-REE!”

Marcelle and I traded comic books, ripping out the ads in the back for books by the first great bodybuilder, Joe Weider. We also loved anything Bruce Lee. He had his own fitness regime, and we ordered his books to learn all about it. From him, we began to understand how to use one muscle against the other, like by pushing our hands together as hard as we could.

I was obsessed with constantly making myself bigger and tougher. I was always thinking about which moves I could do while I was watching TV, and I flexed my legs so hard in the shower that my muscles cramped. Trish thought I was crazy, but the really wild thing was how well it worked. I grew noticeably stronger.

Being big and strong meant everything to me. Even though I was the younger brother, I continued to feel like my family’s protector. If someone said something to Marcelle, I was the one to respond. But then there was the day when an older guy came up on Marcelle as we walked home from school. I started defending my brother. And then I stopped short.
That guy’s too big
, I thought.
I can’t do anything
. The kid attacked Marcelle, beat him up, and threw him in a rosebush.
Ow
. When the bully was gone, I held out my hand to Marcelle and helped him to stand.

“Man, you didn’t even have my back,” he said.

“I’m sorry. He was too big. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

Marcelle accepted my apology, but Trish did not. She was furious at me.

“Don’t you ever, ever let him get beat up,” she said. “You take care of him.”

Because Marcelle had been diagnosed with a learning disability and held back a year in school, we all felt the need to take care of him. But Marcelle was determined to prove he wasn’t dumb. I often came into our room and found him reading the dictionary, trying to learn a new word every day. His quiet determination and commitment to self-improvement left a big impression on me.

I had my own reason to worry people might think I was stupid. I was in the kitchen with Trish one day when she said something, but I couldn’t make it out.

“Huh?” I said. “What?”

“You can’t hear me?” she asked.

I shrugged, not wanting to get in trouble.

There was no hiding the problem, though, and finally, my mother and father took me to a specialist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. After we’d gone through all of the tests, the doctor said my hearing was fine and sent us home. But still, there were times when I missed something I was told to do at school or around the house because I hadn’t heard the person speaking to me. We went to another specialist, and again we were sent home. By the third or fourth doctor visit, Trish had had enough. Before we even got out to the car, she started in on me.

“You know what?” she said. “I’m not taking you to any more of these. You take those tests. And they say nothing’s wrong. Is there something wrong with you?”

“No,” I said. My big thing was I didn’t want to get held back. I’d seen what it had done to my brother, and I was determined
it wasn’t going to happen to me. I didn’t want anyone to think I was dumb, either.

When we were in the car on our way home, they were sitting in the front seat, and I was alone in back. Trish suddenly whipped around and looked at me. I realized she’d been talking to me, but I hadn’t been able to hear her.

“Huh, what’d you say?” I asked.

“There ain’t nothing wrong,” she said. “You’re faking it for attention.”

“No, he ain’t faking it,” Big Terry said. “There’s something wrong with him, Trish. He don’t know what you said.”

My father’s sympathy meant a lot to me, but Trish was done. My mother was very conscious of her time, and as far as she was concerned, I’d wasted enough of it.

And so I did learn to fake it: hearing, that is. As a kid, I pretended to hear whole conversations that I couldn’t really make out, smiling and nodding along with the others. I soon learned to mirror faces. If two people were talking, and one person said something that made the other person laugh, I laughed, too.

And that’s how I got by. A few years ago, I finally acknowledged that getting by was not the same as being able to hear, and I went to another specialist. I learned that my hearing is fine, except within a specific decibel range, like the high-pitched voice belonging to a woman or child, and then it’s gone. Even so, as the specialist said a series of words to me, I was able to repeat them back to her. And then she covered her mouth and asked me to repeat what she said. I couldn’t do it.

“Your whole life you’ve been reading lips,” she said.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

I had no idea because I’d developed so many work-arounds by that point. When I started acting, I memorized everyone’s lines, so even if I couldn’t understand the words the other actors
were saying, I could tell where in the conversation my lines were meant to be and say them at the right moment. And always, I mirrored others nonverbally with my face, which I’m sure was actually one of the most helpful skills I could have acquired as an actor. Back then, I was just learning to pretend.

Even more than I wanted to prove I wasn’t slow, I wanted to show everyone that I was a good kid. Like most children of alcoholics, I was a pleaser. If something would bring peace to the house, I’d do it. I never really shared what I wanted, because nothing I wanted was as important as keeping things calm.

I also wanted to be right for God. When I was little, we attended the Church of God in Christ, which had a way of driving home the importance of being virtuous and the terrifying consequences of the alternative. It helped that I’ve always had a big imagination and could see further than the present moment, which meant I had a clear sense of the consequences of my actions, even when I was little. Being left-handed and right-brained, I’ve since learned that, scientifically, I have a tendency toward imagination rather than analysis, and that’s absolutely correct.

On Sundays, we went to church from eleven to four, and then we returned for night services, from seven to ten. One day, when I was in the first or second grade, I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I fell asleep during the day service. I woke up groggy, already worrying that Trish would be mad at me. And then I sat up quickly, a much deeper fear spiking my heart. My mother wasn’t sitting next to me, and neither was Marcelle or Micki. There was no one in the pews. Everyone was gone.

It was my worst nightmare come true, the one our pastor and Trish had warned me about time and time again, the one I’d worried about at night in my bed. It had always been preached to me in our church that God was coming, and if I was in sin at
the exact moment he arrived, then he would take all of the Christians with him, and he would leave me behind. It was a horrifying thought. I could never commit a sin, because I didn’t know when he would appear on earth, and I didn’t want the moment of sin and the moment of reckoning to be the same. But now it had happened to me. The Rapture had come, and I’d been left behind.
What did I do?
I worried. I’d obviously committed a sin, but I had no idea what it was.

I was too petrified to move, and I sat in that pew, my heart knocking in my chest. And then I heard a noise from the rear of the church. Slowly, fear tingling throughout my body, I crept back toward the stairs that led down to the basement. The sound of voices floated up to where I stood, but that didn’t reassure me at all. Who knew what tortures awaited me and the other sinners who’d been left behind down in the church basement? By the time I got downstairs, I was crying. I recognized the faces I saw. They were people from our church. But I couldn’t stop.

“Where’s my mother?” I said. “They’re all gone.”

“No, no, no, we’re here,” Trish said.

I ran to her and threw myself into her arms. I was so relieved. They’d gone downstairs to have dinner and left me upstairs to finish my nap without thinking anything about it. I’d been spared that day, but the depth of the fear I’d felt when I thought I’d been left behind only strengthened my devotion to being good. I’d always been an antsy kid, and that episode heightened my nervousness and increased my desire to be as perfect as possible.

In layman’s terms, members of the Church of God in Christ denomination were Holy Rollers. Our pastor started out services very steady and deliberate, kind of like a train pulling out of the station. Slowly but surely, he ramped up his talk into a feverish, singsongy yell, punctuated by whooping sounds, as if
he were clearing his throat. I was told that, if a preacher never reached this point in his sermon, it was considered a waste of our time.

“Oooh, he sho did preach toDAY!” the women of the church said at the end of each successful service.

But, as far as I could tell, no one could ever decipher what the service was about. When the preacher started “whooping,” the music minister jumped on the organ and added musical exclamation points. As the mood grew loud and emotional, people in the congregation began to scream and jump. Sometimes while the preacher paused between shouts, the music took off, and people ran around the church in a delirious haze. One lady sprinted from the back of the church, down the center aisle, and slammed full force into the communion table. She fell to the ground writhing as the “mothers” of the church—older women who were the female counterparts to deacons—draped sheets over any body parts exposed as the result of her “receiving the spirit.” As a child, watching grown men and women turn into wild people who sometimes frothed at the mouth was more than a little upsetting.

To the church, people had one of two spirits: the Holy Ghost, or the spirit of Satan. I wanted no part of anything Satanic, and so I wanted to “receive the spirit,” in order to ensure I was right with God. I began to ask people how I could make it happen. No one could tell me how. My mother told me it was a feeling deep inside, and others said it would just overtake me. I prayed and prayed. At every church service, I waited for this thing that would come and take me, making me run around, shaking uncontrollably, and speaking in other tongues. But it didn’t happen.