Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (8 page)

That just crushed me, after I’d spent so many hours practicing, and she’d even made me dance and complimented me in front of everyone. So that’s how I came to do the worst thing I ever did as a teenager—well, besides my double life.

I told Trish I was staying over at Darwin’s house, which, technically, I was. As soon as I got over there, I put on my gray and red Puma track suit. And he put on his black and red gear. We warmed up a little bit in his basement, and then we snuck out and picked up Carlos, the third member of our dance crew, and went to the dance in my high school’s gym. I know, bad boys, right?

Trish truly had nothing to worry about. Going to these
dances wasn’t about girls for me. I hadn’t even slow-danced with a girl at that point. It wasn’t about the hip-hop, either, which of course she couldn’t tolerate one bit. It was about getting on the floor, and finally enjoying the payoff for all of the hard work we’d done in Darwin’s basement, by showing off all of the stuff we could do.

There we were, in the regular high school gym where I played basketball during the week, but with the beat pumping and the lights flashing, it felt like a real hot spot. Well, okay, almost. I looked at Darwin, and he looked at me, and we started doing our thing. Almost instantly, everybody circled up, and they flipped. With my classmates screaming and hollering, the adrenaline hit, and I was in bliss.

When we went back to Darwin’s house later in the night, I was on a high.

I loved performing, and I knew I wanted to work in entertainment, once I’d used football to get me out of Flint. I begged Trish to let me dance in the school talent show, but she was not having it. I couldn’t reconcile how big my dreams were with how small she forced my life to be. I racked my brain for a compromise.

“Can I host the talent show, then?” I asked.

She looked at me hard, as if she was trying to search out the sin in this.

“Well, okay,” she said.

I got to host the talent show, and at least that was something. But I couldn’t line up her rules, which seemed so arbitrary to me, with my behavior, which I knew was good overall. Well, except for my one secret, and I was always swearing I was going to give that up forever. So I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about what I saw as the injustice of her rule, given the fact that I had no interest in going out and being the reckless idiot she accused
me of wanting to be. This meant that Trish and I fought constantly. I was so sick of living at home by the time I was a teenager, and during my last few years of high school, that our relationship ground to a halt.

Even though I was a varsity athlete who played football and lifted weights—and I mean I’d gotten big by this point—Trish often got physical with me. When she was mad, she slapped Marcelle and me like it was nothing, as if we were still little kids. Usually I didn’t let it get to me. But one time I said something, and she whacked me. Before I could stop myself, I lifted my hand in the air, just as a reflex.

“You raise your hand at me?” she snapped.

There was no way I was really going to hit her, and I was already lowering my hand. But Big Terry happened to come into the room just then.

“Ugh, leave me alone,” I said and started to walk away.

Trish turned from me to Big Terry with a wild look in her eye.

“Terry, he was gonna hit me,” she said. “He was gonna hit me!”

I was already on my way up the stairs, but my father started running after me. He couldn’t reach me on the stair above him, so he tried to kick me. The next thing I knew, he was screaming. I looked back, totally confused. He’d kicked me in the butt, but it hadn’t hurt at all. Well, he’d chipped a bone in his foot. Served him right.

I left Big Terry on the stairs, screaming, and went into my room and shut the door.

Taking my place at what had become my regular spot, I stared out the window into the street. There was nothing to see, really, but at least it was a reminder that there was a whole world out there.
I’ve got to get out of here
, I thought.

Of course we weren’t allowed to buy any secular music, but I loved rap music, and I had a little boom box. I sat there at the window for hours, recording snippets of whatever songs I could catch on the radio. My favorite song was “Sucker M.C.’s” by Run-DMC, and I often managed to record part of it, but for some reason, I could never catch the entire song on the radio. Even just hearing part of it was something, though. The music, the view of the street outside, I held on to these and whatever other lifelines I could find for myself. It was a hard time.

No matter how wrong I believed my mother to be during those years, I can look back now and see that she was doing the best she could. Even though I wanted to be good, it was far too easy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in Flint during the eighties. And I really didn’t get that. I was young. If there was a shooting, my mentality was:
Yeah, but I didn’t get shot. I’m fine
. Trish was trying to keep us from getting hurt. She was trying to keep us from slipping through the cracks like so many other young men around us did. So many guys I knew from that time have gone on to have six kids by six different women, or ended up in jail. Or ended up dead.

Darwin was the only person I felt like I could really talk to, and our long conversations about our future plans were another lifeline for me. But even he didn’t know my darkest secret. Sure, there were times we got a porno tape and watched it, but it was almost like sex ed, just trying to figure out what was what.

“Is this how it goes down?” he asked.

“I guess,” I said. “Is that what I have to do there?”

We craned our necks and studied the screen.

In spite of Trish’s obsessive fear that Marcelle or I would actually be around a girl long enough to get her pregnant, like had happened to her when she was our age, she never educated us about how to prevent this, except to once ask us if we knew how
babies were made. I had many questions, but I was way too squeamish to talk about it with her. And while it would have been better to have a conversation about sex with Big Terry, of course he never talked with us about anything.

Sometimes when Darwin and I saw porn, I wanted to come off as a good guy.

“Man, don’t look at that,” I said. “We don’t need that.”

He was cool with this and had no reason to suspect I was watching pornography at other times, so he didn’t know the extent of my obsession. No one did. My secret was safe. But I knew I was doing it. I knew it was wrong. I felt bad. And yet I couldn’t stop. And so my hidden life started to chip away at me, little by little. After I had binged, I clasped my hands over my chest at night, listening to Marcelle sleeping in his bed across the room, and I prayed so hard to be good.

“God forgive me, please, please,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.”

There were times when I abstained for a month, or two months. And then I always slipped. After a while, I figured this was just how my life was going to be, and that it must be normal. Everyone must have a double life like I did.

THE ADULTS WE WERE SUPPOSED TO LOOK UP TO
and respect didn’t seem to be living any better than I was, really. There was a substitute teacher in my high school who knew I wanted to play football at a Division One college and then play in the NFL. He had attended the University of Michigan, which has one of the best teams in college football. One day in tenth grade, he pulled me aside.

“I went to the University of Michigan,” he said. “You’ve never been to a University of Michigan game. You won’t believe it. It’s incredible. You’ll love it.”

I was excited just thinking about it. What a cool guy he was to invite me.

“Wow, okay.”

Soon after that, this substitute teacher picked me up at my house on a Saturday morning. I couldn’t believe I was going to
a University of Michigan game. The whole drive down to Ann Arbor, he talked up the experience.

“Man, I love this,” I said. “I want to go to the University of Michigan.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye as he drove.

“Terry, now, you know you probably can’t go to the University of Michigan.”

All of a sudden, what he was saying made me feel sick.

“Well, why not?” I said.

“Michigan is another animal,” he said. “I mean, it’s just—the competition is huge. You want to go where you could really thrive.”

For the rest of the day, I didn’t hear another word he said. He took me around and introduced me to all of his fellow alumni, and he brought me into the stadium where 105,000 people were screaming for the game. He was cheering and yelling himself. But it all meant nothing to me.
What good is it being here?
I thought.
You’re showing me something you’re saying I can never have. What in the world is wrong with you? You’re going to take a poor kid, show him a feast, and say, “You can never have it. No, no, no, the dog food is for you. This, however, is how the nice guys live.”

I looked around the stadium, and I was sure everyone could see I wasn’t good enough to be there. It was a very long day. When he finally dropped me off at home, I didn’t thank him, and I never, ever talked to him again.

Luckily for me, I didn’t accept his words. Instead, I got mad. I knew I was good enough to make something out of my life. But how many young people believe the limiting things they’re told? That’s why we’ve got to define our circumstances for ourselves. I’m telling you, our sense of ourselves is all we have in this world.

Even though I knew who I was and where I was going, I had to fight hard to hold on to this knowledge, because high school was full of such experiences. In twelfth grade, I had this basketball coach who felt like he could do no wrong. I mean his ego was just out of control.

We had a star player on our team, Craig Sutters. Now, the problem wasn’t with Craig. He was one of the most gifted athletes I’ve ever seen. He could literally take a quarter off the top of the backboard. I mean, this kid could jump. He could throw. He could shoot. He was a superstar. All of us players, we loved Craig. Because he was such a good guy, and we were so glad he was on our team. The problem was what the coach had to say about Craig in relation to the rest of the team.

One day after school, we were sweating our way through practice. I took a shot, and I missed. The coach blew his whistle and stopped the action on the court.

“Terry!” he yelled. “Terry, what’s wrong with you? You think you can shoot better than Craig?”

“Ah, I mean, no, but I had an open shot, so I took it.”

“You know what? Here,” the coach said, throwing me the ball. “Shoot the ball. Shoot the ball. You think you’re better than Craig. Shoot the ball.”

Practice was completely stopped. I was stuck out there in front of everyone. It was incredibly embarrassing. So I shot the ball. Of course, I missed.

“See, you’ll never be as good as Craig. Never. Don’t you ever shoot the ball again. You pass it to Craig. That’s what you do.”

Well, I got the message. He had designated shooters, and that’s the way he wanted us to play. So that’s the way we played. No matter what I did, I felt like this guy hated me, but I never
gave up. And he didn’t have a better athlete to put out on the court, so he had to play me. Anytime I had a shot, I passed to Craig.

That year we were the team to beat, and we went all the way. Finally, we made it to the last championship game. Well, the other team, Flint Hamady, used this technique where they kept passing the ball back and forth without making a play, in order to run down the clock. My teammates and I wanted to attack, but Coach was having none of it. We did as we were told and sat back, but Coach was clearly choking. At the end of the game, we managed to score a shot, which left us within two points of victory, with five seconds left on the clock.

The other team threw the ball into play. I made my move, and I stole it. I took the ball the whole length of the court until I was right under our basket, and then I looked around. Craig was all the way down in the corner. Even if I passed to him, there was no way he could score.

FIVE. FOUR. THREE.

I did a layup.

TWO.

The ball rolled onto the side of the basket. And then it fell off.

ONE.

The buzzer sounded, and the place went nuts. Hamady had won, and it was a huge upset. They stormed the court. Everybody on our team collapsed. This was our senior year. Craig wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t coming back.

We went into the locker room and sat around, waiting for our final talk from Coach. He came in and stood in front of us, clipboard in hand.

“I want to thank you guys for your effort this year,” he said.
“Now, if Terry had thrown the ball to the right guy, Craig was right there under the basket.”

Not only was this untrue, but even if his fantasy was the reality, what then? We would have had a tie? Maybe? Craig still would have had to make the basket.

Hey, wait
, I thought.
We were losing. I stole the ball. If the guy had just held on to it, we would have lost anyway. There were five seconds left
.

He’d painted it like I’d cost us the game, and I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t like we were winning. We’d already lost. My attempt was a last-ditch effort.