Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (6 page)

“Man, I messed up,” he said.

We knew he was making penance somehow, but we never knew for what. I didn’t want to be like any of these examples, but they were the men I saw around me. So if I wasn’t going to be like them, how was I going to be?

I tried to glean information about the other men in my family. The stories were colorful, but not very clear. The only photo I ever saw of my paternal grandfather, James Crews, was a mug shot from when he was arrested for drunk driving. He had died in a car crash, which was all I knew of him, and I never met him.

On my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather, General Simpson, and his brothers, Buddy and Arthur, were not to be played with. My great-uncle Arthur had quite the reputation. A very handsome man, he had ladies of all kinds competing for his attention. One time, he was having an affair with a man’s wife. When the husband found out, he beat his wayward spouse. Arthur then went over to the man’s house, beat him up in front of his wife, and told him if he ever put his hands on her again he’d kill him. The man never touched his wife again.

Arthur was not the subservient black man, either. When he lived in Florida, a white man once threatened him. He knocked the guy out cold in the street and was promptly arrested. This not being the first time he’d behaved in this way, a mob of concerned
white citizens formed outside the jail. A police officer sympathetic to Arthur’s plight sneaked him out the back door to safety. Arthur quickly made his way to Flint, knowing that if he stayed down south, his days on earth were numbered.

My Uncle Buddy had the biggest biceps I’d ever seen. He had a job cleaning and servicing planes at the Tampa airport, and his arms were unbelievably huge. He often flexed his biceps and asked Marcelle and me to try to make it go down. We punched, squeezed, even hung on it, but it was no use. It was like hanging on a tree branch. I wanted to be that strong, and I also wanted to be as funny and personable as my Uncle Buddy. But for all the fun he was, he also had a flip side. He’d been known to yank a man out of his seat with one arm just for looking at him wrong, and it was understood that many a man had been on the wrong side of his punches. But he was my uncle, and he loved me, and I always saw his good side.

My grandfather, General Simpson, lived in a small house on the outskirts of Flint. He and my grandmother, Mama, had been married for a few years when my mother and Aunt Paulette were born, but they divorced soon after. He worked in a fish market and had a gentle toughness about him that I loved. He was never harsh with Marcelle or me. When he smiled, wrinkles formed at the corners of his eyes, making them sparkle. It took a while, but I now see the same wrinkles around my own eyes when I smile. When we were small, he picked Marcelle and me up in his long, boxy Buick, a toothpick pointing to and fro in his mouth as he worked it around in his cheek, and a tan straw fedora slightly askew on his head with a small feather in its band. He took us to his latest girlfriend’s house, and we hung out with their family until it was time for us to go. Not a lot of conversation, or a buckled seat belt on any of these trips, just an appreciation for the fact that he actually wanted to spend
time with us. He was lonely, and I’d like to think having us with him helped.

My grandmother, Mama, later bought the duplex next door to my family’s house as an income property. General had become very sick, and my mother was the only one looking after him, so he moved into one of the two apartments. One day, he and my Aunt Paulette got into a heated argument about how he was not there for them when she was a little girl. He tried to defend himself, but she hauled off and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. Everyone stopped and stared. He held his face and looked at her incredulously, then silently walked out the door.

To this day, the memory of that scene hurts me. Maybe he had not been the best father, but I had never seen him be violent or abusive to anyone, and even my grandmother never told tales of domestic violence or abuse. In fact, he still loved her, and often told her so when she visited him on his deathbed.

THE TRUTH WAS, I WAS MORE LIKE THE MEN IN MY FAMILY
than I would have cared to admit. It was definitely difficult to be good all of the time. When I felt anxious, my thoughts whipped back to the moment I’d stood in my Uncle John’s basement, and how the pictures I’d found there had pushed everything else out of my mind. When it was time for my flute lesson, I snuck down into his basement again and again. I still wanted very much to be the good kid at church, and to be right with God, but I was soon creeping away to look at pornography whenever I could.

When Trish and I ran errands, I told her I was going to the drugstore to look at comic books, but I knew they kept copies of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
out with the rest of the magazines, and I
stood there and flipped through the images for as long as I could get away with it. More than once my reverie was interrupted by a familiar scolding voice, and my blood seemed to freeze in my veins.

“Boy, I sent you in here to get something for me,” Trish said. “And you’re looking at that stuff?”

I quickly tossed the magazine back on the shelf and pretended I had no idea what she was talking about. She never really disciplined me because, to do so, she would have had to acknowledge the content I’d been exposed to, and she wasn’t about to sit down and have a real conversation with Marcelle and me about sex or anything else. Plus, it would have been impossible for her to restrict our lives much more than she already did. We couldn’t watch secular movies in theaters or listen to secular music, and we were forbidden to date or go to dances. And by that point, my interest in pornography went way beyond just a passing curiosity. The next opportunity I had, I snuck back into the drugstore. And I found other ways to see such images.

Ever since JoNathan and I had learned how to fix the cable box so the adult channel, Escapade, came through, we looked at it every chance we got. I’d seen pornography before, but this was the first time I’d viewed pornographic movies, and they captivated me completely. Looking back, I can see why. Not only were they full of sex, which thrilled me, but also, most of them were warped versions of children’s stories:
Jack and Jill, Alice in Wonderland, Goldilocks
. Here we were, two “saved” kids, sneaking peeps at adult movies in between church services. Guilt made me think twice, but I’d soon figured out that our cable box at home worked the same way.

Marcelle and I were in our room one afternoon when we
heard Trish leave the house. As soon as her car door slammed outside and the engine noise grew faint, I looked up from my comic book to where Marcelle was studying on his bed.

In unison, we both jumped up and hurried into our parents’ bedroom, where they had a cable box on their TV. I quickly moved the channel indicator up to the right spot, my heart beating fast, even though I knew Trish would be gone for at least an hour, and there was no real danger of getting caught. As soon as I found the sweet spot, an image of two naked bodies moving together on a bed came into view. I felt all of the tension within me release.

I soon established a pattern where, anytime I was dealing with anxiety, I acted out with pornography. On the one hand, I felt bad because I knew I shouldn’t do so, but at the same time, it was exhilarating, a rush, like taking a drug. And it was a way to rebel against my incredibly strict mother.

Once I had access to pornography in our house, that’s when it first became a problem for me. I watched it every chance I got. Marcelle watched it, too. Until the day he came into the living room, caught sight of the TV, and stopped short.

“Man, I’m not doing that anymore,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

I stared at him for a long moment. I knew I should stop, too. But I couldn’t.

“Shoot, you can go ahead,” I said. “I’m gonna watch.”

I felt guilty as he went upstairs without me, but I didn’t turn it off.

And then, one afternoon when I was about twelve, I was sitting on the couch alone, watching the Escapade channel, when I heard a noise behind me. Trish had crept downstairs and snuck up behind me.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I looked back and forth between her furious expression and the screen.

“Oh my God, what are you watching?” she said, her voice growing more and more agitated as she realized what was on the screen. “What are you watching?”

I was half standing, wanting to cover the image, turn the channel. She reached the TV first and snapped it off. We stood facing each other awkwardly. I knew I was in trouble. I was embarrassed, and I was scared she was going to flip.

She looked at me closely, as if she was trying to read my expression.

“Have you been …?”

I stared at her blankly. I was so naive I had no idea what she meant.

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t know.

“Have you been, you know, masturbating?” she said. “You have, because you’ve been looking at that stuff.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’ve never done that before.”

I was like:
You can do that?
Then I started doing it. And sneaking even more porn.

My new habit was also a part of my ongoing attempt to figure out what it meant to be a man. There was no conversation about anything in our household, certainly not the birds and the bees, and so I picked up what information I could wherever I could find it. I was constantly wondering:
What does it take to be a man? When can I be called a man? Who’s going to say I’m a man?
I became consumed by such questions, and I was on a quest to answer them for myself:
Is it being able to beat somebody up? Is it being able to drive a car? Is it a first kiss? Is it having sex?

At the same time, my desire to be good became a quest to be
so perfect that I could make up for the bad things I did in secret. I was the primo yes man. And I was soon obsessed with achieving perfection in all areas of my life. This meant working harder, working more, becoming fitter, improving my art ability. It wasn’t enough to paint a picture that my teacher and classmates admired. I had to paint the perfect picture. It wasn’t enough to be good at sports. I had to be the best player ever.

The neighborhood I grew up in became worse and worse over the years, and when we played football in the street, or in a park, a handful of grown men always sauntered over to get in on the game. Maybe they were just reliving their youth, but they felt it was their job to make us tough, and they did not mess around.

I took my position, ready to get moving as soon as the play started. A big, grizzled man in his late twenties or early thirties, his arms roped with muscle, hunched down across from me, staring me down, psyching me out.

“Hey,” he said. “You ain’t gonna do nothin’ in here.”

As soon as the action was under way, he lunged toward me. I knew better than to show any fear. I ran at him just as hard as he was coming at me. With a whack that reverberated throughout my core, he smacked me down to the uneven asphalt. I lay with gravel poking into the back of my head, trying to catch my breath. In an instant I was up. If I showed any weakness I was done. We took hits that hard from grown men every time we played. It was really kill or be killed. Looking back, it seems crazy. I’d never let my son be in a situation like that. But I can tell you this: I became a better player. It hurt too much not to learn to run faster, get out of the way quicker, and take on full-body blows, all without complaint. As long as those guys were looking on, when we got hit, we brushed ourselves off and kept on going.

We had to decide whether we were going to grow up quickly, and be strong, maybe even earn enough respect from the older guys to make a name for ourselves, or if we were going to sneak away. A lot of the other boys my age knew it wasn’t for them, and it didn’t take them long to stop messing with these pickup games. But I wasn’t going to show any fear. I was obsessed with my own internal mantra:
I’m big enough. I’m strong enough. I’m fast enough. Even if you beat me today, I’m coming back tomorrow
. That’s how I first realized the power of physical fitness and athleticism, which soon took on an even greater significance in my life.

BASKETBALL WAS THE FAVORED SPORT IN MY
hometown, and I started playing in sixth grade. Pickup games in the summer were huge, and during Flint’s cold winters, it was also a social thing, as well as a sport you could excel at indoors. In ninth grade I added football and track to become a consistent year-round athlete. I knew, however, I was not good enough at basketball to go pro or even play at the college level. Because there were so many great basketball players in the city who were better than me, I decided football would be my ticket out of Flint. My need to be the best meant that I not only threw myself into practice and did extra drills on my own time, but I also volunteered for everything. No matter what the coaches asked us to do, I was the first person to raise my hand.

Fortunately, during my seventh-grade year, I finally came under the leadership of a man who recognized not only how
hard I was pushing myself but also saw something special in me. My football coach, Lee Williams, took an interest in me like no one else ever had, and he became a father figure to me. His encouragement was crucial, arriving at a moment in my life when it was enough to change everything for me going forward.