Redefining Realness (8 page)

“Don’t ever do this,” Dad said with a hint of defeat in his voice. “Go on and play.”

Chad left his worship in that room, and I left behind any illusion of safety. If Dad was all we had, the only person looking out for us, then we were all alone.

“Listen! If I ever catch you guys doing this,” he said, lifting his empty eyes to meet Chad’s wet ones, “I’mma whop your asses.”

When I recalled this pivotal moment to my father years later, he said simply, “Your dad doesn’t lie.”

By 1992, we’d been in Oakland for two years, at what I know now was the height of the crack epidemic, which enveloped our already struggling neighborhood like the rising fog that covered the Golden Gate Bridge during those misty mornings. Some of my classmates were reportedly born addicted to cocaine, mislabeled “crack babies” by the media before their parents even got the chance to name them. We all teased one another incessantly, as kids do, about whose mama smoked crack. “Yo mama” jokes were all the rage (“Yo mama smoke so much crack, she . . .”), and we’d blame anyone’s shortcomings on a mother’s crack smoking. Our teasing mirrored chants of the kids in the Dogs’ hit song, “Your Mama’s on Crack Rock,” in which a little girl is teased by kids chiming about her mother’s “tricking” to get money for crack. The song ends with the girl pleading, “Mama, please stop, ’cause they pickin’ at me.”

Rarely were there images of fathers strolling the streets for a hit of exhilaration. We definitely saw men in filthy clothes around our block, but they didn’t belong to anybody. Besides, none of my friends in our predominantly black neighborhood had a father. Before seeing Dad take a hit from the pipe, I thought crack was a “yo mama” problem, not a “yo daddy” problem.

My closest friend, Maddy, had a white father she had never met. The rumor was that her mother was her married father’s dark secret, a macadamia-nut-colored woman with curly hair that matched Maddy’s. I loved Maddy because she was smart and kind and had an
open capacity for compassion that I envied. Once Maddy’s half-sister, Aisha—who favored her mom, all sharp lines and angles anchored with almond-shaped eyes—yelled at Maddy, “Mama don’t care ’bout us. All she cares about is her glass dick.” Maddy, with tears welling up in her downcast eyes, whispered to Aisha, “You shouldn’t say that. She can’t help herself.”

My feelings for my father didn’t come close to empathy. What little that remained, I disposed of when I heard John, our neighbor, call Dad a crackhead.

Dad worked well with his hands and had a passion for cars, and John’s champagne-colored Cadillac, with a matching leather interior that smelled of lemony oil, was Dad’s adopted baby. At the time, Dad had a green Volkswagen Bug. He never complained about the size or its horrendous vomit color, but there was no hiding Dad’s love of that Caddy. “This is a car right here, man,” Dad said to himself, giggling, while changing the oil one day.

He babied John’s car as if it were his own. It was Dad’s “I’ve made it” marker, a sort of black man’s dream, trumping white picket fences, Girl Scout cookies, and lemonade stands. Dad’s care for John’s car—the washing, the waxing, the tune-ups, and the oil changes—were a gracious act, in my perspective, one of friendship and passion. I was unaware that John and Dad had their own arrangement.

Dad was sweating under the hood of the Caddy on one of those sunny days in California that a kid born in Hawaii and living in Oakland took for granted. Everyone was outside. John wore a brown and beige silk shirt that draped over his rotund belly. He was bald on top of his head, with hair on the sides—he looked like Uncle Phil from
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
, and he had the same air of superiority, which showed in the volume of his voice. Only his should be heard.

As Dad tinkered on the Caddy, I sat on a patch of grass between the driveway and the street, where Chad and Maddy and Aisha were
playing. Dad was on one side of me, under the hood, and on the other side was John, standing with a man who looked at Dad suspiciously. His sideways glance captured my focus because I recognized that I looked at my father the same way. I was the kind of child who, as Dad said, “can’t stay out of grown folks’ business,” so my interest was piqued.

“How much you pay Charlie?” the man asked John.

I had to stop everything inside of me from saying that Dad did not get paid to tend to John’s car. He was no one’s employee; he did it because he was John’s friend and he loved the Caddy as if it were his own.

“He loves that car, man,” John said, calming my defenses. I knew he knew my father and appreciated his work. “But,” John continued, “I feel sorry for him, you know. He’s a crackhead. I give him twenty bucks here, another there.”

I turned my head toward Dad, who was polishing away at a rim. Beads of sweat ran from his hairline to the lines of his forehead as he bobbed his head to a tune only he could hear.

In one instant, Dad was . . . a crackhead. Just like Maddy and Aisha’s mom, ashy and antsy, circling the dudes in do-rags who hung outside the corner store. I realized then that I’d held on to a shred of hope regarding Dad; he was still a hero to me, if flawed. Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn’t define you, I thought.

I saw Dad through a dusty lens that distorted our relationship, as tarnished as his pipe. He was no longer just our father; he was his own person, with an identity and label and body separate from his relationship with us. He was someone who was judged outside of the lens of fatherhood, outside of our connection. When he was in the streets, he was not Dad. He was Charlie the crackhead.

I vividly remember the routine sight of a baby girl wearing a soiled diaper, playing with an equally dirty doll on her lawn. No parent or sibling in sight. She would just cry and cry and cry. No one asked, “Where’s her mama?” Her wailing became the background vocals to our double-Dutch anthems, kind of like the barely heard baby yelps in Aaliyah’s song “Are You That Somebody?” In addition to the baby girl, I saw stray dogs and crack vials on my way to school. But crack’s reach went beyond those vials we skipped over. When Maddy’s mom, who would beg the boys on the corner for “some stuff,” passed away of AIDS complications, I hugged my friend good-bye: Maddy and Aisha moved to San José to begin a better life with their mother’s sister.

An overwhelming feeling of envy spoiled my friendship with Maddy and Aisha because they spent all their lives with their mother. Even if she was flawed, at least she chose to be there with them. I yearned for mine, but Mom existed only in scant memories and dreams of her saving us from the dark cloud that hovered over us. These ideals of my mother contrasted with the reality of Dad, who was an anomaly, a single black father amid a gaggle of equally struggling single black moms. I was not able to recognize how unjust our circumstances were until I was well into adulthood and compared them with the experiences of friends who had relatively minimal exposure to trauma. My first sight of “normal” parent-child relations didn’t come until I moved to New York in my early twenties. Both of my roommates had parents in town to set them up, to buy them underbed storage, and to assemble their Ikea desks. I came alone with a thousand dollars or so in savings, student loan checks on the way, luggage bought by Auntie Lisa as a graduation gift, and $150 in pocket money that Mom held for me.

I saw one of my roommates’ father slip her a wad of cash; she said, “Thanks, Daddy,” while her mom looked on with moist, swollen eyes. I had never felt so lonely as I did that first day in my tiny room in the
East Village with a bed I bought on Craigslist and a Kmart dresser I assembled alone with my iPod buds in my ears. My normal was loneliness and isolation and independence. I depended on myself. I had a family, people I came from, shared experiences with, and checked in on. But they could do nothing for me beyond the love and care and good wishes they sent my way. I grew resentful in adulthood about my parents’ lack of planning. I became so used to being alone and depending on myself that I didn’t know how to ask for help.

As a kid, I had no idea that we were poor because our friends looked like us. We were all outside playing while our parents were inside smoking their pipes. We all had about three outfits, dingy shirts, high-water jeans, and matted hair. I didn’t have a subscription to
Highlights
, wasn’t able to order books from the Scholastic catalog, and never bought school photos. I don’t have a single image of myself from the second grade to the sixth, the years we lived with Dad. If not for Janine, I don’t know how we would’ve survived those Oakland years. She was a single mother who took us on when we needed her most, when she had little to give herself or her own son. She was the one who gave us candy money, who mended our wounds when we fell or fought, who took us to Payless to replace our shoes when the soles began flapping.

No matter how much I adored and appreciated Janine, I couldn’t make her better. Her body was too weak to continue fighting, and Dad was unapologetic about his lack of care. “You know your dad is selfish,” he chanted with a dissonant chord of defeat and defiance, completely at ease with his shortcomings. I disliked his lack of reciprocation.

Dad was charming and energetic. He was the kind of guy who would break out and dance if “his song” came on. “Ooooh, this my jam here,” I remember him saying, putting our car in park at a red light, opening his door, and making the street his dance floor. That
sense of endless amusement is what led women to fall so quickly. It was what made me love my dad while also rolling my eyes at him. Looking back, I can’t distinguish which parts of him were fueled by drugs and alcohol and which parts were not. I don’t know what
before
looked like. His lectures became tangent-filled, disjointed. He often lost his point and would be easily distracted by imaginings of some perceived slight from me. “Boy, why are you looking at me like that? Don’t look at me. Look at your hands,” he’d say. Seconds later, he’d rebut, “Why aren’t you looking at me? Boy, look at me when I’m talking to you.”

I began avoiding him, even forging his signature in jagged all-caps print on report cards and permission slips for field trips for Chad and me. I didn’t want to bother Dad in the mornings; I didn’t want to wake him. I felt that the more he slept, the less time he’d have to search for drugs.

Despite the hardship, there were happy times, too, like the time Dad embraced me and told me he was proud of me after I got my ass kicked by the neighborhood bully in defense of Chad, or a vomit-laden car ride home from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. It was just Chad, Dad, and me, the only time I ever saw the Pacific Ocean from California. I remember the smell of salt in the air from the bright blue water and the sweet taste of cotton candy and sticky caramel between my back teeth from the glossy candy apples. We rode the Pirate Ship, the Sea Swings, and the Ferris wheel. Dad was clear and present that day. His eyes were bright, and he strolled with a steady calm that relaxed me.

I looked over the rail bridge that crossed the San Lorenzo River, and I thought that maybe we were crossing over, maybe there was better in store for us, maybe there’d be more days like this, maybe this was the beginning of good fortune. Chad and I flanked Dad as we walked over the wooden tracks of that old bridge. I could tell Chad
wanted to run across the bridge, but I was worried that one false move and I would slip through the gaps in between the tracks and fall into the river.

“Y’all are all I got, man,” Dad said. “Y’all give my life purpose. Wherever I go, y’all go with me.” He didn’t say it sentimentally; he said it as a fact. His love for us was undoubtedly a fact. I had a father who loved me. This was a gift I wouldn’t fully appreciate until I fell in love in my twenties.

On our way home later that afternoon, I threw up in the backseat of the car. I was scared I would get yelled at for being so greedy and eating too much. “Your eyes are always bigger than your stomach,” Dad often scolded me. He pulled over at a car wash and cleaned up my mess without saying anything mean. It’s still one of the top five moments of my life.

W
e all fulfill our quota of misfortune at some point in our life. This is what I believed as a ten-year-old. It was a belief system of my own creation, part of a silent theory based on fairness and balance. I believed that some reached their quota early and advanced to a life of access and abundance, while others had beginnings filled with open doors and opportunities until they were met with their share of misfortune. This theory helped me cope with the foreboding darkness of Oakland. I held on to the hope that fortune would soon knock on our door.

Instead, when Chad opened our front door one night in 1993 as we watched TV, misfortune fell on our living room carpet in the form of a wounded Derek, who’d been shot just blocks away from our apartment. Blood trailed down Derek’s bare legs, peeking through the fabric of his shorts. Chad’s high-pitched screams launched me off the sofa and
into our room, where we huddled together in our closet. I remember thinking the shooter was following Derek and would find us. This fear diminished when the red lights of the fire truck crept into our room, and Dad came home stunned by the blood in the foyer and the tears in our eyes.

I don’t remember hearing gunfire that night, a common occurrence in our neighborhood, one that startled me the first few times I heard it until I wrote it off as a car backfiring, another common sound. Derek survived three gunshots, an apparent case of mistaken identity, according to Dad, who said the gunman—one of the guys who stood outside the corner store—told Derek, “Sorry, man, you ain’t the one,” then ran off into the streetlamp-lit night.

Those streetlamps are the last things I remember about the yellow house on the hill, the one shrouded by trees, the one Dad, Chad, and I ran away from a few months after Derek returned home on crutches. In early 1994, in the middle of the night, we boarded a Greyhound bus to Dallas, Texas, Dad’s hometown. He refused to let us say good-bye to Janine, fearful that she’d guilt him into staying. Dad cut people off quickly, moving on from relationships with little care or accountability. I don’t know what became of Derek or the kids on my block like Junior, and I was sad to hear from my father only a few years ago that Janine passed “a while back” from kidney complications after years of dialysis. Dad didn’t make the three-hour drive to attend her funeral in Houston, where she had relocated a few years after we left Oakland.