There Goes My Social Life (5 page)

The Founders knew this. The Declaration of Independence says we have a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I've always liked that they selected a very accurate word: pursuit.

No one's going to serve it to you on a silver platter. But—in America—you can at least chase happiness. This is the essence of self-governance, which means solving problems as close to the individual as possible. When government bureaucrats start making decisions from their mahogany desks in D.C.—far away from the problems that afflict us—their solutions usually make everything worse. And it's not just Democrats who come up with stupid solutions. (Yes, I'm talking to you,
Mr
.
Compassionate Conservative No Child Left Behind
George W. Bush.)

Tea Party Patriots founder Mark Meckler said, “America was designed to be a self-governing society, where decisions are made as close to home as possible. Things have changed since Jefferson put down his quill. The government has encroached into every area of life, so infiltrating our culture that we endlessly debate the policies our so-called leaders have decided for us.”

He's right. I wonder how Jefferson would feel if he were transported into this nation now and picked up a newspaper.

“Obamacare?” he might ask. “Why did you let this happen? Have you even read the Constitution?”

There's no telling what Jefferson would say about how the IRS isn't even trying to hide the fact that they targeted, intimidated, and bullied Tea Party, Christian, and pro-Israel groups. The federal government—under President Obama's “leadership”—effectively undermined ordinary Americans' ability to speak out on causes they believe in by frightening them about their tax returns and burying them in paperwork during a crucial presidential election. The president hamstrung conservative organizations' ability to organize and to express their opinions about issues that are pressing in on us today.

And I'd hate to see Thomas Jefferson's face when he learned that we have $19 trillion in national debt.

Here's what I have learned. Limited government protects liberty best. The Founders created the “checks and balances” system so that the various government branches don't get so powerful and onerous that they take away our liberty. The federal government isn't supposed to act in areas that aren't authorized in the Constitution. But politicians think they're smarter than our Founders.
Checks and balances
? they think.
That
'
s so old-fashioned
. Consequently, the federal judiciary enthusiastically holds the hand of Congress and the White House as they erode the sovereignty of the fifty states and the American people.

It's up to citizens to take a stand and to seize back the power the bloated federal government has taken from us. It's up to individuals to plant their feet firmly on the ground and reclaim their lives.

Who decides?

According to the Founders and the Constitution, the citizens should make the decisions that affect their lives.

That's why I didn't let my family or my upbringing define my life. Thankfully, I was born in a nation that gave me another option: freedom.

SIX

EDUCATION, THE GREAT INTEGRATOR

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

—George Washington Carver

I
confess: I'm self-taught.

I've been teaching myself through reading newspapers,
National Review
, and many books like
The Fountainhead
,
The Alchemist
,
Hamlet
, and
The Story of O
. Through my self-teaching, I feel like I'm putting myself through college without having to put up with liberal professors trying to indoctrinate me with the elite nonsense of higher education . . . lessons they teach that might sound sort of reasonable in the classroom but that would never make sense on the street.

No, I didn't go to a single college, but I made up for that by attending so many elementary schools and high schools. Because my parents moved me around a lot, I went to schools in New York, California, and New Jersey. I went to public schools and private schools. I've lost count of all of the schools I've attended, and the ones I remember I can't always recall the names of. (It doesn't help that New York City schools go by number.) I never went to one school for more than two consecutive years of my life. By the time I was six, my parents were sending me to my third school.

I went to schools in wealthy areas and schools in poor areas. So I speak from experience when I say the American school experience is horrible.

One of the main problems I experienced during my academic years was the strong culture of violence. I can't remember the name of my third school in the Bronx, but I do remember the girl who ruled the playground like some sort of queen.

“TaLonna wants to fight you today after school,” my friend told me. It was a sentence that stopped me in my tracks. TaLonna was an enormous black girl—probably twice my size and fat. “What'd I do to her?”

“She said you think you're cute,” my friend told me, her eyes wide. According to my classmate, TaLonna had called me the ultimate insult: “high sidity.” That simply meant she believed I thought I was better than everyone. That I was special.

“Oh, God,” I said, dread filling my stomach.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “She wants to meet you at the corner after school.”

I knew I couldn't turn the challenge down. If I didn't show up, my family would have been disgraced.

“What can I do?” I asked.

My heart raced as I planned my attack and walked to the corner after school. TaLonna could take me out with no problem. Since she had me on size, I had to have her on strategy. When I saw her standing there on the street, I immediately looked around to see what I could use as a tool, a weapon. I wasn't a fighter. Already a crowd had gathered. A nervous energy emanated from the kids, and I could tell they were electrified by the anticipation of seeing a fight. I wasn't going to give them what they wanted—a long-drawn-out scuffle with TaLonna scratching my face like a cat. No, I was going to finish it before she realized it had started. I was going to take her out fast.

My eyes scanned the environment. A plastic bag. Half of a wet cardboard box. Leaves the wind had blown into a crevice so long ago that they'd stopped being individual leaves and were now just a damp, brown mush of old leaves and cigarette butts. Nothing useful.

When my eyes met hers, I took her in. She had a tee shirt on that was about three sizes too small. The fabric pulled tightly over her bulging stomach, showcasing her width, her girth. Her ability to simply sit on me in front of all of these classmates to show who was boss. But she wouldn't simply sit on me. No. She wanted to humiliate me, to bring me down a notch or two. And even though I was six years old, I knew the honor of my family rested squarely on my narrow shoulders. Too bad for her, she'd made a critical mistake.

She was standing, nonchalantly, by a brick wall. Suddenly, my plan was clear. Before she even got to the corner—the predetermined meeting place—I ran up to her, grabbed her, and beat her head against that brick wall.

And that was it. I didn't knock her out, but she was probably dizzy enough that she didn't come at me. She struggled to get up, and I pushed her down.

“Get up again and I'm gonna knock your ass again,” I said. The people standing around on the corner realized they had missed the big fight, so they ran over to us to see what had happened. My mother's words of advice floated through my head.
The bigger they are
,
the harder they fall
.

Turns out, she was right. It was a lesson I'd learn again and again. Word got around.

“Stacey beat TaLonna's ass and you don't really want to fuck with her. She's crazy!” That's how I earned my nickname; suddenly I was known around school as Crazy Stacey. I wasn't thrilled about the nickname, but it helped establish my reputation in the neighborhood as someone to avoid. What TaLonna didn't know—couldn't know—was that she was unevenly matched when she decided to pick on me. Sure, she was big, fat, and strong, but I had a secret advantage.

My life had already been filled with grief that my parents never were around and sadness since no one seemed to care whether I lived or died. But somewhere over the past year—maybe during the first few weeks of kindergarten when many American schoolchildren were learning that
a
was for
a
-
a-apple
—that deep well of melancholy and anguish had turned into fury. Whoever is angrier usually wins.

In third grade, I smoked a joint my cousin gave me and loved the way it felt. I didn't even know it was illegal. I didn't become a “pothead,” but I smoked marijuana whenever it was around. My dad tried to protect me from “hard drugs,” or at least he tried to hide his use from me. When I was twelve, I caught a glimpse of the truth. One day I came home from school, opened the bathroom door, and was surprised to see Uncle Freddy and my dad both in the small room. They looked up, horrified, and I saw that my dad had a belt around his arms and my uncle was holding a syringe. I still didn't understand, but I knew, judging from the shock on their faces, that I was seeing something not meant for my eyes.

“Shut the fucking door!” Uncle Freddy yelled.

A shudder went through me. He had never spoken to me that way. He was like a father to me, always speaking words of encouragement. Immediately, I shut the door and stood in the hallway with my hand still on the knob.
What did I just see? What were they doing with a belt and a needle?
I didn't know. But I knew it was not good, and that I was afraid.

The next year, my mom packed our bags and sent us to live with my grandparents on Long Island for a year. That's the way things went with us—for large portions of our lives, we were shuttled off to other places. . . . Of course, this change wasn't bad. I loved being with my grandparents, being in what felt like a stable family, and going to a new school.

In fact, I had a great teacher named Mr. Ackerman, a very dapper gentleman about 6'4". Like a character out of a storybook, he wore a tweed suit every day, wore a bow tie, smoked a pipe, and had an affected English accent. He told us stories about history and science and how they applied to our real lives. Once he gave a talk on why maps are important, how science relates to nature, and how nature relates to our relationships. He allowed knowledge to encompass our entire lives and being. His passion for teaching gave me passion for learning. That year, I was an honor student and even won the Presidential Award in PE.

When we left Long Island, we were told that we wouldn't be going back to New York. Apparently Mom and Dad had gotten a divorce. In Dad's place was a quiet man we'd never seen before, and Mom told us—without much fanfare—that they were getting married. My new stepfather's name was Cecil Holmes, a tall, handsome black man from Guyana (formerly British Guiana). He was a good Catholic, went to mass every Sunday, and never did a drug in his life. In other words, he was a square compared to my father, and very successful as a record executive. In fact, his record label had KISS and Donna Summer. In 1986, he gave The New Kids on the Block their first contract. He seemed to love my mother, and I could tell he enjoyed having her on his arm.

Suddenly, our family had more wealth and opportunities than we'd ever had. Cecil's job was amazing, but it meant we had to move to California when I was in seventh grade. California was no New York. In my old neighborhood, my friends and I ran into each other naturally in the course of the day. Kids were everywhere—playing stickball in the street, jumping rope, and playing hopscotch. That was not happening in California, where everyone had yards and cars and whole acres to themselves.

Mom immediately enrolled us in the local public school in a residential neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. It had a pretty playground surrounded by eucalyptus trees and big fields circling the school. Though I was going to miss my friends, maybe it was better than going back to New York, where the schools were so violent. Maybe I'd get along a lot better in this sunny, seemingly optimistic place.

One day I came home and found my mom crying.

“What's wrong,” I asked, though I scarcely thought that anything truly was wrong. As an addict, her emotions were always up and down. “Are you okay?”

“They got Uncle Freddy,” she said.

“Who did?” I asked. I'd never seen anyone even so much as glance sideways at the man. No one would dare cross him.

“Didn't you hear me,” she cried. “The cops. They arrested him.”

That word hung in the air between us.

“Arrested?”

Apparently Uncle Freddy—my mentor, my one true fan and advocate—went to jail because he was a pimp. The beautiful women he always had on his arms were not just legions of adoring women. They were prostitutes.
His
prostitutes.

I felt like a ship in a storm when the line holding the anchor snaps. He was the one adult on whom I could lean when times got tough. The one person who represented honor and virtue. Without him, I felt untethered, like I could float away to who-knows-where and no one—not one soul—would care. Later, Uncle Freddy also confessed to killing a sixteen-year-old girl and burying her in the woods behind my grandparents' house. He was put in jail for life, and I never saw him again. I never had a chance to tell him how much I loved him, how much he meant to me, or how much he affected my life. Later, my grandmother told me he had a prison conversion. In fact, his newfound faith was the reason he confessed to the unsolved murder.

I missed him so much after he was taken away, and his words of advice always came to me during times of need. One recommendation would come back to me more than the others: when the Jesus train comes, make sure you're on it.

I think, in a weird way, that this was his way of making sure he was going to be on it too. He died in prison, and I can only hope that he felt the love I had for him during his last days.

On the first day of school in my new home in California, several buses pulled up to the school. I watched as black kids poured out of them.
Oh
,
shit
, I thought. I did the math that quick.
They
'
re coming from somewhere
,
and it
'
s not here
. Because my neighborhood was predominantly white, the government bused black kids in from South Central Los Angeles. It also bused white kids from my neighborhood to South Central L.A. Of course it was a recipe for disaster. The kids that got bused had to get up at 5:00 in the morning. By the time they arrived at school all they wanted to do was fight and sleep. It was obvious they didn't want to be there. The teachers didn't want them there either. And so my new California school was not a respite from violence, but instead a place embroiled in racial conflict. The bused kids stuck together, and the Valley kids stuck together. Since I was black, the Valley kids assumed I was a bus kid. Since I lived in the Valley, the bus kids wanted nothing to do with me.

“You're from here?” the bus kids laughed, pointing at my lighter skin. My hair didn't conform to their standards, either . . . as they told me repeatedly. “You're not even black,” they'd say. Though I had established myself in New York as “Crazy Stacey,” my reputation didn't reach to California. They saw me as “high sidity” too, which meant—of course—that I would scrap every single day.

I didn't like to fight. In New York, violence permeated the school . . . and perhaps the entire culture of the South Bronx. Turns out, California, absolutely dominated by gangs, was no different. The Crips and the Bloods were the most notorious gangs, and membership in one or the other was mandatory . . . like a class needed for graduation. The reason was simple. One guy alone at school will certainly get jumped. If this guy has a friend, he'll be less of a target. His friend will have his back. This is an age-old principle. Even the Bible talks about it in Ecclesiastes 4: “Two are better than one. . . . Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.”