From Staircase to Stage Read online

  Back then dudes was ruthless. They’d punch a lady in the face without a thought. Like I told you, Moms was a fighter, so she’d hit right back. And she had a big mouth and wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself in every way. She was the type to tell her man exactly what he needed to bring to the table. From what I overheard of their conversations, this is what started the fights. It was a cycle that ended in continuous abuse. It would start when they were drinking Bacardi or Smirnoff and smoking weed and going through whatever they was going through until the conversation turned to how she needed him to help her out more financially. And if that talk didn’t go the way she wanted, my mom was the type to say, “If you ain’t helping me, motherfucker, then what the fuck is you here for?”

  When some people drink hard liquor and smoke weed, they get angry, they argue, and they start shit. My mom was living that life. She never started the beatings, but she was the agitator. I’d hear it all develop from my room, and as time went on, these episodes escalated the way things do when you keep having the same argument and don’t resolve it. Plates were broken, punches were thrown, and this became normal to me. All I could do was watch the little TV my mom had put in my room, sitting as close to the screen as I could with the volume turned up, trying to ignore what I still heard anyway. The fighting kept getting worse, so not long after my brother’s first birthday, when my mom told Glen once more to get out of her motherfucking house and never come back, he listened. After that they divorced and my mom started doing it all on her own, raising twelve-year-old me and my eighteen-month-old little brother.

  I wish I could say that was the end of her abusive relationships, but it wasn’t. My mom continued to have boyfriends who were too quick with a fist, and she was right there to answer back. It was tough on me, because I wanted to protect her and help her, but she was the first to tell me to stay out of it because she didn’t want to see me get hurt. I loved that my mom handled herself, but I felt helpless and weak every single time.

  After my brother was born, my mother went back to work for a while. It was hard for her to keep it all together, even with the help of her sisters and me as her main babysitter. Every day after school I’d sit with my little brother and watch cartoons, mostly Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, the Flintstones, and Woody Woodpecker. I’ve always loved Tom and Jerry, they were the shit.

  My mom chilled for a little bit after Glen, but soon she started having boyfriends again. She would start fighting with them if they weren’t willing to help her support our family. I hated to hear all the fights, but I got it—if the dude was going to be an extra burden financially she didn’t need him. She was barely getting by as it was. My mother’s next real relationship was with a guy she met at a bar named Pete, who was the opposite of Glen. He was a hangout guy, a real groovy dude who looked like a member of Kool & the Gang.

  She fell for him because they shared the same spirit: both of them loved music, they loved to dance and party, and they loved to be social. They’d go out to bars or just have a party at home. Looking back now, I bet they were both sniffing blow. Soon enough my mom got pregnant and my sister Simoné was born, right around the time my mom turned thirty-two. Now, Pete was a good guy, and they had a nice relationship, but he was cocky. And now that I’m a man, I recognize that Pete was the type of guy who was running around fucking other girls while fucking the missus too. Knowing my mom, she definitely caught his ass out there.

  One thing about Pete was that when he got upset and started yelling, his voice got so fucking loud. My mom never backed down, so they would be yelling and fighting and you couldn’t hear anything else. That became the normal for them. What I never understood was how they’d go to sleep and the next morning wake up and act like nothing happened. There was one time they couldn’t do that though. One night they got so bad that my mom hit Pete with something and broke his fucking arm. That wasn’t the end of things, because as crazy as it might seem, these two really loved each other. Pete was a ladies’ man, but he loved my mother. He also loved that they had a daughter together, so he stuck it out with her for five years.

  They had the kind of relationship that is so wrong but was normal back then, the kind where men were quick to beat the shit out of their women. Men didn’t look at that behavior as wrong, they saw it as “checkin’ my bitch.” And my mother grew up seeing her siblings live that kind of life, so they were on the same page, even though it wasn’t the right page to be on. She definitely didn’t get that from my grandmother and step-grandfather. There was no abuse there that I know of, but I can tell you that they argued. My grandmother put up with it because he was putting meals on the table and paying the bills. So I think my mother had both of those realities stuck in her head. She was used to the type of violence that defined men and women in her world back then, and she felt like a bit of arguing and fighting wasn’t bad if he was putting food on the table. To her, you stuck with him no matter what if he was paying the bills, but if he wasn’t, he got to go.

  Once my sister was born, my mom didn’t work anymore and felt like whoever was in her life was going to take care of her. And Pete did that: when he had a couple of dollars, he’d take all of us out to eat. We’d go to Beefsteak Charlie’s on 42nd Street, and I thought that was just the shit. We’d also go to Tad’s Steaks, where you could get a steak for ten dollars, and then see a movie. Those were the good times—the closest we had to what people consider normal family shit—and they didn’t happen often.

  Pete was the closest thing I had to a father figure, but he never acted like a father when it came to me. He had his own child in our little family, so that’s where his focus was. And that was fine by me, because like I told you, I never knew what I was missing. My biological father was a ghost to me, a mystery in life and in death. I used to hear stories about him from people in the neighborhood as I grew into a man: that he overdosed, that he died of AIDS, that he left town, that he was in jail. The real truth is that he got stabbed up out in Brooklyn. He owed some gangster money, and when he didn’t pay up, they collected it another way. That street life caught up to my father the way it does to anyone who stays in it long enough.

  CHAPTER 2 BOYHOOD

  When I moved back with my mom on a more permanent basis in Staten Island, it was still nice but getting ghetto real fast. Now, what I mean by nice is that you’d come to our building, you’d press the intercom for the apartment you’d want to visit, and someone would say, “Who is it?” You’d announce yourself, they’d press a button, a buzzer would go off, the door would open, and you’d go upstairs. There was a security guard in the building then, who would watch the lobby and the exits and patrol the stairwells and roof. The neighborhood was fucked up, but the project buildings were looked after like that.

  By the time I turned thirteen just two years later, the drugs had flooded our project, and they took the good times with them. The intercoms didn’t work because someone had broken them, and the buzzer system was busted too, so the addicts and dealers came and went as they pleased. And the security guards? If they weren’t long gone already they’d have been eliminated in a permanent way.

  Poverty was serious all around us, but by then my mom had gotten into her relationship with Pete. Things were stable enough that she was able to take me back full-time. Like I told you, Pete didn’t pay me or my brother no mind as a father figure, he was focused on my half sister Simoné. His attitude was that I was a boy and I was going to do what I was going to do, so I started hanging out. I had to be in the front or the back of the building where my mom and Pete could find me, and I started becoming cool with the dudes who were out there every day.

  Even though I’d hurt my knee pretty bad, at thirteen I had a fetish for baseball that kept me out of trouble, and I started playing with a few guys in my little building crew who were dope at sports. There were two wings to our six-floor building, doors with numbers from A–L on one side, and M–Z on the other. I had friends in both, all of us around the same age, united by sports. I had
one best friend who was Italian and two who were Puerto Rican. My man Fats had three brothers and two sisters. One of his brothers, Dee, was full-blown gay. He dressed like a girl, prostituted himself, was just out there and wild. Fats being thirteen, just becoming a man and wanting to be a macho Italian guy, hated that shit. Fats’s other brother Tommy was nuts and just a bad kid in every way. But Fats looked up to his brother Jerome, who was very into sports and who got us into them too. There are only two positions in baseball a fat kid can play, catcher or first base, and since Fats was a fat kid, he was our catcher. I was second base and Jerome was our pitcher, and he used to throw side arm. When you’re thirteen and someone is throwing side arm real good, that is the flyest shit you’ve ever seen. I was infatuated with his pitching style. He was hard as hell to get a hit off, no matter how much I studied his technique.

  That was my life as I started to emerge from my family and create my own world. We’d play stickball, and we’d watch the older guys play and pick up some moves from them. There was a group of older guys that were good role models for us. They were working dudes, not running around in the drug game, and they were athletes. They would cool out and play when they weren’t at their jobs. That’s how we would spend our days in the summer and after school when the weather was nice.

  At night, though, we’d hang out with Fats’s brother Tommy, which was a different story. Like I told you, he was bad. He’d light fires in the fucking woods and watch them burn, waiting for the fire department to come. He’d go up and down the staircases smashing out all the lights, leaving everyone in the dark. So I was seeing both sides of how people could turn out in my neighborhood.

  Fats’s father was never around, but we assumed he was in the Mafia at some level. We knew because Fats bragged about it every time he opened his mouth. That is, until the day he got checked. Fats’s dad sent a few associates over to smack the kid up in front of the whole neighborhood. This fucking Cadillac pulled up in front of our building and three Italian dudes jumped out and grabbed Fats right up off the fence poles we used to sit on out front. They started smacking him up good. His mother leaned out the window and started yelling, and one of them said, “Get back in the window, Bernice, don’t worry about it.”

  Fats’s father might not have come around much or been involved in his life or the neighborhood, but Bernice and the kids never lacked for anything. She had everything but a car, which was the real sign that you were living large in the ’hood. His family always had plenty of food and the kids always had new clothes. Bernice was such a nice lady, she always cooked for us and fed us. She’d make us ham sandwiches after we’d been playing stickball. Back then my favorite shit was ham with cheese and mustard—I used to eat it every chance I got. After a game we’d go to Fats’s and Bernice would have it all laid out, because Italians know their shit and always have food on the table. It meant a lot to me because I never had money and my family was barely getting by. So Fats’s dad took care of them, but by the same token, he didn’t appreciate his son running his mouth to the world about his business.

  My other best friend in the building was Michael, who was Puerto Rican. He had a real pretty mom whose partner was a black lady named Deborah. Now Deborah, she was a hustler, a female in body, but a man in mindset. She was up to no good, and Michael learned from her and became a real bad kid. He was my boy so that rubbed off on me, no doubt. Michael’s mom and her partner literally had a candy shop in the first floor of the building that was a front for selling drugs. They’d be selling candy to moms for their kids over the counter and selling coke and whatever else for the grown-ups out of the storage room in back. They were hustling, and doing well too. They bought a van and had the side painted in script that said “Lady’s Night,” which was a popular thing to do back then. When motherfuckers got a car they were proud of it, so you better know they were spraying something on it, customizing it every which way. Those ladies were doing their thing discreetly, but looking back now, I can tell you they were getting money. Cocaine was the thing, disco was king, and everybody was buying. Michael wasn’t my only friend whose mom was hustling either: I had a friend named Space, at the end of my hallway, whose mom also happened to be a lesbian, and she and her partner were straight up dealing out of their apartment.

  First time I smoked weed was with Michael, after he stole a joint from his mom and we went to the top of the stairwell to smoke it inside the door to the roof. We lit it up, and holy shit, we were like, “This is crazy.” Next thing you know we’re laughing and snapping on Fats, calling him a fat fucking pig. Fats spat on us, because we used to spit on each other and shit. Fats, by the way, was really good at doing that thing where you let your spit drip as far as you can toward the floor before you slurp it back up. When you’re ten to twelve, that skill is impressive.

  Michael, Tommy, Fats, and I became a little no-good crew. We’d bang on people’s doors and run away. We’d get in the elevator, break the lightbulb, then start karate fighting in the dark, just kicking into space, hitting whoever we hit. We fucked with each other all the time, but Fats got it the worst because he was a butterball, just fat and short. Everybody loved him, because he had a good heart and he was the man, but he was so easily provoked that none of us could keep ourselves from snapping on him.

  We were punks and shit, but by the same token we loved baseball and sports so much. We joined the community baseball team, the Park Hill Cubs, and for the three years we were on the team we were some of the best players. We learned a lot from this guy Darnell who lived in the other side of the building. His parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses and he was a lot like Jerome—just a teacher and a leader type when it came to athletics. He was also the guy who taught me about fashion, because he was early into hip-hop. He was wearing Lee jeans and Kangol hats, looking cool as hell before it was ever a thing. We had some good times playing on that baseball team: we won championships and we were really passionate about it. I had big dreams then, thinking that if I worked hard enough I could make it into a professional league or at least be a starter for my high school team one day. But the fact was, my family didn’t have money for that and never would. It just wasn’t going to happen. I’d never be able to join a summer league or afford the equipment I’d need to grow and progress as a young player. So I stayed in the neighborhood YMCA circuit, but all that changed when some volunteer coaches got deep into drugs. This was the early eighties, and these guys were strung out so bad that it was obvious to me and my friends, even at our age. It ruined the fun of playing sports, that’s for damn sure.

  In my early teens, it was all sports all day and mischief all night. There was a wild individuality that defined me, my friends, and some of the other kids we knew. The combination of influences, both bad and good, that we were exposed to in our households and all around us in the projects caused us to grow up differently than any other people that age I’ve ever met.

  I loved baseball more than anything else, but two years later, I didn’t care about it or any sports no more. It wasn’t just because our coaches were on drugs; it was puberty, it was culture, and as they say, the times they were a-changin’. Once the movie Scarface came out, in 1983, everything was different in my universe. Everyone wanted to be a drug dealer and live glamorously. At the same time, hip-hop was starting to develop, make an impact, and become a movement. I first saw that up at Fats’s house, where we would watch Hot Tracks on WABC every week. For us in the projects, that show was our MTV. All I wanted to do was watch videos because music was everything. Back then Michael Jackson was in his prime, Prince was kicking off, and out on the streets people were playing hip-hop. They were dressing different too. The disco look was still going, but it wasn’t as cool as what was coming up behind: sheepskin coats, leather bombers, Kangols, and of course Adidas sneakers.

  One thing that hasn’t changed is how important sneakers are to teenage boys. Back then I was lucky to get a pair of sneakers every four months. The best my mom could afford for me was Pro-Keds,
but damn I wanted a pair of Adidas so bad. If you were cool you either wore Converse or Adidas; and I was stuck with Pro-Keds. When I did get a new pair, I tried to take care of them as much as I could. But when you’re wearing them every day doing everything you do, next thing you know, they’re run down, they’ve got holes. I remember one summer I had a pair with a hole, and my mom told me straight up I had to make them last until it was time to go back to school, no matter how dirty that one foot got from playing outside all day. I’d press my mom to sponsor my sneaker game and she’d just say, “You should be happy you even got clothes.”

  What she’d do was throw my sneakers in the washing machine and leave them on the windowsill to dry, and every day I’d put them on, until I just got used to wearing those fucked-up shits. Fuck it, what was I gonna do? When it got real hot outside, I wouldn’t wear socks, so I’d come in with my feet stinking so bad my mom would make me leave my sneakers at the door. She sure as hell wasn’t worried about someone stealing them. Ain’t nobody wanted them, not even me.

  What all the kids did want was a sheepskin coat or a leather bomber. The only kid we knew who had a sheepskin way before any of us was fat Fats. He also had Cazals, the square glasses everyone started wearing after Run-D.M.C. made them cool. You would have thought that getting smacked up that day on the block would have broken Fats. Not at all, it made him even more of a tyrant and a hustler. He got himself the gear and before you knew it, Fats—the most vulnerable to the criminal life out of all of us—started to sell coke. He was sniffing it too, and running around doing his thing with the older crowd while the rest of us were still acting like the kids we were.

  I never had the luxury of willin’ out like that. My mother gave birth to another kid, my brother Donperrion, and I was stuck being a babysitter every night so she could go out. I hated that, so I took it out physically on my younger brother Kareem every chance I got. We were into wrestling—Randy Savage and Andre the Giant and Bob Backlund—so we would tear the house up. We were jumping off furniture, fucking everything up, and I got blamed when something got broken. I’d get the ass whooping, but that didn’t matter because I knew I was going to make him pay for that next time. I realized later that all of my beatings made Kareem a beast and a madman for years after I had left the house for good. I saw the start of it the time he got a knife from the kitchen and came at me saying, “You’ve got to stop fucking hitting me.” I didn’t flinch. I grabbed the knife and said, “What the fuck you going to do with this?” And then I started beating him up harder than before. In our neighborhood, this was a typical, normal household.