It took less than a year for my parents’ arguments to grow louder and more frequent—setting off a period of angst, uncertainty, and turmoil that would shape my life indelibly. That’s when the violence started. Even though I couldn’t understand the source of the arguments and why my parents just couldn’t get along, I knew what it felt like to see my father hit my mother. Her screams and then muffled cries made me feel powerless as I hid from my father’s anger.
It scared me. What’s worse, it scarred me. I’m still recovering from the trauma of being unable to protect my mother from the noise, from the pain, from the arguments. And one day, my mother screamed “Enough!”
And in a flash, my father was gone, leaving behind his seven-year-old son. Less than a year after my parents married, my father returned to the streets where to me he became as much a rumor as a mystery. He loved my mother once. Very deeply. A long time ago when my eyes were young. But he left, and my heart filled with hate. And yet I wanted him to love me more than I hated him. He always had the benefit of the doubt . . . his weakness more powerful than my greatest strength.
My hate for him burned. But I sought his junkie approval above all things.
Mom and I moved back into Grandma Mildred’s house on 131st Street. Along with my mother’s sister, JaNean, we tried to salvage our family and insulate ourselves from the harshness of everyday life. I shared an upstairs bedroom with Mom. It was the first door on the left and had been my mother’s alone before I was born. She moved another twin bed in and cleared out some closet space. Each and every night we talked to each other until one of us fell asleep. I always seemed to fall asleep first.
Soon she got a new job as a corrections officer at Rikers Island, one of the most notorious prisons in America . . . where there was no assurance its staff would make it home after they clocked in. Most people assumed that because she had such a dangerous job, she was some tough-as-nails broad. But she wasn’t. Now, she didn’t take any mess from anyone, but she wasn’t hardened. That place couldn’t rob her of being a mother or a daughter. Her humanity was more resilient than the concrete walls and razor wire that housed hopelessness and despair.
In my young eyes, she was soft and angelic. Beautiful. Her delicate voice a song on the wind. Even at five feet nine she never seemed imposing to me. More of a protector who would rather love than quarrel. And all her love was for her little Mookah. That’s what she called me.
Once we settled in at Grandma Mildred’s house, my life started to return to some semblance of normalcy. The sounds of my mother’s favorite artists, Anita Baker and El DeBarge, filled the house. She sang along to Anita’s “Giving You the Best That I Got” as Grandma Mildred fried chicken in the kitchen on a Saturday night.
This was the best time of my young life. My mother was happy. I felt safe. I was a regular kid.
In 1991, I turned twelve and made the Lynvet Jets, a youth football squad for eleven- to fourteen-year-olds. My mother came to nearly every game she could when she wasn’t working. During one of our Saturday afternoon games, while playing quarterback (I dubbed myself a young Randall Cunningham), I rolled out to the right and got hit pretty hard by a much bigger kid.
As I writhed on the ground, the only thing worse than the pain in my knee was my complete embarrassment as Mom dashed onto the field to take care of her only son.
“Ma, what are you doing?” I screamed as my teammates laughed.
At Christmastime, presents under the tree were sparse. Birthdays usually yielded just as little. Sometimes it was a piece of athletic equipment or a Nintendo cartridge, but it didn’t matter because I knew she tried. One particular Christmas I kind of wish she hadn’t. She worked extra shifts at Rikers for a month to get me a new, fancy mountain bike with rugged tires and racing stripes. The only problem was that it had these weird, old-timey U-shaped handlebars. When I rode it down the street, I had to awkwardly steer it as my knees popped up to my shoulders while pedaling. It was way too hard to look cool on it in the hood, so I parked it behind the house and hoped my mother wouldn’t notice I had stopped riding it.
I was seven when I first dribbled a basketball at P.S. 155, an elementary school that was a block away if you hung a right out of my front gate. Little kids gathered there after school and on weekends to thrash around the asphalt imitating basketball gods such as Rod Strickland, Mark Jackson, or Pearl Washington, heaving the ball toward the rim with both hands.
As I hit middle school, I turned my sights toward Lincoln Park, the neighborhood proving ground where physicality and artistry clashed on a daily basis. The park had an unforgiving asphalt court with rims with no nets in the shadow of the Van Wyck Expressway. It’s where everything went down, and you had to bring it or go home. It didn’t hurt that by eighth grade I had sprouted to six feet even. I always played with guys who were older, quicker, and stronger than me. When I was thirteen, I told them I was fifteen so they’d let me in games. The running joke in my neighborhood was when I would actually tell the truth about my age, someone would say, “Damn, you’ve been fifteen for two years.”
My game developed rapidly during the educationally brutal runs at Lincoln Park. I insisted I was Magic Johnson reborn. I loved the way the six-foot-nine point guard could bring a crowd to its feet with the flip of a no-look pass and how his teammates loved to play with someone who could get the ball to them in just about any situation. I discovered early on that while my mind wandered in the classroom or during a test, I could figure things out easily on a basketball court.
I became a problem solver. Where other kids forced shots up, I drew defenders and made the extra pass. I saw the value in surveying the entire concrete court to make plays instead of pounding the ball into the pavement with my head down. I wasn’t exactly bucket-getter Bernard King, but I was unusually tall for my age and not without skills . . . to the point where the local tournament announcers began to invite me to play at Lincoln Park.
Around this time I’d see my father about once a month. He’d stop by to give me some money or maybe a pair of shoes. I still had a tremendous amount of animosity toward him. The gulf between us was flooded with unanswered questions: Why did you leave us? Why did you hit my mother? Why did you choose drugs? Why did you try to destroy our home? Why didn’t you love me?
I was just a fucking kid.
I imagine those conversations were just as hard for him as they were for me. But he was the adult. He ran and hid and refused to deal with things, leaving me to fall deeper down the hole of confusion and regret. Accountability was a concept that never occurred to him. Getting high was easier. He thought he could just show up and press twenty dollars in my hand and everything would be okay. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was handing me a blueprint to follow, and the things I hated him for . . . I would become.