MY DAD, MARVIN DRIVER JR., it has been said to me many times, was one of the best quarterbacks ever to come out of Texas high school football. He was the starting quarterback his freshman year at Drew High School in Crosby, Texas, a town about thirty-five miles northeast of Houston. My dad could throw the ball seventy-eight yards in the air. The legend is that he kicked a football from a tee from one end zone to the other barefoot in the winter. I suspect that was how he earned the nickname “Steel-Toe.”
Time brought change to Texas. After Brown v. Board of Education, integration became mandatory, and race relations in the South turned really ugly. Drew High School, where my mom as well as dad went to school, was all black, and Crosby High School was all white. When the courts ordered the integration of Crosby High, the whites rioted.
At that point all the black players decided they didn’t want to play with the white boys, and they quit the team—all except my dad, whose father told him, “We’re not quitters. We’re going to fight this, and you’re going to play football.”
Dad said he was stunned by what happened next: Most of the hatred toward him came not from the whites but from people of his own race. He was called “whitey lover,” and one day he opened up his locker and was horrified to see a stuffed monkey hanging with a rope around its neck with a sign that said, “Quit nigger or you’ll wish you had.”
My dad, scared, went home and told his father what happened.
“Stay strong,” his father advised him.
My dad stayed on the football team, even though the white coaches made him backup behind a less talented white quarterback.
Sports often is an antidote to prejudice and racism. Coaches and fans want to win, and, even in the 1960s, if the white guy couldn’t do the job, to save his own job a white coach would put in the more talented black player. Once a player can help a coach win, the color of the player’s skin no longer matters.
The Crosby Cougars football team wasn’t doing very well under their white quarterback, and so as a last resort the coach put my dad in, and my dad brought the team victories.
As my father tells the story, the crowd would yell, “We want Driver! We want Driver!”
He told me, “It gave everyone, including me, goose bumps.”
(To show how times have changed, I never once—not in high school or in college—felt the sting of racism.)
My dad became the captain of the Crosby Cougars, and he was recruited and given a scholarship to Texas A&M, but he never went because life threw him for a big loss when his father died unexpectedly his senior year.
My father was the eldest of ten children, and he felt the pressure of suddenly having to be the breadwinner of the family. With his father’s income gone, his mother, Betty, had to raise ten children by herself. Money was very hard to come by.
Before his dad died, my father had had big dreams. He saw himself as an NFL quarterback. He loved Perry Mason, his favorite TV show, and he fancied himself becoming a lawyer. But with the death of his father, his dreams died with him. When he graduated from Crosby High School in June 1971, he married his girlfriend, Faye—my mother—and went to work. He drove a truck during the day, and he had a second job working in a canning factory in Highlands, Texas, as a machine operator.
People who saw him play still talk about him, bragging about how he was such a great quarterback and how he could have made it to the pros. And it’s tough, because it’s forty years later and he still thinks about that. When I got older, my dad would pull out the old 8 mm films and show us how he could throw and run, how he would jump off a blocker’s back and run down the sideline. There he was captured on film, the captain of the football team and the school homecoming king standing alongside my mother, the homecoming queen and the head cheerleader.
He met Faye in high school. She was a little country girl who lived on a farm. She was beautiful, smart, and had a great sense of humor. Mom was hardworking, independent, and very loving. She was twenty-one years old when she had my sister Tamela; was twenty-two when she had Marvin; and twenty-three when she had me, so she was pretty young. What I remember most about her when I was a child was that she was very affectionate. We were always hugging, always kissing. My mom would greet me with “Hey baby,” and she’d wrap her arms around me and plant a big kiss on me. Today mom is sixty, but she never changed. She’s still that same loving, passionate person.
My given name was Donald, but no one ever called me that. My nickname was Quickie. Everyone called me Quickie Driver, never Donald. As an infant my mom had called me Quickie because I was so fast she had a lot of trouble catching me when she went to put a diaper on me. My dad said that every time I got in trouble and he wanted to spank me, I’d take off running. He said he rarely could catch me.
In the end my father couldn’t get over his not fulfilling his dreams in football. Time went on, and the fame and the stardom became more and more distant. After high school, the way my father tells it, he met new friends. Jobs were scarce for African Americans, and he and his new friends were desperate to provide for their families. You don’t have a lot of choices when finding a job isn’t possible. He and his new friends sold drugs. They robbed and stole. When my mom was pregnant with me in May 1974, my dad went to prison for robbing a convenience store.
Dad was locked up for six months—he insisted he was innocent, but as with many defendants, he worried about what a jury would do and pleaded guilty in exchange for a shorter prison sentence. He figured it was better than having the case go to trial, losing, and serving a much longer sentence.
“When I got out,” my dad told me, “I did didn’t take my eight-year probation sentence seriously.”
He got in trouble again, this time for drug possession, and with that came a new arrest warrant. He was sent back to jail, this time for two years, although it was reduced to eight months and twenty-four days. After he got out of jail, he was caught with a pistol and had to return once again.
The truth is, I had no father figure when I was young. My dad wasn’t around when I was born, and with him in and out of jail, my mom decided to part ways with him when I was two years old. She had three children and didn’t want us growing up with a part-time father. She set out for a new life. My mother took us to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and didn’t tell my father where we moved. I didn’t know that at the time.
For years dad had no way of tracking us down, until he hired a private detective, who determined where we were living. Once he found her, he pleaded with her to come back to Houston.
Because of these trials, I didn’t meet my father until I was six years old. I remember it like it was yesterday. My mom drove to my paternal grandparents’ house in the Hattiesburg section of Houston in her green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. My dad had just gotten out of prison, and he was inside my grandparents’ home waiting for us.
Inside I met a tall, smiling stranger who had this whole goatee thing going on.
“Quickie,” my mom said to me, “this is your dad.”
He looked like a tough guy.
I was caught by surprise. I looked at him like, Who is that? I don’t know that guy. Who are you?
After my mom and siblings moved to Houston, the relationship between my parents cooled, and we saw little of my father.
• • •
MY MOTHER THEN fell in love with a man named Sam Gray, and after they got married, Sam became my father. Officially he was my stepdad, of course, but I was young, and to me he wasn’t anything but my dad.
The years I lived with mom and Sam were among the better ones of my childhood. Sam was everything you would want in a father. While living in Baton Rouge, my mother had had a boyfriend, and she gave birth to a fourth child, a beautiful baby girl named Patrice. Sam took us all in and raised us as if we were his own. Sam’s no longer with us, and I get teary-eyed and choked up just talking about him. Sam, who didn’t have any kids of his own, raised us during my formative years. He didn’t have to do it, but he did. Sam fell in love with my mother, and he fell in love with us. He was great, and I loved him to death.
From Sam, I learned that anyone can father a child, but not everyone can be a father to a child. By the time I was in the second grade, Sam and I were connected. He’d always do things for us. He never hesitated. Sam was always there for us.
It’s hard to find a good man like that.
When my mom was married to Sam, they had a baby, Sam Jr. I had a little sister, Patrice, but I didn’t have a little brother, so when Sam Jr. came along I thought that was great. My older brother Marvin wasn’t so sure.
“I have one little brother. That’s enough,” he said. But once Sam Jr. was old enough to walk and talk, he was thrilled to have a little brother he could pick on. We loved to tease him, but we were also his bodyguards. We protected him. We were always there for him.
Sam’s job was driving a bus for handicapped people to and from MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. Short and chubby, he had hair on the sides and was bald in the middle. He reminded me of George Jefferson.
Every Tuesday night Sam went out bowling and brought home all these bowling trophies. Usually we would go with him because that’s what the family did. And I can still bowl pretty well because of him.
When it was homework time, Sam would walk through the door and yell, “Hey, it’s time, let’s get your homework done!”
Sam was always supportive, and when we did wrong, mom gave him the right to spank us. Sam was our dad; that’s how we looked at him.
When we were with Sam, we had stability. We lived in a nice middle-class home. Sam had a job and my mother worked cleaning hotel rooms.
For years she had worked as a housekeeper from morning until evening. When we were very young she would take us with her to work. She wasn’t supposed to have us there. She’d say to me, “Don’t move from this spot. Stay here.” And I would stay and wait until she came back.
As I got older, I would go into the rooms with her, and I’d watch her work. I saw the way people would abuse hotel rooms—it was terrible.
I saw how hard my mom worked to get those rooms cleaned. Maybe that’s why, to this day, when I leave a hotel room, I always try to clean up. For me I find it tough to leave a hotel room with wet towels thrown all over the place. I just can’t do it. I take them up and put them in a pile. I always pick up the trash and throw it in the wastebasket.
Around the time I was in fifth grade, my mom went back to school to get a license to be a security guard.
“I don’t want to just clean hotel rooms for a living for the rest of my life,” she said. “I need to do something better.”
My mother’s determination to improve her lot sparked something in me. I can never forget seeing this woman determined to make a better life for herself.
ONE QUIRKY THING about my mom: She had the traveler’s blues. For some reason she didn’t like to stay in one spot. She felt like she needed to keep moving—as a child you don’t really question these things, but it was unsettling.
She wasn’t running from bill collectors. She always paid her bills on time.
We moved rather frequently, and we would change schools each time we moved. Maybe she thought she was improving herself with each move. I don’t know. I do know it wasn’t good for her kids.
Why are we moving again? we would constantly ask ourselves.
Sam liked to be settled, and moving drove him crazy. We were never in one place long enough to enjoy it. I would be at one elementary school, we’d up and move, and I’d go to another elementary school. And then another. And another. I attended a different elementary school each year from kindergarten to fifth grade. It was as though my mother was running from something, but we never knew from what. The reasons my mom gave for picking up stakes usually had to do with an issue at the school we were attending. Either one of us kids was getting in trouble, or we didn’t like the teachers, or we didn’t like the other kids. Someone was always getting into fights. Among my brother Moses, my sister Tamela, and me, something was always wrong in her mind.
We would also get into it with our neighbors. We had our normal kids accidents, too, of course, which probably terrified mom.
When Mom was married to Sam we lived in several middle-class areas of Houston. We lived in South Park, Martin Luther King, and in an apartment off MacGregor Way, where one afternoon Moses was hit by a car. We were playing tag, and he ran into the middle of the street. A car hit him and flipped him over and broke his leg. When he came back from the hospital, he had a cast on his leg from thigh to ankle.
Mom decided it was time to move.
Eventually her need to move took a terrible toll. When I was in the fifth grade mom wanted to move yet again. My brother Moses was in the sixth grade, and a kid was picking on him. He would get in a fight every day, and he didn’t want to go to that school anymore. But to go to another school, he would have to get on a bus and travel a long way to get there. My mother decided that rather than put Moses on a bus, we’d move again.
Sam finally put his foot down.
“Faye, I’m not moving anymore,” he said. “I can’t keep doing this. You have to understand. This is it. Stay. Let’s not keep moving because you’re not comfortable or happy.”
My mother gave him an ultimatum.
“If you don’t want to move,” she said, “I’m moving without you.”
And she moved with her kids, leaving Sam behind.
Only as time went on, and her kids got older and split up, did she realize that staying in one place would have been better than the constant moving, especially after we moved into bad neighborhoods.
Without Sam, our father.
MOM NO LONGER had Sam’s income, and so she moved into the Fifth Ward of Houston, an old, secluded area with private homes but mostly Section 8 apartments and low-income housing. You might say we were living in Houston’s ghetto. The residents were African American and Cuban, and the unemployment rate there was probably 60 percent. Where we lived no one drove a nice car and headed off to work. No one had a comfort zone. Everything was a struggle.
Mom was working as a security guard from 11 P.M. to 7 A.M. She’d go to work and leave behind five children. Tamela was in the eighth grade, Moses seventh, and I was in the sixth. Little sister Patrice was in the second grade, and Sam Jr. was just a toddler. As the older ones, we were in charge of watching and taking care of the younger ones.
Before Mom would leave for work, she would ask our next-door neighbor, J.R., “Would you please keep an eye on the kids for me?
J.R. was tall, about six foot five, and he had to be in his early twenties.
“Momma, I got them,” he would always say. “Go ahead and go to work.”
J.R. would take care of us all right. If we needed something from the store he would run there, get it, and bring it back. During the three years we lived there—it was about the only time Mom didn’t pick up and move after a year—J.R. became the bond, the father figure my brother, sister, and I didn’t have. We looked up to him. What Mom never knew was that J.R. was a big-time drug dealer, and it wasn’t long before Moses and I went to work for him.
When Tamela turned thirteen, she met a boy in the neighborhood and started hanging out with him at night. The young children, Trice and Sam, would be asleep by the time Mom left for work at ten thirty, and that gave Moses and me the opportunity to sneak out after she left.
We lived in a dangerous neighborhood, and my brother and I realized that if we didn’t become part of the drug scene, we would be outcasts. We wanted to be part of the dominant culture because this was what most of my extended family was doing. My father, my uncles, and many of our friends were dealing drugs—and we wanted to fit in.
J.R. offered Moses and me fifty dollars each a night to stand on the street and watch for the police while he was making his drug deals. If a police car came, we’d yell or make enough noise to give the drug dealers the heads-up to take off. Every night we had a different signal. One night it was “Blue, blue”; another night it was “one time.” I’d say “blue, blue” and I’d hear someone else scream “blue, blue” and everyone would just start running. The police would scatter through the neighborhood looking for suspects, but they always came up empty.
“What are you guys doing outside?” the cops would ask me.
I was never scared. I felt invincible. I knew they didn’t have anything on me. All I was doing was yelling something. I was bold enough as a kid to talk back.
“I can be outside,” I’d answer. “What are you doing here?”
Sometimes the police would search us.
“I didn’t do anything,” I’d keep repeating, because I hadn’t.
The cops would check my background. I had no warrants and no run-ins, and they would have to let me go.
“Go home!” they would yell at me and my friends.
“Nope,” I’d say. “I’m not going home. I don’t have to.”
I would sit back down on the corner where they found me.
That was my attitude then.
No one lived a normal life in the Fifth Ward. Normal for me was walking down the street at one in the morning and staying out all night.
The hundred dollars a night Moses and I took in was big money in 1987, but my mom never knew. We would break the hundred into smaller bills, and every once in a while we’d slip some money into her purse. She paid the rent with the checks from her job, but it didn’t go much further, and if I saw she was having trouble with the light bill, say, I’d always make sure she had the money to pay it. She’d go through her purse, and she’d find the money, and she’d say, “Shoot, I had it after all.”
Having money made me feel important. Having money made me feel a heck of a lot better than when I was dirt poor. Moses and I were able to buy expensive shoes. We, like every other kid in the country, wanted Nike Jordans. My sister’s boyfriend, who was also a drug dealer, preferred Fila athletic wear, and so we used to call him Fila-man. He wore Fila clothes from head to foot. Tamela fell in love with him and had four kids with him. They were together all through my high school and college days, and then they drifted apart.
Moses and I made enough money working for J.R. that we were able to became established drug dealers ourselves. We’d give him five hundred dollars and he’d give us a decent supply of drugs, and we’d make $1,200 selling it to the people in the hood.
Most of the guys who sold drugs sold marijuana. One reason they did it was that the penalty was much less if they got caught. But to me selling marijuana seemed too difficult because it wasn’t a big attraction in my neighborhood. Most of the people I knew who did drugs wanted something other than pot. Besides, weed was just too much work. After you bought it, you had to break it up, get rid of the seeds, and put it in bags. Other drugs were a lot easier and much more profitable.
It was a fast life. What saved me from going to prison was that though I sold drugs, I never used them. I never used them because I saw what they did to other people. I saw how they really transformed people’s lives, people who went from a nice, comfortable middle-class life to pawning or selling a microwave or stealing jewelry from their family, or taking money from a mother’s purse. I saw how they took over people’s lives, and always for the worse. So I knew what drugs could get you.
The other thing was, if you used drugs, that took away from your money supply, because now you were addicted to what you were selling. I never wanted to do that. There was nothing positive about using drugs.
The big-time drug dealers I knew didn’t use drugs, either. They realized they were a product to make them money. If they took drugs, they knew they’d just be strung-out junkies like their buyers.
I never thought about how selling drugs might jeopardize someone’s life. Back then, when I was struggling to help my mother so we could pay the bills, I didn’t care who I hurt. I had family members who became addicted to cocaine. If it was the neighbor down the street or a family member, I didn’t care. When I look back, I feel terribly guilty that I was selling drugs.
I don’t know why, but I never feared getting caught. As a kid I had no choice but to grow up fast. Maybe if I had grown up like a normal kid with normal parents and a normal upbringing, it all would have been different.
I also had no fear of dying. I can’t tell you how many times I looked down the barrel of a gun. It happened so many times. The first time I was in the seventh grade in middle school. Moses was in the eighth grade. We were working for J.R.
I was sitting on the curb bouncing a tennis ball. The tennis ball was filled with drugs. If you make a small cut in a tennis ball, you can pop it open and drop your drugs into it. If you don’t make the hole too big, the ball closes up and still bounces.
I often would sit there bouncing the tennis ball, and one night a good friend of mine named Corey came by with four of his friends. Corey lived in a different apartment complex, but we knew each other from school. I didn’t know his friends from Adam and Eve, but I knew Corey. He came up to me and started talking.
“What’s up, Quick?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, man,” I said. “Just hanging on the curb. It’s what we do.”
One of the other guys kept saying, “What do you got?”
“Who are you?” I asked him.
We were bantering back and forth when my boy Corey pulled a pistol on me.
I thought he was joking. I knocked the gun away from my face.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
He took a step back and leveled the gun at my face again. He was nervous and shaking.
“Corey, what are you pulling a gun on me for?” I asked.
“Man, where’s the drugs?”
He knew they were in the tennis ball, which I threw down the street as far as I could.
“They’re in the tennis ball!” Corey yelled at the other guys.
I wanted to fight them, but I realized I was outnumbered. It was one against five, and fighting them wasn’t going to work.
As Corey and his four friends started after the ball, my brother Moses came around the corner, and when they saw him, they started running. Moses and I chased them, and we caught one of them and beat him real bad.
They took the ball with the drugs in it, and I lost a lot of money. Now I had to figure out how to get it back. You have to go back out onto the streets and hustle again.
Corey and I no longer were friends. In fact, I never saw him again.
THE DRUG RUNNERS for J.R. had nicknames. I never knew any of their real names. One afternoon a friend by the name of Red lent my brother Moses his little Mustang in exchange for some drugs. Moses was thirteen. I was twelve.
“Be careful,” Red said.
Moses wasn’t old enough to have a license, and I had never driven before.
My brother drove down a back road.
“It’s time you got behind the wheel,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Red is going to kill us.”
“You’ll be fine,” Moses said. “Red won’t be mad at us.”
At age twelve I was tall enough to reach the gas pedal and brake and see over the windshield. I drove Red’s car around town until I felt comfortable driving.
“Next thing we’ve got to learn to do,” I said, “is steal cars.”
Stealing cars attracted me because of the adrenaline rush. It was something to look forward to. You were going to run from the police and make a nice score. At the time, that was what I considered fun. There were also times when I’d steal a car and then use it to pick up girls and drive around. It was all about show.
Stealing cars, it turned out, was just as easy as selling drugs. The easiest cars to steal were those old Cadillacs. I’d stake out the streets of Houston, a T-shirt wrapped around my right fist. I would punch out the back window, and in a flash I’d be inside. Within thirty seconds I’d be ready to roll.
I learned from cousins and an uncle who were experts in these things that hot-wiring a car took too much time. They taught me it was much quicker to take a screwdriver, break the steering wheel so it could move, and then stick the screwdriver into the hole for the key to the ignition and turn it, and it would pop. Once it popped, I could start the car.
Usually I’d steal the car for parts. I’d drive it to the warehouse and drop it off, and the men at the chop shop would break it apart. They paid for the whole car, not each piece. If you pulled up in a Mercedes, they’d look at you and say, “Nice car,” and hand you a grand or five hundred dollars. You took the money and got out of there, because you didn’t want to be around if the cops ever showed up.
I would steal cars at gas stations.
One time I was riding in a car with a friend, and another driver cut him off. My friend blew his horn and the driver gave us the finger.
“Follow him,” I said. “I’m going to teach him a lesson.”
We trailed him at a safe distance as he pulled into a gas station to buy something in its store: cigarettes, candy, or a lottery ticket. When he closed the driver’s side door and walked inside I didn’t hear the telltale beep-beep that you get when the driver locks the car, and I saw that the tailpipe was still puffing smoke. The car was running and the key was still in it. You’d be surprised how many people do that when they bop quickly in to buy something at a gas station or a convenience store.
I jogged to his car—a Honda Accord with expensive rims—jumped inside, slammed the door, blew the horn, and waited for him to come out. When he saw me, I gave him the finger and sped off. He was lucky I didn’t take his car to sell it. I just took it to piss him off. I drove it about six blocks and left it in a Walmart parking lot as if to say, You cut us off. Don’t be a jerk.
My friend thought I was absolutely nuts.
I stole perhaps thirty cars. I was very good at selecting the right cars to steal and I was a skilled driver. I only had to escape from the police once. Just as I was starting the car, I heard sirens. I floored it, and I was flying along, checking the mirror to see how close the police were. I drove into a back alley and slowed to about twenty miles an hour. When an older woman backed her car out of her driveway into my path, I T-boned her car. I jumped out and took off running.
I had about a block head start on the cops, but I was concerned about the woman, so I circled back to see if she was all right. The police were around the corner.
“Go sit on my porch,” the woman said.
I trusted her. Exactly why, I’m not sure. When the police questioned her, she said the driver had run off.
“Who is that on your porch swing?” she was asked.
“Oh, that’s my grandson,” she said.
After the police left, the woman ordered me into her house.
“Why did you do this, young man?” she wanted to know. “You could be doing so much more with your life.”
Her name was Evelyn Johnson, and I never forgot her kindness. We would become close. After she did that for me, I felt as though she were a guardian angel watching over me. In truth her kindness didn’t change my mind about how I was going to live my life—I continued to sell drugs and steal cars. She would warn me what might happen, but her words went in one ear and came out the other. Even so, I knew I owed her everything because she gave the opportunity to continue to live my life. If it weren’t for Miss Johnson, I know I’d have ended up doing a couple of years in juvenile detention.
Miss Johnson was a great Christian woman. She believed that God allows people to get second chances in life.
“You have your whole life ahead of you,” she said to me. “You’re so young. This is your second chance in life right now.”
“Thank you,” I said when I walked out of her house, then went back to my way of life, always looking over my shoulder for the cops.
Still, Miss Johnson was always there when I needed her. I would go over to her house just to say hello. If she needed something from the grocery store or if she needed me to pick something up, I was always there for her. I felt I owed her that. I felt I owed her my life because that day she had given me the chance to get it back.
She was like having a second grandmother, which is what I needed, someone who was always going to try to keep me straight.
“How are you doing? How are your grades?” she would say to me.
It was what I needed. My biological grandmother was saying it, but it’s always great to hear it from someone else, too. She would want to know all about the positive things I was doing. Later, when I was invited to try out for the Olympics, she was excited. It put a smile on my face knowing I had made her happy.
When I was in college I would call her and ask how she was feeling. Whenever I visited Houston, I would go back and see her. In time she got sick, and during my sophomore year in college she passed away.
Whenever I think about Miss Johnson, and her kindness and her ability to forgive, I miss her.
DESPITE GOING TO bed many a time at four in the morning after a night of dealing and stealing, I somehow got enough sleep to go to school and to do well. I was a smart kid and a B student. Despite my drug dealing, I never did anything to jeopardize my advancing to the next grade. I knew education was important, though I wanted to be in the streets because that’s where the money was.
Growing up where I did in the projects of Houston, all I saw were drug dealers and drugs. I saw people who were on crack. It was so prevalent that as a kid you thought this was the way life was supposed to be. As an impressionable middle schooler I told myself, If I wanted to make any sort of decent money, this was the way it had to be.
There were certainly more legitimate ways to make money than drug dealing or car stealing, but there wasn’t enough money in it. It wasn’t about getting a job at McDonald’s or working at a plant for minimum wage. I wanted cars, jewelry, and Air Jordans, and the only way I was going to get them was by selling drugs.
It was a lifestyle I was accustomed to. It was the way of life. It was how I grew up, living around people who sold drugs, people who stole cars. I had uncles and cousins in the drug business. One uncle was making a great living selling drugs, driving his Mercedes-Benz to the house he owned. I would ask him for money, and he’d peel off a twenty and give it to me. It seemed easy for him. So that’s what I thought I had to do.
As I got older, I thought about breaking tradition, but my family was heavy into dealing drugs and stealing cars, so I figured I should do that, too.
I DIDN’T THINK much about the consequences of getting caught because at age thirteen, I knew the system well enough to know that if I got caught, all they were going to do was send me to a juvenile detention center. At juvie you didn’t do hard time. You didn’t go behind the big steel bars. You had a room and a roommate; you had decent meals. You think, Okay, if I have to do this for two or three years, who cares? I’m fine with it. We knew nothing bad was going to come of it. In fact, for a lot of kids, it was a far better environment than where they were coming from.
And so as I began my teen years in middle school I led a double life. In the daytime I was a student. At night I was a drug dealer and car thief. Mom would walk into our apartment after a night’s work as a security guard at 7:30 A.M., and Moses and I would be sleeping on the living room floor.
“Hey, get up, let’s go!” Mom would yell, and we’d get up and she’d drive us to school. She’d drop us off, then go home and sleep.
At school I was the quiet guy, everyone’s friend, and the jokester. I wanted to be liked by everyone. I wanted to be popular, and I was, even with the teachers.
“Quickie! Stop joking around,” the teachers were always saying. But I was also the teacher’s pet, even though I knew some of the wiseguy kids frowned on that. I wanted to build that good-kid reputation for myself, and I wasn’t afraid of bullies. My attitude was I’m not afraid of anyone or anything.
AFTER WE MOVED away from Sam, my mom and my biological dad started dating again.
This is the opportunity for them to get back together, I remember thinking. What every kid in that situation wishes for. Mom and Dad are getting back together. This is awesome.
In my mind all I saw were lollipops and roses, but it turned out to be a disaster. One night my mom was supposed to meet my dad at this club. She got there and … he was with someone else.
He came over to the apartment and my mom screamed at him to get out. My brother and I were in bed in our room, and I could hear them fighting.
My dad walked in, gave us a kiss, and said, “Y’all be good. I’m gone.”
My father walked out of the door, and that was it between them. At the time, Mom didn’t tell us what happened. We only found out after Mom got mad at me for sticking up for my dad.
“You think your dad is such an angel,” she said. “Your dad hit me.”
“What do you mean, he hit you?” I asked.
Not long afterward I confronted my dad. He didn’t deny it.
“I wish you’d hit her one more time,” I said, staring as menacingly as I could into his face.
“Are you threatening me?” he asked.
“I promise this is no threat,” I said. “If you ever put your hands on Mom again, I will kill you.”
Dad wasn’t the person to let a threat like that go unchallenged.
“Before I let you put your hands on me,” he said, “I’ll put you six feet under.”
It was a standoff, but it was a turning point for me and my dad for a long time. The night when my father went out the door was the last time my mom ever thought about getting back together with him. And she never looked back.
Unfortunately, that’s when she met Tom.