kept walking and left the park and went home. I was ten years old.
I often say that I was the bad seed in the family, but when I think about it, I was really a meek kid for most of my childhood. I was born in Cumberland Hospital in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York, on June 30, 1966. My earliest memories were of being in the hospital – I was always sick with lung problems. One time, to get some attention, I put my thumb in some Drano and then put it in my mouth. They rushed me to the hospital. I remember my godmother gave me a toy gun while I was there, but I think I broke it right away.
I don’t know much about my family background. My mother, Lorna Mae, was a New Yorker but she was born down south in Virginia. My brother once went down to visit the area where my mother grew up and he said there was nothing but trailer parks there. So I’m really a trailer park nigga. My grandmother Bertha and my great-aunt used to work for this white lady back in the thirties at a time when most whites wouldn’t have blacks working for them, and Bertha and her sister were so appreciative that they both named their daughters Lorna after the white lady. Then Bertha used the money from her job to send her kids to college.
I may have gotten the family knockout gene from my grandma. My mother’s cousin Lorna told me that the husband of the family Bertha worked for kept beating on his wife, and Bertha didn’t like it. And she was a big woman.
“Don’t you put your hands on her,” she told him.
He took it as a joke, and she threw a punch and knocked him on his ass. The next day he saw Bertha and said, “Well, how are you doing, Miss Price?” He stopped hitting on his wife and became a different man.
Everybody liked my mom. When I was born, she was working as a prison matron at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, but she was studying to be a teacher. She had completed three years of college when she met my dad. He got sick so she had to drop out of school to care for him. For a person that well educated, she didn’t have very good taste in men.
I don’t know much about my father’s family. In fact, I didn’t really know my father much at all. Or the man I was told was my father. On my birth certificate it said my father was Percel Tyson. The only problem was that my brother, my sister, and I never met this guy.
We were all told that our biological father was Jimmy “Curlee” Kirkpatrick Jr. But he was barely in the picture. As time went on I heard rumors that Curlee was a pimp and that he used to extort ladies. Then, all of a sudden, he started calling himself a deacon in the church. That’s why every time I hear someone referring to themselves as reverend, I say “Reverend-slash-Pimp.” When you really think about it, these religious guys have the charisma of a pimp. They can get anybody in the church to do whatever they want. So to me it’s always “Yeah, Bishop-slash-Pimp,” “Reverend Ike-slash-Pimp.”
Curlee would drive over to where we stayed, periodically. He and my mother never spoke to each other, he’d just beep the horn and we’d just go down and meet him. The kids would pile into his Cadillac and we thought we were going on an excursion to Coney Island or Brighton Beach, but he’d just drive around for a few minutes, pull back up to our apartment building, give us some money, give my sister a kiss, and shake me and my brother’s hands and that was it. Maybe I’d see him in another year.
My first neighborhood was Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. It was a decent working-class neighborhood then. Everybody knew one another. Things were pretty normal, but they weren’t calm. Every Friday and Saturday, it was like Vegas in the house. My mom would have a card party and invite all her girlfriends, many of whom were in the vice business. She would send her boyfriend Eddie to buy a case of liquor and they’d water it down and sell shots. Every fourth hand of cards the winner had to throw into the pot so the house made money. My mom would cook some wings. My brother remembers that, besides the hookers, there’d be gangsters, detectives. The whole gamut was there.
When my mother had some money, she’d splurge. She was a great facilitator and she’d always have her girlfriends over and a bunch of men too. Everybody would be drinking, drinking, drinking. She didn’t smoke marijuana but all her friends did, so she’d supply them with the drugs. She just smoked cigarettes, Kool 100’s. My mother’s friends were prostitutes, or at least women who would sleep with men for money. No high-level or even street-level stuff. They would drop off their kids at our house before they went to meet their men. When they’d come to pick up their kids, they might have blood on their clothes, so my mom would help them clean up. I came home one day and there was a white baby in the house. What the fuck is this shit? I thought. But that’s just what my life was like.
My brother Rodney was five years older than I was so we didn’t have much in common. He’s a weird dude. We’re black guys from the ghetto and he was like a scientist – he had all these test tubes, was always experimenting. He even had coin collections. I was, like, “White people do this stuff.”
He once went to the chemistry lab at Pratt Institute, a nearby college, and got some chemicals to do an experiment. A few days later when he went out, I snuck into his room, started adding water to his test tubes, and I blew out the whole back window and started a fire in his room. He had to put a lock on his door after that.
I fought with him a lot, but it was just typical brother stuff. Except for the day that I cut him with a razor. He had beaten me up for some reason and then he had gone to sleep. My sister, Denise, and I were watching one of those doctor-type soap operas and they were doing an operation. “We could do that and Rodney could be the patient. I can be the doctor and you can be the nurse,” I told my sister. So we rolled up his sleeve and got to work on his left arm. “Scalpel,” I said, and my sister handed me a razor. I cut him a bit and he started bleeding. “We need the alcohol, nurse,” I said, and she passed it to me and I poured it onto his cuts. He woke up screaming and yelling and chased us around the house. I hid behind my mom. He still has those slices to this day.
We had some good times together too. Once, my brother and I were walking down Atlantic Avenue and he said, “Let’s go to the doughnut factory.” He had stolen some doughnuts from that place before and I guess he wanted to show me he could do it again. So we walked by and the gate was open. He went in and got a few boxes of doughnuts, but something happened and the gate closed and he was stuck in there and the security guards started coming. So he handed me the doughnuts and I ran home with them. My sister and I were sitting on our stoop and cramming down those doughnuts and our faces were white with the powder. Our mom was standing next to us, talking to her neighbor.
“My son aced the test to get into Brooklyn Tech,” she boasted to her friend. “He is such a remarkable student, he’s the best pupil in his class.”
Just then a cop car drove up and Rodney was in it. They were going to drop him off at home, but he heard our mother bragging about what a good son he was and he told the cops to keep going. They took him straight to Spofford, a juvenile detention center. My sister and I happily finished off those doughnuts.
I spent most of my time with my sister Denise. She was two years older than me and she was beloved by everybody in the neighborhood. If she was your friend, she was your best friend. But if she was your enemy, go across the street. We made mud pies; we watched wrestling and karate movies and went to the store with our mother. It was a nice existence, but then when I was just seven years old, our world got turned upside down.
There was a recession and my mom lost her job and we got evicted out of our nice apartment in Bed-Stuy. They came and took all our furniture and put it outside on the sidewalk. The three of us kids had to sit down on it and protect it so that nobody took it while my mother went to find a spot for us to stay. I was sitting there, and some kids from the neighborhood came up and said, “Mike, why is your furniture out here, Mike?” We just told them we were moving. Then some neighbors saw us out there
