The people were louder, more aggressive. It was a very horrific, tough, and gruesome kind of place. My mother wasn’t used to hanging around those particular types of aggressive black people and she appeared to be intimidated, and so were my brother and sister and me. Everything was hostile, there was never a subtle moment there. Cops were always driving by with their sirens on; ambulances always coming to pick up somebody; guns always going off, people getting stabbed, windows being broken. One day my brother and I even got robbed right in front of our apartment building. We used to watch these guys shooting it out with one another. It was like something out of an old Edward G. Robinson movie. We would watch and say, “Wow, this is happening in real life.”
The whole neighborhood was also a hotbed of lust. A lot of people there seemed to be uninhibited. It wasn’t uncommon to hear people talking on the street: “Suck my dick,” “Eat my pussy.” It was a different kind of environment from my old neighborhood. One day a guy pulled me off the street, took me into an abandoned building, and tried to molest me. I never really felt safe on those streets. After a while, we weren’t even safe in our apartment. My mom’s parties ended when we got to Brownsville. My mother made some friends, but she wasn’t in the mix like she was in Bed-Stuy. So she started drinking heavily. She never got another job, and I remember waiting in these long lines with my mother down at the welfare center. We’d wait and wait for hours and then we’d be right up front, and it was five o’clock and they’d close the fucking shit on you, just like in the movies.
We kept getting evicted in Brownsville too. That happened quite a few times. Every now and then we’d get a decent spot, crashing for a short time with some friends or a boyfriend of my mother’s. But for the most part, each time we moved, the conditions got worse – from being poor to being serious poor to being fucked-up poor. Eventually we lived in condemned buildings, with no heat, no water, maybe some electricity. In the wintertime all four of us slept in the same bed to keep warm. We’d stay there until a guy would come and kick us out. My mother would do whatever she had to do to keep a roof over our heads. That often meant sleeping with someone that she really didn’t care for. That was just the way it was.
She’d never take us to a homeless shelter, so we’d just move into another abandoned building. It was so traumatic, but what could you do? This is what I hate about myself, what I learned from my mother – there was nothing you wouldn’t do to survive.
One of my earliest memories is of welfare workers coming into the apartment to look for men under the bed. In the summertime, we’d go get the free lunches and free breakfasts. I’d tell them, “I got nine brothers and sisters,” so they’d pack more. I’d feel like I just went to war and got a bounty. I was so proud that I got food for the house. Can you imagine that bullshit? I’d open the refrigerator and see the baloney sandwich and the orange and the little carton of milk. Twenty of them. I’d invite people over. “Do you need something to eat, brother? Are you hungry? We have food.” We were acting like we paid for this with hard-earned money. It was a free lunch.
I was a momma’s boy when I was young. I always slept with my mother. My sister and brother had their own rooms, but I slept with my mother until I was fifteen. One time, my mother slept with a man while I was in the bed with her. She probably thought I was asleep. I’m sure it had an impact on me, but that’s just how it was. I got booted to the couch when her boyfriend Eddie Gillison came into the picture. They had a really dysfunctional love affair. I guess that’s why my own relationships were so strange. They’d drink, fight, and fuck, break up, then drink, fight, and fuck some more. They were truly in love, even if it was a really sick love.
Eddie was a short, compact guy from South Carolina who was a worker at an industrial Laundromat factory. He didn’t get too far in school, and by the time my brother and sister got to fourth grade, he really couldn’t help them with their homework. Eddie was a controlling guy, but my mother was a very controlling woman, so all hell would break loose on a routine basis. There was always some kind of fight, and the cops would come, and they’d go, “Hey, buddy, walk around the block.” Sometimes we’d all get in on the fighting. One day my mother and Eddie were having a bad argument and they got physical. I jumped in between them trying to defend my mom and I was trying to restrain him and, whop, he slugged me in my stomach and I went down. I was, like, Oh, man, I can’t believe this shit. I was just a little kid! That’s why I’ve never put my hands on any of my kids. I don’t want them thinking I’m a monster when they get old. But back then, beating on a kid was just the way it was. Nobody cared. Now it’s murder, you go to jail.
Eddie and my mother fought over anything – other men or women, money, control. Eddie was no angel. When my mother had female friends over and they’d all get drunk and she’d pass out, he’d fuck her friends. And then they’d fight. There was really some barbaric stuff, going at each other with weapons and cursing, “You motherfucker, fuck you” and “You nigga, suck my …” We’d be screaming, “Mommy, stop, no!” Once, when I was seven years old, they were fighting and Eddie punched her and knocked her gold tooth out. My mother started boiling up a large pot of water. She told my brother and sister to get under the quilt, but I was so mesmerized watching my wrestling program on the TV that I didn’t hear her. My mother was so slick, she walked by and nothing happened, then she came back into the room and by then my sister and brother were prepared, they were hiding under the quilt. Eddie was sitting right next to me, and the next thing I heard was this boom and the pot with the boiling water hit Eddie in the head. A little bit of the water splashed on me. It felt like it weighed a ton.
“Aaggghhh!” Eddie ran screaming out the door into the hallway. I ran right after him. He turned around and grabbed me. “Oh, baby, baby, that bitch got you too?” he said. “Yeah, the bitch got me, ah, ah, the bitch got me!” We brought him back in the room and took his shirt off, and his neck and his back and the side of his face were covered in blistery bubbles. He looked like a reptile. So we put him on the floor in front of the little window air conditioner, and my sister sat down next to him. She took a lighter and sterilized the end of a needle and then burst the blisters, one by one. My sister and I were both crying, and I gave him a quarter to cheer him up.
When I think about it, I always thought of my mother as the victim in most situations, and Eddie did beat on her. I’m sure the lady lib would think that her reaction was great, but I thought, How could you do that to somebody who is supposed to be your boyfriend? It made me realize that my mother was no Mother Teresa. She did some serious stuff and he still stayed with her. In fact, he went to the store to buy her some liquor after she burned him. So you see, he rewarded her for it. That’s why I was so sexually dysfunctional.
That is the kind of life I grew up in. People in love cracking their heads and bleeding like dogs. They love each other but they’re stabbing each other. Holy shit, I was scared to death of my family in the house. I’m growing up around tough women, women who fight men. So I didn’t think fighting a woman was taboo because the women I knew would kill you. You had to fight them, because if you didn’t, they’d slice you or shoot you. Or else they’d bring some men to take advantage of you and beat you up, because they thought you were a punk.
If I was scared to be in the house, I was also scared to go outside. By then, I was going to public school and that was a nightmare. I was a pudgy kid, very shy, almost effeminate shy, and I spoke with a lisp. The kids used to call me “Little Fairy Boy” because I was always hanging out with my sister, but my mother had told me that I had to stay around Denise because she was older than me and had to watch me. They also called me “Dirty Ike” or “Dirty Motherfucker” because I didn’t know about hygiene back then. We didn’t have hot water to shower in, and if the gas wasn’t on, we couldn’t even boil water. My mother tried to teach me about it, but I still didn’t do a very good job. She used to take soap and fill a bucket up with hot water and wash me. But when you’re a young kid, you don’t care about hygiene. Eventually I’d learn it in the streets from the older kids. They told me about Brut and Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin.
My
