Friends: A Love Story (5 page)

My dad was also independent. He was one of those black men who, perhaps because of his life circumstances, was determined to do everything for himself. Most of the time he did—and did it right. But he could be independent to a fault. If he made a wrong turn or we got lost in the car, he hated to ask for directions. I remember driving around in circles, with my mother going, “Conroy, will you stop at the gas station, please?” Cec and I would be in the back seat. “Oh, gosh, Daddy, please stop.”

My father and I hung out a lot together. But our interests were different. We didn't have a lot of things in common, and emotionally we weren't on the same page. I was rough-and-tumble on the outside, but I was also very sensitive. Daddy would laugh at my tenderness. I remember back in the days of the natural and Afro, he gave me an ultimatum: comb my hair or it all comes off. It hurt to comb my hair, so I didn't like to do it. He told me I'd have to suffer the consequences: the dreaded “bald head.” I remember feeling embarrassed after getting all my hair cut off. I didn't want anyone to see me just yet. As we rode our bikes home from the barbershop, I asked Dad if we could go down the side streets so my friends didn't see me. My plan worked beautifully right until we reached the beginning of my block. One of the young twin boys a few doors down saw me. “Ooh, look at Courtney,” he hollered. “Look at the bald head.” I broke into tears. My father laughed so hard he just about peed himself. When I was older—I was in high school—my first girlfriend broke up with me. I was just destroyed. I ran into the house saying, “It's over, it's over!” Daddy burst out laughing again. I ran upstairs and into my room. He wasn't very good at dealing with feelings. Between his insensitivity and the kids on the playground, I learned not to show my emotions often.

Dad also didn't know how to have one-on-one conversations about some of the more personal aspects of life. That included the birds and the bees. Beginning when I was about nine or ten, he would come into my bedroom on occasion and ask me if I liked girls. I would just say no—what kid wants to talk about the birds and the bees with his parents, especially at that age? It was territory that I certainly didn't want to go into. But in reality my little buddies and I had been noticing girls since we were six or so. The first love of my life was a pretty little girl named Gina. She and I developed a crush on each other and everyone thought it was cute.

Now I'm sure Mom sat Cecilie down on several occasions and went through the birds and the bees speech, but Dad never said, “Son, let's sit down and talk.” Instead, he put the burden of whether or not we'd have “the talk” on my shoulders. Because I had no intention of bringing it up, I missed out. I effectively avoided that speech for my entire childhood.

I had, however, stumbled onto my father's stash of
Playboy
magazines back when I was six. Dad hid the magazines in the basement in his office. Back then,
Playboy
was soft-core porn—breasts, side views, hands strategically placed. But no genitalia. Still, the centerfold was enough to make me say,
“Whoaaa…
This is
cool!”
They were secret. Taboo. And they were in
our house!
Of course, the fact that I was secretly peeking at my father's hidden pornography only made me feel more uncomfortable about talking about my sexuality. But today I realize that his difficulty getting below the surface was chiefly because of his background. There was an unspoken understanding when I was a child that certain questions about his childhood were off-limits. As I got older I became curious about finding his parents, but although I suspect Dad knew some things about them, he never expressed any interest in finding them.

My mother was very nurturing and always took care of us. She was the family's implementer, following up behind the scenes after my dad gave his directives or did his life-of-the-party thing. She made sure we did our homework and finished our chores. Mom was an educator and a librarian. She was always reading books. To this day she reads or listens to more books than anyone I know. We were always around books. In our home there was an unspoken rule that you'd better read and do well in school. After school, Cec and I would usually hang out at the library where she worked. The library was our touchstone, our sanctuary—and the place we went to bug her, especially after she transferred from the main library to a local branch five minutes from home.

“Mommy, Cec is doing this…”

“Mommy, Courtney's doing that…”

Physically and educationally, the library was huge in our lives. I used to explore the stacks and try to figure out where books on different topics were located. There were fun things to do there after school and on Saturdays. When I got older I'd write my school papers there. As a librarian, Mom was involved with all kinds of groups all over the city—literacy groups, homeless groups, Habitat for Humanity, book clubs. Long before publishers sold books on tape, Mom would read aloud and tape stories so people could hear them. A whole community of people in that library system supported each other and helped lift us up.

Cecilie and I didn't always go to the library after school. When we were younger, we might stay home with a babysitter. When we were older, we'd stay by ourselves. Sometimes when we didn't go to the library, we would sneak and watch
General Hospital
and
Dark Shadows.
Cec was a TV junkie. But the only time we were actually allowed to watch TV was cartoons on Saturday morning and
Jacques Cousteau, Wild Kingdom
and
Disney
on Sunday nights. From the example my mother set, I learned the power of lifelong learning.

Because my mom was so nurturing, I felt that I could always go to her and just talk about whatever was going on—I didn't have to have a debate. If Cecilie didn't do what she was told, I would go to Mom and tell on her. Cec was a little fireball. You couldn't tell her or make her do nothin'. When I was eleven we got two dogs, Rana and Pepper. We were supposed to walk and feed them, but when it came time to get up in the morning, Cecilie would say, “I ain't getting up, Court. You get them.” And I would.

Although Cecilie could keep up with my father in debating, she and my mother were close, as well. They talked about every
thing. However, once Cec became a teenager they became like oil and vinegar. They would often bump heads, but always came back together.

 

We were your typical lower-middle-class, black-American, slightly dysfunctional family. Our parents believed in kids having chores. On Saturdays, Cec and I cleaned the house. I would take the upstairs, she would take the downstairs and we would do the basement together. I might rake the leaves, mow the grass or help shovel a neighbor's sidewalk for allowance money. Our parents also believed in discipline. We grew up with spankings and punishments. We didn't think of raising our voices. Sucking your teeth or rolling your eyes were grounds for Lava soap on the tongue, which has to be one of the worst punishments ever devised by parents! After a while, Cecilie and I were self-checking—our parents only had to look at us and we would fall in line.

After our chores were done, my parents always had ways of keeping us busy. I would go to the boys' club and play bumper pool or basketball or peewee football, and they would take us to museums and the theater and other safe environments where we could dream and learn. Sometimes we would go ice-skating at the Jack Adams Memorial Arena near our house. On Sundays we went to church, although when I was twelve we just stopped going. I never knew why, yet I missed it. We didn't go on family vacations, probably because my dad worked all the time. Plus, traveling was expensive. But when I was a teenager, Pappy came and got us and took us out to Boston. There I met my extended family. We talked to my maternal grandparents on the phone three times a week and definitely on Sundays. I grew up in a family where my grandparents had the longest long-distance relationship I'll ever know in my life. That's what we knew—really keeping in touch. We were on the phone all the time.

On the downside, my parents argued about money. They
had this thing about “this is your money, this is my money.” As best I can tell, they never worked that out. Mom just chose to let Dad manage the family finances. And my dad always seemed to have a lot of secrets. He closed himself up in his office a lot. My mom would retreat upstairs.

Other than that, we were a tight little unit—our family did everything together. Mom and Dad protected us and kept us close. They instilled in us the spirit that we could do what we wanted to do and be what we wanted to be. If we could think and dream it, we could do it. But that was tempered with a you've-gotta-work-it ethic. “Things are not going to come easy, but you can work for them.” They couldn't protect me from the harsh realities of being a black boy, but my parents knew that if they armed me with education, knowing right from wrong and the knowledge that I was loved, I would do all right.

 

Over that first year or so that we lived on Appoline Street the climate began to change. The peer pressure shifted from being about school, good grades and running fast, to what you were wearing and how well you could fight. You had to fight to defend yourself and your reputation. Now, it wasn't like today, where if someone is bullied, they might turn around and say, “I'm gonna kill you,” and mean it. It was more like, “I'm gonna get my cousin and he'll beat you up,” or “I'm gonna get you after school,” and the whole school knew, gathered around and almost forced you to fight.

When we played, we played hard! Pom-pom one-hand touch gave way to pom-pom two-hand touch and finally to pom-pom tackle. In pom-pom two-hand touch you had to touch the person solidly with both hands at the same time. If you touched them with one and then the other, that was considered pitty-pat, and pitty-pat didn't count. Of course that led to a lot of arguments!

“That was pitty-pat!”

“No, I touched you two-hands solid!”

“No, you didn't!”

“Yes, I did!!!”

To make sure you didn't pitty-pat, you had to hit somebody solid and might even push them over. And if someone called, “pom-pom tackle,” hey, you just had to do it. You had to tackle somebody on the gravel, which, of course, my mother hated because it would tear up my clothes. Needless to say, all the pushing and tackling led to a lot of altercations.

Fighting over pom-pom was one thing, but during the first semester of fourth grade, I was peer-pressured into fighting in school. Fred, a friend who was also my nemesis, called me out one day in homeroom. I can't remember what he said, but they were definitely fighting words.

The entire class said, “Oooooh!”

I told him, “You can't call me that!”

He said, “I did!”

The whole class was asking, “Whatcha gonna do, Court?”

I remember the teacher saying, “Courtney, don't you get up!”

But I had been called out. I had to get up for my reputation's sake. Next thing I knew, we were fighting and getting sent to the principal's office. Now, this was back in the days when there was still discipline in the schools. Teachers could spank kids, and all the paddles were different thicknesses and had different names. But there was no abuse. You'd get paddled on your hands or your bottom at school, then get a spanking when you got home for doing wrong in school. Back then, parents accepted that if the teacher paddled you, you must have done wrong. And they were right; we were always trying to get away with something. I know that if those paddles were not there we would have overrun those teachers. For that incident I got paddled and suspended for three days.

Now, when I got in trouble for fighting in class, my parents knew that something was really wrong. I was “Courtney-Boy,” as my mother called me. I was a nice kid and well behaved. I
was not a person who fought—that was not like me at all. And worse than the fact that I fought at all was that I fought
in class.
My parents went down to school and had a conference with the teacher about what had gone down. Then they came home and had their powwow with each other. They came to the conclusion that they had to get us out of that school. If they didn't, they knew that something was going to go down that would be out of their control.

Cec and I got wind of the fact that they were thinking about putting us in a different school and we were going to run away. We packed our bags and hid them under our beds. As usual, our parents scooped us; somehow they knew what was going on. While we slept, they pulled our bags out of their hiding places and put our clothes away. The next morning we were on our way to a brand-new school—a Catholic school called Mother of Our Savior. Because it was a Catholic school, my parents would have to pay tuition. It wasn't cheap and they couldn't afford it but they figured out a way, although it increased their financial stress. The world Cecilie and I lived in changed overnight. This was our first experience at a mostly white school, an environment I would remain in for high school, college and grad school.

I finished out grade school at Mother of Our Savior, followed by St. Mary of Redford for middle school. I did well academically at both places and although they were basically all white, my experiences were, for the most part, uneventful. I had my white friends at school and my black friends at home—except for one black girl at school named Marie Hollis. Boy, did I have a schoolboy crush on Marie! I remember pining over her. One day I slipped a note in her math book and waited anxiously to see if she liked me, too. Unfortunately, she didn't. But we ended up being good friends. I learned that you can't make somebody like you; some relationships are just meant to be what they are.