I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons Read online

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  To my mom, my rock, my angel.

  I am who I am because of you. My commitment to my craft and to becoming the best version of myself is all because of you. The lessons that you’ve given me are beyond priceless.

  For that, I thank you.

  Let him who would move the world first move himself.

  —Socrates

  A sliding board can’t be slid on if you ain’t got on the right pants.

  —Chocolate Droppa

  MANDATORY INTRODUCTION

  This introduction is mandatory.

  That means you have to read it.

  You can’t just skip ahead to the sex scenes.

  Because in order to get the most out of this book, there are three important words you’re going to need to know and understand.

  The first word is: “Huh?”

  It’s pronounced short and sharp, as if someone just hit you in the stomach. Typically, it’s spoken while pulling your neck back, raising your eyebrows, and quickly scanning the room to make sure everything looks normal and you’re not in some weird-ass dream.

  The dictionary definition of the word is: “Did you just say what I think you said? Because it literally makes no sense and my mind can’t process it right now, so I’m going to have to ask you to repeat it.” It’s the kind of thing you might say when your dad comes home bleeding and tells you that someone hacked him up with an axe.

  (This really happened, people. I can’t make this up.)

  The second word is: “What?”

  This is pronounced with a silent “t,” and it generally follows a few seconds after a Huh. It’s spoken with your mouth contorted into a look of disgust and your forehead creased, while looking at someone like they’re batshit crazy.

  It is short for: “What the hell did you just say? Because I only asked you to repeat the crazy shit you just said, and now you’re adding some even crazier shit on top of it. My ears can’t believe what they’re hearing right now.”

  It’s the kind of thing you might say when your dad, whose head is busted open and wrapped in a blood-soaked towel, assures you that he’s fine and doesn’t need to go to the hospital and just wants to lie down for a little bit.

  The third word is: “Okay.”

  It’s spoken with a shoulder shrug, a side-to-side shake of the head, and a roll of the eyes. It means: “I can’t even begin to fathom your reality, but I’ve decided to just accept it and move on.”

  It’s what you say when a Huh and a What have gotten you nowhere, and you’re starting to think that maybe you actually are stuck in a dream and shouldn’t eat pizza before bedtime anymore. Like when your dad tells you that the reason someone hacked him up with an axe was because he was jealous of his skills as a refrigerator repairman.

  This all may seem unbelievable to anyone who hasn’t met my father, but this is the honest-to-God truth. In life, you can choose to cry about the bullshit that happens to you or you can choose to laugh about it.

  I chose laughter.

  These are the stories behind the jokes, and a few lessons I’ve figured out about life, success, family, and relationships along the way.

  Actually, I’m still working on the relationships part, but the rest I got down.

  Life Lessons

  FROM DAD

  * * *

  Don’t do what I do, do what I would tell you to do if I wasn’t doing the stupid stuff I did.

  Visiting Dad in prison with my older brother

  1

  * * *

  BIRTH OF A SEX SYMBOL

  My life began with one of the biggest lies men tell women:

  “I’ll pull out, I promise.”

  Those were the words that turned into me.

  Of course, my dad had no intention of pulling out. He wasn’t planning on knocking up my mom either. He just never learns from his mistakes.

  The first mistake happened eight years earlier. His name was Robert Kenneth, my older brother. Our parents had just met back then, so Dad was able to get away with bigger lies:

  “My nuts done got squashed in a bike accident. I can’t do nothing with them.”

  That’s really what he told her. I can’t make this up.

  When my mother found out she was pregnant, she beat the hell out of my dad.

  His other lines were: “I’m just gonna put it in a little and leave it there. I just wanna be close to you.” And then there was the classic, “I’m just gonna rub you with it. I promise I won’t put it in.”

  I’m surprised there are just two of us.

  Though if you count all the other women he did this with, there are something like eleven of us with six different women. At least one of them is my age too.

  He definitely didn’t learn from his mistakes.

  * * *

  My mom and dad met when he was working for Bell Telephone and she was a cashier at a Shop N Bag grocery store next door. From the moment he laid eyes on her—“a fine, petite country girl with big hips,” as he put it—my dad started begging her to go on a date. This went on every day for a year.

  My dad wasn’t persistent because he was in love with her. He was a player. He probably had thirty women all over town he was using the same lines on. My mom just held out longer. As my dad always tells me, even though I definitely don’t need to hear it, he had to “con her out of her drawers” because she’d never had sex before.

  They never married, though they stuck it out together, probably because Kenneth was born a year after they started seeing each other. But they were like oil and water: My mom was bossy; my dad hated being told what to do. My mom didn’t party; my dad did. My mom didn’t believe in fighting; my dad believed fighting made you a man. My mom couldn’t stand the smell of cigarettes, weed, or alcohol; my dad stank of all three. My mom believed that sex was a sacred thing; my dad didn’t believe anything was sacred, especially sex.

  When Mom found out she was pregnant with me, my father was picking up Kenneth from school.

  “Spoon,” my mom’s sister Patsy yelled from inside the house when my father and Kenneth came home. My dad’s full name is Henry Witherspoon, but everyone called him Spoon, and my brother was nicknamed Little Spoon.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Come here.”

  My father walked up the steps.

  Aunt Patsy didn’t budge. “Get in here!”

  That’s when my father knew he was in trouble.

  “What did you do?” she asked as soon as he walked inside.

  “What you talkin—”

  “Nancy is pregnant, and she crying.”

  “Naw, Nance ain’t pregnant!”

  “Go tell her that. She waiting on you.”

  My dad hung his head and accepted his fate. He walked apologetically into the bedroom, and got cussed out royally. Usually, he could say “I love you” to calm her down. Whether he meant it or just used it as a strategy to appease her, no one knew. But this time, it didn’t do him any good, and he went to sleep that night with her still going off on him, saying how this pregnancy was going to destroy her life. She’d just gone back to school and completed a computer programming class, so she was focused on a fresh start, not fresh diapers.

  When my dad woke up the day after
finding out I was on the way, Mom wouldn’t speak to him. She didn’t say another word to him for the next three weeks.

  * * *

  And that’s how I came into this world: My life began as a lie. I was unwanted. My mother cried when she found out I existed. And I sat there stewing in her anger for months in the womb.

  At least, that’s one way to look at it. Here’s another way.

  My life began with passion, with my father’s unrelenting desire for my mother. Even though I was unplanned, my mother made the commitment to having me and raising me right. And I inherited her commitment to hard work, and my father’s unique sense of humor, bottomless optimism, and ability to get his way.

  Life is a story. It’s full of chapters. And the beauty of life is that not only do you get to choose how you interpret each chapter, but your interpretation writes the next chapter. It determines whether it’s comedy or tragedy, fairy tale or horror story, rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags.

  You can’t control the events that happen to you, but you can control your interpretation of them. So why not choose the story that serves your life the best?

  2

  * * *

  BLESSED LIFE OF A GENIUS

  Though no one spoke about it, I always knew I was an accident. It would have been obvious to anyone who looked at my mom’s photo albums.

  Me: Mom, where was y’all at here?

  Mom: I think that’s when we went to some island in Florida.

  Me: Huh? How’d y’all get island money?

  Mom: That was before you were born. We took a family trip to Key West.

  Me: What’s Key West? (Turns page.) Mom, what’s that tree Kenneth is swinging on?

  Mom: Oh, that was our poplar tree. Your father built a swing on that tree.

  Me: A swing? Okay.

  I kept turning pages, asking where they were in different photos since I’d never had the luxury of traveling. I asked about the sharp suit Dad was wearing and about Mom’s fancy hairdo. I saw my brother eating cake and holding ice cream in pictures, sitting next to Dad, who looked healthy, with firm muscles and good hair. They looked so happy and well-off.

  Then I came along.

  As soon as I was born, the pictures in the photo album changed. There were no tree houses or wooden swings or new bicycles. Dad didn’t have sharp clothes. Mom’s hair wasn’t done. There were no more trips. Everything got a little more . . . poor.

  Me: How come the furniture went away when I came around?

  Mom: We had to cut back, son.

  The only nice thing I ever got back then was a dog.

  We lived on Fifteenth Street and Erie Avenue, in the heart of North Philadelphia. It was a tough area where shit happened consistently. One afternoon, my dad came home with a huge Labrador. I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy, I couldn’t stop screaming. I fell in love with that dog instantly.

  “What’s this, Spoon?” my mom asked when she saw it. There was a note of skepticism in her voice. “You got a dog?”

  “I bought a dog for the boys,” my dad said with forced nonchalance. “They been talking about a dog.”

  This dog wasn’t a puppy. It was full-grown, with a tongue as big as my arm and fur that looked like old paper that had been left in the sun too long. It was probably seven. But it didn’t matter to my brother and me. We’d been wanting a pet for so long.

  We named him Tramp and brought him into our room to play. He was on the bed, licking our faces, when the doorbell rang.

  I walked over to take a look. There was a man and a woman I hadn’t seen before.

  “You took our dog,” they said.

  “Your what?” my dad asked, as if he’d never heard anything so preposterous.

  “You took our dog,” they repeated. “She got loose and was running down the street, and the neighbors saw you take her and bring her here.”

  “What’s going on?” My mom jumped in. “I thought you said you bought this dog.”

  “I did,” my dad protested. I could see his wheels spinning as he quickly thought of a lie. “A friend of mine had it. I gave him money for it.”

  “Coco,” the woman called.

  The dog came bounding out of my room, stopped at her feet, and nuzzled against her leg.

  They walked out of the house with their pet, and that was one of my earliest memories: getting and losing my first dog, all within fifteen minutes.

  I suppose that was also my first life lesson: What’s here today may be gone later today. Nothing is permanent.

  Especially my father.

  On a day I was too young to remember, he disappeared for four years.

  My dad happens to be here with me as I’m writing this, and he wants to explain for the first time why he went away. So I’m going to slide over and let him onto the keyboard.

  Here are a few words from Henry Witherspoon on what he feels happened at that time. Buckle up and prepare to enter the mind that shaped and molded me.

  Go ahead, Dad.

  3

  * * *

  FOUR YEARS GONE

  by Henry “Spoon” Witherspoon

  All right, all right, all right!

  I guess I gotta tell this story. For my son Kevin—I’d do anything in the world for him.

  Because he’s my son. Who I’d do anything in the world for.

  First of all, you ever deal with a public defender? I don’t recommend it. I was this motherfucker’s first case.

  Kev, is it okay to use motherfucker in your book?

  Kev?

  Fuck it.

  Here’s what happened:

  Now, I come up on my bike to this house, and they shootin’ dice. So I shot dice. I’m gambling, but I got short.

  I said, “Let me go home and grab some more money. I’ll be right back.”

  When I come back, it’s dark. I get up there, I don’t pay this place no mind. I’m in a game. I know where we ain’t, but I ain’t really paying attention to where we at.

  All I know is that the windows are boarded up. Shit, I knew people that lived in houses with windows boarded up, so that don’t mean nothing to me.

  I knock on the door. Ain’t nobody answering. Makes sense: They got a game going on.

  I go in. I think, Hey, the lights are out. I’m half-high. Actually, I’m whole high.

  The whole of me is high.

  I take a few steps and I trip over something. I feel around and it’s a body. I don’t know if it’s alive or dead or sleeping or high. I pull it to the door to see what the situation is cause there ain’t no light in there.

  Suddenly, a cop opens the door. I ask him to help me. Next thing I know, I’m handcuffed.

  That’s what happened. This is God’s honest truth, Kev.

  I figure the cop had seen me walk into the building. Now, this cop gave a statement that he looked through the window and saw me having sex with this body I was dragging.

  Mind you, the body was alive, and he told me it was a woman.

  But that ain’t even possible. How do you see through this piece-of-shit boarded-up window into a totally dark house? I couldn’t even tell myself if it was a man or a woman.

  They got this girl in court eighteen months later cause she didn’t wanna come. They had me sitting in the detention center that whole time. When she got there, she told ’em, “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know him. Never seen him before. I don’t even know how I got there. I was drinking.”

  There’s no way I should have gone to jail, but I did. I went to jail for a rape that I didn’t commit.

  These are straight-up facts, Kev. You know Nancy and her sisters. They wouldn’t be speaking to me if it had happened. They told me they were sitting next to these cops while they was out in the waiting room, and the cops were concocting the story that they wanted to tell.

  So I wind up getting four to eight years. Them’s the kind of charges, though they let me go home before my four years were up.

  So here I go coming home from the roughest peni
tentiary in Pennsylvania, and Nancy is expecting me to be one way, but I done changed.

  She hoping I’ll be a perfect husband now. She still trying to run my life and pick my friends. She wanting me to get a job when won’t nobody hire me with that jail time. She wanting too many changes too fast. But I had to be as rough as these people in this jail to survive. I got harder, you see. And I couldn’t turn that shit on and off like it’s a lightbulb or something. She didn’t understand.

  What you don’t know, Kev, is that one day I come in and I’m trying to talk to her, and I guess she had a lot of pent-up anger in her. She started hollering and cussing and getting in my face. I’m macho, and I’m not gonna let myself be spoken to that way. So I grabbed her and I told her she better listen.

  She broke away and ran to the bed. Reached under her side between the mattress and the springs and pulled out a hammer of mine that I hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks.

  I think on my feet. I looked at this and I told her, “Now, if you raise that hammer at me, I’mma beat the shit out of you.”

  That kind of toned her down with that hammer. But at the same time, it let me know how far we had gone and how unhappy I’d made this woman. Right then and there I knew that this shit was over. So I just said, “To hell with this. We done.” And I go on ’bout my business.

  4

  * * *

  ALL ABOUT MY AMAZING SHOULDERS

  When most parents want to break bad news to their kid, they sit them down, place a hand over theirs, get real serious, and have a heart-to-heart talk. My dad never did that.

  Instead, he would appear out of nowhere and start laying heavy shit on me in an offhand, matter-of-fact way, like he was talking about what he ate for breakfast.