Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business

Hard Childhood Makes It Easy to Accept Harsh Truths

I was born in 1985 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and spent the first ten years of my life in the Terrace Village housing projects in the Hill District. This was the height of the crack epidemic, and while the entire nation was dealing with the devastating effects of this new drug, poor Black Americans were getting hit the hardest.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that the projects were a nice place to live before crack. You didn't move to the projects because you couldn't decide between a ranch-style home in the suburbs and a downtown condominium. Chris Rock said it best in his comedy special Bring the Pain: "Crack is destroying the ghetto? Yeah, like the ghetto was so nice before crack!"

Even before crack came to the ghetto, the ghetto was where you went when you had nowhere else to go. Crack fed the fire of violence and crime and then fanned those flames to incinerate anything in the ghetto that resembled peaceful life in a developed nation. Gunshots, gang violence, and hard drugs were the backdrop of my everyday life from as early as I can remember.

When I was four, my babysitter left out what I thought was a toy water gun. I decided to have some fun and spray it around a bit. Well, it turns out that the "water gun" was a syringe, and the "water" it was filled with was heroin.

One thing I've always admired about hard-drug users is their unapologetic attitude toward their addiction. Years later, my mom told me that the woman who left out the needle showed no shame-she just wanted her money back.

"I need some money for this, Miss Faye. That baggie of horse was twenty!"

For my mom's part, it wasn't the woman's addiction that bothered her; it was the careless placement of drugs around a child. My mom wasn't indifferent to having a drug user babysit, she just chose the lesser evil: leave me home alone or let the neighborhood junkie watch me.

I've always made a lot of jokes about drugs and the ghetto. Seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine once wrote, "Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel." My sense of humor is how I cope with the residual trauma from my childhood. I figure I can either laugh a little or cry a lot. I choose to laugh.

After the argument about the wasted heroin, my mom had to find a new babysitter. Choosing not to work, and instead relying on welfare, food stamps, and child support was always an option, but it was easily the worst one. Food stamps can only be used for food, and hardly enough of it to support a family. The only reason I got three meals a day was because I relied on free lunches during the school year and community meal programs during the summer. This was in addition to our biweekly trips to the food bank.

We lived in subsidized public housing projects. We didn't have to pay for utilities, but the rent was based on my mom's income. So, no matter how much my mom made, she would be left with roughly the same meager amount of money after living expenses were taken care of, and that wasn't ever enough.

My mother had no degrees or certifications, so she couldn't get a higher-paying job. However, she had learned how to type, so she used a temporary job agency to help her find work. This helped a little when she got an assignment, but getting a job meant her monthly food stamps and welfare benefits decreased, while the monthly rent increased.

People think that going on food stamps and welfare is a free ride to an easy life, but once you get stuck in that system, it's difficult to escape. Furthermore, government assistance is not a lifeboat that will float forever. Recipients eventually exhaust their benefits, and after that, eviction comes. If you get evicted from the projects, your options are either staying with family or becoming homeless.

As a result of this dynamic, most people in the projects take up side hustles that the government doesn't tax, like babysitting, drug dealing, or selling "40s"-forty-ounce glass bottles of malt liquor. My mom dabbled in all three at different times, but she also used another tactic to lessen the financial burden: She got a boyfriend living with her but kept him off the lease.

Just Because It's Normal Doesn't Mean It's Right

I don't remember how my mom met Fred. I just remember he appeared one day and started living with us. He worked at Wendy's and liked to build model airplanes. He would occasionally play me in Tecmo Super Bowl on my Nintendo, but other than that, I don't have any positive memories of him.

Instead, I remember the beatings. Aside from striking us with a belt or extension cord, Fred would make us put our hands against the wall, extend our arms, and kick out our feet so that our arms were the only thing keeping us from falling to the ground. Then we'd have to hold the pose indefinitely. He beat us if we bent our arms or dropped to a knee. I grew up thinking these types of beatings from Fred were normal for two tragic reasons: Everyone around me received similar beatings, and my mom often beat me worse.

The popular saying was "A hard head makes a soft ass," meaning, kids who don't listen got beat. It's the ghetto version of "Spare the rod, spoil the child." The problem with beating young children is that they can't make the connection between the pain and what they did wrong. It only makes them fearful of the adults around them. This type of punishment doesn't teach a kid anything but how to be afraid, and it sets them up for failure later in life.

Even if children could make the connection, beating them doesn't teach them anything about how to behave correctly. It only teaches them that violence is the way to get what they want. Proponents of physical discipline often call them "spankings," but at least in the hood, we didn't grow up with any illusions. Everyone I grew up with called these acts exactly what they were.

We weren't spanked. We were beaten. "Spanking" sounds harmless and innocent. When you hear "spanking," you think of someone putting a young child over their lap for a few open-palmed slaps to teach them the error of their ways. Worst case, the image that comes to mind is of the child being hit across the ass a few times with a belt. That is not what I experienced, nor was it the experience of many children I grew up around.

My sister and I were beaten with everything from belts and extension cords to plastic bats and, as we got older, open-handed slaps and plastic hangers. Once, my mom was pissed that I hadn't cleaned up my room, so she started throwing all the stuff at me that I hadn't picked up. One of those things was a snow boot, and she launched it with all the fury of an out-of-control woman under the heavy influence of alcohol. It landed squarely on my brow and opened a cut that I should have gotten stitched up, but my mom wasn't going to take me to the hospital for a wound she had inflicted.

Whenever people asked what happened, I told them that I hurt myself during a "rock fight" with the neighborhood kids. This wasn't unbelievable, as I often had rock fights with other boys as a game. It was a dangerously stupid way to pass the time, but it was fun. We were all used to getting beat up at home, so getting tagged with a few boulders while talking shit never seemed like a big deal to us. Of course, when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

One day, my mom sent me to a corner store, and I crossed paths with some kids I had tossed rocks with before. This time, they decided to take things to the next level and tried to jump me. There were four of them, but it's hard for prepubescent kids to do real damage to each other-at least with their bare hands. In the middle of me dancing around, throwing blows at one kid and evading another, one of the kids I wasn't fending off picked up a rock. He launched a stone the size of my fist from a distance that was far enough for him to get a good windup and too close for me to dodge it. It landed square on my eyebrow, busting it open.

It must have been severe, because it didn't hurt, and lack of feeling is a telltale sign of damage. (Part of that is the adrenaline rush, the fight-or-flight survival response.) The other telltale sign was that instead of continuing the harassment, the kids took one look at me and fled the scene of the crime. I continued to the corner store, not wanting to disobey my mother.

"Yo, kid, you're bleeding pretty bad."
"I'm OK, man."
"Aight, whatever."

The corner-store guy sold me a box of cornstarch, and I staggered home, where my mom took one look at me and rushed me to the hospital for stitches. When we got back, she and Fred got into it. It turned out the kids who attacked me were the children of the woman Fred was seeing on the side. My mom knew about the affair but stayed with Fred anyway, which infuriated the other woman. She'd instructed her kids to beat me up when they saw me. That day, as I passed their apartment row, they finally acted on her orders.

Aside from beating the hell out of my sister and me and indirectly landing me in the hospital, Fred was also a criminal. My sister and I often accompanied my mom to visit him at the county jail. I remember waiting in a narrow hallway before we were let past the bars, guarded by correctional officers, so we could sit and she could talk to Fred.

I don't know what Fred got locked up in county jail so often for, but I remember being happy whenever he was away, and I hated it when he was back home. I don't understand why, but he somehow made my mom happy. She sent him money for a commissary in jail and accepted his collect calls. (If you've never received a collect call, the recipient of those calls has to pay for them.) We sure didn't have the money, but somehow, she found the funds to help pay for this loser in jail.

He also cost us money when he wasn't in jail. I remember one day when my mother got the phone bill, and there were over two hundred dollars in charges from calls to 1-900 sex chat lines. Back in the days before OnlyFans and streaming internet porn, guys had fewer options to satisfy their needs, extramarital or otherwise. Men could call these chat lines and talk dirty to women for $4.99 a minute. Just like the porn of today, these chat lines were addictive. Unlike the porn of today, they were not free.

The commercials for these lines ran overnight on television, and I'm sure there were ads in adult video stores as well. As a five-year-old, I was neither up overnight nor had I ever been in an adult video store, but when my mom confronted Fred about the bill, he tried to say that I was making those calls. My mom might have been stupidly in love, but she wasn't stupid enough to believe that.

Despite her many flaws, my mom never tolerated physical abuse from Fred. So, when he hit her during this argument, she struck back, and they started fighting right over the ironing board where he was prepping his Wendy's uniform. At five foot nine and around two hundred pounds, my mom was a force to be reckoned with, especially against Fred, who was small-maybe 165 pounds soaking wet after a big meal. They shoved, exchanged blows, and shouted, but in the end, she threw him out.

Unfortunately, it wasn't the last time we'd see Fred. My mom-a woman who tolerated her man's cheating and her child being attacked by his mistress's kids-was not about to be deterred by a phone-sex bill higher than our rent, or even by domestic abuse. When Fred came back a few days later, they made up, and for a short while, things seemed OK.

I imagine part of the reason my mom tolerated Fred is that she viewed him as a better alternative to the crackheads across the hall who would sometimes babysit us. Since Fred worked the closing shifts at Wendy's, from 3:00 to 11:00 p.m., he was available to babysit during the day.

When I was five, I was old enough to attend kindergarten while my two-year-old sister stayed home with Fred. One day, when I got home, I found her in tears.

"Jasmine! Tell your brother what you did," Fred yelled at her.

"I . . . I broke your train." Between her toddler level of speech and her crying, I could hardly understand what she was saying to me.

"Now you hit her for that shit," Fred barked at me. I'd been beaten before, but my mom never made us hit each other. Hitting my sister was something that would almost guarantee an ass-whooping from my mom, but Fred was the adult in charge, so I hit her in the arm.

Fred then dropped us off downstairs with a neighbor, Ms. Tiny, while he got ready for work. I always thought it was funny that we called her Ms. Tiny, because she was severely overweight. Anyway, she took one look at the bleeding welts on my sister and knew something was wrong.

"Oh damn, he fucked her up good," said Ms. Tiny's boyfriend. "We heard that shit earlier and wondered what the hell was happening." Ms. Tiny and her boyfriend now realized the screams they had heard coming from upstairs earlier that day were the result of a grown man beating a toddler with a metal coat hanger.

After Ms. Tiny called my mom, she then called one of her nephews, a known gang member.

"If you see him, fuck him up," she told him. "Beatin' on a baby like this is fucked up."

The thing was, I'd heard Ms. Tiny beat her kids, so if she thought it warranted street justice, it must have been bad. But I didn't expect anyone to do anything. My world had already taught me that no one really cared about helping others. If my parents couldn't handle threats to their own children, why would I expect random thugs to help? Everyone around me had their own problems, and even as a kid, I knew being a problem just brought the wrong kind of attention.