Booker T: From Prison to Promise: Life Before the Squared Circle (11 page)

However, by no means were we free of the usual drawbacks of a relationship. We had our rocky moments, as every couple does, but we were mature enough to move past the petty, trivial arguments. But occasionally another issue beyond our control reared its ugly head.

One time we went for a little lovers’ stroll in the nearby park, holding hands, minding our own business. As we enjoyed the day and took in the sights, someone in the distance pierced the peace with a scream.

“Nigger lover!”

Michelle and I looked at each other quizzically. Obviously, hearing something like that took me aback. Having never been in an interracial relationship before, I hadn’t anticipated being on the receiving end of that kind of hate speech.

I suppose it was to be expected. Racism was just one of those old stigmas that wasn’t ever going away. Sometimes we would hear comments in a crowd, or someone would mumble something. I never got into a fight with anyone over it. I knew the people who would make those remarks were cowards, because nobody would ever dare say them directly to our faces.

I felt horrible for Michelle, though. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have been subjected to any of that unnecessary tension. It’s hard enough to make a relationship work as it is, but when undeserved fuel is dumped onto a fire, it can be frustrating.

However, we let those things roll right off our backs and never even really acknowledged them. The greatest downfall between Michelle and me didn’t have anything to do with race at all. It was something much simpler and far more gut-wrenching.

At Willow Creek we had a basketball court where I used to shoot around. After going a few times, I met this cool dude named Melvin, who I called Mel, and we played one-on-one and pickup games. We got along great, and like any friends do, we talked about everything—our jobs, things we wanted to do with our lives, and of course girls.

One time after a game, Mel was kicking it about this chick he’d recently started seeing. He told me the graphic play-by-play of all the sexual exploits they were up to.

I listened with a big smile, and then I talked the same game about Michelle and me, except that I never mentioned her by name.

Man, we laughed our asses off at the deviance both of us got into with our chicks.

Then he said his girl’s name was Michelle.

I stopped dead in my tracks. “What’s her last name?”

He told me.

It was
my
Michelle. I was completely crushed. “Yo, Mel, I
live
with Michelle. That’s my girl.”

Mel’s face dropped, and he went dead silent for a minute, obviously not knowing what to say. He just looked at me stunned and tried to apologize.

I didn’t want to hear it. I left the court quickly, telling him, “Don’t worry about it.” It wasn’t his fault anyway, and I didn’t hold it against him. He had no idea she was dating someone else.

Stomach turning, head spinning, wondering what had just happened to my seemingly perfect life, I stormed back to the apartment. All of a sudden, everything I had held so close to my heart had turned against me. I had never experienced such betrayal and emotional devastation at the hands of a girl. Not only was she cheating on me, but she was doing it right under my own nose in the same complex. It was beyond anything I had ever anticipated, and the hurt was overwhelming. It had never occurred to me that a woman would be so devious and backhanded, and I felt like a moron for being so oblivious. My blood was boiling, and all I could think about was getting even.

After I confronted Michelle about Mel, she broke down crying and admitted everything. She apologized repeatedly, begging me to stay.

That’s exactly what I did. I stayed. But my motivation wasn’t reconciliation. Sure, I still had emotional investment in this girl, but the truth of the matter was that my street mentality had kicked in and I was obsessed with getting revenge.

First I convinced her to sign over the apartment lease in my name. She was so desperate to do anything I asked that it didn’t take any effort. I just gave her a pen and a stare and said, “If you want me to stay and feel like our relationship is important to you again, you have to show me by putting me on the lease.”

She bought it and went all the way with the paperwork, making me the primary on the agreement. I now had full legal control of the place.

With the lease out of the way, I had her also sign a waiver stating that I owned all the furniture in the apartment. She had some really nice property in there. I was putting my chess pieces in such great positions that Bobby Fischer would have pulled out his paper and pen to take notes.

Despite my anger, for a while I truly did try to make it work with Michelle. But it was impossible. Every time we argued about anything, it went right back to Mel. Her cheating proved to be a fatal strike to what we’d once had.

Our fighting escalated out of control until one time she came at me and tried to throw a punch. I quickly pushed her hands out of the way. She ran to call the cops.

When the police showed up, she spun ridiculous lies to try to get me arrested. “He was grabbing me and tried to choke me.”

I stood there listening and looking at the cops, thinking,
Ah, shit, here we go. They’re gonna take me to jail.

They probably would have had I not known one of them from the club scene with Lash. He didn’t buy her story, but he did pull me aside and warn me. “Book, you better watch out for this kind of shit. You can land in jail real easy when a woman makes claims like what she’s saying.”

I told him I understood and thanked him for giving me a break, and they took off.

Michelle’s attempt to incriminate me that night was the last straw. Because she had signed the apartment and everything over to me, I kicked her out of her own place. I kept it all—the bed, the couches, the television, and even the phone she had used to call the cops on me. In my mind, I had to get her back for what she had done. She’d gotten in way over her head. Checkmate.

After the breakup, my old downward spiral started again. Without the stability and influence of Michelle and being all alone in the apartment, I was tempted to revert to old street behaviors. For the time being, I put my blinders on and remained focused.

On December 29, 1983, Angela gave birth to my son, Brandon T. Huffman. Although I’d had my doubts that I was his father, I accepted that he was my own. But man, Brandon couldn’t have come into a more turbulent time. Angela and I had not really spoken much at all since her grandmother had cornered me about nine months earlier. As I had with Angela, I initially did the wrong thing and ignored Brandon as well. I just could not face the gravity of it all.

When Angela called up on occasion and asked for money to help out, I did not give her a dime. I refused to even see my new son. I simply could not let go of my resentment toward her. In the balance, Brandon suffered from the lack of a father’s support.

After a few more weeks passed and I really thought about my behavior as a man toward this baby, I began to feel differently. I can’t explain it exactly, but some instinctual click went off inside of me. I could not get Brandon off my mind. I knew I had to at least try to do right by this little boy. No matter how selfish I was, the only choice that made sense was to give fatherhood the best attempt possible with my limited resources.

For the sake of our son, Angela and I reconciled enough to manage a fair arrangement for Brandon. It worked at first, but then Angela began playing ridiculous head games with me, putting unnecessary stipulations on my visits with my boy. For example, she would not let me have Brandon if she knew I would be with another woman at the same time, which made no sense to me. I thought without a doubt she was bitter because I had not married her and we didn’t have that picture-perfect family.

I didn’t know what she was thinking by using our son as a tool to exact her revenge on me, but her plan was backfiring. I never reacted well to being told what to do. Anyone who knew me could have predicted my response. “If you don’t want me to see him, I won’t,” I said. “That’s on you.”

Still there were times she compromised and brought Brandon over and let me have him for the weekend. It was great. Brandon was such an adorable baby, and I just sat and stared at him as he slept in my arms. It was a powerful feeling to have such a tiny and helpless piece of my own flesh and blood cradled on my chest. That special bond was forming between father and son, and I imagined how close we would be for the rest of our lives.

The heartbreaking truth of it all is that due to Angela’s growing frustration over my rejection of her, the pressure of being a single mom, and whatever else might have been going on in her life, she eventually spun out of control. In a short span of time, Angela began hanging out with a bad crowd and developed a newfound penchant for heavy drug use, which affected her ability to care for Brandon. In fact, she stopped caring about him completely, and her grandmother was unwilling to take on the responsibility.

I simply could not handle it all. Without a good-bye, I cut off communication with Angela again. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of how Brandon was doing, and my heart grew unbearably heavy. Brandon was now abandoned emotionally just as I had been all those times in my earlier days. It was a bad call but the only one I could come up with.

After Brandon was out of my life and I no longer had Angela intruding in my business, things resumed to normal. I was still working at Wendy’s, trying to assimilate and create some semblance of a decent existence. By now it was the spring of 1984, and I was nineteen and still wondering where things would go for me. Although I had done a good job of staying out of trouble and minding my own business, sometimes turmoil would just seem to find me.

In the beginning of my days at Wendy’s, I had walked to work because it was so close. But now I had been transferred to another location a few more miles away and had to use the bus system. After the second bus dropped me off in town, I had to wait almost thirty minutes for the third.

After everything I had been through over the years, I was always leery about being in town alone. I always carried nunchakus in a little satchel and was pretty damn good with them. They were my equalizer.
In case of emergency, break glass, grab nunchakus, kick some fuckin’ ass.

One day while I was waiting on the sidewalk for the bus to arrive, I overheard this guy next to me talking to another dude. Even though I was listening to music on my headphones, the volume was low enough for me to hear everything he was saying.

“I need to get my hands on some fuckin’ money real bad, man.”

I glanced at him. He looked ragged and strung out. My first thought was,
I’ll bet the farm he’s fiending for some coke or heroin.

He didn’t pay much attention to me, maybe because of my headphones. He was getting really agitated and pacing manically, gripping something in his front jacket pocket. I assumed he had a knife and didn’t want to find out. After listening to this guy’s rants, I wondered when this derelict would do something.

A businessman with a briefcase crossed the street to catch a different bus. This desperate crackhead followed, picking up his pace to catch up to the unsuspecting guy strolling through the intersection. Just when the junkie was within ten feet of striking distance, the bus roared up, opened the doors, and the man made it in, completely oblivious to how close he had come to serious harm.

As the bus took off, the druggie stood there looking defeated. Then he stormed back to my area and began loudly ranting to his buddy. “I was that close. Did you see that shit? Fuck!”

I couldn’t stand the unpredictability and tension, so I ducked into a nearby game room to wait it out. The last thing I needed was for this dude to start something with me and ruin the decent progress I’d been making in life.

After waiting for about five minutes, I noticed a big crowd gathering outside the game room window. I walked out and pushed my way through the people to see what the commotion was about. A man lay on the ground with blood squirting out of his heart with each pulse.

It was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen. It turned out my feeling about that junkie had been right on. He had robbed and stabbed some poor guy and left him for dead. I stood there in complete confusion, just taking it all in.

No one could do anything for the man as he was going into shock, terror on his face.

In the midst of all this, my bus pulled up. I got in and sat down, looking at the dying man on the ground as we drove away. I kept thinking,
That could’ve been me.

All day at work I told the story to anyone who would listen. Venting what I’d seen helped me process the imagery pounding in my mind. Another one of life’s lessons had been thrown in my face, reminding me how randomly tragedy could strike.

The traumatic memory of the sidewalk stabbing remained at the forefront of my thoughts for days. Meanwhile, the drudgery of Wendy’s was getting me down. Working the same dead-end job every day for hours on end with no hope of advancement played games with my head. It got to the point that I couldn’t stand looking at my coworkers. At home I saw those popular “Where’s the beef?” commercials on television and lost it. All I could think about was punching that old lady to show her exactly where the damn beef was. It was driving me crazy, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hack it.

I was so relieved when a friend from Willow Creek Apartments came on board to help relieve the monotony. I’d met Zach and his wife around the pool, and he and I had played basketball here and there. The minute I first saw him, I could tell he was from the streets, and I gravitated to him. In fact, Zach had been in prison for robbery. Although he had a definite edge, he carried himself with a cool, laid-back attitude that was a welcome addition at work.

Before I knew it, my twentieth birthday had come and gone, but I was still really impressionable and open to all kinds of ideas. One of my brilliant new schemes came after I reunited with Billie Jean, who was now living nearby and running with a new pimp named Toffa.