My Infamous Life_bounce_003

At fifteen, Pops was in a doo-wop group called the Chanters.

They had a couple of lukewarm records.

Moms’s music career, on the other hand,

must have had Pops wishing he never messed up with her.

In 1962, six years after my pops’s short run in the music biz,

Moms was asked to join a group called the Crystals.

Moms was a dime

—a nineteen-year-old light-skinned sista with hazelgreen eyes

who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

She had a young son,

my older brother, Greg (we have different fathers),

and she left him with family so she could hit the road.

Moms was big-time. The Crystals had a bunch of hit records,

including “He’s a Rebel,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,”

“Then He Kissed Me,” “Uptown,” and

“There’s No Other Like My Baby.”

They went on world tours with Diana Ross and the Supremes,

**** Clark, and the like.

At one point she was engaged to Charlie Thomas from the Drifters,

but that didn’t last.

That was just some on-the-roadtoo-long-and-feeling-lonely thing.

After being on tour for three years straight,

Moms and Pops got back together soon after she came back to New York.

I guess he really loved her,

but he was a wild boy. I know that she loved him.

They finally stopped bull****tin’ and got married.

I was born on November 2, 1974,

at approximately nine thirty-two P.M.

at Nassau Medical Center in Hempstead, Long Island.

By the time I popped out,

Hempstead had become almost all black

because of what was called white flight.

That means black people started buying property

in white neighborhoods and the whites moved out.

My grandmother owned two houses at the time,

one in Hempstead and another in Lakeview,

the next town over. Moms, Pops, my brother Greg,

and I moved into my grandmoms’s crib in Lakeview.

At less than one year old,

I was admitted to the hospital for the first time.

Bright lights; doctors poking, stabbing, pushing,

and pulling all over my pain.

My mother. My father. Relatives’ faces bending down, looking at me.

Wires connected to my arm with bags of fluid dripping through them.

All these foggy memories

—I guess the trauma I went through forced me to remember.

I wanted to crawl back into my mother’s stomach the same way I came out,

back to the warm, dark place where I was safe.

Who said I wanted to come out anyway?

I was fine where I was.

But the witch and wizard doctors cut my mother open

and pulled me out like they were conducting some

twisted ritual that forced me to take part in this crazy world.

There was nothing I could do but be confused and wait.

I was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia SS type,

the worst form of sickle-cell,

a painful hereditary blood disorder

that affects mostly blacks and Latinos.

There was very limited

info about sickle-cell when my parents were planning to have a child,

so they were just as confused as me.

When I got out of the hospital,

my parents brought me to Grandmoms’s dance studio in Jamaica,Queens.

I went from being a science experiment

screaming in a cold dark hospital alone

to laughing while doing the baby bounce

to the sound of African drums, stomping feet,

girls joltin’ and gyratin’ their bodies to the beat

with hundreds of smiling black faces surrounding me.

My father was a master African drummer and my mother was a dancer.

I’d sit in my stroller on the sidelines

or someone would hold me in their lap for a better view,

bopping my head to the beat

so intensely that my father called me Bop Head.

Extreme pain to extreme pleasure has been the story of my entire life.

That tremendous joy then pain then joy then pain again

turned me into one moody li’l mutha****er.

? ? ?

My grandmother’s dance business was making a lot of money

and she enrolled me in a private preschool at age four.

During winter, waiting for the school bus in the morning,

my ankles would start to ache.

I hated cold winter mornings.

A sickle-cell attack would creep up slowly in my ankles,

legs, arms, back, stomach, and chest.

Sometimes my lips and tongue turned numb

and I knew I was going into a crisis.

Crazy, right?

When the bus came, I would walk slowly

to avoid the pain bum-rushing my whole body

while the other kids stared through the bus windows

wondering if I was crazy or retarded.

But I learned to stay calm and not be embarrassed.

I’d rather move slow

and look crazy than take a trip to the emergency room.

If I moved my body parts fast,

it would agitate my sickled cells and cause my pain to increase,

but if I moved slowly and was lucky enough,

the pain would remain minimal and sometimes go away.

One chilly autumn morning,

after walking extra slowly to the bus because the pain was sneaking up,

I sat in a seat where the sun was beaming hot.

The sun shined in that spot the entire ride.

I sat very still without moving a muscle.

Fifteen minutes later, I got off the bus and the pain was gone.

I learned a new trick! The sun’s heat actually killed the sickled cells.

So every cold morning,

I sat in the sun, and I cursed Mother Nature on cloudy, rainy days.

I was a very serious child

who never got to enjoy life to the fullest like a normal,

healthy kid because of my sickle-cell.

All my boys were into sports and physical fitness.

But as bad as I wanted to,

I couldn’t join in because overworking my body

would trigger my pain.

Sometimes I’d wake up with severe pain in my stomach and back,

a constant throbbing like my bones were broken.

Pain and I got real close in those early years.

Ever since I was born,

I was in the hospital at least four to six times a year with sickle-cell.

Every year.Sometimes for a week, sometimes up to a month.

There’s no conventional medical cure for sickle-cell.

The only treatment was high doses of strong pain medication

like Tylenol with codeine as a child and Demerol or ******** as I got older,

the stuff they give soldiers when their limbs are blown off in war.

Hospitals only allow doses every four hours,

but I had a high tolerance for the medication

because my pain was greater than most people’s. After an hour,

I was screaming again.

As a child, I’d be in the emergency room screaming

and squirming on the stretcher like I was about to die.

Some evil nurses and doctors would try to shut me up.

When they couldn’t, they called security,

wheeled me into a back room, and closed the door

to muffle my screams.

Finally the meds would settle me down.

My family would rub the painful spots,

trying to soothe me. But after visiting hours were over,

it was just me and my comrade pain.

I saw a lot of death and disease in those hospitals.

I shared rooms with white kids with leukemia

whose parents bought them everything they could wish for

because they were on their deathbeds,

and it had a profound effect on my mentality.

It turned me into a very no-nonsense little kid.