Read Online Redefining Realness by Janet Mock - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Janet Mock
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released the white from his plum lips. Chad and my eyes grew large. This was against everything we heard at school. We were products of D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), programmed since we’d learned our ABCs and 123s to “Just Say No,” with graffiti onour school walls proclaiming, “Crack Is Wack!” We were instilled with the hope that if we just said no and got an education, we could avoid the pitfalls of our community and, apparently, our own home. I bought into this dream wholeheartedly. It was all I really had, besides Chad. The dream I clutched to my chest was a black-and-white world where drugs were poison and the people who did them were poisonous.
“You see how goofy I look?” Dad said with the pipe in his hand and the vapor diminishing around him. “You see how silly I’m acting?”
I actually did not see any silliness; all I could think about was how weak he was. The strongest man I knew, my father, was smoking crack from a pipe in our bedroom, and he had the audacity to do it in front of us. I didn’t understand addiction as a disease, so I saw my father as weak. His search for pleasure and power in a pipe made him pathetic. His eyes still follow me now. They were these black balls of nothingness, like looking into an empty well with no sunlight above you.
I was not attached to this man who smoked crack, and I was tempted to raise my hand, as if we were in show-and-tell, and ask him how he felt and whether his body tingled. I equated his inhalation to the burning of mouthwash at bedtime. I wondered if he burned on the inside. I also wanted to ask how he could do this to Chad. I was naive enough to think that I could handle this. Looking at Chad, with his head down and feet pointing into the carpet, I knew he had seen too much. In that moment, I realized that Dad meant more to Chad than he meant to me. For my brother, Dad was an all-knowing hero who could do nothing wrong. That was how I felt about Mom. But as with the heroes of childhood, you realize they’re make-believe characters, and the qualities you so admired in them were magnified through your obstructed lens of adoration.
“Don’t ever do this,” Dad said with a hint of defeat in his voice. “Go on and play.”
Chad left his worship in that room, and I left behind any illusion of safety. If Dad was all we had, the only person looking out for us, then we were all alone.
“Listen! If I ever catch you guys doing this,” he said, lifting his empty eyes to meet Chad’s wet ones, “I’mma whop your asses.”
When I recalled this pivotal moment to my father years later, he said simply, “Your dad doesn’t lie.”
By 1992, we’d been in Oakland for two years, at what I know now was the height of the crack epidemic, which enveloped our already struggling neighborhood like the rising fog that covered the Golden Gate Bridge during those misty mornings. Some of my classmates were reportedly born addicted to cocaine, mislabeled “crack babies” by the media before their parents even got the chance to name them. We all teased one another incessantly, as kids do, about whose mama smoked crack. “Yo mama” jokes were all the rage (“Yo mama smoke so much crack, she . . .”), and we’d blame anyone’s shortcomings on a mother’s crack smoking. Our teasing mirrored chants of the kids in the Dogs’ hit song, “Your Mama’s on Crack Rock,” in which a little girl is teased by kids chiming about her mother’s “tricking” to get money for crack. The song ends with the girl pleading, “Mama, please stop, ’cause they pickin’ at me.”
Rarely were there images of fathers strolling the streets for a hit of exhilaration. We definitely saw men in filthy clothes around our block, but they didn’t belong to anybody. Besides, none of my friends in our predominantly black neighborhood had a father. Before seeing Dad take a hit from the pipe, I thought crack was a “yo mama” problem, not a “yo daddy” problem.
My
“You see how goofy I look?” Dad said with the pipe in his hand and the vapor diminishing around him. “You see how silly I’m acting?”
I actually did not see any silliness; all I could think about was how weak he was. The strongest man I knew, my father, was smoking crack from a pipe in our bedroom, and he had the audacity to do it in front of us. I didn’t understand addiction as a disease, so I saw my father as weak. His search for pleasure and power in a pipe made him pathetic. His eyes still follow me now. They were these black balls of nothingness, like looking into an empty well with no sunlight above you.
I was not attached to this man who smoked crack, and I was tempted to raise my hand, as if we were in show-and-tell, and ask him how he felt and whether his body tingled. I equated his inhalation to the burning of mouthwash at bedtime. I wondered if he burned on the inside. I also wanted to ask how he could do this to Chad. I was naive enough to think that I could handle this. Looking at Chad, with his head down and feet pointing into the carpet, I knew he had seen too much. In that moment, I realized that Dad meant more to Chad than he meant to me. For my brother, Dad was an all-knowing hero who could do nothing wrong. That was how I felt about Mom. But as with the heroes of childhood, you realize they’re make-believe characters, and the qualities you so admired in them were magnified through your obstructed lens of adoration.
“Don’t ever do this,” Dad said with a hint of defeat in his voice. “Go on and play.”
Chad left his worship in that room, and I left behind any illusion of safety. If Dad was all we had, the only person looking out for us, then we were all alone.
“Listen! If I ever catch you guys doing this,” he said, lifting his empty eyes to meet Chad’s wet ones, “I’mma whop your asses.”
When I recalled this pivotal moment to my father years later, he said simply, “Your dad doesn’t lie.”
By 1992, we’d been in Oakland for two years, at what I know now was the height of the crack epidemic, which enveloped our already struggling neighborhood like the rising fog that covered the Golden Gate Bridge during those misty mornings. Some of my classmates were reportedly born addicted to cocaine, mislabeled “crack babies” by the media before their parents even got the chance to name them. We all teased one another incessantly, as kids do, about whose mama smoked crack. “Yo mama” jokes were all the rage (“Yo mama smoke so much crack, she . . .”), and we’d blame anyone’s shortcomings on a mother’s crack smoking. Our teasing mirrored chants of the kids in the Dogs’ hit song, “Your Mama’s on Crack Rock,” in which a little girl is teased by kids chiming about her mother’s “tricking” to get money for crack. The song ends with the girl pleading, “Mama, please stop, ’cause they pickin’ at me.”
Rarely were there images of fathers strolling the streets for a hit of exhilaration. We definitely saw men in filthy clothes around our block, but they didn’t belong to anybody. Besides, none of my friends in our predominantly black neighborhood had a father. Before seeing Dad take a hit from the pipe, I thought crack was a “yo mama” problem, not a “yo daddy” problem.
My
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