Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (14 page)

As busy as I was, I certainly wasn’t working. We had so little money that even though Rebecca and I lived together off campus, I didn’t eat at home because I was scared to eat up all of
Rebecca and Naomi’s food. I often snuck back into my old dormitory to eat, sometimes twice a day. This really nice older white guy headed up the kitchen, and he knew how much I was struggling.

“Terry, come on in,” he said, smiling. “I know you want to eat.”

“Thanks, man,” I said, clapping his palm in a hearty handshake.

I was so appreciative whenever he waved me through. But it didn’t always happen that way. One day, I was starving and late for practice when he stopped me.

“I can’t do it today,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He had snuck me in so many times that he was on the verge of getting in trouble. But even if he had to pull back on his kindness sometimes, he always found a way to let me back in again, and at the time, I was incredibly grateful. I knew I was breaking the rules, but at the same time, my sense of entitlement had turned me into a bit of a hustler, and the sad part is, I felt justified in getting over on others.

I was young and extremely immature. I’d had this vision that when I got married, things would just take care of themselves, but it wasn’t happening. I had this great idea that I was going to make T-shirts and sell them. So I used the little bit of money I had to buy an airbrush.

“Why are you buying this thing?” Rebecca said. “You know, you’d better use it. Are you using it? Are you doing it?”

Of course I didn’t follow through. I was always starting things like that, saying I was going to do them to get some money, and then I never did anything with them. I put Rebecca through a lot of stress.

At the time, credit card companies were handing out accounts
like candy, and my whole mentality of entitlement meant that I’d charged up all of my cards. I had them all: American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and even a Sears card. They’d all since been halted, and I had no way to make even the minimum payments on them, so we had creditors calling the house constantly. On several occasions, there was a knock on the door of our apartment. When I answered, our upstairs neighbor was standing there looking sheepish.

“Hey, uh, Visa is on the line at my house, asking to talk to you,” he said.

“Whoa, I’m sorry, man,” I said. “We’ll handle it.”

But the real truth was, I didn’t have any money coming in, and I wouldn’t until I went pro. Looking back, I can see I was really very ignorant about the ways of the world, but at the time, I was young, and I was bound for glory, and I thought I knew everything. I think my attitude had a lot to do with growing up in a city like Flint, where everyone worked for General Motors, and the mentality was that GM was going to take care of us. GM was like our dad. We worked for the shop, and in return, they gave us a house, a car, whatever we needed. I had rejected that lifestyle because I didn’t want to work for the shop, but I still had the mentality that someone owed me. That was part of how I’d grown up feeling so entitled, expecting my parents to give things to us, without ever really taking responsibility for them.

Usually, I dodged the calls, but one day I was around the house trying to study. I ended up on the phone with collections, and finally, I snapped.

“You don’t pay your bills,” he said.

“You know what, man,” I said. “In a minute I’m going to be in the NFL, and you are still going to be calling people, begging for your little money. You probably don’t make, what, eight dollars an hour, maybe, if that?”

Not that I was even making eight dollars an hour at the time, but you know.

“I’m going to be rich,” I said. “And you’re still going to be working there, and you’re still going to be bothering people for their money.”

Finally, Rebecca grabbed the phone out of my hand and hung it up.

A minute later, the phone rang again. Instead of being nervous about what this guy might say or do, I was so mad that I was ready to get back into it.

“Sir, you know what, I apologize,” he said.

Well, now, this was the first time I’d ever had a bill collector call me back to say he was sorry, so maybe my rant had worked.

“Pay us when you can,” he added before hanging up.

Even I was surprised to receive such kindness, but the stress I was under at the time was incredible, and I guess he could tell I was not in good shape.

Some days the phone rang and rang, and Naomi cried, and Rebecca looked at me like she was wondering what she had gotten herself into this time.

“We’re gonna go pro, baby,” I said. “And as soon as I go pro, all of these bills are going to be paid. So don’t even worry.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

I was good at saying the right thing to keep Rebecca’s anxiety at bay, but I wasn’t always so good at convincing myself. After we’d been married for a few months, Rebecca got pregnant. I was excited to have a baby, but the thought of the cost and responsibility terrified me. There were times when Rebecca went off to work, and I watched Naomi, and I just sat there in a fog. On other days, when Naomi was with her babysitter, I started acting out in secret with pornography again. Every time, I felt guilty afterward, and I swore I’d never do it again, but somehow,
I always did. I grew depressed, which made me even less able to get on top of our money problems and made things seem that much more overwhelming.

It didn’t help that tensions were worse than ever between my football coaches and me, and I knew if I didn’t hang on and make it through college, I’d jeopardize everything I’d worked so hard for since the seventh grade. It was a difficult season. And then, during a game, I got called to the sideline by one of my coaches. “Your wife’s in the hospital,” he said.

She’d had a miscarriage. I walked off the field and arrived at the hospital, sweaty and crying. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry about?” she said. “It’s okay. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”

But in my heart, I knew I was being punished for my dark secret. Rebecca soon became pregnant again, and I was filled with fear. I tried my best to be good.

THE PREVIOUS YEAR, EVEN WHEN I’D SOMETIMES
felt discouraged by my football experience, we were playing so well that I got swept up in the excitement of winning. But this year, we had a terrible season, largely because we had a brilliant backup quarterback, who happened to be black. This was in the days when there hadn’t been many black quarterbacks yet, so they benched him and played this little white freshman from Canada instead. It was not good. Our quarterback went in, led the nation in interceptions, and had a horrible time, but they stuck with him.

I’d always suspected there was racism at play on our team. From the beginning, my linebacker coach had told me that I wasn’t smart enough to play linebacker (even though the NFL eventually thought I was intelligent enough to keep me there for six seasons). I noticed that he played all of the white guys in what they called the thinking man’s spots, whereas I was forced
to play a position that was about being a physical body. I knew I should have had a different position, because of my athleticism, but I also knew my ability to take a tremendous amount of physical pain was my ticket out, so I went with what I’d been given.

Most of the black players on the team were angry, but we didn’t feel there was anything we could do. I later found out that the racial tension finally boiled over a few years after I left, and the black players actually had a sit-down strike, where they refused to even go out on the field because of the discrimination they felt.

What was happening on the football field at school primed me for a 1989 movie that shook me to the core: Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
. I probably saw that movie twenty times in the theater. I couldn’t get enough. When
School Daze
had been released the year before, we’d had a midnight screening at school, and it was an event for all of the black students. This was even better. I’d never seen images so raw, so compelling, or so truthful. As
Star Wars
had done years earlier, it cemented my conviction that I was meant to be in film someday.

I wanted to write and direct my own movies, and Spike Lee was my hero. I found out that his aunt, Gloria Lee, worked at our college, and I tracked her down.

“Can I just paint a picture of Spike, and see if you like it, and if you do, maybe you could send it to him?” I asked.

“I’ve seen your work,” she said. “If you make it, I will be sure he gets it.”

I painted Spike’s portrait, with all these headlines around him in the background. I used it as the final project for my independent study in painting, and then I had it framed. Gloria sent it off, and I was in suspense while I waited to see if he liked it. Well, a few weeks later, he sent back a book about the making of his new movie,
Mo’ Better Blues
, with a personal note to Gloria
from Spike: “Tell your student, Terry, thank you for the beautiful painting, and that I wish him luck.”

That was like a lifeline for me. We were living in this basement apartment, really struggling, and yet I felt like I had touched Hollywood in some small way, and my life was never the same again. After that, I always knew I belonged in Hollywood, and I wouldn’t be happy until I made it out there someday.

I certainly didn’t want to be in Kalamazoo anymore. That was the beginning of a militant period for me, where I saw everything in racial terms, even though my wife was half white. I was big, I was black, and I was very aware of being treated like a threat. I felt like I could never get ahead as long as my coaches and bosses were discriminating against me. Of course, when I went back to Flint, and I saw the gangs and drugs and guys with six different kids by six different women, I was like, I can’t end up over here with my own people when they’re living like this, either.

I was young, and I was angry. Now I can see that my anger hurt me more than anyone else. There were times when it became a form of self-sabotage, because when I was mad, I was often blinded to the possibilities of my life. When I eventually realized this, I understood that I had to see what was actually open to me and do my best to achieve it. But at that time, I was experiencing my first political awakening, crude as it was. And I’m glad I went through that phase, because I think every young man needs to rebel to find his way—every young woman does, too—and this means cutting Mom’s apron strings, and questioning Dad’s lessons, questioning everything.

Rebecca was older than me, and way more mature, but she was always patient with me, and my growing pains, even when she became pregnant again not long after her first miscarriage,
and she really needed me to grow up. She had graduated beauty school with all of the awards, and she’d gotten a job at Regis, a hair place at the mall. It was a great job, and they were paying her well. Finally, it seemed like an end to our worries might be in sight. And then, just as she’d started to attract a lot of clients, and she was about to get a raise, one of her friends opened a shop and asked Rebecca to go work for her. I was already feeling guilty enough about the fact that I was playing football, which meant I couldn’t make any money. And then she jumped ship from this really great job to her friend’s salon and ended up making very little. “Becky, uh, you do know we have nothing, right?” I said.

“I’ve got to help my friend,” she said. “I’ve got to do this.”

So then we were even broker than we had been, which I hadn’t even thought was possible. With another baby on the way, I had to make it to the pros.

I couldn’t wait for my football dream to come true and take me all the way to the NFL. But as hard as I’d worked, and as ready as I felt, it wasn’t going to be easy. Our daughter Azriel was born on November 13, 1990, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And so now we were down in our basement apartment with Naomi climbing all over, and with little bitty Azi sitting in her chair, and Rebecca and I just trying to make it.

I threw everything I had into my final season of college football. The school held what were called pro days, when NFL scouts came and talked to the most celebrated players. A few scouts had sat me down for meetings that fall, but no one ever called me back to follow up. I was sure I was going to fight my way into the NFL, but this lack of serious attention was making me nervous, especially because I’d gotten some light from the pros after our championship, and now it felt like the momentum
had slowed, just when I needed it to pick up. My big thing was that I had to make it to the NFL Combine in February. During two and a half days in Indianapolis, representatives from all of the NFL teams would get a look at the best up-and-coming college players. And it was unclear if I was going to be there or not.

My deteriorating relationship with my coaches wasn’t helping. We were doing a drill on the field during practice when another player began doing some dirty stuff, and I fought back. The coach jumped up on me and started screaming.

“Terry, what are you doing?”

“I was protecting myself,” I said.