Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (22 page)

Let me tell you, I was hooked. I started eating right, the pounds came off, and that twenty-one days turned into years. Even though I was still right where I’d been, filing paperwork for eight hours a day, I noticed that everything else had changed for me. My mood was better, as well as my thinking, and my reactions to the things that happened to me, even when they weren’t good in and of themselves.

That’s why I always tell people to treat working out like the spa, not as something we force ourselves to do, but as an indulgence, a treat, an activity we do to get our minds together. Honestly, for me, it’s really not about my body anymore. Working out calms me. And it’s always been like that for me. When I was a little kid, I dealt with feeling scared or out of control by lifting the furniture. Now exercising is something I look forward to doing every day. I go to the gym to find my peace, especially now that I’ve got an iPod. That changed everything for me. I fill it up with my audiobooks, teaching tapes, books on anything I want to learn about—Hollywood, acting, writing, working out—not to mention great podcasts, amazing tapes by inspirational pastors, and music. Once I have all of that good stuff going into my system for an hour or two every morning, I feel good. I feel pumped for the day. It’s honestly become my joy. This is why I always tell people it’s the wrong approach to feel like we need to
go to the gym to get in shape. Rather, we should adopt the attitude that because we’re in shape, we must go to the gym.

I WAS SOON LOOKING AND FEELING BETTER, BUT IT WAS
still a very intense time. Rebecca was pregnant with our third child, and money was very tight. One night, I had a dream. I was at a high school football game, watching my son play on the field. I couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a helmet, but I knew he was my son, and all of the other parents were complimenting me about how athletic he was. Only I didn’t really care about his performance because I was so elated to have a son. In fact, when I woke up, I was disappointed to find I’d only been dreaming.

“Rebecca, I dreamt we had a son, and he was playing football,” I said.

“That reminds me of a vision I had that I was in a big, beautiful house, standing on a large staircase, holding a baby boy,” she said.

I put my hand on Rebecca’s big belly, convinced there was a boy in there.

“It’s a boy,” I said, giddy with excitement.

“No, Terry,” she said. “I’m telling you, it’s a girl.”

Rebecca knew the baby was a girl and told me so whenever I brought up the possibility that she was pregnant with a boy. When the doctor was finally able to tell us the baby’s gender, I was excited to find out for sure. Even once it was confirmed that Tera was indeed a girl, I still felt like she was my namesake. I’d always believed children should have their own name and was never interested in having a junior, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about it. We saw a Terah in the Bible, and every time
Rebecca drove me to work at the Veterans Administration, we passed the Terra Bella exit on the 5 Freeway. Our third daughter’s name would be Tera.

We were really struggling financially, but I did my best to hold on to my newly discovered positive attitude. When my alarm went off in the morning, before I could be crushed beneath the weight of the day’s many stresses, I took a moment to think:
I’m alive. I’m alive. I can keep going as long as I’m alive
.

As I got dressed, packed my sack lunch with a sandwich and a PowerBar, and headed off to my eight hours of filing, I kept talking to myself the whole time:
I’m bigger than this. I am not this situation. This is not for me
.

For once, my confidence didn’t come from an egotistical place. I really didn’t agree with my circumstances. I knew I had greater value than $8 an hour. And I truly believe it was my ability to hold on to my sense of my own value that helped me to get through that time, even when things got worse. Our landlady went crazy and evicted us from our apartment, which we could barely afford. In order to keep the older kids in the same school, we took on an apartment across the street. It was a beautiful, barnlike structure, but small and more expensive. It seemed impossible that things could get any worse, or more stressful, but through it all, I hung on to my positive attitude. And I learned a major lesson, which is this: We determine our core value. We do. And we have to keep that value strong, no matter what.

Eating healthy, exercising, and working hard, even at a job I didn’t love, all helped to keep my core value intact. But I still had bad habits that did not. We were able to afford an early iMac around this time, and soon I discovered that pornography was readily available on the Internet. These were the days of dial-up, and it took half an hour to load an image, but now there
was no more sneaking out to video or liquor stores to get a fix. It was right at home and easily viewed with the push of a button. As the years went on, pornography became easier and easier to find and moved from pictures to full-on videos. It was like discovering I could jimmy the cable box all over again. I was able to become even more secretive, because my vice was pretty much evidence-free. Delete the image and search history and no one would be the wiser. But there was still a cost. My core value was continually battered by the pornography I snuck during times of stress. I couldn’t objectify women like that, and keep a secret from my wife, and still feel good about myself.

During that time, my brother was in a terrible car accident. When the paramedics first arrived at the scene, his face was completely crushed, and they thought he was dead. He was airlifted to the hospital. They put metal plates in his face, and he had a very slow and painful recovery. I was devastated because I couldn’t afford to fly home to visit him in the hospital, or to help him in any way. I felt so guilty, like this had happened to him because I hadn’t taken good enough care of him. Here I was, out in LA, chasing my dream, when I should have been doing more for him. But I also knew I had my own family now, and I had to put them first.

It was a very difficult time, with so many emotions ricocheting around inside of me.
Is this ever going to work? Am I ever going to see anything out of this? What if I end up going back to Michigan anyway?
I knew that couldn’t happen, ever, and I pulled myself together. I vowed, again, I’d never leave LA. And I limited my contact with my family back in Michigan, because talking to them made me feel like a loser.

I had made some initial progress with my film,
Young Boys, Inc
. I’d managed to attract the interest of director Reginald Hudlin, and my friend Anthony and I had found a manager.
But after nearly a year of being convinced it was about to happen for us at any moment, while Anthony lived on our couch, Anthony and I had a falling-out. That was it, not only with our friendship, but also with the movie. Clearly, it wasn’t working out.

I still worked at the Veterans Administration, and I was also doing some bouncing at Timmy Nolan’s Tavern and Grill in Toluca Lake. While there, I made a good friend, Trevor Ziemba, a police officer who also did security for fitness icon Billy Blanks. Trevor took a liking to me and used his influence to land me a job as a security guard on movie sets. This was the best thing to happen to me since I’d left the NFL. The job was a minimum of twelve hours a day, and it paid $12 an hour, $18 if we did music videos or commercials, so I instantly doubled my earnings.

There was just one problem: my attitude. Many of my coworkers had recently been released from prison. My supervisors had barely finished high school, and yet they talked to me like I was an ex-con: “Go over there. Tuck in your shirt.”

I didn’t like it. At all. In fact, I was often really offended. My ego once again reared its ugly head. Even though I was making good money, because I hated being talked down to, I became depressed. Even after the humbling of janitorial work, I felt I was still this big-time ballplayer, and now I was working for people beneath me. I was hurt by my situation, and so I had a very bad attitude.

And then, one day, it hit me:
Terry, look at what you have here. Really sit down and examine it
. I was working on my first movie,
Man on the Moon
, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman. There I was, at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown LA, wide-eyed, watching them move the lights and cameras, learning where the trailers were and what
time they went to lunch. All I had to do for my job was to keep an eye on the extras, and so I had plenty of opportunity to observe everything else.

It was heaven. For lunch, there was steak and lobster and crab. I couldn’t believe it. Now, of course, I’ve never had that again, even as an actor. But it was an amazing moment in my life. I’d literally been starving, you know, digging in the couch cushions in search of money for a burger. But now I could eat on the set, leaving Rebecca and the kids to have whatever was at home. And I was learning all of these film facts I never would have known unless I was on a set.

You are making more than double what you were making at your Veterans Administration job. They feed you. You get to spend twelve hours a day on a movie set, watching how all of these movies are made. This is basically paid film school, if you just open your eyes and see where you are
.

I went home that night and told Rebecca what I’d realized.

“This is a godsend,” I said. “My attitude has been totally wrong. Right now, I have to treat this job as if I’m getting paid a million dollars a day.”

From that moment on, I ironed my shirts every day. I made sure my flashlight had batteries. I gassed up my car the night before. I decided everything was going to be a learning experience, and I was going to make good use of every single moment of every single day. I was the super security guard. There were days when I worked twelve hours, and I didn’t have time to work out. So if I was at my guard post watching a trailer, and there was nobody in sight, I jogged in place for an hour, and that was my day’s workout. I did push-ups. If there was a light post, I did pull-ups.

I wasn’t going to let my brain atrophy, either, so I went to the
library and filled up a gym bag with books on the entertainment industry. And when no one was looking, I sat and read book after book.

It had taken me only a few weeks to realize that standing there for twelve hours a day, staring at a wall, was making my brain shrink. Every hour was one in which I could learn. I had to constantly grow, and I’m still like that. My kids know that my car runs on gas and audio books. The way I look at it is that in the hour it took me to get from here to there, I could have learned something that changed my life. I was actually feeling positive about my job, and my life, for the first time in months. And then, one day, I was sitting down on a chair I’d found, when my supervisor came by.

“What are you doing sitting down?” he said.

“We can’t sit down?” I said. “I’m doing my job.”

“No, no, no, there’s no sitting down on your post,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” I said, standing up.

Meanwhile, across the street, one of his friends who also worked for us, and was wearing the same uniform as me, was sitting in a chair.

“He’s sitting there,” I said, pointing across the way.

“No, no, no, I’m talking to you,” my supervisor said.

So I folded up my chair, and I stood for the rest of the day.

Another day, that same supervisor came up and nodded at me.

“Go get some lunch,” he said.

I nodded back and walked off to get lunch. Another supervisor saw me.

“Why’d you leave your post?” he asked.

“Well, I was told I could get lunch.”

“No, you never leave your post.”

So I went back to my post, and I wondered what was going
on.
Was this a game, or a mere unfortunate coincidence? Was I being hazed like I had been in football camp, or did these supervisors never talk to one another about how things were done?
The one thing I did know was that I never wanted anyone to ever have to discipline me. I wanted and needed that job too much. I decided I was going to do them one better. I threw away the chair, and I never sat again. I packed my own lunch along with my library books. I didn’t care what anybody else was doing. I vowed they would never have to correct me, ever again. When my supervisor saw me jogging in place, he couldn’t say anything about that.

“I’m up,” I said, smiling.

“Go get some lunch,” he said.

“I’m good,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

I had my lunch in my bag, but I didn’t want them to see me eat.

This was the best job I’d had in several years. Forget saving, but at least now we were at even, and we could eat and put gas in our car. On payday, I could never risk the extra time it took to have my check mailed to our house, so I always went into the security office to pick it up. There was one guy who loved to taunt me.

“You used to play in the NFL, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I mean, what happened? Why are you doing this?”

“Hey, man, everybody’s got to work, right?”

I reached for my check. He pulled it back.

“Was it drugs? Were you on drugs?”

“No, sir, I was never on drugs.”

“Oh, okay, so you just kind of messed up. It don’t make no sense, man.”

I kept my eyes on my check the whole time.

“Yeah, so what is it like in the NFL?” he said, holding the check.

I didn’t want to answer, and I’d honestly become quite annoyed with all of the questions. But, looking back, if I was in his position, I’m sure I would have wondered the same thing. To say his interest was awkward was an understatement, but I was working, and for the moment, I had to avoid taking offense.

“Yeah, you know, it was tough,” I said. “It was the NFL. May I have my check, please?”

“Yeah, here you go,” he said, finally handing it over.

I knew this was the best job for me at the moment, and I had to hang on to it.

One day, I was standing at my post, with a book open, when my supervisor drove by and saw me. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said. “Whatcha doing, reading?”