PART I SIR ROBERT
Okay, BITCH! I got another one of your FUCKINâ numbers! Iâve already got seven! No, this ainât the number, call the other number! You call the other fuckinâ number and you gotta wait for another fuckinâ number! Then call fuckinâ Baltimore! Then find out what state youâre in. Then call THAT fuckinâ number! And then find out they didnât take the fuckinâ Medicare!â
My mom was on the phone again.
âNow, cunt Mary motherfuckers of the planet, YOU do this shit! All this shit! Every fuckinâ time for TWENTY YEARS I have called these motherfuckers itâs like this! Donât know what the fuck youâre talkinâ about!â
I was around fifteen years old, just getting into hip-hop and recording everything I could all the time, songs off the radio, stuff off the TV, my friends goofing around. So one day I decided to record one of her phone calls.
âFuck it! Iâm a psychopathic, cocksuckinâ fuckinâ sinner! Jesus, if youâre going to do something to me, then DO IT! I canât fuckinâ take it!â
What you canât hear on the page is that sheâs screeching so loud the neighbors can hear it in the next apartment, and what you canât see is that sheâs frantically pacing back and forth, chain-smoking, slamming her fists on the kitchen counter, and throwing shit at the wall, like a child having a tantrum because sheâs been put on hold for the millionth time.
âYeah, you stupid cunt, itâs correct! Fuckinâ bastards! Fuckinâ swine! Fuckinâ motherfucker! Are you gonna fuck with me or help me?!â
It was like this every day, and this was mild.
âFuckinâ bitch! Fuckinâ knows how to fuckinâ tell me how to fuckinâ CALM DOWN! She canât even fuckinâ see the name of the fuckinâ benefits!â
She was calling some government agency about her medication, whichever pill she was taking that month to balance her brain. Zoloft, maybe. I canât remember them all. One day it was her medication, the next day it was welfare or food stamps.
âAll I want to know is if these GODDAMN people pay for this FUCKINâ medicine! Because what am I supposed to fuckinâ do?! Go back to the fuckinâ doctor here? This medicine they donât pay for. I donât know⌠write me out another one! Okay, here, go to the pharmacy. Oh, they donât pay for this. Okay, let me go back to the doctor again! Here, hmmm, letâs see⌠take this medicine!â
She was a sick person, and she was in pain, so she was lashing out at the people who were trying to help her. Which is pretty much the story of her life.
âThanks! Thatâs all the FUCK I wanted to know! Why couldnât I get somebody a fuckinâ half hour ago to say that! Weâre dropping like flies âcause we fuckinâ want to kill ourselves so they get a POPULATION CONTROL!â
Whenever I tell my story and I get to the stuff about my mom, part of me feels like a liar and a fraud, like I must be exaggerating this stuff to make myself sound tougher, because if I tell it this way, Iâve got one of the craziest American come-up stories in history. Then I go back and listen to this tape, and I remember: âOh. Right. It was actually more fucked up than what I usually tell people.â
Still, as strange and fucked up as my life may have been because of her, her life was actually way worse than mine.
My mom was born in 1961 in Washington, D.C. Back then, before all the husbands, before she was Terry Lee Bell or Terry Lee Stone or Terry Lee Bransford, she was Terry Lee Miller. But all the rotating last names didnât matter so much because my whole life everyone just called her Terry Lee.
By the time I was born, my mother was estranged from her family, so I donât know a whole lot about them. From what I understand, they were well-off. Not super-wealthy or anything, but they owned a house and a car and things like that. My grandfather, I donât have any memories of him at all, not even what his name was. I know my grandmotherâs name, but only because I found it once on the back of an old photograph. I donât have many pictures of me as a child, a dozen maybe, but thereâs this one Polaroid of me as a ten-month-old baby, and on the bottom it says, âNov. 27, 1990 Bobbyâs first cucumber at his Grand-mas Judie.â
So that was her name: Judie.
My mom told me her heritage was German and English, which to look at her was true, I guess. She had green eyes and pale skin with freckles and brown hair that she always wore short, never past her shoulders. I never saw my mom as ugly, but I wouldnât say she was particularly attractive. Her teeth were all crooked and filled with gaps and she was insecure about them. Weâd be watching Seinfeld in the apartment, and whenever she laughed sheâd cover her mouth, even with nobody else there.
I only know two stories about my mom growing up. The first one she always used to tell was how when she was five she got this brand-new Schwinn bicycle, the one with the banana seat. She loved it so much and she used to ride around her neighborhood and it was on one of those rides that she was sexually assaulted for the first time. A man in the neighborhood exposed himself to her and made her touch his penis. She went and told her mom, but her mom reacted like too many people do when it comes to sexual abuse. She tried to minimize it, bury it. She told my mom that the man was just playing a game and not to worry and letâs all get back to pretending everything is normal and perfect. Which fucked my mom up, obviously, as it would.
The other story my mom told me was how when she was fourteen she brought home a boy she wanted to date. His name was Duncan, and he was black. âDuncan was so beautiful and sweet and kind,â she used to say, but then her parents completely flipped out on her. âWe donât mix with those people,â they said, and they made her break up with him. Something about that incident had a huge impact on her, though Iâm not entirely sure why. For the rest of her life, she was attracted to black men. She had all of her children with black men, and I only ever saw her with one man who wasnât black, her second husband, Kenny. At the same time, deep down, because of her upbringing, part of her was every bit as racist as her parents.
The Duncan story and the bicycle penis-touching story are the only ones I know. She never told me anything else; it was like she didnât have a childhood. Everything else I know about her starts when she was seventeen, when she ran away from home and fell into drugs and prostitution. I donât know if she ran away because her parents were abusive or if thatâs when her issues with mental illness started to come up. All I know is that my mom never fit in, with her family, or with anyone, anywhere.
The impression I have is that when she ran away she was a stoner pothead, hanging out with the white guys listening to AC/DC and the brothers listening to Run-DMC. I imagine her life being like that movie Detroit Rock City, a bunch of burnouts having a good time trying to scam their way into a KISS concert. But things turned dark pretty fast.
She never talked much about her prostitution years. The subject would only come up every now and then, typically out of anger, as a weapon she could wield against me. Iâd be watching cartoons and bouncing off the walls, being a typical kid, and sheâd flip the fuck out and start screaming at me, and Iâd be like, âBut Mom. Iâm just having fun.â
âFun?â sheâd scream. âYou want to have fun?! You should just be grateful that you have a fuckinâ place to sleep and live and eat, because I sure fuckinâ didnât. You donât even fuckinâ know. When I was a kid, I didnât have anywhere to go. I had to walk the fuckinâ streets at three a.m. getting picked up by truckers who raped me and threw me out and left me for dead on the highway!â
In another story she told me, she was in an apartment with these two guys and one of them put a butcher knife on the stove until it was red-hot and then he held her down and sodomized her and said if she made a noise heâd stab her with it.
âHe sodomized me,â she said, red-faced and screaming, as usual. âThat means he stuck his dick in my ass.â
She told me that when I was maybe about ten.
Then there was the one she told me about why she was mostly deaf in her left ear. It was permanently damaged from when some man had been beating on her.
Once she started in with these stories, sheâd get so wrapped up in her own pain that sheâd start lashing out, like she did with the people on the phone. Since I was the only person there, sheâd be lashing out at me. âYou donât know what this world is,â and âYouâre gonna feel real pain one day,â and âI hope you feel pain!â and âYou deserve to feel pain!â Sheâd be screaming this shit at me, and Iâd be thinking to myself, âBitch, Iâm just trying to watch SpongeBob.â
At some point in those years my mom married her first husband, Eugene Bell, a guy she met at a party. Eugene played guitar and buckets on the street. Black guy. Dark skin. They had three kids together before getting divorced. Thereâs Amber, whoâs the oldest, seven years older than me; then Geanie, whoâs five years older; and then my brother Jesse, whoâs only two years older than me. When Jesse was five, Eugene took him and climbed up a tree with him so he could videotape a woman undressing in her apartment. He did this with his kidâthatâs the kind of guy Eugene was.
Even though he got caught doing that shit, he still had primary custody. Which is crazy, but it probably says a lot about my mom. So my siblings sort of lived with us sometimes, but mostly they didnât. I have no memories of us sharing a home and being a family. The only real memory I have is them throwing me a birthday party when I turned four. It was weird because I didnât know what a birthday was, since no one had never celebrated my birthday before. I woke up and walked out to the living room and in this beautiful morning light there were balloons everywhere and cut-up pieces of construction paper all over the floor like confetti. I went and woke up my brother and sisters and said, âI donât know whatâs going on. I think a clown broke into the house or something.â
âDude,â they said, âitâs your birthday!â
âMy what?â
âYour birthday!â
And that was the last time I saw them. Not too long after that Eugene threw them on a Greyhound bus and took them to California and by my fifth birthday they were gone, which I know for a fact because now that I knew what a birthday was I woke up and ran out of my bedroom yelling, âItâs my birthday, Mom!â But I didnât get shit. No balloons, no cake. Nothing.
From then on, it was like I was an only child. We never had any family besides me and my mom. Whatâs crazy is that I felt that way even though my momâs parents still lived a few miles away. Iâve got the picture of me eating cucumbers at Judieâs house, so I have to assume my mom and her parents tried to reestablish their relationship, but it didnât work out. The only real memory I have of my grandmother is calling her and asking if I could come spend the weekend, and her giving me a bunch of excuses why I couldnât.
âCan I come and stay with you?â
âI donât think we can right now.â
âWhat about the guest room?â
âWell, itâs being worked on.â
âWhat about the couch?â
âOh, you donât want to sleep on the couch.â
âWhat about the floor? Iâll sleep on the floor.â
I kept trying, and she kept saying no. Part of me, thinking back to the story about Duncan and why my mom ran away, wants to believe that the rift between my mom and her family was because I was black, because they were racist. And that had to have been part of it; racism never makes anything any easier. But ultimately I think the reason my motherâs family wasnât in our life was because of my mother. Some people are so toxic you have no choice but to cut them off, and my mom was that person. Because of the cucumber photo, I have to believe that my grandparents at least tried to help me and eventually gave up because they were like, âWe canât fuck with this bitch. Sheâs crazy.â Which is why it was always just me and Terry Lee, and everything I know about her family and her life is from her screaming at me during SpongeBob.
But as fucked up as my momâs stories are, I absolutely believe that theyâre true. Youâd think that someone like her wouldnât be the most reliable narrator of her own life, that her stories must be delusional or detached from reality. But whenever she talked, she talked like someone whoâd been scarred, whoâd relived those stories a million times in her head. The details were always the same, too, like they were burned into her memory. That shitâs real, for sure.
Then thereâs my dad.
The hard thing about my dadâs story is that itâs impossible to know whatâs true and whatâs not because heâs a fuckinâ liar. All I can do is piece together the half-true stories heâs already told me because he isnât in my life right now. Maybe he will be again someday, but recently I had to stop talking to him because he asked me for eight hundred grand so he could buy a house and turn it into a studio for his band.
Weâre working on boundaries.
Robert Bryson Hall was born somewhere in Pennsylvania. That much I know is true. I also know he had two brothers. His brother Michael was a cool dude; I got to meet him and know him a bit. There was another brother, too, but I forget his name. He died. It might have been drugs. I have an aunt on that side, too. She sent me a letter a couple of years ago, but Iâve never spoken to her. I think her name is Robin or Roberta or something like that.
Both of my dadâs parents were alcoholics. I never met them because they both died long before I was born. My grandfather, as the story goes, went out on Christmas Eve and got shitfaced drunk and as he was coming up the front steps he slipped on the ice, fell back, hit his head on a rock, knocked himself out, and froze to death in the snow. They found him on Christmas morning. Crazy.
My grandmother had a serious drinking problem, too. What my dad told me about her was that she drank herself into some insane state and had to go to the hospital and practically went into a coma. When she came to the doctors told her, âIf you drink again, youâll die.â Not long after that, she was at a Christmas partyâwhich is weird, because of how her husband wentâand she got drunk and fell asleep in a chair and never woke up.
My dad has told me those stories a few times and the details always add up and thereâs no reason why my dad would lie about how his parents died, but I still canât be sure since heâs told me so many stories where the details donât add up at all. For most of my life, pretty much everything that came out of my dadâs mouth was bullshit. Heâs a slick motherfucker, for sure, the definition of a hustlerâa smooth, silver-tongued dude who can talk his way into or out of just about anything. With the exception of fatherhood. He denied that I was his when I was born, but then he got a paternity test, which I had no idea about until a couple of years ago when my dad, whoâs now a recovering crack addict in his sixties, found out that heâd knocked up a twenty-three-year-old heroin addict even though he got a vasectomy after heâd had me.
âCan you believe this shit?â he said. âI got a vasectomy and Iâm still having another kid.â
âWhat the fuck?â I said. âWhen did you get a vasectomy?â
âAfter I had your ass.â
âDamn. Well, how do you know itâs yours?â
âBecause I got a paternity test.â
That gave me this feeling I couldnât shake, so a couple of months later I called my dad and said, âSo, wait⌠did you get a paternity test with me?â
âFuck yeah!â he said. âYou know I did!â
So that was special. I donât know if the test was something my parents did together, but the safer bet is that the motherfucker snuck me off somewhere and got a paternity test on his ownâyou know, just to be sureâand it came back positive. But he didnât need a test to tell him that. Heâs 100 percent my dad. Weâre both skinny and lanky, both with the same hunched-over posture that we need to work on. The only difference is that while I look mixed, heâs definitely a black guy.
At some point my dad moved to D.C. with huge ambitions as a musician. He played congas and percussion and sang all over the Chocolate City Go-Go scene. He played with Chuck Brown. He played in E.U. What he wanted more than anything was to be Smokey Robinson. Heâd introduce himself that way, too. âHi, my nameâs Smokey.â So everyone called him Smokey, which I find hilarious âcause heâs a crackhead who named himself Smokey. And when it wasnât Smokey Robinson, it was Prince. I think I heard my dad cover âPurple Rainâ about a million times.
My dad was a legit musician, though. He had real talent. But he was also an addict. My whole life Iâve met people who did gigs with him, and theyâve all got stories. After the show, heâd go to the promoter and get the money and then run out on his bandmates. Like, heâd do that to his own people. Did he think he was never going to see them again? But thatâs an addictâs mentality. He cou...