Two Daddies, One Graduation

In the weeks leading up to my Yale graduation, I realized that I was reliving my teenage years all over again. The feeling of being trapped. The dread of coming home from school. The tiptoeing around a powerful, volatile male figure. Only this time, I had exchanged Daddy for Conspiracy.

Commencement was supposed to be a joyous time, and it sort of was. Somehow, despite my overall hatred of Yale, I had managed to make it through all four years. Academically, I was in the top third of my class, officially cum laude. The African-American student body had voted me "most artistic" woman, in recognition of all of the roles I had played in various theater productions.

I had accomplished everything I set out to do and more.

I had no job, no money and no clue, but I had reached this remarkable milestone. After 17 straight years of schooling, from age five to almost age 22, I was done. No more teachers, no more books.

My family came into town to help me celebrate. First to arrive were my brother and my mom, a few days ahead of Foster Mama. My dad arrived on graduation day itself, and boy, was he sour.

In retrospect, I can see that my dad was worried and angry about the antics of his two daughters. My older sister was five months' pregnant with no husband. A few days before, she had informed my dad that instead of moving to Detroit to be with him, she was moving to South Carolina to be with my mom.

Stung by that turn of events, Daddy arrived in New Haven to find me living with Conspiracy, his shorter, skinnier, angrier and only slightly younger twin.

Daddy reacted by lashing out.

My mother had crocheted a beautiful white dress for me. My dad took one look at it and declared that he thought graduation was a formal occasion, not an excuse to wear a "rape-me dress." He continued the sexually inappropriate theme at my post-Commencement dinner. We were in a fancy restaurant, with tablecloths, and he ordered me to "lower your voice because you're coming across as a ho."

Yep, I was a Yale graduate. But my dad talked down to me like I was a cheap hooker.

I could see Foster Mama's eyes flicking back and forth between Conspiracy and my dad, my dad and Conspiracy. She didn't say a word, but she didn't need to. She was thinking that I had found an exact replica of my dad and moved in with him.

I was thinking the same thing.

Slightly different package, same f*d up dynamic.

After the ceremony, my family packed up and went home.

My now-former classmates went off to their presumably fabulous new lives.

I remained in New Haven with Conspiracy.

I wanted to move to New York or Los Angeles to be an acclaimed, award-winning actress. I didn't have the money, and I didn't have a plan. But with Conspiracy, I had subsidized rent and emotional dependency and what I thought was a great friendship.

So I stayed put.

I was so mad at my dad, I didn't speak to him for nine months, not even on his birthday.

Much later, when we patched things up, he told me exactly what he thought of Conspiracy: "You already have a Daddy, you didn't need two."

Conspiracy Diaries Part 20 of 25 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25)
Conspiracy Lessons Learned 1-4 (1 2 3 4)

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Janitorial Urges and Summer Flings

The person I kinda wanted to give my virginity up to was a janitor at Yale. Janitor was fine. Dark chocolate with luscious, plum-colored lips.

Right before the end of my freshman year, I screwed up every ounce of courage that I had and told him I liked him.

I can't overemphasize how difficult that was for me. I was almost paralyzingly shy around men I was interested in. More like completely shut down. Often, I had a hard time getting anything out of my mouth at all.

I entered the summer aglow with the half-promised notion that when the fall semester started, Janitor might become my first real boyfriend.

I went home to Detroit to stay with Foster Mama, who'd called me up a few weeks earlier and said, "I was afraid you was going to run home to your real mama, so I said, 'Let me call up my child and see what her plans are.'" It meant so much to know that her home was still open to me.

The most eventful happening of the summer was that finally, at age 19, I learned to drive. My dad bought me a $500, six-year-old, stick-shift-hoopty Ford Escort that needed tons of repairs. My dad still purrs with pride at how he made me cut my fingernails, install my own brake pads and change my own oil (all without really knowing what the hell I was doing).

I scared the piss out of both Foster Mama and Daddy with my bad driving. With Foster Mama, I almost hit a light pole. With Daddy, I stalled in the middle of a busy intersection, unable to get the car into first gear. All eclipsed by my ultimate crowning moment – backing my car into Foster Mama's porch, knocking a whole column of bricks askew.

But that's not all that happened.

I started fooling around with a friend's almost ex-boyfriend. My friend claimed she didn't mind, but Foster Mama didn't buy it. She expressed her disapproval, telling me that messing with my friend's boyfriend was a good way to lose my friend.

But initially, I didn't listen, leading to a couple of heavy-petting sessions in the front seat of a car and the dark quiet of a school playground. Sessions that left me with the increasingly familiar feeling of stop-go, no-yes as the pleasure of my body warred with the shame of my mind.

I truly believed that premarital sex would doom me to eternal damnation because it necessitated breaking my third-grade virginity pledge.

A few weeks into my would-be summer fling, I got cold feet. I didn't think I could fool around with him and not get emotionally attached, and what was the point? We were both going back to school the following month.

He agreed and said it would probably be better if we just stayed friends. Then he added, "I've been feeling that what we have had is mostly physical, and it doesn't feel right – it almost feels like a one-night stand."

He was 100% right. But hearing him say that made me feel like I was a soiled garment that was getting him grimy and greasy. I had less sexual morals, apparently, than a guy. What kind of woman was I?

So I went back to school to pick things up where me and Janitor had left them ... only to have things go nowhere. He'd avoid me, stand me up, not return my calls. And then he'd act really happy to see me, kiss me on the forehead and lamely explain that he was going through a lot and was "trying to get himself together."

Eventually I gave up on Janitor and settled for a Puerto Rican drug dealer.

And 12 years and tons of drama later, my friend and Almost Ex-Boyfriend married each other, proving that Foster Mama really did know what the hell she was talking about.

(Virginity Diaries Part 2 of 11: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Lessons Learned 1 2 3)

At Home With My New Mama

Foster Mama was a straight-up hustler, but she was also a down-home, big-hearted person.

Life with her meant trips to the mall, home-made BBQ dinners, fast food, roadside carnivals, after-hours clubs, summer picnics, camaraderie and cat fights with my new foster sisters, rowdy dancing, drive-in movies, raunchy girl talk, loud laughter and an endless supply of mother wit.

She was the kind of person who had seen it all and done half of it.

She was the one who explained to me that my dad's bow-wow babes were really hookers. I naively protested my dad's innocence. "Hummph!" Foster Mama sniffed. "I saw him last week at a Coney Island with a woman I know is a ho."

Daddy would drive across town to visit me, and talk to Foster Mama at length about how I moved out because I was hard-headed and stubborn and didn't want to do chores.

Not true.

I did more chores at Foster Mama's in a week than I'd done at my dad's house in a year.

Despite her free-wheeling nature, when it came to running her house, Foster Mama had rules. There were dishes to be washed, floors to be mopped, tables to be dusted, beds to be made, dinners to be cooked.

Some of her rules related to hygiene. You were to take a bath or wash up at the sink every single morning without fail.

I honestly didn't know that's what normal people did. I washed my face and brushed my teeth twice a day, but the rest of my body got attention once a week. If that.

"Lord, that girl will take care of that face," I'd hear her remark to the other girls as I performed my nightly Noxzema ritual. Then she'd add that maybe I should wash my ass, too.

Thank God she took me in.

I was starved for order and for maternal affection.

From ages 12 to 16, I hadn't seen my own mother at all. Just before I entered 7th grade, Mommy tried one last time to win custody of us. During our annual summer visit, she took us to see a lawyer. When Daddy arrived, she presented him with court papers that said he couldn't take us back to Detroit.

He responded by bellowing, "Kids, get in the damned car!"

He got arrested for kidnapping ... but the charges were dropped when he proved that Michigan had jurisdiction over our custody case, and that everything my mom had tried to do through her local Pennsylvanian courts was null and void.

I had no more face-to-face contact with my mother until my junior year of high school.

With Foster Mama, suddenly, I had a mom again.

Someone to do my hair. Someone to buy me clothes. Someone to talk to about boys and sex and relationships, not that I had anything to talk about. I was the only virgin in the house, aside from the precocious three-year-old. So I mostly listened to the other girls' tales of love lost and sex had.

Foster Mama had been married once. Now her attitude was, "F*ck a damn husband! Unless he's somebody else's."

She'd never had children of her own, save for one miscarriage.

And she'd been in the foster-care business for over 10 years.

We were part business decision, part labor of love. For each child in her care, the state paid her $200-$300 per month.

So year in and year out, she took in the girls that nobody wanted and dealt with their emotional damage. She taught them how to cook and clean and care for their kids. And she helped set some of her "chirren" up with apartments, cars and furniture after they turned 18.

I loved Foster Mama, and I literally followed her from room to room like a baby chick.

She never once ridiculed me or tried to make me stop.

Introduction to the Detroit Hustle

Before I moved into the house for unwed teenage moms, I'd lived a pretty sheltered existence. Even though we ate welfare cheese and got free lunch and wore second-hand clothes and lived in a raggedy house, my family was mostly middle class in its values, if not in its outward appearances.

Foster Mama was anything but. She was unabashedly old-school ghetto, the queen of the Detroit hustle:

• She had two different names and two different ID cards that she used for different purposes.
  
  
• She had a beauty shop in her basement, and you could bet your life she wasn't reporting the income to any government entity in existence.
  
  
• She had an arrangement worked out with a cashier at a local supermarket. The cashier would ring up a small portion of Foster Mama's groceries. Foster Mama would slip her $50 as a bribe and take home most of her shopping cart for free.
  
  
• She kept in touch with someone who worked at a beauty school. He'd leave a stash of stolen hair supplies in a dumpster, and she'd swing by in the evening to pick it up.
  
  
• She knew where to buy food stamps for half their face value from local drug addicts who bought their drugs with their government provisions.
  
  
• She had a business relationship with one of Detroit's biggest drug dealers, an unassuming, unattractive seemingly poor guy – until he pulled a four-inch-thick wad of cash from his sock. He was her loan shark. (And he died a particularly bloody death a few years later – 40-something bullet wounds.)
  
  
• One of Drug Dealer's many side businesses was running Detroit's illegal lottery, where people would pay a nickel, dime or quarter to play the three-digit or four-digit numbers. For a while, Foster Mama was "the house" where people placed their bets, and I was the accountant who used my straight A's in algebra to keep track of the earnings. But Foster Mama even had a hustle on top of this hustle – every so often, but not often enough that Drug Dealer would get suspicious – she arranged for herself and a friend to hit the winning number for $500 and split it 50-50.
  
  
• And my absolute favorite of all her hustles was her booster clothing liquidations. She had a working relationship with boosters, slang for professional shoplifters. They would steal clothes from department stores, and Foster Mama would hold clearance sales in her dining room. The rule was, the consumer paid 1/3 of the ticket price. I went off to college looking real cute in all my 67 percent off stolen outfits.

I wish I could say I disapproved of Foster Mama's scheming, hustling ways, but truthfully, I kind of admired them.

At least until she eventually hustled me, and until I eventually realized that in all of her hustling, she never, ever came out ahead.

But those realizations came years later.

In the short term, I blossomed under her unorthodox and unethical tutelage in a way that I hadn't under my dad's rule.

House for Unwed Teenage Moms

When I became an emancipated minor just shy of my 18th birthday, I went straight from my dad's cluttered kingdom to a neat, clean queendom ruled by Foster Mama.

Foster Mama specialized in the least sought-after foster kids imaginable: teenage foster girls who were now mothers themselves.

When I moved in, there was a twenty-year-old mom and her adorable three-year-old daughter. She'd been with Foster Mama since she was 16. And before that, she'd been in a group home, the last-ditch institution for foster kids who couldn't get adopted or placed in private homes. And before that, she'd been severely beaten by her own mother, who was still alive.

The other girl, who was a year younger than me, was very, very pregnant. She'd recently run away to Ohio with her boyfriend, and the cops had just brought her back. Her mother was dead. And she once admitted, with a mixture of embarrassment, sadness and humor, that her mom had tried to "rob a damned D.O.T. bus."

The saddest case was that of little Ingenue. She was 12 when I first moved in. Foster Mama had taken care of Ingenue and her two little brothers back when they were still in preschool. She had pictures of them in their little school clothes and was very close to adopting all three of them, when their biological grandmother stepped in and fought for custody. Not because the grandmother loved them, but because she wanted the welfare check.

Now seven years later, Ingenue lived in a broken-down house on the East Side of Detroit with her grandmother and a host of drug-addicted uncles, while her two juvenile-delinquent brothers ran the streets unsupervised.

(Foster Mama eventually won custody of teenage Ingenue, but the story doesn't have a happy ending. Ingenue, an unwed mother of two, was shot dead by one of her baby's fathers at age 19, in front of one of her toddlers. And Foster Mama died of heartbreak shortly thereafter.)

Moving into foster care was my first real inkling that as bad and as sad and as weird as I'd had it, there were a lot of kids who'd had it much, much worse.

I wasn't a high-school dropout with a baby. I was a high-school scholar with a future.

Daddy Blues

My junior year of high school was one of the darkest years of my life. I was so depressed, I couldn't feel anything at all. I was numb.

Somehow or another, I started seeing a shrink at the Lafayette Clinic. Once a week, I'd take the bus downtown, and sit with my male psychologist.

And say nothing.

I'd just stare at the wall until time was up, answering his questions in one syllable or not at all. Then I'd walk to Greektown for a Stroh's ice cream.

It wasn't that I didn't want to talk.

It was just that I'd learned that silence was a powerful protection against Daddy's tirades. If I didn't talk, there was less chance that some innocuous comment would send my dad over the edge and into the school principal's office, where I would surely be embarrassed. Or that I'd mouth off to him and end up getting a backhand slap to the forehead.

So I developed the habits of stony silence and of tuning out my surroundings.

Along with skipping school ... often. Arriving whenever I felt like it, but staying until well after school was out ... because the school hallway was so much better than being home with my dad.

During this period of dark depression, the unthinkable happened. I got a B on my report card. In journalism. From my favorite teacher.

I hadn't seen one of those since the 5th grade, when I'd decided that if I couldn't be pretty, and I couldn't be well-dressed, and I couldn't be well-fed, and I couldn't have a mother, and I couldn't have a normal dad, and I couldn't have a normal life, at least I could be the smartest person in my school, with the report card to prove it.

Now I was out of the running for high-school valedictorian, which had always been my goal.

Things got worse in senior year, when I became a de facto only child. Alone with Daddy, with no siblings to cushion the blows. My older sister was away at college. My younger brother had visited my mom for the summer and decided not to come back. And my Best Friend, who had always lived a few blocks away, was going through her own family turmoil and had just been uprooted to a different neighborhood.

So I was dealing with my dad all by my lonesome, which also meant dealing with his Bow Wow Babes. They would raid my bedroom while I was at school and steal my stuff. Once, my purse went missing, and I eventually found it in my dad's bedroom closet.

Another time, a rash of expensive things disappeared from my room. All of my makeup, plus a $42 necklace-and-earring set I'd bought myself with money from babysitting or pushing shopping carts or shelving library books or doing office work or winning writing contests.

I was livid. My dad said he would get my stuff back, but he didn't. So I wrote him the meanest, rudest, three-page piece-of-my-mind that any angry teenager ever dared to write to her ill-tempered father.

And I asked my journalism teacher, who had a daughter around my age, if I could move in with her. She turned me down flat, but discussed my situation with the vice principal of my school. His wife worked at an agency that placed black foster kids into homes.

And ultimately, that's what I became. Two months shy of my high-school graduation and my 18th birthday, I became an emancipated minor and unofficial foster kid.

Mixed Messages and Bow Wow Babes

Saying my dad often behaved inappropriately is like saying rain is soggy. Inappropriate and my dad go together like coffee and cream.

Most dads with daughters don't walk around the house in their underwear. But my dad sure did. And still does.

Most dads don't brag about how much poontang they're getting. But my dad sure did. And still does.

Most dads don't make flamboyant statements about how high their IQ is and how long their penis is. But my dad sure did. And still does.

Living with my dad was a study in mixed messages.

My older sister and I were expected to be smart. We were expected to bring home good report cards. We were expected to go to college. And we were even held to a higher academic standard than our younger brother, because "little girls mature faster than little boys."

But back of all that expectation was my dad's constant assertion that every woman who succeeded in business was a dizzy broad who screwed her way into a position of power.

The zenith was when Detroit Mayor Coleman Young got caught with his pants down. A high-ranking employee from the Department of Public Works hit him with a paternity suit – and won. "How the hell does a thirty-something chickiepoo get to run the Department of Public Works?" my dad would grumble aloud at the TV, and then answer his own question.

Talk about mixed messages.

My dad's idea of sex education was to counsel me and my sister to remain virgins because "sex was a powerful, special thing" that we needed to be mature enough to handle.

But then again, one of his favorite phrases was, "Candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker," and we got to see the truth of that statement close up. My dad had casual encounter after casual encounter with some seriously ugly creatures that I nicknamed Bow Wow Babes.

My dad would show up, usually on a Friday or Saturday night, with some tipsy woman. He'd sit her at the kitchen table (along with us kids) and feed her some (usually burnt) dish, accompanied by a glass of his famous juice – generic Kool-Aid mixed with pulpy lemonade mixed with random spices mixed with sugar. Or, if he had some in the house, wine.

After a short, romantic dinner for five, my dad would take said Bow Wow Babe up to his room and close the door. We knew what that meant. We'd better not knock, and we'd better not disturb Daddy.

A half-hour or so later, the door would open and Daddy would whisk said Bow Wow Babe out of the house and into the Detroit night, and we'd never see that particular (toothless, ignorant, incoherent) one again. Often, he'd leave a used condom floating limply in the toilet.

Talk about mixed messages.

He'd urge us to be careful as we walked to school, because it wasn't uncommon for Detroit schoolgirls to get raped, and occasionally killed, by serial rapists who never seemed to get caught.

But his oft-repeated rape-prevention advice was to never "play games with men" by getting them all excited and then telling them no. He explained that it was physically painful for a man to try to stop once aroused, and if a women put herself in that position, she brought it all on herself.

Talk about mixed messages.

• Sex was special and sacred, but not so special and sacred that my father didn't have a different Bow Wow Babe every weekend (and sometimes more than one during the same weekend).
• I was supposed to take his advice and be a smart virgin, but if I wanted to get anywhere with my career I really needed to be a dizzy, manipulative broad who slept with the right men.
• And I needed to say yes to all men in all sexual circumstances or they'd be in physical pain and have no choice but to rape me.

Um ... ok, Daddy ... I think I got it.

Meet My Dad

Everyone who knows me asks the same question: Why don't you write about your dad?

They say that because they know he's about 10 billion blog posts waiting to happen. A character so infamous he was lampooned by a Detroit TV station and became a local celebrity against his will. The alpha and omega of all my man issues. And without question the most influential person in my life.

I don't write about him primarily because I don't want to hurt his feelings. He's still alive. And I wouldn't want him to be offended if he happened to stumble across this blog.

But I really can't write the next few chapters without explaining how it is that I came to college completely messed up, an emotional wreck and a relationship disaster waiting to happen.

So you've got to meet Daddy in order to meet 19-year-old me.

In a nutshell, my dad is a bitter, frustrated genius with minimal social skills. He reads voraciously and incessantly. National Geographic. Time. Road & Track. The Detroit News (until some labor dispute pissed him off in the 80's, and he permanently switched to the Detroit Free Press).

He doodles incessantly on yellow legal pads. Not drawings. Calculations. Math formulas. Half-formed dreams of car parts he wants to design.

His house is a wreck of Oprah-esque "clean up your clutter" proportions. Magazines and periodicals stacked to the ceiling. Car parts strewn hither and thither. Nothing ever, ever thrown away. And don't forget the grime. Growing up, we were the only family on the block to have motorcycles in our living room ... and a live mushroom growing under the bathroom sink.

Then there's my dad's personal appearance. He's unkempt, bedraggled, snaggletoothed. He hasn't shaved in more than 30 years, and his sad, little, nappy beard absolutely refuses to grow. It just lays on his face in a curly tangle and hides his drop-dead-gorgeous dimples.

People who don't know him thinks he's a bum, that he's ignorant, that he's just another inner-city casualty. What they don't know is that he came from an uppity, snooty, could-almost-pass-for-white-if-the-hair-was-a-little-bit-straighter family of school teachers and administrators. That he had a somewhat privileged upbringing as the son of a school principal.

And that he basically couldn't keep a job because he knew more than his supervisors and wasn't shy about telling them so in colorful, profanity-laced language.

Growing up, everyone – and I do mean everyone – accused me of looking and acting just like him, which was the easiest way to send me into instant infuriation.

When I was in 5th grade, I wrote a short story called "I live in a madhouse" which basically summed up my take on a colorful and unusual childhood that included the weirdest dad in the entire universe and no mom.

Don't get me wrong. I have a mom. She too is alive and well.

But my dad literally stole me and my two siblings from my mom, obtained the iron-clad blessing of the Michigan Third Circuit Court and raised us as a single parent.

How in the world did that happen?!?

Easy.

My mom has bipolar disorder. And although my dad is clearly as crazy as my mom, he doesn't have the commitment papers to prove it. So he won sole custody and raised us in his cluttered Michigan madhouse, while my mom lived 500 miles away in Pennsylvania with a new husband 30 years her senior.

Life with Daddy was a trip, and it paved the way for all the trippy, sucky, yucky relationships that dotted the landscape of my 20's.