[Analcuck]

CHAPTER ONE:
KUCHI

“Boy, you better get your ass back down there and knock that little mutherfucker right across his lips.”

Mama wasn’t playin’. She didn’t say it mean, she was high, and as Richard Pryor would later point out, it’s hard to be mad when you’re high (I guess he would know), but things had come to a head, and there was no use arguing with her.

Ricky Trujillo had been stealing my lunch money since the first day of school. The already husky boy had been fattening himself up even more on Twinkies and grape Nehi literally on my dime for months. There hadn’t been a day go by since then that I wasn’t terrified he was gonna kick my scrawny little ass.

And it wasn’t just at school. You’d think in a big city like Chicago you could get lost in the shuffle and avoid trouble like that, but you would be wrong. Cities are just like small towns when you’re a kid. You can only walk so far away from the house (or tenement, for most of us).

If you were lucky enough to have a bike, which I wasn’t since my older brothers hadn’t yet passed down the big banana seat Schwinn with the sissy bar to me just yet, you could get away from bullies and thugs quicker if you had to, and you could ride farther away to hang out in places they might not be; but eventually they were gonna get you. It was just a matter of time, and my time had come.

We were living on Erie at the time, about a ten minute drive but a forty minute walk from Talcott Elementary School, so everybody rode the bus, meaning that at least twice a day during the week, there was no escape from other kids who went to the same school. Ricky was about two years older than me but in the same grade. Nobody knew why he had been “left back” twice – he seemed intelligent enough – but regardless of the reason, being thirteen in the 5th grade had its obvious advantages if you were a bully.

Not only could you be the only kid in your class with a moustache, another perk of being a full-blooded Mexican, but you could throw your weight around and get pretty much whatever you wanted. What Ricky most often wanted, apparently, was my lunch money, but occasionally he’d also stop me on the way to the burger store or the convenience store (we had a “store” for everything in those days, didn’t we?) and relieve me of my burger or candy money that I had usually earned from dancing for an aunt or an uncle or some other visiting family friend or relative. I’ll tell you, back then, we’re talking the early to mid-‘60s, a dime could score you some edibles now…and a quarter? Fuggedaboutit!

I’m sure I wasn’t the only slightly malnourished ten-year-old in the projects of Chicago’s North Side in 1965 to be bullied by flunkies for spare change, but I felt like I was. Not long before this encounter my mom had asked me if I’d been eating at school (which, when you were in our circumstances sometimes meant it was the only meal you were gonna get), and I’d told her no - that Ricky had been taking my money, and she was like, “What?! Okay…so the next time you go to school, I want you to put a rock in your hand, one in each hand, and when he tries to take your money, I want you to hit him as hard as you can.” She wasn’t gonna have no Mexican thug beatin’ up on her baby, especially if he was literally starving me.

So I told her okay; she’d convinced me, talked me up - she talked up a good game. Right. So the next time he slapped my pockets and barked “Gimme that money!” I dropped the rocks and gave him my money. I mean, to me he was Goliath, you know? Even if I hit him with rocks in my hands, there was no way I could knock him out – even if I’d wanted to (which I kinda didn’t). And he had this breath that was just nasty, like ass and cat food, and he was a “close talker”, so half my thought process was, just give him the money so you can get away from that breath and maybe avoid getting your butt whooped in the process.

So when I got home and told my mom what had happened she was like, “Oh, hell no; we’re gonna fix this right now,” and she went to one of her mob friends. He was a tall, black Cuban man named “Watusi”. All my mom’s friends had names like that, like “Black Barbara”, “Big Lee”, you know, these were the original “street names”. Who knows? There might’ve even been someone calling themselves “Ozone” out there somewhere at the time. But these people were a little higher up on the crime syndicate ladder than your average street punk.

So she went to Watusi who was a pimp and a hustler over on Madison Street. When I say he was a pimp AND a hustler, I mean that those are two different things. A hustler was sort of a street entrepreneur who had their fingers in a lot of pies. As a matter of fact, Madison Street had their own gang called “The Four Corner Hustlers”, and they later became known as one of the most violent gangs in Chicago history; but at the time they were primarily drug dealers, counterfeiters, and black market merchants. Watusi was a hustler’s hustler, able to cut deals other hustlers couldn’t and procure just about any contraband you could imagine.

But he was also a pimp. A pimp, unlike a mere hustler, sold people’s bodies, both male and female. They were known for being extravagant in their style and demeanor but didn’t really become a parody of themselves till about a decade later. In the mid 60’s they were still violent and flashy but had more of a touch of class and could actually command respect from others in the community, though it was a grudging respect based on the amount of money they threw around more than anything else. My father had also been a pimp.

So anyway, Watusi gave my mom a blackjack. A blackjack is a kind of weapon made out of leather that works like a club – it’s wrapped in (usually black) leather on the outside with a strap on the end, but inside the business end of it is this two and a half pound lead ball. It’s a mean looking thing that the cops used to use till they were outlawed in most places because of too many “accidental’ brain injuries.

Yeah, so I’m looking at this thing Mom got from Watusi and she tells me I’m supposed to wait around in an alley or something till Ricky walks by and then I’m supposed to hit him with it. So it wasn’t long before I got the opportunity, but when he came around the corner with his big, mean self I got scared, dropped the blackjack, and took off running.

This was right around the time my mom started to worry about me. She thought maybe I might be gay or something. When she would tell me I needed to defend myself and fight bullies and even tried to give me the means to do so, I would just come back with my money gone and beat up sometimes, crying and insisting I didn’t want to fight.

She would get concerned about my sexuality and ask me weird questions like, “None of those boys be touchin’ you do they? You don’t let them put their hands on you, right?” and I’d tell her no, but I didn’t really understand the depth of what she was asking me and wouldn’t till a year or two later.

Looking back I kind of get it. I probably would have been worried about my son too. I had these fine features, you know. I was thin and lithe, and almost “pretty” in a way. My nose was “dainty” unlike most of my friends; if I’d been even just a little bit lighter skinned, I may even have been able to pass off as a white boy. I had kind of pretty hair, and my movements were slightly feminine; and also unlike the other boys in my area, I had a severe aversion to fighting.

My second oldest brother (my half-brother Philip) latched onto this and for the longest time would quip, “If it looks like a fairy…” Ha, ha, very funny mutha-effer (you will notice I often use replacement words for curse words – I don’t like to curse, not just because of my religion but because I despise negativity; this puts me at odds with a lot of rap music – kinda ironic if you think about it, since rap might not even still be around if it wasn’t for me and Boogaloo Shrimp and Ice-T takin’ it to the mainstream, but we’ll get into all that soon enough).

So after I’d dropped the blackjack and run back home and told my mom in tears that I just couldn’t do it, she told me she’d had enough. She dragged me over to Ricky’s house, pounded on the door, and laid into Ricky’s mom. “Your little punk ass son been pushin’ my son around and takin’ his money. I’m tellin’ you right now bitch, every time he lay a muthafuckin’ finger on my boy, I’mma come over here and kick YOUR ass.” Those were the parts I could understand. She was telling Ricky’s mom this in Spanish, English, and “Spanglish”, and it sounded very serious and very angry and very, very vicious. That had been a couple of days prior, and I hadn’t seen Ricky since then...till now.

There’s your back story – so now, on this particular day, I had been playing outside and seen Ricky walking towards me, looking particularly unhappy – more than usual if you could believe it; so I ran back up to the house and slammed the door and locked it. When Mama asked me what the hell I was doing I told her, and that’s when she ordered me to go down and punch Ricky. But I couldn’t. I argued with her, crying, explaining that he was gonna hurt me real bad ‘cause he was a big boy, and couldn’t I just go in my room and read my comic books or somethin’? So she starts to lay into me when we hear this knock on the door. She opens it up and it’s Ricky.

“Hi, I’m Ricky Trujillo.”

“I know who you are,” she said. “What the fuck are you doin’ knockin’ on my door?”

“I came to apologize.”

And from that moment on, Ricky and I became close friends. If we were in school or anywhere else and somebody started trouble with me and he found out about it, he’d tell them that if they wanted to fight me, they’d have to fight him. He got to know my mom and seemed to admire her because she was tough. She had this street toughness that he looked up to; he even told her one time, “Lady, you’re crazy,” but it was said reverently, like he knew that she would do anything she had to in order to protect what was hers. Ricky pretty much became my best friend (but his breath still stank – I hope you brush your teeth better now, wherever you are, fool).

Not too long after that though, my mom got busted for heroin possession. Ricky told me that his mom had been talking to her friends about it and that he thought she might have had something to do with the bust or knew who did, but regardless of how she’d gotten caught, my mom had hit rock bottom. After years of moving from man to man, flirting with organized crime and various shady activities, and finally becoming a junkie herself, it was a blessing in disguise. As much as I loved my Mama, even Ricky knew she had as serious problem, and something had to give.

After Mama got busted and was looking at some serious time, she made a decision in jail to turn her life around. She got on her knees and prayed to God that if He would just help her get clean and get her back to her family that she would completely turn her life over to Him. It took a little while – even the Apostle Paul had to walk around blind for a little while before he could get about the business of changing his ways and making a difference in the world with his faith, but eventually that’s just what she did.

That, I believe, was the beginning of the turning point in her life and ours. The opportunities I wound up having might never have occurred without Mama’s change of heart – her literal “come to Jesus” moment, and the love and care of her friend and the woman who would become my second mother, Joan. But there are a lot of things that led up to that moment – a lot of drama, a lot of heartache, and I’m sharing it publicly for the first time.

I am hopeful that someone out there reading this will be able to look at that scared little boy, hear about his rough upbringing, and realize that it doesn’t matter where you come from or how hard or how high you have to climb to get to the top; with the right people in your life, the right amount of faith, the right determination, and the right passion you can live a successful life and eventually make something of yourself just like I did. But to tell that story, I’m going to have to introduce a part of myself that I’ve never shared with the public at large.

A lot of folks know me as Shabba-Doo, some may know me as Adolfo; a few may even know me as Ozone (ha! Maybe just a few of the hundred-million-dollar audience of the Breakin’ movies...), or by one of the other minor or major roles I’ve played in film, on television, or on the stage, but only those closest to me know the real me – the secret me that I only reveal to those I love. If you’re reading this, I presume you are either a fan or are interested in me as a person. So you deserve my love and respect, and I hope by being honest, transparent, and willing to show the bad with the good that I can provide that to you. It’s time for you to meet Kuchi.

* * *

Watching the recent footage of the devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Grace was heartbreaking for me. I used social media as much as I could to get the word out about their plight. One of the worst hit areas was Aguadilla, which really hit home since that’s where my grandparents on my dad’s side came over from.

As of this writing, there are still areas destroyed by the hurricane that have not found relief; issues like power outages, non-potable water, and even basic medical supplies and food have plagued the entire island, and help was very slow to arrive. While I did what I could, I’m certainly not the superstar I once was; there was only so much I could do on my own – I am grateful, therefore, for all the fans and friends who joined me in supporting and sending aid to my people.

My people – by this I mean that I have many Puerto Rican relatives; Quiñones is a fairly common name, being the surname of one in ten thousand people in the United States, which may not sound like a lot, but considering that the population of the US is around 320 million, it’s actually fairly prevalent.

That kind of stuff fascinates me, but I’ll try not to bore you with it too much – I just want to get across that I am very proud of my Puerto Rican heritage; even though I self-identify as a “black” man, that distinction is less about my ethnic origins and more about my skin tone and the culture that has been dominant in most of my life – but not entirely.

On my birth certificate, it lists my father as “white” even though he had darker skin than me! That’s because Puerto Ricans and Hispanics in general were considered white, basically because they weren’t black. People actually hate on Mexicans and other Latin immigrants today way more than they did in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. Think of Ricky Ricardo and how it wasn’t even unusual that he was married to a Caucasian woman on national television.

My mother wasn’t quite so lucky, race-wise. She is listed on my birth certificate as a “Negro”, and nobody ever accused her of being a white woman or any other race. That didn’t stop her from dating white, Spanish, Italian, and black men though. My mother was, simply put, a knockout in any race.

Another important thing to mention regarding my racial identity is that my Puerto Rican grandfather’s father, I recently discovered, was full-blooded African. It turns out what makes a Puerto Rican, not in every case but many if not most, is a mixture of Spaniard (mostly from Andalusia and the Canary Islands), African (mostly from slaves), and Taíno Indian ancestry. So I have African slave blood on both sides of my family; just another reason to identify more strongly as black than Puerto Rican, though really the two are strongly linked.

My Abuela, Carmen Quiñones and my grandfather, Juan Gutierrez started out as laborers in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico in the early 20th Century, and sometime around the start of World War II, they came to America to seek work. There are a couple of stories, legends, associated with how my grandfather met my grandmother, how they got together, and how they ended up married and coming over to the States together.

How much of it is true I couldn’t say for sure, but one of them that’s kind of bandied about in the family involved my grandmother working her fingers to the bone in a sugar cane field and my grandfather riding by on a horse, scooping her up, and taking her away when she was in her early teens and promising her she’d never have to work in a field again. As far as I know, he kept that promise. Another involved him wooing her by giving her free tickets to one of the two theaters in town, then stopping in the middle of the show he was performing in, bringing her up on stage with him, and dancing with her while the band played a love song.

Dance and music have always been traditional cultural expressions of Puerto Rico's ethnic heritage. There are many different styles of dance that are performed on the island, including salsa, merengue, danza, plena, bomba, and cha-cha, to name a few. In any case, he literally swept her off her feet. Everyone told me that my Abuela Carmen was very beautiful and always had very long, black hair.

When I knew her it touched the ground, though it was peppered with streaks of gray and white, some of which I’m sure I contributed, but most of which likely came from my father who, after a certain age, could have started a gray hair making factory with all the raw heartache he was capable of inducing, despite his fine features. My grandfather was reportedly a very handsome man in his youth as well, with chiseled features and perfect hair. What can I say? Shabba-Doo comes from good stock!

The way the Puerto Rican marriage tradition worked, at least on my grandparents’ part of the island, the husband takes the last name of the wife and vice versa, and often the children are given both surnames. Apparently this was a common occurrence in their small town of San Antonio in the city of Aguadilla, so I was given a name which carries on that tradition: “Adolfo Gutierrez Quiñones.”

I say it now with just as much pride as my character Ozone in Breakin’ did when asked what his real name was, and he/I replied, “Orlando.” It was actually my idea to give Ozone such a Latin-sounding real name (apparently Otis, Ozzy, Obadiah, and Oprah were all taken). One of the higher ups in the Latin Kings gang that I briefly got caught up in as a teenager was named Orlando, so it was the toughest (yet smoothest) sounding Latin name I could come up with, and the director liked it (and the way I said it), so it stuck.

Aguadilla, which is located in the very Northwest corner of the island, is a beautiful, tropical area, with palm trees and legendary sunsets, but it also has a long history of ups and downs, including a horrific train wreck, of course the recent hurricane, and during my grandparents’ day it was nearly wiped out by an earthquake and a tsunami (circa 1918). My grandparents were part of the generation that began to rebuild and make it a profitable, viable area in which to live.

Surfer's Beach, Gas Chambers, Crash Boat, and Wilderness are some of the beaches that have become highly sought after by tourists over the past several decades, especially surfers due to the crystal-clear waters and killer waves (we won’t talk about the occasional killer shark, no sir – Jaws STILL gives me nightmares, and I never even go in the water if it ain’t chlorinated!).

The economy prior to World War II was actually thriving despite The Great Depression raging in the US mainland, with my grandparents able to find steady work; unfortunately, they were displaced, like many in that area and around the world, by the war. Happiness and prosperity in their village waned after the Federal Government claimed they needed the land to build an air base which would later become Ramey Air Force Base. In 1939 thousands of acres of sugar cane were expropriated for the military, basically bankrupting the village and forcing my grandparents to seek employment elsewhere after more and more land was lost to “eminent domain” as a result of expansions to the military base.

Perhaps they might have stayed and taken on jobs at the Air Force base, but in those days the native Puerto Ricans were treated like second-class citizens, despite their eventual mostly tolerated presence in the States; most of the base personnel didn’t even seem to realize that the locals were themselves American citizens – hell, I still run into people who think Puerto Rico is another country!

Maybe it should be, the way the US government has been caring for her lately…but nah, nah. No politics. You can come hang out with me at my Facebook page if you want my political views, which I’ll probably eventually blather about in this book anyway, but if I do it won’t be on purpose. I’ll just leave it at this: Having a known bigot in charge of running things for people of color during a disaster situation is sort of counterintuitive, don’t you think?

I’m sorry to tell you that blatant ignorance and racism play into my story pretty often, all the way from the beginning up through to today. It’s a part of the story of America, the story of Hip-Hop, and my own experience as a minority. But my grandparents weren’t about to stick around and be looked down on in their own US-Military-supplanted neighborhood – they packed up and moved to Chicago, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The steel mill industry was taking off in the Midwest at that time, and people from all around the country were flocking there to find work, including minorities who had found safety in numbers in and around the big city during a turbulent time in America’s checkered past of racism and inequality. My mother’s parents, who had roots in slavery – some of her ancestral relatives having come over from Ethiopia on slave ships – were seeking to escape the oppression of the South, mostly Alabama and Georgia, and, lucky for me, they also fled to Chicago during the same time my father’s parents came to the city.

* * *

My grandmother on my mother’s side, Viola McDaniel was a hard woman. Her home in Chicago was infested with roaches, and I mean no disrespect when I say this but I think her heart was too. My Mama, before the cruel ailment of dementia began to take her from me a bit at a time, had stories she could tell that would make your flesh crawl.

For one thing, I recall Mama talking about believing that she was in a similar situation to characters in the recent film Fences with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, insofar as Davis’s character wound up raising Denzel’s character’s child by another woman he’d cheated on her with. Mama believed that Viola McDaniel was not her actual mother.

One thing I can also tell you about Fences is that if you want to get a pretty good feel about the neighborhood I grew up in, that movie gets pretty close to the mark. Mama was mentally and physically abused growing up, and the psychological scars followed her throughout her life, some of which she unintentionally passed down to her kids.

But when you are handed a certain bag of tricks and never given any kind of help or support from the husband or (in my mom’s case) baby-daddy who is supposed to be there for you the most, you just go off what you were given. So, since Mama was beat as a kid, she gave whoopins to her kids ‘cause that’s all she knew.

I’m not saying it’s a good excuse, but I understand. Mama knew her way around a wooden spoon, a switch, or sometimes whatever was convenient, like a broom maybe or a frying pan, but as a survivor of abusive parents, she never crossed the line from honest attempts at discipline into sheer, unconscionable abuse. But Grandma did…boy, did she ever.

My grandmother’s full, maiden name was Viola Hazel Davis (The original Viola Davis! How’s that for a coincidence!), most people called her “Vi”; and her parents’ names were Cy Davis and Emma Davis. She married a man named Burnett McDaniel, who was referred to as “The White Man” because he had very light skin and from ten feet away could easily pass as Caucasian.

Cy was a chef who specialized in Southern cuisine, and he developed quite a local reputation for both his barbecued ribs and his Cajun recipes. When they had my mother on November 19th, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois they named her Ruth Medina McDaniel.

I had no problem believing my mother’s stories of abuse by my grandmother because that woman did it to me as well, both verbal abuse and physical abuse that involved hitting me with straps or extension cords or telling me I was a little spick who would never amount to anything and other such uplifting comments.

I had a very strained relationship with my grandmother who insisted we just call her “Vi” like everyone else. She would frequently beat me and my brothers and sisters, and damn if I ain’t gettin’ a little emotional just thinkin’ about it now. Even my father, as messed up as he was, was proud that he had a son; there were very few times I felt it from him, but at least I have those to cling to – what can I cling to of Vi other than gettin’ beat and beat down? I forgive ‘cause it’s what I’m supposed to do, but there’s no way to forget.

One day she beat me so badly with an extension cord for failing to learn my multiplication tables that I couldn’t sit down – I was probably seven or eight years old – and she made me kneel in the night on salt. My older step-brother, Eric Von Smith, had lived with her his whole life, but thankfully for my sake and the other kids, we only lived there for a few years.

You’ll find out more about Eric later, Eric who rose above his own rough background and escaped not just intact but empowered by it, but I should point out that he had a different father who we later found out was Italian and involved in the Chicago mob. In fact, my mother was one of those kind of women who hung out with gangsters – not the G-Thugs you might think of today, on a street level, but more Mafioso, organized crime types.

From time to time she would abandon me and her other kids at grandma’s house or at other places which always left me with an uneasy feeling – a feeling of abandonment which I didn’t take well. I was always crying and always upset growing up, which helped me develop defense mechanisms and skills that would later be of use both on the streets and in a cutthroat industry, but at the time I was just trying to survive. I still couldn’t tell you how Eric turned out as well as he did, but I always loved him for it.

The abuse didn’t just occur on my mother’s side though. My grandfather Juan Quiñones abused my dad, my Uncle Mike, and their sister, verbally and physically. I grew up around this man but never personally experienced any of his violent side and in fact felt a sense of love from him, even though later I heard all these horrific things about him. I can’t verify it, but my theory is that he may have considered how my father had turned out and felt like he was getting a second chance at parenthood with a new boy, one he maybe didn’t want to try and beat into submission this time around. But it was his wife, my Abuela, Carmen, who was the person from whom I felt the most love.

I also felt safe around her, and she always made me feel better about whatever bad things were happening in my life. She would sing to me, rock me, play little games that taught me things and made me laugh…we had a relationship that was extraordinary. We used to play a game where she would cover my ears with her hands and say something to me then when she uncovered my ears she’d ask me what she had said. I NEVER got it right, but that was half the fun, and I remember both of us laughing so hard sometimes my grandfather would holler in at us to keep it down.

There was another we would play where she would show me a jelly bean, or a small piece of chocolate then send me away; then she’d call me back, “Cuchillo!” and I’d have to find where she’d hidden it. I can still picture her smiling so big with her long, yellow teeth when I would find it, and I can hear the sound of her laughter as it echoed in the tiny kitchen that she turned into a playground for me where I would always be safe. And do you know what else? She was the one who taught me how to dance. Not the fantastic moves that I would someday become famous for, but how to dance with my heart. Picture this tiny old woman with impossibly long hair holding the little hands of an even tinier little boy and dancing around in a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet. That was, and will always be, my safe place.

As I mentioned, she had hair that touched the floor, partly because she grew it out so long, but partly because she was just this short, thin woman who was almost elf-like. She always smelled of lavender, and I will never forget the feel of her hands on my face, skin thin and soft, like tissue paper, the tickle of her little Puerto Rican Abuela moustache when she kissed me, and how she would chase off any of my siblings who tried to mess with me or sometimes even defend me from adults I’d ticked off for whatever reason.

She couldn’t speak English (though at a very young age I understood her because I could speak Spanish, a skill I am trying to re-learn after decades of letting it slip away), but she conveyed love to me so strongly that I have never been able to forget the warmth, enthusiasm, and unconditional affection she had for me as a child; and she is the one who nicknamed me “Kuchi”.

Actually, it started as “Cuchillo” (pronounced KOO-CHEE-YO) which literally means “knife” in Spanish, when I would be in the kitchen with her reaching for things on the counter, and she would yell at me, “No! Cuchillo! No!” She was trying to warn me that I would cut myself with a knife if I didn’t quit reaching up there. Well, I suppose this happened enough times that someone, maybe Abuela herself, picked up on it and started calling me Cuchillo, which eventually evolved into Cuchi with a “C”, then eventually became Kuchi with a “K” because “reasons”. Ha! So now you know the humble origins of the secret name my family and closest friends call me – in my own family I’m not Adolfo, I’m not Shabba-Doo, I’m “Kuchi”, and I will tell you that it is the name I prefer above the rest, despite the deep heritage of my given name and the celebrity of my stage name. It once meant “knife”, but it now means “home”, “love”, and “family” – nah, that’s Ohana. Kuchi’s just Kuchi! It means ME!

* * *

My mom met my father at the beach on the north side of Chicago and instantly fell head over heels for him. She was 21 years old, he was 20. And while I don’t know a lot about their courtship, I can tell you as a footnote that it broke her heart that they were never officially married. He may have been a scoundrel – a pimp, a playboy, a hustler, and a straight-up criminal, but she loved him deeply and would have done anything for him. He was, after all my father and the father of my sister, Fawn. But he never legitimized my mother, and I felt it really bothered her. Eventually he ran off with a thirteen year old girl and fathered my half-sister Nina.

The thirteen year old girl, Joan, wound up being one of the biggest influences in my life and in many ways became just as much of a mom to me as my own mother, sometimes more so; oddly enough she and my mother wound up becoming very close friends, almost like sisters. This was a bizarre dynamic under the circumstances, especially since my father eventually wound up marrying Joan - a fact I know really tore up Mama inside. And yet Joan became roommates with my mother on occasion. She got so tight with Joan that Joan’s house, or rather her father’s house (which she still lives in to this day) became one of the preferred places to drop me and my siblings off while Mama was off…doing other things.

Joan’s father, Otis, also became an important factor in my life. Otis was really my first stable, somewhat normal father figure who, while he was far from perfect, showed me a few things about life and showed me what a semi-normal life of working for a living and taking care of your own could look like. But it was mostly through observation, rather than him going out of his way to teach me anything, that I learned from him. He seemed to hate my guts, perhaps because I reminded him of my deadbeat, hoodlum of a father as he saw him.

I can’t say I blame him, really. My “father” (I use that term loosely) was around just enough for Fawn and I to know he existed, but we never had much of a relationship to speak of. A career criminal, Adolfo Quitiera Quinones had racked up 108 felony arrests by the time I reached my teenage years. Known on the street for running the block, he was perhaps better known for his activity as one of Chicago’s most notorious pimps.

He lived his life with no regard for the people he hurt through his actions. As with most men who lead similar lives, my father surrounded himself with enablers, and everyone from his women to his family made my father’s reign of terror possible. Meeting Joan when she was eleven and marrying her at fourteen (which, again, secretly broke my mother’s heart, the marriage, not the near-pedophilia which was strangely often overlooked in those days), my father played the role of husband to Joan and father to their daughter Elizabeth during his stints out of jail. His love, however, rarely extended itself around the corner to my house.

Determined to mark her territory, there was a fateful day when my mother went to Joan’s house to confront her, probably to beat that ass, but when a little girl opened the door, Mama couldn’t respond in any way but compassionately. Their relationship was tentative at first, and Mama kept her distance from the home of the child molester pimp and his apparently willing victim for a while, but it wasn’t long before smack and booze would pull her away from our family and we would end up staying at Joan’s house for varying stints of time.

Changing clothes three and four times a day, my father lived in tailored suits and never left the house without looking flawless. As a kid, I remember admiring his carefully crafted style and elegance. He was like a real-life version of Cab Calloway, who for as long as I can remember was an inspiration to me. I also remember the shame I felt when I learned of my father’s behavior in the streets and the reputation that preceded him.

Although I didn’t understand the term “bisexual” at the time, I would later learn from Joan that my father had as many male lovers as he did female. For him it wasn’t about sexuality, it was about control, and he would utilize any tool in his arsenal to give him control over another person – even sex.

One of the most disgusting, manipulative ways a pimp has of keeping his roster around besides getting them hooked on drugs is to seduce them, often with alcohol and other drugs in the mix, then get them to perform sexual acts that they are ashamed of which the pimp can then use as a psychological weapon to remind the “whore” or the “rent boy” of what they are and what they will always be.

This simultaneous beating down with the false affection and “protection” pimps like my father offered their prostitutes is effective and so devastating to the human psyche that many of those subjected to it commit suicide or end up overdosing, homeless, or worse – on the wrong end of the law at the right end of a switchblade or pistol.

One of my earliest memories of my father is visiting him at Jolliet State Penitentiary when I was probably about eight. Visitation in prison wasn’t like it is today with Plexiglas between you and the inmate as you face each other and talk through a phone. It was this strange set-up where the prisoner was on an elevated platform with an intimidating concrete barrier between you and a single chair in the middle of the room for them to sit on.

It was a surreal moment when he came into the room in his prison fatigues, almost regally, strutting across this gray tile as if he were in a palace rather than behind bars. I can’t explain why, I mean, even at eight I knew where we were and what it meant, but in that instant I felt like royalty myself – like he was the big bad king, on his elevated throne, and I was the prince coming to court to pay him a visit. He must have sensed this because when he addressed me it was to confirm that he was royalty, and I was next in line.

“Kuchi,” he said to me in his crazy Puerto Rican accent that he seemed to want to almost touch-up with a sort of British hoity-toity, “Listen, Kuchi, you know I’m boss in here, right? I’m like a king, and this place is my kingdom. I’m the king of our neighborhood, too. And our street. Kuchi, I want you to be the king when you grow up, too - understand? You be the king of your street, but don’t ever be the king in a place like this, okay?” I nodded, like I understood, and maybe I did just a little, but the gist of it as far as I was concerned was that we were royalty, and I could live with that, even if the prince hardly ever got to see the king.

This is one of the moments etched into my memory about him that I’ve clung to all my life; one of the better ones. Funny, that one of my better memories of him was visiting him in prison – funny-strange, not funny-ha-ha. There were a couple of other times like that, just as odd, just as memorable – but I mean, that’s the kind of stuff we remember the best anyway, isn’t it? The weird stuff?

Another time was several years later, after I had gone to L.A. with the family and was shopping around for some clothes to modify my Lockers outfit. I had on a big red Scooby Doo hat, suspenders, some Scooby Doo shoes, some striped socks – you know, the original Lockers get-up. But I was on the prowl for some stuff with a different fit, maybe a little flashier. I’m looking at this display in a store window. All the sudden I see his reflection in the glass of the window and I turn around, and sure enough there he is. “What are you doing here?” I asked him, surprised as hell and genuinely curious.

“I’m here on business, Kuchi,” he remarked in that smooth, measured voice with unwarranted pomp that he so often used to schmooze unsuspecting marks. “Why don’t you come up to my hotel room and let me show you something?” So he took me up there to this rat hole of a hotel room that he still somehow managed to make seem like it was better than it was just by his mere presence, and as soon as I enter the room I see these two naked chicks in his bed sitting there smoking and watching, ironically enough, Soul Train.

They completely ignored me, and I tried to act like I was ignoring them, but I’m not gonna lie, I might have snuck a peek or two – but the overall situation made me feel…I don’t know, discombobulated? It was surreal, like I was in another world - a world where fathers nonchalantly hand their sons huge wads of cash and give sage advice in the presence of large-breasted women.

I’ll never forget this; he said, “Don’t ever go to prison, Kuchi,” and I may have said something along the lines of I didn’t plan on it or something, but whatever it was it pissed him off ‘cause he backhanded me and very urgently. “Now LISTEN you little bitch,” the way he said it sounded like “beach”, “I’m trying to teach you something. Listen, they'd make you into a girl in there; your features are too fine.”

This confused the hell out of me - I mean, I just wasn’t prepared for all of this out of the blue, so all I could manage was a weak little, “Uh, thanks Pop.” That seemed to calm him down, and then he said something that surprised me and was probably about as close to actual love that I ever felt from him.

He said, “You are my son.” He put his hand, the one he had just smacked me with, on my shoulder, squeezed it a couple of times and with tears in his eyes he repeated more forcefully, “You ARE my son…” then he touched my cheek with that same hand and said, “But don’t you ever be like me.”

I remember thinking, what a crazy thing to say to your kid. What I wanted him to say was that he missed me and that he was glad to see me and that he was proud of me. In that moment I couldn’t do anything but hate him and wish he’d never shown up in the first place – but despite all the craziness, the abuse, the broken promises, the disappointments, and my mother’s broken heart, if I could go back to that moment and tell him anything, it would be that I forgive him – I think maybe that’s what HE wanted to hear, or at least sense from me, but why should I give a fuck what he wants? He never gave one about me or my mom, or her other kids.

But it’s funny how the passage of time, having your own kids judge you for your own mistakes, and a little more wisdom and humility can change your attitude about some things. No one is all bad, not even the worst of us, and we should try to realize that some people are broken, some of them on the inside, very deeply for whatever reason, sometimes beyond repair; and we ought to try and cling to those parts of them that are most human and draw them out however we can. He was a lost soul, but all of us are to one varying degree or another – some of us just show it more.

Instead of forgiving him I gave him a generic “Right on, Pop,” and a jive handshake, then I turned around (after one final peripheral glance at the bed urchins) and walked back into my own life. I wish he had been more of a part of it. I wish I could have had a real relationship with him. I wish a lot of things. I took the money and used it to buy the Lockers upgrade I had been poking around for…and never looked back.

For the remainder of my life, my father would orbit in and out of my universe with the frequency of a lunar eclipse, but he never again held any power over me – no guilt, no trying to please him, no hatred – just a sort of nothingness. Our relationship consisted mainly of me experiencing sightings of him out in the hood or in some restaurant or random setting with his various and sundry clientele and cadre of associates.

Even to this day, this doesn’t bother me as much as maybe it should – I’m recounting it now as a matter of historical curiosity. I try to put it in perspective by thinking of other friends of mine who never even met their dads or whose fathers were cruel, murderous drunks who beat the living shit out of their wives (sometimes to death) and traumatized their children, and I think to myself hey, it could have been way, way worse.

My father wasn't a good guy, and for that reason alone his absence from my life was a gift. As I journeyed into fatherhood, I would repeat some of his same mistakes, but I’d also choose to evolve beyond his limitations. While I didn't do the job perfectly, I can say that at least I tried, which is more than he could truthfully say, and for this I am proud of myself.

I was in my 40s when my father died, and I'm still waiting to feel something. I didn't have many memories to mourn or even a contribution beyond DNA and a moth-eaten Locker 2.0 outfit to attribute to him. I was just his namesake and the bearer of his guilt (till I was able to let it go), and as much as I wish my experience with my father had been different, I'm also happy that I didn't allow his actions to define my future.

I have always really enjoyed the Star Wars movies; as someone who had some real daddy issues myself, I felt I could identify with Luke Skywalker, up to the point where he takes off Darth Vader’s mask at the end of Return of the Jedi, still convinced that there is some good in his old Pop. Sometimes, when I think about that last caress on my stinging cheek, or his regal entrance into that throne room of ours, maybe I do feel something for Darth Quiñones…just a little. I like to think maybe he’d be happy about that.

But the fact is that my real dad was and remains Ruth McDaniel. She raised me, loved me, provided for me, and supported me. She is the greatest gift Jehovah God could have ever given my siblings and me; she was always enough…well, almost always.