Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One

by Terry Crews

  While the events portrayed in this book are accurate to the author’s recollection, a few of the names have changed.

  Copyright © 2014 by Terry Crews

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Zinc Ink, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  ZINC INK is a trademark of David Zinczenko.

  ISBN 978-0-8041-7805-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7806-8

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: Joseph Perez

  Jacket image: Rainer Hosch

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART 1

  TRUE LIES // SPIRITUALITY 1. Superhero

  2. Is That What a Man Is?

  3. Double Life

  4. A Way Out

  5. Taking My Shot

  PART 2

  JUST KEEP GOING // WORK

  6. No Is Negotiable

  7. As Soon as I Go Pro

  8. Don’t You Give Up

  9. No Wives Allowed

  10. It’s Not Over

  11. What I’m Worth

  PART 3

  FALLING AWAKE // FAMILY

  12. Attitude Adjustment

  13. King of the Mountain

  14. Break Out

  15. That’s Not How It’s Done

  16. D-Day

  17. I’m Not Like Them

  18. Manhood

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  PROLOGUE

  I HAVE TO PREFACE THIS BOOK WITH A STORY. IT WAS A blazing hot summer day in Southern California, the perfect moment to sit in an air-conditioned movie theater and relax with a wonderful, special effects–driven Hollywood extravaganza, expensive candy, crunchy popcorn, and an ice-cold drink. I had promised my seven-year-old son, Isaiah, that we’d do what we call “Man Time”—something very rare in our household, which is mainly comprised of the female energy of six women—my wife, four daughters, one granddaughter—and our twelve-year-old female house dog, Coffee.

  Isaiah and I both agreed a movie would be the perfect respite from the heat. Being men, we decided our movie would be Iron Man 3. It being summer, there were product tie-ins for the film everywhere we looked, and I actually owned a fairly pristine original print copy of the third issue of the Iron Man comic book. So even though my son had never seen the first two movies in the franchise, he had to see the new one, and he was at the impressionable age where, if he didn’t see Iron Man 3, he wasn’t cool.

  We found the perfect seats, sat down with our snacks, and endured what seemed like an hour of previews. Isaiah was noticeably wincing through most of them, but I attributed this to the fact that the movie theater had a really loud sound system. Then, finally, the movie started. Robert Downey Jr. was as compelling as ever, the effects were amazing, and the action was ramped up to eclipse the first two movies. I was enjoying myself.

  Then I noticed something.

  Isaiah’s face was caught in a twisted frown, one hand in his popcorn, the other covering his eyes as he peered through his small fingers.

  “Isaiah, you okay?” I asked, thinking maybe he had to go to the bathroom but didn’t want to miss anything.

  “Yeah …,” he said, his hand still stuck to his face.

  I shrugged and turned back to the movie. A bomb exploded, and one of the bad guys appeared to die. I heard a whimper next to me. My son was gritting his teeth, holding a bunch of popcorn in a clenched, sweaty fist, paralyzed with his hand in the bag of popcorn. He was shaking.

  “Isaiah, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m okay.”

  But something was clearly not okay. More intense scenes occurred seconds later, and he tensed with every one. I knew I had to do something.

  “Isaiah, let’s go to the lobby for a sec.”

  He nodded, and we headed out into the lobby. Our eyes squinted as we adjusted to the sunlight and found a spot against a wall. I took a knee so I could examine his face as I talked to him.

  “Isaiah, are you scared?” I asked, as gently as I could, so it wouldn’t sound like a taunt.

  “Uh, no. I’m okay.” His face was still squinting, well after our eyes had already acclimated to the light in the lobby.

  “Isaiah. It’s okay. You can tell me. There’s nothing wrong with being scared. Even Daddy gets scared sometimes. You can always tell me if you’re scared. There’s nothing wrong with that. Are you scared?”

  “Yes …,” he said with a nod, appearing defeated.

  “Isaiah, you wanna go home? We can get in the pool. Would you like that?”

  His face relaxed and brightened, and I knew I had found the answer.

  “Yeah! But the movie—”

  “Don’t worry about the movie, man. The most important thing is that we have Man Time.”

  I smiled, and he cheered up immediately.

  “Isaiah, always tell me if you don’t like something, or if you’re scared of something. I’m not disappointed in you if you are, but I would be disappointed if you didn’t tell me how you really feel. I love you, man.”

  “I love you, too, Dad. Let’s go swimming!”

  With that, we threw all of our concessions in the trash and headed out into the hot sun.

  I’D LOVE TO BE ABLE TO TELL YOU THAT I’VE ALWAYS BEEN like this: patient, caring, thoughtful, and a good listener. But the truth is, for most of my life, I was just the opposite. I was impatient, uncaring, hardheaded, and ignorant. I was selfish in every way possible, a brute to my wife, and a tyrant to my kids. My older daughters can tell you I’ve made them sit through movies they were scared of, just because they asked me to take them. No pain, no gain. My way or the highway. Right? Well, that’s what I thought back then. I was the classic, type A, alpha male to the core. A strong, athletic competitor who used all of the charm and wit at my disposal to manipulate family, friends, coworkers, and everyone around me into giving me exactly what I wanted, and if they didn’t, I was going to get them back one way or another.

  I am a man. That’s what men do. Kick ass. Take names. Do the job you’ve been paid to do. Accomplish your dream, no matter what it costs you or who gets hurt. He with the gold makes the rules. You crying? I’ll give you something to cry about. That’s life. That’s the way it is.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  After we came home from the theater that summer day, I watched Isaiah run down from his room in his bathing suit and leap into the pool, as happy as I’ve ever seen him. I became overwhelmed with emotion when I thought about all of the wasted opportunities, the dumb mistakes, the ruined family trips, the things I should have said, and the hard lessons I’d had to learn in order to get to this place of greater clarity.

  We absorb the world’s lessons young: Be brave. Be tough. Show no weakness. Have no pity. Isaiah went to that ideal of manhood that day. He felt he needed to be tough for me. Endure this test for me. I can do this. Even when he couldn’t. He denied how he felt, even as his world was crumbling all around him. Male pride is like walking a ledge on the side of a building, and any taunt or challenge will keep a man out there—until he falls to his death. I talked Isaiah down off that fictional ledge, at a movie theater. At seven years old. But now he’s free. Until the next challenge.

  I’ve been out there. I was on that ledge for more than forty-one years. Thinking that this is what manhood is.
Being scared to death but never admitting it. Yelling and being angry with everyone, like I was holding on to the side of a building, because, psychologically, I was.

  I’ve been searching my whole life, trying to find out what the definition of manhood is. Was it my father, Big Terry, when he went to work as a foreman at the GM plant in Flint, Michigan, with his work shirt ironed and his work shoes shined? Or was it Big Terry, drunk after work, and descending into the dark place where he made everyone in our household afraid? Was it Big Terry’s calloused hands? His ability to build anything and everything? The fact that he put a roof over our heads and shoes on our feet? Was it the preacher who worked our church up into a frenzy of righteous fervor, rolling on the floor and speaking in tongues, but had dark secrets of his own? Was it five-year-old me, lifting our household furniture to feel strong? Or me, at age ten, starting my own secret life that would haunt me for the next three decades? Or me, finding football in junior high and being told by one miraculous coach that this could be my way out? Or me, getting married the day before my twenty-first birthday? Or me, being drafted into a seven-year career in the NFL? Or me, having been featured in more than forty movies and three hundred episodes of television, and earning success as a pitchman for three of the most popular brands in the world? Was any or all of that being a man? This book addresses that question—to both men and women—and explains, through the story of my life, what I’ve discovered. Welcome to Manhood.

  I ALWAYS FELT LIKE A SUPERHERO. AND EVERY SUPERHERO has an origin story. The Hulk got hit with gamma rays, Batman became an orphan, and Spider-Man received that infamous bite from a radioactive spider. My origin story happened when I was two years old. My mother and father were arguing, a common occurrence in our cramped upstairs apartment on Albert Street in Flint, Michigan. An extension cord was plugged into the living room wall to power a nearby lamp. As they fought, I put one end of the cord in my mouth while it was still attached to the wall socket. It blew up, and I got shocked. My mother said I never made a sound. No screaming or crying, just a bloody, smoking lower lip with a hunk of skin hanging grotesquely from my chin. The cord at my feet told her what had happened.

  Panicked I was in cardiac arrest—or worse—because of my eerie silence, they both rushed me off to the hospital. My mother was questioned by nurses, doctors, and even the police, as they harbored suspicions about her story, but eventually—to her great relief—child abuse was ruled out. A sense of gratitude accompanied the realization that it could have been much worse: I could have been electrocuted. Instead, the jolt of electricity gave me my “superpowers” and the scar I still have on my lower lip.

  As I grew up, I loved hearing about my superhero beginnings, and I asked my parents to tell me the story again and again. As they told and retold it, I sometimes imagined I’d been electrocuted and had died in that room. I had visions of God sending angels to bring me back to life because God had determined I was special. Not only that, but I also saw God speaking as the doctors did in the opening titles of my favorite show, The Six Million Dollar Man: “I can rebuild him. Make him stronger.” My imagination as a child stayed on overdrive at all times and has remained just as vivid to this day.

  The matriarch of our family—my wise, tough-as-nails grand-aunt, Mama Z—put the piece of my lip in a mason jar and kept it on her mantel. Needless to say, my mother was horrified every time she saw it, as it had blackened into a tough jerky, and she was happy when Mama Z finally threw out her macabre souvenir. But for me, this family legend was just more proof that I was special. The story made me feel exceptionally tough because I’d survived something that should have killed me. My quarter-sized keloid scar on my bottom lip has always been a reminder of my strength and survival.

  When I was three, the arguments with my father became so unbearable that my mother moved out of our Albert Street apartment and joined Mama Z and her husband, Brother Wright, on their farm just outside Flint. My mother, my older brother, Marcelle, and I lived in their attic for a year. I loved every minute of our time there, especially running outside among the chickens, pigs, and cornstalks.

  Mama Z talked nonstop while Brother Wright sat in the kitchen nodding yes or shaking his head no. She was an amazing cook and prepared feasts, which I devoured. My hunger embarrassed my mother, and she always told me not to ask for anything. But she also told me not to lie. And Mama Z constantly asked me if I was hungry. I looked at my mother, noticed her angry squint, but still I nodded yes. Mama Z fixed me a huge plate of meat, beans, vegetables, and potatoes, as well as peach cobbler packed with ripe peaches she’d picked behind the house. I grinned at my mother until she reluctantly smiled back, knowing she’d been foiled again.

  My mother often left us alone with Mama Z, a tough cookie who worked outside every day and introduced me to how real the world could be. In the morning, she stood in her kitchen, declaring there would be chicken for dinner as Brother Wright nodded in agreement. Then she went out back by the barn and looked for a good-sized chicken. I sat on the back stoop, watching as Mama Z tiptoed around with the fowl, almost mimicking their steps.

  “Here, chickee, chickee, chickee,” she called out in the sweetest little-old-lady voice imaginable.

  Then she violently yanked the bird she wanted out of the crowd and held the neck still while spinning the body around in circles like a jump rope. When she let her victim go, the other chickens scattered and clucked loudly as her chicken—its neck broken, head dangling near its feet—ran around the yard flapping its wings for what was the longest minute of my short life. As the runaway chicken came near me, I recoiled on the stoop, scared to death it might attack me.

  “Go on in the house,” she said, waving me inside.

  When she carried in the chicken, she promptly dunked it in boiling water, then plucked, gutted, butchered, and fried it. I watched every step, determined that I was never going to eat that bird. But as time went on, I grew hungrier and hungrier, and by the time she placed that same chicken down in front of me, with white rice and corn, I ate every bite. Plus seconds. It was the best chicken I ever tasted.

  After a year with Mama Z, my mother and father reconciled, and we moved back in with my father. But not all reunions are happy. Before long, there were plenty of reasons I started feeling the need to be tough, even though I was only in kindergarten. We relocated to a small, ramshackle house on Flint Park Avenue. My father, Big Terry, began getting ready for the birth of my little sister, Michaell, and he and Trish, which is what we called my mother, moved Marcelle and me into the smaller of the two bedrooms.

  At sixteen, my mother had given birth to my brother, and then had me at eighteen. I now suspect her youth had something to do with why we never called her Mom. And I believe we didn’t refer to Big Terry as Dad in order to make it easier on Marcelle because he wasn’t Marcelle’s birth father. The fact that we had different fathers was never hidden from Marcelle and me, and I often wondered what Marcelle’s father looked like and what he was doing. I thought about how it would feel to not know or have contact with my birth father, and I was always sensitive to what it must be like for Marcelle.

  Once Big Terry and Trish had moved us into the smaller bedroom, they stacked our beds into bunk beds, which my brother and I loved because they now earned our highest compliment. “It’s just like on TV!” we shouted when we ran into the room and saw them for the first time. I prowled around, trying out amazing feats of strength and showing off for Marcelle. Superhero-style, I lifted dressers and the living room couch and flexed endlessly, imagining electricity still running through my body. I would take the bottom bunk because I had a bad habit of falling out of bed in my sleep. I was also a bed wetter. Until I was fourteen.

  Looking back on that time, I realize that my bed-wetting had something to do with how unsafe I sometimes felt in that house. One of the first nights my brother and I were sleeping in our new room, I woke up from a sound sleep to rumbling in the house that felt like thunder. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. I lay in t
he dark, trying to make sense of where I was and what was happening. The whole place was shuddering. Trish was shrieking and screaming. It was pandemonium. I’d never heard anything like that before in our house, but nothing could have prepared me for those sounds anyhow. It felt like war.

  Our bedroom door was closed, but light leaked in from the other side. My father had just installed a makeshift divider between our bedroom and the living room. It was uneven and allowed light and sounds to filter through the cracks to where we lay. I heard Big Terry’s booming footsteps and a weird shuffling sound. It felt like an earthquake was shaking everything. I thought of my favorite Godzilla movies and wondered if the house would fall down like when he destroyed a city. I was scared of what was happening, and I stayed in my bed with the covers pulled up over my head. Marcelle did, too.

  It became common for me to wake up to these sounds. And soon, there was a night when the chaos spilled into our room as my mother burst through the door.

  “I’m going to take the boys and go,” she said.

  Big Terry followed close behind her. She had left before, and he knew she was serious. “Don’t, Trish,” he said, his voice pleading.

  I blinked against the light, scared, trying not to do anything to make it worse.

  “I’m telling you, I’m gonna take them,” she said.

  Something in Big Terry seemed to snap.

  “You do that, and you’ll be sorry,” he said, his voice growing angry.

  Trish yanked me out of bed and held me in her arms, gesturing toward the door. Big Terry’s silhouette hulked over us in the darkness. He was yelling now.

  “Calm down, Trish! Calm down.”

  She held me closer, my heart beating wildly, scared of what would happen. And then, just like that, she placed me back in bed. I pulled the covers up over me.

  “Go to sleep!” she yelled at Marcelle and me.

  Trish stormed out of the room, Big Terry close behind her. They slammed the door, but I could hear them continuing their argument in the living room. Sleep was impossible. My nerves were on high alert, and I stayed up for hours until the adrenaline finally wore off, and I fell into an uneasy sleep that left me exhausted.