When I was growing up, most women had a relationship with their father. If it wasn’t their father, there were a lot of positive male role models around. These women had self-esteem, went to a church where everyone watched out for one another, and had many people that they looked up to. They believed that they were valuable. It meant that getting pussy was hard. Having sex with them was almost impossible. No matter what game you spat, the response was the same: “You want me to put that where? Sir, I know you’ve got a job to do and I respect you. But I’m not comfortable. You can call my father.”
The way women view relationships and how they feel about themselves, then and now, is all based on how the first man in their lives interacted with them. The way I see it, my gig as a dad is for my daughters to have as few dicks as possible. That’s the overriding goal. The more a woman has a relationship with a male role model, the more it reinforces to her that she’s valuable—and the less inclined she is to give that shit up to just anybody. She becomes that much more selective about her partners.
But so few women have relationships with positive male role models now that they’re always looking for a way to have it happen. They want someone to be that male role model who loves them and gives them some kind of attention. No matter how old they get, they’re still looking for their real father.
I don’t want to be like Laurence Fishburne and wake up one day to find out my daughter has been making a porno. Sometimes I have to suck it up and do things I would not normally do. My daughters will occasionally get mad at me and not call. If this were anyone else in the world, my response would be, “Fuck you! I’m not calling you either.” That would especially be the case if it was just some random girl, like I’m going to let a woman do that to me. But I always end up being the one to call my daughters first, because I know that I have to stay close to them. I’ve got to swallow my pride and call so they know that no matter what they do, somebody loves them. It’s infuriating, but I do it.
It turns out that Ryan recently got an apartment. “It’s in a rough neighborhood,” she announced, “so I know that you would want me to have an alarm system.” Now why the hell would anyone choose to move somewhere where you need an alarm? She thought that she was going to live wherever she wanted, and I was the motherfucker who was going to take care of it and make it safe for her. It annoyed the hell out of me.
I told her, “Sometimes you want to be my child, when it suits your purposes, and sometimes you want to be a woman. Pick one. You can’t ask for my money but not my advice. You can live your life and I’ll just kind of observe it, and it’ll be cool. But if you want the accoutrements of being my daughter, you have to be my daughter all the time. So which is it going to be?”
“I want to be your daughter.”
Well, I did say that she was smart.
Now, as hard as it is for me sometimes to bite my tongue and play the father role to my daughters, raising my son was that much harder. Every dad sees himself in his son. But when Kyle was born, it brought back some really bad memories of when I was a kid.
We all have moments that, at the time, seem like any other day—but that haunt you for the rest of your life. I’ve had my share of misgivings just like everyone else. But one of those events is so shameful to me that I’ve never mentioned it to anyone or even said out loud. Next door to my elementary school was another school called Benjamin Banneker. Both of them are still there. Benjamin Banneker is a school for retarded kids—and those of us from Avalon Gardens Elementary used to give those kids hell. We were horrible to them. We just didn’t know that we couldn’t and that we shouldn’t. Of course I know that now, but I wish that I had known that then.
The worst day—although there are plenty to choose from, believe me—was when a bunch of my friends started messing around with a paraplegic boy. Push came to shove, literally, and they knocked him out of his wheelchair. He looked at me, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Help me.”
I didn’t even pretend that I couldn’t hear him. “No,” I told him. I knew that if I helped him, then my so-called buddies would turn on me next.
That incident and those like it took on a new significance when my son was born. Very early on, I knew something about him just wasn’t right. My wife, on the other hand, was a separate story. Most women have blinders on when it comes to their children having flaws. With LaDonna, that tendency was exacerbated to the nth degree. For a long while she was in denial, and for an even longer time she was extremely protective of Kyle. But as time went on, even my wife couldn’t deny the signs.
When Kyle would talk, he would keep on talking and talking until he ran out of breath. Not even women talk that much, and he was just a little boy. He never knew how close to stand to another person. He was always in their space and couldn’t seem to grasp that it was rude. Every time there was a loud noise, like an ambulance going by, he would get upset and cover his ears. Every time. He would always sit and fiddle with his hands. I didn’t even register that as symptomatic until my mother pointed out that I used to do it myself. I’d just called it playing with my hands. I had no idea what it was, or even that it was something. But now I realized that other kids didn’t do that.
By the time Kyle was old enough to go to school, the officials told us that they wanted to evaluate him. Now LaDonna didn’t really have a choice but to face that things were off with Kyle. She knew that there was something that we had to do so that he could have a life. Whatever was wrong, I just didn’t want the school to have control over that kind of information. I had seen what they did with young black boys who were considered to have something the matter with them. Nothing good ever came of it. I knew they would either give Kyle some medication or put him in some special-needs class. Neither of those options was palatable to me.
If I paid for the test, however, then there wouldn’t be any notes in his official school chart. My son’s educational choices would be made by me and my wife, not by some stranger who didn’t know him. We took him to UCLA and paid to have him evaluated ourselves, so that we could finally find out what the issue was.
The specialist looked our son over, ran some tests, and finally gave us his diagnosis: Kyle had a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome. It’s a very complicated condition, but effectively it meant his brain was wired a little differently. He would always be a bit off. They even had a term for his playing with his hands. It was called “stimming,” because he was “stim”-ulating his psyche with physical activity. At the time, autism was regarded as existing on a spectrum. At one extreme were kids who had virtually no communicative skills whatsoever. At the other extreme were kids like Kyle, who could get by. The specialist told us what kind of resources were available and what kind of exercises we could do. But no matter what we did, Kyle would never be “normal.” His brain was simply wired a different way. When all was said and done, I just didn’t know if he would ever be all right.
I kept a careful eye on him growing up, and LaDonna completely monitored his every move. I’d see him in the schoolyard by himself, stimming, and it made me realize that it was my genes that did this. It made me think of the Bible, and how the sins of the father are visited on the son.
As Kyle got older, more and more of his condition became more and more evident. Instead of talking until he was out of breath, he became much quieter and shier. He wasn’t able to be a good liar, either. An autistic person will tell a woman, “Yes, those jeans do make you look fat,” and then be genuinely clueless as to why she starts crying. Kyle didn’t really have the capacity to lie, which makes it horrible to be a black man.
At the same time, I couldn’t really joke with him because everything I said he could only take literally. A friend of mine took his autistic nephew to an event one evening, and his nephew was very worried that the celebrity wouldn’t show up. “She’s here,” my friend insisted. Sure enough, the celebrity was there and the event went off without a hitch. At the end of the event, my friend turned to his nephew. “See?�
�� he said. “I told you she’s here.”
“Yes, you did,” the nephew replied matter-of-factly (it’s always matter-of-factly with them). “Why do you bring that up now?” That’s what it’s like talking to someone who is literally completely literal-minded.
Where LaDonna’s instinct was always to step in and to protect Kyle, I hoped to raise him to the point where he wouldn’t need our protection. I couldn’t always be there to look over his shoulder, and one day I wouldn’t be there at all. When Kyle was on the set of The Hughleys as a teenager, some other boy started an argument with him. Soon it escalated into shoving, and then they were fighting. By the time it was over, Kyle had whupped that boy’s ass. Though I didn’t say so in front of everybody else, it made me very, very proud that he could stand up for himself.
When he was going to turn sixteen, it was time for Kyle to learn how to drive—just as for every other boy his age. I didn’t want to be impatient with his driving, so I figured I’d pay a professional driving instructor. He had to go through two different courses and take his driver’s license test four times. It was like JFK Jr. trying to pass the fucking bar exam. And just like JFK Jr., eventually he got it right. For his sixteenth birthday, I bought him a brand-new red Mustang.
Yet Kyle wouldn’t drive his new car, and he always asked his mother or me to take him places. He was too scared. I finally just said, “You either go where you want to go—or you don’t. But we’re not taking you anymore.” That’s how he started driving, and another ordinary milestone was passed.
Chauffeuring Kyle around had gone on for years. Part of the reason was that my wife and I consciously fight very hard to make sure that our family remains close. I invited my father-in-law to come live with us, for example, and he’s been living in my home for fifteen years. These feelings run in both directions. Kyle adores his mother and his sisters, and nothing upsets me more than when he doesn’t get along with his sisters.
Occasionally, like a typical female, his sister Tyler would be impatient with him when they were growing up. Kyle would be talking, telling her something in that specific cadence that all people with autism have, and she’d snap at him. “Hurry up with the story!” It was almost crippling to me, it really was, because I couldn’t be defending him against a girl.
Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and I sat Tyler down. “I can provide the shelter and safety,” I told her. “But when you and your brother argue like that, or are indifferent to each other like that, it hurts me so bad it’s almost palpable. It’s almost causing me physical pain. The only reason I’ve ever worked this hard was to have my children be close. That’s the one thing I always wanted, because I never was close to my siblings.” To some extent, that message did get through with her.
Okay, that’s enough with the cornball family-values shit. Let me talk about pussy.
There’s a tendency among parents of kids like Kyle to think of their children as precious angels that God has sent to them. I didn’t look at my son like that, for one simple reason: Angels don’t fuck. To sweep the sexuality of autistic children under the rug is to deny a central part of regular human experience. Dehumanizing these children is supposedly a very bad, horrible thing and precisely what many of their parents are fighting against. I wanted my autistic boy to grow up to be an autistic man.
Like a lot of dads, I sat my son down and gave him some advice about getting laid. I was under no misconception that Kyle would be a pussy-later dude instead of a pussy-now type. But I just wanted to make sure he wouldn’t end up being a pussy-never motherfucker. Autistic people are very blunt. It’s hard to flirt when everything you say—and everything you hear—is taken literally. That could be disastrous.
I knew from experience that any time I had given him advice, I had to be overly simple. I thought for a while about how best to help him out. It dawned on me that Kyle was actually in the best situation possible when it came to speaking with women. “You don’t talk that much anyway,” I told him, “so pretend like you’re interested. Don’t say much; just listen. Then, when she says something, repeat the same thing she just said but in a question. If she tells you that she likes her job, you say, ‘So, you like your job a lot?’ ”
Eventually my advice paid off. Kyle came home one day and told me that he had gotten some for the first time. He was with an older woman who was just trying to be friendly. I told LaDonna, and to her great credit, she didn’t freak out in any way. LaDonna even said that I needed to call that woman and say thank you. I know people could look at it all kinds of ways, but I certainly took it as a very loving thing to do. It’s a loving act to give somebody your body, knowing that it’s going to be their first time, and to shepherd a dude through an incredibly awkward time.
When it came time for Kyle to go to college, my wife and I had a big argument. She wanted him to go away to school. Part of her being protective is pretending like he’s just like everybody else. Well, he’s not. “He’s not going away to school,” I told her. “A dude goes crazy when he gets a certain amount of freedom at that age. Until he can prove that he can interact with people, and come home, and do all the regular things—have a social life, get laid, and not go crazy—he’s staying here. To have that freedom with no kind of structure or guidance is putting him in a situation where he is more prone to fail than to succeed.”
I understood that most black men gotta get the fuck out when they reach a certain age. But I wanted Kyle to stay until he was ready to go. He ended up staying home and got his college degree. He got a job. He went out on road trips, by himself. Every father wants his son to grow up to be an athlete, a scholar, and a ladies’ man. I got a wonderful human being, one who has already accomplished more than many of the people that I grew up with have. I didn’t go to college. I don’t know Krav Maga, the fancy Israeli kung fu—but my son does.
Throughout all the things that he’s gone through—and that we as his parents have gone though—Kyle has always been somewhat protected. People might have thought he’s weird, but they invariably liked him. As a result, he never really got the brunt of the nasty things that people can say. That will come now, when people don’t know him, when he’s not in school among friends or at home among family.
My daughter Ryan wrote a paper last year that perfectly laid out my perspective. She wrote about how LaDonna would try to stop the kids from touching the hot stove, while I would stand there while they did it. In other words, I wasn’t going to let them hurt themselves—but I was going to let them get burned a little. Now that Kyle is twenty-three, I want him to get bloodied a little bit. I don’t mean some heinous injury where he would get irreparable damage. I don’t want my son to lose a limb or get a skull fracture. But I do want him to be prepared for a world that is often unkind. My wife has even come around to my perspective a little bit. She moves out of the way when I deal with Kyle. She knows there’s only so much she can do right now.
This is why the recent anti-bullying movement is something I do not agree with. I’m really in a position to speak on this issue. If there’s anyone who would be a victim of bullying, it’s autistic kids like my son. I am not defending bullying in the sense that I think it should be encouraged. I’m simply saying something that is often impossible for people in this country to understand, let alone agree with: Sometimes horrible things have positive consequences.
Bullies are kind of like Los Angeles smog: It’s there and it can hurt you, so you just have to watch yourself. Sometimes the threat is really high and they give you warnings, so you’ve got to be even more careful. But just like Los Angeles smog, bullies are a fact of life. They are always, always, always going to be there. The mentality now is to purge us of bullies, and I don’t know if there’s any way that you can do that.
I wouldn’t be the man I am today if it wasn’t for a bully.
When I was in fourth or fifth grade, this dude named Clifford used to take my lunch money from me all the time. Every day, he came to me and told me the same thing: “Give
me your quarter or I’m gonna whup your ass.” He was bigger than me and he was stronger than me, so every day I gave him that twenty-five cents.
At that time, the kids had a rule for dealing with bullies. You either fought the dude that was messing with you or you fought your father when you got home—and you had to do that in front of the neighborhood. A lot of us fought bullies because we didn’t want to fight our old man.
The next time Clifford asked me for my lunch money, I refused. “Nah,” I told him. “You’re going to actually have to kick my ass.” Then and there, we fought—and Clifford did, in fact, kick my ass. He gave me a bloody nose—but I didn’t give him my quarter.
Getting my ass kicked every day was not going to be a better situation. When I told my father what had happened, his advice was very simple. “Darryl,” he said, “you fight that bully until you win.” I knew that sticks and stones can break a bully’s bones just as easily as they can break anyone else’s. Clifford could say whatever he wanted, but if he put his hands on me I’d have to pick up a stick and knock the hell out of him. I decided that I was going to listen to my dad and fight Clifford until I won.
Every time I saw Clifford, I would start fighting him. If he was coming out of the school bathroom and I happened to be in the hall, I would run at him. If he was coming out of the liquor store with groceries for his parents, I started a fight. If we were at the playground, I started a fight. Unfortunately, there never happened to be any sticks or stones for me to use, so it was an uphill battle for me. But I knew if I was meaner than Clifford, I could win. I also couldn’t become bigger and stronger, so I just became faster.
By about the seventh or eighth fight, it started to get inconvenient for Clifford to deal with me. The last two times Clifford and I fought, I ended up winning. And the second time I won, I won in front of everybody. Clifford and I eventually even became friends. I learned as much from the bloody noses that Clifford gave me as I ever did from any book.
I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up Page 22