Got to Give the People What They Want: True Stories and Flagrant Opinions from Center Court Read online

  It sounds worse than it was, because the only souvenir I have from the adventure is that small bump on my forehead that never went away.

  —

  WE LIVED on the west side of Detroit. When I was real little, our house was a two-family home right off 6 Mile and Greenlawn. The room I shared with my brothers Bill and Kev was upstairs, down the hall from my mom, and my sister Tam lived downstairs with my grandmother. Tam was the princess, with her own room, decorated all in pink. Bill, Kev, and I were stuck in the slanted attic. They had the bunk bed; I got the mattress on the floor.

  Bill and Kev are both ten years older than me, so when I was little, they were already off at school, doing their own thing. The task of watching me basically fell to whoever was home, which meant my mom and my grandma were like tag-team wrestlers, coming in and out. Mom worked days at Chrysler as a keypunch clerk, and Grammie worked the graveyard shift as a nurse. And the truth was, if they weren’t working, they were often sleeping, because when else were they going to do it? So I was left to figure out things for myself, even when I was as young as five or six. That certainly wasn’t my mom's or my grandma’s fault. They were doing everything they could to make sure we had that roof over our heads.

  We never struggled to the point where we didn’t have a roof, but we sometimes had to eat popcorn for dinner or mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch. And sometimes we didn’t have hot water for showers, or couldn’t pay for our heat in the winter, so we had to sleep in hoodies and skullies and socks. And at one point, my mom had a car that had a hole in the floor—if you removed the mat, you could see the street going past. Looking back, it wasn’t exactly pleasant. But at the time, as a young kid, how did I know any better? I still have a Thanksgiving card that I made in school for my family when I was young. I glued a family portrait to the paper, and in crayon I wrote, “From Jay. To My Pretty Family.” And I meant it.

  Furthermore, my mom wasn’t the kind of person who complained about what we didn’t have. She had far too much pride, and far too much confidence in herself that she would figure something out. When she could, she worked a second job as a waitress at a bar called the Chez Beau over on Livernois Avenue. When no one else could watch me, I’d have to go over there with her. I’d play pinball, drink some Shirley Temples, even try and help my mom by making jukebox runs. Customers drinking cocktails and smoking cigars would give me a coin to play the Spinners, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers, whatever. It’s how I first got into music, and it was a good way to hustle a few extra dollars in tips. The Chez Beau wasn’t exactly a club in South Beach, but it was a popular place for a while, and at some point or other, it became clear to me that it was where my mom had met my dad.

  —

  I GUESS technically, Kev and Bill and Tam are my half siblings, but I’ve never thought of it that way. Even though I knew I had a different father than they did, it’s not like their dad was ever really around much either. My mom’s ex-husband is actually where we all got the name Rose. With no dads around, I think we all just became hardened by the situation. My brothers didn’t talk about it, I didn’t talk about it, and my mom made clear those men were not worth talking about. Honestly, I don’t even think I ever asked her about my dad until middle school. Not one question.

  I had plenty of adults in my life setting me straight anyway. My grandma is ninety-seven years old, and I’m still afraid of her. Grammie’s philosophy has always been simple: You own the things that don’t cost anything. You own your pride, your dignity, your self-esteem. Those things, no one can take away from you. She’s the kind of neat freak who always covers her sofas in plastic, saves her food in the refrigerator in ziplock bags (once you open something—it goes in a bag), always makes sure there’s a napkin under the glass on the coffee table. And growing up, you knew not to mess with that. With her working nights, she’d usually sleep during the day when I was at school and take me on errands with her in the afternoons.

  I remember one time she went into a store and left me in her car, and I got thirsty. There was no water in the car, so I went into her purse and took a bunch of pieces of Clorets gum. When she came back, I freaked out, nervous she’d get mad at me with a mouth full of her gum. So I quickly rolled down the window and tossed it out. Well, a few minutes later I stuck my hand out the window, and I’ll never forget the feeling of that gum, stuck on the side of the car, right where it left my hand. I tried to rub it off, peel it off, do whatever I could. We got home, I got out and took a look, and that gum was still all over the side of that car. I tried to stand there and block her view, but she was waiting for my help with the grocery bags, and about ten seconds later I got busted. She marched right past me into the house to her room to grab “the strap,” which she always kept wrapped around the doorknob of her room. And with Grammie, the neat freak, it was always sort of a sloppy, wild whipping—anywhere she could get you: head, face, body. And you’d get it in the exact spot wherever the crime had taken place. So that time she just came back out and whipped me right there next to the car, and kids from the whole neighborhood could see me getting it as they were walking home from school. I remember my sister coming home and yelling, “Leave him alone, Grammie!” and me hollering like she was killing me. Because she was.

  Bill and Kev were characters, too. We used to say Kev was like J.J. from Good Times, always finding things. He’d come home with these random stray dogs that would become pets for a few weeks or months. I remember we had a German shepherd named Champ, and a Doberman named Capone. I also distinctly remember the garage being stacked high with hubcaps and car emblems. Who knows where they came from. Bill was always more of the workman, headed toward a nine-to-five lifestyle. I was eight or nine when they finished high school and Kev went off to the army and Bill went off to work, leaving just me and my sister in the house.

  Fortunately, there was a big village around me to make sure I learned the rules of the world, and of the street. And at the time, the rules of the street were a lot more important.

  —

  JALEN WAS a name my mom came up with on her own. She liked the name Jason, but she wanted something more original. The Ja is for James, my dad, and the len is for my Uncle Len, who (almost) got me to the hospital when I was born. Twenty or so years later, my uncle was in a mall in Detroit and heard a mom yell after her kid: “Jalen!!!” He went up to her and asked how she came up with the name, since he’d never heard it anywhere else before. She said she’d heard it on that basketball player at Michigan and liked it.

  I’ve always had a lot of pride about being named for Len. Len worked as a mechanic for Pontiac for decades, and he did well. Like I said, he always had at least a few cars, including a Corvette, a Bonneville, and that little Fiat, and he had a nice house on the west side a few neighborhoods over from us. He had two daughters, my cousins Traci and Tonya. We used to have Christmas at Uncle Len’s, where there was a piano in the living room, and where I got my first glimpses of what being rich looked like.

  Len and my mom were the two youngest children of Grammie and my grandfather, who everyone called Big Daddy. By the time I was old enough to know anything, Big Daddy and Grammie had gotten divorced, and he had moved back to his hometown of Bainbridge, Georgia. He’d worked at Ford for years but then moved south and opened a convenience store, Hicks Grocery, right next to his house. (His last name was Hicks.) Big Daddy was the first vision of cool I ever got: always immaculately dressed, with a peacoat and a hat. He called me Long Boy. “Hey, Long Boy,” he’d say to me. “Don’t smoke Kool. Be cool.” Even though he’d moved away, Big Daddy would come up for a month or so every year, to make sure everyone was doing all right and give out some cash to those who needed it. And then in the summers we’d all get in a car and drive down to Georgia to spend a few weeks there, hang out, barbecue, all that good stuff. It was a long drive—we’d leave in the morning and get down there at night, though there was one time when we got lost and it took a full twenty-four hours. At the wheel that time was the man wh
o was named for Big Daddy, his and Grammie’s oldest son: the one and only Paramore Hicks Junior.

  In Detroit, my Uncle Paramore is unquestionably the most famous member of my family, far more famous than me. When I’m in town, and I’m at a game, or a restaurant, or a store, people come up to me all the time and ask how my uncle’s doing. He’s battled some health problems over the last few years, but once you sit down and get him talking, you’ll discover it hasn’t slowed him down on the inside one bit.

  Back in the day, people had no trouble spotting Uncle P. wherever he went—first off because of his car, which was always filled to the brim with what looked like all of his possessions. He looked like a man who’d just been kicked out of his house. But my Aunt Barbara wasn’t ever sending him anywhere—it was just the way Paramore liked to roll. And he rolled everywhere: to the community center, where he was always involved with kids; to the bowling alley, where he ran like four leagues at once; and to work at the Ford plant, where he was a leader in the union and was known across the company for his art skills.

  Uncle P. wasn’t strictly an industry guy, making his money in the factory. He was a hustler. Like his dad, Uncle P. has his own signature saying: “Have mind, will create.” If you talk to him long enough, and there’s a pen and paper around, he’ll sketch a portrait of you in about ten minutes. Years ago, you’d also be able to find him downtown, drawing pictures of people’s faces for a couple of extra dollars. In his working days, when someone famous, like Jesse Jackson, came to visit and give a speech at the factory, Paramore would do a sketch on a big Styrofoam board and proudly present the portrait to the subject in question. Retiring executives would get the same treatment.

  At family parties, Uncle P. would break out one of the hundred magic tricks he knew, dazzling the kids, and a few adults, too. He’d shave his head in the summer, nice and clean, before a lot of people did that, and then charge kids “a nickel to touch, and a quarter to smooch.” Then he’d use the money to take all of us to a baseball game or something. He was kind of like our family’s version of Muhammad Ali: always entertaining, always the center of attention.

  If it sounds like I look up to Paramore, it’s because I do. Oh, and then there was the time he saved my life.

  —

  BACK IN the day, the pool in Paramore’s backyard was where everyone in the neighborhood learned to swim. (The pool is now his botanical garden, filled with plants and trees.) Every summer, kids would come over for lessons taught by the pool owner himself. The only requirements were to bring your own towel, and a cup of bleach that he’d toss into the water as some sort of chlorine substitute. And if you weren’t clean, which he’d determine by looking at the insides of your wrists, he’d get his hose and rag and rinse you off before you jumped in. The rest of your body could be full of dirt, but for some reason, your wrists had to be clean. He was happy to teach you, but you weren’t getting into his pool with dirty wrists.

  A few kids weren’t into swimming at all. Maybe the water was too cold, maybe they didn’t want to get wet, maybe they just didn’t feel like it. I know all the excuses pretty well because they all applied to me. I was one of those kids you weren’t getting in that pool if you tried. It wasn’t a big deal until one winter when I was eight or nine and playing with my cousin Tia’von, Uncle P.’s daughter. It was a Saturday, Paramore’s day off, and that meant he spent almost the whole day inside, in front of his crazy TV setup: four small monitors stacked on top of one another, broadcasting what he called “Hanger Vision.” He didn’t get regular cable, and instead used a collection of wire hangers to get a signal. On this Saturday he sat there in his shorts watching cartoons in Hanger Vision, occasionally dozing off and just catching up on his rest.

  Outside, the pool had a gate around it to protect against kids walking on the ice that usually froze over on top of it before Paramore got a chance to put the cover on. That day, though, it was just too enticing, and Tia’von and I were inside the gate, playing a superhero game. I was Steve Austin, the old Six Million Dollar Man, and she was supposed to be the Bionic Woman. And for whatever reason, in character, I determined that jumping over the pool was something worth trying. Even if it was at least ten, maybe fifteen, feet across. I was the Six Million Dollar Man. Tia’von and I were going to do it together: I’d count to three, run back to the wall, bounce off it like it was a turnbuckle or something (I was already watching too much wrestling), and then we’d both jump. Today Tia’von is the principal of a school for special-needs kids, meaning she’s pretty smart. She proved it that day. When we got to the edge of that pool, she stopped. I jumped.

  My jump got me halfway over the pool before gravity won out and I dropped right through the ice, into the freezing pool water. Me, the kid who didn’t feel like learning to swim.

  Very quickly, two heroes sprang into action. First, Tia’von ran inside to rouse my uncle, semiconsciously watching Elmer Fudd, and screamed at him to go to the backyard to do something. Also watching the scene unfold was Uncle Paramore’s dog, Wolf. Wolf ran onto the ice and got his teeth into the hood of my winter jacket, which wasn’t exactly enough to keep me above water but did keep me near the hole long enough for Uncle P. to sprint outside in his boxer shorts and then promptly lose his balance on not just the ice, but on all the crap that Wolf had been depositing atop it all winter. So boom—down goes Uncle Paramore through the ice, hard. Underneath the freezing-cold water, he looked around and found himself face-to-face with me, eyes and mouth wide open. He grabbed me, lifted me up, and then slipped again as he tried to climb out. But when my head hit his shoulders, I started coughing, and he knew I was going to be okay.

  Right next to Tia’von, whose face was drenched in tears, Wolf the Dog was waiting for us on the side of the pool, wagging his tail, happy as could be.

  —

  I DON’T want you to think that men like Big Daddy, Uncle Len, and Uncle P. were perfect human beings, because that’s not the point. They had a few beers at night, they smoked, they pissed off their wives occasionally. But more important, unlike so many other men on the west side of Detroit in the late ’70s and ’80s, they were there. They didn’t disappear on their families, on their sons and daughters, on their responsibilities. And because of that, kids like me, and Tia’von, and my other cousins Traci and Tonya, and my brothers and sister, and my friends—we all learned things from them. How to live, and how to lead. And what success looked like. Maybe they weren’t rich by everyone’s standards, but they were bosses to us.

  Then there was one more lesson I learned from those men. How to compete.

  Because that television setup Uncle P. had in his room wasn’t just for watching cartoons. The monitors were also all attached to different video game consoles. Intellivision. ColecoVision. Atari 2600. Video horse racing. Video baseball. He always had the latest model, and kids were always welcome to come inside and try their hand at beating the master. And Uncle P. didn’t just beat you with his skills. He beat you with his head, and with his mouth. He would say whatever he had to say to get you out of your game, and before you had a chance to figure out how to respond, he’d won. It wasn’t just about trash-talking, it was about being competitive.

  And you couldn’t just leave and go play outside after you lost. If you wanted another shot, you had to sit there, and wait until your turn came again. That built mental and emotional toughness. Waiting it out meant you couldn’t look or be weak and fragile. I remember sitting for two hours to get another shot, stewing as I took more lip from Uncle P., and whoever else was in the room. Those were the rules, and those rules made you care about winning, not just in the video game battles, but in whatever other games we played outside.

  Out there, when we played football in the street, or basketball, we talked trash just like Uncle Paramore did. Winning wasn’t just about scoring more than the other guy—it was about making sure he knew you were scoring more, and that you were going to do it again, and again, and again. Not really to be mean, but—even if we
didn’t realize it at the time—to increase that edge you had on your opponent. It’s probably how Uncle P. beat us for years after we were as good as him at Donkey Kong or Pac-Man or whatever it was. And it’s why as the years would go on, that part of the game would remain a central piece of my repertoire.

  Not to mention that when you told the guy what you were going to do, and then did it, it felt as good as anything in the world.

  Still does.

  —

  TALKING TRASH as ten-year-olds was, admittedly, a pretty direct route to fighting. While things stayed civil in front of the video game console, thanks to Uncle Paramore’s supervision, out on the court we’d lose control pretty often. The good thing was, these were the days when kids could just fight with their fists. There wasn’t going to be some idiot who ran off and got his brother’s gun or something stupid like that. I won some brawls, I lost some—but I was definitely in the middle of more than some.

  We were all friends, but I was an easy target. Kids knew that I wet the bed until I was in the fourth grade—I tried to hide it by flipping the mattress all the time and washing my pajamas by myself, but there was nothing I could do when friends came over and my room smelled like piss. So I was Mr. Peebody, or Pee Boy, or whatever they came up with that day. I also got teased for being skinny, for having bumps on my face, for having horrible “rock teeth.” (I got veneers when I got drafted by the Nuggets. It was the first trip to the dentist of my life.) In those fights, in those games, I learned about how to defend myself and how to stand up for myself.

  Of course, I was also learning how to play the games. We played whatever was in season. In our version of basketball, we put milk crates on telephone poles to serve as hoops, meaning if you weren’t careful driving to the “basket,” you’d end up with a face full of wood. So that’s how, in my earliest days, I started developing some three- or four-foot touch shots and flip shots in the lane. Sometimes when it was too cold or raining, my best friend, Mike Ham (short for Hamilton), and I would take hangers out of a closet in his house on Virginia Park Street, put two together with some tape to create a net, and then get some foil and put a sock around it for a ball. His grandmother hated when we did that, because the games could end with a broken lamp or two.