Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoes before work. I strolled up to where he sat and smiled at him.
    “Hey, I love you,” I said.
    “Mm-hm,” he said, not even looking up.
    It was like the moment when he’d been a loving dad had never happened. I was crushed.
    Even though I didn’t like being around Big Terry when he was drunk, I wanted so badly to connect with him that I went into the living room one night when he was in his chair, beer in hand, listening to Bobby Womack. I leaned in and kissed him on his cheek. He looked at me like I was crazy. I backed away from him so quickly I nearly tripped over my own feet, and I never made that mistake again. Whether he was sober or drunk, I kept myself apart from him as much as I could.
    THE ONE PERSON I COULD COUNT ON WAS MY BROTHER , Marcelle. We were always paired together. We shared the same socks and underwear and wore the same outfits in differentcolors, and we were often asked if we were twins, even though we looked nothing alike, and we couldn’t have been more different. Marcelle was very small and handsome, with lighter skin and softer hair. I was the spitting image of my father and earned the nickname Little Terry. My mother had this singsong way of calling out each of our names around the house: “Mar-SA-yell! Lil TER-REE!”
    Marcelle and I traded comic books, ripping out the ads in the back for books by the first great bodybuilder, Joe Weider. We also loved anything Bruce Lee. He had his own fitness regime, and we ordered his books to learn all about it. From him, we began to understand how to use one muscle against the other, like by pushing our hands together as hard as we could.
    I was obsessed with constantly making myself bigger and tougher. I was always thinking about which moves I could do while I was watching TV, and I flexed my legs so hard in the shower that my muscles cramped. Trish thought I was crazy, but the really wild thing was how well it worked. I grew noticeably stronger.
    Being big and strong meant everything to me. Even though I was the younger brother, I continued to feel like my family’s protector. If someone said something to Marcelle, I was the one to respond. But then there was the day when an older guy came up on Marcelle as we walked home from school. I started defending my brother. And then I stopped short.
That guy’s too big
, I thought.
I can’t do anything
. The kid attacked Marcelle, beat him up, and threw him in a rosebush.
Ow
. When the bully was gone, I held out my hand to Marcelle and helped him to stand.
    “Man, you didn’t even have my back,” he said.
    “I’m sorry. He was too big. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
    Marcelle accepted my apology, but Trish did not. She was furious at me.
    “Don’t you ever, ever let him get beat up,” she said. “You take care of him.”
    Because Marcelle had been diagnosed with a learning disability and held back a year in school, we all felt the need to take care of him. But Marcelle was determined to prove he wasn’t dumb. I often came into our room and found him reading the dictionary, trying to learn a new word every day. His quiet determination and commitment to self-improvement left a big impression on me.
    I had my own reason to worry people might think I was stupid. I was in the kitchen with Trish one day when she said something, but I couldn’t make it out.
    “Huh?” I said. “What?”
    “You can’t hear me?” she asked.
    I shrugged, not wanting to get in trouble.
    There was no hiding the problem, though, and finally, my mother and father took me to a specialist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. After we’d gone through all of the tests, the doctor said my hearing was fine and sent us home. But still, there were times when I missed something I was told to do at school or around the house because I hadn’t heard the person speaking to me. We went to another specialist, and again we were sent home. By the third or fourth doctor visit, Trish had had enough. Before we even