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

got out to the car, she started in on me.
    “You know what?” she said. “I’m not taking you to any more of these. You take those tests. And they say nothing’s wrong. Is there something wrong with you?”
    “No,” I said. My big thing was I didn’t want to get held back. I’d seen what it had done to my brother, and I was determinedit wasn’t going to happen to me. I didn’t want anyone to think I was dumb, either.
    When we were in the car on our way home, they were sitting in the front seat, and I was alone in back. Trish suddenly whipped around and looked at me. I realized she’d been talking to me, but I hadn’t been able to hear her.
    “Huh, what’d you say?” I asked.
    “There ain’t nothing wrong,” she said. “You’re faking it for attention.”
    “No, he ain’t faking it,” Big Terry said. “There’s something wrong with him, Trish. He don’t know what you said.”
    My father’s sympathy meant a lot to me, but Trish was done. My mother was very conscious of her time, and as far as she was concerned, I’d wasted enough of it.
    And so I did learn to fake it: hearing, that is. As a kid, I pretended to hear whole conversations that I couldn’t really make out, smiling and nodding along with the others. I soon learned to mirror faces. If two people were talking, and one person said something that made the other person laugh, I laughed, too.
    And that’s how I got by. A few years ago, I finally acknowledged that getting by was not the same as being able to hear, and I went to another specialist. I learned that my hearing is fine, except within a specific decibel range, like the high-pitched voice belonging to a woman or child, and then it’s gone. Even so, as the specialist said a series of words to me, I was able to repeat them back to her. And then she covered her mouth and asked me to repeat what she said. I couldn’t do it.
    “Your whole life you’ve been reading lips,” she said.
    “Are you serious?” I asked.
    I had no idea because I’d developed so many work-arounds by that point. When I started acting, I memorized everyone’s lines, so even if I couldn’t understand the words the other actorswere saying, I could tell where in the conversation my lines were meant to be and say them at the right moment. And always, I mirrored others nonverbally with my face, which I’m sure was actually one of the most helpful skills I could have acquired as an actor. Back then, I was just learning to pretend.
    Even more than I wanted to prove I wasn’t slow, I wanted to show everyone that I was a good kid. Like most children of alcoholics, I was a pleaser. If something would bring peace to the house, I’d do it. I never really shared what I wanted, because nothing I wanted was as important as keeping things calm.
    I also wanted to be right for God. When I was little, we attended the Church of God in Christ, which had a way of driving home the importance of being virtuous and the terrifying consequences of the alternative. It helped that I’ve always had a big imagination and could see further than the present moment, which meant I had a clear sense of the consequences of my actions, even when I was little. Being left-handed and right-brained, I’ve since learned that, scientifically, I have a tendency toward imagination rather than analysis, and that’s absolutely correct.
    On Sundays, we went to church from eleven to four, and then we returned for night services, from seven to ten. One day, when I was in the first or second grade, I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I fell asleep during the day service. I woke up groggy, already worrying that Trish would be mad at me. And then I sat up quickly, a much deeper fear spiking my heart. My mother wasn’t sitting next to me, and neither was Marcelle or Micki. There was no one in the pews. Everyone was gone.
    It was my worst nightmare come true, the one our pastor and Trish had warned me about time and time again, the one I’d worried