LIFE IS NOT EASY

LIFE IS NOT EASY

Looking back, I find I had forgotten how dangerous life in the ghetto was. We were new living there and we didn’t know anyone.

One time we went down to the playground before school started, I was about nine years old. There was a gang of kids down there and a little guy called Bo Wheat started an argument with me about something. He slugged me and I slugged him back and knocked him down. Then the whole gang came in on me. A very dark kid nicknamed Wicky and Bo Wheat’s brother, a light skinned kid, both started in on me. All of them. They beat the shit out of me. Harry and Sharon were helpless and standing there crying.

After a while, they got tired of beating on me, or actually I think some grownup came through the park and told them to leave me alone. We went home – I looked horrible – lips all swollen up. Later on, all these people became my friends. Termite, Bo Wheat, Wicky – everybody had a nickname. Not me – I was called Robert. But when, later, the white kids started calling me Bob that name stuck.

I’M A SQUARE THEN I MOVE OUT

Better things were expected of me and that’s what kept me right. I was an absolute square. I remember a girl, I must have been in 11th grade. She was very pretty but she was a grade ahead of me. But she offered me sex and I was so innocent, I told her, “I can’t do that!”

When I was 15 or 16, the head of the church offered to let me run one of the study groups they had all over town. By then I was through with them. I couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn’t go door to door.

I had a girlfriend and she was no Jehovah’s Witness. What had happened, she was just crazy about me and I didn’t like her. And for almost the whole school year, I would avoid her and she knew it. But she was just in love. Towards the end of the school year, I started liking her and she asked me to walk her home and I walked her home even though I wasn’t supposed to. In fact one of my songs—that’s where I got the words from. Because she would kiss me.

I didn’t know how to kiss nobody!! I lost a couple of girlfriends because I didn’t know how to kiss ‘em. So I was square as you could be. Then as I got older, I didn’t want the boys to know that I hadn’t had sex because they’d had it. And they would ridicule me. I didn’t have sex till I was 20. I was told by the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I wasn’t supposed to have sex till I got married. They kept me square.

And the girl that I had sex with—remember I told you my mother had an apartment building and I was living there. It was an old Victorian house that had been made into apartments, and I lived in what would have been the attic. The girl’s name was Joanna, and I didn’t like her that much anyway. But she liked me. So I saw it as chance to stop being a virgin.