Second grade in Brazil

Annunciation was a small school. Sister Katherine taught all of first and second grade in a single classroom, and with only eighteen kids to teach, she wasn’t willing to shirk her responsibility and blame my academic struggles, or anybody’s bad behavior, on learning disabilities or emotional problems. She didn’t know my backstory and didn’t have to. All that mattered to her was that I turned up at her door with a kindergarten education, and it was her job to shape my mind. She had every excuse in the world to farm me out to some specialist or label me a problem, but that wasn’t her style. She started teaching before labeling kids was a normal thing to do, and she embodied the no-excuses mentality that I needed if I was going to catch up.

Sister Katherine is the reason why I’ll never trust a smile or judge a scowl.

My dad smiled a hell of a lot, and he didn’t give two shits about me, but grouchy Sister Katherine cared about us, cared about me. She wanted us to be our very best. I know this because she proved it by spending extra time with me, as much time as it took, until I retained my lessons. Before the year was out, I could read at a second grade level. Trunnis Jr. hadn’t adjusted nearly as well. Within a few months he was back in Buffalo, shadowing my father and working that Skateland detail like he’d never left.

By then, we’d moved into a place of our own: a 600-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment at Lamplight Manor, a public housing block, that cost us $7 a month. My father, who earned thousands every night, sporadically sent $25 every three or four weeks (if that) for child support, while my mother earned a few hundred dollars a month with her department store job.

In her off-hours she was taking courses at Indiana State University, which cost money too. The point is, we had gaps to fill, so my mother enrolled in welfare and received $123 a month and food stamps. They wrote her a check for the first month, but when they found out she owned a car they disqualified her, explaining that if she sold her car they’d be happy to help.

The problem is we lived in a rural town with a population of about 8,000

that didn’t have a mass transit system. We needed that car so I could get to school, and so she could get to work and take night classes. She was hell-bent on changing her life circumstances and found a workaround through the Aide to Dependent Children program. She arranged for our check to go to my grandmother who signed it over to her, but that didn’t make life easy.

How far can $123 really go?

I vividly recall one night we were so broke we drove home on a gas tank that was near empty, to a bare refrigerator and a past due electric bill, with no money in the bank. Then I remembered that we had two mason jars filled with pennies and other loose change. I grabbed them off the shelf.

“Mom, let’s count our change!”

She smiled. Growing up, her father had taught her to pick up the change she found on the street. He was molded by the Great Depression and knew what it was like to be down and out. “You never know when you might need it,”

he’d say. When we lived in Hell, carrying home thousands of dollars every night, the notion that we would ever run out of money sounded ludicrous, but my mother retained her childhood habit. Trunnis used to belittle her for it, but now it was time to see how far found money could take us.

We dumped that change out on the living room floor and counted out enough to cover the electric bill, fill the gas tank, and buy groceries. We even had enough to buy burgers at Hardee’s on the way home. These were dark times, but we were managing. Barely. My mother missed Trunnis Jr.

terribly, but she was pleased that I was adjusting and making friends. I’d had a good year at school, and from our first night in Indiana I hadn’t wet the bed once. It seemed that I was healing, but my demons weren’t gone.

They were dormant. And when they came back, they hit hard.

* * *

Third grade was a shock to my system. Not just because we had to learn cursive when I was still getting the hang of reading block letters, but because our teacher, Ms. D, was nothing like Sister Katherine. Our class was still small, we had about twenty kids total, split between third and fourth grade, but she didn’t handle it nearly as well and wasn’t interested in taking the extra time I required.

My trouble started with the standardized test we took during our first couple of weeks of class. Mine came back a mess. I was still way behind the other kids and I had trouble building on lessons from the previous days, let alone the previous academic year. Sister Katherine considered similar signs as cues to dedicate more time with her weakest student, and she challenged me daily. Ms. D looked for a way out. Within the first month of class, she told my mother that I belonged in a different school. One for “special students.”

Every kid knows what “special” means. It means you are about to be stigmatized for the rest of your damn life. It means that you are not normal.

The threat alone was a trigger, and I developed a stutter almost overnight.

My thought-to-speech flow was jammed up with stress and anxiety, and it was at its worst in school.

Imagine being the only black kid in class, in the entire school, and enduring the daily humiliation of also being the dumbest. I felt like everything I tried to do or say was wrong, and it got so bad that instead of responding and skipping like scratched vinyl whenever the teacher called my name, I often chose to keep quiet. It was all about limiting exposure to save face.

Ms. D didn’t even attempt to empathize. She went straight to frustration and vented it by yelling at me, sometimes when she was leaning down, her hand on the back of my chair, her face just inches from my own. She had no idea the Pandora’s box she was tearing open. Once, school was a safe harbor, the one place I knew I couldn’t be hurt, but in Indiana it morphed into my torture chamber.

Ms. D wanted me out of her classroom, and the administration supported her until my mother fought for me. The principal agreed to keep me enrolled if my mother signed off on time with a speech therapist and put me into group therapy with a local shrink they recommended.

The psychologist’s office was adjacent to a hospital, which was exactly where you’d want to put it if you were trying to make a little kid doubt himself. It was like a bad movie. The shrink set up seven chairs in a semicircle around him, but some of the kids wouldn’t or couldn’t sit still.

One child wore a helmet and banged his head against the wall repeatedly.

Another kid stood up while the doctor was mid-sentence, walked toward a far corner of the room, and pissed in the trash can. The kid sitting next to me was the most normal person in the group, and he had set his own house on fire! I can remember staring up at the shrink on my first day, thinking, There’s no way I belong here.

That experience kicked my social anxiety up several notches. My stutter was out of control. My hair started falling out, and white splotches bloomed on my dark skin. The doctor diagnosed me as an ADHD case and prescribed Ritalin, but my problems were more complex.

I was suffering from toxic stress.

The type of physical and emotional abuse I was exposed to has been proven to have a range of side effects on young children because in our early years

the brain grows and develops so rapidly. If, during those years, your father is an evil motherfucker hell-bent on destroying everyone in his house, stress spikes, and when those spikes occur frequently enough, you can draw a line across the peaks. That’s your new baseline. It puts kids in a permanent

“fight or flight” mode. Fight or flight can be a great tool when you’re in danger because it amps you up to battle through or sprint from trouble, but it’s no way to live.

I’m not the type of guy to try to explain everything with science, but facts are facts. I’ve read that some pediatricians believe toxic stress does more damage to kids than polio or meningitis. I know firsthand that it leads to learning disabilities and social anxiety because according to doctors it limits language development and memory, which makes it difficult for even the most gifted student to recall what they have already learned. Looking at the long game, when kids like me grow up, they face an increased risk for clinical depression, heart disease, obesity, and cancer, not to mention smoking, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Those raised in abusive households have an increased probability of being arrested as a juvenile by 53 percent.

Their odds of committing a violent crime as an adult are increased by 38

percent. I was the poster child of that generic term we’ve all heard before:

“at-risk youth.” My mother wasn’t the one raising a thug. Look at the numbers and it’s clear: if anyone put me on a destructive path it was Trunnis Goggins.

I didn’t stay in group therapy for long, and I didn’t take Ritalin either. My mom picked me up after my second session and I sat in the front seat of her car wearing a thousand-yard stare. “Mom, I’m not going back,” I said.

“These boys are crazy.” She agreed.

But I was still a damaged kid, and while there are proven interventions on the best way to teach and manage kids who suffer from toxic stress, it’s fair to say that Ms. D didn’t get those memos. I can’t blame her for her own ignorance. The science wasn’t nearly as clear in the 1980s as it is now. All I know is, Sister Katherine toiled in the trenches with the same malformed kid that Ms. D dealt with, but she maintained high expectations and didn’t let her frustration overwhelm her. She had the mindset of, Look, everybody learns in a different way and we’re gonna figure out how you learn. She

deduced that I needed repetition. That I needed to solve the same problems over and over again in a different way to learn, and she knew that took time.

Ms. D was all about productivity. She was saying, Keep up or get out.

Meanwhile, I felt backed into a corner. I knew that if I didn’t show some improvement I would eventually be shipped out to that special black hole for good, so I found a solution.

I started cheating my ass off.

Studying was hard, especially with my fucked-up brain, but I was a damn good cheat. I copied friends’ homework and scanned my neighbors’ work during tests. I even copied the answers on the standardized tests that didn’t have any impact on my grades. It worked! My rising test scores placated Ms. D, and my mother stopped getting calls from school. I thought I’d solved a problem when really I was creating new ones by taking the path of least resistance. My coping mechanism confirmed that I would never learn squat at school, and that I would never catch up, which pushed me closer toward a flunked out fate.

The saving grace of those early years in Brazil was that I was way too young to understand the kind of prejudice I would soon face in my new hick hometown. Whenever you’re the only one of your kind, you’re in danger of being pushed toward the margins, suspected and disregarded, bullied and mistreated by ignorant people. That’s just the way life is, especially back then, and by the time that reality kicked me in the throat, my life had already become a full-fledged, fuck-you fortune cookie.

Whenever I cracked it open, I got the same message.

You were born to fail!

CHALLENGE #1

My bad cards arrived early and stuck around a while, but everyone gets challenged in life at some point. What was your bad hand? What kind of bullshit did you contend with growing up? Were you beaten? Abused?

Bullied? Did you ever feel insecure? Maybe your limiting factor is that you grew up so supported and comfortable, you never pushed yourself?

What are the current factors limiting your growth and success? Is someone standing in your way at work or school? Are you underappreciated and overlooked for opportunities? What are the long odds you’re up against right now? Are you standing in your own way?

Break out your journal—if you don’t have one, buy one, or start one on your laptop, tablet, or in the notes app on your smart phone—and write them all out in minute detail. Don’t be bland with this assignment. I showed you every piece of my dirty laundry. If you were hurt or are still in harm’s way, tell the story in full. Give your pain shape. Absorb its power, because you are about to flip that shit.

You will use your story, this list of excuses, these very good reasons why you shouldn’t amount to a damn thing, to fuel your ultimate success.

Sounds fun right? Yeah, it won’t be. But don’t worry about that yet. We’ll get there. For now, just take inventory.

Once you have your list, share it with whoever you want. For some, it may mean logging onto social media, posting a picture, and writing out a few lines about how your own past or present circumstances challenge you to the depth of your soul. If that’s you, use the hashtags #badhand

#canthurtme. Otherwise, acknowledge and accept it privately. Whatever works for you. I know it’s hard, but this act alone will begin to empower you to overcome.

C H A P T E R T W O