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Within a few months, the fear of the men lessened, finding instead that while they did so with a lot of yelling and cursing, they were kind of amused by the presence of two small boys in the club, making us fetch them things, do basic cleaning tasks, sometimes tossing balls with us outside the way they all wished their own fathers had done with them when they were young.
By the time we were in school, we realized how unique our world was. Maybe we didn't have moms around, didn't have soft and sweet things. No home cooked meals. No nighttime kisses. No one to wipe our brows with cold compresses when we were sick.
But we had freedom all our classmates envied.
We had no rules except to stay out of the club member's way when they were trying to work. We could run free all day, shirk our homework without getting in trouble, bring home solid Cs every semester without anyone getting on our case about our wasted potential, get into fights in or out of school without getting lectures.
We were inseparable.
Brothers in every way we possibly could be.
And then one day, Sean's dad went to jail, and his mom showed back up again.
And ripped him away from me.
The days after that were long and lonely, feeling oddly left behind, left out, knowing that Sean was getting things I never would. All the softer things in life.
It didn't last long, though.
Three months later, Phil was out, and he brought Sean back with him. Back to me.
Unfortunately for me, every once in a while when Dwayne got locked up or was gone for any stretch of time, I was - for some unknown reason - shipped back to my grandmother. I didn't even know how they knew about her, where they found her, why they couldn't just let me stay there with Sean and Phil. But it wasn't my place to question. What the president wanted, he got. And that meant my banishment when my father was gone.
As an adult, I figured maybe it was a law thing. Maybe the president didn't want child services sniffing around when they got word that my dad was locked up, that it was safer for them to ship me off to my next of kin since they couldn't have the law in their clubhouse around all the guns and drugs and fugitives.
All I knew at the time though was the feeling of being unwanted, the rejection, the aloneness as I found myself at a doorstep I had seen years before in a house with plastic covers on the furniture and a table I once slept under.
And that the woman who owned it was no longer just a chain-smoking, soap-opera-addicted, mean woman.
No.
She was a fucking lunatic.
Made that way by too much booze and maybe some kind of dementia, making her meaner than a rabid cat, coming at me with rolled up magazines, frying pans, a belt that once belonged to her late husband. Not for any real reason. Just because I was there. Or because I wasn't there - as in at school - when she wanted me to do some menial task. Then, as time went on, for no actual reason at all except the warped voices in her head claimed I was guilty of something I had no part of.
Just when I was sure I couldn't take another beating, another screaming match, another incident of full-blown insanity, Dwayne would get out, and I would be brought back to my club, back to my people.
When we changed clubs a few times over the next few years due to massive incarcerations or lousy leadership, Dwayne, Phil, and Sean were the only constants in my life.
In the next clubs, we weren't seen as the club's kids, everyone imparting their fucked up little life wisdom on us, treating us like the kids they all actually hoped they didn't have, not wanting the actual responsibility of having one of us show up at their doors, just liking the idea from a hands-off distance.
The new club didn't want us around, didn't try to make it seem like they did. We endured. We did the dirty work. Took their taunts without argument.
It was there that I got my road name, a couple years after Sugar got his with that whole raid incident.
After some asshole taunted me about my 'slut mother,' my 'whack job grandmother,' my 'gay' friendship with Sugar relentlessly, trying to get a rise out of me.
But I had long since learned to lock all that shit down.
It all started that first night when my mom dropped me off at the club, and Sean told me we were men now. Then every single visit back to my grandmother's where any reaction on my part brought about worse treatment on hers.
