Fixing Hell Read Free Page A

visited Tyrone’s house one evening and had a chat with his dad. I asked Tyrone’s father exactly what he did at work.
    “Well,” he said, “I get paid a lot of money for talking to people.”
    This sounded interesting, but I was still trying to fit the concept into the world I knew at my strict school. “Do you ever get sent to detention for talking too much?” I asked.
    Tyrone’s father laughed long and hard before catching his breath and answering my question. “No, son, I don’t go to detention,” he said. “I talk as long as I want, and the longer I talk, the more I get paid.”
    I was sold on the idea. Many more conversations followed with Tyrone’s father in the next few years, and by the time I went to college in 1975 I had my plan all laid out: an undergraduate degree in four years and on to a PhD and a career in psychology. I left my beloved New Orleans, where I felt truly at home as a light-skinned black man of Creole heritage, to attend the University of Dubuque in Iowa, where I feared I would stand out like a palm tree in a cornfield. The folks in Iowa welcomed me warmly, though, and my full football and track scholarship paid for nearly everything I needed. I was an intensely focused student athlete, spending every minute on my studies or on the practice field, so much so that my roommate insisted on setting me up on a blind date because he figured I would never make the effort myself. The blind date turned out to be a lovely, petite Iowa girl named Janet who had fourteen brothers and sisters, all of them raised by their father to be fiercely independent and capable. When he was repairing the roof and needed someone else up there with a hammer, he didn’t give a damn if the closest offspring’s name was Jack or Jane, the kid better scramble up on the roof.
    On our first date, we were riding around in Janet’s little white Gremlin when a tire went flat. Already liking this gal enough that I wanted to impress her with my gallantry, I hopped out and went right to changing the tire. What I had forgotten, and what I could never tell this girl I’d just met, was that being raised in a house full of women had left me with absolutely zero mechanical skills. I looked into the trunk of that car and had no idea how to even get the spare tire out. After I fumbled with it for a while, Janet finally came around and, with a look of consternation, showed me how to do it. At least she wasn’t strong enough to actually lift the tire out by herself.
    Once we got the tire around to the side of the car, I began fumbling with the jack, getting more embarrassed and ham-handed as I realized I didn’t know how to work it. Janet watched for a few minutes and finally had had enough. With a heavy sigh and a roll of the eyes, she said, “Stand back and get out of the way.” I did as I was told and watched this beautiful little gal change that tire like she’d done it a hundred times before and didn’t need any man to come to her rescue.
    Ten minutes later, we were back on the road and I was in love. Later, I called my mother back in New Orleans and told her I’d met the woman I was going to marry. She expressed skepticism, to say the least, but I kept going on and on about how capable Janet was and how I’d never seen a woman take charge like that before, a woman who could be so delicate and gentle but also so independent. By the end of the phone call, my mother knew I was serious.
    I married Janet while still in school and we had our son soon after. While obtaining my doctorate, I wrote my dissertation on child molesters. That required working twenty to thirty hours a week in a prison, interviewing prisoners. Still facing several more years of training as a psychology resident in a hospital, I looked at the different opportunities and my attention kept going to the military option. Medical residents were, and still are to some degree, treated like indentured servants, working extremely long hours under stressful