Shaq Uncut: My Story Read Free Page A

present. They were Chuck Taylor sneakers, brand-new, the original white canvas ones. I couldn’t believe it. I never had shoes like that. I knew we couldn’t reallyafford them. So my dad tells me, “Hey, you’ve got to wear these shoes to school, to play ball. You’ve gotto wear them in the summer. They’ve got to last. Don’t mess them up, you hear me?”
    I go outside in my new Chuck Taylors and I’m strutting around and I’m feeling good. I am
The Man
. But at 4:15 the screen door opens and that damn dog Sam starts coming right for me. I start running and I tryto jump the fence, but I’m so big I’m having trouble scrambling up there. My feet are dangling and I’m trying to hoist myself over, but the dog gets the back of my shoe and rips it. So I go home and tell my dad and he says, “I don’t want to hear that crap!” and he punches me.
    The next day I get myself a stick, and when Pee Wee’s dog comes out I try to break his neck. I’m so mad about the ChuckTaylors I’m trying to kill that dog Sam. The dog runs back in the house and Pee Wee comes out acting real tough and I hit him with the stick, too. Next thing you know his three brothers come out and they beat the stuffing out of me. I am so messed up my father doesn’t even bother to whip me again.
    I was on punishment a lot. I used to be sent to my room, and to keep myself from going crazy I’dclose my eyes and create all these dreams. In one dream I was the Incredible Hulk, so I’d close my eyes and start growling, “Aaaaaahhhhh.” In my next dream I was Superman, so I’d close my eyes and flex my muscles and then I was flying. Next time, I was a hero in
Star Wars
.
    Once in a while, I’d close my eyes and I’d dream I was one of those drug dealers on the corner. They always had money. Thewads of bills would be sticking out of their pockets so we could see how well they were doing. I’d think about what it would be like to be them for a second, but I was always on punishment so I couldn’t even get out of the house to do something stupid like that. See, Pops? Your “tough love” worked.
    Grandmother Odessa hated it when I was on punishment. Funny thing was, I was on punishment in herhouse, because we couldn’t afford our own place. After I screwed up and my dad beat me, she’dwait until he left and that’s when she’d sneak in with a glass of milk and a slice of Entenmann’s pound cake and tell me in that low voice, “Here, have this. Stop crying now. It’s going to be all right. You’re my baby. Don’t worry.”
    I used to tell my grandma, “When I get rich, I’m going to buy you ahouse.” She’d smile and tell me, “Baby, I don’t need a new house. This one is just fine.”
    We lived with my grandmother for a while, but she and my father didn’t really get along that well so we ended up moving to Newark, on Vassar Avenue. My grandfather, my dad’s father, was this hard-core Jamaican man, and we moved in with him. We also lived with my dad’s brother and some of my aunts and a tonof cousins. The house was full. It was a pretty big house, nine or ten rooms, but there weren’t enough beds to go around. I slept on the floor with a bunch of my cousins.
    My grandpa had dreams of being rich, so every day he’d give me and my cousin Andre a dollar to go buy the Quick Pick lottery ticket and another dollar to buy bread. My cousin and I were entrepreneurs. We’d buy the Quick Pick,but then we’d buy the cheap, stale bread that cost sixty cents and use the other forty cents to buy gum. We did that a few times before someone in the house said, “How come this bread never tastes fresh?” We got found out and got a whupping from my crazy grandpa.
    By that point we were used to having our gum. We
had
to have it. So we stole it. We’d develop all sorts of elaborate plans to distractthe guy at the cash register so we wouldn’t get caught. One day, Andre and I were chewing our gum and my grandfather said to me, “Where did you