Can't hurt me 02

 Story doesn't motivate you. I know a lot of you are thinking I don't know what the hell you're talking about. 

Motivation is a crap. 

Why do I say that? It comes and it goes. You're very motivated on those days when your life is perfect. 

When the sun is out, when the bills are paid, when the wife or husband everything is, everything's in its right place. That's when most of us are nice and motivated. 

So It comes and goes. 

Let's say right now you read this book and you find motivation from this book and you're living in Chicago. Let's say it's December in Chicago. 

Chicago and December time is real cold and you're motivated to go out for a two mile run. 

You open that door and that wind chill hits your face. 

If you're motivated, you're going to shut that door and go back and sit down on that couch and watch TV. 

Those people who find more than motivation from this maybe a little drive or maybe even a little obsession to change their life. 

When they open that door and that wind chill hits their face. 

They're gonna close it. 

Just to go back to their closet and put warm clothes on. 

So they can go back out there and tackle whatever is in front of them when you're driven. 

And obsessed you no longer care what's in front of you if your bills aren't paid because you can't figure out a way to do it if you're you know, if your life isn't perfect. 

It doesn't matter. You realize that's just life. It's not going to be perfect, but that's not going to derail me from what I have to do to get better. 

Charter One. I should have been a statistic. 

We found hell in a beautiful neighborhood. 

In 1981, Williamsville offered the tastiest real estate in Buffalo, NY. 

Leafy and friendly, its safe streets were dotted with dainty homes filled with model citizens. 

Doctors, attorneys, steel plant executives, dentists and professional football players live there with their adoring wives and their 2.2 kids. 

Cars were new, roads swept, possibilities endless. We're talking about a living, breathing American dream. 

Hell was a corner lot on Paradise Rd. 

That's where we lived in a two-story, four bedroom white wooden home with four square pillars framing a front porch that led to the widest, greenest lawn in Williamsville. We had a vegetable garden Outback and A2 car garage stocked with a 1962 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, a 1980 Mercedes 450 SLC, and in the driveway was a sparkling new 1981 black Corvette. 

Everyone on Paradise Rd. live near the top of the food chain. 

And based on appearances, most of our neighbors thought that we, the so-called happy, well adjusted Goggins family, were the tip of that spear. But glossy surfaces reflect much more than they reveal. 

They'd see us most weekday mornings, gathered in the driveway at 7:00 AM My dad, Trueness. Goggins wasn't tall, but he was handsome and built like a boxer. 

He wore tailored suits, his smile warm and open. He looked every bit the successful businessman on his way to work. 

My mother, Jackie, was 17 years younger, slender and beautiful, and my brother and I were clean cut, well dressed in jeans and pastel Izod shirts and strapped with backpacks, just like the other kids, the white kids. 

In our version of affluent America, each driveway was a staging ground for nods and waves before parents and children rode off to work in school. 

Neighbors saw what they wanted. Nobody probed too deep. 

Good thing the truth was the Goggins family had just returned home from another all nighter in the Hood, and if Paradise Rd. was hell, that meant I lived with the Devil himself. 

As soon as our neighbors shut the door or turned the corner, my father smiled, morphed into a scowl. He barked orders and went inside to sleep another one off. But our work wasn't done. My brother, Trueness Junior and I had somewhere to be, and it was up to our sleepless mother to get us there. 

I was in first grade in 1981 and I was in a school days for real. 

Not because the academics were hard, at least not yet, but because I couldn't stay awake. 

The teachers sing song voice was my lullaby, my crossed arms on my desk, a comfy pillow and her sharp words when she caught me dreaming, An unwelcome alarm clock that wouldn't stop blaring. 

Children that young are infinite sponges. They soak up language and ideas at warp speed to establish a fundamental foundation upon which most people build lifelong skills like reading and spelling and basic math. But because I worked nights, I couldn't concentrate on anything most mornings except trying to stay awake. 

Recess and PE were a whole different minefield out on the playground. Staying lucid was the easy part. The hard part was the hiding. 

Couldn't let my shirt slip, Couldn't wear shorts. Bruises were red flags I couldn't show because if I did, I knew I'd catch even more. 

Still, on that playground and in the classroom, I knew I was safe for a little while. At least it was the one place he couldn't reach me, at least not physically. 

My brother went through a similar dance in 6th grade, his first year in middle school. He had his own wounds to hide and sleep to harvest, because once that bell rang, real life began. 

The ride from Williamsville to the Masten district in East Buffalo took about 1/2 an hour, but it may as well have been a world away. 

Like much of East Buffalo, Mason was a mostly black working class neighborhood in the inner city that was rough around the edges. 

Though in the early 1980s it was not yet completely ghetto as ****. 

Back then, the Bethlehem Steel plant was still humming and Buffalo was the last Great American steel town. 

Most men in the city, black and white, worked solid union jobs and earned a living wage, which meant business. And Maston was good for my dad. It always had been. 

By the time he was 20 years old, he owned a Coca-Cola distribution concession and four delivery routes in the Buffalo area. 

That's good money for a kid, but he had bigger dreams and an eye on the future. His future had four wheels and a disco funk soundtrack. 

When a local bakery shut down, he leased the building and built one of Buffalo's first roller skating rinks. 

Fast forward 10 years and Skateland had been relocated to a building on Ferry Street that stretched nearly a full block in the heart of the Masten district. 

He opened a bar above the rink, which he named the Vermillion Room, in the 1970s. That was the place to be in East Buffalo, and it's where he met my mother when she was just 19 and he was 36. 

It was her first time away from home. 

Jackie grew up in the Catholic Church. Trueness was the son of a minister and knew her language well enough to masquerade as a believer, which appealed to her. But let's keep it real. She was just as drunk on his charm. 

Trueness Junior was born in 1971. I was born in 1975, and by the time I was six years old, the roller disco craze was at its absolute peak. Skateland rocked every night. We usually get there around 5:00 PM, and while my brother worked the concession stand, popping corn, grilling hot dogs, loading the cooler, and making pizzas, I organized the skates by size and style. 

Each afternoon I stood on a step stool to spray my stock with aerosol deodorizer and replaced the rubber stoppers that aerosol stink would cloud all around my head and live in my nostrils. My eyes looked permanently bloodshot. It was the only thing I could smell for hours. But those are the distractions I had to ignore, to stay organized and on hustle because my dad, who worked the DJ booth, was always watching and if any of those skates went missing, it meant my ***. 

Before the doors opened, I'd Polish the skate rink floor with a dust mop that was twice my size. 

At around 6:00 PM, my mother called us to dinner in the back office. That woman lived in a permanent state of denial. 

But her maternal instinct was real, and it made a big ******* show of itself grasping for any shred of normalcy. 

Every night in that office, she'd set out two electric burners on the floor, sit with her legs curled behind her, and prepare a full dinner roast meat, potatoes, green beans and dinner rolls while my dad did the books and made calls. The food was good, but even at six and seven years old, I knew our family dinner was a ******** facsimile compared to what most families had. 

Plus, we ate fast. There was no time to enjoy it because at 7:00 PM when the doors opened, it was Showtime and we all had to be in our places with our stations prepped. 

My dad was the sheriff and once he stepped into the DJ booth, he had us triangulated. He scanned that room like an all seeing eye and if you ****** ** you'd hear about it unless you felt it first. 

The room didn't look like much under the harsh overhead house lights, but once he dimmed them, the show lights bade the rink in red and glanced off the spinning mirror ball, conjuring a skate disco fantasy weekend or week night. Hundreds of skaters piled through that door. Most of the time they came in as a family, paying their $3 entrance fee and half dollar skate fee before hitting the floor. 

I rented out the skates and managed that entire station by myself. I carried that step stool around like a crutch. Without it, the customers couldn't even see me. 

The bigger size skates were down below the counter, but the smaller sizes were stored so high to have to scale the shelves, which always made the customers laugh. Mom was the one and only cashier. She collected everyone's cover charge and to trueness money was everything. He counted the people as they came in, calculating his take in real time, so he had a rough idea of what to expect when he counted out the register after we closed up and had better all be there. 

All the money was his. The rest of us never earned a cent for our sweat. In fact, my mother was never given any money of her own. She had no bank account or credit cards in her name. He controlled everything, and we all knew what would happen if her cash drawer ever came up short. 

None of the customers who came through our doors knew any of this, of course. To them, Skateland was a family owned and operated Dream Cloud. My dad spun the fading vinyl echoes of disco and funk, and the early rumbles of hip hop bass bounced off the red walls. Courtesy of Buffalo's favorite son, Rick James, George Clinton Funkadelic, and the first tracks ever released by hip hop innovators run DMC. 

Some of the kids were speed skating. I like to go fast too, but we had our share of skate dancers and that floor got funky. 

For the first hour or two, the parents stayed downstairs and skated or watched their kids spin the Oval. But they would eventually leak upstairs to make their own scene, and when enough of them made their move, trueness slipped out of the DJ booth so he could join them. 

My dad was considered the unofficial mayor of Mason, and he was a phony politician to the core. His customers were his marks, and what they didn't know was that no matter how many drinks he poured on the House and bro hugs he shared, he didn't give a **** about any of them. They were all dollar signs to him. 

If he poured you a drink for free, it was because he knew you would buy two or three more. 

While we had our share of all night skates and 24 hour skate marathons, the Skateland doors typically closed at 10:00 PM. 

That's when my mother, brother and I went to work fishing bloody tampons out of **** filled toilets, airing the lingering cannabis haze out of both bathrooms, scraping bacteria loaded gum off the rink floor, cleaning the concession kitchen and taking inventory. 

Just before midnight, we slog into the office half dead. 

Our mother would tuck in my brother and me beneath a blanket on the office sofa, our heads opposite one another as the ceiling shook with the sound of bass heavy funk. Mom was still on the clock. 

As soon as she stepped inside the bar, Trueness had her working the door or hustling downstairs like a booze mule to fetch cases of liquor from the basement. 

There was always some menial tasks to perform, and she didn't stop moving while my father kept watch from his corner of the bar where you could take in the whole scene. In those days, Rick James, a Buffalo native and one of my father's closest friends, stopped by whenever he was in town, parking his Excalibur on the sidewalk out front. 

His car was a billboard that let the hood know a super freak was in the house. 

He wasn't the only celebrity that came through. OJ Simpson was one of the NFL's biggest stars, and he and his Buffalo Bills teammates were regulars, as was Teddy Pendergrass and Sister Sledge. If you don't know the names, look them up. 

Maybe if I had been older or my father had been a good man, I might have had some pride in being part of a cultural moment like that. 

But young kids aren't about that life. It's almost like no matter who our parents are and what they do, we're all born with a moral compass that's properly tuned. 

When you're 6-7 or eight years old, you know what feels right and what feels way the **** ***. 

And when you are born into a cyclone of terror and pain, you know it doesn't have to be that way, and that truth nags at you like a splinter in your jacked up mind. 

You can choose to ignore it, but the dull throbbing is always there as the days and nights bleed together into one blurred memory. 

Some moments do stick out, though, and one I'm thinking of right now still haunts me. That was the night my mom stepped into the bar before she was expected and found my dad. Sweet talking, a woman about 10 years her junior. 

Trueness saw her watching and shrugged while my mother eyeballed him and slugged two shots of Johnny Walker red to calm her nerves. 

He noticed her reaction and didn't like it one damn bit. 

She knew how things were that trueness ran prostitutes across the border to Fort Erie and Canada. 

A summer cottage belonging to the president of one of Buffalo's biggest banks doubled as his pop-up brothel. 

He introduced Buffalo bankers to his girls whenever he needed a longer line of credit, and those loans always came through. 

My mom knew the young woman she was watching was one of the girls in his stable. She'd seen her before once she walked in on them ******* on the skate land off his sofa where she tucked her children in damn near every night. 

When she found them together, the woman smiled at her. Trueness shrugged. 

No, my mom wasn't clueless, but seeing it with her own eyes always burned. 

Around midnight, my mother drove with one of our security guards to make a bank deposit. He begged her to leave my father. He told her to leave that very night.