The next day in school the word got around that I had beaten the two toughest guys in the school. Over the years I became good friends with both John and Mickey, hanging out at their houses, but I always had their respect after that encounter in the gym; it was a great feeling to gain respect without having to fight.
About two weeks after that incident I met John Clark. I was walking home from school and saw three guys starting to fight in the street. Two of the guys were going up against the one guy, who was John. He had a large tree branch in his hands trying to take the two guys on at the same time. They were afraid of John who looked like a wild man swinging the branch with his afro and red dashiki shirt. John hit one of them in the arm and sent him hard to the ground. It seemed that the two had had enough, so John let them go with a warning to stay out of his way. From that moment, I liked John—or JC as I came to call him. JC reminded me of myself by the way he took on bigger guys, and how he didn’t back down when outnumbered.
I went over and asked him his name, and from that point on we became the best of friends. I got to know his mom and his five sisters and three brothers, and soon my family took JC in as a surrogate son and brother. JC and I hung out almost every day after school.
Soon afterwards, my family moved from our small house to a 40-unit apartment complex ten blocks away where my father had just gotten a job as the apartment manager. It was right behind a McDonald’s restaurant, which was great for me because I loved the place.
My mom found a new church in Florida for us to attend; my mom loved small churches because it reminded her of her days growing up in Mississippi. The church was called New Hope United Holiness Church, and the pastor was a very kind and humble man named Reverend William Burnett. He and his wife, Sister Barnett, ran the church. Sister Barnett stood tall at six feet. When it was time for the music she would sit up in front near the pulpit and beat her large pair of tambourines so loud it would drown out all of our singing. I loved that church and the small crowd that came there for worship. My mom would say that while we were young she was going to keep us in church just like the Bible said. She said when we got older it would be up to us and the Good Lord to decide how we worship. Sometimes Mom would let us get away with not going to church, but she attended faithfully, and that meant sometimes going two or three times a week.
I came from a family of preachers and church mothers, as they are called. My grandmother on my father’s side was a church founder, and many of my uncles were preachers and several of my aunts were either founders or mothers of the church. My great uncle Richard in Atlanta was the pastor of a large church that he built from the ground up. When we had come down from New Jersey and stayed with them for three months, I went to work with him to help build his church; it was just he and I out there working in that empty lot. Uncle Richard let me lay the first brick to construction, and I felt proud to know that I laid the cornerstone to one of God’s churches. There is an old saying in the Bible: “Train up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart.”
My mom was doing her best by putting Christian values in us, and she knew that someday it would take hold and come in handy when trouble came our way. The whole family was busy at our new place; Mom had just gotten a new job at a computer company called Modcom. Dad was busy running the apartment complex, and my brothers were gone and my sister had gotten married and had two children and was busy with them. My little brother Louis would be picked up by my aunt and stay over at their house until my mother got him, so most of the time I would come home after school before anyone got there and be alone.
One day I arrived home and was extremely bored, so I decided to look for my father’s hand gun that I had seen many times when we lived in New Jersey; I knew in New Jersey he used to keep it under their bed so I decided to look there, and sure enough I found it. I believe it was a 380 automatic with 12 rounds in the clip. I didn’t see the clip, only the gun, and besides I didn’t know what a clip was for or how the whole thing worked. Regardless, little did I know that death was almost at my door.
I picked the gun up and began to play with it as if I were a cowboy, then I tucked it in my pants as if I were a gangster. I then took the gun into the living room and wondered what to do next with it. I laid the gun down on the kitchen table and poured a glass of juice from the refrigerator and tried to figure out my next move. In my fourteen-year-old mind, I knew the gun was safe because there were no bullets in it, but what I did next was simply stupid and foolish: I took the gun up off the table and pointed it to my head. A small voice told me Pull the trigger, to go ahead pull the trigger, it’s okay, but luckily, another small voice spoke up and said Don’t do it, don’t even play like that. Still, I put my finger on the trigger and began to pull back when the small voice spoke again: Don’t. I took the gun away from my head and pointed the gun to the floor and pulled the trigger and BAM! A bullet shot out, hitting the tile floor then bouncing into the hall plaster wall, lodging itself inside deep inside it.
Frightened, I fell up against the wall. I couldn’t believe what almost just happened. I thought about my parents and their faces if they were to come home and see me lying on the floor with a bullet in my head and my dad’s gun in my hand. It makes me cry even to this day.
I quickly gathered myself and put the gun back under their bed; I then went to the storage room at the apartment and got some putty, plaster, and green paint. I came back and covered the hole with the putty, painted it over and put the items back in the storage room. When my parents came home that evening they never knew what tragedy almost happened. The angels were there for me again, and looking back I know the Good Lord showed me mercy on that day. To be 50 years old now and think back on how the Lord could have let me die in that horrible way, I’m eternally grateful to Him.
A year later I started a new school called South Plantation. I was in the 9th grade, and most of the people from Parkway Middle School were also going to the new school, so that meant some of my old friends would be joining me there. My friend John Clark also went there, but JC was in a different section of the school because he was in a special class for students with learning disabilities. JC was a talented singer and musician, but academics were not his specialty.
I hated the name of the new school—South Plantation—because it reminded me of a time of slavery. I complained to my mother about it, but she said don’t worry about it and just get an education because a name can’t stop you. It still bothered me from time to time, but I had to remember this was the Deep South and not Jersey, so after a period of time I finally just put the name out of my mind and moved on.
At South Plantation High School I met people who would have a positive influence on the direction my life would take; one of these people was my gym teacher Bob Wilson. Coach Wilson was an ex-boxer from New York who also acted in films and TV commercials in his free time. In New Jersey I had acted in a couple of school plays: I played the wicked witch in “Hansel & Gretel” and Santa Claus in a Christmas show. When I heard from other students that Coach Wilson was a part-time actor, I immediately went to see him.
Coach Wilson told me to stick around after school to talk about acting, and after the final bell we sat in his office and began to talk. Coach told me he was from New Jersey, too, and within a few minutes we quickly bonded like good friends. There’s just something about Jersey boys; it’s a small state but we always look out for each other. We spent over an hour just talking about Jersey. He then told me he had an agent in both New York and Miami, and that he would be happy to introduce me to his Miami agent who helps him get film and commercial work.
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