بخش 02

it was nothing, I mean it was the furthest thing from paradise.

It was absolute hell.

You know, imagine waking up in the morning time as a kid and all you know is, am I going to get beat today?

And the whippings weren’t like, I’m going to give you like three whippings, just like three across your butt, whatever.

They were like serious beat-downs to the point where my mom had to write letters to school excusing me from class because I was so bruised up.

So that was the beginning of my life, so with that kind of foundation, to take that broken foundation, because you want to build a house on a good foundation.

When you have a seriously broken foundation and you go to a small town in Brazil, Indiana, where there’s a lot of racism there.

You know, and in my book, I have a lot of pictures.

Like people were are, oh my God, you didn’t come up like that.

Even people from that town didn’t believe that Brazil was that bad.

No one wants to really see because no one’s you.

No one’s you.

No one hears what you hear.

No one sees what you see.

No one’s living the way you’re living.

And they assume what they want to

assume because their life’s a certain way.

And so now I’m in Brazil, coming from Buffalo, and that started a whole another hell for me.

And I started realizing I had a learning disability.

A lot of it was from toxic stress.

So I don’t believe I so much had a disability in learning.

I believe that with my foundation was so broken as a young kid, all that toxic stress caused a whole bunch of issues.

So stuttering, patches of hair falling out, white spots on my, I mean, I still have these white spots on my skin.

[Vishen] How old were you when all of this was happening?

[David] So, like I said, it was, I was born in 1975.

We left in 1983, so it was about eight years old, in Buffalo, and that was nothing but beat-downs there.

But worse than the beat-downs, there’s a lot of mental torture from my dad.

My dad was a great psychiatrist.

He was almost a shrink.

Even though he wasn’t, he was good at getting in your head, because weak people are really good at getting in your head, because they don’t want to ever see you get, like, he was really bad on my mom.

They never want to see you get above them.

A weak person wants to always keep you

[Vishen] Pull you down.

[David] Yes, beneath them.

And I started realizing that, so as a young kid, I was takin’ notes, even though I wasn’t the smartest kid, because my brain didn’t want to learn.

It was caught in this hell.

But I was takin’ note on everything.

What makes this man this way?

What makes this man this way?

So that was up until I was eight.

And then when I was eight we moved to Brazil, Indiana.

And then from eight until I graduated, it was just a lot of hell.

It was one thing after another.

God always put another obstacle in front of me, so whenever I thought I was getting over one obstacle the next one would come up.

[Vishen] And it wasn’t just the bruises.

I remember in your book, Can’t Hurt Me, you spoke about how you had to cover the bruises because the more bruises these kids in school would see, the more they’d want to beat up on you.

[David] Right.

[Vishen] But it was the racism.

I mean, you were growing up in like KKK territory.

[David] Right, right.

[Vishen] Tell us about that.

[David] So Brazil, Indiana was about 10 minutes from a small town called Center Point, Indiana.

And if you look it up online, Center Point, Indiana, 1995, you’ll see a great picture of Center Point, Indiana, in 1995.

You’ll see some pictures of people burning crosses.

The Klan burning crosses.

This is 1995.

So now in that town, I’m not for sure how racist Brazil was, but Center Point was where a lot of it came from.

So those kids and those parents in Center Point, those kids went to my school.

So those kids traveled that 10 minutes, went to Brazil, Indiana, and they went to my school.

And they grew up in hate.

So all they knew was hate.

So they put that hate on me.

And if you’re the black kid, so there’s about five black kids that went to my high school.

So I was one of five.

I think it was about 2,000 kids in my school.

And you know, one time I came out of this class one day and I saw my brown Citation, and it had, Nigger we’re going to kill you, spray-painted on it.

So these are some things, like, I hear about bullying nowadays, and stuff like this, if it happened now, it’d be all over CNN news.

Back then, my mom was working three jobs.

By now, her fiancé, she was about to get married December, right after Christmas.

And it was when I was 14 years old.

She was about to get married.

And he got murdered.

[Vishen] Fuck.

[David] So my soon-to-be new role model in my life got murdered.

And so fast forward now. My mom’s working three jobs.

We just moved out of a $7 a month place, so we lived there for a about three or four years, and now we live in this decent house.

But it was always just a constant struggle, but I never put my fears and insecurities on my mother, because I saw her come up.

My dad drug her down the stairs by her hair.