Prologue
1969: The Sample
Not that this is anything to brag about, but I may well have been the only teenager in the history of the Western world punished for not masturbating. As the sound of Dad’s oversized feet clomped their way up the stairs and lumbered purposefully towards my bedroom, I braced myself for another of our confrontations. Still, I was in no way prepared for the perverse twist this, our third major argument in as many days, would take. Trust me, if I’d possessed advance knowledge of the screwball Q&A Dad was going to put me through I would have handily escaped out my bedroom window, always left open just in case. After all, any self-respecting teenager would have eagerly risked breaking an ankle over one of my dad’s inquisitions.
Thwackkk! The door flew open, smashing against my bedroom wall and bouncing right back at Dad. He flicked out the big, broad palm of his hand with the speed and deftness of a seasoned boxer, steadying the door and then closing it behind him as if to say, “Whatever’s about to go down between us stays in this room.”
Then he said, in his patented Dad snarl, “Where is it, boy?”
“Where’s what?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Sorry, Dad, I don’t.”
For once I wasn’t lying. The kind of stuff I concealed from my old man wasn’t really the sort of thing that could be found stashed away in my room, like, say, a skin magazine (Dad had been buying me Playboys since I’d turned eight), or his coveted World War II pistol, or a twenty-dollar bill he’d left sitting on his bedroom dresser. My secrets, my sweet little acts of rebellion and betrayal, were way cooler than that.
“Look up at me when I’m talking to you. And stop slouching over that daggum guitar of yours.”
I tilted my head ever so slightly in his direction, careful to make sure his face was still out of my line of vision.
“That’s better. Now, I’m talking about that sample of yours. The one you promised Dr. Peters you’d produce and have on his secretary’s desk last week.”
“Oh, that.” I mumbled, straining to keep the “Oh God, here we go” out of my voice. This was going to get ugly. Beyond ugly. And Dad was just getting started.
“Stop your stalling, boy, and tell me, right this instant, where that sample is.”
“I lost it.”
“You’re lying through your teeth, boy.”
Something about the way my dad leaned on the word “boy,” the way he used it as a kind of punctuation to cap off one of his insulting harangues, always pissed me off more than the harangue itself. “Boy” was what white officers called lowly Negro privates like Dad in the U.S. Army during World War II. And now, a quarter-century later, “boy” was what Dad called me to remind me that I was, and would always be, his subordinate. Still, boy or no boy, it occurred to me that I might just be able to take him. I was fifteen, on the high school wrestling and cross-country teams. Dad was forty-five, overweight, overworked and diabetic. But then I thought about how quickly he’d intercepted the bounce-back of my bedroom door. I knew from experience that his hands were big and fast, and I’d been on the receiving end of his out-of-nowhere slaps enough times to know better than to knuckle it out with him.
“There you go, daydreaming again. Get that moony look out of your eyes and start listening, carefully.” Dad paused here, just to make sure his words were having the intended effect. They were.
“Danny, we both know that Dr. Peters gave you that deposit cup two weeks ago. I want your sperm sample in that cup and in his office by the end of the week. No ifs, ands or buts.”
Just hearing that dreaded word, “sperm,” made me shout out in protest: “No way I’m doing that. You can’t make me. I don’t care if I’m sterile. I don’t wanna have kids anyway.”
Saying that would wind Dad up even more, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him the real reason why Dr. Peters wasn’t going to get his precious little sample out of me: I hadn’t masturbated. And the closest I’d come to being sexually active was sneak-reading Dad’s paperback copy of Candy, memorizing the juicy parts and reciting them to my thunderstruck classmates over the phone. Although, truth be told, even if I had been more, well, experienced, I would have put off delivering what my doctor had so breezily ordered. To see Dad go apoplectic at the thought of his first son possibly being sterile was high entertainment for me. I was, after all, Daniel Grafton Hill the Fourth, the eldest of three kids—the extension of the Hill family legacy rested on my shoulders, or, to be blunt, on my so far unproven ability to coax a sperm sample out of my reluctant body. Talk about pressure. Especially since, according to Dad, the Hill family was a superior species. “Hills were born to be extraordinary,” he’d trumpet around the house with that mad grin sweeping across his face. After all, his PhD-toting father, Daniel Hill Jr., in his capacity as dean of the Howard University School of Religion, had moved in the highest circles of the “Negro elite,” arranging in the early sixties for such luminaries as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at his school. (“Continued success in the noble work that you are doing,” the great human rights leader had written Granddad in a thank-you letter that kicked off a correspondence between them.)
Well. What Dad, currently the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, was demanding of me could hardly be considered “noble.” What about my human rights? I thought, as Dad, inching closer to me, clenching and unclenching his hands, hissed, “I’m warning you, boy, you’re in no position to tell me what you will or won’t do, so don’t get sassy with me or I’ll slap you sideways.”
From I Am My Father’s Son: A Memoir of Love and Forgiveness. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright © 2009 by Out of Control Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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