Everybody's Brother by CeeLo Green Read Free Book Online Page B

could be really liberal, and sometimes a little absentee, but at the same time she was very tough too. My mother gave me enough credit to make up my ownmind and enough freedom that I could have ended up getting myself killed. But on some deeper level that neither of us ever totally understood, she always seemed to trust me to make the right decision… eventually.
    I think she just prayed that she’d still be around to see me make a man of myself.

I don’t recall, ever graduatin’ at all
    Sometimes I feel I’m just a disappointment to y’all…
    … I admit, I’ve done some dumb shit
    And I’m probably gon do some mo’
    You shouldn’t hold that against me though (Why not?)
    Why not? My music’s all that I got
    But some time must be ingested for this to be manifested.
    —
OutKast featuring Goodie Mob,
“Git Up, Git Out”

IN MY ROOM
    Dig the expression on my face and the posters on the wall.
    It all screams teen attitude.

W hen I came back home to Atlanta from military school at age thirteen, I stopped following orders entirely and started to freely pursue my own passions. And there was no shortage other new passions to pursue. For instance, having left an all-boys school, there were lots of girls to notice.
    From an age that would shock many of you, I have loved women. Right from the start, being with a woman rubbed me the right way. Here’s what I learned early—and continue to be reminded of often to this very day—there is nothing like the touch or the scent of a woman.
    My first sexual experience was very, very early and with a much older woman. Today, she might be thrown in jail, but trust me, I would never be the one to press charges. See, one thing that you should know about me is that I always have admired older things. Older cars. Older singers. Older music. And yes, I always admired older women too.
    I know it’s rude to blow my own horn, but the truth is that I always had game with women because there was one thing that I could always do that woman loved—and that’s talk. In my experience, the gift of gab will help you get a lot of great rides—with both fast cars and fast womentoo. That very first experience was with one of my mom’s friends. How old was I at the time? Let me just put it this way—I was just a boy, but in her defense, I was already acting like some strange kind of man-child, wearing suits and carrying around that pipe of my dad’s. So from an early age, I acted and behaved like a much older person, like an older man. To play amateur psychiatrist, I suppose I was dressing for a part that no one else was playing—the man of the house who wasn’t anywhere to be found.
    According to the textbooks, there is a clinical term that my mother was once diagnosed me with called pseudomaturity or some shit like that. It’s a very real condition that causes young people to act like they are much older than they are. I was never tested for this condition, but I’m pretty sure I had a serious case of it anyway. It may explain why I grew up trying to charm the pants off my momma’s friends. When I think back to the day, I remind myself of the smart hustling little boy in the movie
Fresh
who was always running the bags. If you’ve never seen that movie, then you must see it because I grew up a lot like that, only my unlikely story came to pass in the Dirty South and not Brooklyn. Actually, I was even more of a mix between that kid in
Fresh
and Damien from
The Omen
. I don’t mean to say that I was demonic—Damien clearly had me beat in the pure evil category. But I always related to Damien in terms of understanding a lot at a very early age—and of course being devilishly charming.
    I understood full well that my mother’s friend was much older than me. Yet at the same time I understoodthat I could say the same thing twice, but a whole different way once my mother walked away. For example, there are two ways to say “Don’t you look beautiful today.” It all depended on how you