“Yeah,” said Salter, nodding his head thoughtfully, “I’m your daddy too. Here—” and he took out another dollar bill that he handed to me, saying, “Now you go and put that in your bank, son.”

With a big smile on my face, even though I had no bank, I started to turn and strut off, one dollar richer, with Ophelia’s daddy agreeing to be my daddy too, when I was met by Freddie’s scowl as he bellowed, out of nowhere, “Well, I ain’t your goddamned daddy, and you ain’t getting shit from me!”

Talk about bursting my balloon. For a moment I glanced back at Salter, who shot Freddie a strange look that went right over my head and Freddie’s as well. Probably Salter meant something along the lines of what I was feeling—that Freddie had no call to say anything, number one ’cause I was talking to Salter at the time, and number two ’cause it was cruel and unusual punishment. Freddie had just made his point one too many times, on top of his incessant commentary about the size of my ears.

Even when I was standing nearby, whenever anybody asked about where I was, he answered with a roar, “I don’t know where that big-eared motherfucker is.”

Then, as if he did not care, he’d turn and look at me with a grin—like it made him a bigger man for stomping on me and my self-esteem—while I stood there and felt my naturally dark shade of skin burn red with hurt and embarrassment.

Another time I was in the bathroom when I heard someone asking for me and had to hear Freddie snarl, “I don’t know where that big-eared motherfucker is,” behind my back. It was bad enough when he said it in front of me, especially since he enjoyed watching me try to mask my seven-year-old pain, but it was almost worse hearing him say it when he really didn’t know where I was. Besides, when I looked at my ears in the bathroom mirror to see how big they were, I realized they were sort of big, which made his comments sting all the more. It didn’t matter that I would grow into them one day.

Between Freddie’s remarks and some of the kids in the neighborhood and at school calling me “Dumbo”—the flying elephant from the Disney cartoon movie—a toll was being taken on my self-esteem, compounded by the gaping hole left by having no daddy. Everybody else knew who their daddy was. Ophelia’s daddy was Salter, Sharon and Kim had Freddie, my friends all had daddies. That needless comment from Freddie that afternoon when Salter gave me the one dollar made it clear to my young sensibilities, finally, that he was never going to warm to me. The question for me then became—what could I do about it?