My Cross to Bear Read Online Free

it took me a long time to get over it.
    A FTER FOURTH GRADE, MY MOM HAD HER CPA LICENSE, SO WE could come back and be with her. For a long time after coming out of Castle Heights, I was still kinda shell-shocked, like these ghosts were around me. I was so afraid of having to go back to that damn place that it lingered with me. After being in military school, public school seemed really loose and jive. I thought, “Shit, how does anybody learn anything around here? Everybody is talking to this person or that person and throwing spitballs.” In military school, you walked into class in single file and stood at the chair until the instructor told us we could sit down. Adjusting took a long time.
    Back in Nashville, I had to deal with this girl who sat behind me in the fifth grade. Fifth grade was kind of rough for me—I only did half of it in Nashville. I was starting to get into clothes, and I loved cowboys. I’m not sure if it was my mother or my grandmother or one of my uncles who got it for me, but I got a Gene Autry shirt for my birthday. It was one of those shirts that buttons around, and it was black. That was my favorite shirt.
    Remember those little round things with sticky stuff on the back that you would put on notebook paper? If you accidentally ripped the paper out, you would get one of these things, and just lick ’em and stick ’em, and it would heal up the hole in the paper. Well, this girl had a little box of those, and she was licking them bad boys and sticking them on the back of my favorite shirt. I could feel every time her little hand would just barely touch me, and I knew what she was doing. She wasn’t trying to do anything malicious. She was just flirting with me, but I didn’t realize that.
    I turned around to her and said, “If you stick one more of those things on the back of my shirt, I’m gonna knock the hell out of you.”
    Well, the fact that I said the word “hell” really took her aback. She couldn’t wait, she couldn’t wait , to stick another one in the center of my back. I came around real quick, and bap! I gave her a haymaker that knocked the shit out of her. I turned back around, and the teacher hadn’t seen anything. Oh God, was that a mistake. I put it out of my mind and forgot about it—and was that another mistake. I didn’t know about vengeance and shit, you know?
    These other two guys and I kinda hung together. One guy’s name was Win Dixon, and the other guy was Lee Craft, who actually came to one of my gigs not too long ago. We walked around the side of the school to the bike rack, and when we got there, all the spokes were kicked out of my wheels. Everybody else’s were fine, and one of them guys said, “Man, looks like somebody’s got it in for you.” And right then, bang! It felt like a hammer had hit me in the temple. But it wasn’t a hammer, it was that girl’s pocketbook—I don’t know what she had in there.
    For what seemed like the next three or four hours, she just danced on my head, man. All I could see was shoes and petticoats. I was getting my ass whipped for the first time in my life—by a girl. My partners were sitting there, and they couldn’t do nothing, so they were laughing and clapping. I mean, she was hurting me, man—she was banging on my head, and she wouldn’t stop. She would jump in, do a number on me, and jump back out. So my bloody ass pushes my bike home, and my mother asks, “Honey, what happened?” I said, “Oh … never mind.” God knows if my brother had found out—oh boy!
    Now, my brother did kick my ass pretty much every day for the first few years. There were times that me and Duane just hated each other’s guts. You know how it is with brothers. He got me to do what he wanted, and if that required a beating, then I got one. As a matter of fact, when we were really little and they took him off the bottle, I was still in the crib, and if one of my extremities, say a finger or a toe, was poking out where he could get