Achieve your goals

 

WE FOUND HELL IN A BEAUTIFUL NEIGHBORHOOD. IN 1981, WILLIAMSVILLE 

offered the most delectable land in Buffalo, New York. Verdant and amicable, its 

safe roads were specked with modest homes loaded up with model residents. 

Specialists, lawyers, steel plant leaders, dental specialists, and expert football 

players lived there with their revering spouses and their 2.2 children. Vehicles were 

new, streets cleared, potential outcomes interminable. We're discussing a living, 

breathing American Dream. Hellfire was a corner parcel on Paradise Road. 

That is the place where we resided in a two-story, four-room, white wooden home 

with four square columns outlining an entryway patio that prompted the vastest, 

greenest yard in Williamsville. We had a vegetable nursery out back and a 

enclosed carport loaded with a 1962 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, a 1980 

Mercedes 450 SLC, and, in the carport, a shimmering new 1981 dark 

Corvette. Everybody on Paradise Road lived close to the highest point of the evolved way of life, 

furthermore, in light of appearances, a large portion of our neighbors felt that we, the so- 

called glad, composed Goggins family, were the tip of that lance. In any case 

shiny surfaces reflect considerably more than they uncover. 

They'd see us most work day mornings, accumulated in the carport at 7 a.m. 

My father, Trunnis Goggins, wasn't tall yet he was attractive and constructed like a 

fighter. He wore custom-made suits, his grin warm and open. He looked each bit 

the fruitful financial specialist en route to work. My mom, Jackie, was 

seventeen years more youthful, thin and lovely, and my sibling and I were 

neat and tidy, fashionable in pants and pastel Izod shirts, and lashed with 

rucksacks very much like different children. The white children. In our variant of rich           America, each driveway was a staging ground for nods and waves before

parents and children rode off to work and school. Neighbors saw what they

wanted. Nobody probed too deep.

Good thing. The truth was, the Goggins family had just returned home from

another all-nighter in the hood, and if Paradise Road was Hell, that meant I

lived with the Devil himself. As soon as our neighbors shut the door or

turned the corner, my father’s smile morphed into a scowl. He barked

orders and went inside to sleep another one off, but our work wasn’t done.

My brother, Trunnis Jr., and I had somewhere to be, and it was up to our

sleepless mother to get us there.

I was in first grade in 1981, and I was in a school daze, for real. Not

because the academics were hard—at least not yet—but because I couldn’t

stay awake. The teacher’s sing-song voice was my lullaby, my crossed arms

on my desk, a comfy pillow, and her sharp words—once she caught me

dreaming—an unwelcome alarm clock that wouldn’t stop blaring. Children

that young are infinite sponges. They soak up language and ideas at warp

speed to establish a fundamental foundation upon which most people build

life-long skills like reading and spelling and basic math, but because I

worked nights, I couldn’t concentrate on anything most mornings, except

trying to stay awake.

Recess and PE were a whole different minefield. Out on the playground

staying lucid was the easy part. The hard part was the hiding. Couldn’t let

my shirt slip. Couldn’t wear shorts. Bruises were red flags I couldn’t show

because if I did, I knew I’d catch even more. Still, on that playground and

in the classroom I knew I was safe, for a little while at least. It was the one

place he couldn’t reach me, at least not physically. My brother went through

a similar dance in sixth grade, his first year in middle school. He had his                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

own wounds to hide and sleep to harvest, because once that bell rang, real

life began.

The ride from Williamsville to the Masten District in East Buffalo took

about a half an hour, but it may as well have been a world away. Like much

of East Buffalo, Masten was a mostly black working-class neighborhood in

the inner city that was rough around the edges; though, in the early 1980s, it

was not yet completely ghetto as fuck. Back then the Bethlehem Steel plant