Prologue 000 - How My Father Became a Ghost

Winter 2021

“COON… COME BACK TO CALIFORNIA!!!”

Pops fried my eardrum detonating high octave black-talk through the phone like a hollering Banshee.

“Come live with me son. I have all this house.”

All this house? As if square footage was the antidote to my geopolitical situation.

Expat living can be rough. I was living in Bucharest Romania at the time. Eastern Europe seen better winters. Not days earlier Russia released fury into their southern neighbor Ukraine.

I’ve always been on the right side of calamity but I was a bit too close to a scorching block for my ole man.

In his wild imagination because black people know drama, pops saw … Russian soliders kicking down my door - Kalashnikovs in my face - broken english threats.

YOU AMERICAN FROM CALIFORNIA! YOU DIE!”

Little did he know croissant sales were through the roof. That morning I had a rather awkward encounter with a tiny sweater wearing poodle while ordering black tea. I actually think it was trying to be friendly, even a little forward. (laughs) I was fine.

I was 40. Survived New York’s crack-fueled apocalypse. California earthquakes. Wildfires that blanketed our bridges in black ash for weeks. I survived Miami hurricanes and prehistoric cockroaches large enough to qualify for citizenship. And multiple economic meltdowns that left Wall Street suits sobbing into tear-soaked palms.

But now… NOW he’s worried about me.

Adorable

Before I keep chumming these waters you should know…

I am the oldest of two sons from colorful parents and grands. Little brother and I grew up outside the walls of default boxes. No offense to the template, just wasn’t our fit. We don’t resemble societal images of average American black men.

Little brother is a blunt force object.

Fluent in Portuguese. Conversational in Spanish. Weaponized in Italian - enough to offend every Brooklyn Nonna with words of affirmation and bargain basement Cannoli. He bleeds Inter Milan, fashion photography and Ferrari red. He dresses in ivy league prep. Like pops when he enters a room, ligths and sirens activate.

I, on the other hand, am a precision tool. Highfalutin. Curious to a fault. A risk taker. Erudite. I wander fast cities, slowly - a Flâneur - as described by Charles Baudelaire. I rep Real Madrid. Mercedes F1. I dress like a postmodern rockstar.

Unlike my father.

Unlike my brother.

More like my mother.

Shy.

Which makes it even funnier that I’m building a public saga.

THE INSTRUMENT OF SAMENESS

Like half the black men in America, pops served his purpose and bounced for many Earth rotations. He made me. Thats our gig.

He married mom. They traveled, saw the world. Had me. Little brother two years after. Eventually pops pulled the BIG RED LEVER - jettisoned outta our lives.

Sure on occasion he popped up like Wack-a-Mole with new bikes and sneaker boxes under his armpit. We were never pals. Never threw the ole pig skin. Never had “the talk” about women or money or how to tie a Windsor knot.

He bailed as I figured this whole walking thing out. Here’s the thing about my father the black community doesn’t talk about… he took the easy path.

The same path.

A path well trodden by thousands of Black men before him - show up, commit, make babies, disappear when life happens. It’s the path of least resistance. Our default setting. Our cultural epidemic disquised as individual choice.

But now, for reasons that escape all logic and sanity, decades later, he’s suddenly concerned strong military Russian hands might interfere with my weekend.

THE FRESH PRINCE OF WALNUT CREEK - ESCAPING SAMENESS

Dad followed the guilded manual from drop letter to appendix. Trauma - jab, jab, uppercut. Instead of taking each blow, processing it, healing, growing, he vanished. Abandoning his heirs. Let someone else deal with the fallout. It’s what everyone else was doing in 1983. Why should my ole man tread different?

Sameness speaks with unbridled charm whispering sweet nothings…

So yeah…

Mom, single and completely fed up with New York morphing into a crime-infested sewer thanks to crack, gangs and the general collapse of urban civilization. But even more, she was fed up with sameness. Boys in the hood usually found themselves following an inevitable pipeline from playground to prison. She grabbed me and brother - whisked us to Walnut Creek, California.

You got it… Our own Fresh Prince story arc. No mansion. Butler. Pool, or anything else awe inspiring that made that epic watchable.

Just a single mom, two bewildered black preteens. A cramped two-bedroom, one bath apartment in affluent suburbia.

Culture shock and awe doesn’t even begin to describe my ten-year-old stomach knots. Three born in bred New Yorkers went from urban jungle, sirens, street fights to California recycling, redwood trees and some strange phenomenon named - hippies.

Daily I saw weird things:

• Aggressive pleasantries
• Smiling teeth
• Crosswalk obedience
• Pump first, pay later gas stations
• Yorkies
• Yorkies dressed in sweaters

Mom rejected sameness with every fiber of her being choosing the hardest possible path while laying down one central directive vital to our survival.

Mom laid down one rule. In truth, she had over fourteen hundred rules, but they all boiled down to one…

“I’m a single parent making one income. I cannot afford to miss work to bail your bums out of jail, so you better behave.”

— Love, Mom, Walnut Creek, California, 1990

One night before our Caligula-themed feast of Mcdonalds chicken nuggets mom marched us to the police station, introduced us to the captain like we were visiting dignitaries from Saigon.

“These are my boys. We live at [address]. Don’t shoot them.”

THE CODE - WEAPONIZING DIFFERENCE

For most families, “staying out of trouble” means no drugs, gangs or pregnancy.

She wasn’t interested in bare mininim behavior. She was at war with sameness itself. In the Dolly house - This meant becoming a Shapeshyfter.

The only two black boys amongst a population of 60,000 meant we had to dress better. Make eye contact Shake hands. Speak in complete sentences - no slang, profanity. We needed knowledge and nuance. Book knowledge. Cultural intelligence. Street smarts. Spacial awareness. Situational awareness.

We were taught to read rooms. Take interest in people who looked nothing like us, talked nothing like us, understood nothing about us.

Navigate any foreign environment with surgical precision - country clubs, principal’s office, playground, police station, wherever.

For Mom, just fitting in wasn’t enough. We had to transcend. That was the only way two Black kids could survive in affluent white suburb while she worked ten-hour days just to keep the lights on.

My father chose the easy path: one identity, one culture, one way of being. Mom forced us onto the hard path: multiple identities, cultural fluidity, infinite adaptability.

My father became an instrument with one function, no growth, no evolution. Mom turned us into shapeshyfters. Infinite forms, agency, curiosity, survival through transcendence.

You’re wondering: Was Dad around for any of this?

Are you kidding? Of course not. He was too busy being a biological footnote somewhere else.

THE SOUL BROTHER - WHERE SAMENESS BEGINS

I’ve seen 45 years as I write this. Winter 2026. Every man I know. Every man - every race, age, tax bracket is fighting some internal war. War against sameness, identity, belonging, purpose, meaning. I fear most of them are losing badly.

Now a war against machines.

Dad’s war started long before becoming a ghost.

You ever have a friend who felt closer than family? Someone you’d actually trust with your life? That was Damon to my father. Best friends. Soul brothers. The kind of bond that made you think maybe life wasn’t completely rigged.

1979 Manhattan.

Damon and his wife were moving apartments. Their couch wouldn’t fit in the elevator—too wide, too stubborn, too full of malt liquor stains and memories.

Back then, movers had a solution that would give modern safety inspectors a heart attack: ride the furniture down on top of the elevator car. One or two guys would hold onto the cables and the couch while the elevator slowly descended to the basement.

Standard procedure: building maintenance stops all the other elevators first.

This didn’t happen.

Damon was balancing on his elevator car, wrestling with the couch, when he looked over at the neighboring shaft. The other elevator was coming down.

He never saw it coming.

My father—twenty-six years old, full of plans and dreams—was waiting upstairs with the next load of furniture when his best friend, his soul brother, got his head taken off by a machine designed to make life easier.

The maintenance guy remembered his tools but forgot to stop the other elevator.

One moment: two young guys building their lives, helping each other move forward.

Next moment: my father standing there alone with a lamp, wondering why everything had gone so quiet.

THE BREAK

He was never the same.

Some wounds don’t heal—they just teach you to live scared. My father carried that moment around for forty years like a lead weight chained to his chest.

Damon looking over.
Damon not seeing.
Damon gone.

This is how fathers break. How they learn that loving someone means risking catastrophic loss. How they become ghosts instead of men, because ghosts don’t have best friends. Ghosts don’t get close to anyone. Ghosts just drift.

Samenesss

Dad suffered from sameness. Damon’s death destroyed something inside. Instead of challenging, healing from his grief he followed tens of thousands of African American man out the door of their kids life.

When trauma hits, you’ve got two choices:

Choice One: Process it. Feel it. Grow through it. Become someone new, someone better, stronger, more capable of love despite loss. This is the hard path. The unique path. The path that requires you to be different from everyone else who’s been broken.

Choice Two: Run. Disappear. Follow the well-worn pattern of men who came before you. Let trauma justify abandonment. Become the same as millions of other broken men who chose comfort over courage. This is the easy path. The path of sameness.

My father chose sameness.

Not because he was uniquely weak. Because sameness is always easier. It’s pre-approved. It’s what everyone else is doing. It requires no imagination, no courage, no deviation from the script.

Lose your best friend? Abandon your kids. That’s what traumatized men do. Can’t process grief? Become a ghost. That’s what broken fathers do. Life gets hard? Disappear. That’s what many Black men in America do.

You’re wondering

What does this have to do with A.I?

I’ll get there.

• Shape