There are a lot of hard knocks along the way, but he ultimately wins at life and goes on to become a millionaire. The book wasn’t quite as family friendly.
A lot of the memoir is occupied by Gardner’s relationship with his abusive stepfather … and Gardner’s attempts to kill him. Gardner tries to poison him, and fantasizes constantly about shooting or bludgeoning the man to death. He even pushes a refrigerator down the stairs on top of him. Here he is bragging about the precision of this murder scheme:
In perfect timing, I missed a step, on purpose, and let the refrigerator go. A priceless look of confusion and horror came over his face, and like a work of art, the next thing I knew Freddie had a refrigerator on his chest and they were both tumbling down the steps.
It seems like a gruesome thing to actively try to murder his stepfather, but to be fair, the stepfather sucks. He almost kills Chris’ mother multiple times, even chasing her into a store with a shotgun at one point. The closest he gets to ending her life is with a two-by-four, “bashing it into the back of her skull with such a force that the wood splintered into her skin, sticking into her, spewing blood not just underneath her but everywhere in the room.”
Columbia PicturesIt’s a fun read.
Chris eventually gets out of there without committing murder, but things do not get any less horrible. At one point, he talks about one unhappy mark returning from a hustle gone wrong. And we mean very, very wrong.
But even if I can’t track time, I remember every detail of what happens, from the second he pulls a knife to my throat, forces me on my back, pulls down my pants, puts his dick between my legs, to registering the confused horror of my dick getting hard from stimulation, to the true horror of him hoisting me into position so he can fuck me in the ass, right on the living room floor. Every grunt, every breath. His smell overwhelms. Funky. Rancid even, inhuman. White hot pain. Cold hard linoleum.
Luckily, the story doesn’t end there. Because Gardner gets his revenge three years (and 11 pages) later, when he waits outside a bar for his rapist to exit and beats him to death with a cinder block!
“Oh shit,” he said, not even finishing the statement before I crowned him with the cinder block, bearing down with all my strength on the top of his head.
At first, he didn’t fall, but he faltered. After more pounding, he finally crumpled to the sidewalk, and I threw the brick down, left it right there, and walked away. Didn’t look back, didn’t run. Right or wrong, I silently said the last words that I’d ever think about him — Got your motherfucking ass.
So to be clear, someone was reading this book and thought, “This would make an excellent, uplifting family film! Starring the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!”
Not gonna spoil anything, but IT (based on the book by Stephen King) did a pretty good job editing the book into a script too.
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For more check out 6 Deleted Scenes That Prove the Book Isn’t Always Better and 4 Scenes From Books That Were Too F***cked Up For The Movie.
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