The Word Pimpdex

Poetry

  LOVE

Bloom
Blood Moon
Night Falls
Eight Blades 
The Longest Day
Nothing

Ghosts 
Your Eternal Dance
I Do Not Need
Painting the Moon
Lunacy
Jasmine
Wilt
My Night
Lunatic
the Bigger the Bang
Your Eternal Dance
Cyclops
Water: A Love Story
A Woman's Kiss
Phase
Alchemy
Firefly
Jealousy
Sky
Tarot for Beginners
The Jewel & The Shogun
Snapshot
Praying in the Temple of the Moon

Purgatory

Eternal
Under the Whatever Tree
Chosen

 NATURE

The Fall
Disconnect
Sons of the Equinox
Villalba

Orange Eye

Memory

  FAMILY

SonSpot

Candelario

Sometimes
The Daisy Field
Rocked by Ages
Parade
Father's Daze
Ceremony

  WRITING

How to Read This Poem

[LIKE A DIAMOND TRAPPED IN LODE...]

  SELF PORTRAITS

Five O'clock Shadows

smacking birdies from the foul line in the bed that eats tired men

These Lips 
Within, Without

  HATE

Final Letter to Maria

Embers

Clean Rinse

  POLITICAL

lullaby

soular eclipse

State of My Soul Address
#niggersmatter

Middlesex

I was thirteen years old the night I helped my newest friends drag a massive cross we had hastily built near the train tracks that served as one of our hangouts. We got it to the top of the hill behind Stemmers Run Middle School, the highest point on school property, drove it into the ground until it was deep enough to stay up on its own, smothered it in gasoline, and set it on fire. As I write this, I understand that many of you are immediately wondering how a little Puerto Rican like me, one that could never easily be mistaken for white, ends up burning a cross in Middle River, Maryland. Well, the first thing I had to do was become white, enough.

My first semester at Stemmers Run could almost be considered mundane. Once I got settled in, after my mom finally replaced my Sikes with a pair of Keds, I managed to make a couple of friends. As usual, I gravitated towards the smarter, nerdier kids, in this case, Paul & Pete, two boys who were already good friends. They invited me over, and we walked the two miles to Essex to get to Peter’s house, where we played with his TI-99, an early home computer put out by Texas Instruments. Usually, we would stay at school playing Dungeons & Dragons until it would start getting dark, but as the days got longer, as April turned into May, the walk to Essex became more appealing.

Our geeky trio fell apart when Pete’s dad, who worked at Martins Airport, was abruptly transferred out of state, with only a few weeks left in the school year. Paul and I needed him as a buffer. Without him, we were constantly clashing. The tension came to a head when Paul came to my locker after school and insisted I wait until he got out of detention so we could hang out. I had just been sick and had missed a few days of school. 

I apologized, showed the small stack of assignments I had missed and needed to make up. Actually, it was just an excuse. I was already tired of Paul’s over the top personality. He insisted, and I refused, back & forth, until he snatched the papers out of my hand, tore them apart, and tossed them in the air so they floated down to the floor, like oversized confetti.

I couldn’t let that go. I had always been serious about my schoolwork, making up missed assignments as quickly as possible. More importantly, I couldn’t let other kids that might be watching think they could get away with anything like that. As the smallest kid in 7th grade, it was imperative that everyone knew my size wasn’t going to stop me from defending myself. I pounced on him, but we were promptly pulled apart and escorted off school property.

I was still steamed as I walked home. We were pulled apart too quickly. I doubted I would get another chance to beat his ass, and I was right. That was my last interaction with Paul.

I would get another chance to release that rage. On my way home, I ran into my sister. She was upset. Some boy had come on to her, and when she rejected him, called her a bitch, grabbed her by the arm and flung her to the ground. I ran off in the direction he had headed. I caught up to him in a small patch of woods that separated the two halves of Riverdale Village, the apartment complex we all lived in. “Hey, are you the motherfucker who just called my sister a bitch?” I yelled after him.

He turned around, and I immediately regretted what I was doing. He wasn’t much bigger than me. He didn’t look faster. There was just something about him that scared me, a wildness. “Yeah, so?”

“So, don’t ever touch her again. Don’t talk to her. Don’t even look at her!”

He wasn’t the least bit intimidated. He just stepped right up to me and cold cocked me in the face. I was down before I even realized I was going down. By the time I got up, blood now streaming from my nose, he was just about gone. I got a quick glimpse of the apartment he went into.


My rage only swelling, I wiped at the blood on my face and hurried back to my apartment. Tony was there. Tony was my mom’s boyfriend, at the time. He was a Marielito, coming over from Cuba during the Mariel boatlift. He claimed to have been a political prisoner, a master chess player who would have become a grandmaster if only he had pledged allegiance to the Communist Party. His lack of loyalty to the party had also kept him off the national baseball team, if he was to be believed. In truth, he was little more than a thug, a wannabe Scarface without the drive or the wits, only the propensity for paranoia and violence.

Tony hadn’t been able to hold down a regular job since getting to the states, so he mostly sponged off our family’s welfare benefits, only supplementing them with the occasional odd job. He loved to offer fatherly advice, in the form of Cuban proverbs. You knew your actions were about to be judged when he opened a sentence with the phrase, “Refran dice…” As far as I could tell, though, his favorite pastime was getting drunk with my mother on weekends and letting himself get drawn into an argument that would inevitably turn physical.

Tony saw the blood smeared across my face, but even before he could ask, I told him everything that had happened. He insisted I show him where the boy lived. I took him across the open quad that was surrounded by the two story buildings that made up our block of the apartment complex, then across the quad the next block over, to the apartment I had watched the kid enter. Tony beat on the door until a short, older woman answered, and he immediately cut into his broken English, so flawed that the only word that could be made out was the occasional sprinkling of “motherfucker.” The lady, obviously the boy’s mother, looked scared and confused. I jumped in and explained. She turned her head and hollered. “Billy!” He came to the door, and all that cockiness had dissolved into fear.

She introduced herself as Sue, and she made Billy apologize to me and promise not to harass my sister, again. It should’ve ended there, but it wasn’t long before school was over, and perhaps out of sheer proximity, Billy Cook had become my closest friend.

His family had cable, a luxury we couldn’t afford, then. I would go over to his house to watch videos on Mtv with him and Joe, his younger brother. He introduced me to his crew, a group of boys from families as broken as ours. Together, we would haunt the parking lot at the Mars Supermarket a couple of blocks from Riverdale Village. We would help people with their groceries, collecting quarters and the occasional dollar bills, until we could pool together enough money to afford a pack of cigarettes, a fifth of liquor, & enough Coke for us to chase it with. We’d have just enough left over to buy a few slices at the pizza shop and dump some quarters into the Ms. Pacman machine. If we got chased away from Mars, we would walk the quarter mile up the road to the Giant.

I wasn’t new to drinking. My mom was liberal enough to allow me the occasional sip of beer or wine, even the occasional shot of Bacardi. It wasn’t difficult for me to adapt to drinking regularly. I enjoyed the sensation. The numbness was preferable to how aware I often was that I didn’t fit in, that I was far from the place where I did, where you’d walk out of your home and straight into a wall of Disco, Salsa, or Hip Hop, sometimes all three colliding into a sonic wall of beautiful chaos. Drinking with my new friends was preferable to the drinking and violence I had to deal with at home. By the time I got home, walking off my buzz on the way, everyone would be in bed. I had missed any drama.

In Riverdale Village, the soundtrack was heavy metal. We would ride around Middle River on our bikes—or in my case, not owning a bike, on the back of someone else’s—singing Ozzy, Scorpions, Iron Maiden at the top of our lungs. We would ride along the train tracks until we got to this wooded area where we could congregate, but stay invisible. We set coins on the track to see how flat they’d get. We’d build terrible forts that would fall apart, almost immediately. We fought.

I wasn’t the only small guy in our crew. There was a boy named Keith. He was the youngest, just having turned twelve. Keith was pale, with bright red, closely cropped hair. Despite being younger, Keith was still a tad bigger than me. Billy came up with the idea that the two smallest ones in the crew should fight, to see who was the most badass little guy. The fight didn’t last long. We exchanged a few blows until Keith caught me upside , the head, sending my glasses flying. Everything stopped. Everyone of us were in the same situation. We all knew how expensive it was to replace things like a pair of glasses when benefits only covered a new pair every other year.

“I can see! I can see!” I shouted. We all laughed. I bent over, picked up my glasses, inspected them enough to see there was no catastrophic damage, and put them back on. We were still laughing, with echoes of “I can see!” coming from the others, as we walked on to find something else to do.

I was led to believe we had rivals, crews from the neighboring towns, like Hawthorne and, of course, Essex, though I never saw them. Apparently, they took on the name of their respective towns. Not us. Middle River didn’t sound as cool as Middlesex. Middlesex wasn’t a even town so much as a business district. Just beyond the part of I-695 that went over Eastern Boulevard near the school, it divided Essex from Middle River. We did spent plenty of time there, especially at Skateland, the closest roller rink, where Billy taught me how to stay on my feet, and by the end of the summer, skate backwards. It’s also where the closest library was, where I’d spent plenty of time, before Billy.

The closest I got to the library after was the time near the end of the summer when we were all supposed to meet up with a high school girl behind the library. She had promised to fuck us all. I was the only one of the group who was still a virgin, if you can believe the claims of a bunch of teen boys. It's unlikely I was the only one lying about it. I got as far as the shopping center, behind which was the library, before Billy pulled me aside.

“Listen, Freddy,” he said, “she said everyone’s okay, except for the one with glasses.” I was the only one in the group who needed glasses to see, at all. I got it. There was no point in my coming along.

“That’s fine,” I replied, “I’ll find something else to do.” I watched them walk behind the shopping center before I turned around to go home. On the walk home, I wondered if it had anything at all to do with the fact that I wore glasses, or if it had everything to do with the fact that I wasn’t white.

But times like those were few and far between. For the most part, Middlesex made me feel like I belonged. When I next saw them, they downplayed the encounter behind the library, telling me that she had smelled bad, so they just let her blow them before moving on. Once I developed a taste for hard rock and foreswore the WWF for the WCW, I was really no different. I might not be white, but at least I wasn’t black.

There were no black people in Middle River, at least none that I remember. Black folk were just the people we would hear about on the news, getting arrested for drugs and murder in Baltimore, about twenty minutes west of us down Eastern Boulevard. They were little more than rumors of race riots taking place after school in places like Patterson Park, instigated by black kids from notorious schools, like Hampstead Hill Jr High.

Despite my early upbringing in the diverse melting pot that is the New York Metropolitan area, I was not immune to racist thinking. Some of my mom’s closest friends were black. Hell, Puerto Ricans came in all shades! But my grandmother held a deep seated fear of non Hispanic Blacks, a fear that easily carried over to me as I watched the news and we discussed it among our crew. Blacks were taking over the city and taking the decent working class jobs away from whites. That’s what we were all taught. It came as no surprise that we wanted to cap off the summer by burning a cross at our school.


We stood there, around our flaming cross, and I genuinely felt nothing. Not hate. Not fear. Just an inkling of guilt that I swallowed down with whiskey and chased with Coke when the bottle of Jack made it back to me. We stood there, until we saw the flashing blue lights pop up over Eastern Boulevard. We jumped the low fence that separated school property from the woods surrounding it and scattered.

School started up again that fall, but the partying never stopped. School became just what wasted time before I could be free to hang with the crew. In the fall, we volunteered to work at the haunted house at Cox Point, setting it up and taking roles as ghouls and zombies. As Christmas approached, we abandoned our grocery carrying enterprise in favor of singing Christmas carols door to door for cash. I was settling into everything except the my schoolwork, but I had become oblivious to my grades. My effort had become minimal, but it’s not like I cared enough to want to change.

And then I came home to find out that Tony had finally found a real job. In Baltimore.

We had been here barely a year, and we were moving, again—another new year, another new town, another new school. As I went around to each of my teachers to get my grades, it finally became apparent how much I had neglected my schoolwork. I was failing everything except English, Drama, and Art. I was barely passing English! I think I was lucky that Ms. Fleming, the English teacher was also my Drama teacher, that she had seen my potential for both, maybe. Or maybe she just felt sorry for me.

That Saturday, I had to force my goodbyes, not just to Middlesex, but everyone that I’d become acquainted with because of them: Billy’s older brother, Chuck, the most level headed of the Cook family, who once flew out of his apartment to smother a scarecrow we’d set on fire with a lighter and a can of hairspray; Tasha, the cute, blonde girl I’d had a crush on since moving to Middle River, who when I told her I was moving finally invited me into her apartment and gave me the most amazing kiss I’d ever had up until then; and of course, Sue Cook, who despite our less than hospitable introductions, treated me like a son.

The following Monday, as my family was barely settled into our tiny apartment on Pratt Street, two blocks from Patterson Park, my mom walked me through the main doors of the notorious Hampstead Hill Jr High, my new zoned school. I sat in the guidance office, head down, as Mr. Gregory reviewed my transcripts. I could feel him looking at me for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time before he finally spoke.

“You know what I’m looking at, right?” I nodded, sheepishly. “Let me tell you what I see. I see a kid who doesn’t look like these grades. I can’t imagine that these grades are who you really are. So, this is what we’re going to do. Since these grades aren’t you, we’re going to ignore them. We’re starting over, here. I think we’ll see the real you, soon enough.”

I fought to hold back tears all the way back home. Once I found some privacy, I set them free. I needed to start again, but there was no part of me that wanted to. I had sacrificed so much of myself to belong in Middlesex. Now, I was right back to feeling like ever belonging anywhere was just an illusion.

Coke Is It!

I’m sitting around a small kitchen table with my friend Nicky, Roberto, the drug dealer I’d just met, and twenty-eight grams of powder cocaine. There is a pot of coke on the stove, mixed with water and baking soda, boiling down to crack rock. That isn’t for us. Ricky and I decided to go half on an ounce of dust. It was easier to sell without having to piss off the dealers in the projects and poorer neighborhoods. Pissed off ghetto dealers will shoot you. Powder sells to anyone.

I’m not happy doing this. My mother died a little over six months ago. AIDS. I had sworn never to use hard drugs after watching heroin annihilate her. Selling them is just as bad. Worse. I feel like I’m about to enable chaos for dozens of people.

I’ve justified it to myself. I told myself that it was my only choice, my last option. If this didn’t work... I have two children, two beautiful boys. Fernando, my oldest, had turned two in October. We call him Boo because he looked so scared when he was born. Cristiano, born thirteen months later, had just turned one. He came out looking like Leonard Nimoy, so we call him Spock. I had just spoken to their mother, Maria, and she had nothing to offer.

Maria and I split up a few weeks ago. It was a long time in coming. She was barely sixteen when we met, and I was just some horny, nineteen year old virgin. It wasn't long before she had the baby she’d chosen me for. Cristiano, our second child, was no one’s choice.

When Cris was born, Maria went despondent. She paid a minimal amount of attention to Cris. I spent more time with him, and I was working forty hours a week, selling camera equipment for Ritz. When she had recuperated from labor, a very easy labor where she practically shot Cris out of her womb like a cannon, Maria started to let me know that she felt as if she’d wasted her childhood.

I had warned her when we first started dating that we were too young to start a family. My mother had her first child at sixteen, and I was witness to the disasters that can befall the family of a single, teenaged mother. I don’t recommend it. But it was exactly what Maria wanted, and she had chosen me to father her child. I had done my part. I could hang around or go away. The choice was mine.

I chose to stay. I had never had a father around, even though I was the first child my mother had in wedlock. My father had spent some time in jail, and once he got out, my parents just couldn’t pick up the pieces, mostly because mom had started using again, mostly because dad had been in jail. I was eight the last time I saw my dad. There was no fucking way I was going to be that father.

I stayed. I stayed even though I suspected that it wouldn’t be long before this maternal instinct gave way to a need to be young and free. I stayed through three years of pointless arguments, futile fights, and painful cheating. The last six months were the worst. Maria would be waiting for me to get home from work so she could flee for the night. What started out as a little partying on the weekends had become a nightly celebration of her youth. I’d spend the night tossing, turning, and crying until the sun began creeping out and I would finally hear her key in the door. There was no doubt she was fucking anyone but me, in the end.

I was buying my first home, a small rowhouse on the four hundred block of North Rose Street. It was during the height of The Great White Flight from Baltimore. What I didn’t know was that the drug area that had once started closer to North East Market was creeping down to our block. The neighborhood seemed like it was falling apart, and Maria having gotten her jaw broken by some thug that summer was proof of that.

I felt lucky to have found a place on the south end of Patterson Park, right on Eastern Ave. It was three stories tall, had four bedrooms, big enough for us, the kids, and my younger sister and brother, who had gravitated to me after we’d lost our mom. It looked like the perfect place to make a fresh start.

I had even convinced Maria that it was the best thing for the children, the best thing to save our relationship. The friends she made on Rose Street only enabled her bad behavior. But on the last day of September, the day before we were supposed to move, Maria decided she was going to stay. Her friend Tammy—they were both dancing at the Golden Nugget on The Block—was going to move in, and together they would cover the mortgage. At least that was the plan. ...until it wasn't.

Like anything else in her life, Maria was unable to remain committed to even that. It only took a couple weeks before she decided to try her hand (or is that her ass?) at dancing for more money in New York. With her stretchmarks, I doubted she could pull it off, but I was still left with a house I would soon lose and two children I could barely take care of. But I had to try.

I found someone to live in the house on Rose Street, although I never did get much more than the first month’s rent from her. As far as childcare was concerned, I had this girl named Kim move in. We had flirted on a few occasions, and as was often the case, I was her go-to guy to call whenever she had boy problems. Kim would sleep in my bed, as long as I understood that she wasn’t really ready to start a relationship. That was cool. I was a gentleman. I just needed her to watch the boys when I went to work. She wasn’t really ready for that either, though.

I would get home, and the boys would be wearing the same diapers they wore when I had left. I wasn’t sure that they’d been fed. I wasn’t sure that they’d even spent any time out of their playpen. It was miserable. But there was nothing better I could afford selling cameras for $6.50 an hour. I had yet to learn the art of the sale, so commissions were still light. I had to do something.

I went to Social Services, sat in their grungy, stank sitting room for hours just to get a bunch of dirty looks and to be told that I didn’t qualify for help. I might qualify for childcare, but the waiting list was six months long. So yeah, when the chance came up to make a small investment for my children’s future, illegal as it might be, distasteful as I found it, I went for it.

Nicky was a DJ. He came from a large Filipino family that were all into music and dancing. We would all pile into a couple of cars and head down to Traxx Nightclub in D.C. on teen night, and because I was twenty-one, I could buy pitchers of beer and get everyone drunk. They loved me.

Nicky came to me with the proposition, and I had just gotten my Christmas bonus, not to mention Christmas commissions. If you can’t sell cameras at Christmas, you don’t belong in the business. Nicky had the connection. It would already be vialed into individual grams. All I had to do was put in my half and drive up with him. I would even see Maria, who had been dodging me on sending money to help with the kids. It felt right.

Granted, when I did see Maria, when I figured out she had nothing to offer, everything suddenly felt very wrong.

***

I’m a terrible drug dealer. Nicky’s already sold his, and I’m still stuck with most of mine. I’m too nice. I immediately start selling on credit to friends who promise to pay me on payday. Payday comes and goes, and I never see the money. If it wasn’t for my little brother, Joe, selling some at the supermarket where he stocked shelves, the whole ordeal would have been a disaster. Nicky ends up buying a lot of my stake, at cost of course.

It doesn’t take me very long to realize that this isn’t going to work out. And after only four short months, the family was falling apart. My sister’s fallen in love. She’s practically living with the guy, and it isn’t going to be long before she stays with him for good. Joe and I are constantly fighting about the noise he and his friends make when I’m trying to sleep after a long day’s work. I’m tired of listening to Kim talk about all the boys she’s interested in, none of them me. My poor sons are still suffering.

If my mother were still around...

Eventually, the desperation eats at me. I go to Maria’s father, Jupiter. It’s not my mother, but if anyone has an interest in seeing Boo and Spock thrive, it should be their grandfather. Maybe once he understands the situation, he’ll at least agree to help pay for childcare. Not so.

However, his new wife Karen, formerly his daughter’s babysitter, has been bugging him to have his vasectomy reversed because she wants a kid of her own. His offer? He’s willing to take Boo off my hands, if only to show Karen that the experience of parenthood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. His ex-wife, Martha, would take Spock. Those are my options: give away the children I fought so hard for, or think of myself and allow them to continue living a squalid, meager existence.

Of course, when word reaches Maria, she’s back in Baltimore within days, in my face, raving about how dare I give up her children. As always, she has no real solutions. Maria’s return to Baltimore, especially her insistence on staying at the new house with me and the gang, hastens the inevitable. For however bad things were, Maria’s manic energy makes matters worse. My sister moves in with her new beau. My brother moves in with his girlfriend and her mother. Kim, my ersatz nanny, also moves back home.

I find a couple of rooms to rent across the street from my old middle school, the former Hampstead Hill Junior High, whose name changes with every infamous atrocity that occurs within its walls. Within weeks of handing over Boo & Spock to my in-laws, the house that was supposed to save us, keep our little family together, is just another abandoned, empty shell in the neighborhood. For the first time in my life I am totally, utterly alone.

I bury myself in my work. I learn the art of the sale: You’re selling yourself, not the camera. I start taking cameras home, and shooting during long walks on my way to work, from Highlandtown to Harborplace, and back. The store manager begins displaying my pictures. Apparently, I have a good eye. I even start getting work shooting weddings and other events. It feels good.

I’d failed as a husband. I’d failed as a father. I’d certainly failed as a drug dealer. I’d failed at keeping a house or even my family together. I needed this, something I could feel good at, feel good about. Having nothing finally gives me the space to make something of myself.

Originally published by Smile Hon, You're in Baltimore

Tongue!

I'm four, maybe five. Mom has everything I need laid out on the bed, except for my shoes, of course, because shoes don't go on the bed. "Okay, you know what to do," she says before walking out of the room and closing the door behind her.

I know exactly what to do. I'm ready. Underwear first: bright blue Spiderman Underoos with red trim. No problem. The matching Spidey tee, easy peasy. The overshirt's not as easy. My head slips into a sleeve a few times before I realize it's supposed to go through the larger hole in the center. I eventually get it on with not too much effort. Pants are a little harder. Somehow, I get both of my legs into the same pant leg. I fall over, wriggling like a lost  caterpillar until I can squeeze the wrong leg back out. But even a pair of slacks is no match for my four-year-old thinking process, in the end.

What truly trips me up are the shoes, specifically the right shoe. I remember the way mom taught me to get socks on easily: roll them all the way to the toe, first. Each sock completes its trip over my toes, ankles and calves like magic. Not even my left shoe gives me any hassle.

The right shoe, however, puts up a fight. No matter how hard I try, it refuses to slip on. Eventually, I hear my mom's voice. "Fernando?"

I leave my room to ask my mother's advice, waddling the way we all do when we walk around with only one shoe on. "No me puedo poner el zapato," I tell mom, dejected that I've failed.

"Le sacastes la lengua?" she asks, sincerely.

I'm confused, but brighten up. I hadn't thought of that. I'm not sure how it will work, but mom's full of wise advice. I rush back into my room to try again. I sit on the floor and do as she say: stick my tongue out at the shoe before trying to slip my foot in. Nothing. However ridiculing this shoe is supposed to help, it isn't. If anything, it's getting worse. Perhaps my shoe's mad at me for teasing it.

My mother walks in. "Fernando, what are you doing?" she asks curiously.

"You told me to stick my tongue out at my shoe to get it on!"

Mom laughs gently as she takes the shoe from me. "No, Fernando, sacale la lengua means to pull out the shoe's tongue, not yours," she explains as she does just that: pulls the tongue that is stuffed deep in the toe, the tongue that I had driven even deeper, right out before slipping it easily over my foot.

I get it now. Shoes have tongues. As I take mom's hand to walk to the PATH that will take us into New York, I just can't resist sticking my tongue out at my right shoe one last time, just for spite.

Saving Fase

Here's a little preview of the story coming out in Smile Hon, You're in Baltimore's upcoming "Alleyways" issue:

Two people are dead, my one-time bestie is in prison for the rest of his life, and it’s my fault. Not really. I wasn’t there during either of the two brutal murders he was involved in, but maybe I should have been. Maybe I could have stopped him.

I moved in with Chris Mills in the Fall of 1988. I had no choice. My mother was fed up with her boyfriend, Jose, who had become more resentful the more successful mom became . After years of living on the dole, mom had finally decided to abdicate her throne as Welfare Queen. She had to. I was nineteen, meaning she had long stopped receiving benefits for me. My sister, Kyra, was a senior, meaning she would soon lose those benefits, too. Her only choices were to finally, officially join the workforce or become even more beholden to Jose and his income. My mother never liked being beholden to anyone.

Jose liked it too much. The more money mom made on her own, the more abusive he became. When he began to demand her paychecks, I wasn’t surprised to see mom come down into my basement to let me know she was leaving, taking Kyra with her. My little brother, Jojo was safe and sound with his father, in Delaware.  I, on the other hand, would have to fend for myself.

Apparently, there was no room for me whereever she was going. That left me as the odd man out. Jose came down a little later to let me know that he thought of me as a son, that I was welcome to stay. I had never thought much of him, especially after watching him change in the face of my mother’s success. I loved our little house on the unit block of North Rose Street, but the time had come for me to try on a pair of those big boy pants everyone always talked about, branch out.

The problem was that I had nowhere to go. I began wandering Patterson Park and its surroundings aimlessly, wondering where in the park it would be safe enough for me to sleep, when I ran into Chris Mills. I’d first met Chris when he was in Jojo’s class at General Wolfe Elementary School. I came across Chris in tears on Washington Street, being shoved around by a couple of bullies. I chased them off and walked him home. His mother thanked me for bringing him home safely.

You know you want to read the rest. Pre-order your copy, now!

A Little Puerto Rican

It had become such a part of my youth that I was shocked to learn during my first day in the ninth grade that I was no longer the Smallest Kid in the Class. That honor went to some kid named Eddie who had me beat by a good inch or so. Although I hated being so small, I was disappointed by having lost my title. I was still teased, but I’d lost the only thing that had set me apart since moving to Maryland two years earlier.

Being Puerto Rican—the strongest part of my identity back in Jersey—meant nothing here. No one at Stemmer’s Run Junior High had ever met a Hispanic, much less a Puerto Rican. “Are you Indian?” they would ask, a question that plagues me to this day. “Is that Mexican?” was the next question, followed by, “Do you speak Puerto Rican?” I tried not to let the questions, however absurd, bother me, and I answered them patiently. “No, I’m not Indian. Mexican’s are different. We all speak Spanish.” I also started using Freddy, my father’s nickname, because I couldn’t stand the twang they added when saying Fernando.

What did bother me were those who insisted on mocking my uniqueness with their own labels, like the kids at Hampstead Hill Junior High in Highlandtown that called me The Cambonian, or those in high school that refused to consider me anything besides Mexican or The Immigrant. One of those kids, a boy of Italian descent named Tony, wanted to beat the shit out of me when, after months of harassment, I pointed out that my family, having been granted citizenship dating back to 1899 following the Spanish-American War, had been Americans longer, most likely, than his family.

He refused to accept the facts, even though I opened up a history book and pointed out to him the part where Spain gave up Puerto Rico as part of the treaty ending the war, and where all Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship a few years thereafter.

Being so detached from my culture, my size became the only thing that set me apart, as long as I could find ways use it to my advantage. As boys who, like me, grew up height disadvantaged know all too well, the tendency is to get picked on incessantly. I was no different, except that I was more game than most. 

During the Hampstead years, rather than fighting the inevitable, I would ingratiate myself to my tormentors by playing the willing victim. “Sure, you can see how far you can lift/toss/bench press me,” just became part of my vocabulary. When someone suggested that I be placed in a gym bag and hung from a basketball hoop, I was the first to try to fit in the bag. And anytime they played their little macho games, like Letter B, or the one to test how hard a punch you could take right to the sternum, I was always all-in, making sure they realized that I could take it with the best of them.

It didn’t take long before I was just another one of the group. What’s more, they decided that being their little guy, their French Fry as I was dubbed, I had to be protected. Anytime anyone outside our group tried to mess with me, one, if not all of them, would break in and scare off the offender. It wasn’t hard considering that my little gang included the biggest boys in Hampstead: Kirk, Russell and Stan. They were all nearly six feet tall by eighth grade. 

Kirk and Stan tipped the scales at close to, if not over, 200 pounds. I once got to see Kirk and Stan wrestle each other near Patterson Park. Afraid of getting in trouble, we all scattered after Kirk picked Stan up and slammed him into a car leaving a huge Stan-shaped dent on the side.

There was a downside. I could never stick up for myself, even when I wanted to. 

I was seeing this girl named Bobbi Jo who I’d met on top of one of the Spiders, what we called huge twin the playsets that inhabited the playground in Patterson Park. The older kids would climb unto the rooves, the Spider's back, where we could get away from the younger kids. It offered a great view of the park, as well as the perfect lookout point for police. 

Bobbi Jo was one of the first girls to show an interest in me since I’d moved to Baltimore from Middle River. She was welcoming, friendly and sweet. She was also a little too boyish for my thirteen-year-old tastes, short hair, flat chest. But as easy as it was for me to attract a girlfriend in Jersey, it was equally as hard to find one here. Here, I had to take what I could get.

Bobbi Jo was maybe a little too friendly, though. The day we met, after some flirting and kissing, we walked across the park to get home. I lived just west of the park, on Pratt Street. She lived northwest, near Patterson Park Avenue. We got to a large bush sitting in the shadow of The Pagoda that stands watch from the top of Hampstead Hill, the very hill that defended the city successfully during the Battle of Baltimore, in 1812.

As usual, I got distracted by the Pagoda, and when I looked back, she was gone. The bush whispered to me, beckoned me. I followed the voice, found the opening and made my way inside. With its thin trunk and its long, bowing branches, the bush created a cove, of sorts, that kept us hidden from the rest of the park. Inside was Bobbi Jo, and I was faced with a bush of another kind. Bobbi Jo had pulled down her tiny O.P. shorts, spread her legs.

"We can fuck if you want," she said.

I was never a prude, was always eager to give up my virginity, but this was sudden, unexpected. I immediately got nervous and scared. I apologized and made up some excuse about being late for dinner. Another time.

Bobbi Jo casually pulled her shorts back up, followed me out of the bush, and continued our walk to the top of the hill. I mentioned how cool the bush was, and that we would be hanging out there plenty, in the future. We kissed one last time on the corner of Patterson Park Avenue and Baltimore Street, said our goodbyes, and promised we'd see each other the next day.

Bobbi Jo wasn’t on top of either of the Spiders the next day. Her cousin Tammy was there, however, and introduced herself. She also introduced me to French kissing. Actually, I had French kissed once before. 

The day we left Middle River for Baltimore, as I was making my rounds, saying my goodbyes, Tasha, one of the cutest girls in Riverdale Village, invited me into her apartment. I'd always had a biggest crush on her, but she had barely ever said more than a few words to me the year I lived in Middle River. She closed the door behind us, whipped around, grabbed me, put her lips to mine, and our tongues were dancing, like flames. So I guess Tammy was actually practice. 

Tammy was more my type, more feminine, prettier. After a few hours with Tammy, I decided that I needed to break up with Bobbi Jo. Tammy said that Bobbi Jo would be there early the next morning. I ran off, excited, in love, delighted at my turn of events. I had choices!

Jimmy, one of my not-so-big friends, was the only one I told about the experience. Jimmy led around a crew of misfits that were always fun to hang around with. Jimmy soon realized that I wasn't really a follower, that I was just as smart and charismatic as he was, so we became close friends. I would go to his house, where he would brag about incredible lie after incredible lie while we played Atari. 

I hadn't seen him in a couple of days, so I was excited to tell him about my girl problems.He knew Bobbi Jo, so I asked him not to mention a word to her. I wanted to be the one to tell her so that I could break it to her as gently as possible. But when I saw Bobbi Jo the next day, she already knew. Jimmy had told her.

Furious, I found Jimmy on the playground and after a few choice words, punched him in the mouth. I wanted a chance to beat the piss out of him. He was eager for a little mano a mano, too, but Kirk and Russell weren’t about to let me get in a real fight. They stepped in and kept us separated. Granted, when Jimmy’s big brother Joe came around looking to exact revenge for hitting Jimmy so hard that he had to have the orthodontist separate his lips from his braces, the guys were there to stop that too.

Looking back, I’m grateful to have had them around. Kirk once saved me from a stint in Juvie. There was one idiot in my class, I can’t even remember his name, who just seemed to have it out for me. Coming in late for school one day, he took the opportunity of passing by my desk to knock my books to the floor. When I got my chance, I knocked his books across the room. 

Next period, gym, coming out of the locker room, I felt an arm wrap around my neck and yank me to the ground. The idiot was choking the life out of me, and the more I struggled, the harder he squeezed. Finally, just when I thought I would pass out, he let me go.

Once I caught my breath, I peeled myself off the ground and picked up the first thing I could find, an aluminum baseball bat. That bastard had his back turned to me chatting with some friends. I crept up close behind him and swung, as hard as I could. The bat stopped inches from his head with a smack as Kirk caught it with one hand. 

“Freddy, are you nuts?!” I remembered Kirk yelling as he yanked the bat out of my hand. I felt nuts. I must have looked it too, judging by the fear in that kid’s eyes when he spun around to realize how close he had come to getting beaned by the little Puerto Rican. He didn’t give me any problems after that.

High school pretty much broke up our little band. I got into Baltimore Polytechnic while everyone else was fated to attend Patterson High, their zoned school. Two plus hours of daily travel time and a heavy homework load made it nearly impossible to even meet up with the old crew, except for the occasional weekend. They were always excited to see me, but I could tell even then that they were getting used to not having me around. None of them felt the need to see how high they could lift me or how far they could toss me anymore. They didn’t need me. They’d never needed me.

I didn’t need them either, I would think in fits of anger. They never even let me fight my own battles. But that’s not exactly true. It’s not that they felt I couldn’t handle myself in a fight. The truth was that they knew that while I did hang out with them, I wasn’t part of them. They knew then what I’ve only realized recently. As violent as they could be, they could see I wasn’t. Not really. I just needed to fit in somewhere. They weren’t protecting me from getting hurt. They were protecting me from becoming like them. And now, I had outgrown them.

I ran into Kirk one chilly November night on Castle Street. He asked me what I was up to, and I let him know I had decided to join Poly’s wrestling team. “Oh yeah?” he replied, all excited, “Let me see what you got French Fry!” He reached out to grab me in one of his crushing bear hugs. I ducked under, grabbed around his knees offering a hug of my own, and pulled, hard. He fell on his back with a loud ¡fwoomp! and started laughing uncontrollably. 

I helped him up and he was still laughing, shaking his head. He offered me a friendlier, less painful embrace. “It’s great seeing you, French Fry” he said, still laughing, still shaking his head as we both continued on our separate paths.