Originally published in the e-zine SNReview in January of 2014, I decided to rewrite. I think it’s much better.
I can hear the other children in the park below, the same as yesterday, as the day before: shouting, playing, having fun. The sounds are always there, always the same. And I am always here, the same, to hear them. I listen every day, trying to understand them. But I know I can’t; I don’t make those sounds.
I’m alone in a small room in a small apartment, surrounded mostly by off-white walls. Maybe they’re actually white. I can never tell. There are other things: a TV, a bed, a Super Nintendo, game cartridges, a VCR, and a small collection of VHS tapes.
In the living room is where Dad’s books are. There are a lot of books: encyclopedias, biographies, textbooks, novels. Dad doesn’t seem to have any preference. Many of them have pictures, which I really like: Abraham Lincoln, the Earth, a volcano. Most are old, some torn. I wonder where he gets them.
Dad is in the kitchen, as usual, watching the small TV set he has there, probably drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. Mom is out, probably working. My sister is in the other room, also watching TV.
I don’t have any friends. And the other things in my room don’t always work. So I go to the living room and pick up one of the books and sit down. I do this every day during the summer, trading one book for another, searching for something. But I can still hear them in the park below; there are no other sounds when I read, nothing except the turning of a page.
*
I’ve always felt different. It was just physical at first: having a separate body, my own brain, but it developed into something more. I began life speaking the wrong language, Spanish, when everyone else, except Mom and Dad, spoke English. Mom came here to America in a plane in her twenties from half an island called the Dominican Republic. She met Dad, a poor Puerto Rican with four kids by two women, and married him. To Mom’s credit, though, she hadn’t known about the kids. And she did try to leave Dad once. She went to DR with my sister and me without telling him. He was pretty upset. He wrecked Tia’s house, where we were living in Washington Heights, in a drunken rage, we later found out. Good thing Mom had found a new place to live. We left Manhattan for the Bronx when I was eight, which was a good move because it took a while for Dad to find us. One night he came knocking on the door. Mom didn’t look through the peephole. I was next to her when she opened. She spoke with him with the door ajar. He put his foot in the crack. I thought maybe he had a gun or a knife. Maybe he did. Luckily, though, Mom let him in; and we became a family again.
Dad wasn’t so good at being a dad. I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t made it his mission to make my life worse; he’d never let a day go by without verbally insulting me, and he’d beat me whenever he was angry with me. I don’t know why he always had it out for me. But one good thing about him was he had a lot of books.
Mom, on the other hand, raised my sister and me the best she could. Unfortunately, the best she could was el Bronx. Or what I knew of it. I grew up around poverty and crime, broken concrete and graffiti, blacks and Hispanics, rap and merengue, have-nots and have-nots. This made me realize two important things growing up. One, I was Hispanic. Why else did I speak Spanish? Why else was I living in the hood? Why else were my parents poor and foreign? And two, I was not Hispanic. Why else was my English, compared to those around me, so . . . proper? Why else did I identify with Cory from Boy Meets World more than with The Fresh Prince? Why else were Dad and Papa Vía, Mom’s dad, blue-eyed white guys? Other kids looked at me and knew I was different. I had no choice but to concur.
Mom tried to provide me with a Dominican identity by taking me to the DR every summer. But despite the trips, I never felt very Dominican. I felt more Dominican than Puerto Rican, yes. (I’d never been to PR or met any of Dad’s family.) But I felt more American than Dominican, and I didn’t feel very American. Except when in the DR. There, I couldn’t help but feel like anything other than the fluent-English-speaking, afraid-of-insects, afraid-of-the-sun, non-donkey-riding, non-swimming American I was.
In the DR or the Bronx, I was the stand-in for white people. I didn’t even know what white people were really like. As far as I knew, all the white people in the city lived in Downtown Manhattan. I only saw them on TV or in school as teachers, but I never knew them to exist in the real world. Did they simply disappear after they had served their purpose?
Going to public school in the Bronx didn’t make things any easier. At PS 26, few kids would talk to me. I couldn’t blame them. I was shy, or, as far as anybody else knew, mute. I certainly didn’t talk to any girls. I was talked to by girls occasionally, though often by mistake. My bully seemed like the only one who’d talk to me. I was, according to him, a “rock-and-roll star”; he’d yank on my long locks as he teased me.
In the third grade, I met Naim, my first real friend. We used to play Super Nintendo at my house every day after school. But at twelve, he left to live with his mom in Africa, since his parents were divorced. I’d met a boy named Xavier in the fifth grade. Now, with Naim gone, “X” and I became close. We’d talk on the phone for hours after school. When Dad would pick up the phone, he’d hand it to me and say, “It’s your girlfriend.” “X” was, much to my luck, fat and tall. Being one of the bigger kids more than anything else made him popular, which made me popular, too, sort of. I just had to make sure the other kids saw us hanging out together.
“X” introduced me to two things that had a big impact on me growing up.
“X” was obsessed with pro wrestling, especially with the wrestling group the NWO, or the New World Order. So was the whole school! This was during pro wrestling’s heyday in the mid-90s, before we all found out it was fake. In school, you were either in the NWO or you were picked on. I knew “X,” who was in the NWO, so I guess I was in it, too. But I got picked on, anyway. I wouldn’t let that deter me, though; inside, I knew I wanted to become a pro wrestler. I just had to figure out how.
Heavy metal, on the other hand, was an acquired taste. The screams of Sepultura just didn’t do it for me at first. I didn’t get how “X” enjoyed it all. Until I heard Metallica, the marijuana of heavy metal, for the first time and got addicted. There was no turning back; as far as most people in the Bronx were concerned, this was “Devil music.” “X” only got away at school with liking heavy metal because of his size. I had to hide, a talent I developed as I grew older.
Before I left PS 26, the school became MS 330. That meant three more years in the same school before having to go to high school and, eventually, growing up; three more years of the safety of having “X” as my friend. But come the sixth grade, “X” and I had different classes. Well, I suppose it was inevitable. I managed, which is to say I didn’t talk to anyone. Did the same in the seventh. But in the eighth, something unexpected happened: I made a new friend.
He was a big-headed, big-eared, curly-haired Dominican kid named Uriah. And he started talking to me on the first day of class. The conversation felt . . . normal, like how I’d supposed it’d feel. I thought I’d finally been accepted. Uri would tell me years later, though, that the only reason he started talking to me was because he thought I was white, which he thought was cool in a weird way. Uri and I chatted every day like we were going steady, ironic since neither of us had touched a girl, except by accident or in ways appropriate with family.
Uri wasn’t like me, though; he had friends. That’s how I came to know Angel, another Dominican. Uri and Angel had met while taking bilingual ed together. That’s how it was with the bilingual ed kids; they all seemed to know each other, like a foreign clique. They’d break out into Spanish for seemingly no reason in the middle of a sentence, always sounding so damn cool when they did. Despite knowing the language, I never knew what the hell they were talking about. Angel’s skin was darker, like habichuelas con dulce. He was short, heavyset, and wore glasses. We must’ve looked like quite the Three Amigos, three shades from Quisqueya. Ah, they made me feel more Dominican.
“Shut up, white bitch!” Uri’d shout at me as we played Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 64. We played video games at Angel’s house every day after school. I hated losing, especially when Uri would rub it in. My wrists would be sore, my palms sweaty. Which would actually make the controller easier to handle: the joystick less stiff, the buttons more responsive. Still, I’d watch Uri beat my character, poor Pikachu, over and over again, beaming him across the stage round after round.
Video game sessions were rough, like a kind of social experiment. Good players would gloat and claim superiority. Bad ones would complain and argue cheating. Losing meant humiliation, the imposition of someone else’s will against your own. I hated Uri when we played Super Smash Bros.
But there was nothing else for guys like us, no other way we could climb the dominance hierarchy; I was still waiting for puberty to kick in. Worse, the girls our age were fully developed breast-and-ass monsters, which tends to make me think about the hormones they put in livestock. Worst of all, they’d make “ew” sounds.
“James likes Lena!”
“Eww!”
I held out hope for high school, fueled by 90s TV showcasing young love.
Having applied to two art schools, and not understanding yet I wasn’t particularly good at drawing, I got zoned to Theodore Roosevelt, one of the worst high schools in the borough, not a good start, which happens to be across the street from Fordham University, the best college in the Bronx. I knew that because I’d see the white students, out of place in the Boogie Down, going in and out of the campus, surrounded by an iron fence, and the plots of green grass and archaic architecture inside.
Roosevelt was tough, friends said. There were gangs. And metal detectors. A minority majority school. I was scared. I’d grown up around blacks and browns, but they hadn’t typically grown up around people that looked like me. To many of them, I represented privilege, like the people across the street. And with my long hair, I repped rap’s mortal enemy: metal.
Luckily - actually, this is probably the only reason why I’m still alive - there were a lot of us there from MS 330. We’d barely talked at 330; but at Roosevelt, we followed a different code: It was better to be friends than to try to go it alone. Most of the kids I knew were black. I don’t know why that made them cool there, but it did. We’d hang out. Sort of. When we saw each other. In the hallway. Ok, outside, they’d hang out. I would see them. Occasionally.
“What’s up?”
“What up, James?”
I wasn’t cool yet.
My freshman year, I did well. Academically. I was even taking math a year ahead of the other freshmen. I remember being the only person in math class without facial hair. But slowly I changed.
My friends, or at least the kids I knew, were not like me. They were cool. They were black. They knew people. They were popular. We’d hang out after school. Or we’d cut class together. Play video games at my house. Or we’d backyard wrestle outside, often not a good idea for me. I started wearing baseball caps, baggy pants, and puffy coats.
Even then I stuck out.
“I hate white people, son,” someone would say.
People would look at me.
“James ain’t white, though.”
Hanging out with them had another unexpected consequence, something I’d never experienced: girls started to show an interest in me. In fact, they’d approach me: at lunch, in the hall, outside the school, on the bus.
“I like your hair,” they’d say, sometimes reaching for my head.
“Thanks.” I’d walk away, terrified.
“It’s the hair,” my black friends would say, attributing the attention I was getting, and they weren’t, to something they didn’t have.
You’d likely think there was no way for me to leave Roosevelt without getting laid. Alas, you’d be underestimating my powers to fuck up. I’d make up reasons in my head why the girls weren’t right for me, “Too ghetto,” or why I wasn’t good enough, “Her butt’s too big.”
As my grades started to slip, Uri said I should transfer over to his school, Christopher Columbus. I wasn’t sure. He said it was a better school. Sure, so was almost every other high school in the Bronx. He mentioned white girls. White girls? Yes, white girls, he said. I transferred.
Now, I had to wake up at six in the morning and take an hour-long bus ride Monday through Friday. I would look out the window and listen to Radiohead, wishing I were an alien waiting to be taken away to my real home. But when I stepped off the bus and onto Pelham Parkway, I cared a little less. Pelham Parkway, to me, with its islands of green grass and trees and white people was like a suburb. It was almost nice.
After my first few weeks, Uri got mad at me for something, I forget what, and stopped talking to me. I lost the only friend I came into Columbus with. I went from being the most popular I’d ever been to being no one, again. I could bear the classes: the not knowing anyone, the no one talking to me. But I dreaded lunch. The lunchroom was packed with hormones and crackles and gibberish, and there were long white tables of separation: one for Puerto Ricans, one for Dominicans, one for blacks, one for Albanians, one for Russians, one for the goth and punk kids. I’d eat standing up against a pillar until lunch was over. Once, I wore all black in as many layers as possible to try to impress the goth and punk kids. It worked. They saw me standing and eating alone and asked me to sit at their table. Their friendliness took me off guard. They thought I’d eventually come around. But I never saw them again. I’d learned to avoid the lunchroom altogether, that the library was open the whole time. I owe much of my knowledge of Greek mythology to my deep-seated, often justified fear of people.
Well, my grades got worse. I stopped doing homework. I started cutting class. I was convinced I didn’t need school. I’d already decided on my future: I’d become a professional wrestler, all 120 pounds of me. Besides, I thought, a GED is like the same thing and takes less time!
Mom was not happy. I told her my dream. She thought I was dumb. But I convinced her of my passion and that pro wrestling was a viable career, or at least one that could make a lot of money. She made me promise to at least get a GED. And paid for wrestling school.
There were no wrestling schools in the Bronx. The closest was in New Jersey: The Monster Factory. Only, Dad would have to drive me.
I’d never seen white people in their natural habitat before, except for briefly on the streets of Manhattan or the Albanians or Russians of Pelham Parkway. I wondered what white people were really like: what clothes they wore, how they spoke among themselves, what they did. I wondered what they’d think of me: if they’d see me as one of them or if they’d know I was different.
The drive was an hour and forty-five minutes: an hour and forty-five minutes alone in a car with Dad, an hour and forty-five minutes of awkward silence set to the sounds of the road, an hour and forty-five minutes of nauseating car fumes and butterflies in my stomach, an hour and forty-five minutes of being driven further and further away from the Bronx and everything I knew and into the unknown whiteness of New Jersey.
Then Dad’s car would pull up to the large Plexiglas windows of The Monster Factory, the white, brightly clad white bodies wrestling inside. My legs would feel like spaghetti. I’d want to use the bathroom. No going back now. I’d go in. And Dad would wait outside.
The guys were nice, if a little distant. Wrestling is an interesting way of interacting with someone, I learned, where, despite the physical contact, you barely speak to each other. I would find out months later, with an older woman, though briefly, that sex is the same way.
At the moment, though, I wasn’t getting any sex. I knew that well because I was always paired up for training with a white girl my age, fifteen, Monica. She wore different color streaks in her hair every other week, was attractive, and, even worse, big-hipped. I was nervous enough wrestling with the guys. I remember bumping heads with her three separate times. And she would say “Hi, James” and “Bye, James” every week. That itself was a kind of torture.
Whenever the other wrestlers heard where I was from, they’d ask me to tell them about the Bronx. I didn’t know much about it. And when they found out I was part Dominican, they asked me to tell them about the DR. I knew even less about the DR.
I only came on the weekends and only for about four months. A couple of weeks before my first match in front of an audience, Dad’s car broke down somewhere in still-white New Jersey. He had to pay to get it towed, stored, and fixed. He was pissed. He refused to ever drive me back. I asked if he would lend me the car if I got my license. “Fine,” he said. I studied and took driving lessons, and a few weeks after turning sixteen, I got my license. But when I asked Dad for the car, he refused. He said I’d wreck it or get lost or that it would break down again. I argued at first. Then said nothing. I’d, also, say nothing when he’d remind Mom, when they’d argue, that she “wasted” $3,500 on me. On my dream.
I stayed home and sought relief in music: heavy, dark music. There were times, however, when Uri would call, and, reluctantly, I’d hang out with Angel and him. One summer, we realized that we all wanted to be in a band, a kick-ass metal band like Korn or Slipknot; but we didn’t have any instruments. So, we’d dream. Uri would play guitar; Angel for some reason wanted to play the steel drums; and I, having the least talent, would sing. We’d call ourselves The Crazy Pavos.
Making music didn’t come for a few years. Uri had gotten a guitar and had made some new friends. There was Niles, a Desi-looking goth from Tobago. Raphael, a black/Hispanic rap-metal head. And Phil, a Chinese/Puerto Rican grunger. Really. We formed a band, or, at least, a weird-looking gang that carried around instruments. Phil and Uri played guitar. Raphael drums. And Niles, though he’d never said it, wanted to sing. We ended up both singing for the band, if you call screaming bloody murder to thrashing electric guitars and machine gun-like drumming, singing.
With the little money we had, we’d rent out music studios an hour at a time. We did this for months. And got nowhere. It was partially due to our eclectic tastes but mostly because, except for Phil and Raphael, we had no talent. Making music for us was a confusing mess. And being in a band, I had learned, forces you to realize your hidden dislike of certain people. Band members came and went. Bands formed and broke up. Eventually, I found myself stuck with Niles and one of his friends, Louis, in a crappy goth band. Niles had picked up guitar, or tried to, and Louis played drums. I played bad guitar and sang badly, and wondered what the hell I was doing there.
Approaching our twenties with no lives or jobs, we got along ok. We’d hang out late at night at shitty goth clubs, get drunk, not talk to girls, and go home. It wasn’t so bad because I didn’t know better times.
Niles and Louis shared a singular vision for the band. They wanted to be creepy, and they were. Though probably not in the way they wanted. I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to be. I’d show up to Niles’ crammed, unlit apartment and listen to horrifying music being made. I wore a Buffy the Vampire Slayer T-shirt to piss off Niles. Louis complained about my lack of contributions.
I told Niles one night I was quitting the band, and never returned.
I stayed home a lot after that. Directionless. Uninspired. Mom was not happy. She wanted me to enroll in community college. To get an education, to have something to fall back on. I didn’t get the reasoning of that. She nagged. I enrolled. But I was resentful. I didn’t want to do the work. I didn’t like attending the classes. I gave Mom three weeks. Then dropped out.
I’d dropped out of high school. Now, community college. I wasn’t a pro wrestler. I wasn’t a rock star. I had no friends. Again. No life. Dad made sure I knew that.
I had to figure my shit out. To gain some sense of direction. Inspiration. Something. It took time. Naturally, I gravitated back to books. They hadn’t gone anywhere, as if they’d been waiting for me to return.
I learned more during this time than perhaps in all my previous years combined. I read Poe. Shakespeare. Mom bought a computer, and I started listening to science podcasts and studying French. I discovered something I’d never been taught in school: the reward of learning.
Mom hadn’t given up on me. She still wanted me to go back to school. That or get a job. I couldn’t decide which was worse. I resisted with everything I had. For three years. Then reason hit me in the ass. Part of growing up, perhaps. I realized at some point I’d have to get a job, and that an education would make that easier. I realized I could study French, science, and Shakespeare; that I could get a degree for doing what I was already doing. Mom nagged. And if she hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t have gone back.
It began, again, for me at Bronx Community College, BCC. It was three blocks away from home. I didn’t have much of an excuse. I was committed. I’d ditched the black hair dye, nail polish, and clothes for khakis and dress shirts; I wore my hair in a ponytail, split down the middle. I was quite the dork, sneezing and sniffling and all that. Because I’d enrolled three years ago, before my renaissance, I started out quite slow. I was a star in my remedial classes. In French. There were challenging courses, like bio, but most weren’t.
Did I stick out? As if I were wearing crotchless underwear. I passed for white in a mostly black and Hispanic environment. But, well, I was used to that. I can’t say I felt any pressure to represent any particular group because I didn’t feel a part of one. Occasionally, a class would have a white student, someone who looked a little more like me. But they were usually Hungarian or something. To me, they might as well have been Elvish.
It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that I didn’t evolve into a social butterfly here. I kept to myself. If I needed to eat, I’d usually walk home. I told myself I didn’t care about making friends, convenient since I didn’t make any.
Most of the time, I’d go to the library between classes. Where it’s OK to be alone and quiet. Where being social is considered rude. I remember discovering an old book of Poe’s short stories and poems. It was a few semesters in, and I was upset I hadn’t discovered it sooner. Each break seemed to last the length of a Poe story. That momentary freedom in fiction, to lose oneself in narrative, to escape reality, to share another perspective, was a gift. And even though I was alone, I didn’t feel so when I read. I felt as if Poe was my friend. A really creepy one.
Speaking of, something happened to me. You wouldn’t believe me if I said. So, instead, let’s do an analogy. Imagine being a massive fuck up. Then, having finally developed some momentum in the right direction, you were sabotaged, relentlessly and maliciously. This was the beginning of that. Where my life would have gone without that, I’ll never know.
Anyway, back to the story.
After two years, I had a couple of classes left. I could stay and graduate. Or, as an adviser had suggested, I could transfer to a four-year. I decided on: Why wait? I’d done well. Academically. But I didn’t feel the school held anything more for me.
Not being able to afford living elsewhere, I applied to every major college in the city. I wanted to get a degree in English since it seemed natural to me to study books. And there was something else, a feeling that, so far, I’d only gotten in English class when we’d discuss complex ideas and interpretation together. I don’t know. It just felt right.
I got rejected by almost every school. Star no longer. Then I got one acceptance letter, from Lehman College. It’s not a bad school. But it was the expected school, a half-rung above BCC. Or, so I felt. I was going to let the semester pass. Defeated. I was not expecting a letter from Fordham. They wanted to talk with me, see if I was interested in another college in the university. I was.
Walking through the Bronx campus felt like I was in a small suburban community, a gated one. Actual grass and flowers and trees in the middle of Fordham Road, and they weren’t part of the Bronx Zoo or Botanical Gardens. Even the bathrooms were clean. And smelled good. I had never been in a good-smelling college bathroom before.
Despite being in the BX, Fordham was white. Really white. Every now and then I’d see someone Asian. But to see someone black or Hispanic, I’d have to be pretty lucky. Or at Keating Hall. Keating was where evening classes were held. Where I took classes.
It’s the most beautiful building on campus. Like a medieval church with a clock tower. Especially pretty at night and in the rain.
The classes were not much different to what I was used to. Mostly minorities. Relatively easy coursework. I felt almost comfortable at Keating. Not that I made any friends. But I was used to that, too.
I didn’t spend all my time at Keating. As an evening student, I was allowed to take two day classes per semester. I did. Every time. If for no other reason than to prove I could.
Day classes were white. Really white. I was almost always the only Hispanic. Though I don’t know if anyone ever knew. The whites would come from comfortable socioeconomic backgrounds, interspersed their speech with “like,” and were happy and confident all the time for no apparent reason. They had accomplished things. They had worked in the theater; they had travelled Europe; they had published things. I hadn’t worked anywhere, except as a writing tutor at BCC. I hadn’t traveled at all, except to the DR, the last time when I was twelve. I hadn’t published anything. I didn’t even have a finished story. I felt ashamed. I hardly spoke in class, if at all.
Most voids between classes were spent in Walsh Library. It was large with a museum and various rooms and lots of windows. And more books than I’d ever seen in one place. It was quiet. And served as a sort of refuge for me. I liked to sit in the Reserves and Periodicals room, on those seats by the large windows that look up as if looking down on Fordham Road. On a sunny day, they’d shine like gold. But people always took those damn seats.
I wish I had slowed down, enjoyed the moment more. But I was distracted, harassed by the aforementioned problem. It affected my grades. And my lack of social progress. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Well, this was killing me. I managed. I survived. But when I look back at my time at Fordham, I feel a sense of regret.
It wasn’t all bad. No way. There were brilliant courses taught by brilliant professors. And there was one course that perhaps changed the trajectory of my life more than any other: The American Voice, my first creative writing class. The dread of grades didn’t loom over my head. I could just write. Imagine that. Write what you enjoy and work with others to make it better. No ulterior motives. For two hours, that little room, where we sat in a circle, became a Finnish school.
Most importantly, I rediscovered something I’d neglected for many years. In fact, I hadn’t realized I’d neglected it until it was back. My passion for writing. It wasn’t that I wanted to escape. Or be alone. It’s that I wanted to create. To create things that didn’t exist. But maybe should. Maybe the world was held back. I wanted to unfetter imagination. And to discover within myself.
I knew what I wanted to be. After graduation, I applied to MFA programs in creative writing in the city. I almost didn’t go because of the rejections. But City College accepted me. And it was a beautiful experience. Despite the hardship. It’s where I began this story. Where I first learned I have one worth telling. I don’t know where it ends. No one knows these things.
But I know that, despite the fuck-ups, I stay me. Here. To hear it all. I am stronger. So, let’s write some more.
*
The books in the living room fill me with ideas. Soon, I need a place to put them.
I keep notebooks with me: at school, outside, when Dad drives me, even in the DR. That way, I don’t miss anything. They are black and white with the word “COMPOSITION” on the front. They are a jumble, like me. I draw in them: fighters and robots and characters from video games I’ve invented. One day, I’ll make them come alive.
Then the words come. Those things in books that make them work. I write. Everything else is noise.