3/25/2023 0 Comments The rumpusMy mom was a sixteen-year-old immigrant teenager from Bolivia with a two-year-old daughter, and befriended my dad’s sister when they met at the continuation school for pregnant girls in downtown LA. By the time my mom walked the Canadian border into this country, my dad was moving from Chinatown to a suburb that edges East LA. In 1994, my parents met through the receiving end of wired wall phones, though, some years before, they eyed each other from afar at the local rollerskating rink. It was around this time that he started stealing cigarettes from his father and tíos, at first in macho imitation. Long, thick hair framed my face-each year a different hue, reflecting a colorful rebellion that helped me cope with a drug-addicted father and abusive mother whose only outlet for anger when Dad’s tweaking emerged, as it often did, was to take it out on her daughters.ĭad’s addiction began when he was ten years old, when his macho, God-loving father forced tequila shots down his throat to initiate him into manhood. At all these ages, I was large-eyed and freckled, with bangs cut straight across my forehead. As he picked at his face, spotted with purple manchas, his lanky six feet and bulging eyes pleaded in desperation. “Give me five dollars and I’ll double it, I promise,” he begged while pacing within the hallway’s dirty white walls-the same walls my sister and I scrubbed clean in adherence to our punishment for one minor offense or another each summer. I was five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, when my dad lied to me. Some mornings, I would even find my uncle discarded there with them, his disheveled body wrapped around the tree, surrounded by rotten crab apples as if the poison had seeped into them, too. Cut-off straws that were useless to drink your Pepsi with made the perfect suction for inhaling poison I would often find them discarded under the crab apple tree in front of our house. Like opening the kitchen cabinet to find a little corner ripped off the roll of aluminum foil-my uncle used them to construct his aspirin bottle crack pipes. The things that are not talked about in the glamorization of addiction played out on your favorite television shows. I thought about the shame I felt as I walked past the neighborhood bodega, eyes fixed to the ground, to avoid making eye contact with my brother who stood outside, shaking in the middle of three-day crack cocaine binge. Years that morphed into the “I’ll just do it myself” attitude that haunts my relationships to this day. The many years my uncle, brother, and father spent in and out of prison, leaving my mother and I alone-years that robbed me of having a father, of having a stable male presence in our family. Instead, I went back in time, back to a time before I knew that substances and people were not meant to be abused. I knew that she was more than likely referring to my own addictions, but I did not want to talk about those. “What do you feel addiction has stolen from you?” I disinterestedly responded, “I’m sorry, can you ask the question again?” Her pause snapped me back into the conversation. The afternoon sun danced on her desk, diverting my attention from her latest inquisition. The sixty pounds that I’d shed in prison had already begun to creep back on, settling at my waist, legs, and arms, reminding me that my body was trauma’s home. I sat across from her desk in an uncomfortable wooden chair, my legs spread slightly open, unable to cross due to the girth of my thighs. This was my third visit with Kali, a blond-haired, blue-eyed recent graduate with rail-thin lips that she constantly slathered in Chapstick during our sessions. Six months after the end of a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence I served for larceny and embezzlement. At twenty-nine, I found myself sitting in a therapist office, six months away from the end of my court-ordered parole.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |