“<\/em>S<\/span>o\u2026you REALLY want to know about MY New York? Phones were in the kitchen, water came from faucets and ice coffee was when you left your cup on the fire escape. Bad neighborhoods were bad neighborhoods. Times Square was a place you stayed away from. The ‘D’ in Avenue D stood for Death\u2026 and Drugs. There was no Park Slope South or Williamsburg East or Harlem Light. My New York had junkies and bums and drunks, graffiti and garbage and punks. I mean real punks\u2014like The Ramones. They were from Forest Hills. And if you knew how growing up in a neighborhood like <\/em>Forest Hills or Bensonhurst or Canarsie or Parkchester or Tottenville or Washington Heights<\/em>\u2014<\/em>or any other place you would call a small town but we call a \u2018hood\u2014if you only knew how it could be just as suffocating, just as limiting, just as provincial as where you came from, you’d know why we have to find a way out, too<\/em>\u2026”<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Most people leave their hometowns and move to NYC because it\u2019s the only place where they can pursue their dreams. But what if you\u2019re already from New York City? Where do you go to pursue yours? How do you run away from home when you already are home?”<\/p>\n

Ever see a photograph of one of those horrible old-time zoos with the tiny metal cages with the iron bars where the animals pace back and forth and back and forth and their vision is limited to the narrow spaces between the bars? Well, that’s what it was like for me whenever I looked past the bars of the fire escape outside my bedroom window in the top-floor tenement walkup in The Bronx where I grew up.<\/p>\n

But to my family, that apartment was the best place we’d ever lived. Because my family, are what I like to call \u201cMayflower\u201d Puerto Ricans. They came to New York in the 1920s and \u201930s\u2014way before the big migration after WWII\u2014and moved into what\u2019s now called \u201cSpanish\u201d Harlem, where the soon-to-be-displaced Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants who came before them said, \u201cgo back to your own country.\u201d<\/em> No one told them Puerto Rico actually belonged<\/em> to the United States.<\/p>\n

So years later when my parents, Luz Rafaela Ramirez Beltran (a.k.a. the \u201cJackie O of East 103rd Street,\u201d because even though she was born in P.R., she \u201cspoke like this\u201d)<\/em> married Rodolfo Valentino Carlo (\u201cNice-Guy Rudy from East 106th\u201d) they swore their children would not go through the prejudice they did. Their children would have American names: Michele and Kevin. And we would grow up speaking only English\u2014a decision that would come around to bite us all in the culo.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I was five years old and drawing, behind the plastic-covered couch in my grandmother\u2019s, my abuela\u2019s<\/em> living room in Washington Heights. My little brother Kevin and I had been living there all year while my mother was in and out of hospitals. I didn\u2019t know what was wrong with her, or when she was coming home\u2014but there was a phone on a table at the end of the couch. That\u2019s why I drew there. My Aunt, my Titi<\/em> Ofelia was always talking to someone\u2026and if she didn\u2019t catch me, she\u2019d keep speaking in English and maybe\u2026I\u2019d find out when my mother was coming home.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with Michele is, our sister brought her up to be white.\u201d<\/p>\n

I scooted up to the very end of the couch as Ofelia lit another cigarette. I squished my face against the back of the couch to hold my breath.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlways pretending she\u2019s something she\u2019s not, that princesa<\/em> of a sister of ours. <\/em>When is she coming home?\u201d<\/p>\n

(Cough, cough<\/em>) I couldn\u2019t hold my breath anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh nothing, just Michele drawing behind the couch. \u201cSi,<\/em> los doctores dicen que Lucy puede venir a casa pronto. Pero entonces \u00bfqu\u00e9? Claro!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Spanish. The mystery language my family used for phone calls, lost tempers and secrets. Secrets like Uncle Junior, my father\u2019s younger brother. He came to see us one day before my mother got sick.<\/p>\n

\u201cRudy, this is the last time, I swear.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou swear? On what? When was the last time you saw our Mom...or your kids?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSoon, man. Get this monkey off my back\u2026sell a few paintings...\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMonkey? Did Uncle Junior bring me a present?\u201d<\/p>\n

“Michele, go back to your cartoons! Co\u00f1o, Junior\u2014no quiero tu tecate alrededor de mis hijos\u2014nunca se vuelve! Oyete? Nunca!”<\/em><\/p>\n

Why was everything in this family always a secret?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

When my mother came home from the hospital my father moved us away from abuela\u2019s<\/em> to the top of The Bronx, where we were the first and only Puerto Rican family to ever live in the building. I knew this because my father told all the De Lucas, O\u2019Donnells and Kowalskis we came from \u201cThe Italian part of Puerto Rico.\u201d It worked. My brother and I got free egg creams at the ice cream parlor and no one spilled garbage in front of our door, the way my father said people used to do to his family in Spanish Harlem when he was growing up.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

But outside our door was St. Peter\u2019s Park, the playground down the block, where all the neighborhood kids went to play from right after breakfast till their moms yelled out the window, \u201cDawn! Ant\u2019ny! Nicole! Pasquale\u2014dinna!”<\/p>\n

“In St. Peter\u2019s Park we kids wore the proud scars of playground battles: lumpy heads, scabby knees, missing fingers\u2014hey, there was no padding under the monkey bars back then. But there were broken Rheingold bottles! No, not the ironic hipster Rheingold\u2014but the swill guzzled by old men with no teeth who would die soon. Yeah, there were broken bottles and if you fell on something and got cut, it was your fault: \u201cStooopid!\u201d In my New York seven kids would share a soda, eight a piece of gum, we called it \u201cABC,\u201d Already Been Chewed, and if you dropped it, you kissed it up to God and stuck that shit right back in your mouth. No one ever got sick. If you survived 4th grade in my New York\u2026you could survive anything...”<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A solo show<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3278,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3176\/revisions\/3278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}