My dad is a drug dealer, and my mom is a Jehovah’s witness. Our family has a moral geography, God is in heaven , and soon, the end of this wicked world will be here, and we are going to go to “paradise on earth” as long as we are good. Sometimes I suspect that my mom has joined a religion because she does not have to do any work, or even think for herself. She has put her life and fate into the hands of someone else. All I have to say, though, is that I thank god for cable tv everyday. Our family tries to get dad to do the right thing. We keep forgiving him for all of the rotten things that he does, and when we catch him in a non aggressive moment, we try to talk sense into him. I wonder if it would be any better if my dad was sober, he ruins everything in my life.
This morning, my mom took my sisters and I out to do some door to door preaching work with some women from the congregation. We were on the way to the neighborhood that we would be preaching in when my mom begins to talk about controlling my little sister at the church meetings. Sister Margaret, an old woman in the car, gives some advice; she says, “ carry a wooden spoon in your book bag, and when the child begins to fidget, take that child out and spank the ornery-ness out of her.” My mom said “I don’t think that I should spank the kids at the meetings.” Sister Margaret continues“ you don’t want your child to become wicked, it will be hard, but your child will thank you once she makes it to paradise on earth” But my mom looks grim and apprehensive about doing such a thing. She has seen other parents take their children outside, screaming and crying, begging their parents to stop, did she want to deal with that?
As we reach the neighborhood, we break up into groups. I am with my mom and sister. My mom has her presentation memorized; going door to door and talking to strangers is something that she doesn’t like to do. At door number one, a man answers and she starts with her presentation ” Hi, how are you this morning? I’m here today because, as you may notice, there are a lot of problems in the world.” The man quickly slams the door in her face. “Separating the sheep from the goats,” she says when that sort of thing happens. Then we went to the second door, which is easy enough, there is a nice older woman who takes the magazines right away, smiling at me and my sister.
In the afternoon, we come in the front door to see dad is smoking crack at the kitchen stove; he is using a burner to heat up his glass pipe. He ignores us so we ignore him. Grandma, who lives in the same bedroom with me and my two sisters, walks down the hall with her walker, I can hear the sound of the walker legs tapping the floor. When she reaches the front room, She says to my dad “why don’t you be a mensch and take care of your family right?” Then she goes back to the room, settling into the bed, which is surrounded by posters that my sister put up of the New Kids, Janet Jackson, and other pictures from Tiger Beat magazine. Our house has three bedrooms, but my dad turned one bedroom into his den, where he makes his drug deals.
My sister and I always have a sense of disappointment when returning home. The house that we live in is small and dumpy, with a slight smell of fermenting bread, my mom calls it a crackerjack box. There is a wood burning stove in the kitchen that is made out of a 50 gallon drum with legs attached, the stove pipe pops out of the side wall. My dad has stacked some cinderblocks around the stove and has painted them bright red with spray paint. Everything is brown. When I complain about everything being brown, my grandma tells me to respect my parents, because if I don’t, when I grow up, everything in my house is going to be brown too. Plants hang from the ceiling in macramé holders. All of the furniture is worn out, like the couch my dad picked up off of a curb while he was visiting my aunt who lives in the projects. He had seen a couple arguing over it, one wanted to throw it out, the other wanted to keep it. The dad jumped in, saying “I’ll take it!” and brought it home. After he puts it in the living room, he acts so proud of it, like it is the nicest thing we’ve ever owned. Personally, I think that the nicest thing we own is the TV, it has remote control.
I have changed from my dress clothes into my regular clothes, and I am sitting in our backyard where there are three junk cars, piles of tires, pieces of equipment, and a garden where my dad grows his weed to sell. Our dog, Cyndi Lauper, is dragging her butt across the ground. I feel that she is a reflection of our family. She wants to break free like any dog wants to, also like we do. Last week, while someone was knocking on the door, she ran her snout through the front window in a frenzy, cutting herself in the process. My dad replaced the window with a piece of plywood. As a dog, she has a sense self defeat and has a broken heart. If a dog can feel that way, Cyndi Lauper does. She spends days feeling worthless, at least she looks that way. The dog has low self esteem. She’s unsure of what to do with herself, a self conscious pit bull. When she notices me looking at her and laughing, she looks at me as if to say, what are you looking at? She has her moments of freedom though, when she manages to escape by jumping over the fence at night. Her favorite thing to do is to tip over garbage cans in the neighborhood. When she finds a good smelling bag of garbage, she drags it home, manages to pull it over the fence. Once she is in the backyard, she tears every bit of trash into shreds. On the mornings after, before going to school, my dad sends me out to pick up the trash. My dad built a dog pen to keep her in, making the walls higher and higher with pieces of plywood attached to the fence, but that only caused her to howl all night, keeping the neighbors awake. Eventually we just had to allow her to get out, and hope that she would not be caught by the pound.
On mondays at school, there is a D.A.R.E. officer who talks to the kids about drugs and the D.A.R.E. philosophy, leadership skills, and social responsibility. The D.A.R.E. officer is encouraging us to avoid negative influences that lead to drug abuse.All I have to say is that I am never going to tell the police about my parents.
My older sister is trying to be a normal teenager, which entails having a social life, and being popular. She hangs out with friends and goes to the mall. She loves the hot music mixes on the radio and new kids on the block. She is tired of taping the music with a tape recorder held up to the speaker, so our dad gave us his old stereo but only with one speaker, saying that we don’t know how to take care of things so we don’t deserve to have stereo sound. My sister is also trying to be good by practicing our religion. When my mom doesn’t want to go to one of the church meetings, my sister says, “what? you don’t want to go? Armageddon could come tomorrow, and you won’t make it!” She feels that our family life is so weird and she is embarrassed about it. She is upset because she doesn’t have the things that other kids have, but not because we can’t afford them but because our dad spends all of the money on drugs and gambling.
We have food stamps and our parents always send me and my sister to the 7 Eleven to buy a gallon of milk and a newspaper for the tv guide. We always argue about whose turn it is to buy because we always have to use food stamps. This time, it is my turn, so when I go to pay, I throw the wadded up food stamp on the counter. The cashier frowns at me, asking me, “what the hell is this?” “Yeah” my sister adds, “he can’t read your mind.” So, quickly I flatten the food stamp out. The cashier takes it wordlessly, unsmiling. After that, we argue all the way home.
I ask my mom what it was like when I was born, she says that she had hoped that having children in the house would cause our dad to settle down, possibly; but by the time that my little sister was born, things hadn’t changed. My mother had taken an interest in natural medicine and had my sister at home with me and my family and half of the neighbors on the block watching. I remember that my dad had been in his den snorting lines of coke. Then he came into the room and she, in a rare moment of assertiveness, as she was pushing out the baby, yelled at him, “You have been doing coke haven’t you? Get out of here! You don’t deserve to witness the miracle of life!”
Tonight, mom and dad are going to a bar because my dad is going to enter a beard contest. They hop into our family car, which is a van with the top taken off. It is a flat bed with a windshield and framework welded on it with 2 by 4’s attached. There is a back seat that my sister and I sit in. Whenever we go anywhere as a family, my mom holds the baby in the front seat with out wearing a seat belt, because there isn’t one. The only thing holding them in is a metal bar that crosses the hole where the door used to be. The wind is always blowing on us as my mom looks out across the wide dusty streets with the mountains beyond. She smooths down my little sister’s hair and says, poor baby.
So they go to the bar which is a cowboy rough guy bar. In the contest, the first prize is a rifle, the second prize, a knife. Dad doesn’t win the contest but now he has it in his mind that he wants a gun. This worries my mom. When they get home, my mom says “ why do they got to have weapons as prizes? They could at least have a VCR .” She hates weapons, fake ones too. Last year, she made me return the antique cap gun that the neighbors gave me.
The other week, while my dad was coked out, my sister decided to have a talk with him about how he is destroying our family. She says, “look at you, the way that you are talking right now. I am going to tape record this and when you aren’t messed up, we are going to play this back to you and you can see how you are.” After that, she tells me that I am the man of the house because I am the only male in the family who is actively involved in our religion. So, I must accept responsibility. But, I don’t know how to be a man. If my dad is not the man of the house then he must be the owner of us, because, that is what he says: “I own you, do the dishes.” Or when my mom stands in the kitchen eating a candy bar while facing the wall, trying to conceal it, he says, “I own that candy bar, give me a bite.”
My sister looks at me and says to my mom, “poor boy, he has no positive male role models in his life.” This causes me to say to her, “find someone to teach me how to become a man.” As it is, I only have women who tell me not to be like my dad. I figure that I had better not grow up, because all men are victimizers. I ask my mom why she doesn’t divorce him. She says that our religion forbids it, unless my dad commits adultery.
I see things, like boys with their dads hanging out and camping and spending quality time together, all men can’t be losers, right? My dad doesn’t do any of that with me. I don’t have any close friends either. The boys in the church and in school think that I am weird. One Sister in the church told me that I was like a vegetable. In my weekly bible study, Sister Ortiz tells me that I should not get too close to the non believing friends that I have at school because they are wicked, and when the end comes, they are going to die in Armageddon and the birds will peck the eyes out of their skulls. Whenever the class has a holiday party I have to leave early, missing out on all of the activity. So I walk home alone early, or sit in the school office.
So, I have this question, how do I live? The options are not looking good at the moment, but a neighbor woman tells me, ”you are so worried about what to do with yourself; but look, you are young, you will learn to live your life well because you are thinking about it. That is something that I think that maybe your dad never did.” I think that I believe her.
