The Courage to be Different

The Courage to be Different

A True Story of Abuse and Opportunity

By

I. Vicente

The Courage to be Different

Copyright 2014 I. Vicente

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 978-0-9916552-1-2

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Introduction

Now that I am fifty-six years old, and survived a heart attack a year ago, I have this need to share with anyone who might be interested, how I grew up. There are so many stories of my childhood that have swirled in my mind for all these years. I figure that by getting out, into the open, details of my childhood and adolescent years, I may be able to, once and for all, put all the horror behind me.

I have never believed in psychological counseling, so this is my best attempt at therapy. I have never thought that telling my life’s story to a stranger, and expecting answers to the many questions I had was a good idea. No one knows me better than I know myself, or so I have always thought.

I was not a child raised with love, caring, self-confidence, integrity, respect, patience, understanding, unselfishness, and trust; all of those attributes that are supposed to serve as a solid foundation in life. Instead, I remember a childhood filled with hate, violence, deceit, fear, disrespect, cheating, negative criticism, selfishness, and impatience.

It has taken me well into my forties and even fifties to try to undo the damage done from years of an abusive upbringing, and to become a better person.

It is entirely possible, I suppose, for someone to be satisfied with being what they were raised to be. They can somehow accept that this is who they are, and are content to live their life that way. I saw that in some of my siblings who felt they could not move away from the old neighborhood where we grew up, and didn’t feel they were good enough or smart enough to do better for themselves than the way they were raised.

My older brother Nelson dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He had odd jobs, but never a career. Like a nomad, he jumped around from job to job and from one girlfriend to another. My two sisters, Evelyn and Susan, also dropped out of school early, got married and had children. They both stayed in the neighborhood where we grew up. Susan still lives in the rented apartment where my parents lived before her on 94th Street and Northern Boulevard in Queens, New York. The exception is Wil, who followed in my footsteps. He, like all of us, dropped out of school, but went back and graduated with a GED. He had many of the aspirations that I did and looked up to me as a role model, something I did not have in either my dad or Nelson when I was growing up. He graduated from New York University and became a successful professional.

It was almost like they were stuck in quicksand and could not get out. They accepted that violence was a part of who they were, and ultimately passed that on to their children.

They learned to be takers, as a result of all the selfishness they were taught by our parents and other immediate family members. They learned to lie and cheat, as a result of the deceit and cheating they witnessed in their formative years. They learned to constantly be negatively critical of others, and rarely had anything positive to say about anyone or anything. They were, and will be, this way with anyone and everyone, including their own family members. It is what they have become and they accept it. That was the path of least resistance for them.

The more complicated and challenging thing to do is recognize what it takes to be different, break the vicious cycle of negativity, and work hard to be a positive, progressive, and successful human being.

The challenge was trying to take a different path and becoming a different, and better, person. It is probably a life-long challenge with improvements along the way that serve to validate that you are on the right path, that you made the right decision in deciding to be different than your parents. You constantly look in the mirror and question your actions, making sure that through self-criticism you correct yourself, when almost by nature, you exhibit negative traits.

I always felt that the best criticism you can get, is the one you are honest enough to give to yourself. That self–criticism will trigger the changes and improvements to your character.

In spite of all the improvements I have tried to make in my life, the one thing I have not been able to do is to release the memories of many experiences I have been unable to comprehend.

Why do parents do so many negative things to their children? Why do they teach their children so many bad things, and what result do they expect to get from that?

My recollection of events goes way back to when I was as young as five years old, in 1962.

Chapter One

We were living in the South Bronx on 179th Street near the train station where the IRT number 5 train stopped. The train station was actually Tremont Avenue, with an exit toward the front on 179th Street. Our building was between Vyse Avenue and Boston Road. We lived there for probably four years, in an apartment with two bedrooms and one bathroom. There were five of us kids sleeping in one bedroom and my parents were in the other one.

Wherever we lived, up to the time I was sixteen years old, the five of us kids shared the same bedroom. All seven of us, including my parents, always shared one bathroom.

We were three boys and two girls, each two years apart in age for at least part of the year. All of us were born in the summer months between June and August, except for my younger brother Wil, who was born in November. I was the second oldest after Nelson.

In the Bronx I grew up playing in the street from an early age. At five years old I would be outside in front of the building where we lived, usually throwing a Spalding rubber ball against the wall of the building across the street from ours. I chose that building to play catch against the wall because it was the most level part of the street. The street was uphill all the way, but less so toward the bottom of the street where we lived.

My mom would usually keep an eye on me by leaning out the window, when she wasn’t cooking or doing something with my brothers and sisters. That was usually her entertainment, as was common in the city. During the summer many people in the neighborhood would hang out of their windows, or sit on their fire escapes, which were our version of a terrace.

Back then we used to call my mom Mami and my dad Papi. We spoke Spanglish at home, a mixture of Spanish and English. My parents came to the mainland from Puerto Rico when they were around 12 years old, but never learned to speak English very well. They never corrected me when I began calling them mom and dad.

One day as I was playing outside, my mom called for me from our apartment window. I was across the street and a little bit up the street from our apartment, so I had to look left in the direction that traffic was coming from in order to see her on the window ledge. I had to cross the street to get to our side of 179th Street, which was a one-lane street with cars parked on either side. There were two cars double-parked, so I could not easily see if there were any cars coming up the block. I was five years old, and not tall enough to see above the double-parked cars. I tried to be careful crossing the street, and had to lean forward from the front of one of the double-parked cars to check for any cars driving up the street.

As I leaned forward, I saw a car speeding up the street so fast that when the driver saw me, he pressed his brakes and the tires screeched as he came to a stop. He was going so fast that he ended up stopping probably two or three car lengths up the hill beyond where I was standing. My mom, who was still looking out the window to watch me as I crossed the street, started yelling hysterically thinking the worst had happened to me. She was always pretty dramatic in her responses to almost anything. She would yell, cry, and sometimes even faint in response to an accident, or even just a confrontation.

Anyway, the driver got out of his car and asked if I was okay. It turns out that the front bumper of the car grazed my right knee, which was sticking out from behind the double-parked car. Peeking out from between cars was the only way I could look down the street for oncoming traffic. It didn’t really hurt, but I was scared, the driver was scared, and my mom was hysterical upstairs.

The worst was yet to come for me. When I got upstairs to our apartment, my mom was still screaming. On the one hand, she was asking me if was ok. She wanted to make sure nothing happened to me. On the other hand, she was frightening me by screaming and acting hysterical. I was so afraid I went and hid behind one of the beds in the cramped bedroom that I shared with my brothers and sisters.

I remember the room had three beds in it. Two were near the window, and one was on the other end, near the door to the room. I hid behind the farthest one from the door, the one on the right side of the window. My mom came into the room, found me and proceeded to beat on me. I suppose that was her way of communicating to me that at five years old I should know better than to nearly get killed by a car which was speeding up the street. Somehow she felt that it was my fault.

The beating I got from my mom caused much more physical pain than the accident with the car. The emotional pain, the fear as I hid behind the bed in anticipation of what was coming, was also much worse than the encounter with the car.

That minor accident, although it could have been much worse, happened so quickly that I didn’t have much time to be frightened. My mom’s reaction did not provide a teaching experience that would benefit me in the future. There was no praise for avoiding a potentially fatal accident by just peeking out from behind the double-parked car. Had I just run across the street, I probably would not be here today to tell this story.

Now that I know the speed at which cars can travel, I would guess that the car must have been traveling a good sixty miles per hour.

It would have been much more productive if she had used that experience to teach me how to better handle a similar situation in the future. She could have instructed me to walk down to the corner and cross at the intersection. This would have given me a better view of oncoming traffic, and cars could clearly see me, rather than crossing in the middle of the block with double-parked cars in the way.

That, however, would have been counter to my mom’s thinking. Since my parents’ approach was to take the easy way out of things, crossing the street in the middle of the block, even for a five year old, made perfect sense to my mom. I just needed to make sure I didn’t get hit by a car. It was the quick and easy, though not necessarily the safest, way to get across the street. Going down the block to the corner to look out for traffic, cross over, then walk up the block, just to get home would have been too much work for her to even suggest, never mind that it was the proper way to teach a child to cross the street.

I did learn many things, however, as a result of this experience. At the early and tender age of five I was learning that anything that went wrong was my fault. I learned that if my parents saw or heard that I did something they considered to be either wrong or a mistake, I would be punished and subjected to a beating for it. Sometimes the beatings were severe. It was common for either my mom or dad to beat me