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For the past couple of decades, the beauty of the Bronx has been buried under overbearing rusted signage, littered sidewalks and hip-hop thugs in pants hanging midway down their asses. Call me old school but I never considered the upper half of my boxers the most appealing part of my wardrobe.
In the early ‘60’s, before its eventual deterioration, my beloved hometown still had some decorum and a mother could let her children accompany her to the bodega without hearing shit and motherfucker being flipped back and forth in loud casual conversation (I know, I should talk). Crime in our neighborhoods also hadn’t risen to the barbaric levels that it would in the following years. Of course there were places to avoid, just like anywhere else, but when I was twelve, I was able to go wherever I wanted without being bothered. Mami and Papi didn’t even give a second thought to letting me and my five-year-old sister Dani go to the playground at the Joyce Kilmer Park, across the street, unsupervised. They were comfortable enough to put me in charge of watching her with them peeking out periodically from the windows of our apartment.
Papi made a decent buck at a small clothing factory in the garment district. He came to the states after graduating high school in Puerto Rico, bringing no work experience but a decent head for numbers. The company’s owner, Walter Reinhardt, quickly noticed Papi’s affinity and took a liking to him, eventually pulling Papi out of the warehouse and putting him in charge of bookkeeping.
We were doing well. The building we lived in was on Walton Avenue near the Grand Concourse, which is a wide major boulevard not unlike Park Avenue. It was one of the nicer places to live in the Bronx, and while the residents in our area were not as well off as those living in Manhattan, they were comfortable and white enough to wonder how this Puerto Rican family became their neighbors. Eventually los blancos grew to recognize us as a hard-working respectable Christian family and their concerns began to subside, even if la señora played that Latin music too loud on the hi-fi.
With Papi making enough money to meet our modest expenses, Mami was able to be a stay-at-home mom raising me and Dani. Every night Papi would come home to a happy family eagerly awaiting his arrival before sitting down for some arróz con gandules y chuleta. On Sunday nights like every American family, we sat in the living room watching the Ed Sullivan show (Papi swore the Beatles were maricóns). During the week my mother would walk us to school in the morning while Papi would take the subway to work. On Saturdays we would either, go to the movies, take a family trip into the city, or maybe visit some relatives. Sometimes after work my father would join me and Dani at the playground, throwing a ball around a little bit with me and push Dani a couple of times on the swings. We would all then go upstairs together for supper.
In the pictures I saw from before I was born, Mami was pretty and surprisingly petite. I say surprisingly because by the time I was ten years old, Mami was anything but petite. It might have to do with the fact that she was an amazing cook and her own biggest fan. She was short, just under five feet, but she looked like a woman that never lost her pregnancy weight—that is, if she were carrying a linebacker. It didn’t bother Papi, though. He was still as much in love with her as he was when he first met her in the city. Flowers every Friday, snuggles in the kitchen, and from the noises coming from their bedroom, I’m surprised that I only ended up with one little sister.
#
On Monday, May 9 1964 I was thirteen years old and it was a time when I’d get funny little feelings inside my pants when in visual range of a pretty girl. That afternoon, there was a group of Catholic school girls from Christ the King fawning over a portable record player while listening to the latest Beatles LP. I was a couple of yards away shooting hoops at the basketball court but I don’t think I made even one shot. The girls were wearing those Catholic schoolgirl uniforms that seemed to have been designed by sexual deviants. I wasn’t able to take my eyes off their legs.
Dani was over at the sliding pond playing with one of those light marble-colored inflated balls that they sell in those bins at the supermarket. She was throwing the ball up the slide and catching it on the way down. When it bounced away from her towards the entrance of the playground, I’d tell her to wait and let me get it but she would have none of that.
“I’m not a baby,” she’d say, running after it on her own.
I had to be firm with her. “Stop!” The street was only a few steps away from the park entrance. There was no reason to take any unnecessary risks, especially since the ball sometimes went under the parked cars outside the playground.
Unfortunately for us men, sometimes the female anatomy can be a cruel distraction because at one moment, much to my visual delight, the pretty ladies started shaking their little asses and squealing as George Harrison rang out the opening chords to Fab Four’s latest release.
I stopped dribbling.
The basketball, that is. My mouth was still dribbling. The lovely lasses then looked over my way and then started giggling the way girls do when they want to make you feel like a wart on a flea’s ass. Sheepishly, I averted their eyes the way a baserunner would avoid his managers after being picked off of first base. I resumed dribbling; The basketball, that is. My mouth was dribbling all along.
Humbly landing back on solid ground, my attention was drawn back to Dani, whose ball was once again bouncing past the park entrance. I called out right away. “Okay Dani, I got it.”
“No, I’ll get it,” she contested.
“No Dani, wait!”
The ball rolled out onto the sidewalk, wedging itself between a car bumper and the curb underneath. Behind the fence was a tree, which partially obstructed Dani’s view of the sidewalk. Otherwise she might have seen that a few feet away, a man was walking a hulking, 120 pound German Shepherd.
Like many little girls that age tend to be, Dani was thick-headed and liked to pretend that she was tough and independent. But also just like other little girls, Dani had her share of irrational fears. One of them was dogs.
Dani happily skipped past the park entrance and the obtrusive tree to get her ball. Startled by her sudden presence, and perhaps with intentions of defending his master, the dog lunged aggressively towards Dani with a rabid bark that was clearly unnegotiable. The owner commanded the dog to stop and was able hold him back, but Dani was so frightened by the growling beast that she ran screaming between the parked cars, out into the street.
“DANI, NO!”
The sound of the screeching tires echoed through the entire neighborhood as the driver slammed on his brakes. I turned away covering my face. For a split second, with the exception of a surprisingly appropriately placed shout by Paul McCartney, there was a pause of paralyzed silence. The essentially happy pop record then took a suddenly dark tone, reverberating in the stillness of the street. To this day I still can’t listen to those mop-topped motherfuckers.
Even the dog ceased to bark. It was as if he realized what had just occurred.
The silence didn’t last long.
First came the screams of the horrified girls from Christ the King. Then came the cries from the other neighborhood women as they ran towards the scene of the accident. A crowd formed on the street as the driver tentatively opened his car. He never made it out of his seat. Holding on to the door of his 1962 Chevy to keep himself from collapsing, he heaved on to the street as his knees violently buckled. Somehow he didn’t collapse on to the concrete.
The German Shepherd and his owner? As the crowd around Dani grew, they mysteriously broke away unnoticed.
I couldn’t move nor make a sound. I was paralyzed. A damaged and devastated scream was building up inside of me that wanted to come out but it couldn’t. I’m not even sure I was breathing at the moment.
Our senses as humans have a way of leaving permanent impressions. For example, there are sights, sounds, and scents that you can always associate with an experience from the past. The next sound that I heard while my mind was still trying to wrap itself around what had just happened, was one that I will always associate with death; the scream of my mother from our window across the street. Since that horrible afternoon I have seen lots of death, much of it by my own hand. But to this day, I have never again heard a sound as awful as that. Nor do I want to.
Despite Mami’s crippling hysteria, she somehow made it down to the street, breaking through the crowd to see her daughter. Me? I still hadn’t moved. I was trembling at the same spot where I was when the car struck my little sister. Mami then must have asked where I was because a couple of women in the crowd reluctantly turned towards me, with fear of what might happen next. Their fear was just. Mami sprang up and stormed in my direction with a ferocity that would normally have sent me running. And I did want to. Instinctively, that’s what my mind was telling me to do. My legs were not listening.
“Hijo de puta! Maricón! Te máto, maricón. Te máto.” They were words that no child should ever hear from his mother, words that reeked of hatred. This was not my mother. It was a woman that I did not recognize. Surely this wasn’t the woman that cradled me and comforted me in her arms in my younger years.
Run Nicky.
The legs were still not cooperating.
Say something dammit!
Cry, scream, defend yourself!
I couldn’t even open my mouth to form a word or make a sound. Except for the involuntary shaking, I was completely still. Was it fear? Was it shock? I didn’t know. I still don’t. I was numb, unable to feel anything. Until that first fist crashed against my chin.
“Hijo de puta! I told you to watch her!” The blows felt like sledgehammers. “You were supposed to watch her! You were supposed to watch your little sister!” Dutifully, I took every hit until the neighbors realized the type of massacre that was developing in front of them. Once they did they quickly jumped in and pulled her away.
Somehow my legs didn’t give out. I did. I was out on my feet, drifting away, distancing myself from the horror that had just occurred. When Mami was separated from me, I fell from the radar. No one showed any concern in seeing if I was okay. The attention went solely to my mother. Not a second thought went to the pre-teen child that just witnessed his sister’s death and was assaulted by his own mother. Eventually one woman did turn away from the focus of everyone else’s attention and looked back towards me. It finally dawned upon her that someone else was suffering. A boy, standing alone, just a few feet away, expressionless, suspended in another dimension away from this horrifying tragedy. Only the urine that soaked his pants served as possible acknowledgment that part of the child was hovering within range of reality. Sympathetic as she might have been. The woman never came over. It probably would have been an unpopular move. I was public enemy number one.
Papi was someone I had never seen cry before. It made the sound all the more gut-wrenching when he came home from work to find his baby daughter lying lifelessly in a pool of blood. Dropping to his knees, he cried alongside Mami almost to the point of suffocation. When they finally looked back to where I was still standing it became clear that my parents lost two children that day. Their numbed expression was one of confusion. They didn’t know who I was or what they were going to do with me.
#
Doctor calls it tinnitus. I called it Los Ruidos, the Spanish term for noises. Tinnitus is a medical term for permanent ringing in the ears. For me it was the permanent effect of the walloping my head took, courtesy of my mother. When you have tinnitus the world is never truly silent again. The ringing stays with you, alternating with whooshing sounds. It’s there throughout the day and it’s especially loud at night when you’re trying to fall asleep, a ceaseless, unwanted companion that you can’t turn off the way you would a radio or a TV. It became the eternal reminder of the day that shrouded my family with darkness, an evil one-note tune with lyrics that sang, “Los Ruidos estan sonando, Nicky. Your pain is calling. You can’t hide. Your pain is what defines you.”
There was never any conversation at our apartment during that period. Outside of supper, it was even rare that two of us would be in the same room at the same time. And when we were, we barely ever made any eye contact. The air was thick with inexorable grief. We would never recover. How could we? How could any family? Was it even possible?
Our priest Father Gallagher did his best to help us come to terms with what had happened. It was a noble attempt on his part but the stench on his clothes from what he’d been drinking the night before made it difficult for any of us to lend him too much credibility. By the time my parents started making half-hearted efforts to reassure me that what happened wasn’t my fault, it was too late. Their effort was forced. They couldn’t even fake it, although I’m sure in their hearts they felt that they tried.
As we went on with our daily routines, doing our best to function under the same roof as La Familia Negrón, the closeness and the love that once lived within those four walls continued to seep out under the doors and the open windows. Most of my time there I stayed inside my bedroom reading Superman comics while listening to Cousin Brucie on my transistor radio playing the current popular tunes on WABC. In the living room (an ironic term considering that Mami and Papi sat like zombies watching Dean Martin, Red Skelton or some other variety show), the laughter from the TV audience only reinforced how all of the laughter and joy that was in our household had left with Dani.
A year or so later, Papi had all that he could take. He took off to Puerto Rico leaving us with assurances that he’d call regularly and come back once in a while to visit.
He did neither.
For a few months he sent checks back home to help us get by but that stopped as well. Mami tried making a few calls to track him down but in those days long distance calls to Puerto Rico were an expensive luxury that was out of our budget. She soon gave up and we never heard from him again. A buzz went around saying that he had committed suicide somewhere around Pónce but no one was ever able to confirm it.
We were now on our own, Mami and I, carrying on in the same morbid silence that had by then become a living, breathing part of our home. Even her Hector Lavoe LP’s could do nothing to brighten the mood in our apartment. And with Papi’s checks no longer coming around to lighten the load, Mami had to put herself back together and go back out into the work force.
In the late 1940’s having just arrived from Puerto Rico, Mami had worked in the garment district like Papi. She was sewing dresses at a shop around the corner from where he worked for Mr. Reinhardt, they met at a sandwich shop that was on the same block; Papi used to go there to order his cubanos. Now it was over a decade and a half later and Papi was gone. Mami was desperate for some help. She put out a call to Mr. Reinhardt, who was obviously aware of our streak of misfortune, and he promptly hired her to get behind one of the sewing machines at the factory.
Once she was back at work, a different Mami emerged. The job appeared to be just what the doctor ordered. She met new people and her spirits seemed to lift, even if it was just a little bit. Her voice even softened whenever she spoke to me. Until then, her tone towards me always had an icy edge that pushed me deeper into solitude. And though her new tone wasn’t of the Mami that once had an unconditional love for her little Nicky, I at least was feeling less like an unwanted border in the apartment I grew up in.
For my part, I was burying myself in schoolwork, doing well enough to graduate high school and enroll at Hunter College as a math major. Had Papi been around he might have been proud I’d inherited his adeptness at working with numbers.
On Tuesday, August 5th, 1969 I rushed back to the apartment after registering for classes so I could catch the first game of the doubleheader the Mets were playing against the Cincinnati Reds. Tom Seaver was pitching and I hated missing any of his starts, but as soon as I flicked on the television I saw that this was one I would have been better off catching the highlights (or should I say lowlights) on the ten o’clock news. The Reds were giving Tom Terrific a thorough ass-kicking.
That should have told me something.
Prior to that day I was starting to feel pretty good about things. I was on the verge of adulthood with college offering a host of possibilities that could lead to a path away from the bitter walls that stored our despondency.
Having seen enough, Mets manager Gil Hodges mercifully came out of the dugout to give his ace pitcher the hook. Shit! I ran all the way home to see this? When the skipper signaled the bullpen to bring in Cal Koonce, I went to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich.
The refrigerator was pretty lightly stocked. A trip to the supermarket was due. We had a few slices of Boar’s Head ham and a couple of slices of yellow American cheese, none of which there would be any left after I made one of my Nicky specials. Some slices of salami would have been a great addition but it looked like we were all out. There was no mayo either.
I laid out all the components on the counter, ready to layer them between two slices of Wonder Bread but before the process could begin, the phone on the wall above the toaster rang. I figured it was Mami wanting me to pick up something at the store for dinner.
“Hello Nicky?” The deep voice on the other end jarred me. It was Mr. Reinhardt. The somberness in his voice immediately alarmed me. I had met Mr. Reinhardt several times in the past at the Christmas parties. He was always very informal and very friendly. I could sense his hesitancy on the other end. Whatever he had to say, he did not want to say it. “Nicky, it’s Walter Reinhardt.”
I got right to the point. “What’s wrong?”
“Nicky I’m so sorry but your mother’s in the hospital.”
“What? What happened?”
“I’m not sure, Nicky. She was fine...” Normally a well-spoken business owner, Mr. Reinhardt struggled in his attempt to convey something that he himself hadn’t totally absorbed yet. “Your mother, she was working and then suddenly she just collapsed.”
I learned from my parents to love and respect God but at
that moment I wondered if He was ever going to cut our family a break. “Is she okay? Where is she?”
“Nicky, the doctors—”
“I said where is she?”
“She’s at St. Joseph’s—”
“Where at St. Joseph’s?”
She was in ICU.
I’m not even sure I hung up the phone. As soon as Reinhardt laid out the details I rushed downtown in the opposite direction of those who were coming home from work. The doctor at the hospital informed me that Mami had fallen into a diabetic coma.
Diabetic coma!
I didn’t even know she was diabetic! Apparently neither did she. It had been a couple of years since she’d gone to the doctor for any kind of checkup so she was completely unaware. If she’d known maybe she could have taken some precautions. Instead it had all accumulated to the point where she ended up collapsing at work and going into a seizure. By the time the ambulance got her to the hospital, all consciousness was lost and she remained that way throughout all the tests that were being performed on her.
I had never given up trying to regain the closeness I once had with Mami. Not even the bitter memory of the pummeling I withstood on the day of Dani’s accident kept me from hoping that connection could once again exist. The doctor’s expression made it clear that the likelihood of that coming to be was all but gone.
My hesitancy in entering the room was a futile attempt at trying to prepare myself for the sight of my prone mother. One would think that the emotional distance that had developed between us might have softened the blow, but it wasn’t that way at all. I never blamed Mami for anything that happened after the realization that she had lost her daughter. Her heart may have still been functioning biologically, but it had lost all its ability to hold on to those around her.
I leaned over the bed and took Mami’s hand, barely getting her name out. Not wanting to move anything hooked to the IV, I touched her as lightly as I could. There were no signs of any movement under her eyelids. It gave the strange illusion that she was at some kind of peace. Still denying reality, I nudged her gently to see if I could get her attention.
Nothing.
Reinhardt had done his best to prepare me over the telephone, as did the doctor when he walked me in, but even as I absorbed their bleak outlooks, there is nothing that can prepare you for the reality that your mother is slipping away.
In the end she wound up holding on for about a week. Any fight that she had left in her was probably lost years before. Mami died two months short of her 46th birthday.
The nagging pitch of my unwelcome guests, Los Ruidos, grew louder. Like any normal human being, I wanted to break out into a wail of frustrated despair but the paralyzing hum that roared between my ears wouldn’t allow me. It was their cruel way of heightening anything I had ever suffered.
Once again all I could do was stare out into nothing. My own passing would come almost twenty years later. One would think that Los Ruidos would have died right along with me but they didn’t. They’re with me to this day. Apparently Los Ruidos are genetically resistant as well.