Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules

by A. J. Mendez Brooks

  If there was a closet in any room I was alone in for more than five minutes, Robbie would somehow manifest inside of it and violently burst out. If it wasn’t the closet he terrifyingly emerged from, he was under the bed or sometimes magically flattened within the sheets. One time he emerged from deep inside a laundry basket while I was sitting on a toilet. The boy was committed. He not only took pleasure in giving me tiny, but very real, heart attacks, but thoroughly enjoyed waving a white flag and then proceeding to stab me in the eye with it. Robbie knew how much I enjoyed playing games on his Sega Genesis and chose to bribe me with it. “If you stop talking to me for one hour, I will play Bubsy with you for two.” Bubsy was basically Sega’s cat version of Super Mario and brought me so much joy I would work up tears to convince my brother to let me play it. At the end of my silent hour Robbie would then change the rules and promise to play IF I could find the Bubsy cartridge. I would search tirelessly for forty minutes before he quietly snuck out the door to go skateboarding with his friends.

  And thus I saved my strongest punches for Robbie’s head. I would sometimes try to beat him to the literal punch, hiding behind doors to catch him off guard. But it never worked. Robbie was a CQC expert before he hit puberty and would somehow always manage to evade my swings, punch me in the gut, and leave me doubled over writhing for air each and every time. Ours was a literal blood feud.

  You might be asking, What kind of home would create such tiny monsters? Well, clearly, a broken one. My family was dysfunctional, to say the least. First of all, we were never well off. We were never even middle class, or lower middle class. For most of our years together, my family was poor. Oliver Twist, “please sir can I have some more” kind of poor. There were rare times when we experienced short windfalls, like when a relative would lend my parents rent money or a lawsuit against the apartment complex in which a ceiling collapsed onto my sleeping father paid out a few grand, but that money would be spent frivolously and swiftly. Most of the time, making ends meet was nearly impossible. Our extended periods of poverty were not something I noticed right away. Before I began socializing in school, all I knew of the world was contained between the walls of whatever tiny apartment we lived in. I just assumed all people moved every few months with whatever belongings could fit in a backpack. My dad jokingly called us “gypsies,” and even though I didn’t know the definition of the word, I really liked the way it sounded. I thought every family shopped for free dented cans at a food bank. My mother tried to explain that this particular food was free because other people didn’t want it, whether it was close to expiring or donated. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that any logical human would not want a can of SpaghettiOs for any reason. And it was a step up from rationing week-old leftovers among four people, while my dad resorted to eating canned dog food to leave more for the rest of us. The fact that most of my toys were rescued from the Dumpster or found in garbage cans in front of neighboring apartment buildings didn’t seem dirty to me. If some other kid couldn’t appreciate the bike with tassels, training wheels, and popped tires my dad proudly salvaged for me, I sure as hell was going to.

  The first time I realized there was any negative connotation to being poor was when a girl in school commented on my lack of clothing. “Do you just REALLY like that shirt or something?” she said, referring to one of the three tops I wore on a continuous rotation. Before that moment I didn’t think there was anything wrong with having one pair of jeans, sharing T-shirts with my sister, or waiting two years to get a new pair of sneakers that actually fit. I didn’t even care that the one pair I owned matched my brother’s and sister’s and came from the bargain section all the way in the back of Modell’s. But in this moment, I questioned myself. Not only did teachers expect me to act a certain way, and kids expect me to play a certain way, but now I was expected to dress a certain way? What the hell? “Your mom really liked my shirt last night” was my only comeback, albeit a solid one. I didn’t know what it meant, but my brother assured me it was a safe bet to go with some variation of a “your mom” joke should the need ever arise. And that has been my attitude toward style ever since. My Target tank top isn’t name brand enough for you? Well, I fucked your mom.

  I learned to never really give a damn about my style out of necessity. I was always going to be the kid who shared clothes with her sister, and all five of those items would undoubtedly come from the “irregulars” bin at Walmart. So instead of trying and failing to fit in based on something as trivial as clothing, I embraced what I had at my disposal. Never learning my lesson, I would steal my brother’s sweatpants, cut up my dad’s Hanes T-shirts, and proudly wear my title as “the tiny weirdo in baggy clothing who always looks angry.” I basically had the same aesthetic every day from first grade well into high school: cheap shirt, boy’s pants, and a snarky attitude. And guess what happened? People ate that shit up. My lack of giving a damn was somehow interpreted as being a casual, “no-fuss” kind of girl. What was once primed to become a source of insecurity became the basis of others’ attraction to me. Because, remember, if you are confident enough, idiots will blindly follow you.

  Bullshitting my way out of being discovered as the poor kid in school became a necessary evil. I became Alcatraz-like guarded, having to always be on the lookout for cracks in my constructed walls that would expose my hardships at home. And thus the human Pez dispenser of desperate explanations was born. When I couldn’t afford to pay for a field trip, I blamed it on my strict parents not trusting the school system to keep me safe. If I didn’t have lunch to bring to school, I just pretended I was nauseated and didn’t feel like eating. When a teacher asked why I was late to school, I’d tell them I overslept, when really my siblings and I had just walked a few miles because we couldn’t afford the city bus. If a friend asked to come to my house after school, I told her my mother was a werewolf who ate visitors on sight. There was no way in hell I was bringing anyone home with me.

  —

  At seven years old, I am actually not allowed to call our apartment “home.” My mother doesn’t like it when I get too attached to a place and has to repeatedly remind me that it is “where we are staying for now.” She’s right, because it technically is not ours. We stole it.

  My mother’s sister agreed to let our family of five move in with her, her husband, and my younger cousin. Normally, when my parents owed months in back rent, instead of finding a way to pay it, they found a cheaper apartment in another town and quietly moved us there faster than you can say, “lost security deposit.” But this time, our landlord was one step ahead of them. Escorted by law enforcement, we had to pack what we could carry and leave the premises in under an hour. With nowhere to go, my mother begrudgingly turned to her younger sister for help. Housing eight people was a lot to ask of a modest two-bedroom apartment. Imagine trying to squeeze into a child’s one-piece bathing suit after eating a whole pizza and you are twenty-eight. It was a tight fit. The concept of a stocked fridge and hot water was so foreign to our family, we abused the privileges and became a nuisance. We were less the Six to their Blossom, and more the Urkel to their Family Matters. Understandably, we wore out our welcome in a few short weeks. But so desperate to be rid of us, instead of kicking us out, my aunt and her family simply packed their belongings and moved to another state. We had been welcomed in, allowed to share their food, and eventually forced them out of their own home. We were straight-up pilgrims without the scurvy. Now upon entering the apartment, life returned to our normal.

  After school one day, I ran into the bedroom I shared with Robbie and Erica to change out of my one good pair of pants. The freezing apartment made it painful to have any skin exposed, so the process had to be a quick one. Once the utility bills became my parents’ responsibility, the heat was cut within two months’ time. It was deemed a nonessential, as my parents believed gas and electricity were the top priority. We could easily combat the cold air and showers by wrapping up in quilts and boiling water to bathe in. But without ga
s we could not make rice for dinner, and without electricity we could not find out who shot Mr. Burns. I declared myself a child prodigy upon figuring out that sleeping in my bulky winter coat practically guaranteed I would not wake up with the sniffles.

  I opened the drawer I had claimed in my aunt’s abandoned dresser to search for something to cover my goose-bump-riddled legs. But before my hands left the metal pulls, I screamed bloody murder.

  “Ahhhh! Robbie, you piece of shit!” I yelled as I stared into the eight eyes of a startlingly realistic toy spider. The nauseatingly furry beast, as large as the entirety of my upper body, was just casually chilling between a gray sweatshirt and floral-patterned cotton briefs. I had mistakenly opened up to my brother about how scary I found the movie Arachnophobia and was now being tormented for my vulnerability. A classic mistake among the Mendez children was to get wrapped up in the rare harmony of a late-night gab session. After our parents had fallen asleep, we would sneakily turn on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and muffle our giggles by pulling the bedsheets over our faces. High off heavy-eyed laughter and the adrenaline of staying up past our bedtime, Robbie, Eri, and I would spend hours baring our souls to one another. In the morning, when the positive vibes of delirium had worn off and we returned to enemy territory, we would naturally blackmail each other with the newfound juicy secrets.

  “If you don’t get out of the bathroom right now, I am going to tell Ma you want to be an ice cream truck driver when you grow up,” Erica once threatened.

  From behind the barricaded bathroom door I questioned her betrayal: “They make people so happy! And they get to eat all the ice cream they want! I could live in the truck next to the Push Pops! You said you understood!”

  “Eri,” Robbie calmly interrupted with his own barter, “if you let me go to the bathroom before you, I won’t tell Daddy you wish you were one of the kids on In the House so ‘sexy’ LL Cool J could be your nanny.”

  It was essential I begin plotting my revenge for the spider surprise while Robbie’s guard was still down. But first, I would have to work up some tears if I was really going to get him in trouble with our mother.

  “Maaaaaaaaa! Look what Robbie did!” I burst out of the room and into the foul-smelling kitchen. When my aunt was here, it always smelled like lasagna, her homemade dish of choice. She made it so often the fridge was continuously overstocked with leftover trays I would pick at dozens of times throughout the day. Now the fridge’s only consistency is a box of baking soda and a forty-ounce of Budweiser.

  “Slow down, chiquita. The oven door is open,” my mother warned while adjusting the oven knobs. Still wearing her medical scrubs, she was in the middle of her daily routine. After working an eight-hour day as a home health aide, a certified caregiver appointed to the homes of terminally ill or senior patients, Ma would arrive home an hour before we did. She would put on a pair of her plastic surgical gloves and scrub the kitchen counters, the inside of the refrigerator, and the bathtub. Next she would sweep every room and fold any item of clothing not in the laundry hamper, though sometimes she would fold those too. Then she would turn the oven on high and open its door in an attempt to add some much-needed heat into the apartment. As I approached, she was standing guard to make sure nothing dangerous happened. Before I could bury Robbie with some Oscar-worthy waterworks, Ma grabbed my father’s attention. “Roberto, can I talk to you?”

  “Yes, Jan?” he responded, putting an agitated emphasis on her name. My father always says my mother’s name like they are in a sitcom taped in front of a live studio audience and she is the quirky sidekick. “Yes, Jaaaaaan.” “What is it, Jaaaaaan?” “Oh, Jaaaaaaaan.” Part of the reason for that could be my dad always seems overwhelmingly tired. Like he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders and my mother just asked him to hold her purse. He pulled up a seat at the kitchen table, knowing exactly what she wanted to talk about.

  “Did you get any side jobs today?” My father was a mechanic. A “side job” was what my parents called any extra work my dad could find outside of the shop that employed him. Scheduled hours at work were inconsistent, and the majority of our spending money came from random neighbors who needed a tune-up or strangers on the road with a busted tire. Dad would occasionally make some business for himself by only finishing half the work necessary on the shop clients’ cars. He would then “run into them” later in the week, offer his private services, and be able to pocket the money on the sly. Ingenuity at its best.

  “No, Jan.” Dad was tired of having the same conversation every day. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” she worried. “I don’t get paid until Friday, and your kids probably need to eat something before then.”

  I pulled up a chair, figuring I could complain about Robbie once their “talk” was over. It normally took about five minutes. Revenge could wait five minutes.

  “I’m sure they ate their school lunch, so relax. I’ll figure something out for tonight.” I missed my aunt’s Sega Genesis. For depriving me of Disney’s Aladdin, the game, she will never be forgiven.

  “So you don’t have money for dinner but you have money for a forty?” Ma made a good point, I thought as I made the giant spider dance across the table. “I clean up some old guy’s shit every day and you can’t find one side job?”

  “Drop it, Jan!” Dad shouted, standing up with such a powerful jerk it knocked his chair over. I couldn’t help but think it was impressive how he slammed their bedroom door closed at the exact same time Ma snapped the oven’s shut.

  “Do you wanna know what Robbie did?” I began, but it seemed she couldn’t hear my words as she walked over, laying a hand roughly on my head.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” Ma almost whispered before leaving the room.

  My mom is one of those adults who lie.

  Janet Acevedo and Robert Mendez first locked eyes when they were fifteen years old and Robert was beating a man half to death inside a phone booth. Naturally, they fell in love immediately. Products of the New York City projects, they sensed a kindred spirit within each other. Both came from violent homes, enduring physical abuse from emotionally withholding parents. Both experienced the tragedy of loss: Janet losing her father when she was only eleven, and Robert losing all three of his brothers. They quickly became each other’s whole world. When Janet got pregnant at sixteen, they were kicked out of their homes and disowned by their families.

  They married and moved to New Jersey before Robbie Jr. was born. Without any formal schooling, Robert used his prodigy-like knowledge of automotive engineering to get odd jobs at various local body shops. Janet spent the next few years raising Robbie; their second/only planned baby, Erica (completely appropriately named after the All My Children character Erica Kane); and the best mistake they ever made: me.

  I am named April, after the month I was supposed to be born in, and Jeanette, representing the Spanish version of Janet’s name. I was born prematurely in March, but my parents had already bought an “April” license plate keychain at a gas station and were determined to see this thing through. I am only called April Jeanette when I have pissed someone off. Which is often. But for the most part, my family refers to me as AJ, a tongue-in-cheek nickname given for my penchant to shout things like “Why does Robbie get to have a penis and I don’t?” and “If I ever get boobs, I am going to chop them off with a kitchen knife!”

  In school, I am the kid with the cool parents. They curse like sailors on leave, have ink, and use hip slang like “Yo, that’s fresh, son!” when talking to my friends. They are attractive and young. So young looking, in fact, several male teachers nauseatingly tell my mother, “You must be April’s sister.” When bringing me into school late one day, a teacher genuinely scolds my mother for skipping class, “You girls better get moving before I tell your teachers where you are!” “She’s my frickin’ mom!” I have exclaimed more times than I would like to admit.

  My friends are insanely jealou
s Janet and Robert are my parents. They assume every night we have ice cream for dinner and go to bed at three in the morning, coked out of our minds. And some of that envy is certainly warranted. I have the fun parents that take us to R-rated movies, say things like “That teacher can go fuck herself” when I get a 95 instead of a 100 on a test, and who will encourage me, at age fourteen, to get a tattoo (I will decline, stating, “I feel like one of us needs to think rationally about this”). But having the “fun” parents can have its drawbacks.

  Fun parents can be found sitting on the stoop of their low-income housing complex, listening to a boom box with some of the building’s teenage dropouts. A child of fun parents has to call these cool cats inside at 11 p.m. because it is time for bed and the child has an English test in the morning. Fun parents hand out high fives for solid disses. Erica would serve me with such classic lines as “Your cheeks are so fat; you look like you’re storing nuts for winter.” To which Fun Dad Robert would delicately respond, “Oh, snap, do you need some aloe for that sick burn?”