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

by A. J. Mendez Brooks

  Janet Acevedo, MILF circa 1983

  Fun parents accidentally spend the rent money on a new pair of sneakers for themselves, and when their youngest child scolds them for it, fun parents respond by saying, “Stop being jealous of my fresh kicks.” And when the landlord would inevitably come banging on our door for the money now being worn on their feet, Fun Mom Janet would flippantly instruct the family, “Just be really quiet and he’ll think we’re not home.”

  Fun parents party hard. I would often awake in the middle of the night, sick to my stomach from questionable fumes invading my nostrils, to find my dad smoking pot and drinking in the kitchen with some of the older teens in the neighborhood. I was a bit perturbed to see their supply spread out on the same place setting where I ate my morning Farina. I hated the way these kids looked at me when I passed them in the street, like they held a secret of mine in their hands and it was a plaything. More than anything, I felt a burning envy that my dad paid so much attention to children who weren’t his. They got so much of his time and got to see a side of him he tried to keep hidden away from the rest of us. My jealousy would give way to pure, unfiltered rage upon finding out from my brother that drugs and alcohol cost actual money. Every time I opened our refrigerator to find nothing but a forty-ounce Budweiser, I would ugly cry to Erica. It was around this time I began to realize that my parents did not have their priorities straight.

  At some point my father began dabbling with drugs a little stronger than weed, and we all got to experience the fun side effects together. One early morning, around three o’clock, Dad had wandered into our bedroom, dragging his feet on the carpet and eventually stopping in the center of the room. At the sight of a sliver of light entering the darkened room, I bounced up in bed, calling out to him. “Daddy? Are you okay?” I wasn’t sure he heard me. He stood unnervingly still for several minutes and then slowly made his way over to the foot of our bed.

  “I thought you were ignoring me. Is everything okay, Da—” Before I could finish my sentence, he had grabbed ahold of the bed’s footboard and begun shaking it. Something about the way it moved did not please him. I tensed up as he then began kicking it. It started off gently, like he was checking the footboard’s tire pressure. But slowly the wallops became faster and more forceful. I tried to shake Erica awake, but she can—and has—slept through several of my openhanded slaps. Pulling the comforter over my face as a shield, I pretended to be asleep while he finished punishing the footboard for an unknown offense. The next morning, I pulled Ma aside to tell her what happened, but she didn’t seem too worried about it: “Oh, baby, relax. He was probably just trippin’ balls.”

  Having the fun parents really just meant having an extra pair of siblings. I began to feel the need to pick up the stress slack. Growing up in my parents’ care meant growing up together. They weren’t carefree because they were purposefully negligent or dismissive of responsibility; they just didn’t understand what was traditionally required of them. They were forced into the duties of adulthood at sixteen, but that didn’t make them adults. It made them teenagers who had to find a way to get by with no experience or assistance. They were children raising children. What were new experiences to me more often than not were new to them as well. We would have to learn how to navigate life together. And in that way, we were, unsettlingly, equals.

  There was also no need to coddle. If my parents experienced pain, we all needed to experience it with them. I learned this when Dad didn’t come home one night. We would eventually learn he was arrested, but for forty-eight hours his whereabouts were unknown. When I cried to Ma trying to get answers, she responded, “I think the asshole left us. I knew this would happen. Don’t waste your tears on a man who just takes off, baby.”

  Living alongside us meant no one stepped up to take the reins. We all pulled together. When there was a heavy downpour, instead of being a shelter from the storm, we all got drenched. We were not shielded. We were not protected. We were expected to protect ourselves, and too often expected to protect our own parents.

  ALL IT TAKES IS ONE BAD DAY

  Ma would often boast that she was a “loud Puerto Rican,” like it was a badge of honor. She and Dad would get into shouting matches so loud our upstairs neighbors would bang on their floor to get them to shut up. When that did not work, and the fights escalated into “who can throw more furniture” matches, the local police would inevitably end up at our door.

  One fight was so extreme that Dad actually did take off. He wandered around New York City, eventually pawning his wedding band to “buy a drink.” When he returned two days later, sans wedding band, Ma was a wrecking ball. Robbie, Erica, and I huddled together, barricaded inside of our room, playing The Game of Life on the itchy carpet.

  “They’re throwing things again,” Erica worried. “That big cop said last time was their final warning.”

  Robbie’s patience with the noise was wearing thin. “Good. I hope they both get arrested. That’ll teach ’em.”

  “No!” I screamed. “Do you think Ma and Daddy are really gonna go to jail?”

  “Not if you do something about it.” Erica had her game face on.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Because you’re the baby.” (There it is.) “You’re the cute one! They can’t say no to you.” She rested her arm on my shoulders to make the persuasion all the more convincing. She knew this approach worked. Anytime my brother and sister wanted to stay up past their bedtime or wanted some of our parents’ stashed candy, they would employ my gift of cute, boosting my ego in the process. Occasionally I would be recruited to handle the dirty work of inserting my cuteness into one of our parents’ fights, but never had one sounded this scary. “You got this,” Erica assured me.

  Taking a deep breath, I prepared to peer through the bedroom door. Opening it just enough to fit an eyeball through, I could tell Ma and Dad were nowhere in sight. Cautiously, I entered the living room. It was a war zone. Chairs were flipped. A stereo was crushed in the center as if it had been stepped on by a giant. Loose sheets of paper littered every inch of the floor. I tiptoed through the mess, trying to not crinkle the paper beneath my feet too loudly. The shouting was now contained to the privacy of their bedroom. All I had to do was knock on their door and ask them to stop making noise. They would understand I was just trying to protect them. The big cop did not look friendly, and I did not want him to come back here and take them away from us. I also didn’t like how Erica kept wiping her tears and then used the same wet hand to spin the Life wheel. My turn was right after hers.

  I tried to steady my shaky hand as I knocked on the thin wooden door.

  “Go back to your room! You don’t want to see this,” Dad yelled from deep within his gut.

  “No! Come in here!” I could hear Ma’s voice farther away, like she may have been sitting inside of their closet.

  I stood frozen as the yelling halted. There was no more banging against the wall. Maybe it worked. They could tell I was upset and decided to give it a break for the day. The silence was so welcome I didn’t want to disrupt it and continued to delicately maneuver my way back. And then I heard gargling. It was faint and accompanied by gentle, rapid stomps. The kind Robbie would always do when he rolled on the floor laughing at me. After a few seconds, a deep gasp broke the silence.

  “He’s choking me! Someone get in here!” Ma screamed for help.

  What was I supposed to do? I could run back to the room and hide under the bed, like Eri and I did last time. It was so quiet and dark under there. Though we had never been to church a day in our lives, Erica and I decided to lie on our stomachs, hold hands, and pray for the yelling to end. It hadn’t worked then, and it probably wasn’t going to work now. No one, besides nosy neighbors, was listening.

  Daddy probably wouldn’t hurt her. Sometimes Ma could be overly dramatic. If I just pop my head in, I will find that everything is okay.

  When I pushed the door forward, I saw Dad holding the TV set above his head. He was pre
paring to send it crashing down on top of Ma, who was cowering in a ball on the floor. Without thinking, I burst into the room. I ran to her shaking body and threw all thirty pounds of me on top of her. Dad froze, but for a split second I met the gaze intended for my mother’s eyes, and it sent fire through my chest. He threw the set against the wall, making the loudest series of booms and bangs I have ever heard. It sounded as if a truckload of fireworks had crashed into a brick wall.

  “Please stop. Please stop.” I could not stop my mouth from repeating this over and over. But when I finally dared to look up, I saw Dad was gone. The distant slam of the apartment’s heavy front door comforted my trembling body.

  “You’re such a good girl,” Ma cried while scooping me into her arms.

  —

  Later that night Ma and Dad were cuddling in bed like nothing happened that day. When they called me over, I hesitantly approached. For once I did not find it icky to see them in an embrace. It was a welcome sight. I crawled into their bed and Dad pulled me between them. I was an AJ sandwich and they were the bread.

  “You’re a tough little thing. Do you know that?” Dad asked. I had never been called tough before. In fact, Robbie called me a “weakling” every time I cried during Beauty and the Beast.

  “You think I’m tough? Really?”

  “Do you know how many fights I’ve been in? I’ve knocked out jerks twice my size. They’ve all been little bitches. No one has ever stood up to me like you did today.”

  My insides were warm. I was as radiant as a Glow Worm. This moment felt rare, like I would never have both of my parents so proud of me ever again.

  —

  I am thirty-six pounds and I am invincible. I have always been a straight-A student, proudly hanging my own stellar report cards on the refrigerator door. The rousing reception to my academic excellence I build up in my mind and entirely anticipate never actually comes to fruition. Looking back now, I understand that my parents were justifiably too preoccupied with working painfully long hours at their grueling jobs to perfect the backflips I fully expected to see in response to my good grades. But at the time, it was demoralizing. It felt as if my parents couldn’t see the golden child my teachers had built me up to feel like. But lying squished between them while they praised my toughness made any desire for a report card parade melt away. In this moment I had their admiration and it was for the last thing I would have ever guessed. I was frail and skinny, weak and asthmatic, awkward and uncoordinated. My brother and sister made sure to remind me of these traits on a daily basis, often while pushing me over. The last thing I ever thought I could be was strong. Jean Grey was strong. Miss Elizabeth was brave. Princess Toadstool was tough. April Jeanette Mendez was a fucking spaz. I needed to cement my parents’ new vision of me. I craved nothing more than to see the warm, addictive eyes of parents who felt proud. I was told I had accomplished something no grown man was able to. I would find a way to accomplish it again.

  STEP 1: TEST YOUR MIGHT

  Erica was obsessed with baby dolls. And since I could fit into most of her Waterbabies’ clothes, she would just cut out the middleman and carry me around instead. While she rocked me in her arms like an infant, we would joke that she was my new mommy, “Except I don’t yell as much” she would say, laughing. One day, karma would bite us in the ass for our shit talk. While swinging me around, Erica’s hands slipped apart and my miniature skull came crashing to the ground. As my head contacted the apartment’s linoleum floor it made a nauseatingly sharp crack ring through the room. We both froze in fear. Erica stared wide-eyed at me, waiting for my inevitable full body ugly cry, but mostly making sure she hadn’t just killed me. As the tears welled up in my throat, it hit me that this was an opportunity to test my might. “I’m okay. I AM OOOO…KAAAAAY!” I smoothly said as I stood up and immediately fell back down on my ass. “Well, you don’t look okay.” Erica looked worried.

  She nervously checked the apartment to see if Ma had heard my brain go splat, but she was busy scrubbing the kitchen countertop down with Ajax. As we tried to tiptoe past her, playing it as cool as two very guilty cucumbers, Ma whipped around, noticing something amiss. “I’m okay!” I shouted in response to no one’s question. She raised an eyebrow. “Your hair is…very messy.” She was getting suspicious, but she wasn’t entirely sure why. Ma was in what we called her “cleaning mood,” intensely scrubbing every inch of the apartment to a germ-free finish, and the sight of my unruly hair drastically conflicted with all her hard work. “I can fix this. Go get me a brush and I’ll fix your hair.”

  I scurried to the bathroom to find the one round brush the Mendez women shared and began to feel light-headed. “I’m okay,” I repeated to myself. When I returned to the kitchen, Ma was sitting in a dining chair, her plastic gloves removed, and motioned for me to stand in front of her, facing out. “I don’t know how you girls play for your hair to get this messy,” she mumbled as she attempted to move the brush through my hair. But on the first stroke it got stuck on a large knot. “April Jeanette, when is the last time you combed your hair? It’s full of knots! And why is it so dirty?” In an instant her demeanor changed and she became enraged. She had just spent two hours cleaning to find her daughter was the real-life Pig-Pen. I winced as her stroke became rougher and rougher, unsuccessfully trying to loosen the bird’s nest resting on my scalp. With a strong flick of the wrist, the brush finally made way, its teeth ripping through to the other end. As I stared at the ground in front of me, trying to focus my eyes, I noticed what looked like a small pony’s tail fall to the ground. I thought it was strange, but my mother continued to furiously tug at my locks and I didn’t want to disturb her until she was done. But then another disturbingly large hunk of hair floated to the floor in front of me. “Umm, Ma. Is my hair falling out?” This question seemed to snap her out of her trance-like determined brushing. Looking down, she let out a horrified gasp upon finding her hands covered in blood. “What the fuck did you girls do!?”

  “Erica dropped me and now I’m bald!” I screamed while the severity of the situation began to dawn on me.

  “I’ll get a towel! I just mopped this floor!” She hurriedly wrapped a towel around my head. “Wait, I just washed these towels! Goddammit!” My mother did not do well in stressful situations.

  “Do I have to go to the hospital?” I tried to focus her.

  “No! No hospitals. We’ll just leave that wrapped for a while. Pretend you just washed your hair. How long have you been bleeding?” She began pacing, visibly flustered.

  “I don’t know! You were the one brushing my hair. Who doesn’t notice they’re ripping someone’s hair out?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know! Who doesn’t notice their own head is cracked open?” She began hyperventilating. “I’m gonna have to take you to the hospital and then do you know what’s gonna happen? The state is gonna take you away. They’re gonna think I did this to you and…”

  While using one hand to hold the towel in place around my head like a snake charmer, I grabbed her forearm with the other. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Really, I’m fine.” Three lumps of foot-long bloodied hair strewn across the tile begged to differ. “Really?” She exhaled. “Okay, good. You must have a really tough head.”

  Yes! There it was again! And all it cost was a few bald spots for a year!

  STEP 2: KNOW YOUR LIMITS

  I was fascinated with my newfound strength. This was the first time I had seen how much blood was really inside of me. I had soaked a bath towel through, lost my hair, and somehow convinced myself it didn’t hurt. I was sure I had willed myself into being okay. Could this be my very own superhero origin story? Sure, it wasn’t as cool as gamma rays, but I was convinced something special was afoot. Naturally, I wondered what other kind of damage I could withstand.

  When a shouting match with Erica inevitably ended with me in tears, I thought I had the perfect amount of rage-filled adrenaline to test the resiliency of my skull again.

  “If you don’t shut up, I
’m gonna smash this cookie tin on my head!” I threatened an understandably perplexed Erica.

  “I want to see you do that. Why would I shut up?”

  “Because I’m gonna tell Ma you did it again. Remember how mad she got last time?”

  “Dude, go for it.”

  And with that, I smashed the hard, circular lid of a sugar cookie tin against my forehead. But it didn’t hurt. Had I whiffed and hit air? Or was my head just tougher than I had ever imagined? I rapidly and forcefully banged it against my forehead twenty more times just to be sure.

  “Maaaaaaa!” Erica screamed. “AJ’s a psychopath!”

  I had not entirely thought this one through. Within an hour an enormous goose egg appeared. It looked as if a grapefruit was trying to force its way through the skin of my forehead or I was in the process of transforming into a unicorn. I decided inflicting pain upon myself was not the way to prove my toughness. I was going to have to start inflicting it on other people.

  STEP 3: SHARING IS CARING

  In the third grade I got into my first fistfight in school, and I have never looked back.

  The majority of my friends in school were guys, because most girls at the time didn’t want to talk about my theory that Princess Peach kept getting kidnapped because she just liked the attention. One day, a boy shared his Gameboy with me and an older kid decided to make fun of it. “Why are you guys sitting so close? Are you doing hand stuff under the desk?”

  I was insulted. Not only did this sad excuse for a class clown make me feel uncomfortable for hanging out with a boy, he sullied my sacred Tetris time. How dare a child so dumb he had been left back a grade three times in a row try to make me feel inferior? But instead of coming back at him with “I do hand stuff with your mom,” I just wildly swung my teeny tiny fist at his temple. Before he could blink, it connected with a dull thud, almost knocking him off his chair. I thought I saw some of his third-grade mustache instantaneously fly off. “Can’t you take a joke?” he yelled, tears welling in his eyes. My small hands had normally felt weak and ineffective when used against my siblings, but with the power of indignation, it was a mighty hand of justice. Why had no one ever told me violence was the key to solving problems? That felt like a serious lack of communication. A boy twice my size had tried to bully me and I made him frickin’ cry. Word quickly got around the whole school that tiny AJ was a low-key violent menace. I felt drunk with power. Eagerly I awaited the next opportunity to swing for the fences.