I was proud to be a smart-ass. This smart mouth was going to build armored walls around me and keep me safe.
—
When the holidays came around, my mom wanted to drive into Manhattan for Christmas Eve dinner with her relatives. It had been quite some time since our little band of merry misfits had been invited, and coincidentally, it had also been some time since my parents last asked any of them for money.
Going to these family gatherings had once held a special place in my heart. When my parents couldn’t afford to buy us Christmas presents, an aunt or uncle would bring a bag of extra toys to our family gathering and make sure the Mendez kids had at least one present to unwrap. I was so appreciative to receive my first childhood baby doll at one of these dinners, over twenty years later I haven’t had the heart to get rid of it. Though I probably should, since it now looks like it’s haunted.
Looking beat.
But the more dependent on them we became, the less they wanted to share their holidays. Having become a little ball of bitterness, I asked to be excused from the evening.
“We don’t ever celebrate Christmas. We don’t give each other presents. Why are we going to start now?” I made my case.
“Because these people are your family, and family is supposed to be together on the holidays,” Dad tried to convince me.
“Is this the same family that let us live in a car?” I bit back.
“You know what,” Ma interrupted, “just leave her home alone if she wants to be a little Grinch. I don’t want you embarrassing me with your smart mouth anyway.”
“The Grinch had a pretty sweet dog.” I pushed my face against Mugsy’s like we were posing for a cheesy Kmart photo op.
I was psyched. I had taken a trip to Hollywood Video and rented a VHS of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo’s sci-fi anime classic. My interests had now broadened to all things anime, and it was an essential part of the education.
“It’s just you and me, Mugsy,” I said as I popped the tape into the mouth of the impressive TV/VHS combo my dad had recently found on a curb, cuddling up with my little pup. Except by this time he wasn’t really little. He was the size of a very small but very fat horse. Though he thought his overwhelming frame could still comfortably fit within my comparatively diminutive lap. He curled up across me, like one of those circus bears trying to ride a teeny bicycle. I began to stroke his fur and sing his favorite song, “You Are My Sunshine,” and as he drifted off to sleep he felt twice as chunky.
I thought it was endearing Mugsy had convinced himself he was still the size of a puppy but frustrated that I would now be trapped underneath a boulder for the next few hours. Still, my night had to be miles ahead of a family function filled with phony smiles and stilted conversation. Even if my company tended to lick his own crotch in front of me, at least I knew it was company I could rely on.
I was sure Mugsy’s fur released some kind of tryptophan, because every time he fell asleep on me, I would inevitably doze off soon after. As I strained to stay conscious and finish my movie, a loud bang snapped me awake.
We now lived in a basement apartment, which is just as dreary as it sounds. The subterranean abode would not only flood during a heavy rain, but its windows would also amplify all the noises of the all-too-close street they faced. I assumed someone had hastily thrown some garbage in a can out front and went back to watching my movie. But then the bang happened again.
Mugsy leaped off my lap in a single bound, scratching my legs through my sweatpants. In an instant he was snarling and barking at the door, letting me know he did not like whoever was on the other side. I looked through the peephole and was startled to see a man slumped over in the hallway. I watched as he used all his strength to throw his body against the door again.
Mugsy was in full-on guard dog mode, his instincts for protection kicking in. He was not about to let anyone come in and harm the lady who serenades him. But instead of letting the hundred-pound furry security guard handle his business, I irrationally worried about what the guy on the other side of the door might do to him. Upon further inspection through the peephole, his mouth was foaming and his eyes were almost inhuman. “Roooooooooooobeeeerrrrtttttoooooo,” he gutturally shouted. Oh. So this was what one of Dad’s new friends looked like.
I naturally assumed the guy was on drugs and began to dial 911, but he had stopped throwing himself at the door, seemingly giving up on his search for my dad. Moments later there was a crack against one of the front windows and I almost screamed in response. The man wasn’t gaining entry through the front door, so he figured he would just pop in through a window.
My mind raced. This man would soon easily crawl into the apartment. I needed to protect Mugsy. I was home alone. What would Kevin McCallister do? Realizing I did not have access to marbles, let alone the time to properly set up an effective human trap, I found the next best thing. A steak knife. My dad let us know Mr. Pointy was easily accessible inside of a kitchen drawer, in his own words, If you ever need to shank a fool. Well, here was a fool. And he needed shanking. Mugsy wasn’t about to grow an opposable thumb and do it, so I guess I needed to step up.
I watched as the stranger’s hands successfully punched a hole through the window screen. My heartbeat pulsed inside of my throat. Luckily he was so out of it, he couldn’t process how to unlatch the lock to slide it up. But his dry, dirty hands roamed around the inside of the sill, desperately looking for a way in.
“Roooooobeeeeerrrrtttttoooooo,” he continued to yell as if Dad would happily greet him at the busted window frame. I dialed 911 on the landline while my hands shook around the rusty steak knife. I was okay for now. The police were on their way. If he kept fiddling around the lock, I would scare him off with the knife.
As I tried to calm myself down I saw his hand bend around the frame and grab hold of the lock. Fuck this noise, I’m going in. Screaming at the top of my lungs, I wildly waved my weapon at his arms. He shrieked, seemingly noticing my brandished blade, but it did nothing to stop his hands from fiddling around the lock. He pushed the screen up, dropped his hands to the sill, and lowered his head through the foot-tall opening. He was going to try to wriggle through the small gap instead of just continuing to lift the screen the whole way. His cracked-out mind was doing me a favor. As his hands tried to pull the rest of his body through, I uncontrollably stabbed at them.
Somehow over my banshee screams I heard the blade connect with skin, a thick and wet sound that made me gag in return. It seemed to do the trick, and he retreated in a flash. Minutes later the police arrived to scold me. “You know, that giant pit bull would probably make a great guard dog if you didn’t lock him in a back room.”
Now, I’m not saying stabbing an intruder is the smartest, or safest, thing in the world, but I must admit, getting myself out of a dangerous situation using nothing but quick thinking and balls of steel certainly made me feel stronger than I thought I was.
I felt more in control. I felt safer behind the strength of my own hands. But over time, merely reading a comic, watching someone else’s story unfold in a role-playing game, or dreaming of one day being a pro wrestler wasn’t enough to drown out the anxiety anymore. I thought I had found a way to stop my twitch, but I really just somehow traded it in for full-on obsessive-compulsive disorder. I found myself having to crack each knuckle in a very specific order after finishing every homework assignment. Before leaving a room I absolutely had to rub both palms on every edge and corner inside of it. Of course, I would wash my hands right after because I eventually needed to wash my hands after I touched literally anything. The delicate skin on my fingers began to crack and bleed after a particularly handsy day. The hand sanitizer I needed to have in my pocket at all times would burn when applied to the fissures, but at least I knew the germs were gone.
I started having trouble sleeping. At first any creak or noise I heard when the lights were off would make me fear someone was trying to break in again. And when that chill of paranoia ran down my spine,
it was soon followed by the nauseating memory of the squishy sound of popping skin. By around 2 a.m. I would finally fall asleep. But only a few hours later my alarm would go off and I would need to get ready for school. My body began to anticipate the early alarm, and I would wake up a half an hour before it, making my night of sleep even shorter. As time went on I would take longer to fall asleep, and instinctively I’d wake up earlier and earlier.
Ultimately these habits met somewhere in the middle and I became a bona fide insomniac. I needed to take action. But only my make-believe worlds of crime fighters and saviors had been able to soothe the beast in my brain. So I decided to step it up. I had found strength in control, so now I would control the narrative.
For every video game or anime that ended in “happily ever after,” I would open a notebook and write the “ever after.” I was creating fan fictions before I even knew what “fanfic” was. I would continue the stories I loved so much so they would always be with me. I could make the heroines say what I wish they had said before. But that wasn’t enough. I then started drawing my own characters and creating original stories. When I lay awake in bed, unable to sleep before school, I would quietly crawl out of it, prop a flashlight onto my desk, open a notebook, and enter the worlds created by my own hand.
When stress would overcome me, or I had a fight with my mother, I would take a pencil to a blank sheet of paper and create a new protagonist who would defend me from pain. Writing and drawing seemed to be doing the trick. My mind calmed a bit. I still couldn’t sleep, but now I only had to push my palms against the corners of the desk before leaving the bedroom. It was progress.
Even though my mind was now preoccupied, my body was itching to join the game. I had curbed my loose-hand ways a while back, after Ma had found out I was punching randos in school. If only there was a way someone would just let me hit them. Not out of rage, but for practice. I promised myself I would become my own superhero and enter the world of professional wrestling when I was of legal age, but I didn’t want to wait that long. And that’s when having all guy friends really paid off. My friends were into wrestling just as much as I was, and after discussing our dreams of squared circle stardom, we decided we would just create our own wrestling federation.
At lunch and after school we would all meet in the park and practice the moves we had seen on TV. Since I was the only girl, I was designated as the referee so none of the guys had to feel bad about clotheslining me in the neck. But they would let me try moves on them after their matches. I would jump off plastic slides with a flying cross-body and practice dropkicks in the softer patches of grass, and each of the boys was kind enough to let me try out forearms on their faces. It was so, deeply, stupid. There’s a reason they advise kids “Do not try this at home.” Someone would always end up breaking a finger or a nose, and dozens of times the cops were called to kick us out of the park. Apparently actual children didn’t like playing on bloody monkey bars. Pansies. But I was hooked. I was inspired. I wanted to inspire. I believed I was meant for better things than car living, break-ins, and glass baths. I would create my own way out.
FUSHIGI YUGI
Erica had worked hard and scored some scholarships to send her to a good college. After graduating, there was practically an Erica-shaped hole in our front door. She was not as understanding of our parents’ devolving ways as I tried to be—as I needed to be. She, like Robbie before her, just wanted out.
She picked a school that would not be easy for our parents to drive to on a weekend, and she never looked back. I was happy for her, but also scared of what being alone in this place would mean for me. I was basically Claire Danes watching Kate Beckinsale walk out of the Thai prison at the end of Brokedown Palace. Or maybe I was as angst ridden as Claire Danes in My So-Called Life. Whatever, I just wanted to be Claire Danes. I decided to formulate my own plans of escape. I wanted to go to a school that would encourage my blooming creativity. My grades were ideal, and I was in the top 10 percent of my class, but I enjoyed writing and creating more than science and math. When I started to look at colleges, I found amazing options all over the United States that would help me grow as an artist. But moving so far from home seemed an impossible task. I worried for my parents.
Living without Robbie and Erica had, in a way, broken their spirits. Sure, your average parent understands that spreading your wings and flying from the nest is a natural, healthy, positive part of life. But Janet and Robert were not your ordinary parents. They were dependent on their children. Not only did we serve to bring order, tranquillity, and rational thinking to decision making and everyday life, but my parents relied on us for the most basic of things.
Robbie and Erica used their meager savings from part-time jobs as supermarket cashiers to help pay rent. Janet used our Social Security numbers to open cable accounts and home phone lines when too many unpaid bills piled up in her name.
Erica shouldered most of the burden, acting as a surrogate mother to us all. She would organize the bills that came through the mail and try to remind Ma and Dad to pay them on time. She would carry heavy loads of laundry several blocks, all by herself, to the Laundromat in town so we would all have clean clothes for the week. She would work overtime at ShopRite to make sure I had a gift on my birthday. She was such a little adult at a young age.
Once, when she was around ten, she cut herself while preparing dinner and walked ten minutes to a CVS so she could steal a Band-Aid. There was no way we had enough money to buy a whole box. Unfortunately, she was caught in the act, but a kindhearted CVS employee, seeing how bloody her little finger was, snuck one bandage out of the pack and told her to take it and run.
—
Janet and Robert felt safer knowing there was someone else around to carry the burden, even if those hands were ridiculously tiny. I knew I couldn’t just take off and leave them behind. I decided to try to find a school I could travel home from, so I could take care of my parents.
My perfect match was NYU. New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts became my dream school. Not only could I study writing, performing, filmmaking, and animation, I would only be one train and one bus ride away from home. Just in case. The only problem was NYU is expensive as hell. We had no money. This seemed like a pickle. So I did some research. I found out my grades could help me get some grants and scholarships, and our household income being only slightly more than that of our apartment’s roaches would help me qualify for financial aid. Ma had spent so long ruining her children’s credit scores, hers had ample time to repair itself, and she would be able to apply for loans to pay for the rest. Basically, the financial burden of education would be something I could worry about in the future, after graduating.
The problem was what was asked of me in the present. I was required to apply for early admission to enter Tisch, and should I be accepted, I would need five hundred dollars to hold my spot in the freshman class.
I needed to start making my own money. I sold my collection of WWF magazines on eBay. Three days a week I got paid under the table to clean the bathrooms at a local day care. Between that and my future obsession with cardigan sweaters, I had all the birth control I would ever really need.
But twenty-five bucks a week to clean up baby poop was not going to get me where I needed to go. I entered various poetry and writing contests and ended up winning hundreds of dollars in first-place prizes. Not only was I awarded exactly what I needed to hold my dream spot in school, I had some money left over to spend on anything I could dream of. I had never held so much money in my hands. The possibilities seemed endless.
Now I just needed to get accepted. All my friends, many also applying early to NYU, were discussing safety and backup schools just in case the stacked odds were too much to overcome. That seemed ridiculous to me. I knew exactly what I wanted, and there was no way I would let any other possibility enter the world even through thought.
Why did everyone want to play it so safe? If you are tightrope walking between two skyscrapers,
the last thing you want to do is look down. I chose full steam ahead. At the beginning of my senior year, I decided to apply to only one school, my dream school. Unfortunately for me, my anxiety reared its ugly head, mutating into what I now know was a hatchling of depression.
But at seventeen, I had no idea what was happening. All I knew was that sometimes I would stay awake an entire night thinking about death. The death of my loved ones and of myself. I would horrify myself with worst-possible scenarios and begin the next school day exhausted and paranoid. Some days, I would actually get three full hours of sleep and wake up feeling refreshed. I would have a great day at school and come home full of positivity. But the rush of good energy seemed to come crashing down hard and I would lock myself inside of the bathroom, pretending to be showering, and cry for twenty straight minutes.
It started to scare me. I couldn’t pinpoint this feeling growing within my chest and gut. I just knew that something felt…missing. And no matter what I tried to do to feel complete, the hole just seemed to swallow all attempts, growing bigger, stronger, emptier.
My health began to fail. Somehow my mind’s ailments conjured themselves into a physical form. My asthma came back with a vengeance and I now required a bulky machine called a nebulizer to be strapped to my face for a few hours a day to help open up my lungs. However, I used those hours to perfect my Psycho Mantis impression. I would eventually miss over thirty days of my senior year. Sometimes this was because I felt ill; more often, it was because I woke up feeling like I was cloaked in a lead blanket. I couldn’t peel myself off the bed. I couldn’t dress myself. I dreaded the idea of opening the front door and moving within the world while I felt so damn heavy. My parents supported my decision to stay home, because it meant we could hang out and watch TV together.
Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules Page 8