Jack of All Trades…
He was a cab driver, a mechanic, a restaurateur, owned his own store, a limo service, an import export business (and these are the jobs I actually know about), pretty much a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None… i.e… a con man. My dad was one of the original silver tongued devils. He’d come up with an idea (see above) and talk you and your next door neighbor into financing it. Did anyone ever make a profit… did they ever get their money back? Let’s just say most didn’t.
When he drove the cab he would take me out for drives in the back and we’d end up at some garage where he’d hang out with his buddies for what felt like hours… and hours. He’d look back at me and say “Get down” and I knew the drill… I’d have to lie down in the back of the cab so no one would see me until he’d completed his business. Some of those days were rainy days… I remember looking up at the ceiling of the cab humming something (anything) to pass the time, and on those rainy days I’d fall silent… awed by the sound of Mother Nature tapping on the window. Rain makes an awesome sound on the metal of cars… I think this is where my love of rainy days probably started. I could lay there for days wrapped up in the smell of gasoline and my simple imaginings… fall asleep enveloped in the low drumbeat of raindrops on the roof.
There were days he’d come home sweaty and smelling like motor oil… a hush would drop over the house every day when we heard his heavy footsteps in the hall… the house would fall silent. I remember running to meet him at the door “Papi!” there were days he’d acknowledge me, and there were days he wouldn’t, depending on his mood. I remember his dirty hands, blackened with motor oil underneath his fingernails. I know this is where my affection for someone who can work with their hands started. My mom would always have dinner ready… and we’d eat 3 home cooked meals virtually every day. Things like Wendy’s, McDonalds, Chinese food and pizza… well those… were treats.
We had a detached garage, so a key was required. We kept all manner of things in there… tools, furniture my bike… my sister’s. It was the weekend and on this particular sunny afternoon my sister and I went bike riding. We asked my mom for the key to the garage and set out looking for adventure. We rode around the block several times, amazing how back then no one thought or cared about safety. We rode on the side walk, in the street, without padding and without helmets. Rebels right? When we were tired of moving in circles and had updated ourselves on the ‘going ons’ of the neighborhood we headed home, put our bikes away and my sister locked up the garage. She went into my parent’s room and placed the key in my mom’s glass vanity tray on their dresser. We went about the business of burning through the rest of the hours in the day watching TV and doing our own thing.
I remember hearing the front door open, running to greet my dad at the front door. He ws tense… and had with him a KFC bag and a bucket of chicken… TREATS! My mom was in the kitchen making preparations’ to sit down to dinner. I’ll never forget my dad’s face when he said he needed to go to the garage… “Where is the key?” My sister looked at him and said “We went bike riding today. Its on your dresser.” My dad walked into the kitchen, sat down at the table and said very quietly, “Its not… find it.” She hurriedly went into their room to get the key, when she came back in a few moments later she stood in the doorway of the kitchen and nervously said, “Um it’s not there, I can’t find it.” My dad stood up and said “Find it or I’m going to beat you.” I looked from his face clouded over with barely suppressed anger and her face wide eyed with the first sparks of fear, and we went to search.
We tore the entire house apart. I went into the junk drawer in the kitchen and got out the flashlight. My mom was seated at the kitchen table chewing away at that fried chicken. My sister and I went outside in the dark together to retrace our steps. She asked me over and over again if I touched the key, did I move it. While I was apprehensive I wasn’t really worried because girl genius that I was… I had secretly disposed of all of the belts in the house. Yup… in the trash… weeks ago, my dad had been pulling up his pants for a while now. As we made our way back she stopped me before going into the house, “Ok, we can’t find it, if it’s out here we can’t find it till morning. You won’t get in trouble, you tell him.” I looked up at her, and bravely said, “Ok.”
He was standing in the dining room… in what appeared to be a full blown rage. “Where is it” he demanded pacing back and forth. “Papi, we can’t find it. Maybe it fell outside… we can find it when its daytime…” he stalked toward his bedroom (presumably on the hunt for one of those long gone belts) and I stood there with my sister, uncertain but not yet afraid. My mom sat there looking at us through the kitchen door… eating that fucking chicken. When he came back into the room he had a long brown extension cord in hand. My sister and I looked at each other, then we looked back at my mom, she just shrugged and said, “Don’t look at me you should put things back where you found them.” I was still uncertain but not yet afraid SMH, sadly though… I should have been afraid.
He wrapped the two ends around his fist… leaving the rest loose and called me… “Carlyn… come here.” Now what you must remember is while I was intimidated by my father I never really feared him. Up until this point in my life his spankings almost always consisted of those damn thick leather belts (not that silly light weight stuff people buy off of the street corner… real leather) or the hand slap. He used to tell me to put out my open palm and he would slap it as hard as he could, and lastly… the head slap. He’d wait until we were walking by and would slap the back of our heads… really hard (this was usually followed by some variation of “STUPID”). In that moment when he called me and I eyed the cord in his hand I felt the first real fear of this man of my short little life… but then calm washed over me… reason prevailed… ‘he’d never hit me with that’… I looked him in the eye and I walked up to him.
When I looked up at him, my little heart trying to thump out of my chest I looked for something… anything in his face that would tell me everything would be ok. He looked down at me… nostrils flaring… eyes dilated… a fine sheen of sweat on his upper lip… and raised his fist. I could tell you I braced myself… or that I flinched or even that I was clear on what was coming, but I’d be lying. The first lick of that cord on my skin was white hot… I didn’t see stars… I didn’t black out… my vision turned white and all of the breath in my body released as I dropped to my knees and the world was perfect silence.
Everything moved in slow motion and then I heard it… the screaming… like an out of body experience I listened… curious… until I realized it was me… I was the one screaming. Seems like the second that was clear I was back inside of myself. My wrist was in his grip and with each rise and fall of that extension cord I was screaming “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… please Papi… please!” Thinking back on it clothing is a Godsend… every place that cord touched me was on fire.. ruby red welts would form and stick around for days to come… but those places where that cord touched my skin? On impact… shredded. Thin white strips appeared… agony… those would bleed later. I remember two in particular… the one on the back of my knee… and the one on the inside of my elbow… I can still see the outline of the faded scar today.
When he finally let me go I took off running. I ran to my mother (still sitting there eating that fucking chicken) she shrugged me off and said, “Get away from me.” I looked at her and climbed underneath the kitchen table, where I sat and cried. Then he called my sister, “Thalia, come here.” She stood in the doorway of the dining room and just looked at him for a minute, “Not if you’re going to hit me with that.” He stood up a little bit straighter… pulled up his pants and said “Come here.” She stood her ground and said, “Not if you’re going to hit me with that” then he reached for her and she took off running.
He chased her through the entire house, lashing out with that extenstion cord, by the time they made their way back to the kitchen one end of the cord was loose and he was flicking it out like a full blown whip. He caught her mostly on her legs… she was fast. She ran into the kitchen… where my mom was still eating that fucking chicken and dropped down to her knees next to my mom… wrapped her arms around my mother’s legs screaming, “Mommy please” we looked at each other… me crying under that kitchen table and my sister cowering at my mother’s feet. My mom put down the piece of chicken she was chewing as my dad ran into the kitchen, panting heavily. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and said “That’s enough.”
I cried for hours… the kind of tears that are silent and numb. My mom took us into the front room and started applying rubbing alcohol to the worst of our wounds, chiding us the whole time…chiding us, “Next time you’ll be more careful, next time you’ll put things back where you found them, next time you’ll be more careful”. I looked up at her… my little heart broken for the first time in my life, “Next time? Mommy next time I’m calling the police” (yeah I know but my 7 year old azz was as serious as you can be at 7). She looked at me… “Oh yeah… call them… see what happens…” and resumed her rubbing alcohol torture.
My sister and I shared a bedroom and went to bed wordless. I lay for hours with water just leaking out of my eyes… just leaking… like a faucet someone forgot to shut off. I cried myself to sleep that night for the first time ever. The next morning my sister and I were stiff and moving slowly, sudden movements caused the freshly scabbed wounds to split open again. We ate breakfast in silence. I sat in our room watching tv… rather looking at it but not really seeing anything. “Carlyn… come here.” I paused before I realized it was my sister calling. Slowly I picked myself up and followed the sound of her voice. She was standing in my parents room, at the dresser shaking. “Look.” She said as I hobbled over and stood next to her and there in my mom’s glass vanity tray… rested the key to the garage. We looked at each other… silent… what was there to say really?