The occasional stubby-finger typo is understandable. The incessant use of all caps is annoying. But if all you do is botch up the English language on the regular, you may fall victim to unfortunate missteps ... such as the one created here without that ever important space between words.
So, please - at least do a cursory review before you hit publish.
Thank you.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4: The Mask
The crying had to stop. I knew it did; certainly, I couldn’t grow up and be a grown man who cried all the time. But I needed another coping mechanism. I didn’t exactly know the right terminology then, but I knew I needed something. Something outside of my family, because my family could never understand. My mother wasn’t what I would call motherly, and so I needed something that would make me feel like someone was taking care of me. I remember telling my mother one day that I wanted to go to church.
She sent me with a neighbor to a Catholic mass. It was grueling. I sat through the service and found it empty – not the church, because it was full of people. But the place was missing something. There was no one to connect to and that’s really what I needed. So, although I was sure that church was the answer, this particular church wasn’t.
One day, I was looking out of the front window and saw a blur of color run across the street. Now, this doesn’t happen often in the residential neighborhoods of New York City. It was definitely different. It was a clown. Clown suit, face paint and all, running across the street and disappearing into the backyard. I went to investigate. (Did Steve King move in down the street?!?)
With some trepidation, I walked down the street and into the backyard where IT went. When I got back there, I saw rows of chairs, a lectern and a microphone. I was welcomed by two ladies who explained that they were having a church gathering. For kids. Hmmmmm, I thought. Ok. So, I stayed – and met Mr. Scriptures, the Gospel Clown.
For all the ridiculousness it sounds like, several things are important here. First, they were glad I was there. Second, it was actually kind of fun. Third, I was a nerd and was totally given, even at 10, to the notion that knowledge was power. So, I stayed and met tons of new people – and of all the people on my block that showed up that day, I was the only one that kept coming back. And there I began to construct a new family, new friends a new life where no one knew I was really a confused little boy that cried all the time just to get attention.
So, with all this newfound attention, the crying itself actually stopped. I think that’s what convinced my parents to let me continue to attend this church – they figured it was good for me. And to a very large extent, it was. The good things to say that were buried deep within me began to surface because people actually began to listen. I learned to sing, I learned lots of Bible and found my first real girlfriend.
I really liked her. We held hands and all and she made me feel good, special. She thought I was the cutest thing ever and I really thought she was pretty. And I began to think that the confusion was lifting – I really liked this girl. It didn’t matter to me at the time that the confusing fantasies about boys never left or subsided; all that mattered is that I really liked this girl, I didn’t have to kiss her because it was strictly forbidden in church and all the confines to that puppy-love relationship made it just perfect for me.
I really loved that church. For a while, I would attend in the winters and disappear during the summers because there was so much else to do around the neighborhood. That became an issue in that church because I needed to be more consistent. Well, I had to give that some thought – but the reality of my life was that I was living a duality. Another one.
Not only was I hiding my attraction to the same sex, and learning to stifle it away and not deal with it … I was developing relationships with a church family who didn’t know anyone in my biological family … and my biological family never went to church with me and didn’t know my church family. There was no cross-contamination there for me. My parents let me go to church because it kept me off the streets and I was maturing, growing out of the crybaby phase. And my pastors began to feel like I was their kid and treated me as such.
The real me was buried down deeper than before. I wasn’t trying to deal with anything, so I wore this crybaby image for a while and let it go for this devout Christian image. But even then, there was the real me – that only the people at school knew. I had a trunk full of facemasks that I interchanged at will. And everywhere I went I fit in perfectly.
Except when I was by myself.
Remember the guy who bought me a ring? Well, what's very interesting about that situation is that I never told him my real last name. I don't remember ever telling him it was Martinez, but that's what he thinks my last name is. In fact, just a few minutes ago, he called me and said, "Hello Mr. Martinez. How are YOU?"
It took me a bit to compose myself so as not to laugh uproariously into the mouthpiece - and no sooner did the call end did I text Jaded to tell her what happened. Her response, in classic JADED-JACK vernacular?
ME MEOOOO!
Right then and there, I realized I had found JACK's last name. It just HAS to be Martinez. It *must* be.
And so it shall be.
-JACK Martinez
This promises to be a long post. Longest ever I’ve written. And if you choose not to read all the way to the end, I understand. However, if you live in Indianapolis, I hope you stay the course.
Whenever I have explain to people my upbringing and how life was for me as a kid, I am usually met with some version of, “I don’t know how you survived it.” But the reality is that it was my life – I knew nothing else apart from it all and so it was my normalcy. Only in hindsight do I recognize the dysfunction. At least I wasn’t like my friend across the street whose crazy ass grandmother would beat the fuck out her in broad daylight, once with a telephone cord and another time with a broom, for all to see and admire. I felt at the time that it wasn’t that bad.
I remember my first semester of college at a predominantly White, rural University. I really didn’t go into it expecting any type of culture shock, but there it was. I suppose if you anticipating it, then you can’t really term it “shock,” but whatever. It wasn’t so much in how I felt as it was in how I was treated. It was underlying, never overt, and hard to pinpoint or describe. But I knew everyone thought I was different, that my music was odd (at the time I was into old Spanish ballads – as in from Spain) and I was actually pretty sad a lot.
The more I got to know people in that Fall of 1993, I found myself dismayed a lot. When I learned that MANY of my fellow freshman had never even SEEN a Black person in real life, I really didn’t know how to react or feel. How the fuck do you get to be 18 and never SEE a Black person?!? I couldn’t comprehend it, coming from New York City and having attended a High School of 5,000 that was 1/3 Latino, 1/3 Black, 1/3 Asian. I went from a place where less than 5% were White to a place where less than 3% were minorities. And it took me a while to settle well into that environment. But, you know what – I did it.
Hereto forward, several incidences in my life stand out re: subject issue.
• When I told my mother that I wanted a car, she accused me of becoming too Americanized. Apparently, whatever I had done having learned to fit in among my peers at college was distancing me from my own culture. And my mother was more than happy to scold me for it, because my expectations had change. By this point, I had begun to see the dysfunction in my upbringing and chalked it up to the nature of being a first generation American.
• The head of the minority student office sat me down one day to tell me that it must be interesting to be such a light skinned minority because I could fit in with Whites easily until they realized that I was Latino and then it would become a little weird. And that I could fit in with Blacks because I was a minority, but there would always be the issue that I was light skinned and perceived to partake in White privilege. “How do you feel about that?” he asked. I hit the ceiling and told him he was crazy and left abruptly – but the reality is that he opened my eyes to a fact that I was not then ready to face … the fact that he was right.
• My roommate of three years tried to tell me that the apartment that we shared was his. It was a big argument – but it ended with him mocking me for thinking it was just as much my apartment because I could go to the minority student office and “nah nah nah,” he said shaking his neck. My roommate was White (I’m sure he still is) and I can honestly say that my being Latino was not even an issue in my head during this discussion – I froze. I totally just didn’t know what to do. I simply said, “you know what Dan – I can’t believe you just went there. This conversation is over.” And I left the room. Eventually that day, unable to express the type of frustration I was experiencing, unable to release it and unable to fix it … the tears welled in my eyes and I had to just cry it out and let it go.
• My boss in Indianapolis takes the cake. My first week in that office, I put up a picture of a Jazz scene, you know the ones where all the figures are black shadows dressed in ethnic clothing and some play instruments and others dance in skewed poses, with a picture of my then girlfriend and I. He walked into my cube, bent over and stuck his face up against the 10” X 6” picture frame, inspected it for a while and then left. He never said a word.
• The same boss, when I had lost some weight and bought new clothes, told me that I was dressing sharp lately. “Lately?” I asked. And he said, that, well, I had always dressed well but that lately I had put a little “salsa” in my wardrobe. He meant the dip, not the dance.
• Yet again about the boss … he was wont to walk around the office whistling the theme to the Mexican hat dance … and when walking by me one day, I pointed and said, “The Mexican Hat dance.” I expected to bring it to his attention and hopefully make it stop … instead, he threw his hands over his head, snapping his fingers and danced a circle around me as if I was the sombrero. And then he kept walking down the hallway. I stood there and just watched him leave … I totally forgot what I was up for .. and turned around to see that another coworker had witnessed it and looked at me like he was crazy. He is.
• Same boss – he used to tell me that when Castro is ousted that he was going to take me to Havana to sing in night clubs and be my manager and that we would make millions. Of course, I’m not Cuban and I felt like he wanted to pimp me or something.
These are just the highlights and I bring these up because a very good friend of mine told me recently that she and others have had a hard time with this character I’ve invented, JACK. What struck me is the following:
• My blog isn’t even pro Latino – it’s anti-White
• Which one is the real me? The me they know – or JACK?
I struggled with this for hours after that call – the idea that I am a racist. And since then I just accepted that to some extent I am – in that the experiences above, and many, many others, have impacted my world view as a Latino, a Latino with bi-racial kids. For the sake of protecting myself, I do just try to accept that my “Latinoness” is an issue for people – and when I find that it’s not, it’s a relief. That has been much easier for me than assuming that my ethnicity doesn’t matter in this country and then finding myself with those vacuous feelings that I cannot describe well … with those feelings that hurt me really bad and having to pretend they don’t … when I encounter head on the fact that it does. To that extent, the real me is somewhat racist, I suppose.
It’s caused me to put up a wall and become very observant of and thoughtful about people. I don’t trust too quickly, but I will engage in pleasant conversation with everyone. And the wall is usually it’s thickest when I deal with Whites in business, especially Presidents. Can you image why?
The thing that really bothers me right now is that the two people that had this conversation about me are so close to the top of my list of favorite people that if they were to disown me, I would be a mess. Yet, how would I feel if they started blogging about those damn wetback Latinos that aren’t worth anything but to scrub their toilet?!?
So, I get it – I know how you feel. All in all – the reality is this … I don’t in real life discriminate with a broad brush stroke (unless we’re talking about people in power in corporations – then I discriminate against them all) … and this is because my life has taught me how to spot a racist … it’s akin to Gaydar. I can spot another gay man without a problem and I can’t explain to you how … I just know. It’s in way he holds his head up, in the way he walks, in that tiny little mannerism that only “we” can see. And so it is with racism – when it’s there, I can spot it.
For the longest time in Indianapolis, this issue never came up, and I can understand your frustration with the racial undertones to this blog. But the reality is that that is MY fault. My fault for succumbing to the same temptation as every other minority in Indianapolis and pretending it doesn’t exist. I did that … and it was part of my frustration with that city. My broad brush strokes on JGC do not apply to you – to the scores of people I know who do not possess not an ounce of the racism that causes others to, say … dance the Mexican Hat dance around a Latino.
I wish so badly that I could say that I’m not a racist because I have White friends. (That was supposed to be hysterically funny, btw) But there is a little bit of racism in my assumption that White people are racist until they prove otherwise, fine. But JACK takes every opportunity to exploit anything he can
even spotlighting Mr. Jackson as an asshole when he threatened to castrate our next President.
Or when I called “c” a damn Mexican
or wrote about Kwame and called him a train wreck
or just shook my head at ghetto bitchez
or called my daughter a little Heiffer
If there’s one thing I can say about JACK – it’s that he’s equal opportunity.
He's redundant and says some things over and over again, but when you sort through it ... it's an interesting, errrr, sermon
OK, so what if I blog about my school work? That's like two birds with one stone, right? I get to feed my blogger addiction and synthesize my reading at the same time!
I am reading right now about the retention of adults enrolled in literacy or 'adult basic education' (ABE) programs. Qualitative research suggests that the Field Dependence of this set of the adult education population is extremely high.
Field dependence refers to self esteem, and where your overall sense of well being comes from. That is, if you are highly Field INdependent, you don't rely on other people for your overall sense of well being. Conversely, High Field Dependence refers to the need to have the affirmation and support of OTHER people in order to maintain self esteem and sense of security.
So, in short - folks that don't finish high school, or that obtain a GED, will likely have low self esteem and would rely on the affirmation of others in order to feel a solid sense of self. The studies suggest that the field dependence of these adults is similar to that of the average 10 year old. This gave me serious pause.
The research plainly says that more research is needed to understand the relationship of race and social class with field dependence-independence in ABE settings. And then I hit the roof - WHAT?!?!
"there are some findings that African-American and Hispanic learners tend to have higher levels of field dependence [than normal]" it says.
I gave it some thought - is the "we-ness" in our respective cultures to blame? I'm fucked in the head about this. Unless research tells me otherwise, it's about social class in my book. It's not about race - aside from the fact that Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately represented among the poor and lower middle class. So, a correlation based on race without any regard for social status will piss me off.
This has less to do with our ethnicity than it does with the fact that society is wont to ignore the poor and forces the poor to rely on their support systems in order to live life. THAT causes high field dependence - not the fact that's I'm Latino, or Black by injection.
I can't tell you how aggravated I get when I have to face the fact that the great majority of the studies out there have been researched without regard to the economic conditions that impact my people. I'm tired of it. And I'm more fired up now to GET this fucking masters degree and announce to all these elitists, "ya bitchez gon' hafta move over ... JACK'S HERE!"
Thanks for listening.
Carry on.
OK, I know I said I wouldn't post (although before my "homework cometh to me" post, I published five more to go live at a later date), but it's 6:30 am and I'm making this a quickie.
Did you listen to the radio show? OMG, did I have a blast. There's tons of good advice given in this segment amidst the hilarity. Don't be shy, click the link and listen in ...
(no, seriously - click the damn link)
I think we did ok - definitely a step up from that FIRST Monday Musings show where they were all serious and shit ... bbbboooorrrrriiiiinnnnggggg.
I jest - Jaded's work is bar none.
*smooches* (as she says)
