My earliest memory in life was of me and my father in my bedroom in our little lower middle class home on Clearwater Ave. He came in to say goodnight but I could feel that this was a different kind of goodnight. I could feel that he was leaving and that something in our lives was shifting and would never be the same. I’ve always had an indefinable sense of things that comes in the form of a feeling. The feeling that night was a deep sadness; a sadness that felt like there was not going to be end to it. It was like I was beginning to fall into a dark pit and an enormous weight, the weight of the entire universe pushed down into my chest causing me to suffocate and lose my breath. A part of my soul began to crack and that crack would continue to split and eventually break and become a cavernous abyss continuing to evolve inside me into my adulthood. I didn’t want him to leave but I couldn’t speak.  I wanted to tell him not to go.  I wanted to yell for him not to go and leap out of bed to beg and plead with him to stay and fight with my mother one more time. Fight with her to stay together.  I wanted to tell him that I loved him and needed him and that he meant everything to me. But I could not speak.  I had lost my voice.  The pressure of the universe pushed down on me to the point of overwhelm and shock converting my verbal expression to a state of muteness.  To this day, when I get overwhelmed with life, I literally lose my voice to laryngitis. Depending on my life’s circumstances, I lose my voice two or three times a year.

As a child, I often wondered why my parents divorced. My young mind mostly settled with confusion and curiosity and it wasn’t until I got older that my mother explained to me why she divorced him and locked him out of the house. His drinking habit had gotten worse and worse over the years and she felt that she had tried everything to get him to stop. He was still able to go to work and function but towards the end, the late nights were getting more frequent and it got to the point where he was also spending all of their money when going out drinking and gambling.  My mother was beginning to reach the end of the line as she would watch him get home in the early morning intoxicated and carrying a pungent odor of rotting alcohol coming out of his skin and hitting the bed like a corpse still holding on to some semblance of life.  The icing on the cake was when he would come up short to pay bills in addition to the dysfunctional behavior.

The last straw came one morning when he had come home in the early hours still intoxicated but instead of going to pass out on the bed, he came to breakfast with the family. My mother had been a stay at home mom for many years prior to the divorce and it was a daily routine for her to wake up with the children and make breakfast. This morning she continued with her routine with a lingering anxiety and impending doom that her life as she knew it could change anytime. She was making breakfast and facing the stove while I sat in a high chair across from my older sisters and my father came into the kitchen and sat down with us looking ghostly and exuding the smell of rotting alcohol bleeding out from the pores in his oily skin.  Later in life I would recognize this ghostly vampire look after a hard night of drinking— he had a real intense white face that contrasted sharply by his dark black hair; it looked like the life-force had been syphoned out of him after a hard night of drinking.  My mother explained to me how things got quiet and tense because my sisters knew that he was not okay and my mother would have preferred that he go into the bedroom and sleep it off so the anger inside her leaked out in the form of a palpable energy in the kitchen. I was only three and a busy little toddler as I sat in my high chair. I was wanting something from my mother, her memory was vague, but I needed something and I started to fuss and whine. I continued to fuss and whine while my sisters innocently ate the their breakfast.  My mother tried to settle me down assuring me that I would have my food soon.  “No the precupes mojo ya mero termino” she probably would have said gently.  My fussing and whining evolved into the beginnings of a good cry and tantrum.  Within seconds my cry began and before my mother could come over with my food, my father quickly and abruptly, like the reflexes of master horse trainer smacked my across the face to shut me up.  It worked for a few brief seconds as I processed the pain and shock and the kitchen sat eerily quiet as a gasp for the air needed to let out the kind of toddler cry that would wake the angels in heaven, and once the cry came out it was like the sound of hell emerging from the ground.  My sisters observed in disbelief since they had never seen my father commit this sort of violence before and my mother also stood in disbelief frozen by the sound and wonder of how her life had culminated to this moment of horrifying abusive circumstance. She came over to me and picked me up and glared at my father uttering the words “se acabo, se acabo.”

She had been saving money over the last few months out of fear that my father would leave them penniless and she would have nothing to feed the children.  The seeds of the American litigious mindset sown by watching Matlock and other legal TV shows—the place where my mother learned English, began to branch out and turn into aggressive thoughts driving her to go to a lawyer for help.  My mother’s memory is vague about this time but she remembers going to a lawyer and paying to have divorce papers written up and being advised to change the locks on the house. She had already convinced my father to move out and told him it was temporary so he has a sliver of hope that maybe reconciliation was possible.  My mother moved swiftly with this process motivated by a maternal protective instinct to get him away from her and the children—to essentially get to safety.  

I asked my father about this time and he explained to me that yes he did remember and how he felt he was tricked by mother.  He only moved out because he trusted that it was a temporary separation so that they could have time apart to think about things and think about ways to come back to together. He explained to me how he loved his family deeply and how she was overreacting about his drinking problem.  He reluctantly admits that he had a drinking problem but that violence was a one off act and he felt terrible about making her feel scared. He outright denies ever hitting me and claims that the never laid a hand on me for my entire life. He would lay on hand on me eventually when I was older, but as a child nothing, not even a finger. He told me how he was served a manilla envelope while at work one evening towards the end of his shift. He had been a waiter on the Las Vegas strip for seventeen years and the divorce happened when he was early in his waiting career. He said how confused he was when this stranger approached him and asked him his name and then simply handed him the envelope and walked away. He found a quiet place in the restaurant to open the envelope and since he couldn’t read English very well he was still confused although a deeper sixth sense kicked in and he knew that what he was looking at was not good. He finally deciphered the words and realized that he had been served with divorce papers.

He explained to me how the pit of his stomach felt like it had fallen out and he suddenly felt dazed and confused—like he had been hit with a dense wood board right across the forehead. His memory after that is very fuzzy but he knew that his life had taken a sharp turn for the worse and he knew that things would never be the same again.

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