On PTSD
In 1954 we lived in Hoboken, the same year they filmed On The Waterfront there. I was about nine years old. Mami had worked at the Tootsie Roll Factory for a brief time but mostly she stayed at home raising us. She and her sisters had learned to sew on the island; young peasant girls doing piecework as a survival skill. But, here, caste could not hide the fact that my mother was a world-class couturier.
Mostly it was family stuff. Whenever the next victim decided that she was going to get married, she would come to my mother. They would go off in a gaggle - the girl, her mom, Mami - to New York, to scope out the finest stores and pick out the dream wedding dress. Price was no object. She would come home and duplicate it immaculately. She was a legend,
She had a flair for organization - and control. She was our family’s event planner and in complete charge of whatever event was happening. Everything, down to the little swans with the almonds and the little organza bags, the fake carnation boutonnieres, white ribbons with the couple’s names, the cake from Valencia Bakery; all of the Puerto Rican accoutrements of weddings, that was her gig.
Not that she practiced alone. She had co-conspirators, Tias Celina and Blanca usually, sometimes Tia Viňa or some random cousin. Normally these projects would have been done at someone else’s house, but this day they had come to Hoboken and our cramped little apartment.
Tia Celina brought along my cousin Ray. My mother's nickname for Ray was Dennis the Menace. She tried to keep us apart as he was a trouble magnet and I was often his foil. Whatever problem others might manage to miss found him. He was my hero.
We were bored. The women, preoccupied with the project and their bochinches, either let us go out or we escaped, not sure which, but we went off to discover the neighborhood. Ray’s misdeeds were always centered on his overactive mind. He would have some project or some little thing to do, some button to push, line to cross, a query that had up to that point been unanswered. "Let's go spelunking,” he said. I didn't know what spelunking was but he told me we were just going out to discover what was out there, lack of caves be damned.
We wandered around our decrepit neighborhood, eventually coming up on two duplicate three-story federal townhouses. They were abandoned but in the process of repair. One of them looked like it was about to fall down. His eyes lit up and with that devilish grin said “Come on. Let’s find something to make a bow and arrow.” “I'm not going in there,” I said. I did not share his genius for trouble or his bravura. The initiative was always his. He was the gutsy one, the fearless one. “Aw, you chicken shit.”
He was in there for the longest time. I paced nervously, pissed that I hadn't gone in there with him, demoralized, alone, afraid, ashamed. He finally returned and wanted to go into the other building. It looked like it was just about finished with the rehab. I thought, “well, that one I'm not afraid of.” We went in.
We were up on the third floor when the front door slammed. Looking down the banister we could see two workmen, two young guys coming up. We hid in a closet. We hid in there for five or ten minutes - it seemed like forever. “Fuck this,” Ray said, taking out a tiny one or two inch bladed Boy Scout knife. I wanted to cry. Off he went to confront them while I stayed in the closet.
Alone, I didn’t last long. I gave myself up. They had Ray and were trying to figure out what to do with us. They terrorized us for about an hour or two; they put us up against a wall, slammed a shovel on the concrete over our heads, the rubble going down our backs and into our shirts. They cut our hair. Frightened out of our wits, we were going to jump out of this third or four-story window. They realized that and took us down to this creepy basement. They made us dig our graves. They wanted us to suck their dicks and all manner of crazy stuff.
I finally convinced them to let us go, that I wasn't going to say anything, that all I wanted to do was just to be left alone. Ray agreed. They took us straight to our mothers and told them that they had found us in their building. The minute the door closed, Ray ratted them out. The police came and arrested the guys. They had a court date. We didn't go. It was a big inconvenience and, besides, “nothing had happened”.
Hoboken had been a nightmare. Papo (and maybe Janet and I) got polio, Eggy asthma, and this. We moved to downtown Jersey City. But it didn’t end there. We had been in our new school maybe two weeks and Eggy and I were in a nearby candy store. I had only casually noticed the guys in the back playing cards. I don't know if they saw me and started the story just to scare me or if it was just another cosmic incident. But their conversation sounded way too familiar. They were talking about how they'd scared these little Spic kids. I looked over and it was them. I was in a panic. Our family moved again.
But only physically. Emotionally, I’m still there. I cry at the drop of a hat. The fear that this incident implanted in me I have only recently recognized as a life template and something about which to be conscious. I am constantly forecasting disaster even in the mundane. Had I been on guard, I tell myself, had I been wary, been vigilant, that wouldn't have happened to me. I blame the victim.
It has taken me years to bring a bit of accommodation to my PTSD, to sort out my anxiety into tiers of reality - from “Don’t be ridiculous, that brick is not going to fall out of the mortar from that building and kill you” to “It’s probably not cancer that your head is throbbing”. Still, it is always a struggle to remember that it’s not real. Maybe. I am a work in progress but my insanity and I have reached a modicum of stasis. I credit being removed from that environment, of now having a pretty pleasant life, a wonderful family and friends that shower me with love and, thankfully, boatloads of understanding.
