There is bad news and there is BAD news. When someone offers you a seat, because they are concerned about how you might react, nine out of ten times it’s an overreaction on their part. Because there is news that goes so far beyond bad that no amount of positional adjustment to your body is going to make a damn bit of difference.
The blow that is coming is either going to kill you outright or knock you unconscious, and there is nothing you can do about it.
First there was a lump, then the inconclusive tests and biopsies, now there is blood and the doctor already told you what that would mean. Someone died. You’re fired! The bank is on the line. Your son is in jail. The list goes on and on. Improbable that we could ever articulate all the faces of tragedy and, it’s not necessary to try. We get it.
Anyone who has lived four or more decades in this world knows a thing or two about the storms of life that form into tragedy.
Some tragedies are occurrences that we consciously create and choose to live with. For instance, when your doctor sits you down to tell you that you have stage four lung cancer and you’ve been smoking two packs a day since puberty, you’re not exactly blown away by the development of your impending death. Or, your childhood friend was killed yesterday, but he was a drug dealer and a pimp, so, again, you’re not exactly surprised.
But then there are the things that were not on anyone’s radar: the car accident that erases a family; or a police officer whose first response is to shoot.
For me, it was the price that I would have to pay for being someone’s friend. It never occurred to me that the longterm consequences of tossing a ball back and forth would lead to a friendship, a series of betrayals, and eventually a prison sentence too long to contemplate.
I looked in the mirror the other day and there was no smile. Given my circumstances I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I tried to make myself smile, only to find that my facial muscles had somehow atrophied to the point where they could no longer lift the edges of my mouth into any semblance of a smile.
Determination brought my hands into the equation as I attempted to lift, pull and prod my face into a smile. I managed to rescue from the lumpy disappointment that is my face, what I thought was a smile--it had teeth!--but when I tried it out on someone, he spilled his coffee. So I returned to the mirror with more questions than I had answers.
I began to sift through photos from childhood up to my arrest, and, there it was, a smile as genuine as ever there was one. I returned to the mirror any number of times, but it was no use, I simply couldn’t produce what was no longer there. My smile was somehow lost.
I began to wonder if maybe it hadn’t so much been lost but worn away like paint under the sun. Which brought me to thinking about all that had been lost in this involuntary odyssey of sorts that I had embarked on seventeen years ago. I walked around and asked those who best knew me, when it was that they had last seen my smile.
Most thought that I was joking. What smile? I’ve never seen you smile. And I realized that the situation was apparently more serious than I had initially thought.
If nobody had seen my smile that could only be because I had lost it a while ago and somehow never noticed. What happened to it? Where does a smile go, anyway? Did someone else find it stuck to a street drain or a fence and decide to make it their own?
Was that even possible? The more I thought about it the more determined I became, not only to uncover the answers that could potentially lead to the whereabouts of my smile, but to better understand the questions themselves.
Prison is a form of tragedy that is not a universal experience, in the sense that not everyone responds to it in the same way. What is, however, universal is our familiarity with the hurricanes of life that touch down on the shores of our reality; and few of those are more destructive and heartfelt as betrayal. There you were, doing some of those everyday things that you do. Walking the dog. Doing laundry.
Working. Writing that paper. Making dinner. Paying bills. You were not paying full attention to the details of your task, because as your mind often does, it drifts to some past or future setting to where it would rather be. That’s when the storm hits. The ring of the phone or the firm knock at the door, and before your mind can even posture a guess at what or who it might be, you feel it in the pit of your stomach.
Your pulse begins to race, time slows. Fear. A moment ago you were humming some catchy tune you had picked up at that new Mediterranean restaurant with the mouth watering pasta dishes. What was it called? You don’t know and you no longer care. Your stomach is in a knot of worry and you can’t imagine ever having been hungry in your life.
For me to better understand the questions related to the disappearance or whereabouts of my smile required that I not only sift through the photos, but the memories behind those photos.
I wanted to believe that delving into the past was an exercise of futility. Like going into a dusty attic to look through old boxes for something that could not possibly be there. Or maybe that was just the fear talking.
Because deep down I was afraid to uncover and revisit old truths. Whether futility or fear was somewhat irrelevant to the task at hand, because if my smile was important to me I was going to have to confront the truth of all that once was. But as I sat down to write it out, to face whatever was there, I began to waver.
As the memories began to flow, so too did the sadness. The one was entrenched with the other. Somehow I knew, though, that wherever there was sadness there would also be joy. It was there that I would find my smile. But first I had to confront the truth of what one particular friendship had cost me.
There was the terry cloth bathrobe that I missed. The feel of a porcelain cup in my hands as I sipped my tea. The shirtless runs with my dog through the neighborhood, on the beach, through the desert trails. Clothing. The feel of a tailor-made suit.
The crispness of a dry-cleaned shirt. My Allen-Edmunds. Ordering food from a menu. Tipping someone for great service. The serendipitous nature of meeting someone new in an elevator, a cab-line, on a bus, on a train, or in an airport terminal.
It occurred to me that my smile may not have been lost. It might have just gotten fed up and fled. I was on the verge of adding family and friends to my peculiar list of what I had lost. But there was something inherently false or misrepresentative about listing two things that I knew so little about. Family and friendship were as foreign to me as space travel and monogamy.
To understand this statement it’s necessary for me to peel back a few layers of this onion I call my life. As many of you will be able to relate, I have lived through some rather painful experiences, but for all the pain and all the tears they made me into who I am. I would not want to relive any of it, but I always return to it and revel in it in a way that is hard for even me to understand.
The best way to explain it is to point out that the best parts of my life are irrevocably intertwined with the parts that were most painful. I am not  able to revisit one without the other. The disaster. The tragedy. Whatever we want to call it, the truth is, the painful moments offered us an opportunity to stop and see just how far we’ve drifted from the charted course.
The normality of my childhood ended when my grandfather passed away in 1983, when I was six. If life is like a sandcastle on the beach, as I have come to imagine it, then my grandfather’s death was the tide that moves in. He was what made my mother’s family, a family. And the debris that was left behind by the tide was not anything that anyone was willing to rebuild with.
My parents’ divorce is not something I remember. It happened years before the tide had come to wash away my castle. What I do remember with the clarity that only pain can recollect is how my mother and me worked as a team to salvage some sort of normality from the ruins and debris we had before us.
There is no stability when you are poor; opportunity, even less. As an uneducated, single mother she took whatever job she could find, and one was never enough. Which meant that I was left to my own devices most of the time. I made good grades, played sports, excelled at the violin, and for the most part tried not to give my mom headaches.
Her headaches were legendary. I never knew if it was the sadness of her father’s passing, the stress of trying to make ends meet, or the fear and uncertainty of not knowing how we were ever going to make it that made her headaches so bad that she literally would cry out in pain.
What I did know was that we could not afford a doctor, or for her to miss work. So I did the best that I could to prepare meals, wash dishes, take out the trash, do laundry, or whatever I could to make her life easier. But it was difficult for me. Because I still wanted to be a kid, play with friends, have new toys; and the only way I could see that happening was to have a family. Which, as I already mentioned, I didn’t have, but, little did I know, one was on the way.
My mother fell in love with a man named Guillermo. he had a stable career, a home, and four sons. I had always wanted brothers and now I had themthree older,one younger.
Guillermo was stern and authoritarian in that he expected us to do chores and workaround the house. He encouraged good grades and never treated me different for not being his. What I most appreciated about him was that he seemed to make my mom happy. Her headaches became non-existent and I was able to be a kid again. But somehow I had completely forgotten about the tide.
Without even realizing it I had begun to let my fingers run through the sand again, scooped a fistful out, and started to rebuild the castle that was my life. I guess I had forgotten about the other castle because I was building something much more extravagant than before. I did not yet know that the tide never stops coming in. I was not yet able to connect the dots of destiny and causality. And again, I was blind-sided by the inevitable.
Guillermo’s boys began to resent my mother’s role in their lives. She was seen as the reason that their own mother could not be there, under the same roof as their father. Guillermo was often away with work and could not see the strain and tyranny that my mom was living under whenever he was gone. It was as if the boys had planned and plotted a strategic attack for how to get rid of the imposter so as to bring back the rightful queen.
Arguments between my mother and Guillermo ensued, but the boys had underestimated a mother’s resilience when she is determined to be with the man she loved and give her son a normal life. the boys doubled down their efforts and Guillermo sent them to spend the summer with their mother, a welcomed reprieve.
Guillermo and my mom spent a lot of time together that particular summer. He taught me how to ride a motorcycle and how to swim. He taught me how to control my breathing when running long distances, and how to make a fist and defend myself. I accidentally called him dad one day when we were raking the yard.
It was awkward, the silence that followed once I said it. We both stopped what we were doing as we looked at one another. I muttered an apology while he smiled and told me that I could call him dad if I wanted. I couldn’t have been happier.
When the boys returned from the summer months with their mother, a revised strategy of attack came with them. On the day of their arrival Guillermo sat the five of us down together and told us that we were a family, and that he expected us to behave as such.
And that anyone who was unwilling to participate or behave as such was welcome to leave. The latter statement was not intended for me, but for the older boys who had caused he and my mother so much grief.
The oldest boy was nearly eighteen, and the others only followed by eighteen months to two years. I was not yet ten. Nobody could have anticipated that the enmity harbored for my mother after a summer of being sent into exile by the king would have led to me being the target of their demise. At first their actions toward me were equivalent to the hazing I would later experience from pledging a fraternity at the university.
There were bruises and scrapes from the horseplay, and for the most part I was just happy to have their attention. Before, they had just ignored me, and since I was so much younger there was not much in common between us.
Suddenly I was invited to do most things; even mores, if there was a chance that I could be humiliated or hurt in the process. Looking back on it now, I think they expected that with a few bloody noses, bruises scraped elbows and knees that I would go running to mommy for help. They underestimated, of course, the level of my commitments to never returning to the life that my mother and I had shared before.
The more I resisted or refused to complain the more extreme and perverse their pressures became. It got to the point where the horseplay had turned to straight out beatings. From about 3pm to 8pm, Monday through Friday, there was nobody in the house but us. If I could I would visit at a friend’s house until my mother drove up.
Always trying to make the visits seem more casual than necessitated. But said feats were not always possible, and other times the boys would grab me in the street before I had a chance to disappear into a friend’s house. If I was already in the house I would try to lock myself in my bedroom or closet. Because the physical beatings had started to turn into something far more serious. Sexual Violations.
There were very few lessons more engrained into my young self like the commandment to never tell on someone. In my culture, the only thing worse than a rat, was a rat who went crying to his mommy. And because of that, I bore my tortures in all their twisted forms, with the stoic resolve of a martyr.
Seashells. Sunsets. The aroma of good tequila.Falling in love. Live music. Watching someone I love react to the perfect gift. Giving some stranger my best smile and knowing that I had made a difference in their day. Running through rain puddles. Surprising someone with a yes when they thought they would get a no. Beach volleyball.
My dilemma was obvious. To have brought an accusation against the boys would have been to forever lose my new family. I already had a good idea of what my mom would do. She would cry, ask me a dozen times if I was telling the truth, and when she was convinced that I was, she would pack us up in an instant and move us. I had no doubt that she would give up her happiness and stability with Guillermo for me. But I couldn’t really see how that was a win for either of us.
I sincerely thought that I could endure the abuse by slipping in and out of these different versions of myself. The lie became the defense mechanism. There was the good student, the athlete, the charismatic boy from down the street, so polite and well-spoken who made up my first version. Then there was the neurotic boy who watched the clock on the classroom wall with the uncertainty of a death row inmate awaiting his execution.
I wore these different versions of myself like costumes, and, so long as I never stepped out of the dressing room with the wrong one on at the wrong time, they would help keep us going, my mother and me. There was one problem: I didn’t know that someone capable of creating multiple identities was probably not someone who could keep them from blending into one another.
The exterior stuff was easy. As a boy the scrapes and bruises could always be explained away with sports and accidents on the bike or skateboard. But I didn’t know how to account for the emotions: the fear, the anger, the frustrations. Giving voice to those emotions was not easy. Somehow I arrived at the idea of writing letters to my grandfather.
If anyone could find a way to help me it was him. My mother had always told me that even though he was dead he was watching over us. I guess I figured that if he could manage that, then reading my letters shouldn’t be so far-fetched. I gave voice to emotions powered by the victim imposter who had taken up residence with me.
There were other emotions, too, that went just as deep--the crush I had on the girl from across the street; the feeling go being damaged goods; hatred for the boys for ruining my dream of a family; my irritation with my mother for her lack of ambition; and my secret determination to work hard and be successful so that I would one day never be a victim to anyone.
I guess you could say that I learned how to lie out of a necessity to survive. The most corrosive lies, being, the ones that I convinced myself to believe: tomorrow would be a better day; my biological father would come rescue us; we would inherit a fortune and move far away and would be happy; my dead grandfather was reading my letters and he was going to help us.
What my mother and me most had in common was our willingness to keep our most important truths from even ourselves just so that we could survive.
Hugging my mother. Travel. Random acts of kindness. The smell of tia Tonni’s house. Park benches. First dates. Take-out food that disappoints. The pile of mail on the kitchen counter that grows by the day. Lost luggage. Sand between my toes. Morning swims in the ocean. Giving a rose to a woman for no other reason than because I had managed to see some beauty in her that everyone else had seemed to miss.
Which was a lot like seeing a random smile from a random woman, then spending the next forty minutes of my commute wondering whether or not it was intended for me, then, laughing at how stupid I was, because when the opportunity to speak with her finally presented itself, all I could think to say was, Good Morning.
There are various grades to the betrayals that we endure throughout the vicissitudes of life. Most are like the superficial wounds that we grow through childhood with.
They hurt for a moment and then they’re quickly forgotten. As adults these are equivalent to those betrayals that cost us a bankruptcy, a marriage, or maybe an unwanted career change. Which is not to suggest that these are not painful or difficult to overcome. Without a doubt they too are tragedies, just the same.
But just as all things are relative so too are these: there are tragedies and then there are Tragedies. Let’s see, a man who I thought was a friend, first, conspired with my enemies to extort me, then, when that failed, blamed me for a murder that I did not commit so as to extricate himself, at my expense, from both blame and consequence. I think this qualifies me to speak on the topic of Tragedy.
The more life we have lived the more likely it is that we’ve all been on both sides of a betrayal. We’ve all betrayed someone other than ourselves. Of course, we find a way to justify it. But because we have both lived tragedy and caused tragedy there is a tendency, opportunity even to respond to it, when it happens to us, with empathy.
A betrayal is a lie manifested that takes shape and form. Like a stain on a shirt. We scrub at it and try to wash it away but it’s very noticeable. Even if others don’t see it, we simply can’t stop seeing it.
We always know it’s there. We learn to live with it because we must, but having done so inevitably leads us to forgiveness, for others and ourselves. That one love, that one relationship, that one time...We’ve all been there.
People have asked me what I would say to Eloy, the friend, if given the opportunity. Yet, when I tell them, their faces inevitably turn to masks of incredulity as they shout, How could you forgive someone who ruined your life?
Let’s see. Imagine for a moment the feelings you would harbor for someone who has taken everything from you that was worth having, with the exception of your life in its living breathing form. Your wife. Your child. Your family. Your friends. Your home. Your hobbies. Your social standing. Not to mention the money. Your opportunities.
You would probably experience anger, hate, with a strong desire to avenge yourself. But, to what end? Regardless of what you say or do to this person, nothing that has been done or taken from you can be given back or undone. Life is a process of age and loss and the only way out is death. Should I go through life angry, too?
Moreover, it would be melodramatic and untrue for me to say that Eloy ruined my life. I am so much more impressed with the man that I am over the man that I was. If anything I should thank him. Partly because I realized that going head-to-head with my circumstances was not going to change my reality. Trying to recuperate what I had was like trying to rebuild the sandcastle of my life from so long ago.
What I needed to do was figure out how to build something new with the new life perspective that I now had. Not just something new, something better. I began to see that if the totality of my life could somehow equate to that cornerstone of a better tomorrow then somehow the tragedy that I sip from my cup today would not be so bitter to swallow.
I can see now that Eloy’s betrayal was inevitable. Here was a man who had married a woman with four children from other men and she was pregnant with number five. He was the sole breadwinner, doing so by selling office supplies for pennies better than minimum wage. Desperate doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of where he was in life when I came into town. And there I was, a manifestation or ghost from the past, talking about the sums of money that he could only imagine.
My problems must have seemed petty by comparison: my business partners were pushing me out of our company; my father-in-law was demanding that I pay him for his losses; my marital indiscretions were out in the open; and my enemies had formed an alliance for the sole purpose of taking what was mine..
While Eloy was trying to stay afloat and keep from drowning, there I was describing the water to him. He probably saw me as a piggy-bank, and to solve all of his problems all he needed to do was push me over and break me open.
But, you’ll say, you don’t do that to a friend!
The same could be said about me. I saw that he was in a desperate situation and I wasn’t exactly reaching into my pocket to help him. I could have helped him rob the drug dealer who he had been staking out. I could have applied more effort into finding a house for us to flip together.
His yearly income was literally what I picked up in bar tabs for the month. But I wasn’t about to become a criminal for him, invest in him, or in any way pay for his choices. In part, because I was happy to see him in the position he was in.
Years before, when we were in the university together, just before he dropped out, he criticized my aspirations and told me that all my efforts would be wasted on an expensive education that would take me nowhere. Years later, when he visited me in Mexico or Arizona, he was envious and I was glad. Because when we were younger he had everything and wanted for nothing.
For everything I had to work, from clothing to transportation, and all he had to do was hold out his hand to mommy and daddy. He had the nice car, nice clothing, cash in hand and not a worry in the world. I was the envious one then.
But in the present I was vindicated. I was the one who was taking my business winnings and going to Manhattan to start a new chapter in my already successful life with my new family. And I can see now that I was throwing that in his face.
So when the offer was presented to him that he could help himself by helping my business partners, I had already made that decision for him. Fifty, maybe seventy-five thousand, for putting a bullet through my arrogance probably seemed like a good deed from where he was standing.
And when things didn’t go as planned, and an innocent man was dead by his own hand, what was one more betrayal to make that go away, too?
Whenever I see children play, I find myself wondering how many are having to live behind the masks of their own protective lies. Surely I am not alone to have experienced what I have experienced.
Then I wonder how many of them will be defined, defeated, or, become determined, above all else, to persevere because of said experience. I am hoping there is some larger truth about suffering here, or at least some understanding of it that is somehow transferable. Because everyday when my feet touch the cold concrete floor of my reality I’m tempted to accept and believe that life is catastrophe.
Better never born than born into this sinkhole of broken hearts and shattered dreams. But I always stop myself before traversing too far down the road of self-pity. I remind myself that I once had a smile, a genuine smile, which is evidence of happiness, too. Life is not all bad. I was betrayed. It happened before and I overcame that. And I’ll overcome this, too.
Is this the truth? or, is it the lie that I would rather not confront? Time will tell.
If I’m not smiling it’s because I’m still in the process of falling to the floor from the blow that knocked me over 17 years ago. Eloy’s betrayal, and the tragedy it has evoked, hasn’t yet killed me, it just knocked me over.
I’m aware. And as crazy as it may sound, the idea of thanking someone who has betrayed me to such a brazen extent, well, the truth is, I wince to think who I would be were it not for what I have endured so as to become the man that I am. Someone once told me that we belong to that which we love, and I am yet to live an instance where that has not proven to be true.
Petrichor. Marmelade. Frisbee in the park. Intimacy. The Net. Tenochtitlan. Bakeries before dawn. Sushi.
The emotions I have struggled with for the last 17 years are not so different from those of my childhood: fear, anger, frustration. But now, unlike the buffet of emotions of years long gone, I feel something stronger than all the rest. Empathy.
Eloy, my supposed friend, was without a doubt in a desperate situation and though I could have helped him, I chose not to. So let us not overlook the consequences of that choice, too.
There are no victims here, just actors in the dramas that we ourselves create. And if my smile alludes me still, it’s probably because I’m still pissed-off.
For all that he took from me, all the infinite possibilities of achievements that I could have accomplished with my talents and work ethic, nothing that he took from me was transferable.
He took what I had knowing perfectly well that none of my potential or success would in any way become his. He was simply annoyed, jealous, depressed, and wanted to make damn sure that I didn’t have it. In a sense he contributed to a situation where he would never have to feel inferior to me again.
For the rest of his life he would forever be able to say, well, at least I’m not doing life plus 25 in prison. Which just might be what he says to himself every night just before he drinks himself into oblivion.
I lost my smile because for the briefest of moments I allowed myself to believe that the catastrophe I have lived is the totality of my life, which is not the case. The truth is, I’m just getting started.
The tide has moved in and eventually it will move out. And one day I will run my fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out, and make it into the first tower of my new castle--better and more extravagant than ever before. I’m here to tell you that whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful and make it grand, make it with love and empathy, and, if you can, help others with theirs.
Look out for the next post coming soon from MYLIFEplus25.