Payback Pt. 1: A Narrative

I loved my mother. I needed to protect her from anything and everything—to show her the love and appreciation that she was missing.

People don’t see how disrespectful that is. As if she can’t get on without you. Like she didn’t survive without you—get over yourself. Women are stronger than men, they are completely capable of self-sufficiency—the ones who aren’t, never got the right chance to be.

We grew up poor, so naturally I appreciated what others might see as small things. Things that people might usually take for granted. At 11-years-old, my favorite toy was a Fisher-Price tape recorder that I got for Christmas. I didn’t have any replacement tapes, so I just recorded over old recordings on the same tape.

All of the recordings were pretty much the same.

The average workday is 9AM-5PM, sometimes overtime, sometimes a little later, or a little earlier.

My father left the house everyday before 6 AM. My baby sister had to be at day care at about 8, and I had to be at school before 8:45, so did my brother, and it seemed like my sister went to high school at whatever time she wanted. Most of the time, we were all home by 5 PM. 7PM on late days.

My father would arrive at 12AM the earliest, and there were times where he wouldn’t twist his keys in the door until 3 AM.

You could always tell when Fernando was about to stumble through that door—sort of like a sixth sense. The jingle of the keys was as unique as a fingerprint. But there wasn’t anything physically unique with the keys—we just knew that it was him. On the really late nights, he’d usually drop his keys on the hallway floor before inserting one to unlock the bottom lock.

Sometimes, we’d hear him burp or hum or sing his favorite tunes from the ‘70s—as if everything was all good, as if he was a happy drunk…

Fernando was from a happy drinker. He could have had the best night out with the boys, or the strippers or hookers—whoever he was with, but as soon as he walked through the brick-red door of 311 W17th St., he’d flip like a light switch—just like that. Angry, upset, raging—on fire…and for what? At the time, I couldn’t understand why he was so upset, and even if I did, that is no justification for what he did to our lives.

I can’t exactly recall the first night he came home late, but I remember the countless nights that we couldn’t sleep, or were woken up by his shit. Three in the morning…coming home angry and taking it out on my mother—constant verbal abuse. Non-stop. He would violently scream at her, at 3 AM about a hot plate of food would have been prepared for him had he been home at the right time.

The selfish motherfucker couldn’t quite grasp what he was doing wrong—what he was doing to us. All he saw, all he understood is what she didn’t do. He was impossible to satisfy, and I knew it was only a matter of time before his verbal abuse turned physical.

I knew I couldn’t physically beat him up the way I wanted to, so I took…alternate routes. To make matters worse, he usually had sober days on the weekend, in which he would try to talk to us, or make us breakfast and lunch—as if all was forgotten—or never happened. He couldn’t understand that it just made us despise him more.

My blood boiled because of this sorry excuse of a man who would smile in our faces during the weekends, but disappear during the weekdays. Just coming home to sleep, scream, and occasionally beat us whenever we decided to stand up to him.

I was physically helpless against him, but I knew I could do other things that would hurt him. At 11, my older brother was in high school, my sister just started college, and my younger sister was occupied by after school programs. Almost every weekday, I was home alone for a couple of hours, at least, and I rarely watched TV. It gave me ample time and opportunity to snoop around the house.

I found many things, sensitive documents, condoms, and stashes of cash. I remember the first time I found anything, I was in his room. In his top drawer was a steel-gray safe box. It was hard to get into without taking out the socks, underwear, army knife, and a few condoms. The first time, with sweaty palms, it was enough to just discover that I found something secret—something difficultly placed in the drawer for a reason—I fled the room.

It wasn’t enough.

The very next day—Tuesday, I went back. This time, I didn’t hesitate. I went right for the safe box, moved everything out of the way and pulled it out—it was locked. I didn’t want to turn back, and I know the key had to be in here somewhere so I went through the rest of his drawers and his closet. I also went through his shoe boxes—one was hard to reach for me. I was a short preteen—I struggled to reach the top box, I stood on the ill-balanced tip of my toes.

I had to dodge an avalanche of boxes—one of which had a bunch of 20-dollar bills in them, at least 50 of them. I picked them up as fast and orderly as possible, and took a “finder’s fee” of about $60. I created a monster.

I didn’t tell anyone—not about the safe or the shoebox filled with enough money to buy 100 Nikes. Not a soul, not my brothers or sisters, not my closest friends. Probably because I planned to take more…and I did.

But the money wasn't the only item that I came across. I finally found the key to that safe box, he must have left it in one of his pants pockets in the laundry basket. He kept that key and a few others separate from the keys that he carried around with him daily, I guess. The silver key for the silver box, I found a silver .22 caliber pistol, and a silver Smith & Wesson army knife.

This was my form of reparations.