LOST BABY!

When I was 1, my father lost me in a high rise apartment building by leaving me in the elevator.

KIDNAP ATTEMPT - PART DEUX

    The next day was back to business as usual, and I went to school with the events of the previous night half forgotten.   I came home that afternoon through the usual entrance, our back door that leads directly into the kitchen.   This was the door we used the most, since everything we did was on or near Lincoln Road, and this entrance was the closest one to it.

    I immediately noticed something was wrong, there were patches of dark smudges all over the door and kitchen walls.   I could see fingerprints all in those smudges.  It looked like dirt or ash, but this much dirt wouldn’t have built up after just one school day.

    My mom came into the kitchen; her neck was swollen, scratched and bruised all the way around. She looked like she had been crying. She asked me to close the door, which we usually just left open all day for fresh air.  Then she told me what happened.

    She was doing the dishes earlier that day, with her back to the opened door.   This door was a strong solid wooden door with a window made of fogged glass panels that opened and closed just like a venetian blind.  On the inside of the door a metal grate covered the window to keep someone from easily breaking in by smashing those glass panels. This grate had been damaged by a prior tenant and had a fist-sized hole with spokes that protruded outward.  We often used this hole to grab the door to pull it shut since the doorknob was broken.

    With her wet hands still in the sink, my mom sensed something was up, the way you do when you feel someone is watching you.   She turned and peeked out the door and down the alley, with her back still to the door.   A short, mustached Latino man, wearing blue cut-off shorts and a white t-shirt was slowly making his way up the alley towards our door.   It was clear he was trying to be sneaky, almost cartoonishly tip-toeing.   They locked eyes and my mom slowly began to reach for the jagged grate with a soapy hand.   She did this slowly, I assume, to not insult this stranger, in case he was not there to do her harm.   This action caused him to change pace and he began rushing towards the door. She had just grabbed the busted grate and began pulling when he caught up.   She wasn't able to close the door in time.

    Instead he swung it open so hard, it cut her fingers.   They began to fight, and he soon had a tight grip around her neck with both hands.   This went on for some time and my mom fought to cry out for help.   The choked cries happened to wake my father who was asleep in the bedroom nearby.

    My 60 year old father was practically blind without his coke-bottle glasses and spent all of his time at home wearing nothing but his European-cut bikini briefs.   So he wakes up, doesn’t bother to put on his glasses and slowly walks into the living room.  His wife’s attempted murder is playing out right in front of him, but he can't see a thing.   Annoyed and practically naked he grumbles at my mother, “What is it?"

    The would-be kidnapper slash murderer, startled by this half naked, clueless, blind old man, releases my mother's neck and runs off through the same door.

    Fast forward a bit and I arrive just after the police has fingerprinted the place and left. It wasn’t until she described this person down to the exact clothes he wore the night before that we realized I already knew him and he must have watched us walk home.

    The police never notified us of his capture, and for a while I did most of my playing indoors.  The back door was never left open again.

KIDNAP ATTEMPT - PART 1

   Miami Beach was my home until I was nine.   I lived a couple of blocks from Lincoln Road, which is more than just a road; it’s a wide touristy street with lots of shops and restaurants.   No vehicles are allowed on it other than shuttles for pedestrians.   Down the middle of this wide road were decorative seating areas.   There was one seating area in particular where my mom would always sit at after our 2 block walk and socialize with other local moms while their kids played in the surrounding area.

    One evening out, I chose to play by myself climbing a nearby palm tree. I climbed up and down for quite some time, having little adventures along the curve of the tree.   After a while, I heard a man’s voice from a few feet behind me.   While my mom was lost in conversation about 35 feet in one direction, this little man was asking me for help in finding a lost item in the other.   He was a short, tanned, mustached Latino, likely in his 30’s, wearing a white t-shirt and blue cut-off shorts.  He explained to me that he'd lost a ring somewhere around this palm tree.   He asked me to help him search for it and promised me five whole dollars if I found it.   I started to look around from my perch, but he said it was too small to see from all the way up there.

    He convinced me to get down as he gave me a further description.   Now the ring was gold and then it had a diamond, and then a few minutes later it was most likely laying a little farther from the palm tree. I continued to follow him, farther behind the tropical foliage where I'd be camouflaged from my mother’s view.   I walked about 70 feet to a nearby corner and 70 feet farther from my mom.

   What happens next is the luckiest moment of my life. I stood at one corner of a building, in the last few feet where my mom could still see me.   The mustached man who'd convinced me to walk so far away from where I should have stayed was just around that corner and out of view.   As he talked and waved for me to follow, I heard my mom’s alarmed voice.

   “Susana!!” she yelled.   She had to yell so I could hear her from so far away.   I pleaded back for her to wait while I finished what I was doing.   She yelled back again, “Susana, what are you doing!!”

    As loudly as I could, I explained to her that I was about to earn $5. She stood up! “Come back here!” She got even louder as she stormed towards me.  I looked back towards the man, about to beg him to wait for me but he was already gone.   I walked towards my mom, stomping my feet, pouting, and complaining that she had ruined my chance to make some good money.

    As she got more of the details from me, I could see her heart sink realizing what almost happened. Three more steps and I would never have been seen again, and even worse could have been subject to horrific things.   She immediately walked home as fast as she could holding my hand so tight, yelling at me about how stupid I had been to follow a stranger.

    The short walk home from that corner was basically a walk to the end of a parking lot on our block and a left turn down the pathway leading to every tenants' back door.   It was also a clear view to just exactly where we lived, should any would-be kidnappers be watching...

To Be Continued….

MY HATRED OF CARROTS

    Like many children, I was a very picky eater and did not like to try new things.  My mom fooled me into eating carrots by telling me they contributed to teeth and ear growth, much like calcium makes your bones strong.  She explained that the reason rabbits look the way they do was because of their high carrot diet.

    This was all I needed to hear! I started eating carrots every night after school.  How great would it be to transform into a rabbit?  I couldn’t wait!  I even bragged about it to my friends at school. "So guess what, losers? I'm gonna be turning into a rabbit pretty soon!" They would be so jealous when my ears came in! Sure, I told them my method, so they could follow me down this Kafkaesque hole if they wanted, but I had a head start, and I was committed!  As time went on, I swear I even began to notice a change in the tips of my ears. Were they were really getting pointier?

    No. No they weren't.  After a few months of not at all transforming into a bunny, I figured out I had been tricked.  To spite my mother for her evil lies, I haven’t eaten carrots since that senior year of college.

My Dream Come True

A BABY BROTHER

      My baby brother was born just 3 months after my 5th birthday. As my mom was heading in to the hospital to give birth, I was developing a nice case of the chicken pox. I stayed home in quarantine, slathered in calamine lotion, anxiously awaiting little Albert’s arrival.
      
     My mother and father arrived home and placed this tiny baby on the edge of the bed and warned me to stay away from him. But I couldn’t help it. I had been the only kid in the house for five years and I finally had someone else. I swooped in within seconds of being told not to and laid myself on him, hugging him and inadvertently rubbing all my sores all over his exposed baby skin. My mom screamed, but it was too late. Within days, this cute new baby was covered head to toe in an ugly rash.


      As time went on, his bumps healed. He could thank me later for getting chicken pox out of the way. I was still happy to have a playmate, even though he didn’t do much, but every now and then I was jealous of all the attention he was getting. I started sleeping under his crib, playing with his toys and one day, while my parents were out, I tried on one of his diapers. I had been potty trained for awhile, so I forgot what it was like to just go #1 or #2 right in my pants. I had to know. Why not? Soon enough I had a dirty diaper to dispose of and fast, since my parents had just walked in the door! 

       I stuffed it under my parents' bed and put the whole thing behind me. Days later, like a murdered corpse buried in your backyard, it really started to stink. My parents occasionally mentioned the terrible smell and kept checking my brother’s diaper. I knew exactly what it was and I didn’t dare bring attention to it by attempting to get rid of it. The smell got worse and worse and my mom looked harder until finally, she found the packed diaper under the bed. It was obvious by the size of the deposit that it wasn’t from a newborn.
 
      She stood there, diaper in hand, staring daggers into me, while I looked away hoping she wouldn’t suspect.

WHY I HATE X-MAS

      There are so many reasons to love the holidays: time off from work and school, seeing your family, good food, and when all else fails, of course, presents! When you’re a young kid, your parents usually work hard to make sure X-mas is special and even minimal effort still makes it a happy time.

      It was X-mas eve 1988. I was eight years old and still believed in Santa. I kept watching the clock, counting down the hours until his visit. In fact, I had butterflies in my stomach every time I heard what sounded like hooves clattering on our roof, thinking Santa may be here early. Only thing is that we lived on the 1st floor of a two floor apartment building. So this didn’t make sense unless Santa’s reindeer broke in to the upstairs apartment. I was also aware that as excited as I was, I needed to be asleep if Santa was to feel safe delivering my presents without being detected. I did not want to get in the way of that. Before hitting the hay, I put out some milk and cookies.

      Next morning I jumped out of bed and ran over to meet my parents in the living room, bursting with excitement! While walking across the room, I nonchalantly glanced towards the X-mas tree to see how big the presents I’d be opening were. I didn’t immediately notice anything, so my next thought was to stop and make sure Santa liked his milk and cookies. 

      The glass was full and the milk was becoming gelatinous. The cookies were whole. I was confused, but maybe he had so much milk and so many cookies at the other houses he visited that he was stuffed by the time he got to us? It could happen.

      I waited for my parents’ OK to start looking for my presents near our tiny plastic tree. Instead my father walked over to it, and grabbed the presents off our fake fireplace mantle. He handed them to me since I was too short to see the tiny presents that high up. They were pretty small. One was the size of a business card, and the other was the size of my hand. I still had hope. As they say, good things come in small packages.

      I first unwrapped the flat package. I immediately recognized it from the front of my cereal box a few weeks back. It was the free prize inside. Even worse, it wasn’t the usual toy based on some new exciting kids movie or after school cartoon. It was a piece of cardboard with a printed image of 15 leprechauns. The cardboard could be cut into 3 pieces. Basically it was an optical illusion. When you switched 2 pieces around the image then became 14 leprechauns. Voilà! This would be hours of fun!

 

      Even though I believed in Santa, I had heard a rumor that some parents supplement Santa’s presents with some of their own. This free, cardboard present was obviously from my father, one of the cheapest people to ever live. Good thing I saved the best for last. Santa’s gift would make up for this, tenfold, because I was very good as usual this year. Dean’s list and perfect attendance were only the tip of the iceberg.

      I opened the slightly larger gift slowly, building up the tension. It didn’t take long to see it was a yo-yo. I put forth as much fake excitement as I could muster. I knew the Santa I had built up in my head couldn’t be real, because he would never have been so careless. I had seen the bad kids on TV whose houses got skipped over and I knew I wasn't like them. 

      The rest of the day was spent demonstrating the optical illusion to myself over and over, learning to ‘walk the dog’, and accepting that X-mas was nothing but a big joke. On a good note, I later became a local yo-yo wunderkind, mastering the Sleeper, the Forward Pass, Walk the Dog, Around the World and more. You can still find me touring the east coast as Susana the Amazing Yo-Yo Girl. OK that last part is not true.

The year I stopped believing.

NEW SHOES

      Everything I owned, besides underwear, socks and school supplies, were used garage sale items. Shoes, clothes, toys, furniture – all used. And wearing other people’s shoes sucks! Now, on the rare occasion that I did get something new, or even a really awesome used item, I wanted to enjoy it to its fullest during every waking moment. And when I had to go to sleep, I would continue my enjoyment by wearing the new item or putting it next to my pillow so it can be the last thing I see as I doze off and the first thing I see when I wake. This may seem obsessive, but you tend to really, really appreciate the rare new things you get when you're used to getting nothing.  

      Just before the start of my 6th grade school year, my mother granted me the chance to pick out a new pair of shoes. 6th grade meant starting a whole new school where the middle school shared its location with the high school. It was very important to make a good first impression since I would be at this school for the next 6 years. With a cool new pair of shoes, the other kids may be able to overlook all my outdated clothes, bad teeth and wild hair.   

     My mother took me to the nearest discount shoe store and narrowed down the selection to fit into her price range. Pickings were slim, and out of the few acceptable last season's sneakers, I chose some white low-top Reebok Freestyle classics. These shoes were a compromise. They may have at one point been popular as high-tops, but in the low-top form, they were straight-up lunch lady shoes. Oh, but they were new and that was most important! I was going to be the first person to wear these and break them in.

       We brought them home and I slipped them on and wore them all over the house, but not outside, keeping the soles clean in anticipation of my 1st day of school. At bedtime they stayed right on my feet and under the sheets. Let me tell you, wearing shoes to bed is very uncomfortable and you tend to wake up a few times from the pain. It did not deter me. 

       First day of school arrives and I’m up early, quickly showered and immediately back in my new shoes. My mom walks me to the bus stop about half a mile away and I’m noticing a little tightness around the tips of my toes and there’s even a bulge developing at my big toes. Being unfamiliar with new shoes, I assume all this will work itself out when I break them in. Imagine my surprise when, by lunch period, a gaping hole has already appeared on the front of my right shoe, exposing my sad little green sock-covered toe. Embarrassed, I had to finish out my first day trying to keep my right foot out of sight, which is hard to do when you need both feet for walking.
 

      All the excitement and promise that these new shoes were supposed to bring -- torn up like cheap leather by a big toe. By the second day of school I was back to wearing someone else’s old throw-away shoes. But, at least they weren't "open-toed".

OPEN-TOED

      My mother was always good with crafts and so, in my early years, she made several of my outfits. This came in handy in our low-income household. She would work from time to time, but it was often limited due to her inability to speak English. My father was a blue-collar worker who tended to get laid off a lot. Apparently, he didn’t really deal well with authority or being told he was wrong.

      About a year after my birth, like most children, I had become an avid walker. But my new-found mobility started to become hindered by my seemingly ever-tightening pair of shoes. 

      Many parents, at this point, would have gone out and purchased their only child a new (or even used) pair of size-appropriate sneaks. Not my parents. Instead, my mother craftily cut out the entire front of each of my red, canvass lace-ups, leaving me with some fashionable open-toed shoes and my mother with more time to shop for the next pair.

D.T.S. - DOG TURD SANDWICH

      There was a period of time where my lunch was being stolen out of my locker every day. It was 7th grade, and I had been assigned a locker that came with a pre-installed lock. That means every year a new student would be assigned to the locker and get the same combination handed out to them. So there could have been up to 5 other students in school who had used that locker in the years before me, and knew the combination. And thats how it began. Every morning i would put my bagged lunch into my locker, and every lunch period i would rush back, mouth watering. I’d open my locker and find only my books. No lunch.

      I was starving. You would think after a week I would just not put my lunch in there and keep it with me all day. But I was slow and didn’t pick up or react to the pattern. I thought maybe I was not closing my locker all the way and I would be really diligent aftwards to make sure it clicked and couldn’t be pulled open.

      It continued to happen and I grew fed up. Tired of having my privacy violated and being hungry, I went home and told my mom what was happening. We quickly devised a plan. My mom had made spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner that day. The leftover sauce looked very much like sloppy joe meat. One very special sloppy joe coming up! We added all kinds of random ingredients that would make the culprit regret it instantly: Chili powder, pepper, hot sauce. We made a second, tastier lunch for myself that I would keep out of the locker that day. The first sandwich would taste terrible, but was that enough?

      And then it came to me: ultimate revenge. I ran outside and looked around in the dark for the first dog turd I could find. Dogs were common in our set of townhouse apartment buildings, their owners just letting them 'go' right in the backyard where the kids played. You just learned to avoid stepping on them while you played tag or hide and seek. I brought the old dried turd back to the kitchen and my mom helped me add the finishing touch. She buried it completely in the sauce and topped it off with a slice of cheddar cheese, for added realism. Finally, the bun completed this shit masterpiece.

      We then lovingly wrapped the sandwich, and slid it into a ziplock bag with a handful of chips to really sell it. I went to sleep that night really satisfied with myself and my plans to take back control.

      Next morning, I strode into school with a smile on my face, and a dog turd sandwich in my backpack. I stuffed it in my locker like everything was normal. I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. How many bites will they swallow before they find the meaty turd floating around in their mouth? Will they do something to let me know they resented my actions? Yes, they will probably kick my ass. Perhaps this wasn't a good idea?
    
      Too late, I was ready!

      I went to my locker at lunch time and opened the door. There sat the untouched bag. I knew right away they hadn’t even tried it because the wrapping was completely intact. Unmoved and unopened, the bag was a sign that the thief chose that day to stop stealing. It was the day they grew a conscience or just maybe decided my lunches weren’t tasty enough. 

      After coming up with such a great plan, I would not ever get my revenge. And even worse, I had to carry this dog turd sandwich with me from my locker to dispose of it. I ended up leaving it there for days hoping they would eventually go for it. They never did. After it started to smell, I gave up and threw it out.

Artist's rendering.  Not the actual sandwich.