We are the venacular of our motivations.

We are the venacular of our parents.

We are the uncontrolled desires propelled by a past-that-could-of-been, where drives are rekindled and foddered like dirt in the moment we are conceived.

We are the attics of our generation and those before us where treasures remain and spirits grow cold.

It is with these venaculars we are already ancient beyond our years, even though we have merely begun, peering out of the attic every so often to see what bit of light there is out there in the mundane reality that we call home.

As a youth of my generation, the one so-called, X-generation or Nintendo generation as it had been snidely labeled, we were the ones that were going nowhere; our parents always seeming to be at the forefront as lobbyists who held their flags high on that quintessential cry of: Education, success,
marriage, then death. Without it, we were nothing; but somehow it made them feel better to chastize and persuade us that our steps were wrong.

The child who still hides in the attic frightens me. He waits in the dark with all the knowledge in the world taking thirty five years to understand life, love, philosophy and God. My parents knew him well and have met him before in another time. When I would be of age, he would tell me a secret to share with the world. So I had to listen closely.

My parents had a hard time getting along. They always seemed to be bickering, their affairs always acrimonious; their eyes hollowed by dark shaded colors, their voices bordering contempt.

If they weren't smashing a banana in my face, they were yelling, if my father wasn't smacking me for using the wrong hand to pick up a fork, he was being sarcastic to my mother. My father was brutal. Long after my mother had left him he was an uncontrollable lion living in the Savannah trying to hold onto his pride, his fellowship until another came and took his place. I had wished that day would of been sooner.

Going through school in New York City, especially public schools, were like zoo's in controlled productions. You had to know your place quite quickly or you were targeted. In the cafeteria, patrolled by the lunch monitors, you had the "hot lunch" side or the "cold lunch" side divided by a huge
plastic curtain. The voices of the lunch monitors, echoed throughout the cafeteria as they seemed to shout over their portable microphones attached to a small box. The windows looked like they were attached to the ceilings and beyond them the sunlight out into the playground, surrounded by a large fence with four smaller courts; white paint outlining the asphalt court for basketball or even dodgeball if that is what you wanted to play. There were even large circles drawn out where classes could gather to play a couple rounds of "duck, duck goose" or "red rover".

During the school semester, my father had found out that I had hard time with simple arithmetic, starting as early as the second and third grade. I could not differentiate symbols and their meanings and I had to really struggle to understand. Though I could spell the most difficult words for a second grade student and had an adepth knowledge of the english language, the school informed my father, stating that I should be placed in an after hours class, that was for people like me; they called it the "resource room". So everyday after school, right around three as kids were running home, I was politely escorted by Ms. Rorocco and a small band of other invalids down to the basement of the school where we stayed until 4:30pm going over deficiencies where we needed assistance in. To me, it felt humiliating. What made things worse, my father would also asist in his own
way when I got home from school.

He would drill me, like a drill sargeant would with his platoon. "What's 9 + 4"? He would demand. When the answer didn't come soon enough, his gaze on me would go cold. When I couldn't answer or gave the wrong answer, his voice got louder. "What's 5 + 6 ?!"

"ten. Or nine." I would timidly reply.

Smack! My face would go red.

"What's 5 - 6?!!"

"eleven."

"No stupid!!"

The lesson got harder. My father would switch to subtraction to throw me off. He did it intentionally as part of his most famous learning system. "What is 12 - 8? !!!" He screamed.

I babbled and started to count on my fingers, but the number could not come soon enough.

My pain reddened. For the next three hours I sat on that hard wood floor in the barren living room with a math book opened on my lap, fearing to move against my father's wishes.
Around ten PM, I forced myself to move and crawl into bed, not wanting to wake the beast that laid beside me. I felt the urge to yell at my teachers and at the school the next day for causing that situation to happen, but I could not bear to bring myself to doing it. I only kept to myself to do what I could do and just survive.

* * *

Life was hell on a highway.

You could never get far from here or close enough to get there. It was the existential question that sparked nightmares and nonsense. A religious novelty in fact; and most endeared by quotes at sermons by apathetic preachers, pastors and rabbi's that could only convince themselves that
they were not going to hell in a handbasket, --but, their neighbor was.

Over many years, the lessons continued. School continued. Education continued. Lectures of success in life continued. My father continued. That was enough said.

I never got along with the kids in my neighborhood or in the apartment building. Me and the superintendant's son would always fight constantly. This would go on for years until we got older and grew apart from each other and made our own choices as to the directions we would take. In the summer times, we were avid fanatics of Kung-Fu flicks on Saturday. Our favorites were Sonny Chiba, Bruce Lee or the Shaw Brothers movies, like, "The Kid with The Golden Arm," "The Five Deadly Venoms," "Master Killer," "Super Ninjas", etc.

After the film was over we would get psyched and go outside around the neighborhood pretending we were rival ninja clans or rebels that were going to Shaolin Temple to learn Kung-Fu through rigorous and unusual training. It got to a point we would raid his mother's Jersey fabrics and make Ninja jump suits and stalk neighbors in the nighttime or going on missions that only the clan would know. Since Eric's father was the super of the building we had access to the toolshed where we would let our imagination flourish and ride with the wind. We made wooden swords, shurikens, tiger claws ( steel hand grips that ninjas would climb walls with,) kama knives, with the elongated steel chains that you could throw and strangle a person with; we used to find all the ninja weaponary fascinating and our minds conjured up all sorts of inventions that day.

Between the age of seven til sixteen, Eric and I had, probably more fights, then all of the after school fights combined, where most kids had tended to play chicken shit and run home or head to the principal's office while waiting out their adversaries. NOrmally we would always start out in
pretend fights, where he would play some bad guy character, and I, would be the opposing side; good vs. evil; unless it was Bruce Lee or Elvis Presley he would always pick a rogue character. What started out as fun, always ended up in a grueling, no-hold barred fist match between us. As a kid I
had never really liked to fight, nor did I ever intend to like fighting, but the issue was always pressed like some sort of cosmic entity guiding my intentions and my principles in life. As the fights progressed, they became dirtier and more insinuating; Sometimes the fights would continue as long
as we could stand it. I found Eric, over several years getting to know him to be pompous, lame and stupid like his father and brothers who were prejudiced against black people or asians. If you were not Puerto Rican you were not one of them. I found this all too common with many of people living in Queens but my father was dense to the fact as he continued his on going relationship with the superintendant over several more years where they would be become drinking buddies, shit-kickers at the OK Corrall.

Days when I would go home with a black eye. My father would yell at me for being a "wimp", a "pansy", "a girl who couldn't fight their way out of a paper dress," as he so at the time said.

My father had a drinking problem as well as a social problem, where most psychiatrists today would of labeled him as an overly agressive personality, with little or no emotional intelligence to be counted. Though my father worked hard and played hard and was as smart as they come, he couldn't hold a simple social interaction, unless it was to be belittling,
or accusative. In his early thirties, he started appreciating country music more and more and felt that unique bond with it over his nostalgic records of Bread, Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Elton JOhn, Jim Croce, Eddie Rabbit, or Neil Diamond. Soon my father was listening to Johhny Cash, Waylon
Jennings, Tammy Wynette, George JOnes, Larry Gatlin, Alabama, Brenda Lee, Anne Murray or good ole Willie Nelson. And the list grew from there.

In the Summer of 1981 we had moved from our old ratty apartment to another apartment down the hall which was supposed to be bigger and better. The furniture came from the lady that was moving at the time. My father decided to buy the stuff from her for a modest price. The carpet was a heavy orange as well as the couch, which turned into a bed; the frame solid steel and creaking as you pulled the bed out. There was two chandeliers; one hanging in the hallway and one over the kitchen table which was made of porcelain and brass. The kitchen was white, yellow and brown. The floor was tiled in the same brownish color. The overhead cupboard were made out of simple wood and there was nothing really special about them you would remember except the dullness of the entire outfit. We moved our kitchen table, and chairs to the new apartment and sat it down right underneath the floral like
chandelier.

It was definitely an improvement to the old conditions and I
had to reflect on the time that things might of been improving for my father at work who had recently at the time been promoted to a maintenance supervisor for the post office. So that probably meant more money and more flexibility for the time he had put in with the job, which was already over seven years easily.

Over a few weeks my father had acquired a queen sized bed with an unfinished wood platform with drawers underneath, a vanity desk with mirror, a table where I could do homework at, a 5 shelf-bookcase and some other amenities to brighten up the complex a bit against the overbearing glass windows which were flush with the ceiling and the outside fire-escape
The unsightly air-conditioner that hung in the window was a sore to the living room, but during hot Summer days it was a welcoming attribute that was relished over and over again. On weekends my father would sometimes take me out to the movies, and by that time, I was into horror movies and loved them with a passion. My father even bought me comic books like "Scary tales", "The Unexpected", "The witching Hour", or "Ghosts". I devoured every one of them in minutes filling my thoughts with dread and mayhem trying to fill the cracks of catharsis that hid quietly beneath me.

At a young age I had a talent for drawing; mostly superheroes and cartoon characters. My father would watch me sometimes wondering if I would ever get better. If I did not live up to his expectations then it did not mean a thing. I remember him telling my mother over the phone, how stupid I was, or how immature I was, how I could not amount to nothing, and that I had no talent; just drawing stupid pictures, he would spasmatically say to my mother who was just as gullible and stupid as the rest. When he got done with calling my mother a "bitch", and making her feel little he would hand the phone to me so she could mimic my father; screaming over the phone just as brashly as he did. There was no rhyme or reason to the way this tool was used on me, but I hated it, and I hated everything about my parents then.

As I grew older, my father would hit the bottle heavily. The silence looming in the shadows with a demon in a bottle.