My body never fully got a grasp on the blooming process, as evidenced by the fact that at age twenty-nine, I am still waiting for my boobs to kick in. At age thirteen, on the first day of eighth grade, I got my inaugural period. Because my mother believed if she withheld information about the maturing process, it would actually freeze her children in time, I was clueless as to what was happening to my body. I had read about menstrual cycles in health class but couldn’t be sure what was happening to me was the same thing. I knew some amount of some kind of blood would fall out of somewhere when my hips were wide enough, but the details were fuzzy.
Maybe something had torn in my intestines and I was bleeding out. Perhaps I had been shot in the crotch on the way to school and hadn’t noticed. It was a particularly rough part of town filled with very short hoodlums.
Our school nurse laughed at my concerns and gave me a Suzuki Katana made of cotton to casually sit on and waddle with for the rest of the day. When I got home, I hid from my mom. Television makes this out to be a warm and fuzzy moment, but we were far from a TV family, unless you count the family on Breaking Bad. After an hour of pleading my case, I convinced Erica to share the news of my newfound womanhood with my mother. Naturally, she found the timing incredibly odd.
If I started bleeding on my first day of school, that must’ve meant I met a boy in eighth grade, had sex at some point between history class and lunch, and the blood was actually from tearing my hymen. This was the actual thought process of a real-life human person. I was interrogated for hours, until she eventually retired for bed. That night, as my eyes grew heavy, I silently thanked the stars the situation hadn’t ended any worse.
At 3 a.m., I snapped awake after feeling a presence standing over me. I tried to make sense of the intruder in my bedroom. My sister and I shared a full-sized bed, but she remained unbothered and deeply asleep. As the fog lifted, I realized the figure was my mother. How long had she been there? What was she going to do to me? I looked over at Erica, peacefully asleep, and considered kicking her awake.
“Come with me,” my mother whispered as she grabbed ahold of my wrist. Her grip was painfully tight as she shuffled me through the kitchen to the railroad apartment’s only bathroom. Both our bodies squeezed into the small room, and I stared at her, confused and not fully sure I wasn’t dreaming.
“Pull your pants down.” She left no room to argue. But I tried.
“What are you doing? I’m tired, please let me go back to bed,” I pleaded.
“You can go back to bed after you pull your pants down.” This wasn’t my mother speaking. Yes, she was often intimidating and her actions were questionable, but there was something missing in her eyes. Part of me wondered if she was somehow sleepwalking or just tripping balls. But a bigger part of me truly believed she was possessed. She held firmly to my wrist, jerking me closer to her face as she spoke.
“If you really have your period, I’ll be able to tell by the blood. Pull your pants down, now.”
In that moment I could feel myself begin to melt away.
It felt as if I was watching AJ as she loosened the drawstring to her Pokémon pajama pants, dropped them alongside her underwear to her knees, and exposed the mess between her legs. I could see the tears descend down her pudgy cheeks, but her face didn’t move. They weren’t tears of sadness or fear, but of quiet resignation. My mother seemed satisfied.
“Okay, then. Clean yourself up and go back to bed.” She left the room, content with her findings, and I began to dry my eyes.
I tiptoed into my room and tried to get beneath the covers as quietly as possible. Watching Erica adorably snore, I cursed at her for not waking up. Then I inched my way toward her sleeping body, wrapped my arm around her back, and lay awake until the morning, my mind unable to shut off.
I knew that was not my mother who made me do those things. I wondered, could she also melt away from herself? Or had something vile, after years of closing in on her, finally gained complete control? If it could take over my mother, could it one day swallow me whole as well?
—
There’s a recurring dream I have, where I am standing over my mother as she sleeps. She looks so peaceful and innocent, unsullied by the wickedness of her illness. After watching her for a moment, I notice it in the corner of the room. The darkness, preparing to engulf her. I know there’s nothing I can do. It is waiting. It is too late. But it lets me say good-bye. I lean over and gently kiss her warm forehead. I hover there, close enough to feel her breath on my face. I look at this beautiful woman and whisper, “I love you, Ma. I’m so sorry.”
As I got older Ma’s transformation into a Lifetime channel movie villain continued. It was as if the more I learned about the real world, the more I became a part of it, the more she feared losing her grip on me. She had to find a way to hold on tighter.
Watching me like a hawk, Ma saw every move I made as a cause for interrogation. Every pimple was proof I was dirty. Every pound gained was a painful reminder of how pretty and skinny I used to be. Every male classmate who looked in my direction was the secret father of my nonexistent baby. It set my nerves on edge. I never knew whom I was going to get when I walked through the door. Would I get a smile from the vibrant woman cooking rice and beans while blasting Marc Anthony on her boom box? Or would I get the pissed-off crone wondering if I was home ten minutes later than usual because I had to give a quick BJ before catching my bus?
Even if Ma was in a good mood, there was no guarantee that wouldn’t change an hour later. There was no way to tell what would set her off. She would spend most of the day locked away in her room, and each time the door creaked open, I would get a painful twinge in my stomach. My body was beginning to expect the worst as well.
I even developed a twitch. Every time I felt a hint of anxiousness creeping in, my neck would jerk my head from side to side and push my chin forward. I had no control over it. Eventually it became as natural as a blink. I didn’t think anyone had really noticed it, but ol’ hawkeyes did.
The second Ma pointed out my odd neck movement, its frequency went off the charts. “Stop moving your head like you have Tourette’s,” Ma would gently chide. The more she would notice, the more it would happen, until one day she had enough.
Making me step into the shower fully clothed, Ma turned the showerhead on as cold as it would go and let me know I could leave once I stopped twitching. Her method may have been suspect, but it was surprisingly effective.
Though I had gotten my twitch mostly in check, I was more uneasy being at home than ever. A slammed door here, a loud drop of a TV remote there—even without words Ma was making the plentiful hair on my arms stand at high alert. One day as I was washing the dishes from dinner, Ma slammed the freezer’s door. I was so jumpy that the sound made me wildly flinch. The two glasses I held in my hands collided, shattering upon impact. I had smashed them together so hard the glass crumbled into hundreds of tiny pieces, covering the entirety of my arms and chest.
I held my breath and froze with my arms outstretched, half because I was hoping Ma hadn’t noticed and half because I was covered in frickin’ shards of glass. I didn’t know what to do. Luckily for me, Ma had indeed noticed and was already on her way, washcloth in hand.
“You can’t even do the dishes right? Why do you have to be so fucking worthless?”
Ma had been harsh in the past. She had scared me and made me cry. She had cracked me across the back or upside the head to keep me in check, and I would have preferred those slaps to those words. She had never been that mean. She had never called me worthless. It cut deeper than the glass jutting out of my palm. A familiar frenzied look entered her eyes, and I feared what would come next.
She moved my arms from the sink to my side. Straightening my elbows and moving my palms out, making pieces of glass fall to the ground like a rain of diamonds. “It’s all over the floor now! You got it all over the floor! I have to clean all of this! On top of finishing the dishes since you can’t seem to handle suc
h a simple job.” As she muttered a stream of curses underneath her breath, she wet the washcloth and began to use it to knock the glass off my shirt and into the pile around my feet.
She moved the towel to my arms, roughly dragging it down the exposed skin.
“You’re hurting me,” I tried to plead, but she was focused on the mission at hand. Pressing the washcloth onto my arms just pushed the tiny pieces of glass into the skin. Moving the cloth dragged the shards down my arms, scratching the whole way.
When she was done, I was torn to ribbons. One piece of glass had been so strongly pushed into my flesh, it remained burrowed under the skin of my wrist three months later.
—
My nervousness at home was perpetual. I had the anxiety level of a Chihuahua taking Adderall during a thunderstorm. I needed to find a way to alleviate it before I shattered like broken glass. Robbie, noticing the bizarre wrath I was incurring, became kinder and more accepting of me than he had ever been before.
He actually invited me to use his new PlayStation. Having saved months of checks from his first job as a cashier, Robbie rewarded himself with the gaming system he had coveted for years. Watching the PlayStation symbol grace the screen of the television was as close to a religious experience as I had ever had. Inviting Erica along for the ride, we all sat on his futon and played Resident Evil: Nemesis for hours on end.
The game’s heroine was Jill Valentine, a petite brunette who could not only wear the hell out of leather, but also managed to wield a grenade launcher while fighting hordes of zombies. This was my kind of chick. Before I knew it we had sunk weeks into the game, beating it over and over again. It felt cathartic to blast zombies away into chunky little pieces. There was something about seeing this strong, stylized female lead holding her own and taking out the bad guys that spoke to me. It was like a comic book I could control and be immersed in.
Next we played Metal Gear Solid, and again I was graced with the presence of badass heroes in the form of gun-toting Solid Snake and Meryl Silverburgh. I loved escaping to this world, a world where I could be a capable powerhouse. I, quite literally, had the control. I had the power. When stress began to take its toll, I would escape to the worlds of Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, Need for Speed, Mega Man, Soul Reaver, and Silent Hill. Screw the real world. I was no longer the fragile victim. Video games made me the hero of my own story.
Robbie even invited me to watch wrestling with him again. While we hopped around from apartment to apartment, I had lost interest in trying to keep up with the show. When I sat down and watched an episode with him, I was taken aback by how it all had evolved. No longer was the only female representation the demure, dainty flower Miss Elizabeth. The women who now graced my screen were muscular and overtly sexualized. They now competed inside of the ring instead of just valeting a male wrestler. They even mixed it up with the guys in intergender matches.
I was floored. I had thought spandex-wearing heroines had only existed within the pages of my comics or pixilated games. But here were real-life, flesh-and-blood ass kickers. Some of the women were jacked and tough as nails. The others were gorgeous blond bombshells. All of them were confident, interesting pieces of the show. I watched as they received brutal beatings and doled them out twice as hard. Robbie and I would sit down twice a week and cheer on our favorites: Eddie Guerrero, Chyna, The Rock, Rey Mysterio, Kane, the Hardy Boyz and Lita, Chris Benoit, and Shane and Stephanie McMahon.
On days as rare and glorious as a unicorn we would hit up the PlayStation for a couple of hours, turn on Monday Night Raw, and then create ourselves in the Create-A-Wrestler mode in the WWF’s PlayStation game, SmackDown. I cherished this time with my brother.
I had been so scared of my surroundings, so unsure of myself. But in trying to help me out and take my mind off things, he inadvertently introduced me to exactly who I wanted to become. I wanted to be as brave as Jill Valentine and Meryl Silverburgh. I wanted to be as memorable as Aerith, as skilled as Lara Croft, as strong as Chun-Li and Kitana.
But I needed it to be real. I needed to experience the power and strength with my own hands in real life. The amazing women in the WWF were the closest to the leading ladies as I could ever get.
“I’m going to be a professional wrestler when I grow up!” I proudly announced to my mother at the age of twelve.
“That’s not a real job, baby,” she muttered, walking right past me.
YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST STABBING
As I was preparing to enter high school, Robbie was preparing to leave it. Mere months away from graduating, he was tired of his tumultuous life at home. Ma’s erratic behavior had begun to rub off on Dad, and he too exhibited signs of change and increased violence. Robbie would always fall into something that would cause him to get smacked around by Dad. I remember crying my eyes out when Dad knocked a bowl of cereal out of Robbie’s hands because he wasn’t making enough eye contact while being yelled at. The tension between the Mendez parents and children was at an all-time high.
Erica had rebelled and discovered boys and parties. She made the mistake of staying out too late one night and Dad threw a mug at her head the second she entered the door. As she cowered, all curled up in a crying mess on the floor, Dad wouldn’t back off. He kept yelling and yelling, throwing out nasty names that made my blood boil. I was scared he would hit her the way he smacked around Robbie.
I had enough. I was all hyped on my newfound hope to one day be my own Wonder Woman, and I figured now was a good place to start.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted with all my mousy might.
“What did you just say to me?” Dad was infuriated.
“If you want to hit someone, hit me!” I stupidly challenged. I had been watching so much wrestling I was sure I had figured out the trick to taking a punch was just gritting your teeth. I could do that if it meant sparing my sister. Plus, I was going to have to start getting physically tougher at some point. I considered this practice.
Dad power-walked up to me like a fuming bull, but I did my best not to budge. I clenched my teeth, thinking this was my moment to prove I could take a beating like the wrestlers did. I met his eyes and didn’t flinch. This pissed him off. He reared back and punched clean through the closet door behind me, sending wooden splinters flying around my head.
“You’re not my daughter anymore!” he yelled, storming off.
I didn’t know what that meant. Did it mean I wasn’t acting like myself? If so, good. I didn’t like meek, Chihuahua AJ anymore. I needed to be stronger. Did it mean I was being disowned? As if I should be punished for not being afraid of a man with a balled-up fist? For standing up for myself and for another person? What kind of message was that to send to your own daughter? That cowering is a correct response?
Not only was I upset about all the possibilities, in a strange way I felt empowered. I was becoming a different person. And I liked who she was.
But Robbie was tired of cowering. He was also tired of moving around like gypsies and needed a way out. Unfortunately, my parents had no money and no plan to send him to college. Having average grades, he couldn’t get the scholarships necessary to put him through school, either. And so, at the age of eighteen, he entered the army’s Airborne Infantry unit.
A year later, 9/11 happened right across the river in New York. And my big brother was sent off to war. He had joined the army with the intention of finding stability, of escaping turmoil at home, and he ended up deep within it. Before he left for basic training, he surprised me with my very own PlayStation 2, the latest gaming system. “I’ll kick your ass on it when I get back,” he promised as I wondered how long it would be until I saw him again.
My rock was gone, and the apartment returned to constant hostile territory. I felt for my dad. He seemed to blame himself for pushing Robbie out the door. I knew Dad’s violence wasn’t representative of who he really was. He is the softie who brings home strays. He’s not a bad person. The level of strain thrust onto our family when my mother b
egan her downward spiral was intense and more than anyone could handle alone. Here he was trying to keep this roof over our heads while his wife descended into a mysterious darkness none of us could explain. I understood how the pressure and stress began to break him too.
Forcing human contact on Robbie after his Army Basic Training graduation.
While I began my first years of high school, Robbie toured Iraq and Afghanistan. In his care packages I would include handwritten letters, decorated with colored marker drawings because I figured he could use a little pop of enthusiasm in his day. I also thought it was essential to include match-by-match rundowns and detailed play-by-plays of every episode of WWF shows. I didn’t want him to miss out on the story lines we had bonded over and were invested in. I probably should’ve figured he had more important things to worry about. “You don’t have to write me seven pages about wrestling,” he let me know on a brief, static-filled phone call home. “Just let me know if you ever grow into your giant head.”
Without my brother around to bring me out of my shell, I withdrew into solitude. I felt weaker somehow. Like not having the only person who understood what I dreamed of becoming was somehow making it less attainable. Naturally, my snark multiplied.
I had found strength in standing up for myself once, and I continued to use my words as protection. “You’ve turned into a real smart-ass,” Ma would say, as if that were supposed to be an insult. But the day I invited my dad to take a swing was the last time either of my parents hit me. It was as if my demonstration of nerve had earned some perverse respect.
Psychologically, my mother would continue to find new and exciting ways to torment me, but it was quietly understood there was no way to scare me physically anymore. In numbing my nerves, I began to believe my own strength.
Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules Page 7
