Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules

by A. J. Mendez Brooks

  The actual process of applying to NYU began to haunt me. I had filled out my entire application—which interestingly enough included my own Metal Gear Solid fanfic—but I couldn’t find the strength to mail it out. For weeks it lay on the top of my desk, mocking me. There was no way I could actually make it into such a prestigious school. I was a poor kid from Jersey. Those spots would be reserved for the rich kids who could actually afford it. I bet they didn’t have to mop floors and chase down bare-ass, crying three-year-olds who forgot their pants in the bathroom, just to pay the deposit.

  Every day I would pass the glowing folder holding the dozens of pages of fastidiously prepared essays and documents. It would call out SEND ME! Put a goddamned stamp on my face! But I would ignore it. On the last possible day to mail it in on time to meet the early admissions deadline, I grabbed the folder on my way out the door. But first, I figured I would comb through, just to make sure my work was up to snuff.

  While I perused the mountain of papers I felt my heart beat a little bit faster. Sweat slowly soaked through the fabric beneath my underarms. My chest tightened. Oh shit, I thought. Was I having an asthma attack? I grabbed my nebulizer and flipped its switch, holding the mask to my face. This was a really embarrassing way to go out—death by paperwork.

  But then I felt tears fill up the inside of the plastic mask. An asthma attack doesn’t usually make me cry like a baby who forgot her pants in the bathroom. Something was wrong and I didn’t know what. Hearing the ruckus, Ma worriedly ran out of her bedroom.

  “What’s happening? Are you having an asthma attack?”

  “I don’t think so. I just can’t stop crying. I don’t know why I’m crying and sweating so much,” I responded, confused out of my face.

  “Fine. You can stay home from school today if it means you’ll stop acting crazy,” she said, then returned to bed.

  Well, at least I had an out from school. But what was happening to my body? I assumed it must be the application. Was my body trying to warn me it was all wrong? The solution was clear. I was going to have to tear it all up. It was garbage. I would just simply redo the entire application in one morning and get it to the post office before the day’s cutoff.

  I don’t know what muse or pixie was watching over me, but somehow I actually rewrote all my questionnaires and essays in one sitting. I mailed the application out on time and even made it to school by fifth period. And I have almost zero memory of how. It’s all just one big blur of sitting too close to a Compaq monitor from Rent-A-Center and different bodily fluids.

  —

  While I was lying in bed wearing Pikachu pajamas and watching Kids WB cartoons on a Saturday morning, my dad handed me a big envelope from the good people at NYU Admissions. I was accepted into early admission for Tisch. “I got in! I got into NYU!” I screamed while jumping on the bed, reminding myself to leave the Pokémon pj’s out of the retelling of this beautiful moment. “That’s nice, baby,” Dad calmly mumbled while patting me on the top of the head like I was about to get a Beggin’ Strip. It was much too early in the morning to expect enthusiasm. But lack of congratulations aside, I had accomplished a goal. I was the only student in my high school to make it into NYU that year. I had absolutely no idea how, but I did it. And nothing could bring me down.

  Two weeks later, something brought me down. I had been saving all my money in the top left drawer of my writing desk. I loved my writing desk. My mother had brought it home from a patient’s house after the person died and would clearly no longer be using it. It had a hutch resting on top that I filled with books, comics, the growing collection of action figures I had purchased for myself, and taped-up drawings of my anime creations. It was the most special place in the world. I would sit at my computer or the kitchen table to do homework, but the writing desk was reserved for entering the dozens of worlds I had created. Its drawers were filled with full notebooks, sketchbooks, a possible ghost, and a wad of cash I had earned writing poems and stories atop it.

  When the time came to send a money order in to NYU to reserve my spot for the next year, I opened my secret hiding spot. And saw nothing. My money had vanished. As a stream of expletives flew out of my mouth, I racked my mind for all the possible scenarios. Maybe our second pit bull, Kagome (whom I named after the school-girl heroine in the anime Inuyasha), had taken it as a chew toy. She seemed like kind of a dick. Maybe I had accidentally placed it into the wrong drawer after gently spooning it the other night. Or maybe, when you hear hoofbeats you think horses, not zebras. I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door like the FBI during a raid.

  “Where is my money? Did you take my money?” I questioned the particle wood door.

  It swung open and Ma appeared. “Yeah, baby, you told me I could.”

  “Wha…but…I said you could have a few bucks if you needed it. Like for eggs or rice.” I was midblubber.

  “Well, I needed it for rent. We all live here, don’t we? Would you rather we live in a motel again?”

  There was no point in fighting. There are some people that no matter how heinous their actions will always find a way to rationalize them. I spent days sulking. Opportunity was so very close to my reach, but it slipped away as quickly as it came. I was back at square boned.

  At school I confided in Mr. Donnelly, a teacher who ran the Peer Mediation group I was a member of. Basically we were the school’s solution to fighting and bullying. If two kids got in some sort of tiff, instead of being yelled at by teachers, we would be brought in to help them communicate safely and find a peaceful solution to their conflict. (I know, I know, the irony.) Mr. Donnelly was sympathetic. He offered to call NYU and ask for an extension of my payment deadline. Maybe I would find a way to scrub enough toilets and mop enough floors to make the five hundred dollars I needed.

  I sat in his office as he called the financial office, my fingers nervously interlocked. Everything seemed to be going well. His kind approach and apparent faith in me sealed the deal, and I heard him thank them for bending the rules just this once. But then the woman on the other end of the line asked if she could speak to me for a moment.

  “Miss Mendez? We would be happy to give you a few more weeks to hold your spot, but can I be honest with you for a moment? I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but this is a very expensive school. If you are having trouble affording five hundred dollars, maybe you should consider…other options.”

  All I wanted to do was hang up the phone and cry. Well, I also wanted to graduate from NYU and then use my diploma as kindling to burn her home to the ground. But mostly, I wanted to cry. Looking back, I understand her point. It made sense. But at the time it was just another adult, someone I was supposed to trust to have my best interests at heart, who didn’t have any interest in supporting me.

  A few days later, as I was fiddling through my locker, probably wondering if “joining the circus” was still a thing, my close friend and fellow peer mediator, Sophie, jumped behind me with a giant smile on her face.

  “Guess what we did?” she practically sang. As I scrolled through my Rolodex of mean responses that would surely wipe her smile off her face, she pushed a giant manila envelope into my arms. “Mr. Donnelly and the Peer Mediation group got together and went to every classroom in school collecting money. A lot of it is in change, but we did it! We raised almost the whole five hundred dollars you needed!”

  My heart was a messy blender filled with appreciation, embarrassment, swallowed pride, and pure, unadulterated joy. Though it physically pained me to have to rely on anyone, let alone strangers, for help, I couldn’t help but feel deeply moved. Kids had done something kinder, braver, and more generous than any grown-up I knew. And there was not one well-off person in that whole school. We were all flat broke, so the fact that they shared what little they had to help one of their own succeed is enough to occasionally restore my faith in humanity.

  This was it. This time, everything was going to be okay. I was so sure of it.

  New York City holds a spec
ial place in my heart. It was the first city I saw live wrestling, at the legendary Madison Square Garden. I was just about to turn seventeen and already steadfastly believed I would be a pro wrestler one day. But actually witnessing the spectacle in person, experiencing the electricity in the sold-out arena, really sealed the deal for me.

  For a few hours I actually got to live within the reality of my dream. That night it was no longer an out-of-reach, distant fantasy. It was tangible. It was real. Getting a taste of it only made me want more. Every time I would picture myself inside a wrestling ring, I imagined performing in front of the raucous New York City crowd I had once been a part of. And since then New York City had represented the pinnacle of success. It was the path to escaping my past. It was the destination at the end of a long, arduous journey.

  When I moved into a dorm room in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village to start my first year at New York University, I felt like I was finally where I belonged.

  My mother had complained that I packed my things like someone who had no intention of returning. As we both stared at my barren bedroom, it was clear my entire life was now jammed into boxes labeled FRAGILE. I tried to assure her I was just being prepared, making sure I had everything I needed. But she was right. A part of me was so desperate to be on my own, far away from the memories of childhood, that I was trying to cut ties.

  I hoped that this was what my parents needed too. I was the last child living at home and the requisite responsibilities to the household were overwhelming for an eighteen-year-old. A college freshman’s only concerns should be schoolwork and parties, and part of me wanted to run toward that future without looking back. I thought if I showed them tough love, and let them fend for themselves for at least a year, maybe they would grow stronger. I knew I would need to check in, to make sure they were eating and paying the bills on time, but I hoped they would be able to take care of things from now on.

  Moving my belongings into the dorm was a bittersweet experience. I felt the weight of responsibility that came along with entering college. I was officially an adult. And that pissed me off. Because I never really got to be a kid. I felt like I had been saddled with duties and worry from as early as I could remember, and the door to a carefree childhood was now firmly closed.

  But despite my concern that walking through my dorm room threshold meant entering the “real world,” I knew I was prepared for it more than any of my schoolmates. I was certain the majority of attendees at the prestigious school, the children of privilege, had never had to survive on dry noodles or shank a fool on Christmas Eve.

  Even though the room was musty, had no air-conditioning on a ninety-five-degree August afternoon, and consisted of gray cement walls as inviting as a women’s penitentiary, I thought it was the most beautiful place on Earth. Within these four walls all that would be asked of me was that I get good grades. Here I would learn to harness my creativity, turn it into a career, and make a better life for myself.

  I would try to make this home.

  And for a while, that was exactly what it became. I was surrounded by everything I needed. I lived right next to beautiful Washington Square Park and would walk to class every day with a Cuban coffee in hand and a skip in my step. New York City in the fall is a thing of beauty. With red and orange leaves crunching beneath my feet, I would pass by whatever Will Smith or Matt Damon movie was filming that day on my walk through the city streets that make up the NYU “campus.” I would sit among writers, performers, and artists and get actual school credits for activities that had just been beloved hobbies only weeks before.

  A moment of epiphany came one day in a writing class when my teacher suggested the most important rule of prose was “Write what you know.” Everyone has their own life story, she advised, and drawing from that was the key to original and authentic work.

  My whole life, after every trial or heartbreak, I had told myself it had happened for some unknown, greater reason. That it was happening to me because I was strong enough to handle it and capable enough to pass on the lessons I learned. In a way, this felt like exactly what she was talking about. Writing and storytelling could be my way to catharsis. Also, my roommate didn’t believe in television, so I could play my PS2 uninterrupted all day long. This was exactly where I needed to be.

  When Robbie and Erica hit the age of eighteen, they embraced their independence much as a facehugger in Alien embraces an unexpecting face. They leaped toward their new lives without looking back. Erica was studying to get a degree in education. Her days were also fully occupied with sorority life and a long-term boyfriend. Robbie had been honorably discharged from the army’s Eighty-Second Airborne Division. Two tours of duty, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, had left him with severe PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. On the army’s dime, he enrolled in college in a distant suburb of New Jersey.

  Neither had the time nor desire to come home for visits or check in with phone calls. They wanted to find their place in the world somewhere far, far away from any reminder of where their journeys began. They each wanted to create newer, happier versions of themselves, and that meant cutting ties with painful memories.

  I understood how they felt, but I had been the one left behind to witness how their decisions affected my parents. In Janet’s and Robert’s minds, they had truly tried their best. And their efforts were rewarded with the sound of cartoon tires burning rubber as they sped away. Now that I was free to do the same, I began to feel tremendous guilt in building a life of my own, guilt for desiring that clean slate. And so the pressure I felt to take care of my parents only intensified. There was no one else who could do the job. I tried to make myself believe I could handle the burden of parenting my parents while becoming my own adult. For a while I was pretty good at the balancing act.

  Every weekend I would take the train, followed by the bus, and travel for two hours to visit the parentals. I would finish my schoolwork in my old bedroom and help with chores around the apartment: cleaning, cooking, food shopping. Over time it began to feel like the chores at home were piling up. Every surface seemed dustier than the week before; the same dishes filled the sink. It was as if time hadn’t moved while I was away at school for the week. When a class assignment would make it impossible to travel home, I would worry about how much work was piling up for me back in New Jersey.

  What had changed? Why did my parents seem to be letting things fall by the wayside? I became increasingly confused when upon entering the apartment one Saturday morning, my normally prickly mother greeted me with an all-consuming hug. The warm embrace took me aback, as tenderness had become a vestigial part of her ever-changing personality.

  She enveloped me, letting her body slowly go limp on mine, for an uncomfortable length of time. As she ran her hands through my hair, her chin resting on my shoulder, I could feel the wetness of her tears begin to trickle down my arm. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Nothing. Just happy to see you,” she meekly responded. I thought about that welcome-home hug on the entire trip back to school Sunday night. Something was very different about my mother.

  I had gotten a job on a student-made film and wasn’t able to return home for a few weeks while working on it. When I finally made it back to Jersey, I was horrified by what I saw when I walked through the door. Again Ma had thrown her weight against me, almost collapsing in relief to see me. And as she stroked my hair she whispered, “I used to have pretty, long hair too.” I looked at the scalp nuzzling into my neck and saw it was littered with bald spots.

  “What did you do?” I asked, alarmed.

  It sounded as if a weakened child spoke using her mouth. “Sometimes I get a little nervous and I start pulling it out. Now it’s all gone.”

  I didn’t understand what was happening. All I knew was that it felt as if my mother was slowly melting away.

  Each week she seemed smaller and daintier. Weaker and more vulnerable. The same woman who had scared the ulcers into my intestines was now a dog without bark or bite. When I ques
tioned my father about her ripping patches of hair out of her scalp, he didn’t seem too worried. “She’s just sad all her kids left her.”

  The phrasing of this was grating. Left her. Children are supposed to grow into adults. The logical side of me knew that much. They are supposed to leave the nest and build lives of their own. I understood that Robbie and Erica had grown distant, and I felt bad for my parents, but it felt as if my dad was embracing the pity party a little too strongly. Parents should encourage their children to go out into the world and grow as humans, not make them feel guilty about it. Going to college is not a form of abandonment.

  Somehow, their immature personalities had taken our development and natural life progression as a slap in the face, as an ungrateful insult. And now, along with the hard adjustment of life as a freshman in a challenging school, I was saddled with the responsibility of keeping my mother from completely falling apart.

  “I think maybe she should talk to someone. Like a doctor. Or maybe a psychiatrist,” I hesitantly told Dad, knowing it would not go over well. The Mendez family did not believe in psychiatry. They did not believe in mental illness. They would not allow their brains to be so weak.

  “I don’t ever want to hear you talk like that again.” He brushed the subject off. “Your mother is not a crazy person.”

  I went home every weekend. My college friends would complain I didn’t hang out with them or go to parties, and I tried to find any excuse other than explaining that I was too busy trying to keep my mother alive. We were eighteen-year-olds on very different wavelengths.

  I lay awake at night, worried about what I would find when I arrived home each Saturday morning. In my heart I feared coming home to a dead body. Using the little money I had from part-time jobs, I bought minutes for a prepaid cell phone and made sure it was used for nothing else but calling my mother every single day. (Yeah, “minutes” were a thing, robot children of the future.) Though it was a decade ago, it was still pretty embarrassing to not have a real cell phone. Guys would ask for my number and I couldn’t give it to them. Which was probably for the best since I was in no condition to share my bizarre life with anyone. “I spend my time reading, writing, and providing a twenty-four-hour suicide hotline for my mother. And what do you do?”