Thursday, 07 May 2009

• I grew up with three overbearing women in my life.  I loved them, my mother and my sisters and floated behind them as a child.  Truth be told, I emulated them; watched them cry over nature documentaries where dolphins were slaughtered innocently with schools of tuna, listened to their phone conversations of riveting, jaw-dropping gossip that revolved around a Jesse, Vincent or an Anthony, how they carried a colorful friendship merely on their wrist and lastly, the rare gift of inspecting an emotion and deciding when it was ripe enough to be shared.  In their case, usually when it was too late.
  
  As a boy, unexposed to the brutality of macho-inducted life, I tended to overdo my feminine side.  I was a hopeless romantic, light-years ahead of any limitation on male sensitivity, timid and unfortunately, soft.  Too damn soft.
  
   In fifth grade, I got laughed at for expressing my feelings about how much I despised water pollution and the destruction of our Eco-systems.  The teasing made me cry.  That invoked more teasing.  I got into a fight, no, I rebuke that last statement.  To actually get into a fight means I'd have to put up my dukes, be prepared to throw hands, rumble, brawl down, put up or shut up... I'd just get the shit beat the fuck out of me.  There's no other way to phrase it than that:  I got the shit beat the fuck out of me. 
  
  In seventh grade, I secretly wrote a love poem for Adrianna Huxom.  She was half-Jamaican, half-Brazilian, cream-skinned with curly hair that resembled how the stairs to heaven would look.  She'd always use this peach body spray and every time she'd pass by, I'd tingle and shiver all over.  Later on, I would realize I was horribly allergic to it.  The love poem was found by my older brother during one of his nighttime raids of my belongings and by first period of the next day, Adrianna had read it and so had my entire seventh grade class.
  
  She never looked my way again.  Except the day when I informed my class I was moving to Fresno, a crime-infested city nobody knew about, she told me then that my poem was alright and wished me luck.  Years later, I came to find that she gauged her love interests with my poem as the main criteria.  If they could outdo a wimpy kid who had never even kissed a girl before, then she'd give them a shot.  It took her until college till she found her King Arthur and the Excaliber poem.  Woot, I guess.
  
  Living in Fresno took my emotional side and shot it in the face.  Let it bleed out and hoped for a painful death.  My sisters were all grown up and out, brutalizing the world one man at a time.  Or maybe two at a time, but I don't like to think of my sisters like that.  My mother was in a world of her own, dealing with my father and his stressors.  I was left to figure shit out on my own, the way a man is supposed to.  Problem was, nobody told me that.
  
  I didn't cry when my mother cried anymore.  I didn't cry when people laughed at me anymore.  I didn't write love poetry anymore.  All of it was still there, waiting for that moment to come out, to overwhelm me possibly. 
  
  I didn't cry when my daughter was born, yet I cried when she sang to me.  I didn't cry when my daughter's mother left me with a baby, yet I cried when she asked me back a year later.  I didn't cry in the hospital where my father lay in the ICU, dying in only his physical form, yet I cried ninety days later at his last burial rights. 
  
  This boils down to a point, a convoluted point I'm slow to make.  I couldn't protect the women I loved then, but for damn sure I'll protect them now.  In Vietnam two months ago, someone asked my mother rudely for money, thinking that if he persisted she'd give in because women there are treated like rudimentary slaves.  I stood up, demanded an apology and if it wasn't in the way I wanted, I'd punch a hole through his chest.  A very sincere apology was given.
  
  New Years Eve, I'm walking the wife down the hall out of the loft where we reside, and a group of drunk white college kids are behind us.  One of them chants, "Ching-chong, chong-ching."  It doesn't phase me, it doesn't bother me.  I'm the most diverse sonofabitch you'd ever meet.  The chanting continues, however, it escalates to - "Me so horny," followed by laughter.
  
  As a man, I have to protect the women in my life.  What if my daughter were with me?  How could anyone disrespect women so easily? 
  
  I turn around and walk towards the group.  They freeze in place, as if I were wielding a samurai sword.  There are four guys and three girls.  The guys are typical college scene kids, wearing lighter shades of gay polo shirts and the girls are pale and orange-toned.  I remember one of them having the worst acne I've ever seen this side of a Pro-Activ commercial, and I confront them.
  
  Apologies resound across the hallway.  They blame it on their drinking.  They blame it on their ignorance.  They were so scared of me, just one man by himself, that when I saw them again later that evening, they continued apologizing.  Now every time I see them in the hall, they run back into their apartments.
  
  Being a man doesn't mean having to fight.  It doesn't stipulate anger, doesn't give any justification nor cause.  I was willing to get a beatdown, and for what?  In the end, if things are bloody and broken, swollen and stinging, what was it all for?
  
  I'd have to say that the women, the women that I love and emulate, will look at me and think to themselves, "I love him." 
  
  Dat
  
  

  • 11:35 PM
  • 72 Views
  • 8 eProps
  • 8 Comments