The first twenty five years: 1948-1973

On December 8, 2023, I will celebrate, okay, the better description should be, greet hesitantly, seventy-five revolutions around the sun. This will be a big deal for me, but I’m unsure why. I know that I never thought I would live this long. This is even though my mother lived into her late eighties and only died because she had contracted Parkinson’s disease. My father died in his sixties fro cancer. However, other relatives died at crazy ages in their late nineties, 102, and 103 years. But that was no consolation because, well, I’ve lived a fractured and reckless life and damn, it’s nothing short of luck or genes or missed opportunities that I’m still breathing and above ground.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful. Now that I’ve been sober for more than twelve years, I figure that if I can just lose this damn weight, I might be able to live a little longer than what the Social Security people predict (See my last post on becoming 75 HERE). I love challenging the expectation of how long I will live above ground. To probe the mystery of life expectancy, an enigma wrapped in a big fu*kin’ question mark that drives me now to live life to the fullest, even if it’s just to give death the middle finger?

My birthdays after sixty always got me meditating on how far I’ve come, how much happiness, love, sadness, joy, ups, and downs I’ve experienced in my lifetime, and I think, wow, not bad for a kid from the projects of the South Bronx. A life that began in the old Lincoln Hospital, the oldest son of a migrant from Puerto Rico (an American colony, so everyone is a U.S. citizen), Antonio or Tony as everyone called him (except his children), and an immigrant, Ana Estrella, from the Dominican Republic, a country that at the time suffered under the tyrannical rule of a dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. There’s a cute story about how they met, but I’ll save that for another day. They were married in early 1948, and I was born on December 8^th of that year.

From there, I can trace the chaotic history of this country and my life through some of the most significant historical events of the second half of the twentieth century and the first twenty-three years of this twenty-first century. From 1948 to 1973, when I turned twenty-five, I thought I had seen and lived too much crazy. Only to realize later that I was just getting started.

My first thirteen years living in the South Bronx were average, if you call going to a Catholic School run by strict WASPs and Irishmen and women. Their task was to make sure I would grow up to be like them, pledging allegiance to the Eurocentric image of what America is while denying that my roots are planted somewhere else. The irony was not lost on me when I was treated like I was not like a real American even though my Puerto Rican father was, as I stated earlier, an American citizen like all Puerto Ricans since 1917. I was born in the United States of America, making me an automatic American. Why didn’t they get it?

At the age of ten, I got it into my head that I was going to be a Catholic priest because I had a cousin who was determined to be a nun. Then, at the age of thirteen, I was packed off to Saint Albert’s Junior Seminary in Middletown, New York, at the time a really, and I mean really, rural community with a dairy farm next to the school. From September 1962 until May 1964, with time off for Christmas, Easter, and summer, I lived a seminarian’s life of black suits and white shirts and black ties and a religious routine of daily mass and prayers and learning Latin and all the regular subjects that would be taught in a traditional school, but this was no ordinary school. I was headed toward a life of poverty and chastity, swearing unquestioning obedience to an old man in Rome. The more I learned about the Catholic Church, religion in general, and the often contradictory values and practices of the church, the more I knew I would never make it to the priesthood.

It didn’t take much for me to come up with a rational excuse to leave the seminary when I was fifteen years old: the first time I kissed a girl and got a hard-on during the second easter break—raging teen hormones.  I was convinced that the religious life was not for me then. Hey, it’s better I learn that lesson early than waste my time going the whole way until priesthood and get caught up in a sex abuse scandal. That wouldn’t be cool.

From 1964-1968, living in the sixties in New York was anything but boring. Let’s see: the time I ended up in a hospital ward for observation because I decided to see what would happen if I fell out sprouting gibberish at the feet of a NYC policeman at the crossroads of 57^th Street and Fifth Avenue; or the time I worked on Wall Street, the only brown person for a hundred miles (a very long subway ride from the John Adam Houses in the South Bronx to White, Weld, and Company next to the New York Stock Exchange; maybe, all the times that I got out of going to Vietnam by claiming that I was a heroin addict (yeah, I was); the six months in 1968 that I worked for a woman named Evelina Lopez Antonetty of United Bronx Parents (who along with some other great community organizers) taught me everything I would need to know about community organizing at the age of nineteen. We would protest against the largest Teacher’s Strike in New York City history and ended up being  pummeled and arrested by NYC’s finest during one of those protests while I was still shooting up until I overdosed in an abandoned building and somehow got saved and sent to Phoenix House for rehab (1969-1970) only to find the experience of rehab worse than just getting high. I mean, this was so intense that it needs a whole other book chapter by itself; from the frying pan of Phoenix House into the fire of my first marriage, and when that didn’t succeed after a year, I moved to Washington, D.C. where somehow I fell onto a fast track of life that took me from guerrilla video (some of you know what this is) to hosting two radio shows at WHUR-FM to being a radio and television reporter trainee at then known as WTOP-AM-TV while covering the Nixon Watergate years and living the Vida Loca, all by the age of twenty-five in 1973. I was nowhere near done living a life of being in the right place at the right time.

During those first twenty-five years, there was love, there was heartache. Witnessing the living history of the sixties and early seventies made me wiser and stronger. However, maybe wiser is premature when you consider what came during the next twenty-five years where I fit more living than was humanly possible for one person to experience. But I tried, real hard.

Coming: Part Two, the next twenty-five years: 1974-1998.