How One Sock Turned My Life Upside-Down

Just before Christmas, I innocently decided to post a picture on facebook that would make everyone laugh in disbelief. I borrowed my partner's Norwegian sock, took off all my clothes, and stood by our tiny Christmas tree with nothing but a sock covering my most vital organ. 

The response, as expected, was wild. Within an hour, I already have over two dozen likes and just as many comments. As the CIA-loving American that I am, I don't have anything to hide, therefore I don't censor my facebook to anyone whose friend request I accept; that is something I am certain won't change in the near future.

My mom commented on my picture: “I see you have lost all shame,” and then unfriended me. I deleted her comment, not because I believe in censorship, but rather because the comment was in caps lock. I hate caps lock and have told her repeatedly what poor internet etiquette they show, but she never listens. Anyway, I digress.

My self-righteous aunt (let's call her Mary) started posting religious songs on my wall and even had the audacity to send a private message to my partner. In so doing, she made presumptions about who my partner was, and also jeopardized my relationship. Naturally, I was furious.

Mary has never left out small town in the developing world, nor has she achieved anything of note. “Who the hell is she to go over me and contact someone she doesn't know with a complaint about me!? Who the hell is she to call me immoral!?” I angrily thought to myself, trying to contain my fury.

It was that point, in a fit of rage, that I gained the capacity to finally: talk back; to abandon my typically silent, stoic persona; and to publicly express my feelings. My anger just kept screaming that this was a woman too blinded by her own ignorance to have the capacity to recognize her own cultural failings. I decided that I needed to explain to her publicly just in what ways we are culturally and morally different.

So, just how culturally different am I from some of the members of my clan? In my view, it comes to Nudity vs. Violence.

When I was 6 years old, I weighed no more than 25 kilos. I was a skinny, curious child. Though mischievous, no one can say I ever hit or talked back to any adult in my family. Nonetheless, one day I happened to arrive home a few hours after dark, thus breaking curfew. My father, whose troubled brain killed him at 46 after many months of headaches he neglected, grabbed his belt and shouted, “Child of the devil, where the coño were you!?” before commencing to whip me with all his adult fury once, twice, thrice, 30, maybe as many as 70 times. I defecated mid-way through the beating, right there on the sidewalk on Nicaragua St., for the whole of Villa Altagracia to watch. My brain shut down mid-way through the beating, and time has now erased the memories of the pain I felt each time I showered for weeks afterwards.

If you think that I hate, or hated my father, you'd be mistaken. The ratio of beatings-to-candy, and the fact that I saw him everyday because he lived up the road, made him a righteous, kind man in my eyes; I loved candy, enough to forget his beatings. My mother, on the hand, was just as cruel, beating me similarly after I accidentally broke a small, pink glass table in Los Alcarrizos. The table probably had a value of no more than 30 dollars, if that. I didn't hate my mother, but I certainly felt no love for her. She wasn't around much, and when I saw her, she was almost never happy, always ready to reach for the belt. During a period of 7 years, I saw her for a total of 11 days when I flew from NY to Curaçao. I remember good things, but my strongest memory is her with the belt, berating me for closing the door in a loud way.

That beating that I received in Nicaragua St, and in Los Alcarrizos, are my two oldest memories. I have many good, loving memories, but my two oldest are those. Though loving, I left the Dominican at age 8, and moved to the Bronx with my father. If you think the Nicaragua St. beating was excessive, by age 10 my father had escalated to a broom stick, but I should spare the reader the gory details, since they do nothing but stir a great, vengeful anger in me. Fortunately, with middle-school came puberty and a growth spur. I also became menacing-looking enough that no one in the Bronx was willing to cross me.

And so, puberty came and my subconsciousness started working on burying that feeling of injustice that cursed through my very core. It was Mary's hypocrisy that opened wounds and refreshed my memory. On the 24^th of December, I smashed a wine glass against a wall, and cried myself to sleep. I spent the 25^th in a dark room, staring out of the window as a great anger consumed me, even helping me eschew the need for food or water.

Over the next few days, I found myself unwilling to talk or touch my partner much. I had returned to my angry Bronx self. I just wanted to lock myself in a room, punch the wall, and curse everyone to hell and eternal pain. My new/old attitude thusly placed my relationship under strain. I had reverted to something dark.

I was easily irritable, and just wanted to let loose. Alcohol helped on New Year's, and I awoke on the 1^st in a good mood. It didn't last long, however. I forget what it was that my partner did or didn't do, but I was overcome again by anger even before I left the bed.

My partner, trying to cheer me up, reminded me that I had promised to do a New Year's Dive a month earlier. Figuring that I had nothing to lose, I proceeded. I walked out of the apartment, and jumped into the canal around the corner.

I emerged from the freezing water a new man. My anger was now gone, replaced by contentment. Contentment at the fact that I was now a man, that I had finally developed the courage to express my feelings publicly, and to make the Trujillistas in my family realize just how culturally different we are.

The past 11 days have been great! I finally fell free here in Amsterdam; free from the demons of my past.