Paperback(Third Edition)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781621061014 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Microcosm Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2017 |
| Series: | Punx Series |
| Edition description: | Third Edition |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
It Was my birthday and a six-foot long table stretched across the grass. It covered half the backyard, and while some of us could hardly navigate our bodies through the foliage, it was the only kind of table that could hold three styrofoam trays of maduros, morros, and paella. Everyone was wearing gold Jewelry and either spandex biker shorts or acid wash denim pants. My body was sprouting terrestrial bumps and hairs that year — I was turning eleven that day. I remember being asked to tuck in my t-shirt and wipe the dog shit off my knees — it's what any self-respecting pubescent Cuban girl should do. Especially when around members of the opposite sex who are a few months shy of adolescence. However, I chose to perpetuate unruliness. I played soccer, ate my mother's friend's leftovers out of the trash, and hung live reptiles from my earlobes. That day I fell on the ground, and upon looking up, a seven year old boy perched himself beside me, and tilted his head in curiosity.
"Are you a boy or a girl?" he asked.
"I'm a girl." I responded. "Why do you care?"
"Oh, cause you look like a boy."
I wasn't sure if I was stoked about my androgyny. Two years back, lacking femininity gave me a positive spirit, nevertheless, I would often ask myself if the forms my body was naturally shaping itself into was a slight message saying I should want to be a girl. I asked a friend of my mother's about this and she romanticized ovulating, pubic hair, and smells that encircled pussy, more so than dirt.
"Girl, you'll be a woman soon." She slouched towards me.
"But I don't want to be a woman."
"Oh come on, you know you can't wait to get your nails all done, get your hair done all nice, get yourself a boyfriend."
"That totally sounds like hell."
"That's only what you say now, I promise."
At times I wondered if I had to be a woman. Something in me anticipated growing up without submitting to what most people expected from me. Still, I sometimes entertained notions of the varied routes a growing teenager could choose. I flirted with the notion of having a best friend who felt like as much of a misfit as me. I flirted with thoughts of being tall and curvaceous, and trading in my Aerosmith cassette tapes for salsa music. I would be sexy. But at that moment, I wanted to grow with the facets I already knew, more so than grow by way of the rules pressed upon my gender. I wanted to go out late at night and drink beer. I wanted to wear overalls and dye my hair green. I wanted to talk about sex and stop pretending that I didn't know what an orgasm was. I wanted to be who I was in my pre-pubescent fantasies. I wanted to be a teenage boy.
I had one eyebrow stretched across my forehead. I only wore frayed denim and flannel, and I felt fine. Hot because it was appropriate clothing for Miami's pit-stain climate — but because that year I developed interests, tastes, and an identity. To many, we were fools and eccentrics. To my heroes and likeminded individuals, we were artists and dreamers. Weathered fabrics and torn seams were a badge of honor. At twelve years old, I knew the words to almost every song on Metallica's Master of Puppets and that was totally empowering. How valuable was it to memorize your favorite songs instead of the information you had to learn for Friday's math test? Very valuable.
Part of me knew I would be okay, even if I didn't have best friends and I was mostly uncomfortable in my own skin. I was excited about things like school. Hot because I enjoyed the work-but because of the potential for interactions outside of the neighborhood that sheltered my family.
My family was made up of three women, a staunch work ethic, and a love for gardening and Spanish TV. We lived in a Latino community in Miami where every surrounding element stressed Cuban values, from meals to language. Lefty white ideas hinged on my taste, but were unheard of in my home. Ideas like vegetarianism and resisting beauty standards only existed in white America. My family anticipated growing curvaceous, because our beauty standard didn't comply with thinness. We anticipated mimicking the cultural doctrine of Cuba, rather than America. We sauteed everything in pork. But at the same time, it was safe to admit that white american culture tampers with every boundary in United States cities. While cultural preservation fortified us, popular culture tortured us. I respected the need my family felt to surround me with this Latina identity, and with that self-determination, I knew where I came from. But I was unsure as to what would define my appearance, my questionable optimism, and my uneasy method of growing up. I was unsure at what part white culture would torture me, and what ideals, unheard of to the Cuban family, would embrace me. And the enticement of adolescence went beyond any new pubes and first kisses.
CHAPTER 2In my first year of junior high, I grew tits. I would smile at the prospect of what they could do for me in the future, but right then, I just wanted to get high and cut them off, I didn't wanna submit to the changes that a girl is often taught to experience. Albeit, chances of single-handedly altering socialization are often bleak, While I didn't know how to shave and had crusty knots falling beside my shoulders-the questioning and self-doubt was unwavering. I had begun looking like a girl, but I developed a means to fight it. To fight an interest in walking upright and wearing short skirts. To fight against feeling like I should bear an interest in cosmetics and the boys everyone wanted to fuck. To fight the need of deodorizing my pussy and my human stench. But to a coming of age girl, was this okay? My mother thought it was-she thought the mainstream made girls submissive in nature and catty in persona. Either way, I experimented for a week or two. I masturbated to a Bobby Brown music video and threw myself a birthday party.
It was the kind that girls would wanna shave their thighs for behind their mothers' backs. In my culture, shaved thighs were for sluts. Although, in adolescent culture-who doesn't want to be a slut? My party would attract the kids everyone at school wanted to tongue or look like. I bought a Bobby Brown CD to play as dance music, and invited the girls at school who already looked like women and often felt sorry for me.
"What kinds of things are you going to have at your party?" One girl asked.
"I bought TLC and Bobby Brown CDs and a cake. My sister recorded a C+C Music Factory music video. I heard it's fucking dope."
"Why do you always have to say fuck?" One girl said.
"Are there gonna be guys there?" Another girl said.
"I guess." Inside, I wasn't into it.
On the eve of my party, I was hardly enthused, but convinced I was finally doing the right thing. That afternoon, I wasn't surprised to see that the only guests at ray party were family members, some neighbor kid, and my fucking cake. I locked myself in my room, masturbated for the sixteenth time that day, and thought about how Aeroamith would have dealt with their adolescence. I stared at the wall and thought out loud.
"No one came to my party, my family's broke, I don't have a dad to be masculine with, but I have a sweet dog. I guess I'm not them." I thought "But us."
For a minute, I thought about dying. "Isn't it easier to just die sometimes?" I thought loudly, to the dismay of my dog. I crawled into the formica cabinet and swiped my index finger along the rim of a bottle of ammonia. "Adulthood" I thought to myself, "I'll try to make it there, I guess. It seems to be a relatively interesting place." My thoughts on death, for once, digressed. "I'll be a luminary." I closed the bottle of ammonia. "Like Steven Tyler from Aerosmith."
For once, I replaced the common self-pity with brilliance and determination to show a slew of popular teenagers that they can never match up to a strung-out, angst-ridden daughter of a Cuban feminist. This was junior high.
The following day I heard rumors that I had invited those girls because I was a dyke. According to other students, I clearly just wanted to fuck them. Albeit, I didn't think about queerness then, besides the times I rubbed one out in the shower thinking about girls in slips and combat boots.
That afternoon I sat by Eugene. Eugene was Colombian, tall and unearthly. He sat in the back of the room and played the noble part of class clown. His name was a staple in the school's drug culture because he dealt incredibly cheap weed. He was the oldest student in the eighth grade. Despite the stigma that existed on dealers and clowns, Eugene was soft spoken and intelligent. He was the first teenager I had ever known who read fiction by choice. Hobody really hung out with Eugene because he didn't try to look wealthy. Hobody really hung out with me because I was awkward and wore ratty Aerosmith t-shirts. Eugene liked that about me and would ask me questions sometimes. He would ask me if I had heard of punk rock and if I had a nuclear family. He would ask me where my dad was and if anyone ever beat on me. He would ask me if I really was gay. If I was, that's cool, because his brother was gay. And although coming out for him broke the family in more ways than one-he continued to write Eugene letters. Eugene considered him a hero.
"I guess I'm not really gay. I've never dated a girl or anything. But I think about them when I jack off sometimes." "You masturbate?" Eugene said. "That's awesome. I always knew girls did it."
"Don't they all?"
"I think only really cool ones do. Or gay ones."
"Man, I'm really happy I'm either cool or gay."
"Seriously." He said, "nevertheless, I'm sorry no one came to your party."
"It's okay. I don't even listen to TLC. That's all they would have wanted to listen to anyway. I think I was just scouting out talent for potential friendships, you know? They lost the audition."
"Yeah, you don't need those kids."
"I guess."
"You're one of us."
"Even if I turned out a bitch? Or a lesbian? Because I hear I'm also pretty mean."
"My brother said gay punks always throw the best parties, and angry girls make the best girlfriends.
"Sweet. Let's hang out one day."
"Okay, but I'll have to give your record collection a facelift."
"Why?"
"I'm not telling you to burn your Metallica records; but there's this thing called punk that seems to make more sense to girls and queers than a bunch of long haired dudes jumping around and playing guitar solos. It's 1994 and there's a bigger world out there, you know."
"Okay. I'm open to change. But I doubt I'm the only girl that's into metal."
"I'm just trying to expand your mind."
"I'll expand my mind, alright. But I'm not too into the idea of smoking pot. I don't want to be a hippie or anything."
"No. You don't have to do anything. Plus, we like to go fast. I just sell weed. I don't really smoke it. But I might want to give you a haircut."
CHAPTER 3In retrospect, offhand events that penetrate our adolescence collect dust and we forget the little things that made us or broke us. Eventually, we bask in the big choices, and adult decisions live on in hearsay. Looking back, we realize, it was the offbeat instances that triggered our futures and shaped our self-esteem. Getting into fights made sense. Giving bullying punk girls with the munchies my sandwich and panhandling for lunch money made sense. Infatuations and the inability to recite them made sense. Being as timid as I was as a five year old over the subject of deadbeat dads made sense. Once I started making friends, I began to realize that kids with two parents were few and far between.
High School was a landmine, nestled in a cage of thousands. Between petty cat fights and dull lectures, I sulked in the contentment brought on to me by Eugene. Punk rock was all that mattered. It was much easier this way. It was a school in west Miami, where the students' class background wasn't always consistent, although rich kids were often obsolete. It was a school of low standards towards academics, competitiveness and sports, but with a tense embrace of social hierarchy. The student body's overall grade point average was a D.
In the outfield, the bleachers were tucked in a grassy crevice of the football field-where burnouts could coalesce.
One might often think that belonging comes with that inevitable struggle to fit in. However, in the early nineties, it wasn't cool to be uncool yet-fitting in was for the football team and the color guard. Acceptance in punk rook was based only on whether or not you show up. Show up to the show or to that comforting crevice in the outfield. We searched for misfits and rabble-rousers-we searched for each other.
Despite our overpopulated mess of over five thousand students-things like drug culture allowed cliques to crossover. While the lively presence of other emotionally-wrecked, nonconformist teenagers provided me with safety; these were the years that strangled us haplessly. Adolescence was a disease within itself. As much as we can belong someplace, we still hate ourselves and we still have additional vices and additional drama-this justified teen-angst.
There's a percentage of teenagers who can look back at athletic highs, gossiping in the girls room, awards and accolades, and being in love with whoever sat beside them in the classroom. In most realities, this narrative was a pipedream or was so fucking normative it was everything we didn't want to be, or could afford to be. In the end, all taboos remained true; even head-cheerleaders amassed self-hate and smoked dope. They may have just not felt as malformed as the puddle of misfits who had a different take on popular culture.
The ultimate conditionings pierced into my body by high school were the need to pluck my eyebrows and to embrace academic spirit.
"How white is that?" My mother would recite. "Why shouldn't a Cuban girl be okay with her unibrow?" I fished for strength. How difficult is strength at fourteen? Extremely, I found out. I weakened and shaved the bridge between my eyes.
Within ray family, beauty standards were inconsistent and flung from left to right, and from relative to relative. Within American public schools, beauty standards were polished and whitened at the seams. Girls were taught to be thin, clean, polite, and mature; no matter how many students came from Latin families. Sometimes I hated my body- sometimes I scavenged for the strength my mother talked about. However, that occasional dent in my appearance was the last notch on my list of pubescent brainwashing. Finally, I managed to romanticize not being at school. I valued the lessons on theft and finding your g-spot that I got outside of formal education. I valued the afternoons where we could ask one another questions like "What about America makes poor kids poor?" And "What's so wrong with hot girl on girl action?" We would ask questions that were taboo in mainstream dialogue. We would skip fourth period, in the park on Bird Rd., and nurse a 33oz. of beer; forties were illegal in Florida.
"You re a sell out. Last week you weren't wearing fucking khakis and loafers. Whats your fucking deal?" I asked Roberto one day.
"Whatever Cristy. In the future, when you're moshing in a pit somewhere, drunk off your ass — I'm gonna have a family. I'm gonna have money. I'm gonna be successful."
"Who are you to measure success? Youre just gonna end up fucking poor people over. You're just gonna start shitting competition from the hole in your brain your CEO job is gonna drill. You and your imaginary family can suck it."
"Whatever." He concluded.
I understood that growing up in financial disenfranchisement doesn't always allow us to idealize those dreams that involve steady paychecks. Still, in order to survive, I didn't believe we had to submit to the rich white model of success and commonality. How I would end up anywhere, without perpetuating the notion of true "selling out" was questionable at fourteen. But at the same time — ragged new belongings consumed my every fiber. And for a moment-it was the perfect assurance we needed at fourteen.
Selling out was defined by betraying the honesty and sacredness of our culture. Selling out could exist in any setting — it was any infidelity of one's personal morals.
Defying morals existed as a taboo in almost every identity I embraced; my ethnicity, my gender, punk rock. But then I would ask myself — did it make sense to defy these morals because we were broke? Did it make sense to defy these morals because we needed to heal from faltering mental health?
In one of my first months at school, I made friends and wrote a fanzine. I met a kid named Julian who also wrote a fanzine, listened to Sonic Youth, and wore a ratty Circle Jerks T-shirt almost every day. I thought that was cool, so I started calling him my best friend. I thought if I called him my best friend enough, he would eventually become that. Fortunately, this became the case by my fifteenth birthday, near the middle of freshman year.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Indestructible"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Croadcore.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.