Growing Up

Growing up, I remember having to take the staircase whenever the graffiti-walled, urine and marijuana infested elevators were out of service. One sees a lot when running from the tenth floor to the lobby. If it wasn’t me having to skip steps to avoid feces getting stuck to my shoe on one day (sometimes dog, sometimes human), I would find myself having to evade the couple shooting up, on another. That is just the way it was in the Martin Luther King project building on the New York City corner of 115th street, just one block away from the 116th street 2 and 3 train on Lenox Ave. My neighborhood, and the Latinos and African Americans living in it, made up my world. It wasn’t a marginalized world or a privileged one; it was just my immediate, unquestioned reality.

At the age of five, I was honorably knighted by Sir Public School 185 with the title of “Gifted and Talented” (or G&T as we called it), a label which led me on an upward trajectory toward academic success, and left my obviously not-so-talented five year old peers on a path of lower expectations and poorer education. In second grade alone, I won a total of 27 certificates for achievement (my mother still does not let me live that down), two trophies for earning the highest city wide Mathematic and Verbal test scores in the school, and was the school’s spelling bee champ, now competing against middle school students in the District 3 spell off. The disparity between G&T student and other student's success and accesses to education was only intensified further when in 5th grade, the G&T epithet that will be on my grave, allowed me to take an entrance exam into a highly competitive school near the upper west side, DELTA Honors . Out of the fifty students who were allowed access to the exam, only three of us were accepted: Patricia, Roberto, and I. That is when reality began to change for me.

Being a student at DELTA was an assortment of firsts. It was the first time my over protective parents allowed me to leave the neighborhood, the first time I interacted with White and Asian people, and the first time I got to leave the school for lunch. On the unfortunate contrary, it also marked the first time that I began doing poorly in school and that the words “gay”, “fag”, and “homo” became synonymous with my name. I wasn’t as great as I once thought I was. I was now average. In fact, I would say I was below average. No use in prevaricating, I was definitely within the outlier bracket and my 2 classmates from P.S.185 also seemed to be having the same problem. Average was having teachers, doctors, lawyers, business owners and architects as parents (the list is more extensive than 1000 words allow); living in huge condominiums that had more than one hallway which led to a single room on 115th street (not my 115th street, but the one on Broadway); having a computer at home; and having those damned L.L. Bean book bags. This feeling of misplaced dissonance intensified when on a school project, my house was chosen as the work site for my team. I remember walking up to my building, Jason turning to me, with a look of disbelief and saying, “You live here?”