DR Comics Presents: The Secret Origin of the DominicAnomaly

When I was twelve, my family and I migrated south from New York to a state whose climate was more in keeping with our tropical heritage. I am talking of course about the one and only Sunshine State: Florida. Now you might assume my Caribbean Hispanic family might have picked Miami as their new place to call home. I mean why not? My mom used to love Miami Vice, and as a kid about to explode into full on horny Latin puberty I loved girls in bikinis.

Sadly, however, I never lived in Miami.

No we ended up moving to Tampa. Way before I even knew the Buccaneers were a football team. Before their cool new uniforms. Before they won the Super Bowl. We moved to Tampa before they even had a baseball team. Did I mention I’m Dominican? A few years after Tampa finally got the Devil Rays we would move to Orlando, as if we were trying to avoid anything at all that might associate us with Dominicanness. I was forced to leave the Yankees, all my New York Latino friends and the comfortable cultural nest I called home at the ripe age when I could have finally begun to capitalize on my many years of shared experiences with the girls of my Catholic school. All for a place too far south of the Mason-Dixon line for a young native Dominican Yorker but too far north of South Beach for people not to ask constantly:

What are you?

Whatchu mixed wit?

Is you Haitian?

Are you Christian?

I didn’t know then what I can never forget now.

I am a DominicAnomaly.

Not White enough. Not Black enough. Not even Dominican enough. How could I be? After all, my mysteriously isolationist nomadic family ran away from the most significant Dominican population in the United States to live among a bunch of racially polarized unhyphenated “Americans.” I couldn’t play baseball. I couldn’t dance. I never had a Dominican girlfriend. I couldn’t even self-identify with the racial slur spic. An old racist Italian man informed me that that term was reserved specifically for New York Puerto Ricans.

Are you Christian?

I’m Catholic. Isn’t that the same? C’mon. My Tia’s name is Cruz, and my Grandmother and Legal Guardian’s name is Altagracia. I was baptized, had First Communion, Confirmation, and made several irrationally guilty confessions. If I’m not saved yet it just isn’t gonna happen.

Is you Haitian?

No. I isn’t. I’m Dominican. Same island, different culture. You can thank Europe for that, and for the genocidal culture war we inherited from them.

Whatchu mixed wit?

Everything! Plus mangu.

What are you?

The Future?

But of course that wasn’t enough. They needed proof.

Soy Dominicano.

You Spanish? Full Spanish?

(Sigh)

And then of course I was in Advanced Placement and IB classes in high school along with more Whites, Indians and Asians than I ever knew. Of course. They’re all safe bets. Yeah sure there were Hispanics and Blacks that year too, but once we started failing out of the program one by one sure as statistics would show, a lot of the rest of us just kinda felt like there were countdown timers over our heads, justifying more procrastination, laziness, and depression.

Oh and don’t be fooled by my grammatically correct spell-checked blog. Trust me. I just scraped by without falling through a crack. And I was the only Dominican in our program that year.

And so, somewhere between mastering proper English and proper Spanish in order to better express and define my cultural identity while trying to graduate high school in Tampa, and later digging through the Bible to make conservative Christians in Orlando look like hypocrites and to make me feel like I could still belong anywhere at all, I became a DominicAnomaly.

Cynicism on a Morning Flight

I was on an airplane last fall and it just so happened I was in the very front row of a JetBlue airbus. Not like First Class or anything. I don’t believe the plane I was on even had a First Class Section. In any case I was on the way to a Florida vacation to see some old friends, and to be my special somebody’s special somebody. I had college textbooks in my carry-on. A course pack on my lap. I was doing the multi-tasking New York thing, you know? Work your ass off during every free moment. Conveniently schedule every compartment of your life.

But I knew I was full of it.

I knew the minute I landed in Florida all systems would go offline in the NASA computer room of my brain and Jack would shift from all work to all play. I’d “brought work” with me mostly to convince myself that I was an escapist slacker by choice, and not because I was out of other options. In any case I happened to be sharing my particular seat triplet with two middle-aged White people. I had the aisle. A guy in some autumnal GAP clothes and comfortable sneakers with a receding line of mouse brown hair and small glasses had his laptop-lap in the ready next to the window. A dark-haired lady midway towards Arm-Flapper City with some sleeveless dark top and grainy slacks and heels rode Bitch. Go figure.

Immediately they got each each other, in that unspoken way that people who happen to share the same culture/demographic/tax bracket get each other. Neither of them got me. So I played the fun Minority Spy role as their instant conversation began:

I hate sitting in front says the guy. No space.

Yeah I know, the lady reflexively responds.

And the American cliche unfolded. They barely notice my “crazy” hair or acknowledge my apparent pursuit of higher education before revealing they are both traveling for business. He’s appropriately, moderately affected as he shares that constant travel caused his separation from his wife and keeps him from being more than a weekend fly-in commuter father to his progeny. I’m amused by how morally neutral it seems for him to be a rolling stone/deadbeat. She is appropriately, moderately controlling as she shares that she interviewed nannies alongside her husband before leaving so that she could insure that none of them were attractive enough to elicit adulterous behavior from said husband. I guess she missed whatever episode of Oprah it was where the emasculated “relationship expert” emphatically and condescendingly hailed trust to be the only thing that makes a marriage work. Go figure some more.

Anyway, if you’re as cynical as I am on a 6 a.m. flight then you know where this is going. I listen for signs that they are going to cheat. Same convention? Same hotel? Drinks from the flight attendant? If you’re anywhere near as ADD as I am on a 6 a.m. flight then you understand that it didn’t take too long before I stopped caring and stopped pretending to study my course pack and conked out for the rest of the hour and a half I was above the clouds.

What stays with me about the commuters on my flight is the empathy with which they responded to each other as they shared feelings of helplessness against the way their pursuit of capital regularly disrupts and imbalances their lives. It stirred my deep well of liberal arts student weltschmerz regarding The System and my inner iTunes playlist kicked out The Stones’ “Street Fightin’ Man.” But I have been in enough circular dialogues with various non-professional colleagues to understand the uroboric futility of complaining about things that won’t ever change.

What’s really depressing is that I don’t know how much better my life will be as a result of having recently received my BA. I want to believe in the midst of this recession that I will find a job that makes me happy, pays my bills, and might support my future wife and any potential kids we may have without destroying everything it helps me to build at the same time. I’ll keep you posted if anything comes up.

Oh, yeah… that…

So when I woke up the guy helped the lady get her bags down from the over head compartment. We were first off the plane and I kept spying for just long enough to watch them casually chat as they strolled off to baggage claim. Together. That’s as far as the voyeurism went for me before I stopped myself, but whatever happened between them wouldn’t surprise me. For better or worse. You all know the statistics. And the traveling for business cliches.

I don’t know any happy professionals. Not one.

The River

As odd or delusional as it might sound, I am somewhat jealous of Huckleberry Finn. He has the Mississippi River, after all. A blatant symbol in the real world that centers him every time he visits.

Huck doesn’t argue with the river. It goes its own way, and he simply enjoys floating along its course. Huck doesn’t argue about the river, either. No one can dispute that the Mississippi is real and it is there. Sacredness in feeling and in fact. No wars are fought in the name of the Mississippi. No hypocrites invoke its name on the TV or radio in efforts to seduce audiences for money.

Then again maybe that’s wrong.

People have always found and will always find reasons to war, even over the Mississippi. Things got pretty dirty between the native tribes and the colonizers. The early days of the riverboat business probably had its fair share of gangsters. Environmentalists and businessmen find themselves at odds over it too, I’m sure, dragging all the local politics into the muck with them. There were twenty levee breaches in the Mississippi River Gulf alone during The Storm, after all. And as far as invoking its name goes, there has to be a whole history of advertising devoted to the exploitation of the Mississippi’s particular charms.

Hell, even the existence of the river might be in question should you happen to get into a discussion about it with whatever random quantum physicist you happen to  come across in your travels. At least if a monk f—-d with you like that you could tell yourself it was symbolic or metaphorical. That bastard physicist might actually have you believing that the whole damned river is a lie.

So let me edit my jealousy and crop its scope so that it merely encapsulates Huck. I am jealous of how Huck has the river. I mean Big Money, Inc. might own all the land the river runs through and the nearby developments, etc. but Huck has The River. Inside he has it. Acallin’ to ‘im unconscious-like. All the way from Lake Itahsca in Minnehsohda on down t’the Delta in Nawlins.

But, of course, Huck isn’t real, is he? And my interpretation could be off too. I mean, I haven’t read the book in a while, maybe he does argue about the river. There’s just too many damned editors in our brains, trying to make our intellect their property. That’s what makes us crazier than anything else might. So damned worried about being wrong. S’why dey ain’t no God no mo’. E’rytime summahdy gets’im sum happy summahdy else wanna come ’round’n'pick it apaht ‘n’ twis’it. Dey dun pick’n'twis’d God t’death. S’why dey’s so many devils been loosed ‘pon de world.

Or maybe we’ve been the devils all along, wishing something better was watching over us. I stare long into the night sometimes thinking about that. God, if he exists, just seems to echo my silence.

The truth is I keep dreaming of a river. And I don’t know why. And I dream of the many voices along its bank. It could be the Mississippi. Or the Nile. Or the Tagus. These rivers all seem to flow through the Earth and through me like tears and bloodlines, tributaries into my heart.

But the editor won’t shut the f— up.

Those rivers don’t run together. They are not tears. Tears are salt water and most rivers are fresh water. They don’t flow from eyes they flow from lakes and mountains. They are not bloodlines. Those rivers cannot literally flow into you. Even if they could – which they can’t – your heart could not accept such a massive intake without expanding inside your chest, bursting, filling your lungs with water, and killing you. Check your facts. Stop being so maudlin.

Shut. The Fuck. Up.

Yo soy el Yaque. I am the world. History runs through me in a romance of freed slaves and wild natives, emptying out of my mouth in the northwest. I stretch backwards through the prism of time into the spectrum of peoples of the Earth. I am the open wound of their never-ending civil war. I still bleed.