She broke my thumb. It was like someone hit the pause button on a broke ass VCR. For a moment, there was some static and a glitch in the playback, then the movie continued on. It, like everything else, never worked they way it was supposed to. If I wanted to stop this one, I was going to have to get out of my seat and do it myself. For whatever reason, I decided to let it play through till then end. I saw her swing the racquet but never really believed she would ever hit me with it. Looking back i was a schmuck for that. Human beings are capable of some pretty amazing and despicable shit. Thank you abuelita for the heads up on that one. The next thing I remember is seeing my brother Jared fluidly pick my grandmother up, throw her on the couch, and begin to scream in her face. I remember being so worried for him, as he stood there screaming at her, restraining himself from choking her to death. She looked like a scolded child, sulking mightily, yet still defiant.

Reeling from the pain of having my thumb broken in three places, I began to look at things in the home I shared with abuela and Jared. We were in the living room, which is where all the magic happened in my house. My eyes came to the rug that covered the floor. At some point in its life long long ago, it must have been a deep chocolate. Who orders a brown wall to wall carpet in the projects will forever exist beyond my realm of understanding. Years of getting stepped on my dirty boots, cigarette ashes, spilt drinks, and plenty of vomit and excrement from several species had turned it into the nasty ass rug I had known and loved. It had a smell that was simultaneously repulsed and comforted. I would sleep on it during the summer, as the only fan we had was kept in the living room. Its odor would creep into my nostrils and put me right to sleep. That rug was a repository of memories for so much of my family history. Grandpa held a gun to my mothers head on that rug, as it captured a pretty significant amount of my urine as I watched on at ten years old. Grandpa also poured a box of cereal on my Grandmas head there, his closing remarks in a pretty heated exchange between them. I walked in on my mom during one of her few short visits to the house, buck naked and coked out of her gourd, in the middle of a fuckfest with her boyfriend in the middle of the rug. She at least had the decency to put a blanket down. I don’t think anyone would have thought too highly of her bare-backing on the rug alone. When I entered the living room, she flew up off the floor, picked up the closest thing she could grab, a broom, and began smashing light bulbs around the house. It got pretty dark in there sometimes. All these thoughts went careening around in my head until I was able to snap back to reality.

I still had a pretty serious situation to deal with. My brother was about to choke my grandmother to death if I didn’t stop him, not to mention my thumb was about the size of a small child’s head and beginning to seriously hurt. I yelled at my brother to take me to the emergency room, which pulled is attention away from my grandmother long enough for us to get out of there before anything serious happened. I don’ think I mentioned what precipitated her swinging a racquet at me earlier, but it all began because I was scheduled to play in the biggest tennis tournament of my life the next day. Coming up playing tennis in the schoolyard program across the street from the projects where I grew up as a young kid, I had gotten good enough to play in the “Mayors Cup”, an event for the best high school players in the city. My grandmother was being a pain in the ass as usual, chipping away at me for hours, mocking me half in jest, telling me I wouldn’t get very far. The last straw came when she announced that not only would she not be coming to watch me play, she also wouldn’t be giving my brother and I train fare for the subway to get there. You see, we hadn’t gotten her coffee from the diner across the street the the previous day, and so she was going to teach us a lesson. As you might have guessed, people do not take lightly to being taught lessons in my family, so we stole her remote control. Now, for a woman who spent the last 30 years of her life living on a couch in front of the TV, this was a capital offense. She did give us trainfare to go the hospital, which was nice enough considering the circumstances.

Things didn’t shape up too bad in the aftermath of that event. I ended up in a cast for 6 weeks, getting alot of sympathy from friends as I watched them compete in the tournament. My grandmothers remote took a swim in the east river and her coffee delivery service was suspended for a few months. My brother has yet another emotional scar to add to the collection. When compared with some of the other things that went down in that living room, things ended splendidly. Every time I tell people stories about my childhood all I can really think about is the rug. The “chocolate rug”. The shit rug. My families rug. I never knew it as the “chocolate” rug but I caught myself describing it to someone that way when telling them a story. So many people have bled, shed tears, slept, and been impacted by what has taken place on that rug. Safe from the wonders and the horrors I experienced in that home, the rug doesn’t quite smell like shit to me anymore. I actually yearn for its dirty smell, being one of the only things that could put me right to sleep. Retelling these stories are like my rewind button that doesn’t quite work right. I am content with this as I’m not quite sure if I could work one that functioned properly anyway