Leap of Faith

My students have been using Google Earth to learn about maps this month. There’s something really compelling about zooming in on satellite pictures of their respective homes. First there’s this whole earth, then the planet spins and stops so we see North America, zooms in on the United States, New York, and Brooklyn in one second, then drops a balloon on the general neighborhood of where we are. Then, when it seems like we have located ourselves, we zoom in again and there’s a whole universe of streets to navigate. It serves as some sort of allegory for making a decision. Particularly, how several small and large decisions made the little balloon drop right here.

I had actually gotten a job before I finished my graduate program in Syracuse. It would have been a respectable job, teaching writing at a community college in Northern California. I had a place to live. I had friends there. I had started to pack up my little attic apartment in Syracuse and then a feeling of dread made me stop.

I wasn’t so sure I had made the decision to go back west. Each time I had made a life-altering decision, it was like peeling off a coat in 90-degree heat. Each time it also seemed to involve some sort of geography. Leave a boyfriend. Leave a career. Go write. Take up with that guy. Fly away. Come back. Drive around my ex’s house. And repeat.

This decision didn’t feel like that. I had always meant to live in Northern California again after my four years in college. My mother had thrown some drama worthy of an opera when I moved out of the house to go to Stanford. I was the first in my family to graduate from college and the first one to leave home. After graduating, I spent more than a decade in Los Angeles, sort of apologizing for leaving, sort of taking care of my family, and sort of thinking about maybe living up in the Bay Area again.

Being the oldest daughter in a Latino family is like having a PhD in Obligation. I took about a decade to finish up that lesson, and was left feeling like I wanted something more than what my family expected. That was the story of my life. I wanted freedom but I didn’t know what I wanted to be free from.

I thought back to the time when it seemed the whole world opened up to me, when I felt exhilarated that my effort and luck had brought me to a new place. I had always linked Northern California with that feeling. But it was in San Francisco, during an otherwise forgettable visit on New Years Eve, that I looked out the window at the skyline and I knew that I would have to move very far away to find that feeling again.
And when I was in Syracuse, the prospect of going back felt redundant. I had been away for three years, but I had a sense that I wasn’t done.

I tried a rational course of action. If I crunched the numbers my future plans boiled down to:


a) Staying in Syracuse, taking about 5.5 part time jobs, and enduring more 6.5 month winters
b) Going to Northern California, taking 2.7 part time jobs, only to fall 20% short of making a living
c) Going back to L.A. with 0 jobs, to sleep on my mother’s couch and take an infinite number of trips to Panda Express with her.

So of course, I watched TV for many hours to stop the videos of choices A-C from running through my head, already knowing what every second of each choice would be like. I needed a choice D to appear.

Then I tried the whole “Give me a sign.” business. And one day, just weeks before the lease was up on my place in Syracuse, I got Sign #1. I was walking over to my friend’s house in the middle of a muggy afternoon thinking, “where am I going?” And suddenly I heard myself answer, “New York City.”

And then my phone rang in my pocket and it was some lady who was trying to get me to sign up to pay more than a thousand dollars to take a TESOL course in New York City. I said no thanks. But I took it as Sign #2.

Then I got to my friend’s porch and she was putting down mulch in the little garden in front of her house. We talked about how the purple flowers were doing well.
She said she had a friend who needed a roommate in Brooklyn. I took that as Sign #3.

My friend had lived in NYC for nine years before coming to Syracuse. She said that she had moved there and then found a job. “That’s the way everybody does it,” she said.
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I didn’t trust the everybody business. I’m not everybody. I wanted someone to tell me that my choice (when and if I made one) was the right one, the one that wasn’t going to veer me off course. But then that begged the question—what course? Doesn’t that assume that I know where am I going?

I knew no one would give me the answer. Even my Psychic Superfriends gave me about three relocation possibilities each. So I put my ass in gear. I blasted New York City with my resume and packed up my apartment. Before I knew it, I was saying goodbye to my friends in Syracuse and driving to the city with my friend Tim (to whom I still owe my first born for driving that truck).

After an endless day of driving and then a three-hour getting lost detour, we made it to the brownstone where I was going to live. The two guys that I’d hired on Craig list were waiting for us. They helped us to unload the truck. Tim and I went to dinner, unpacked stuff to sleep on, and slept.

The next morning, I took Tim to the airport to catch his flight back to Syracuse. I didn’t have cash for cab fare (after tipping the Craig list movers). I’d heard that you could take the A train to the airport, and there we were at six in the morning, walking by all the closed 99 cent stores in Bed Stuy. My friend Chelsea had told me to look for the green balls that tell you there’s a subway station. We found the entrance to the C train at Kingston Throop. I had the right directions, thankfully, and he got on his plane.

Then I took the Air Train to Howard Beach to take the subway back to my apartment. Just as I got off the escalator, I saw the train pull up and open its doors. I leapt in, right before the door closed on me. I sat down, a little disoriented and out of breath.

The train started to move. It was above ground and the sun was coming in through the windows and lighting the inside of the old subway car gold. There were three sleeping people on the train, and Asian woman and a Mexican couple who all made perfect stone figurines. Instead of letting my mind race about all the things I had to do that day, I let the subway car became a gallery where I could contemplate the ancient contours of their faces. I sat and watched them until they woke up. I didn’t want to know where they were going or who they were. They reminded me of something I’d read about how artists draw better portraits when their subjects are shown upside down. It helps them not to be distracted by whose face it is or what they know about the people they are painting.

I used my directions to the airport backwards to find my apartment again. I got dressed, found my directions for the school where I was going to interview, went to the interview, did a sample lesson for two people, used my directions to the school backwards to get to my apartment, took off my suit, got a call telling me I’d gotten the job, and then took a nap. I didn’t think about the things that happened that day as signs. I didn’t think about how sore and tired I was from moving, or what I was going to do next. It would detract from whatever mystery I shared with the sleeping figurines on the train.

Falling in Love Underground

Falling in Love Underground

I didn’t have any idea I was going to live in New York when I first rode the 7 train. It was the spring of 2007 and I was visiting the city with the other writers in my graduate program. We were visiting publishing houses, the New Yorker, high-powered agents, and otherwise intoxicating ourselves with dreams of literary success. For two days, we got to live like successful writers, staying at a fancy hotel in midtown, taking cabs everywhere, and had our meals paid for (thanks to a generous gift from our rich sponsor). It was great. But that’s not the reason I decided to move here. Yes, New York City is like a guy that takes you out in his limo and shows you all the big buildings he owns, but I’m not that easy. My relationship with the city is more complicated and here, in some sort of chronology, are the reasons I fell in love with it:

One: I was the only Latina/o on the trip to the city. I think I was one of two Latinos in the program at Syracuse, and one of a handful in the city of Syracuse. Syracuse isn’t really a Latino hot spot. This will become important later.

Two: Except for the two other African/African American classmates in my class, most of the brown people I saw in the city were workers. They were busy in the background, lifting luggage, moving pallets, pouring water, and driving cabs like extras in a movie. I saw them loading and unloading trucks on street after street, seemingly powering the whole city with their motion. This is sort of foreshadowing for number three.

Three: One of my classmates had his foot in a cast. He, and his girlfriend and I were looking for a cab to get to a meeting with one of the aforementioned agents. The only one that stopped for us was a black Lincoln town car, a livery cab, driven by a crusty white dude. He had some kind of New York accent and said something about being on the clock for someone else, but he could take us where we wanted to go. We got in the back seat. There was a smattering of small talk, mostly about how my classmate hurt his foot. Then a delivery guy on a bicycle veered in front of the car.

“Goddamn Mexican,” the driver said. “But even if I run ‘im over, there’s a million others to replace ‘im.”

If there had been an accident, I wasn’t sure whose fault it would have been. But I was pretty sure the guy pedaling away was skinny and was wearing a loose t-shirt and was Asian.

My classmates didn’t say anything. I didn’t either.

Four: When we were at the meeting with the literary agent, we sat around a large conference room table in a large conference room and heard the agent talk about all his famous clients and all the big books he sold, and then…he made his big point. Latino literature. It’s hot right now.

Five: I left the group to go see a Cuban playwright I had met a few months before. We were going to have dinner in Jackson Heights, Queens. I had the directions he gave me in my hand and no idea what to expect.

Six: I walked to Grand Central Station and made my way to the subway through the maze of people. I walked two floors down and I noticed the air get colder, and it was like the molecules were looser, and the volume was turned up and I could breathe.

It was rush hour and there were people of every color waiting to go home. None of them seemed to be talking about killing and replacing Mexican bicycle messengers.

I remembered the agent’s story about meeting Fidel Castro and the tragic glamor that he ascribed to the whole idea of Cuba. I knew that somehow he had become infatuated with a very limited idea of what it is to be Cuban or Latin or whatever it was he called it. I wasn’t sure what to do when my classmates looked over at me for a reaction to the agent’s pronouncements. According to him, all I had to do was produce a story about Fidel Castro, preferably peopled with mobsters smoking Cuban cigars, and throw in a little CIA to become the next big thing.

I felt relief that no one was looking at me in the crowd that was waiting for the train. I didn’t have to say my name, or where I came from, or explain that my parents were immigrants from two different countries, that I was never in a gang, that I don’t listen to Modest Mouse, that I don’t write magical realism, and yes, random prospective students to the program at Syracuse who mysteriously got my email address, I’ll answer your questions about Marquez.

Seven: Poverty is complicated, I thought, as I was pressed into an uncomfortable position between four other people holding on to the same pole on the subway car. Everybody was stacked like furniture inside, a little topsy-turvy as we rumbled forward. First, we went through a tunnel. For a second, I saw people’s faces slacken and I felt I could read their thoughts. But instead of capturing several disparate thoughts, it was one reality that was peeled back and we were all just a cart load of workers, going anywhere from freedom to more work, from this job to the next, to start the task of living the rest of the day. It was something very true that I knew only because my father had worked all his life.
Then I was surprised that we were above ground. There was uniformity in the windows of the buildings with peeling paint and the grimaces on the faces of the people on the train. They all daydreamed together, half suspended in time, half hallucinating to separate themselves from the people pressed against them.

I don’t like being on a crowded train, and I don’t like being poor, but when I was packed like a sardine on the 7 I felt hope for the first time—that I would make it as a writer, that I would be able to write about myself as something other than a cartoon, that I could make sense out of the experience of being deemed a cockroach and marketing gold in the same day. As foreign as I felt in midtown, I felt like one of the working class commuters in Queens. That’s the thing about poverty, when you come from it, it always sort of feels like home.

Eight: Okay, so here’s a little bit of magical realism for you. Only I’m not making it up. Someone’s hand hovered inches from the back of my leg. My leg stiffened involuntarily, and then there was an electric pinprick sensation. I looked behind me and a guy was muttering some Santeria spell while his hand was just two inches away from my calf. The next day I got a carbuncle right on the spot that his hand was near.


Nine: The train starts to empty out and a guy who says his name is Julio and that he’s from Ecuador calls me corazón. He said that in the second I looked at him, I’d stolen his heart from his chest. He was a cocky little guy, a hunter of a sexy, more comfortable future than the one he had as a day laborer. He stopped pretending he was falling in love when he got to his stop and leaped out through the open doors, probably heading home to his wife and kids.

Ten: I walked down the stairs at the 82nd Street exit in Jackson Heights, which was like stepping into the bustling center of Bogotá, Delhi, Quito, and Mexico City all at once. My friend the playwright was waiting for me at the book stand that was on the corner like he said it would be. We looked at the books that were all in Spanish. The playwright had known the guy selling the books for years. The guy said he had a bookstore down the street and gave me his card.

The playwright and I went across the street to a Colombian restaurant. Once there, we talked about theater, books, writing, Cuba, and living in the United States.

We also talked about our families, and he asked me what my father was like.  In some ways, the playwright is like my father—an older generation, diabetic, light-skinned Cuban. But he’s nothing like him. I remembered something my therapist said to me after I spent the whole session talking about how I’d always disappointed my father.

“What if your father had been a writer?” she asked. “What if he was incredibly proud to have a daughter who does what you do?”

It wasn’t until that day, sitting across from my friend Pedro, that I could imagine a world where that could be true. My father had been dead for two years, but I was still looking for some closure, or acceptance, or reconciliation between what he and I wanted.

Now Pedro is my mentor, father figure, and friend. Several times a year, I take the 7 train to 82nd Street, I meet him at the book stand on the corner, we eat Colombian food, and we talk about theater, books, writing, Cuba, and living in New York City.