Just Kids From the Bronx (31 page)

CARLOS J. SERRANO

Playwright, poet, and theatrical producer

(1970– )

My grandparents lived downstairs from us in our apartment building. Whenever they needed something or we wanted to communicate with them, instead of us calling each other, we’d hit the radiator—a steam pipe—with a spoon. The steam pipe went from the top of the building all the way down, so my grandparents, who were directly under us, would answer,
Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding.
We might just be asking them,
Are you downstairs?
Then we basically just invited ourselves there.

My mom worked at the Woolworth’s store on 163rd Street on Southern Boulevard for at least the first five or six years of my life, so my grandparents were our babysitters during that time. They were also the people we went to if we wanted to get away from our parents. We were individually happy, but you had to deal with a lot of domestic arguments, like,
Oh, no. Dad’s drunk. It’s the weekend
. Or
Dad’s drunk again so let’s go downstairs and get away from that
. Or, you know, when my mother was in the middle of a personal hurricane,
Let’s get away. Let’s just go downstairs and hide
.

My dad would get hired on the weekends to deejay a party or to go to some party, but he’d also drink and get really drunk. So my mother had to go out there, find him, and bring him back to the house safely. That led to another set of arguments, which weren’t out of the ordinary, ’cause you heard arguments in the neighborhood in one way or another. I mean, the arguments in our house weren’t violent, but they were screaming matches with my mother always threatening to leave. That’s the thing, at least in a Puerto Rican household. “You know, one day I’m not going to be here.” And that’s what she would tell everybody. “I’m not going to be here. You guys take me for granted, I’m going to go. I’m going to go to Puerto Rico and you’ll never find me.” Once when I was a teenager, when it was just me and her alone with her screaming that, and I said, “Why don’t you leave?” She had no answer. No one had ever asked her that before. She had absolutely no answer.

People say that I look a little bit like my father, which kind of takes me aback. I don’t see myself that way, but then I see pictures of him and I see pictures of myself, and I do. Or I hear my voice. I hear how my voice is when I’m yelling. It’s the pattern, the voice pattern when he’s yelling in Spanish about why everyone is taking money from him. Money was always the basis of the arguments.
Why do you need money for that? Why is everybody taking from me?
That’s always the thing about Latino parents, or maybe just Puerto Rican parents. They’re always wondering why someone needs this or that.
Why they need money, why they need
me
? They’re taking me for granted.

We weren’t poor, or maybe we were as about middle class as a blue-collar family can be with one working parent. I guess when I look back, we took whatever we could ask for, and they did provide. For me, when I was growing up, a lot of examples of what a domestic family should be like I got from watching reruns of
The Brady Bunch
and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. These shows got me wanting something better.

In the South Bronx, where we lived, there were gangs and there was a drug situation. My mom used to hate it when I would go downstairs to play with friends. I felt like I was never in any danger until I was a teenager and understood what those dangers were. But even then, it was like I knew how to take care of myself. But my mom would catch me downstairs and then hit me all the way up. So I tried to figure out how to get out without her knowing. I never had keys to the apartment, so I would just lock the door, go down through the fire escape, and come back up through the fire escape.

My mother was afraid that I’d be recruited for a gang or something. What I did downstairs was play stickball and stoopball. Nothing dangerous. But she never really understood. When I was a teenager she never liked my friends. To me, they were just the neighborhood friends. Everybody had a particular role and characteristic. There was the guy who was the womanizer and would just joke around. And then there was this guy, Julio, who was probably the guy who would get into trouble because he looked like he would joke way too far. It would pass that boundary, and then he’d end up being in a fight. One day the boundary that he crossed was with me and I kind of fought him, but the next day it was like, “Hey, how ya doin’?” That was also the time when there were still those vacant lots and burned-down buildings, so we played in the rubble. As I said, my mother never really understood.

I think I always had a moral compass. I understood right away what was bad and what was good. I saw people being beat up by gangs or getting hurt, and I heard stories of this person who got shot or that person who got thrown in jail. And I could see what people looked like when they were high on cocaine or other stuff. I also had a view of the neighborhood characters through my window and could see how they could get, and I saw my father when he was drunk, in his wobbly stupor. It just never appealed to me.

My mother took us to church as kids. I was baptized late … when I was four … but I never did like church. My mom used to beat me to go to church when beating was the in thing to do. Nowadays, it’s like, “How can you treat your child like that?” But she’d say to me, “The reason I’m doing this is because I don’t want you ending up like them,” meaning the guys on the streets. And I always felt, like,
I’m not!

My mom was also into Santeria and she took me to her Santeria groups. There’s always this one leader of the group who would sit in the center and preach to everybody. I think at some point he would hold people’s heads and just shake them, I guess to get the bad spirits away from them. And people would go, “Viva Chango.” The God, Chango, is the head guy in Santeria. There are also a bunch of saints. There’s a learning thing there. Chango was just a flawed guy and when he became a God he took advantage of his position, so he had to learn the lesson that responsibility comes with power. I think that’s the whole learning thing about that God and the whole Santeria, that mistakes happen when you’re younger and that there are consequences to your actions. That Spider-Man credo.
What comes with great power comes with great responsibility.

I always felt myself different from everybody else. I think I was drawn into theater and the arts very early. I was the quietest of my three siblings, so I observed a lot and I watched a lot and I saw a lot. I’m fascinated with how people act and what people do. There was a PBS presentation of
The Elephant Man
. It was a stage presentation that was on TV and the actor that played the Elephant Man didn’t have makeup on. I remember asking why that was, and my sister explained to me, “I think it’s because everybody has a different perception of what ugly is.” So to have a fixed idea of what ugly is would give you only one point of view, but to have to imagine … For some reason, that stuck with me. So I started writing when I was thirteen because on those days that I couldn’t get away from my mom, or couldn’t figure out that escape, I wrote. I imagined stories. I imagined these adventures that I wanted to have, but couldn’t, or imagined adventures that I thought adults had, like looking for treasure or fighting a bad enemy. In seventh grade, one of my teachers said about something I had written, “We should produce it in front of the whole school,” and that was a big deal for me, you know, to have people laugh and enjoying themselves, and to have teachers saying, “You really did a good job.” Writing was an arena I felt really comfortable in. One where I thrived.

After high school I ended up at Brooklyn College because they had just begun a new creative writing program there. The professor there, Saul Galen, said to me, “Carlos, I know that you’re a writer. You should apply to this program.” So I did it, just on a whim. Meanwhile, I had gotten a scholarship to Rockford College in Illinois. Then I got a call from Professor Galen. He said that they got my application and that they would like me to come down for an interview. So I went there to see him—he’s one of those close talkers, so he’s right in your face—“You know, Carlos, I understand that you got accepted to Illinois, and you’d probably be close to Chicago, but for theater, New York is where it’s at.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, you should stay here. You should do this program.” And that pretty much convinced me because that was the first time that I was seriously encouraged to write. My teachers before that had said to me that I did a good job, or that I should continue because it was a fun thing to do, but this was the first time that it really felt serious. I wanted to write and there was a program for that. And at that same time, I wrote a play about my senior year in high school and it won honorable mention in a citywide contest for young playwrights. It was a sign that I was headed in the right direction, with both the recognition and the encouragement.

RENEE HERNANDEZ

Physician, founder and owner of Tirado Distilleries in the Bronx

(1973– )

Becoming a doctor has been my passion since the age of fourteen. Initially, since I loved animals, I wanted to be a vet. Then at a certain point I think it just was easier to learn about one animal than a lot of different animals, so it boiled down to learning about humans. That’s how I became an MD. And then it evolved further into serving the people, serving the community, serving the area in which we live. I wanted to create an environment that was very different from what my mother used to go to, which was more like a Medicaid mill. They were just pumping out patients and not really giving them the attention they deserved. I love what I do as a doctor. I would do it for free. It’s what I dreamt of since I was young so I’m blessed that I’m living my dream.

As a kid, we lived on Beech Terrace, with relatives living in the same building. I had a couple of aunts living floors above us and a couple of uncles living below us. My father was a chef who worked at the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home on Sixty-Eighth and York Avenue in Manhattan. My mom was a stay-at-home mom until we were a little bit older. Then she worked as a home health aide.

I had been in the gifted program at I.S. 149, the same program as Ruben Diaz Jr. Where I was in the South Bronx, buildings were burning, and there was the crack epidemic, HIV. That was all around me, but basically as a kid in the gifted program I escaped that. One of the things they did in that program was to separate the top ten percent of the students and make them compete with one another so that they pushed one another to their limits. You challenged each other as to who was going to be the best. With that as your background, you knew you could pretty much handle whatever situation was presented out there.

I would say that coming from a loving family that’s supportive, that’s constantly pushing you to achieve, was especially important. And the church was very important in my life too. You can’t do this job of doctoring without being spiritual. You can’t do this job without dedicating your work to God—dedicating your work to serving others. If you don’t have that foundation it’s hard. It’s really hard. You can get corrupted. You realize as you get older that money is nice to have but it’s not everything.

I went from the junior high school in the Bronx to being a scholarship boarding student at Suffield Academy in Connecticut. Although I was lonely there, I realized how blessed I was. A lot of students there were from privileged homes economically, but their families were really in disarray. I had my very strong family background with a lot of love within the family. And then I got to have that education opportunity at Suffield. It was awesome. Just thirteen students to one teacher. And in Spanish class, there were three students to a teacher. We also had advanced math courses. Suffield gave me the preparation and foundation for college.

In the sixties and seventies, there was a shift in the Hispanic population in New York. That’s when a lot of Dominicans came in. It was a new culture for us as Puerto Ricans. There was initially a clash between the two cultures, which I think stems back to the island and the exploitation of each other in Puerto Rico and then continuing in the United States. The Dominican view, which is interesting, is you gotta work. We’re gonna work and we’re gonna do whatever it takes to make it here. The first generation wants to go back, but by the second and third generations they’ve already created enough networking to stay here.