By Mark Cisneros

Prologue

I was three years old when my dad first beat the fuck out of me. It was a brutal beating, made more so by the fact that before he hit me, I was already in a great deal of pain, crying hysterically from a kitchen accident that took place just seconds before. 

Today, had a nosy or concerned neighbor ratted on my dad, he surely would’ve gone to jail for child abuse, but this was 1973 Los Angeles, and we were Mexican, and nothing was more Mexican than getting your ass beat by your parents.  My dad hit me many times after that, even into my early teens, and I’m sure I deserved a few of those beatings, but I was a baby when he first hit me. It was not deserved. 

The pain is gone, but the memory lingers. I can still clearly see that night and hear it. For a long time afterward, and even now as an adult, I asked, “Why?” Why would my dad hit me at a time when I was completely helpless, a toddler just barely learning to be loved by his parents? I asked myself this question and many other questions. I tried looking at the incident from different angles and through different lenses, but nothing I came up with satisfied me. 

I realized I was making excuses for my dad’s actions, even justifying them. “Well, his parents beat him, too.  This is the way Mexican parents dealt with their kids back in those days,” I would say. And it was partly true because every Mexican kid in my neighborhood got his ass beat by his parents. It would happen in public, too: at the park, at Little League games, at Back-to-School Night. Getting beaten by our parents was part of the Mexican culture. I came up with several reasons and excuses to justify the beating, but the truth is I didn’t know why my dad did it.  No rational explanation came to mind.

I knew my dad as a loving man— a hard-working man. He was a veteran of the Korean War. He was a blue-collar worker to his core.  But I also knew my dad to be an angry man. Anger was in his blood, and it came from somewhere that no one knew, not even his brothers and sisters. It controlled him. It often got the best of him. The night he hit me was no exception.

Chapter One: Burned 

I love my mom’s cooking, and when I was a kid, my favorite dish was her homemade French fries.  Being by her side in the kitchen when she made them was a special time for me when I was an only child, and I had her all to myself. I watched her closely and quickly became familiar with the French fry process. First, she would heat a frying pan on high. When it was ready, she would drop in a generous scoop of Farmer John’s Lard right in the middle of it. As quickly as the lard hit the pan, the kitchen and living room came alive with cracks and pops from the sizzling Manteca as it danced in the pan.  The pops were a welcomed sound in our house because it meant my mom was cooking, and my mom’s cooking was in my DNA.

When I was in the kitchen with her, I got close, but not too close. I made sure to stand a few feet away from the stove because when she dropped the potatoes into the pan, tiny drops of heated lard would jump out and land on my baby arms and babyface, bringing sharp little stings to my baby skin, and it hurt. My dad was asleep in the bedroom. He worked the graveyard shift for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and he usually got up around 9:30 p.m. before he left for work. My mom would cook him a late dinner, and he’d take the leftovers to work.  Part of our job while we cooked was to be as quiet as possible so as not to wake my dad.

My mom’s fries were amazing! Even when she made beans and rice with homemade flour tortillas, I still only wanted fries. When she had made enough for both of us, we would sit at the table. As usual, we enjoyed our dinner while my dad slept. I gobbled up my fries, so I decided to get up for seconds, which looking back was a pretty independent move for a three-year-old. My mom remained seated while I walked to the stove. Her back was to me. The plate with the greased-soaked napkins was sitting on one of the unlit burners next to the heated pan. It was the plate my mom put the freshly cooked fries on. The napkins were piled on the plate in order to soak up the excess grease from the fries. There were no more fries on the plate, but I knew more were cooking because I could hear them sizzling and popping in the pan.  I couldn’t see them cooking, though, because I was too small to reach the top of the stove, but I knew they were there. My mom was still at the table, not concerned with what I was attempting.  

My only chance at getting more fries was to reach up and grab hold of the pan’s handle, which was sticking out like a plank over the stove. Not much thought went into my actions. I knew there were fries there and I wanted some. I’d drop a few onto my plate and be right back at the table with my mom.  Excitedly, I pulled down on the handle to get a look at the fries. I’ll do my best to describe this next part. I remember feeling the searing grease land on my three-year-old baby chest and then watching the baby skin melt off my chest and avalanche onto my belly.  The pain was more than instantaneous. It was terrifying. It was torture. It was from another world. The top layer of the skin on my chest had been completely erased. The scene was in slow motion.

I went primal. I dropped what I was holding and screamed a scream that no mother should ever hear their child make. I catapulted from the kitchen to the farthest living room wall, some twenty feet away, frantic, screaming from my chest, completely out of my mind, hitting every high-pitched decibel I could muster. I sprinted to the farthest living room wall, touched it, and ran full speed towards my mother. She was standing near the table where just moments before we were sharing a peaceful dinner Her arms were outstretched, shameful tears, guilty tears running down her skin. I ran into her arms and she caught me like a Navy carrier catches a jet in the middle of the ocean.

She clutched me and immediately took a seat while I stood before her in pure agony. She was crying as much as I was. She was hugging me and rocking me back and forth with delicate timing, chanting, “Ya, ya, mijo. Ya. Ya. No llores, mijo.” But I couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. We had both surrendered to the tragedy. The pain was immense. Then came a boom. It was my dad. He had stormed out of the bedroom like a madman, in his worn-out underwear, yelling and banging on the walls. “Chingada madre! Que chingados paso! Martha? Que chingados paso?” He was my dad, but he was different. I had never seen him like that.

My mom tried in vain to catch her breath so that she could answer my dad’s question. “Se, se, se quemo, Marcos! Se quemo!” She could barely get the words out. She was still holding on to me, sobbing uncontrollably, feeling sorry for me. Suddenly, my right arm was almost torn from its limb. My dad had torn me away from what was the safe haven of my mother’s arms. He jolted me in his direction so that he could get a look at my chest. When he saw the damage, his transformation intensified. He was maniacal. Everything about him was new to me. I had never seen his eyes so lifeless, yet so fiery. He mashed his teeth, then grabbed me by my right arm, lifted me in the air with a mighty pull, and proceeded to beat the fuck out of me with his right hand, in the kitchen, in front of my mom, slapping the shit out of my ass, over and over and over again until the pain in my chest was gone—until I stopped crying from getting burned.  I don’t have any physical scars on my chest to give proof that this ever happened to me, but it did. Trust.

I don’t remember anything after this. In fact, my next memory takes place years later. It’s almost as if I glitched out for three years and then reconnected just in time to be acquainted with my little brother Juan. In a sense, I was reborn. This is how I see it.

I’m the oldest of three. I’m glad I am, too, because I want to believe that I spared my brother and sister from the more brutish years of my dad’s anger.  I absorbed the brunt of his anger in my youth, in his youth, so that they wouldn’t have to, and I’m ok with it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop here.