My Voice: A Memoir Read Online Free
Author: Angie Martinez
never saw him again.
As an adult I don’t have bad feelings toward my father. I feel like he was somebody who was struggling with his own issues and being a parent didn’t really work. So, past a certain time, he no longer was.
From then on it was just my mom, and she always made sure I felt loved. Even so, there was some negative fallout. In relationships to this day I don’t easily let others in. I believe in having four close friends, not twenty. Some people say I’m guarded, but I say I’m careful. And maybe that’s not always a bad thing. In my business it’s actually protected me from a lot of bullshit. So, at the end of the day, the way I was raised—complications and all—made me stronger and smarter about the people I do choose to let in.
• • •
O ur move to Brooklyn when I was eight could not have come any sooner for my mother, the ever-evolving Shirley, who was steadily moving up the career ladder after getting her start as a secretary at PolyGram Records and then transitioning from the label to a job at the radio station WYNY, all while doing whatever she could to find the right child care to keep me out of trouble.
No easy task—I was a crazy kid.
I broke my leg in seven places after jumping out of a tree at six years old. Then, a year later, I fell in the park and slit my arm open and needed eight stitches. And right before our move to Brooklyn, when we lived uptown on 207th Street, I was arguing with my cousin and banging on the French doors and my hand went through the glass. When I pulled my hand out, it ripped my wrist open. My mother—who happened to be in the other room playing her acoustic guitar, her latest interest—heard the screams and thought,
Oh God, what now?
That was until I come walking into her room and my wrist is wide-open. She calmly walks me to the bathtub, wraps my arm in towels, and one of the guys from the neighborhood rushes me to the hospital. The doctors said they could see my veins and I would need stiches inside and out. I still have a nasty scar on my wrist from that one. So yeah, all of this before the age of eight. It’s a wonder my poor mother didn’t have a heart attack.
Her solution was to keep a closer eye on me as she explored new avenues for growth and learning for herself. For example, she took me with her to various self-awareness meetings and Buddhist meditation groups where they would chant, “
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,
” attempting to awaken their deepest enlightenment. I remember sitting in there, in the back with a few other kids who’d been dragged along, too, all of us looking at each other like—
What are these crazy people talking about?
Even though at the time I might have thought they were weirdos, Iappreciate that my mother exposed me to different ways of thinking and believing. She also gave me a set of values that included the importance of splurging—when it mattered. We might have eaten ramen noodles or mac and cheese out of the box all week, but once in a while she’d find a way to take me to a really nice restaurant. We mostly shopped for bargains, but I also remember, now and then, her buying me a pair of expensive sneakers. Those instances were memorable because they were reminders that those experiences didn’t have to be out of reach. Lots of people I knew back then never even left the block where they grew up, mainly because they never could imagine themselves leaving and getting to travel the world beyond it.
In fact, it was while my mom was trying to evolve and remove herself from some of her childhood dysfunction that she decided to move away from our family uptown all the way to a one-bedroom apartment of our own in Brooklyn. And not just Brooklyn, but the end of Brooklyn, the farthest possible part of the city from Washington Heights—the third-to-last stop on the F train—Neptune Avenue, then known as the Van Sicklen stop. The train ride to get to our new neighborhood of Beach Haven took, like, two
As an adult I don’t have bad feelings toward my father. I feel like he was somebody who was struggling with his own issues and being a parent didn’t really work. So, past a certain time, he no longer was.
From then on it was just my mom, and she always made sure I felt loved. Even so, there was some negative fallout. In relationships to this day I don’t easily let others in. I believe in having four close friends, not twenty. Some people say I’m guarded, but I say I’m careful. And maybe that’s not always a bad thing. In my business it’s actually protected me from a lot of bullshit. So, at the end of the day, the way I was raised—complications and all—made me stronger and smarter about the people I do choose to let in.
• • •
O ur move to Brooklyn when I was eight could not have come any sooner for my mother, the ever-evolving Shirley, who was steadily moving up the career ladder after getting her start as a secretary at PolyGram Records and then transitioning from the label to a job at the radio station WYNY, all while doing whatever she could to find the right child care to keep me out of trouble.
No easy task—I was a crazy kid.
I broke my leg in seven places after jumping out of a tree at six years old. Then, a year later, I fell in the park and slit my arm open and needed eight stitches. And right before our move to Brooklyn, when we lived uptown on 207th Street, I was arguing with my cousin and banging on the French doors and my hand went through the glass. When I pulled my hand out, it ripped my wrist open. My mother—who happened to be in the other room playing her acoustic guitar, her latest interest—heard the screams and thought,
Oh God, what now?
That was until I come walking into her room and my wrist is wide-open. She calmly walks me to the bathtub, wraps my arm in towels, and one of the guys from the neighborhood rushes me to the hospital. The doctors said they could see my veins and I would need stiches inside and out. I still have a nasty scar on my wrist from that one. So yeah, all of this before the age of eight. It’s a wonder my poor mother didn’t have a heart attack.
Her solution was to keep a closer eye on me as she explored new avenues for growth and learning for herself. For example, she took me with her to various self-awareness meetings and Buddhist meditation groups where they would chant, “
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,
” attempting to awaken their deepest enlightenment. I remember sitting in there, in the back with a few other kids who’d been dragged along, too, all of us looking at each other like—
What are these crazy people talking about?
Even though at the time I might have thought they were weirdos, Iappreciate that my mother exposed me to different ways of thinking and believing. She also gave me a set of values that included the importance of splurging—when it mattered. We might have eaten ramen noodles or mac and cheese out of the box all week, but once in a while she’d find a way to take me to a really nice restaurant. We mostly shopped for bargains, but I also remember, now and then, her buying me a pair of expensive sneakers. Those instances were memorable because they were reminders that those experiences didn’t have to be out of reach. Lots of people I knew back then never even left the block where they grew up, mainly because they never could imagine themselves leaving and getting to travel the world beyond it.
In fact, it was while my mom was trying to evolve and remove herself from some of her childhood dysfunction that she decided to move away from our family uptown all the way to a one-bedroom apartment of our own in Brooklyn. And not just Brooklyn, but the end of Brooklyn, the farthest possible part of the city from Washington Heights—the third-to-last stop on the F train—Neptune Avenue, then known as the Van Sicklen stop. The train ride to get to our new neighborhood of Beach Haven took, like, two
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