My grandfather got me a slingshot, and I, being the kind of kid I was, immediately set about improving the ammunition. I’d ask for money for the grocery store, head straight for the toy aisle, and come back with a…

I proved my incompetence early. At eleven years old, I was already a liability. Tried to warm up my little brother on a mattress with a goddamn hair dryer, left it unattended. An inevitable watch. I broke every rule in…

My Uncle Brown, he was the white boy who married my grandmother’s sister—another one of those Spaniards with light skin and eyes like goddamn jewels. A beautiful woman. He married her when Huntington Park was still a white man’s town,…

I remember one summer night, we were just kids, running wild after the Fourth of July, thinking we were invincible—like a 9-year-old street gang, looking for trouble just to stay busy. I lived in Whittier on Ahmann Ave, right across…

Here’s the thing: you don’t realize the magic of moments until much later, when you look back through the haze of your past, and suddenly, those little, weird, wild things—those are the memories that stand out. That’s when you realize…

Bliss time, they called it. If you could call it that. My mom had a way of pulling me out of school for weeks at a time, just so she had someone to hang out with while she was unemployed.…

My mother had a saying: “We may be poor, but we always eat filet mignon.” And technically, she wasn’t wrong. We did eat steak. A lot of it. But not because we could afford it. No, my mother had perfected…

My Uncle Brown was the gringo who married my grandmother’s sister. They lived in a neighborhood that felt like something out of an old movie, a clean, white, suburban dream of tree-lined streets and manicured lawns. It was a place…

The studio apartment was tiny, compressed, like the life my stepdad, Jim, was trying to hold together after the divorce. Just enough room for a couch, a TV from Uncle Francis, and a couple of patio chairs. Jim worked the…

My stepdad—a term I loathe—was, in every way that mattered, my father. He had the same first and last name as me on paper, and he was the one who showed up. He was the one who stayed. He was…

My mother was not born angry. She was made that way. Forged in the fires of neglect, betrayal, and a lifetime of being pushed aside by the people who were supposed to love her most. If she lashed out, it…

At nine years old, I learned that family wasn’t forever. It wasn’t warm, or safe, or some sacred thing that wrapped you up and carried you through life. It was fragile. Conditional. Something that cracked under pressure and, if you…

After my Mom and Dad divorced, when I nine years old, I still believed in the illusion. The perfect house in Whittier, the neatly trimmed lawn, the family dinners where everyone sat in their assigned seats. This was how life…

By eleven years old, I was already done with the life I’d been handed. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew it wasn’t in that house, wasn’t in the sour smell of my mother’s drunken slurs,…

After the divorce, my mother drifted—no job, no real plan, just a woman cut loose from everything she thought she’d built. There was no stability, no sense of where we were going, but for a brief, golden window, we had…

The night I left that house for good, the whole goddamn neighborhood became an audience. Porch lights flickered on like cheap stage lights, illuminating the latest episode of the White Trash Family Shitshow. I was shirtless, shoeless, and radiating a…

My organic father finally agreed to take me away from my mother. The life I had with her was a special kind of hell. I wasn’t going to school anymore because I’d become a full-time babysitter for my little brother.…

I divorced my mother twice. The first one happened in my head when I was thirteen. It was the only one that mattered. The courtroom dog-and-pony show came later, a sad formality for the lawyers to get paid. I’d already…

My mother was born in Huntington Park, a Mexican girl in a family that wore hardship like a second skin. She had an older sister, the kind of beautiful that was a ticket out. The sister had a face like…

The title of motherhood died sometime between my ninth and eleventh birthday. She was still walking around, of course. Still breathing, still bitching. But she was dead. The real her, the one who was supposed to be there, had packed…