Coming from Nowhere

The first time someone called me a spic was during recess or after school in the playground or in the park across the street from my house. I was in shirtsleeves and it was hot or I had on a heavy winter coat with a ski hat and gloves and boots because it had snowed overnight and we could see our breath in the frigid winter cold.

I like the thought of the word spic hanging frozen in the air, the vapors of which are exhaled and linger for an unnatural period of time, like in a Saturday morning cartoon, until they disappear.

That’s how I’ve experienced most of what’s happened to me, from childhood on, as a series of vapors, exhalations, and disappearances.

Back when children wore snowsuits in such weather, the ones that had the mittens tied into the sleeves, the winters were majestic all over New York. There were blizzards every other weekend and the drifts would bury the cars parked in the streets and the trees lining the sidewalks. It seemed as if we would never see the cars again and if school ever did reopen we’d have to use wooden tennis rackets as makeshift snowshoes to get there.

We took photographs and when I say we I mean my mother and father took photographs of the cars, of my sister and me, all buried and content and whited out on our lawn outside of our Levitt house in the middle of a particularly conservative and culturally bankrupt part of the country known as Long Island.

One wouldn’t think of this as a realistic setting where one person calls another a spic for the first time. One imagines a brilliant sun and blaring heat, people sweating and wearing mirrored sunglasses and sandals instead of ski hats and waterproof boots.

My sister and I would go out to the backyard and build snow forts. We did this in matching snowsuits, designed to keep us safe and dry and warm, which were bulky and ridiculous and didn’t allow for any sort of athletic maneuver. You couldn’t fight in them, for instance, but you could build a fort and after the fort was built you could build another fort right next to it.

I have no memory of what, if anything, we did inside the forts.

The first time someone called me a spic I was six or nine or eleven years old.

The last time someone called me a spic was probably in high school and most likely a term of endearment.

I don’t think my sister was ever called a spic, regardless of the weather.

I’m sure she was called other things, but none of them ethnically motivated. I remember her friends used to call her Coco for Coco Lopez, which is a Puerto Rican coconut product used in many popular drinks.

I don’t think girls were called spics in the 1980s. Maybe they never were.

Now when it snows I stay inside. Maybe I look out the window, but I wait for the city to plow the streets and for the superintendents to shovel the sidewalks before I venture out into the world unless it is absolutely necessary, unless I have no choice and it’s about food or the possibility of tennis or sex.

I never play in the snow, stopped all that around the age of eight. I hear stories of grown people sledding in the park or cross-country skiing after a blizzard, building snow structures and the like.

I remember once a woman I dated expressed consternation when I didn’t throw a snowball at her after she pelted me with one while we were out walking one winter’s day. She accused me of having no fun.

Now I like it best when I go on the Pratt or New School or Columbia website and they say that all classes are canceled.

I don’t do anything special or especially productive with this unexpected day off and it isn’t as if I don’t like my job, but it still...