When I met your Papi, he was just twenty-one, the same as you now. He was guapo, like you, with such a young face, I couldn’t believe he’d already been to war. I was only seventeen, and though I was against Vietnam, he’d enlisted and I found that brave. I had passion about inequity and oppression, but your father was already putting these things into practice. I remember, the night we met, we went walking in Sunset Park. He was studying education at Brooklyn College and had such big ambitions. To him, history books had been wiped clean of our existences and he wanted to change that. He wanted to change curriculums. To get more Black and Brown teachers in our classrooms. To change the way Black and Brown kids saw their educators; how they saw themselves. His vision was at once practical and expansive. I was excited and in awe and we were together from that day forward. And because of his dreams I started to have my own. Of us. Side by side. Changing the world.
But, Prieto, I was young and na?ve and completely swept up in your father’s energy. Unable to see the trouble laid out right before me. Vietnam offered your Papi a chance to escape his station in life, but it also tethered him to a terrible demon. Like many others he returned a heroin addict. He hid his problems well. It was months before I discovered it and by then I was so in love, the idea of us parting? Well, it physically pained me. He thought I could heal him and I thought I could, too. Thought that if I believed in him enough, he could overcome this and live out all those great ambitions he had for himself.
When he found the Lords I was so grateful. They helped get him clean and keep him clean. They provided him the camaraderie and discipline that your father had loved about the army. The times then were so exciting. For us. For our people. For the world. We were working hard and making a difference. Taking over hospitals, marching at the UN. We were calling attention to public health issues, to colonialism, and most importantly, we were educating and waking up our community. This, I thought, was what life with Johnny Acevedo was going to be about.
Eventually though, the movement collapsed—was ripped apart, really. By the time you were born, I had left the Lords, feeling they had lost their way. Frustrated with what this great organization had become. Your father didn’t agree. They wanted members to take factory jobs—to work directly with the proletariat—and he did. Went down to Bush Terminal and got a job in a plastics factory there. And I watched his world get a little smaller. Suddenly we had two children and his world got smaller still. People with big visions, Prieto, aren’t meant to shrink themselves.
Your father didn’t discover drugs then, he just revisited habits I had thought were long gone. A familiar way to expand his interior world once he decided to narrow his physical one. He’d been clean for years, but to me, when he gave up on his dreams, he lost his discipline. Started partying. Started with the crack, then back to dope. He lost the strength to say no to temptations. And now, because of this weakness, he is being eaten by this disease.
For years while this went on, I sacrificed my own goals and priorities to try and salvage his. In truth, I should have left right away. I didn’t fully comprehend, back then, that the only person who can chart your course is you. No individual can save another, certainly not anyone who doesn’t want to be saved. So, yes, it’s nice that you are there, close to home, for your Papi and your sister—but this sacrifice of yours will not change anything. Your Papi is an addict and has AIDS. He is not rich; he is not white; he is not Magic Johnson. No cure is going to find its way to him, certainly not in time.
When I hear about all that you are doing in Sunset Park—for the community, for Puerto Rican people, for working people—I’m reminded of the best of your father. That spirit of wanting to lift everyone up. You must be careful not to let anyone, including your family—even your own dying father—distract you from your bigger ambitions for yourself. You are a person of great potential, already on your path. Don’t make yourself smaller for anybody.
Prieto, your real Papi died several years ago. What is left now is just a body dying of this pato disease. Don’t make his shame your shame. Put a wall up between you and his last days, if for no other reason than to protect yourself. To preserve your own dreams. Keep the best of him close to your heart. Remember the lessons you learned when he led by example, and leave these days, these last years of his life, in a trash can. Set it on fire so you can’t visit it again.
You must remember, mijo, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors.