Fifty-One Damned Years
My Autobiography, In a Blog Post
(Long Read)
It's late in the night. And 35 years ago today, I was locked up in a psychiatric hospital ward for kids and teenagers because my father despised me and a twisted psychopath named Rafael Carreira wanted me dead at the tender age of fifteen. I survived at fifteen, but not so much at fifty. I may pack it in tonight or sometime soon.
Who was I?
I was born Joseph Manuel Tages II on April 10th, 1972 in Manhattan, New York, the largest metropolitan area in the world. My parents are Gladys Ramona Edmidania Castro Roque (born October 31st, 1929 in Álava, Cuba) and José Manuel Emeterio Gregorio Tages García (born March 3rd, 1946 in Jacán, Cuba). Yes, Spaniards had a tendency to go overboard when naming their kids. My mother was 42. My father was 26. It was her second of two marriages and his first of two. I was raised in Cadiz, Spain, with biannual stays in Anaheim, California during the summer months.
The very first place I ever lived in was my parents' tiny, one bedroom apartment. It's still located at 51 Bennett Avenue in the Hudson Heights neighborhood in Manhattan. It was built in 1924 and has 5 stories and 49 units. It's still standing as of this writing and I expect it to be there for as long as New York City is a thing. Which basically means forever.
Aside from family, I prefer to be simply known as Joe. It keeps things simple and it distances me from my father. He anglicized his name from "José" after my birth, which would make me the senior Joseph. He also neglected to add "Jr." instead of "II" to my surname, since the latter is usually applied only to a man's nephew rather than his son.
I was an "unplanned" baby. My father was apparently not at all interested in having a kid and my mother had been told long before my birth that she would never become pregnant.
Born in the Manhattan borough of New York City by happenstance, I am 99% Cuban and 1% Spanish through my paternal grandfather. I was raised from ages 1 to 8 in his native country of Spain, but I have spent the rest of my life in my country of birth, the United States of America. I have lived in the states of New York, Florida, and Illinois, but have called California my home for most of my 50 years. My mother's family moved and lived out the rest of their lives here starting in the late 1960s.
I am also descended from the French (a great country) through my maternal grandmother, Maria Teresa Roque, or Marie-Thérèse Roque. The Roque surname originated in Languedoc, a former province of France now contained in the modern-day southern region of Occitanie. Its capital city was Toulouse, now referred to as its prefecture. (Don't ask me, it was the French's idea.)
I grew up as an only child. At age 27, I gained a half-brother after my father remarried in 1995. His name is Manny and he was born on February 21st, 2000. He resides in Illinois. On my father's side, I have six first cousins: Eddy Reyes, (born November 27th, 1970) Julio Tages, (born January 8th, 1971) Teddy Tages, (born September 21st, 1971) Pedro "Peter" Tages, (born November 15th, 1971) Mabel Zagales Essex (born April 18th, 1972) and Kitty Labrador, (born December 19th, 1975) all of whom reside in Florida.
As I stated earlier, my journey into this world wasn't planned for. My parents met in a Roman Catholic church in Colón, Cuba during the mid-1960s. The progressive reforms which resulted from Vatican II under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI brought a group of young French Canadian priests to the newly Communist island nation. They were missionaries whose primary goal was to aid the poor. Their idealism brought people like my mother back into the fold since she had been a steadfast revolutionary up to Fidel's eventual Marxist reveal.
At the time that my parents met, religion played a significant role in both of their lives. She was in charge of the church choir. He was an altar boy. She was 16 years his senior, but it was he who fell for her. She was a divorcee in her 30s whose teenage sweetheart had left her for another woman. She wasn't ready for another attempt at finding love and initially rejected his advances, but he persisted and she gave in. Both sets of parents encouraged the union.
My father arrived in New York City in 1967, primarily to undergo surgery on his right leg, which had been ravaged by polio since childhood. But he was actually defecting to the U.S. with the aid of the Swiss embassy in Havana to avoid being drafted into Cuba's Communist armed forces. He later married my mother in Madrid on his 25th birthday: March 3rd, 1971. They moved to New York City soon after. (But he perjured himself in court in 2014 by denying that this event ever took place, to say nothing of my subsequent birth on April 10th, 1972.) After working in a factory for several years, he suddenly decided that he wanted to become a physician. He was in his late 20s by then and had just impregnated my mother.
When my father told my mother that he wanted to enroll in medical school, I was already in the room with them both, albeit within her womb. But I’m pretty sure that I made her belly jump for a second. “Oh my God!” I must have “thought” in there: “I’ll be condemned to live a totally nomadic lifestyle and lack any sort of emotional stability whatsoever! I won’t get to keep any of my childhood friends or even have a girlfriend to begin with! And to top it all off, I’m gonna be born during Nixon’s reelection year. I am NOT going out there!”
So when April of 1972 arrived, my mother’s water just wouldn’t break. When it finally did, she was rushed to St. Luke Women’s Hospital right next to Harlem (hence, my lifelong love of 70s soul music) and the doctor who took a look at her said something to the nurse that she never forgot: “Tomorrow is too late.” Now, my mom didn’t know any English at all, but she understood what that meant. I didn’t want to come out. So they had to perform a caesarean section at age 42 on the poor woman.
Ironically, she didn’t want to come out of my grandmother’s belly back on Halloween of 1929. Maybe it was because she’d heard about the Wall Street Crash that had occurred just mere days prior, kicking off The Great Depression. She said that when the doctor managed to pull her out, the palm of her hand was resting on her forehead, as if she was in deep thought.
We both knew fully well at different points in time that rough lives laid ahead for both of us.
Soon after we had left New York City, my father considered going off on his own to Spain so my mother could raise me in the United States, specifically here in Anaheim where her parents and a few of her cousins resided. In other words, he wanted to end the marriage. Okay.
But he wasn’t able to speak up for himself, so he got one of my mother’s cousins to convince her into staying behind with me. Being an idealistic romantic, my mother did not want to separate the child from his father. So, the three of us foolishly left for Spain together.
In retrospect, this was a very bad move on my mother’s part. Given everything that was to come, it would have been better for everyone involved if my parents had called it quits and ended the marriage, so my father could have had the freedom to do as he pleased. Logical.
But it would have been a far wiser choice if my mother had never become pregnant to begin with. I honestly believe that I wasn’t meant to ever come into this world. It was merely a selfish act on my parents’ part. My father's only priority in life has always been himself.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. If you’re going to bring a kid into your life, you better be damned sure that you want it. Far too many of us arrive in the middle of someone else’s life because two assholes decided to have sex without thinking about the consequences.
They waited until my birth and before my second year of life, we were living in Cadiz, Spain on the other side of the world. He attended the Faculty of Medicine there over a span of seven years from 1974 to 1981. Arriving shortly before my 2nd birthday, I first became aware of the world around me in Cadiz. I wouldn't be able to learn English until after I had left Spain at age 8. But I loved Spain and the very first friendships I made in life were forged there.
Entering a bit late in the game, my father struggled with medical school. His grades weren't the best and he passed each course by the skin of his teeth. He personally wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, but his hands shook too much due to his post-polio syndrome and other health issues. After our return to the United States in 1981, we lived on food stamps while my father studied at Kaplan test center in Orange as he prepared to undergo medical equivalency exams in order to work in this country.
He went back to Spain in November of 1982 because there was an error in his medical degree which couldn't be corrected through the mail. My mother had to give up our small apartment because she couldn't afford the rent, so she and I lived in my grandmother and aunt's living room throughout all of 1983. That's when I first realized that I was suffering from what would later be explained to me as clinical depression. (The type that Vincent van Gogh had.) I lived in that equally tiny but beloved apartment off and on from 1973 to 1989, basically whenever my father wasn't around moving us to other places around the country. He returned from Spain but then went off to New York once again, this time living with a classmate from med school in Cadiz and his wife.
At one point around my 11th birthday, it looked like we were going to settle down in New Rochelle, but he then headed south to Miami and lived with his younger brother along with the guy's wife and kids after landing a job at a nearby hospital. It was brief, but my mother and I joined him in 1984 and lived in a fancy home which we borrowed during the 5 or 6 months we were there. I met my cousin Peter during that time and they celebrated my 12th birthday, but soon after we were headed up north once my father hit paydirt in his endless quest for proper medical employment.
After Miami had started to grow on me, we moved via our Toyota Tercel up to Chicago, Illinois. We settled into the most drab and depressing apartment building I have ever lived in. I was placed in a private Catholic school just as puberty was creeping in on me. But my father had struck gold at long last.
After a couple of years wandering around the country in search of an opening, he undertook his residency in pathology at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, beginning in the second half of 1984. His boss and mentor was Dr. Noly Martinez, who had been the former mayor of my parents' hometown back in Cuba, and was then director of pathology and nuclear medicine at Mercy from 1971 to his death from cancer in 1986. Noly and his wife became friends with my mother and he was always very kind towards me. For the next few years, I accompanied my father to work if he was in the mood for company. (Mostly because the nuns who helped run the place mistook me for his older brother rather than his son. Since he was going through a midlife crisis at the time, that really made his day.) By age 14, I had witnessed an actual autopsy as it took place.
How did it happen? One of my father's colleagues and I had become great friends, and he asked me if I wanted to see what it was like to dissect a corpse. It had once been an elderly nun, but it hardly resembled that when he began to work on her. I'm sure that I wasn't supposed to be in that room with him, but it was a truly enlightening experience in regards to the meaning of life and the importance of forensic medicine. He said to me as he suited up: "By dissecting this lady, whose time on this world is done, she may still help us discover the cure to a disease through the autopsy I'm performing on her." So I watched him as he explained to me each phase of the entire process.
A couple of years later, my father was given the task of handling the body of Laurie Dann, a woman who shot and killed a boy at a school in May of 1988, wounding three more kids before walking into a family's home in Winnetka, Illinois. She met a couple there along with their son. She shot the son, but he survived. Despite her husband's arrival at the scene, Dann committed suicide inside the family's house after the police had surrounded it. Her corpse ended up at my father's morgue. He told us that she had shot herself in the mouth. My father's job was not unlike actor Jack Klugman's character in the TV series "Quincy, M.E." It led me to consider following in his footsteps, but he discouraged me from doing so. Regardless, my own true loves were writing and teaching history in an academic setting, so I turned my attention back to those subjects.
One of the highlights of my father's life is an event which he probably doesn't remember. While scouting possible medical residencies in Miami, my father met up with an old friend who introduced him to Huber Matos, the legendary member of the Cuban Revolution who landed in prison for two decades after turning against Fidel Castro once he realized that Castro would turn Cuba into a Communist dictatorship rather than the Nordic Model-like democracy that Matos and others had envisioned. My father's friend attempted to recruit him as a doctor in a possible army that Matos was building as an exile in Florida, hoping to pick up where the Bay of Pigs fiasco had left off. My father was brought before Matos at his estate, where he lived surrounded by armed bodyguards in case of an assassination attempt on Castro's part. This was the stuff of those early 1980s Cannon Group/Golan-Globus action thrillers! Alas, my father turned Matos down and nothing came of the latter's aspirations to take back Cuba.
My father eventually set up his own business, but the money he earned owning a clinic wasn't enough for him. Aside from his practice, he attempted to run a travel agency with his brother, a taco truck, and even a late night Spanish-language TV show which literally ripped off MTV's own "Loveline" by teaming him up with a Mexican DJ who was very popular in Chicago, as Cuba's answer to Dr. Drew Pinsky. Yes, really. He even had his own freaking TV show complete with "wacky" intro. The DJ would mock the hapless men who called in regarding their troubled sex lives, while my father would provide serious, straight-faced medical advice while dressed in a suit and tie. The topics started off being handled reasonably before veering off into some plainly tasteless territory. Howard Beale was right, people. This drek lasted two "seasons" and his nephew, (my cousin Eddy) served as its executive producer. It did not end well for either one of them. Except for the DJ, that is. He just went back to his normal radio gig.
My father also purchased land and rented it out to a dude ranch for ill children called Ready Set Ride, which was later promoted by crackpot anti-vaxxer ex-Playmate Jenny McCarthy after her son was diagnosed with autism, as was the case with my own half-brother. Finally, my father became the unlikely ringleader of a massive health insurance fraud operation that cost him the loss of his medical license and having his clinic shut down after a raid by the FBI and the IRS. He barely missed serving a lengthy prison sentence. He stopped paying alimony to my mother in 2014 and owes her thousands of dollars to this very day. The last time I saw him was in 2003 and we haven't talked since his trial. I don't expect to see or hear from him ever again and that is probably a very good thing.
We moved around a lot during the 70s and 80s due to my father's ambitions. I attended 7 different schools in 3 states and 2 countries during my first 17 years. I was always "the new kid in town" as the old song goes. It sucked. We were always poor as dirt. My mother was an expert at interior decorating using borrowed furniture or stuff thrown out in the garbage by other people. She never bought a new dress, purse, jewelry, or furniture in all our years together. She attempted to learn English, drive a car, and attend college, but my father always kept her from doing so. Her own aspiration as a young woman had been to become a lawyer, but it was not to be.
I was a born romantic but my loves were always unrequited. I started by crushing on a redheaded girl not unlike Charlie Brown's impossible paramour. Then I moved on to my preschool teacher, the first older woman I was attracted to and the first one who was married. Then came Isabel, a dark-skinned cutie who caught my eye in class.
And so it went: Back from Spain, my next heartbreaks were Emma in 4th grade and Dawn in 5th. By middle school, I found my true First Love. She was 11. I was 13. By the time we parted ways, she was 13 and I was 15. She had green eyes and blonde hair. I wanted nothing more in the world than to make her my wife. But it was not to be. In high school, there was Stacey, who was five months my senior, smoked in the girls' bathroom and likely did heavier stuff. I dropped out of high school and returned home after that. I became infatuated with my first cousin in 1997 and fell deeply for a married woman 16 years my senior in 2002. Those two never were anywhere, except into other men's arms that weren't mine.
After moving 11 times and attending 7 schools in 2 countries without being able to do anything about it, I settled down here in Anaheim during the summer of 1989 at the age of 17. I planned to live in my grandparents' tiny old apartment with my grandmother and aunt, but my father had other ideas. He "purchased" a large home which was then around twenty years old and stuck my aunt with the mortgage. But he was basically laying down the groundwork for a separation from my mother. Sure enough, she had joined us in June of 1990 after he moved to Wyoming.
Did I forget to mention Wyoming? Shortly after having finished his stint as a pathologist, my father went to work at a clinic owned by an Argentinian doctor in Chicago's Mexican neighborhood around 26th street. But he wanted to run his own business, so he began to head out on trips to places such as Burlington, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah. I had left home by then, so my mother was on her own. He settled for Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, replacing the retired physician of that small town on the Nebraska border.
At my mother's request, I traveled there with him in the summer of 1990 to help unpack his move. (And just in time to witness the big celebration of Wyoming's Centenary.) When the doctor told us that he had spent 30 years there, my father said that he would beat his record. But by 1994, he was already back in Chicago working for the Argentinian, who had asked him to come back. The local folks in Pine Bluffs didn't quite take to his bedside manner or jacking up the cost of meds, but some of them were simply weary of suddenly having a Cuban in their midst. They stuck him with a dumpy shack for a home which I nicknamed "the seven dwarves' cottage" due to its size or lack thereof. We were so depressed on our first day there that we chucked the massive unpacking which awaited us and drove off to South Dakota to play tourists at Mount Rushmore. I took my only helicopter ride there and I loved it. While stopping at a motel for the evening, the owners noticed our accents and when we told them that we were "Cubans" they asked us why the heck we weren't in Miami. Way to get paying visitors into your puny state, ya knuckleheads.
Regardless, things started out well for my father. He was offered the mayor's office, (which was rotated among the few important men in town) but he passed on it. He even became friends with the governor himself, (Mike Sullivan) who would visit him down from Cheyenne. He really took to country living until he realized that his predecessor had left him with Eisenhower-era technology to work with, so he had to pay out of his own pocket in order to upgrade and update everything. Eventually, his brother and nephew drove up from Miami and rebuilt the clinic up from scratch. But the stress of being a tri-county doctor would take its toll on him. (He not only serviced counties in Wyoming and Nebraska, but also in Colorado.)
After I returned to California, my father called up his brothers. Between his money and the three of them (along with a small construction crew) they built a large home atop a hill overlooking Pine Bluffs. But his relations with the townsfolk went south real fast. After one of his brothers returned to Miami (he was sick of "smelling horseshit" every day he lived there) my father and his other brother were literally run out of town. Or, by one account, chased by the law (ala Buford T. Justice and Bo "The Bandit" Darville) all the way through the highway which took you from Wyoming to the more metropolitan areas of the midwest, the ending point being once again, Chicago, Illinois.
He hasn't moved from the Aurora area ever since.
Meanwhile, I had taken a high school correspondence course. Donnie and Marie Osmond were among its alumni since they were always on the road as kids. The deal was that they sent you the textbooks for each course and you completed the exams for each course. My first one was psychology and I finished it with an A+. I completed courses on social civics, U.S. and world history, U.S. and UK literature, political science and others, all with A+ grades at the end of each one. I only got stuck when I reached Math and had two hire two different tutors. By the time I graduated, I had an 89.5 grade point average.
It was impressive enough for me to receive an invitation to study at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. This was in 1994 after I began to apply all over western Europe, with England and Spain as my main countries of interest. At Essex, I was offered a degree in history. Soon after, I received an invitation from the University of Plymouth to study political science. I also had a priest inquire into admitting me to the University of Toledo in Spain.
I was particularly interested in Essex for two reasons: For one, English was easier for me to read and write than Spanish. By my early 20s, I had even been thinking in English for years, despite missing out on having grown up in the United States due to my father's medical career.
Secondingly, and most importantly, the British pound has always been more valuable than the American dollar. I was determined on making academia my life's career. I was ambitious: My plan was to make contacts at Essex and maybe land my first job there after graduation, perhaps teaching history. From there on, I'd try to make my way up to Oxford and/or Cambridge. The more prestigious, the better. My goal was to earn enough money that, once converted into dollars, would help my mother and aunt pay off the mortgage faster so that they could become owners of their home once and for all. They had always dreamt about expanding it by adding a second floor and a study, or maybe an additional living room beyond the back patio doors. I wanted to help make their dreams come true along with mine.
Along with teaching, I was also planning on writing. My lifelong dream since childhood was to become a prolific published author. I was writing a lot of poetry at the time and had even begun crafting a stage play based on my mother's family, spanning three generations. A Cuban version of Roots, if you will. At the time, the sky was the limit when it came to the depth and scope of my plans! But it was not to be. None of it. Only disaster and ruin awaited me in the coming years. And death. Lots and lots of deaths. Not to mention the shame that my father would bring to my family by dragging our name through the mud for well over a decade as of this writing.
What happened? I had no funds. Unlike my father, no bank would lend me money. The Department of Education turned me down. My father was only willing to help if I studied in Guadalajara, Mexico. I spent a year selling everything I had to scrounge up the dough. It was all for naught. On October 3rd of 1995, I had to sit down and write a letter to Ms. Janet E. Howe, the kindly admissions department head at Essex, essentially turning down their offer. Moments after, there was a knock at the door. It was a high schooler looking for money so that he and his buddies could spend their summer vacation in the UK. That's when I realized that if there was a higher power which lorded over my destiny, it had a sadistic sense of humor and got its kicks trashing my life every couple of years after I thought I'd finally made a breakthrough.
Eventually, I attended a couple of local community colleges and obtained an Associate Degree in my thirties while simultaneously working as an usher/bouncer at a nearby event venue. After I was diagnosed with a math learning disorder, I transferred to a private Christian university simply because they didn't require that I pass an algebra course in order to graduate like Cal State Fullerton insisted that I do, regardless of my inability to comprehend simple mathematics. So I continued my studies at the Christian school until I could satisfy their own requirements. I did so in 2008, earning a Bachelor of Science in Business Management because it was the only degree they offered that didn't involve religion or missionary work. To this day, I have yet to find a business to manage and I will be up to my neck in student loan debts for the rest of my life. But those invitations from Essex and Plymouth earned off the grade averages from a humble correspondence course will always stand as my proudest achievements.
The places where I have lived are listed below.
1972 to 1973: Manhattan, New York (Birthplace)
1973 to 1974: Anaheim, California
1974 to 1981: Cadiz, Spain
1981 to 1984: Anaheim, California
1984: Miami, Florida (January to June)
1984 to 1987: Chicago, Illinois (Rogers Park)
1987 to 1989: Woodridge, Illinois
1989 to Present: Anaheim, California
Ironically, I have never set foot in Cuba, the land of my ancestors. Time will tell if I ever do so, but as more of my extended family members pass away, the less inclined I feel to travel there. I am against the Cuban Embargo and believe it has only worsened conditions for those living under the Castro regime. By bloodright, I own land on the Isle of Youth, a longtime haven for Caribbean pirates and the historical inspiration for classic works of literature such as Stevenson's Treasure Island and Barrie's Peter Pan. I am a decendent of two Spanish brothers who were members of the royal nobility and originally owned the small isle until one of them died and the other bought out the widow's stake in the land, becoming its de facto proprietor and passing it down to his own children and their kin over several centuries, culminating in the Spanish-American War and the birth of the Republic of Cuba in 1902.
I returned to New York City twice: During the summer of 1977 and in June of 1986. I feel no emotional connection to the city, but I'm proud that I was born in it due to its historical significance, even though I was merely the end result of an unplanned pregnancy.
I returned to Miami for the holiday season in December of 1997 and January of 1998. I was there again for a couple of days in 1999. I didn't like the heat or humidity, but it was a great place to cut loose and shed all inhibitions. I swear that nobody ever sleeps at night over there. The passionate Cuban ambience and its accompanying joie de vivre is intoxicating! My cousin Peter lived there for most of his life and we hung out together in his beloved vintage DeLorean. The most fun I've ever had has been at his side, playing Rico Tubbs to his Sonny Crockett. I truly miss those years. Good times.
I returned to the Chicago suburbs in July of 2003 and to my old Rogers Park neighborhood in November of that year. I had no business ever moving to Chicago. My mother called it a "cleaner" version of New York City, which she also loved. It was easy to navigate by bus and fun to walk through. But I wouldn't ever go back again. Most of the kids I knew have long since moved away.
The same goes for Woodridge and its surrounding suburbs. My father bought a nice house there and it was ours for five years, although I only lived in it for the first three. It was literally in the middle of nowhere and a walk in the snow to the nearest school bus stop could take around half an hour. My mother and I spent most of our time there alone, but we enjoyed raising wild rabbits that had been left behind as baby bunnies by their mom. We'd also free our six parakeets from their cages and let them roam around the kitchen and dining room area after I clipped their wings so they wouldn't fly into something.
I attended high school in nearby Downers Grove, but dropped out halfway during my sophomore year so that I could move back to Anaheim. The teachers there were mighty fine people, though. Downers Grove North is situated in a suburban setting not unlike that of a John Hughes movie from the mid to late 80s era. Although the whole experience of living in suburbia overwhelmed me, I fondly remember many of the folks I briefly knew there: Byron Lott, Jim Lund, Ron Barkley, Doug Dienstberger, Chuck Hlavaty, John Liston, Donald Reid, Vicki Everett, my musical mentor Maestro Richard Hart, (who gave me my only "A" grade for Guitar 101) Ida Edwards (a grand dame who went out of her way so I wouldn't quit physics class and was willing to stay after school to tutor me) and many other outstanding ladies and gentlemen.
I lived very briefly in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming during the summer of 1990. I returned twice: In February of 1991 and for two weeks later on during that same year. I merely went to help my father settle down there, but he started telling people that I was going to move for good. Cheyenne was the only livable city in the area. ...Barely. There's a good reason why he eventually moved back to the Chicago suburbs. Safest place on the list, though.
In mathematical terms, (at which I suck intellectually so I just Googled the numbers) I live 2,783.1 miles from my birthplace, 5,876 miles from where I grew up during ages 1 to 8, 2,716.4 from where I grew up during ages 11 and 12, 2,019.1 from where I grew up during ages 12 to 15, and 1,990.3 from where I grew up during ages 15 to 17. I've been living in Anaheim for the third and last time straight since 1989.
I am presently faced with the impending death of my mother, my only trustworthy direct relative left. My father has led us both to financial ruin, resulting in my dying mother's loss of our home, and his evil will lead me to my becoming one of the many unfortunate Americans who are homeless. I don't intend to go out like that.
I plan on taking my life any day no, for all the difference it's going to make.
Fifty-one damned years is enough.
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