My built-in best friend
It wasn’t Barbies. It wasn’t hide and seek. It wasn’t coloring. It wasn’t the songs we sang on the rainbow-checkered carpet in class. It wasn’t nap time. It wasn’t Sesame Street or Clifford. It wasn’t animal shaped crackers or Lunchables either. When I was five, the best part of my day revolved around my big brother, Antonio. The bell at noon signaled clean-up time and after all twenty of the little hands worked together to put our toys and crayons back into our boxes, everyone’s parents would swarm into the classroom. I would wave to Mrs. Marquez and she’d peep her head outside the building to make sure Antonio was outside the gate on his bicycle before she’d let me leave. He always was.
We would fly down Pacific Avenue. The cold air would hit my face as we zoomed past Mr. C’s Liquor and Harbor Auto Repair, just two of the multiple liquor stores and auto body shops in the short stretch from 15th Street to 26th.
“Did you know, Gab, the same shops to your left and right have been here for years?” he’d tell me as their colors blurred past us. I knew we were close to home when we reached the palm-tree-lined sidewalks that to this day decorate the edges of Fort MacArthur.
“Did you know Fort MacArthur has been in San Pedro for over 100 years?” he said. I absorbed each of words and responded with, “Wow, that’s old.” Knowing bits and pieces of history made the streets feel magical — better than any episode of Dragon Tales. To Antonio, who was sixteen at the time, I was just one more responsibility after his morning spent at Angel’s Gate Continuation School. Forget angels though. As he offered up the facts he knew about San Pedro and its streets, I thought of him as a god.
On December 5, 1996, my big brother Antonio turned 11-years-old. He was a chubby middle-schooler. He probably dreamt of celebrating with our mom’s famous tres leches and whipped cream cake. However, Antonio did not get his favorite pepperoni pizza or any mouth-watering desserts because he had to spend the whole day in the hospital with our big brother Francisco and his two younger brothers, Ricardo and Diego. On his eleventh birthday, my mom gave birth to me; her fifth child and only girl. He did not ask for presents or food like I am positive he would have wanted. Instead, he silently took on many responsibilities he had no idea were to come — the way selfless older brothers from impoverished families often do.
When Antonio was still a round-faced pre-teen, he was close to winning both the geography and spelling bee championships at his school. He never failed to share his knowledge with me. He sat me on his lap and carefully read to me every single day. The more I grew, the more he tried to open my eyes to the world around me. Our parents — a Mexican housekeeper and a terribly unhealthy Spaniard, were either never home or when they were, they sent him on a whirlwind of errands. He found solace from the burdens of poverty within history books that illustrated the lives of past presidents, knights, and pharaohs. Antonio escaped so far into his books that he followed in our brother Francisco’s footsteps and dropped out of high school and chose to attend continuation school. He spent his time at the San Pedro Public Library when he wasn’t working or running after me and Diego.
By the time I was nine, there were no more bike rides. Instead, I would hop off the big yellow school bus that took me from San Pedro to Harbor City every afternoon. My family had moved its seven person clan to live in a Section-8 housing community a city away, and yet so much seemed the same. When the bus whizzed past the harbor on the 110-Freeway, I’d recall what my brother had told me about longshoremen and crane operators. “Did you know that the port of Los Angeles is the busiest port in our whole nation?” his voice echoed in my head.
The stretch from the bus stop to our house was still sprinkled with liquor stores and auto body shops, but this time I speed-walked home, expecting Antonio to help me with my homework if he wasn’t too exhausted from taking community college classes after his graveyard shifts at Del Taco. We sat at our kitchen table and he tested me on the states and their capitals. He opened our kitchen cabinet and took out a box of Fig Newtons to celebrate when I made it through a few rounds without stammering.
“These are so good, it’s a joke how good they are,” he said as he bit into a cookie. “Did you know that Fig Newtons are the third most popular cookie in the WHOLE U.S.?”
I smiled and shook my head.
“Well, now you do.”
He handed me three cookies, reminding me that it was the serving size, and if I ate too much sugar, I’d get cavities and he did not want to hear it.
Next to our television, was a huge shelf, lined with the many books that were donated to our family from a combination of our aunt’s old kindergarten classroom and the Toberman Neighborhood Center, the same place that put the Fig Newtons in our cabinet. After homework, I flipped through the channels in hopes of finding something to watch that wasn’t reruns of I Love Lucy or M*A*S*H. When I failed, I sprinted to Antonio, whining about my boredom.
“I don’t have anything to do,” I whimpered.
“Come on, Yab. Of course you do,” he said.
Antonio walked me over to the rows of encyclopaedias on the shelf and closed his eyes. He picked a volume at random and motioned me over towards the couch. We thumbed through its pages together and he pointed out lavender, language, Laos, Las Vegas, London, Louisiana. I marveled at the amount of knowledge he knew about people, places and things. Never something in particular, but always tidbits here and tidbits there. From there, we’d move on to the next volume. It was just like biking through San Pedro when I was five, only this time, we were teleporting to places and time periods I never thought about before.
Sometimes, his facts, maturity and knowledge made me want to curl up my little hands and beat his head with them. One lazy Saturday afternoon when I was in middle school and going through my “I don’t care about anything except for thick eye-liner, Blink 182, and my side bangs” phase, he hopped over to my spot on the sofa to test me.
“When was the Declaration of Independence adopted?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m not learning that in school.”
“Oh, you think the only things you need to learn are what they teach you in class?”
“Whatever. That’s obviously what’s school’s for.”
That instance not only taught me to say July 4, 1776 on command and not to talk back, but I was also forced to learn how to take the Metro home from my middle school. I would have rather have had my mom slap me across my face with her rough, calloused hands.
I often joke that he’s the reason I’ve mastered QuizUp, a trivia app. When I was eighteen, I’d start playing around 8:00 p.m. and by the time I exited out of the app, all the lights in the living room would be out and the glow of the oven’s clock in the kitchen would read past midnight. At the peak of my QuizUp days, I found my way to the top 50 in California for general knowledge and held fifth place in the state for snacks. However, I’d be doing him a great disservice by saying the best thing he’s given me is the talent to beat anyone I know at trivia.
Antonio absorbed our parents’ struggles to make sure I never had to endure the same childhood he did. He drove me and my friends around for years without any complaints because our parents made him walk or take the bus anywhere he wanted to go — even if it was pouring rain. He gave and still gives our parents huge portions of his paychecks so they don’t have to stress about getting eviction notices taped to their front door. Antonio encouraged me to apply to University of Southern California because he always wanted to attend the Marshall School of Business, but settled for California State University Los Angeles because of its accessibility and price tag. He bought me my first car because he saw how much of a toll it took on me to work full-time and attend community college and our parents couldn’t afford to help me. If he was ever mad at my parents, it never, ever showed.
There is no wonder I thought of him as a god.
