I was home to help my Grandmother move. I was going through boxes in her attic when I came across a small shoebox labeled Cristela Gasparilla. I smiled as I opened it and checked the contents. There were two DVDs in blank boxes and a thin white Tank top. All three had the same Go Wild Logo printed on it with the DVDs adding the words Tampa 2009.
My grandfather's funeral had been pretty uneventful. We all knew it was coming. It was amazing that he had lasted as long as he did. He finished his stint in the airforce in the late 70s His final assignment had him stationed at Macdill in Tampa. If he had thought about moving back home to Ann Arbor at all after twenty years in at all his daughters getting knocked up changed his mind.
My aunt Jeanie was almost nineteen and may or may not have already been engaged when she got pregnant depending on who in the family you asked and how much they had to drink when they told you. She managed to get married with seven months to spare before my cousin Elijah was born. Just ten months later Jeanie gave birth to Isiah. Apparently, condoms were too complicated. My mom didn't learn anything from her older sister because my brother Jerimiah came along a little over a year after that. My mom was for sure not engaged when she got pregnant and had to wait three months into her pregnancy for her sixteenth birthday to get married. I came along two years later just after my mom graduated high school.
Despite being so young our parents had pretty decent marriages at the time. My dad had a good job at the port as a longshoreman and my mom was a bartender/server in the booming convention scene that was Tampa in the 80s. Reagan had convinced the country that we could spend our way out of the recession he inherited and everyone was maxing out their credit cards in an effort to win the cold war by the power of sheer consumerism. The Soviet Union would fall at the end of the decade so he was right about that. Was the victory worth it in the long run? Who knows.
My brother was a touch awkward growing up. We didn't have a name for it back then but he was on the autistic spectrum for sure. He was ridiculously smart and retained information like a machine. The problem was you couldn't get him to shut up. He had narrow interests and would go on and on about them. His passion was boxing and he read the magazines over and over. He would tell you everything about Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran. He knew the Rocky movies forwards and backward When Joe Fraizer and Roberto Duran made cameos in the first two movies he would recite passages from books and magazine articles and newspapers. His whole life was looking for an opportunity to crowbar in a boxing reference.
He wasn't the most graceful or coordinated kid growing up and was a bit of a spaz. He didn't have any friends outside of his older cousins. My aunt Jeanie made them include Jerry whenever we came to visit or they came to see us. That went on fine until my cousins got to be thirteenish. We lived only a few blocks from the beach because there were only two kids, me and my brother Jerry. My aunt Jeanie had three more daughters and her and my uncle Tom went to work in a dental office. My uncle was trying to put himself through dental school working as a dental assistant two twelve-hour shifts on the weekends. My aunt worked full-time as a dental assistant. They did not make enough money between the two of them to afford to have a big enough house on the beach for five kids.
When my cousins came to visit going to the beach was always a big part of the visit. By the time my cousins got to be teenagers, my brother's awkwardness became a liability when it came to talking to girls. Jerry looked like a dufus when he ran and he couldn't catch or throw a football or frisbee to save his life. He didn't understand what my cousins were upset about when he interrupted their conversations with the teeny-bopper tourist girls.
Pretty soon they asked not to take Jerry along with them when they went trolling for girls. I was still allowed to go because even though I was four or five years younger I was an adorable little kid who attracted attention. My cousins used to use me as bait to lure girls into conversations. I actually got pretty good at talking to girls and snuck in quite a few kisses from tourist chicks that were happy to have a makeout story to take back home. I guess I should have felt bad that Jerry was left out but I was enjoying my time with my older cousins.
Left to his own Jerry started a home boxing regimen. He countless pushups and jump rope he slipped on bag gloves and punched a tree doing drills. My parents bought him a weight set and a heavy bag my cousins were still older and therefore tougher than Jerry until puberty kicked in. Jerry walked into high school almost a hundred and sixty pounds. By that summer he was a hundred and eighty-five and just turned fifteen. My parents let him take boxing lessons if he paid for them. My mom got him a summer job setting up tables at the big convention hall.
Jerry was younger than any of his coworkers but earned their respect by out hustling and outworking the grown men on his crew. It didn't hurt that while he was never going to be coordinated enough to be a competitive boxer Jerry had learned how to channel all that muscle and power into a bone-crunching brawling style. As an amateur fighter, he was going to lose more often on points as his opponents ran for the entire round than he was going to cut the ring off and smash his opponent to the canvas but that wouldn't be the case in a street fight.
Jerry learned Spanish working at the convention center and was quite popular with the amigos is the laundry room and the dish line. They would actually show up to watch him fight even though amateur boxing is horribly boring to watch, not like the pros at all. Some of them brought their sisters or daughters or female cousins hoping Jerry would take an interest and maybe Greencard marry one of them in a couple of years. Some nights around the dinner table I would hear my mom tease Jerry about one of the girls from work. It always surprised me because even though Jerry was pretty fit and muscular he was still a total dork.
In his senior year, my parents had convinced Jerry that nothing was going to come of his boxing career and instead of just working at the convention center on the weekends he got a full-time after-school job working in a beach hotel banquet facility. My cousins were thrilled by this as it meant that they could have easy beach parking if they drove Jerry to work on the weekends. That worked great till Spring Break when they left Jerry stranded at the hotel while they took turns with a pair of Twins from Brazil they had picked up and took to Busch Gardens before spending most of the night in a fleabag motel in downtown Tampa.
My mom made Jerry go get his hotel parking pass back from Eli and Ice. My cousins were kind of grown by that point and looked at Jerry like he was still a goofy high school kid which he was. They misjudged how physical Jerry could get though when instead of returning his parking pass, they tore it up in front of him and called my brother a tard. Two on one it had been a pretty vicious fight. One on one either of my cousins might have acknowledged Jerry's physical superiority and admitted defeat after a trip or two to the floor. Because there were two of them they wouldn't accept defeat so easily. Jerry had to pound on them until they couldn't get back up. All three of them were beaten up pretty badly.
My mom and aunt Jeanie were pretty mad about the whole thing. They didn't talk again till Thanksgiving and my mom stayed mad at my cousins for a couple of years until they got married and their wives became part of the family's cabal of women. Throwing parties and gathering in the kitchen before holidays to help prepare food while the men watched sports.
Aunt Jeanie never really got over the broken ribs and face fulls of stitches Jerry had left her two sons. Even two on one Jerry really did get the best of my cousins. Anut Jeanie never really got over it and Jerry kind of slowly disappeared from extended family get-togethers. His hotel job meant he was often working for special occasions like Halloween and SuperBowl and New Year and he was never all that social anyway. It became normal for the big family to only see him On Christmas and or Thanksgiving.
Jerry was really too awkward to have much luck with women. In high school, he had managed to date the big titted black girl from our bus for a while but really she was kind of awkward herself being the only black girl that didn't get bussed in from one of the nearby ghettos to fill some ten percent diversity quota the county schools had. Jerry's main purpose in Tanya's life was to discourage the other boys from taking liberties with her that sometimes happened on a crowded bus of hormone-laden teenagers. I was pretty sure Jerry was sleeping with Tanya but no one ever knew for sure because they didn't invite anyone else to anything. When they broke up a few months before graduation Jerry acted so devastated I can only assume he had lost his ticket to pussy town. He couldn't be around Tanya at all. He skipped all the senior events from class picture day to graduation rehearsals.
Tanya thought it was funny that Jerry was reacting like a simp about the breakup. It was funny right up until the week after finals on senior field day. A day where the school set up all kinds of games and activities along with a DJ and BBQ. Being Florida in June water activities were included from super soakers to a misting tent to dueling Slip and Slides to the caper a fifteen-foot inflatable waterslide in the center of the football field. The joke was on Tanya though when a group of the ghetto bus girls decided she shouldn't leave high school without giving any of the brothers at least a little sample stripped her to her panties and threw her down the water slide into a pile of thugs. But that's another story.
Being with Tanya had left Jerry with an autistic obsession with big black tits. It was obvious that was his fetish whenever you watched him bolster up the courage to talk to a girl who would inevitably shoot him down. Jerry took every interaction with women seriously. If the possibility for marriage wasn't immediately obvious he sabotaged the whole thing. That wasn't the best approach when you want to add in the complications of interracial relations. Jerry just had no skill in dealing with cultural differences. With his big muscles, Jerry did have some short-lived success with a girl or two. His longest post-high school relationship was with a girl named Jazz who explained her tolerance like this.
