machucando 😏

birthday countdown is ON!

I didn’t really like my name growing up.  I’m Puerto Rican so I have 4 names.  Three are after my dad. Luis Roberto Torres. No junior. I’m the second son. And then, Machuca from my mom.  Luis Roberto Torres Machuca is my birth name.  Learning how to write it in kindergarten was hell!  My parents should’ve named me something strong, commanding, atypical for us.  How about ADRIAN?  Isn’t that the perfect name for a curious, sweet boy like myself? 

They named me Luis, which means famous warrior/someone who is glorious in battle according to my dad’s mother.   That part of my name I like a little.  Pero.  LUIS. IN PUERTO RICO??  You know how many Luis’ you’d find in a 2nd grade class of 30 students? Six.  So I wasn’t just Luis- I needed a second identifier.  Again, ROBERTO, IN PUERTO RICO? Adrian would have sufficed. So I was always LUIS TORRES.  LOUIS-TOURESS for the gringos.  Blah. Basic. Common.  Am I that? Is that what you read in these words? I don’t think so honey!  

Thank god I’m gifted and cute, though not always aware of it, especially when the teenage years hit.  Which, I know, they’re hard for everybody but more so for me because of my plot heavy existence.

So with nowhere else to go, I listened to the mother who had abandoned me a decade prior and moved to the suburbs of Pennsylvania.  I lasted a year.  I’ll tell you more about it when I turn this draft into a chapter of my book.  

For now, please allow me to share with ya the identity crisis I had when I moved back to Puerto Rico in 2006.  I had fully embraced the hood gringo aesthetic- white tshirts over michael jordan baseball jersey, Rocawear jeans and Timz.  

My brain was on shuffle between Spanish and English- making me annoying to everybody on the island and rightfully so! Nobody wants to deal with that person who spent 11 months away and returns back with a terrible accent, and no, this is not a reference to Madonna’s British era!  

It was easier than I anticipated adjusting back.  I was so happy to be LUIS and not LU-IS anymore.  I needed to make up some classes I lost, and others I failed, geometry, so I had an odd schedule and spent most of my time in the, uh, disadvantaged group.  

We love everybody and understand that school isn’t for all. With that said, one of the advantages of being in a classroom with folks who don’t care about academic pursuits, is that you develop thick skin or else because most of the time is spent bickering, taunting, bullying (the teachers) and arguing or de-escalating an argument.  I wasn’t involve in many scuffles.  My classmates respected me, granted, they needed me to pass them the answers to every exam, but also because I’m a bully, and a great one, cuz you can’t bully me back!

I’ve always had the wit of my alcoholic maternal grandmother, the rage of displacement  marinating every thought that I will ever have, and the sense of humor of a paraplegic father who loves to say things like, “I’m going for a run after work,” to mean a nap.  Calling me names, addressing me as a faggot, or being the group doormat never took because I didn’t react to it… in high school!

I used to, uh, release vitriol and ancestral hatred in elementary school, when kids would call me MACHUCA.  

The man who named my mother is Carlos Machuca.  He is known in the island because he is a successful coach of baseball players.  The heyday of Puerto Ricans in the MLB throughout the 90s?  His impact.  The one in my life is similar to the one his daughter imprinted in me:  abandonment. 

My abuela had paid him $250 for me and my brother to join his weekend baseball clinics for teenagers.  $250 each, by the way.  We were excited!  For the first time, our family meant something other than neglect and mental illness.  But he never picked us up.  

So, really, what could possibly hurt more than my mother’s original sin?

I can’t stop thinking that high school has an expiration date and then I have to start all over again and really make college happen cuz I have no backup plan.  It’s success or else.  I want to be a lawyer, I tell the school counselor! But I don’t. I don’t know what I want. I can’t strategically plan for the future when my past is what it’s been and my present is abandonment, poverty, mental illness, cancer! 

So I take it out by bullying the bullies who prey on closeted students and the annoying jesus freaks who always point out that my dad, Don Luis Torres, is a good man of God and I… am not! And they were right.  His name doesn’t fit me.  His name doesn’t identify me.  Luckily, I was about to be anointed  by Puerto Rican King Daddy Yankee.

During the second semester of senior year, when I’m fully immersed in graduation and prom planning, getting good grades, and being the coolest LUIS in all the school despite stiff competition. There’s 10 Luis’ total, and then we get another one.  In my classroom! 

And get this, he was also a Torres so our home class teacher decided to go by our maiden names. He would be called LUIS COLON and I became… Luis MACHUCA and as soon as he said it, the entire classroom, in unison, began chanting MACHUCANDO *bass* MACHUCANDO. 

Allow me to explain,

As I returned back home, Daddy Yankee released Machucando, a summer hit about settling animalistic sexual tension through dancing aka Machucando.  The song is a bop, we stan, and it took a different meaning to me that day. 

MACHUCA is not a word used often in conversation, let alone as a last name in Puerto Rican Spanish. It’s a verb.  It means to smash.  As the action in a  wooden mortar to crush spices, enemies, the terrors of my life. 

My classmates chanting MACHUCANDO didn’t register to me as taunting, maybe because I wasn’t paying attention thus confused as to why I had been called MACHUCA in the first place?  I still don’t know. But the rest of this harmonized chorus called for one action and one action only:

I get on top of my chair buckle my knees and thrust my hips to the chanting, MACHUCANDO adolescent fears away; ready for what’s next as the strong, commanding, assertive lion, Luis Machuca.

---