Stepdog (3 page)

And there was my mom's “Get your education so you never have to depend on a man.”

I guess it's no mystery why I stayed single for so long.

Above all, I was trusted. It was as if Mami and Papi could foretell that their oldest would go through college without smoking pot and with her virginity intact. As I prepared to leave the island, I knew I'd be homesick. But I was ready for the non-Caribbean world. I applied to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and enrolled with a patchwork of financial aid—scholarships, loans, work-study programs—and whatever my parents could give me. Once in D.C., finances were the least of my problems. That first year at GW was T-O-U-G-H. I lived in a huge, noisy, awful dorm. Every weekend, drunk students would pull the fire alarm a few times a night, so we all spent a good part of the year freezing in our bathrobes out on the street while firefighters checked the building for smoke. I had several roommates, one of them a nymphomaniac. At least that was my humble opinion as the only virgin in the zoo. We'll call her Betsy. She slept around as if it were a required course. It's as if she had been held hostage for years by her parents and was finally tasting freedom. I didn't care until she brought a guy to our room and had sex right below me on the bunk bed.

“Sheet, Betsy!” I said the next morning in my heavy accent. “You can't do theeese!”

Betsy found me immensely funny, which made me angrier and less fluent. All I could do was move my half of the bunk bed to the study alcove in our room and the next year get out of campus housing altogether. I found a studio apartment with mice above a Roy Rogers chicken restaurant and roomed with a Puerto Rican high school classmate who was as celibate as I was.

That first year I could barely keep up with classes, and my journalism school grades were in the gutter. I had the hardest time with accents that didn't sound like mine. I went to cover Jimmy Carter during a presidential campaign appearance for an assignment and didn't understand a word he said. (I taped him and a friend later interpreted his drawl for me.)

But I was lucky to find a mentor in a beloved professor who everyone knew as Puff, short for Puffenbarger.

Charles Puffenbarger was a business editor at
The Washington Post
who also mentored one of my Watergate heroes, Carl Bernstein, and brought him to class as a speaker. I was so impressed I went out with Puff for a whole year after the course ended. Our relationship was flirtatious, not sexual, but Puff convinced me I could be a good journalist and our friendship endured for twenty years, until he died of brain cancer at seventy. Puff encouraged me to aim high. My grades steadily improved as my English got better. I interned at the Cox Newspapers bureau in Washington and got a few pieces published in
The Washington Post
.

Then, as I was set on returning home, I happened to spot an ad for a summer journalism program for minority journalists at the University of California at Berkeley. A summer in sunny California? I applied, got in, and bought new sunglasses. I had no idea the Bay Area has miserably cold weather in the summer. Neither did I realize until it was too late that the benignly named “summer program” was really a boot camp. Basically, top journalists around the country—the likes of Bob Maynard, Nancy Hicks, Eileen Shanahan, Les Payne, Roy Aarons, Milton Coleman, and many others—came to Berkeley on two-week rotations to kick our butts. They edited a weekly called
Deadline
and we spent the week reporting and writing for it in between seminars about the ethics and standards of our chosen profession. I had never worked so hard in college or life. I also realized I had overlooked an important detail. The program wanted to increase racial diversity in newsrooms, so they wanted me to interview for jobs on the mainland. I told my parents I had to delay my return for a couple years. I told them the experience in the States would help me land an even better job back home. My parents were all for it.

But I never returned home.

My poor parents. They never thought they'd lose me forever by sending me to college. Neither did I. I don't regret my choices, but it would forever gnaw at me that I chose to not have my family around for most of my adult life–or any of my old close friends, for that matter. Phone calls and twice-a-year visits could never make up for all the moments lost. I thought more about this only as I got older. When you live apart from the family you love, by choice, nostalgia only grows with time. But as a twenty-one-year-old suddenly in charge of her own life, I was just excited, even if I cried on the plane all the way to San Francisco from San Juan when I officially moved out of the parental home for good to start my first real job. That would be as a reporter for William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco
Examiner
, an afternoon paper in a city I came to love so much that it took me another ten years to think about moving again.

I fell in love with San Francisco at first sight. It was hilly and surrounded by water just like home. The fog and perennial chill were definite downsides. But the city more than made up for those with its sheer physical beauty, its accepting politics, and its racial integration. I arrived in a shell-shocked city, though. Just a few months earlier, San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk had died at the hands of Dan White. And just days before those shootings, Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones orchestrated the mass murders and suicides in Guyana.

On my first day at the
Examiner,
they assigned me a desk near Tim Reiterman, a reporter who was shot in that tragedy but survived the same hail of bullets that killed Congressman Leo Ryan on a remote jungle airstrip. He was friendly and kind to the new wide-eyed hire, just like the rest of the
Ex
's staff.

My colleagues were eccentrics, cynics, union rabble-rousers, musicians, chili cook-off experts, and brilliant writers, some even more so after a liquid lunch at the corner hangout bar, the M&M. The paper itself promoted fun. It gave the staff free tickets to Giants games at frigid Candlestick Park. It sponsored opera at Golden Gate Park. It threw lavish Christmas parties with exhilarating quantities of Dungeness crab. The newsroom was so loosey-goosey that I would blithely indulge in pot smoking—finally!—with another editor at the end of our midnight shift in the city editor's office, right next to a bustling copy desk. If they smelled something, they said nothing. One night, in the high of very strong weed, I drove over the Bay Bridge to go home to the cozy basement with a fireplace I rented in the house of my friends Laura and Larry in Oakland. The ride was always smooth late at night, but this time I became so paranoid that I thought the car in the rearview mirror was following me—like
really
following me. I rolled down the window hoping that a blast of chilly air would sober me up, then remembered from some news story that the California Highway Patrol spots drunks by their rolled-down windows. I rolled the window back up and turned up the radio and sang gibberish to whatever was playing at the top of my lungs to make it over the five-mile bridge and up the Oakland hills. I cleared the bridge only to run into the cop car that was always stationed at the intersection of the commercial village of Montclair, which I had to pass to get home. They were there to keep an eye on the comings and goings of Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers, who lived in the vicinity. That night I became bridge-phobic. I soon quit pot and moved to San Francisco, to a nice one-bedroom near Golden Gate Park, only fifteen minutes away from the office over solid ground.

I was growing up on the job too. Over ten years at the
Ex
, I pretty much covered every beat and every story. My Spanish was highly valued, especially since the city became a cradle of the sanctuary movement for undocumented immigrants escaping the American-financed wars in Central America. I got sent to Mexico City for the 1985 earthquake that killed ten thousand people, arriving early enough to experience terrifying aftershocks that leveled buildings. And I was almost killed in a road ambush when the
Ex
sent me to Nicaragua for a series of stories as the Sandinista government fought the American-financed contras.

That close call cured me from ever aspiring to be a foreign correspondent again. Some reporters feel a personal responsibility to tell war stories. They relate on a human level to the misery of others no matter where they are in the world. I realized I cared more about reporting about the problems at home. I wanted to expose and, I hoped, affect our own injustices—discrimination, racism, income inequality. Those were the stories that fed my commitment to journalism. The next time I would do any more war coverage, the war would find me—on a crisp September morning at home in New York City.

But by the late 1980s, I was at a career crossroads. I had taught college journalism classes but wasn't interested in teaching full-time just yet. I had so much to learn myself. I still loved journalism but was young enough to pursue a whole new career if I wanted to. I didn't know what to do, so I went back to school, this time on a yearlong journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It led me to renew my vows to journalism and pursue
The New York Times
, which I joined exactly ten years after I first walked into the newsroom at the
Examiner
.

I was sad to abandon my adopted tribe at the
Ex
and a tad scared about moving to New York. The only time I had lived there was a summer during college under a student program. I worked for the telephone company in New Jersey and lived in an NYU dorm on Fifth Avenue. I had loved the bustle of Washington Square Park, walking everywhere, shopping for earrings among street vendors, discovering the bizarre appeal of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and
Oh! Calcutta!
But now I'd be returning as an adult with a sense of mission. New politics, new players, new weather (how do reporters cover news in the snow?), new bosses. You never know with new bosses.

Fortunately, my
Times
editors in Metro—the metropolitan news section that covered the city (along with its region and the state government upstate in Albany) and competed with the “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headlines of the tabloids—were pretty great, as I had to prove myself all over again. They were supportive, smart, and, for the most part, white men in suits. The
Times
was not exactly multicultural back then.

But in the late 1980s, New York was a stark departure from the way it was in the 1940s, when mostly rural Puerto Ricans first began to leave the island in waves for manufacturing jobs in the city that soon disappeared, creating an underclass that persists in some pockets today. The city was different from the days when my Titi (Aunt) Lucy and Tío (Uncle) Luis had to pass themselves off as Italians to get their apartment in Ozone Park in Queens. Or when my cousin Mayrah lived in the urban war zone known as Alphabet City in the East Village, before it gentrified with bistros and cupcake shops. New York was a nicer city than the one my relatives survived—with the added benefit that it came with my Titi Lucy, Tío Luis, and my cousin Mayrah!

I needed an apartment, but the search was painful. I couldn't tell prewar from postwar, and the massive brick buildings all looked equally ugly. But once inside the buildings, the trade-offs were more obvious. I held out for good light and a kitchen that could accommodate a normal-size refrigerator. In the buyer's market of the late 1980s, there were good choices at prices I could afford. After months of looking and indecision, I moved into a bright and spacious rental on the Upper West Side two blocks from Central Park. I was doomed to hearing sirens and honking day and night, but I could at least see sky from the windows and jog around the reservoir.

I missed the Bay Area terribly, but I eventually found mini–New Yorks that were manageable, wonderful, and friendly. I remember the exact moment I realized I had ceased missing San Francisco and became a New Yorker. I was in the back of a cab on my way home, a little tipsy from a night out with friends, when we stopped at a light, right in front of the most beautiful produce and flower display on a sidewalk market. The oranges and reds, greens and yellows just popped, and in my daze, perhaps because the fruits and veggies reminded me of California, I thought, “I love New York.”

Then I moved.

I was happy in New York, had a boyfriend and close colleague friends and my Latina women's group (LIPS) and the theater and Central Park and a gig as adjunct professor at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism. But the
Times
offered me the job of Miami bureau chief, and my mentor at the paper, Gerald Boyd, urged me to take it, wanting me to be strategic about my career. I couldn't pass this assignment up, he told me. I was reluctant to move to Florida barely five years after settling in New York and adjusting to its craziness, but Miami had two big draws aside from the promotion: my sister, her husband, and their two boys lived there; and Puerto Rico would be part of my beat. Not only would I get to travel to the island frequently for stories, but I'd also live close to my family again, so close that I had the chance to hold my third nephew, Alexander, as a newborn, a joy I missed with the first two.

Florida was big and busy and meant constant travel. Who knew the state is big enough to have two time zones? Hurricanes. Fidel and the Cuban exiles. Cuba and Guantánamo. The ValuJet crash. Versace's murder. The declawed lion that escaped from a zoo in Orlando. At some point my hair started falling out in clumps and I got shingles. When my Florida assignment drew to a close on the fifth year, I got to spend seven months covering Central America and the Caribbean for the foreign desk while they looked for a replacement for that beat. As I wrapped up, I was grateful for an amazing run. What a memorable five years of reporting. But when I was offered San Francisco next, a dream job had it come a decade earlier, all I wanted was to go back home—to New York. I didn't want to live so far from my family again—a full day of travel from San Francisco to San Juan. I wanted to travel for work, but just occasionally. After I moved back to New York, I soon was headed for Houston for a six-month detour to follow three businessmen—black, white, and Latino—for the “How Race Is Lived in America” series, a collaboration by a team of writers that won a Pulitzer. I then decamped to Washington Heights at the upper tip of Manhattan, to a cozy apartment by the Hudson River, for good.