The Beat of My Own Drum Read Online Free PDF

Avenue and East Twenty-third Street. Up until we relocated there, the world seemed safe and harmonious. My life and everything in it was pitched just right. Something went badly out of tune for our family the day we shifted our raggle-taggle belongings into that duplex, though, and the effects of it resonate through my life to this day.
    To begin with, we suddenly found ourselves visited frequently by the police—something that hadn’t happened much before. First they came to answer noise complaints from our neighbors about the music. We’d had complaints before, but the new and aggressive hammering on our front door was an unwelcome addition to our percussion.
    If men in uniforms weren’t yelling at us to turn the music down, they’d be banging on a door upstairs, where one of my aunts and my uncle would yell and fight all the time. Once, in the middle of the night, I was startled awake by the sounds of furniture flying in the apartment above ours. Scared, I ran into the front room, where I found my parents looking equally worried.
    They ordered me back to bed, but while I was still there my aunt began banging on the door, begging to be allowed in. She then stumbled into our home, covered in blood. Moms and Pops ran to help her, and I almost passed out at the sight of her blood all over Moms’s blouse.
    After a while, I came to dread the flashing blue lights on the walls and the noise of the sirens, which only added to the cacophony already in my head.
    Soon after we moved to that house, I went for a walk down the street and came upon a German shepherd tied up with a rope. Assuming he was friendly like all the other dogs I’d ever known, I went to pet him. He shot me a strange look and then suddenly lunged at me. I turned to run but I wasn’t fast enough, and the rope was longer than I realized. He sank his teeth into my backside and began shaking me like a rag doll. I screamed and fought him off for what seemed like forever before finally breaking loose.
    When I burst into our duplex with blood pouring down my legs, Moms rushed me to the emergency room. The wounds were deep, and I had to have a tetanus shot. It took me a long time to feel comfortable around dogs again.
    In a matter of weeks, my kid brother Peter Michael went missing. He was only two years old. Everyone gathered on the street as our neighbors stood watching. Moms and Pops were close to hysterics. For a while the situation seemed hopeless. The police came to take statements, but their presence only made me feel more insecure.
    Seeing my mother’s tears, I convinced myself that my brother had been kidnapped after accepting candy from a stranger, something we’d repeatedly been warned against. Thankfully, Peter Michael (or Peto, as he was known until the day he announced that he wanted us to call him by his full name) was returned home safely after several hours. Someone had apparently spotted him aloneoutside and assumed he was lost, so she took him home. Despite the happy ending, my world felt increasingly unsafe, and I continued to harbor a terror of one of us being snatched.
    That house seemed forever to be associated with blood in my mind. We were in that house when my mother suffered a miscarriage. I don’t remember much about it except that she came home late one night and looked wired to me. I asked her what was wrong because I saw blood on her. She said she cut herself and was fine and she told me to go back to bed, but I know she was very sad. Later on Juan hurt himself when the two of us were racing around the backyard. We were weaving in and out of tall weeds when he tripped and landed on a piece of glass, which embedded itself in his knee. I carried him inside as blood dripped down his leg. We spent hours at the emergency room that night.
    Juan still has the scar and sometimes points to it affectionately—a symbol of his big sister’s heroics.
    We were back in the ER a few days later when I had another of my nosebleeds, which had become