March is soon approaching and will mark my 32nd birthday. I was born on Staten Island, N.Y. and never lived in one place longer than two years my entire life. The first three years I lived with my mother and grandmother on South Avenue in Mariner’s Harbor, with my Aunt Ethel in the Bronx for a while and several months with Mother Hale in Harlem. When I was three I was put into foster care, one year in one home and two in another. In foster care I started Head Start/pre-school by the projects in Park Hill and then attended P.S. 20 in Port Richmond for kindergarten and first grade. When I returned to my mother we lived on Lockman Avenue back in the Harbor started going to school at P.S. 44. That was second grade. Third grade I lived with my Aunt Ethel again for a year. She had since left the Bronx and moved back to Mariner’s Harbor. Between nine and eleven I bounced back and forth between my mother and grandmother on one side of the island, in Mariner’s Harbor, and my Aunt Crystal in South Beach on the other.
At twelve my grandmother moved to Grandview Avenue, not far from where we once lived on South Avenue, and I left South Beach for the Harbor again for another year where I started junior high school at I.S.72. That summer I moved upstate to Schenectady with my mother for five months before returned to Staten Island. I spent half the seventh grade in South Beach attending I.S. 49. I finished the other half in Mariner’s Harbor at I.S. 72. I was thirteen the summer of ’89 and moved to South Beach again expecting to return to 49 for they eight grade, but the night before school started I was asked to move back to Schenectady to be with my mother. I said yes and I never lived on Staten Island again.
In Schenectady, my mother was living in a homeless shelter at the time and we waited two months before she found us an apartment on Howard Street in a part of Schenectady called Hamilton Hill. I was 13 years old and it was cold in Upstate New York. While living on Howard Street I completed junior high school at Steinmetz Middle School and attended all but one month of ninth grade at Mt. Pleasant High School. That last month was at Grout Park Alternative School because I’d been arrested for assaulting a police officer. I was 15 and I can remember the police picking me up from my social studies class at Mt. Pleasant several days after I had originally been arrested and released. I was placed in detention and didn’t return to Schenectady until fifteen months later.
When I returned to Schenectady my mom had moved off The Hill to another part of Schenectady called Mt. Pleasant. I was 16 years old and a year later, after spending six weeks in Rhode Island at a summer pre-college program my mother kicked me out of the house. I lived five months with my girlfriend’s family, during which time my then girlfriend gave birth to my daughter. I moved into my own apartment in February of 1994, finished high school at Schenectady High School, where I had done my junior and senior years, and moved to Providence, R.I. to attend college.
In the four years at RISD I spent the first year in the dorms. The second year my daughter, her mother and me lived together in an apartment off campus before my daughter’s mother left me for someone who was something of a friend at the time. I actually moved into his old apartment my third year as he moved in with my ex-girlfriend and my daughter. In my last year of college I lived on Hope Street across from Moses Brown and the Brown athletic facility. Hope Street was only the third time in my life I lived anywhere at least 18 months and the first time since I lived on Howard Street. I spent a fifth year working in Providence after graduating, moving back to Schenectady for about four months, then moved back to Providence for only 2 months before ultimately moving up to Boston in 1999. I always tell people that in the six years I lived in Boston I moved 8 times. That’s the truth. I lived in North Cambridge, Lynn, the South End, Roxbury, Waltham/Newton, Mission Hill, Somerville and Dorchester. I left Boston and moved to Los Angeles in January of 2006 where I lived in three apartments - my third and current apartment for only seven months before taking this job in Iraq.
Friday during prayers Muqtada Al Sadr announced he is extending the cease-fire of his militia. I’m not a very religious, perhaps not even a very spiritual person anymore, but thank God he extending it. I never would have expected the decisions of Al Sadr would ever have a direct effect on me. Of course that decision didn’t stop someone from launching mortars at us the next morning. I don’t know if they were really close or if I’m just a little sensitive after that rocket attack Monday. I was asleep and after the first hit I was up and dressed within a minute. They stopped and I went back to sleep in my clothes. I can’t imagine the amount of violence that would’ve been unleashed if he canceled the cease-fire. The press reports that the now 6 months long cease-fire is one of three contributing factors to the reduction in deaths here in Iraq. The other two being the US troop surge and Sunni militias turning their guns against Al Qaida.
Saturday afternoon was very quiet. Mohamed and I went to play soccer but there was no one there except a young Iraqi guy. We all started talking and again, this has happened before, I was mistaken for Iraqi. Mohamed explained I was American and the look on the guy’s face said it all. He asked me if I was married and I said no. “Why?” I shrugged my shoulders. “No money?” he asked while making that rubbing your fingers “money” gesture. His English wasn’t that good and my Iraqi is worse so I just shook my head and went along with that. He said he was 20 and answered no when I asked him if he was married. My answer had seemed so unfortunate to him and I thought hard about why it should matter to me if I were married or not.
At night we left the office and drove to our trailers. Mohamed laughed, amused because people often think I am Iraqi. On the other hand he said, due to his fair skin his American friends in the states suggested he change his name to something like Steve or Mike. – For what, because he could “pass” and didn’t have to seem so foreign or so Arab? – He mentioned the young guy we met earlier had a hard time making sense of my name and was trying to give it some sort of Arab equivalent, which you can’t. You can’t even do it in Italian. Brian is Irish or Celtic. It’s not like my middle name, which could be translated to Paulo. Maybe the closest you can get in Arabic is Brahim or Ibrahim. Mohamed also explained that most Iraqi men, given I guess that they have money, are usually married by the time they are 21. Maybe if I had more money I would have gotten married already. I think there’s more likelihood that having had more access to money in the past would have had more impact on the person I am today versus having been a different person would have increased the amount of money I’d have access to now. Regardless, I’m still not sure why I’m not married or why it should even matter. I’ll also note that Iraqi men on average marry at age 21 but also have a life expectancy of 48 years. That’s what I heard. I don’t think you can go by the CIA’s internet fact book for that one.
