Come Heat and High Water

I. GET OVER IT

There’s a scar on my knuckle in the shape of a star. I got it from punching Alex Rodriguez in the teeth one afternoon in sixth grade. He and eleven other kids cornered me by the chain-link fence at the end of an empty soccer field. Alex had metal braces that cut my skin open when I swung at him. After I resisted, he and all the other kids went at me like a pack of feral dogs.

But I observed an unwritten code. When I came home badged with bruises, all I offered my parents by way of explanation was that I had fallen. My silence made sense at the time, since my peers and elders told me all this cruelty was supposed to make me tough, resilient, manly. I went to an all-boys Catholic school in Miami whose official motto was “Men for others,” whose unofficial religion was Latin machismo, and whose unspoken mantra was “No seas soplón”: don’t be a snitch.

So there’s no tally of the choke holds, sucker punches, twisted wrists, mango-sized bruises, and swift kicks to the nuts I endured. Nobody kept tabs on how many times I got my face crushed into the boggy dirt behind the swimming pool. If I was lucky, my cousin or one of my friends would push my aggressors off of me and I could run. If I was unlucky—and there were a few days when I was very unlucky—I’d catch a beating that stayed with me for life.

Alex is an actor now, living in New York City, and he’s also my friend. By all accounts he has grown into a kind and gentle adult. We grab coffee whenever he’s in town. And the older boy who whipped me with a belt that one woeful time, who tried to shove a piece of ice up my ass while another, larger boy trapped me in a headlock and giggled as I squealed, now lives in Brooklyn and has founded a tech company. That sadistic motherfucker can burn in hell.

But this isn’t about settling accounts. Rather, this is about the sun-scorched Miami fields where I was beaten, and their natural tendency to flood. This is about actual traumas: my own mild ones, my best friend’s, and those that climate change is already inflicting on Miami, which in 2016 was the city with the greatest income disparity in the United States. This is about how trauma often makes you vulnerable forever, no matter which socioeconomic group you belong to, even though some folks keep trying to tell you that if you’re tough enough you just might come out ahead.

There’s a word...