Tafolla Toro: Three Years of Fear

By Lorenzo Gomez

The great lie of our society is that mental health and mental illness are the same.

Lorenzo Gomez wants to dispel that notion for good. In his new book, Tafolla Toro, he reaches back in time to share stories of his turbulent, traumatic, and often violent middle school years in one of San Antonio's most crime-riddled neighborhoods. He opens up to reveal the fear, anxiety, and hopelessness he felt as a teenager and how those forces shaped his life until he began taking steps as an adult to improve his mental health.

Alternating between shocking stories from his youth and letters written to his 12-year-old self, Lorenzo shows young people how to retake the battle of their mind by dealing with what is true and dismantling the lies that lead to self-deception. In Lorenzo's journey, readers will see someone who understands what they feel, knows what they're going through, and is standing up to tell them: Decide today that you are worthy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781544505152

Book preview

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Copyright © 2019 Lorenzo Gomez

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0515-2

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This book is dedicated to Doug Robins and Marney DeFoore.

Thank you for being my guides on the road to recovery.

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Contents

Introduction

1. First Day of Middle School

2. The Language of the Streets

3. Rules and Rituals

4. A Summer of Drive-bys

5. Smells Like Teen Angst

6. Adult Supervision

7. Brotherly Love

8. Sandbag Showdown

9. Last Day of Middle School

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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Introduction

The End of Innocence

It’s 1992. I’m eleven years old, and Mari is nine years old. I’m listening to Blind Melon’s new song No Rain.

When I was in fifth grade, my younger sister, Mari, and I would walk home from Woodrow Wilson Elementary School together. The elementary school day let out before the middle and high schools, so we normally didn’t see other students on our way home. We had to walk across the Interstate 10 bridge to reach our house, which was on West Hermosa—which ironically means beautiful in Spanish—but there was nothing beautiful about my dead-end street in San Antonio, Texas. We would always hold hands as we crossed the bridge and it was my daily reminder that I was her big brother. And a good big brother always protects his little sister.

On this day, from the moment the school bell rang, we knew something was wrong. Mari and I had walked home across that bridge more than a hundred times. It was always empty, and all we could hear were the cars passing below. On this day, we saw something we had never seen before, a crowd of big kids—that’s what we called the middle and high school students—and they were everywhere. As we approached the bridge, the big kids came up behind us as if they had decided to walk home with us that day. There must have been fifty guys around, ahead of, and behind us. Mari squeezed my hand and whispered, Lencho, why are all these big kids out? All I could say was, I don’t know. As we walked up the bridge, we saw another fifty big kids coming from the other side of the bridge.

I kept my head down and gripped Mari’s hand tighter. We moved to the edge to avoid getting swept up in the crowd. We were surrounded by the big kids, and they didn’t notice us. I felt like we were two ghosts passing in between them. Like they could have walked right through us if they had wanted. That is, if they had even noticed us. As we scurried home, all I could see were Red Wing cowboy boots, the $200 boots construction workers buy once every ten years. I don’t really know why I remember that detail. I think I was so afraid, that I didn’t want to look the big kids in the eye. Because I was staring down, all I could see were their shoes.

We got to our front door. If an adult had been home, we would have been told to go inside. I knew we should have, but our curiosity was too strong. Mari and I stood on the step, still wearing our backpacks that were bigger than we were, and watched. We saw them gather and realized it was two massive groups of kids coming toward each other, and then they stopped. It was so insane, I wondered if they were filming a movie, but I quickly realized this was real. They all stood there still and quiet, while it looked like a couple of them talked to each other. Then, as if lightning had struck, an explosion of fists, yelling, rushing. The bridge, which had chain-link fence covering the top and both sides, became the scene for a hundred-man cage fight.

Almost as soon as it started, a half dozen cop cars pulled up on each end of the bridge, closing off any direct escape. The big kids then started to do things I didn’t think were humanly possible. They jumped off the top of the bridge like comic book superheroes, onto the access road below. They ran and leaped over six-foot fences to get away from the cops. The cops could only catch a fraction of these guys. As I watched I thought, Wow, that’s the power of Red Wing boots. If I had Red Wing boots, I could do everything those guys did. I could be tough. Later, my friend told me that it had been a fight between two gangs: the LenchMob and the Kings.

Before I saw that fight, school had been about learning—I thought the only thing I had to worry about was being a good student and being well behaved. The fight on the bridge was the flicker of something I didn’t understand about my environment-to-come that would leave me terrified. I thought for sure that this fight had to be a once in a lifetime thing. As I prepared for middle school I hoped and prayed that I would never see anything that big and uncontrollable ever again.

The Harvard of Middle Schools

I was supposed to go to Whittier Middle School because it was closest to my house. In the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) world, that made it my home school. But my parents knew from experience that it wasn’t exactly the best school in the district. My older sister Denise had gone to Whittier. One night at dinner, Denise proudly told my family that she helped a classmate roll cigarettes just like she’d done for Grandpa Gomez in Laredo. When my brothers burst her bubble and explained that she was unknowingly rolling joints, my parents decided none of their other children would go to Whittier. It was a shame, too, because the guy told Denise that hers were the tightest, best-rolled joints he had ever had.

My parents had plans for me to go to college, so when my mom said, There’s this new, multilingual program in Tafolla Middle School, I was excited even though I’d never heard of any of those words. I didn’t know what Tafolla was, and I didn’t know what a multilingual program was. Mom explained, You can learn a foreign language. I immediately thought, This is special. I can finally learn Spanish.

A lot of Hispanics of my generation didn’t learn to speak Spanish as children. The San Antonio school district had an informal policy saying they would only admit students who spoke English. So, many Spanish-speaking parents stopped teaching their children Spanish. A whole generation of Hispanic children grew up without this piece of their culture. My own family felt this first hand. There are seven kids in my family and the first three, Danny, Denise, and Mark, all spoke Spanish as their first language. But when my mother put them in school, she was told that if they didn’t speak English, the school would not accept them. So the rest of us all were taught English only. I’ve often felt that I am a broken Mexican, because I don’t speak my mother tongue. As I filled out my application for Tafolla, I said, I want to speak Spanish. I desperately wanted to fit in. Mom was thinking about college and said, No, you’re going to learn Latin because Latin will help you break down words forever. It’ll help you on your SATs and in whatever you decide to study in college. I fought her, but in the end, she was the boss. My Grandma Petra, who had the best sense of humor, teased my mom, Who’s he going to speak Latin to? The Pope?

When I applied and got in, it was one of the highlights of my young life. To me, going to this multilingual program sounded like getting accepted into college, and I later learned the principal proudly called Tafolla the Harvard of Middle Schools.

I was happy about going to Tafolla, but I was also nervous. I wondered, Will I live up to the specialness of this school? Am I really that smart? I know my fifth-grade teacher thinks I’m that smart, but will there be other teachers like her there? I don’t know. I was excited, but the anticipation made me more nervous.

She Wanted Me to Be Brave

Being nervous about going to school wasn’t new for me. I’d been nervous the night before going to kindergarten. I remember Mom helping me put my things together for the next day. She remembered the first day of school for all of her seven children. The one that stood out most was my older brother Mark’s first day of school. She was trying to encourage me when she said how brave he was. She said Mark wouldn’t let her go in with him, and he said, No, no, Mom, I’m okay. Go home. I got this, and he just marched in the school. The rest of the Gomez clan, on the other hand, were crying, soggy messes on our first day of school.

I remember thinking, She wants me to be like Mark. She wants me to be brave. I didn’t feel brave. I was scared, and I was nervous, but I put on a brave face for my first day of kindergarten. At five years old, I already was pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

As an adult, I now know I was telling myself a lie. I should have said, Mom, I’m really nervous and scared, and let her say, It’s okay for you to be nervous and scared. The fact that I didn’t speak up was the start of some bad habits in my thinking. My desire to not worry my mom was greater than the fear I was feeling. I unconsciously created a false story in my head, which was, This is what she wants me to do, and I need to be this other person that I’m not.

I carried that fear and anxiety with me. I loved fifth grade, but I was very nervous and scared about middle school. I didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds until after I graduated high school. After seeing the fight on the bridge, I was even more aware of how small and weak I was. If being brave meant being in a fight like the one the bridge, then I was in big trouble. I should probably get some Red Wing boots pronto.

Remembering My Past

Noted author and pastor Dr. Timothy Keller says that there are certain thoughts in your head that are like carbon monoxide; they’re odorless and tasteless and before you know it, they’ve poisoned your mind. That’s what happened to me. In middle school, my nervousness and anxiety tipped. I had all kinds of thoughts in my head about who I was supposed to be and who the people around me were—many of them exaggerated, most of them untrue—that poisoned me in the years to come. The more I told myself stories about the things that were going on, the worse it got.

I was so afraid and had so much anxiety during those three years of middle school that I completely blocked out my memories of that time. I simply refused to remember those years. As an adult, I decided to go to therapy to work on the unhealthy behaviors I had developed in my life. I thought I had a problem with anger, addiction, and depression, but through therapy I realized those were symptoms. There was a deeper cause underneath those symptoms, and that was my paralyzing fear.

I started thinking about that three-year period of middle school that I’d completely wiped out. I began to remember the extreme fear and anxiety I had in my early years of adolescence, from age twelve to fifteen, and I saw how those three years that I’d completely forgotten had a huge impact on the man I’d become.

When I went into therapy, one of the first things my therapist asked me to do was write down the narrative of my life, beginning with my earliest memories about things like when I started school, who took me, and how I felt. When I started writing about my first day of school, I realized it was the answer to everything that was to come.

This is the story of the years I forgot, and how I made sense of them. Everything I went through then shaped everything that came after.

Your Story

Adults tend to underestimate young people in general. I want you to