Even Enrique’s start to this world was traumatic... A few years after his parents were married, Selva was in the hospital scheduled for an emergency hysterectomy, when a nurse insisted they give her a pregnancy test. It was positive, yet the doctors wanted to continue with the procedure. Selva and one of the nurses fought to keep the baby, and that fateful child was of course Enrique. Enrique is often diplomatic when he describes his life growing up, something he calls “a very tough childhood.” They moved around a lot, living in various trailer parks, motels, staying with friends and family... But he fought his way through and made it to the other side. “My dad would be fine for two or three months, then he’d get a paycheck and get drunk, disappearing for a month. I remember we had a brand-new LTD station wagon in
In comparison, Enrique has nothing but love and admiration for his mother. She was “a tough woman,” who served as his rock, always supporting him and doing what she had to do to make it through... just like Enrique. He remembers being six or seven years old when he and his mom tried to separate from Pepe. “We were homeless for a short time... We were staying at a motel and our money ran out, so we slept in our station wagon.” He tells me she worked two or three jobs at a time, and he remembers her trying to kill herself once, but he says it with a shoulder shrug like “shit happens, ya know?” stress, Enrique developed his own coping mechanism... a sense of structure within the chaos. It began with his baseball card and comic book collections at age 13. He created a spreadsheet on his Atari computer (Excel premiered in 1985, but he didn’t have it yet) and methodically categorized his comics. Accessing The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide from the local library, Enrique hand- calculated the price and grade data each month. The structure of the numbers and the methodology of the math was a type of calm in the storm for Enrique... and a binary brainiac was born. A BINARY BRAINIAC IS BORN As a kid raised in such trauma and hyperstimulation, constantly under
“Being poor sucks. Being on food stamps sucks. SO I CAME UP WITH A PLAN TO NOT BE POOR ."
1979. We got it with a loan on my mom’s credit. Well, he took it and sold it for drinking money, and then we went bankrupt. We ended up fleeing the country for nine months... By then, my uncle had been exiled, so we went and lived with my grandparents in Spain. My dad would threaten my mom, ‘Oh well, if you don’t do this or that, I’m going to get you deported and you’re going to lose the kid.’ So just really nasty... He wouldn’t teach her how to drive, controlling things like that.”
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March 2020
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