Stay Down: A Memoir of Brooklyn, Brotherhood, and Survival

My mother is standing in the government cheese line with a beer can in a paper bag, drinking through a straw. I’m maybe six years old, standing next to her, and I remember thinking she looked normal. Like everyone else in that line. “If it’s in a bag with a straw,” she told me, “people think it’s a Pepsi.” That was the world Angel Cordero was born into. His father was a convicted murderer who drank and then turned on the family. His mother was sixteen when she married him and never found the door out. His brothers were the only thing that made any of it survivable. Stay Down is the true story of that childhood, told without softening and without excuse. A rooster kept as a pet until the day it wasn’t. A pipe under the bed and a plan a ten-year-old believed would work. A gentle brother who loved every stray he ever found. A father’s voice telling a beaten boy to stay down — words that took decades to climb out from under. No mansion at the end. Something better. A life. A real one. One where nobody is hitting anybody, the heat works, and there’s food in the house. Stay Down is available in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Portuguese.