"I'll be out of your house in ten minutes"....that's what I said at the ripe old age of 13 (almost 14). I meant it. I had nowhere to go, but it didn't matter. I was so full or pride and resolve that I left without a clue as to where I was going. You could call it running away from home, but it really wasn't. I calmly left and he didn't try and stop me. More than 20 years would pass before either of my parents saw me again.
I finally settled for a freeway overpass that first night. It reeked of urine and beer, but I slept there anyway. If you could call that sleeping. My backpack had been stolen during the night by one of the many junkies that lived around there. All I had were a few shirts and pairs of pants...and now they were gone. As the days passed, my hunger grew and so did the desire to return home. But I couldn't do that. I would rather die. I even walked toward home several times but changed my mind each of those times. Returning home would accomplish nothing except filling my stomach with their food. That would give my parents even more power over me. They would know that I was incapable of survival without them. I could never live like that.
There are only certain ways of making money on the street, all of them dangerous as well as cruel. Nobody cared that I was still a child. I had to provide for myself. This is what I chose to do. At first this lifestyle scared me...but after a while I grew used to it. It's what I knew. I became indifferent. As I grew up I kept learning. Mother Street was my teacher and she held nothing back. That bitch showed me what life was really like. I still don't know if I should thank her or hate her for it.
I eventually graduated to selling drugs on the street. The money was good, but with every dollar that I made I lost more and more humanity. Drugs are the ultimate eye opener. Not to those who consume, but to those who distribute and sell them. Drugs have no preferred race, gender, or creed. I sold drugs to pregnant women, elementary school children, Pastors, Ministers and Preachers. I sold them to old ladies and college kids. I think that I even sold drugs to that dude who played the young doctor in Doogie Howser Md once. He was just a kid then. But after seeing drug overdosed children as young as 9 years old lying in back alleys, or pregnant mothers shooting heroin in their final stages of pregnancy...nothing really surprised me.
I gave up drugs as my street rank grew. I eventually found that the real money to be made came from taxes. Extortion. That is a concept that civilians never grasp. Do you know how many times I have heard people say that it's foolish to "fight over streets that don't even belong to you?" What they fail to realize is that every piece of street territory has a dollar value attached to it. Some people think that illegal activities are tax free and clear...they aren't. Drug dealers, hookers and their pimps, business owners, taxi cabs, buses, small businesses, and even robberies and car thefts are taxed. This is all controlled by the gangs that run the street.
But along with money and clout you also have losses. It can be very traumatic. But after being surrounded by violence and loss year after year, you become hardened to it. Eventually you lose the ability to shed tears. You also lose the ability to get close to anyone. This is the way you learn to protect yourself from suffering grief. You never let anyone "in." That way, when they die, you don't grieve as much. You eventually lose every bit of humanity and feeling. Once that happens, it's really easy to commit atrocities yourself. It's an endless cycle.
This is what I've struggled with most of my adult life. Allowing people in and learning to care has been an uphill journey. I think that it wasn't until the birth of my children, that I really knew what that was like again. The problem is that it's a learned technique. A skill that must be practiced or it will be lost. It's too easy to revert back to past mistakes.
Don't kid yourselves, though you may have never resorted to such extremes...that doesn't mean that you aren't indifferent and uncaring. We must all work at being good people...and if we don't, then we are slowly (or quickly) deteriorating into bad people. People who would be better off dead. I for one do not want that. I have too much to live for. Just a tip from your uncle Miguel.
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