Day 189 The Teenager Shot



A lot has happened since I last wrote.  I thought I had to be “inspired” to write in order to write.  You know to be a writer you need to be inspired.  But the fact that if anyone reads what I write then that makes me a writer so I’m a writer.  I don’t need a muse.  I will write as I said, the last days before 60 being the vehicle of this blog. So I will write about this picture that a good friend surprised me with on my phone the other day.  Here I am, in full glorious teen years, smiling.  I want to emphasize the smiling because I think it’s a beautiful smile.  I know I’m in my bedroom but I just don’t know where this bedroom was.  There’s a picture of my girlfriend from Germany hanging on the wall so that’s a dead giveaway.  My reel to reel music player, my desk lamp and that’s about it.  If I had stars painted on my bell bottoms that would be another give away as I wore those pants out as a teenager.

What am I thinking?  I like this shot.  Have you ever been to therapy and your therapist says start looking at a picture of yourself as a little child and hold that picture with love.  How anything or anybody could hurt that small person.  Know you’re not responsible for the pain that you experienced.  Well I’ve done that for years but now I want this to be that picture.  If there ever was a time when I was fucked up beyond belief emotionally, it was during my teen years.  That delicate balance between the alleged innocence of childhood and the emergence of manhood hovering in the same neighborhood.  Who am I, who am I supposed to be?  This picture has fueled some long thoughts into the creature that I am today.  I have compassion for this boy because I know the years ahead of him are going to be callous, tenuous, confusing, deadening, shallow, soul-sucking, blindly searching for a purpose.  If there ever was a launch pad for a treacherous trajectory, this is it.  The moments I was high, quite frequent, were the only moments that I could handle.  I hated reality.  I just wasn’t prepared for life in any way that would guarantee peace of mind.  I didn’t know the quality of decisions I was making.  It was like a constant flea market going off in my head.  I just did things that fell in front of me.

I drank, I smoked (drugs and cigs), and I lied to my parents, hell I didn’t even “talk” to my parents.  I just reacted to them.  I went to university for one year and mostly got drunk.  I did get units that qualified forever though.  I almost got beaten to death one night and then almost had the same guy killed by like ignorance and violence.  I packed my bags and moved to California to live with a brother who only tolerated me because his mother told him to.  I disco danced, I snorted California cocaine.  I banged girls only when I was drunk off my ass.  No relationship for this uncaged monkey.  I fell into the wrong crowd and found myself hanging out with criminals just as I had in Maine.  I couldn’t shake my luck.  I was destined to be a loser and I really thought I had no option.  It was just the cards I was dealt.  Hell I knew I was an alcoholic and I didn’t care.  I always seemed to get a job to last long enough to pay rent for some rat hole and get my booze and an occasional snort of something.  My social skills were bent to survival mode and my charm got me into some interesting circles.  But I could never harvest good.  I was repelled by it.  It was fascinating, sure but I knew that it was my kryptonite.  I knew that it wasn’t in my destiny to have goodness in my life.  I didn’t deserve it, I wasn’t built to accept it, and it was too much of a lie to my true inner Chris.  Most of my friends were criminals and I just didn’t care.  I couldn’t go off into full blown criminal mode as I was too much of a coward and that grace saved me.  But I could help sell cocaine for someone, I could help fence products after the fact that they were stolen.  I could steal from my job to make enough money to get some drugs just to get me through.  My guardian angels were in a fit trying to keep me from going any further than that mode.

One day though, one day it all kind of flipped for me.  I had to go over to this guy’s house to get money for stereo equipment that I moved out of a store I worked at.  That was nerve wracking enough but I did it.  And after I loaded it into his El Camino I knew just a little that I had a lot of criminal in me.  That maybe there was something to this anyhow.  Entertaining the life for a few moments I did.  That evening that I went to his house to get paid for my crime was a historical turning point for me. 

It was a typical summer Sacramento night, sunny and fucking hot as hell.  His beautiful trophy blonde wife let me in and pointed me to the back yard.  I was told to bring my swim suit.  There he was, Chuck, with another friend, swimming in his pool.  I walked back to the pool, oh god I hoped I was walking cool enough and donned my shirt and shoes and jumped in.

“What do you want to drink?” Chuck chuckled.

“Scotch on the rocks of course!” I hated Scotch and have no idea why I ordered that drink.  Maybe because that's what I remembered seeing on TV.  I was frozen with fear trying to look cool.  Give me a scotch and make it on the rocks.  Worst tasting shit in the universe if you want the truth.

“Babe” brought it over and set it by the pool’s edge as I was wading in the coolest way to wade possible. “Thank you!”

“What do you think?” Chuck asked.

“Think of what?” I replied.

“Of everything!  All of this” he pointed his finger to the pool, to the house, to his wife. “Everything!” he echoed again as to make certain I could hear his booming voice.  There was no noise in the neighborhood and I was strangely cocooned in a weird space, much weirder than normal.

“I guess it’s nice, I mean, yeah, it’s really nice, thanks for inviting me.”  I just wanted my money now and wanted to get the fuck out of there.

“It’s all crime Chris.  Everything you see is a result of crime.”  He actually said it like that, “It’s all crime.”  Like its all Californian, it’s all free, it’s all dirty, and it’s all crime.  “Everything I got in life is a result of jobs that I’ve done or had my people do.”  He was sipping his drink standing in the low end not wading like I was.  I was literally trying to keep my head above water now, literally and figuratively.  Crime was the word of the evening.  All of a sudden, crime seemed like concrete blocks pulling me under.

“Can we talk about the money you owe me now?” I was pleading inside but pulled it off as a normal request.

“Sure Chris, I’ll give you cash” and he laughed.  He laughed.  Like it was just normal to brag about being a criminal.  I wasn’t high or drunk yet, I was stone cold sober and as sure as hell I wasn’t going to sip that shitty Scotch sitting on the pool’s edge.  I was checking out his wife though, but not just her body but what her thoughts were too.  What was she thinking?  Living like this?  Yeah that moment, I thought of my parents.  I thought that no matter how shitty I thought they had done in raising me I didn’t think that they would want this style of living for me.  As best as they could, they would want me to have something better in my life.  I’m pretty sure a life a crime wasn’t on their list of wants for one of their kids.  I swam over to the pools edge and got out and dried off and mumbled something about having to go.  I felt extremely intimidated.  I met the demon and I didn’t like it.  It didn’t go well with me at all.  I needed the money though and had to sell myself no matter how much whore smelt on me.

Chuck kept on talking but I was reeling in another world and felt cornered and closed in.  Just got to get the fuck out of here was all I could think.  My friends has warned me earlier about the path I was treading and all those messages started coming through and making sense.  I couldn’t live this life.  It didn’t make me reborn or anything, I just knew for sure, for once, for sure that I couldn’t do crime.  No matter what. I got my money and left.  I went straight to my dealer’s house and paid him my debt (of course, what else do I need money for?) and got a little extra just to straighten out my head.  Too many thoughts of my parents, too many thoughts of rehabilitation, too many thoughts of good.

I did stay away from Chuck and his berth from that moment on and I’m glad I did.  His luck was bad and it brought down a friend I loved in the process.  I kept my word to stay out of crime, oh not the little crime stuff though.  I still stole coke from my roommate when I could etc. but the stuff for the police I kept away.  That kid in the picture had a rough start, a rambling, unruly, unkempt plan for life.  In other words, nothing was planned.  There is nothing scarier in this world that walking a step into an unknown future every day with fate banging at the door.  Come this way, go that way, don’t go there!  I may have come a long way but the waves from that upbringing still turn the tide of my future, not as valiant or as strong but they’re still there.  I still have my charm though and some days it’s enough to sway fate to let me live another day.  In the moment is something I discovered long before it was truly discovered.