Y’know, we spent more’n six years in that stinkin’ hell-hole of a Wyoming town. With my mom turnin’ tricks at the truck stop for money for booze. An’ her mom makin’ sure I got fed an’ my diapers got changed an’ I got a hug, once in a while, an’ all that shit. At least, till she keeled over from a heart attack that nobody -- not the paramedics or the E-R doctors -- believed was a heart attack till it killed her. I was four. By the time I hit six, I’d figured out how to fix my own cereal an’ rip off milk from other doorsteps an’ keep myself goin’ while mom slept off her drunks.
We didn’t move to LA till the state tried to take me away from her. Fuckin’ bureaucrats an’ “Christian” folk didn’t give a shit about me till my grandmother was dead from takin’ care of me an’ my mom got preggers, again. Then, by God, they wanted to make fuckin’ sure I was raised right. Same for the kid my mom was carryin’. Fuckin’ hypocrites. They didn’t give a fuck about my mom gettin’ abortions till her usual guy cut too deep into some rich bitch’s scared little girl an’ she bled to death; then they ended the “illegal” practice everybody in town knew about. Those “good Christian folk” who turned my mom in, they wouldn’t take me in or any kid like me. No fuckin’ way. That’d mean practicin’ what they preached, an’ that might be real inconvenient. No, I was gonna get farmed out to some foster family who were more interested in the state stipend than in me, an’ if that didn’t work then I’d get dumped onto the state. So me an’ mom, we split in th’ middle of the night with some trucker who just loved her mouth.
Jesus, over the next seven years we lived in every part of Southern California there was. LA. Oxnard. Oceanside -- mom loved Marines for some fuckin’ reason; maybe my dad was one, once. Riverside -- which stinks, an’ I mean really. San Bernadino, Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Ojai, you name it, I could probably give you an address there. An’ she turned tricks the whole time. Till she married this insurance salesman from Pasadena who “didn’t care about her past.” By that point, I was thirteen goin’ on thirty, an’ nobody had say over me but me. Still, things calmed down a lot. For a while. Till I realized he was a cheap-assed son-of-a-bitch who only took my brother an’ me in ‘cause we came with the package an’ he wasn’t gonna give either of us a fuckin’ penny more’n he had to. An’ I got goin’ in the drug biz. An’ wound up at county.
Anyhow, when I was eighteen, I got dumped out on the world. I couldn’t go home if I’d wanted to. My mom an’ her motherfucker told me there was no fuckin’ way they’d let me back in; I was too “out of control” and’d be a “bad influence on the other kids.” An’ I had nobody else to hold onto. All I had was a few bucks an’ the address for a halfway house in Silver Lake. So I headed there. Tello’s church was in Hollywood. I figured he’d help me get a job an’ get my life goin’ right.
But he didn’t do shit. Didn’t make one fuckin’ call. Didn’t return calls when I gave him as a reference. Got to where he was always “in a meetin’” when I tried t’ call him. It’s like I didn’t exist, anymore. For a while, I thought I’d done somethin’ t’ piss him off, but I couldn’t figure out what. I mean, I was workin’ a regular job at a burger joint for slave wage. I was stayin’ in the halfway house. I’d stopped doin’ drugs, complete. It didn’t’ make sense. Then this kid named Mario who was in county before me explained it.
“Out of sight, out of mind,” he said. I didn’t get it, at first, so Mario laid out the full 4-1-1. “You ain’t around him, no more, vato. He’s like this lifeguard that says he’ll save ya from drownin’ but when ya really need him, he’s on his lunch break an’ it’s your own damn fault for tryin’ to drown at that time. He thinks he did all he had to do while you was inside. Now it’s up to you to make it. Even if you drown.”
God, I felt like a dumb fuck.
But I ain’t one, now. I’m not “educated.” My grammar sucks an’ my two-plus-two’s are about as basic as you can get. But I ain’t stupid, not no more. I know how to take stuff that I need an’ not get caught. I know how to get what I can’t take without bein’ caught. I can do whatever I got to do to keep myself goin’ an’ not worry ‘bout it till it’s done, if then. I guess you’d call that bein’ an animal, but if you’re treated like a dog, that’s what you get to be. Like a dog.
A dog.
Shit. That reminds me of this cousin of my mom’s, lived in Montana. Butte, maybe. He was a mean-assed SOB who wouldn’t do jack for anybody, not even his own family. An’ he had a dog. A scared little mutt he treated like shit. Kicked it. Barely fed it. Yelled at it. I saw him do all that shit the one time I was there. How old was I? Five? Maybe six. Maybe just before we left. Yeah, I think mom went to him for money an’ he whined about how broke he was
