Useless Junk of the Day

My story - Part 3 (Freedom)

This Isn’t TV

Its not like in the movies where you see everything in black and white. This guy is a good guy or this guy is a bad character. One guy is a scum bag and one is a hero. When you grow up in what could only be described as a “gang” in today’s definition, you band together with your friends and neighbors primarily for brotherhood and protection against a violent world.

When the guy next to you is going down the tube before your eyes as a kid, you don’t see it. When your friends around you grow up to be career criminals, it seems normal. I don’t see where most of these guys were ever taught any better or ever know any other way. They, unfortunately, seem more normal to me than a professional who grew up in a house with two parents and drives a Cherokee to the office every day.

Garbage in, garbage out

In college my professor taught us a common saying in the programming world; “Garbage in, garbage out.” Simply put, if you write bad code or input bad data, you will get bad output. This is certainly true with kids too.

This rag tag bunch of city kids I ran with, never had ANYTHING but garbage put into their heads from all directions. How can anyone expect anything more than garbage out of them in return. Its another case of the chickens coming home to roost.

I hear the canned conservative mantra over and over again of “personal responsibility.” What does the bastard son of a wife beaten prostitute and a disapearing junkie father supposed to know of responsibility? As I stated earlier, we are all born innocent until our innocence is stolen from us (some younger than others).

These kids only sense of responsibility is to survive by all means necessary. To them, life is a war zone and the neighborhood is a battlefield. Cliché? Maybe to the UNinitiated. Unfortunately, it’s a metaphor that is all too real for millions of children in America. One that I can relate to all too well.

Then there was Freedom

I remember when this one new kid started hanging around the hood in 75. He was this funny looking, chubby, mixed kid. His name was Anthony. he had a big pimpin afro and was yellow in complexion with big glasses. In other words, he had to become a tough guy or he would suffer a slow death in that environment.

He was the first “Prison house lawyer” I ever met, by the time he was only 12-13. 25 years later, I helped get him a moderator position on DA.com. He was known as “Freedom”, the speaker of truths, fighter for minorities, hater of many.

Some backstory.

One day, we were all playing and this kid Johnny started bullying me to exert his dominance like an up and coming wolf in a pack might do. Despite his slight build, he had a cockiness and confidence about him that intimidated me back when I was still green. Thinking back, it must have come in part from his being a small guy and in part from defending himself from his much older alcoholic brother Jody, whom I once saw hit a wino in the head with a baseball bat for fun.

Jody’s wild long red hair and base ball wielding reputation would strike fear into our young hearts! How strange, I thought, the day I saw Jody crying like a baby when Johnny got hit by a car in front of my house. I can still see him there with half his face missing. The well-traveled city streets and rat and wino infested alleys were our only play grounds.

Anyway, we were playing in the alley by trying to break out street lights with rocks without breaking to many windows in near by apartments or cars (not that we cared). Anthony saw me getting pushed around and said “hey, don’t take that from him, he is a punk” as he proceeded to push Johnny down onto an old mattress left to rot in the alley.

Johnny sheepishly jumped up saying “alright, come on man, be cool.” This amazed me to see since I never thought of Anthony to be that tough at the time. Then and there I began my transformation from a sheep to predator. It was a lesson “Freedom” soon would regret as I quickly moved up the ranks of the “Grace Street Gang” and soon began to punk him out with routine displays of pain and humiliation for years to come. It was also the beginning of a life long friendship.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! Subscribe to Useless Junk of the Day by Email

Thursday, March 20th, 2008 Filed under story |