Youth Happenings
When I got out the hospital, I did some research on the schizoaffective diagnosis I have. One article said that psychotic people have difficulty with reasoning and rationality, so I researched how to become more rational. One website recommended that I memorize the cognitive biases. That is what I did. Ten years ago, I spent a few months researching cognitive bias. Then I memorized all of them.
One of these biases is called the “Negativity Bias.” It is more likely that a person will remember negative experiences and information than positive. It would be nice to look back and write about the good events that happened in my youth; but alas, I recall mainly the bad.
In my old neighborhood, in the southwestern desert, there were, once a week or more, some strange and scary event coming to the fore of this cactus-and-dust-laden scenery.
In this post, I will detail some of them. They resulted, over time, in a crippling anxiety about leaving my house. The anxiety resolved, after moving to a neighborhood that is peaceful, quiet, safe enough, where I have had the space to attain a body which is hazardous to trifle with.
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Once, I was walking through the backstreets of my suburban neighborhood. Some new residents a few streets down were two Mexican boys about seventeen years old. I assume they were brothers. As I was walking past their house, I looked over at them standing outside their front door. They were talking to each other, but stopped, and looked up at me as I passed. I looked away, kept walking, and after I had crossed ten or twenty yards, an object went whizzing past my ear, over my shoulder, and exploded onto the ground in front, to the left of me.
It was a can of soda. One of them wanted to hit me in the head, and missed by mere inches. He must have been angry about life, or wanted to showcase his bad boys nature to anyone watching. Cruelty is the pastime of the male suburban youth without a future.
I turned around, went back home, told my brother what happened. We got his two black friends who were brothers living to the north of us, and went to confront them.
When the boundary encroaching boys saw me, my brother, and two black guys with the bodies of football lineman approaching them, they fell on the ground and profusely apologized; they ran inside their house, and got their mother to defend them.
When she came outside, and saw us walking in their direction, she had a phone in her hand, waved it around at us, while yelling that the police were on their way, so “be prepared for arrest if you touch my sons.” The boys were crying and begging us not to beat them. We made them apologize, shook hands, and I never saw them again.
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One evening, around nine PM, when I was sixteen, I was walking through my neighborhood A steel grey van coming toward me on the opposite side of the street, suddenly swerved in my direction, on purpose, bounced over the curb, and narrowly missed hitting my body. I had to dive off the sidewalk into the gravel in self defense.
These were malevolent pranksters, who, for cruelty reasons, wanted to spook some teenage kid who was innocently getting his daily exercise in the outdoor prison known as suburbia, with threat of a hit and run accident.
I walked in the direction the van was driving, searched all over my neighborhood, and found where the van was parked; I found their house.
Then I went home, and rallied my neighborhood friends through the landline phone attached to the wall, next to the kitchen. We picked up ten pound stones from the creek, drove by the house where the van was parked, and threw the stones out the window, to bust up the exterior of the vehicle.
When I threw my stone, it bounced off the tire, and flew back toward my face, barely not-slamming me in the forehead by mere inches, and ricocheted over the top of the car.
If that stone would have rebounded with the full pressure the tire forced it, and hit me in the head, then FOR SURE, I would be dead right now. It scared me to my wits end, to think revenge could have cost my life.
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Once, at night time, around eight PM, I was walking through my neighborhood. I like to walk at night because there were fewer people out and about, who could cause trouble. It helps the digestion of dinner, keeps blood sugar balanced, accelerates peristalsis (the tensing & relaxing of intestines), and improves gut motility, to walk after eating.
I passed through the greenbelt that goes between the backyards of suburban houses. There were two black guys huddled together nearby a bench, under a pavilion, loudly talking. It appeared they were drunk or high on drugs.
I knew that it would not be a good idea to pass them, so I turned to the right, cut through the grass, and entered the cul-de-sac of another street to walk back home. But it was too late. They had already seen me.
I could hear them running up behind me, loudly cursing and shouting that they were going to jump me. When I turned around to look at them, they slowed down to a walk, so as not to scare me into running away before they could beat me.
I knew that something bad was about to happen, so I ducked into the corridor of a random house, rang the doorbell fast—as hard and fast as I could—to see if these neighbors would shelter me, before the black guys closed enough distance to attack.
When my pursuers saw me enter the corridor, they believed I had gone inside my own house. They passed by thinking they missed their chance.
Then, when they were out of sight my hiding place, I slipt away into another street, flagged down a camo green jeep, told him I was being hunted by black people, and asked for a ride back home. The stranger agreed, and conveyed me to safety. I missed getting jumped that night by a whisker’s toot.
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Once, a tweaker robbed the gas station two miles from me, then fled in a vehicle, before crashing into my neighbors’ house. The cops were chasing him. He needed to get away, but wrecked his car, when the adrenaline made him lose control of his planning ability. One of my neighbors was a police officer. He came running out his house, fully armed, and apprehended the thief, before he could break into the house, before he could barricade himself there, before he could take hostages.
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I was walking through my neighborhood in the late night. There was a police helicopter flying over, shining light beams down on the ground, trying to find someone.
I had not done anything wrong, so I was not afraid. Yet, as I entered the greenbelt, a teenage boy popped out the bushes, ran up along side me, quietly saying, “Are you cool, man? Are you cool?”
I afraid he was going to hurt me, so I said, “yea, what do you need.” He replied, “just walk next to me, until I can get to my house, so the cops don’t catch me. I did something bad and I need to get home.”
I had no choice but to walk with him. Then the helicopter lights poured over us like spaghetti sauce over noodles, but flew away. Since we were walking slowly and not running from the lights, they assumed we were innocent pedestrians caught in the crossfire of a police chase.
When we got to a certain juncture in the greenbelt, he disappeared down another street so that I was alone again.
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When I was in the eight grade, I would spend time at the house of a youngster from my grade, who was my same age. He had an older brother who was a senior varsity wrestler at the high school in our community.
When I was annoying the wrestler with something silly eighth graders say, he used my body as a wrestling doll, put me in various unusual, painful wrestling positions.
It was difficult for me to learn about what to say and not say in his space. When he wanted to punish me further, he grabbed hold of my recently descended testicles over my pants, and SQUEEZED them, until I yelped like a stuck pig, while heeing and hawing in my face like a jackass at the same time.
I still have brotherly love for that man; he was a funny guy and a good friend to me; although he was a hyper-masculine, ultra-competitive southwestern fighter type, which is not with what my nature aligns. I am accustomed to friendship with soft-spoken, sensitive culture aficionados whose temperaments are melancholic, whose values are creativity and artistic expression.
When I was delivering pizzas, I would stop by houses in wrestler’s neighborhood. where there were parties going on. Festivity enthusiasts offered me weed hits from a two foot bong, for the drive back to the store; and while I was ripping a fatty heater from the skunk guzzler, drunken fist fights broke out around me—full out war-brawls between teenage boys—to settle scores for prior wrongs done to each other.
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One fateful evening during the springtime, a block party was held by the black people in my neighborhood.
They cordoned off the street, so that no vehicles could enter, then put up long folding tables, also a DJ booth, decorations, fake palm trees to set the scenery, pinatas, and whatnot. They blasted music from boomboxes, boozed it up with beer and ardent spirits, nourished themselves with baby back ribs and watermelon, and danced like hyenas on the cusp of conjugal enjoyment.
One of my friends lived on the corner of this street, a five foot six white kid named Derek, saw himself as the romantic outlaw type. He and his friends he met online, bought Japanese made cars—we called them “rice burners”—and suped them up with illegal equipment upgrades, for the acceleration at breakneck speeds.
This was around the time “The Fast And The Furious” franchise had released its first film. The boys thought this movie was the holy grail of tough guy shenanigans. They wanted to emulate the action themselves, so they formed teams, and raced their rocketships across desert canyons; outran police that chased them; and in the downtime, manually repaired their vehicles.
[Aside]
When the film “Fight Club” came out, boys across the city created fight clubs that had to be tracked down, and broken up by police. When the film “The Matrix” emerged in 1999, twenty days later the Columbine massacre happened. Boys love to ape the action from the films they have seen. The conduct of humanity itself, could be described as apes aping apes aping apes ad infinitum. Monkey see, monkey do, is the law of the land, since mirror neurons were first introduced into the homo sapien brain!
[Aside]
We were at his house, and the boys in his team infiltrated the block party. They stole bottles of liquor of the black people partying. Three of the bottles were brought back to the house for us to share. Twenty minutes after the last bottle was ours, as they started to drink, there was a noisy banging on the front door.
Derek answered the door. Then I heard a black man’s voice yelling, and demanding the hooch be returned. The blacks had seen what was happening the whole time, but waited until the job was complete to take it back. We thought they were going to raid the house, all of us panicked, but after Derek handed over what was theirs, they left us alone.
It is a good idea if something like this happens to you, to lay down, play dead, and pretend like you were asleep while the other boys are doing bad stuff, in case it spares you a beating.
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When I was sixteen I was romantically involved with a twenty one year old stripper named Hazel, who worked at the gentleman’s club in the city adjacent my neighborhood. She had a side hustle as a coke dealer. I met her on the internet; and she, her best friend Kay, and the boys from my band would, every weekend for a year, fortify ourselves in my room, lock the door, and snort coke all night, while my parents watched television two hundred feet away in the living room. Coke is the worst drug, in my opinion, because of the harsh come down. After stimulated for many hours, once the stash is run out, the nose candy connoisseur falls into depression, as the dopamine neurotransmitters are depleted by early morning.
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In the eighth grade there was, at my school, a six foot two black kid named Jimmy, who was held back three times. He had the body of a high school junior, while in the ninth grade.
He used to lurk up and down the hallways, leap toward the nerdy white kids, pull his arm back like he was going to strike them, and when they cowered, he laughed boisterously. and cried out, “made ya flinch! made ya flinch!” Then he did it to the next boy down the hall. He liked to make his smaller peers, who were collecting books from lockers, innocently minding their P’s & Qs, verge on pissing their pants with a feigned attack, one by one, until he reached the exit of the building.
In the locker room, after gym class, he walked up behind me, and pulled my legs out from under me. I went flying toward the ground, nearly thudding my head on the concrete bench I was standing next to. After he did this, he ran up to me, and bellowed at above-whisper decibel, so as not to attract attention of adults, “sorry! sorry! sorry! you gon snitch? you gon snitch? you gon snitch?” I shook my head no, and never told the teacher. Tattling would have resulted in more beatings.
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My first job, at age sixteen, was as a bag & cart boy at a grocery store. My parents made me get a job to pay for my first car, along with insurance. I filled plastic bags with food that people bought, then took the product to their car after they paid. Sweeping floors, cleaning bathrooms, and collecting carts from the parking lot were my other duties.
There were a few young men in their early twenties working there as cashiers. One of them helped me steal cigarettes from behind the customer service booth.
When a customer requested a pack of cigarettes, the cashier grabbed two packs from the slot; then when he got back to the register, he slid a pack over to me, as if it was an item he rang up from the order. I picked up the pack, and smoothly dipped it into my apron with the finesse of a blackjack dealer.
One stressful day, after six months of performing the theft once a week, I found out this guy got busted by the bosses. They were watching him do the deeds on the cameras the whole time. Cashier pocketed steaks, soda, liquor, caviar, candy, etcetera. They let him wrack up a few thousand dollars worth of merchandise, then they confronted him, fired him, and sued him to pay back the cost of the goods he pilfered. I was afraid he snitched on me, and I would face the same fate he did, so I quit that job shortly after.
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In junior high, a stray pit bull got loose on the campus which began ripping apart freshman that were eating lunch in the outdoors cafeteria.
There were WEEKLY drug and weapon busts at my junior high. Multiple students locker were searched, and found there pistols, methamphetamine crystals, pornography magazines, switchblade knives, and brass knuckles which breaks the facial bones of an enemy. You could buy brass knuckls at the smoke shop, as long as it was labeled a paper weight. Using this weapon, which wrapps around the fingers a layer of steel, and adds two inches metal thickness to a fighters strike, they could do utmost damage to their opponents facial skeletn in a battle.
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We tenth graders discovered that the smoke shop located five miles from our neighborhood, run by a team of Pakistani men, were willing to sell cigarettes and mild hallucinogenic drugs like Salvia to underage kids. Rumors spread throughout the school that we could buy tobacco products. Weekly, my friends and I rode our bikes there, and picked up a few packs to smoke for the unwinding after homework was done.
On a routine basis, minors on the bus offered me pills, and some of them smoked meth out a glass pipe while blowing vapor through the open window afterward.
[I am not opposed to other peoples’ drug/alcohol use, but it is a tad peculiar that thirteen and fourteen year old children were already involved in life destroying substances at such young age.]
One pastime of school bus riders in middle school was to torment the bus driver. There were annual contests to see who could say or do something so mean to her, that it would cause her to have a mental breakdown and quit her job.
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Derek and I got our hands on the Anarchist Cookbook one summer. We figured out how to build a homemade explosive from ordinary household materials.
One bomb required laundry detergent filled half way up a water bottle. Then a wad of tinfoil into a tube was shaped that looked like a silver dookie. When tinfoil is slipped down the neck of the bottle into the detergent, and cap is tightened, a chemical reaction begins.
A gas forms and fills the bottle, until there is no place left for it to go. The fumes expand, expand, and expand, and then shatter the bottle’s body, producing a high decibel BANG.
It was more like a homemade firework than something designed to harm someone. Derek’s backyard wall was bordering an elementary school’s soccer field. When there were no people there, usually at night time, we tossed it over the wall into the field, to hear a garish explosion, as boys tend to enjoy.
Once or five times, we made homemade Napalm, smeared it across the brick of the wall, lit it on fire with a match, and watched the Styrofoam soaked in gasoline ooze toward the ground, while it burnt a bright orange, green, red, and yellow.
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The first heavy metal show I played with my second band, (I have been in four altogether) was in a pizza place. Staff moved the tables to the back of the room, set up a stage, and permitted the teenage rock stars to perform music for locals in the community.
The name of our band was heavily controversial. It got one of my bandmates suspended from school, when he wrote the name of our group on his notebooks. The teacher sent him to the principal when she saw it. He was shipped home that day, and could not return for two weeks.
The music we played is called Grindcore. It is the dirtiest, wretchedest, least sensical heavy metal, meant to be indistinguishable from noise. This music makes an audio-ideological point that perfection is superfluous, stupid, useless, and even dangerous.
Nonsensical noise music was an active (and naive) protest against the authoritarian social order which oppresses young minds & bodies of the full expression our masculine vitality.
Purposely offensive were our lyrics. Our singer grunted and growled about female anatomy dissected and eaten by killres with bloodthirst and extreme pathological perversion.
Naturally, all of us were pampered mama’s boys who wept when a friend overdosed on heroin and died, but it was a coolguy trend at the time, to make song lyrics praising serial kllers and mass shooters.
Young people like to pop out from coddled fox holes at their suburban parents’ houses, make a racket of intentionally transgressive clamor, kick up sprawling piles of dust, and then dive back into safety before peers or authority can punish them. This is the tradition of the American youth, since recently and the furthest of the foreseeable past.
Bandmembers and I were no different. Everyone at school is against violence and repugnant speech? Then we are FOR those concepts. Everyone in the community are fanatically moral Christ-worshippers? Then we attract attention by spewing faux-Satanic roar out five foot amps, blasted drumskins, and crashed cymbals.
The first show we played at the pizza place, the parents of some of the teenagers attending, were devout and radical Christians, who, enraged by the name of our band and the genre music we played, attempted to shut off electricity to the guitar amps we were using. There was quarrel between audience and my team that built and built and built intensity, without resolution from the outside until another force intervened.
Yet, our Irishman guitarist, nicknamed Vandal, savaged himself into orangutang frenzy, like a troop-organ scuffling over turf conflict. He punched a fist sized hole in the wall, to repay the wrong of deliberate censure.
Our adversaries called the police, and Vandal had to return the following week to repair the damage himself.
Girls love badboys though. This stunt got the notice of ladies at my bandmates school. We were quickly becoming legendary subversive heavy metal artists, with the mystique that had the school newspapers wanting interviews.
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I was hanging out with bandmates Jean (Spaniard), Dwayne (Frenchman), Dan (Mexican), and Daystar (Dutch/Welsh).
We were drunk at Mexican food place. All of our clothes were tight black jeans covered in punk rock and heavy metal band patches. We crust punk rocker boys competed to see who could cover their pants in the most patches.
One crustie named Floyd, who won the competition, (the only African-American star among us,) covered his clothes in leather patches. At one point in time, I had a trihawk—three bands of hair, with bald patches in between them, spiked with hairspray and colored blue&red with hair dye.
It was the conformity agreed between musicians to stand out visually from the weaker mass of conformists in the city, by designing our clothes in an outlandish and bizarre fashion.
After we drunkenly ate our food, we walked out to the car to drive home. There was a jock, what looked & dressed like a sportsball player, standing out front of the store. He made fun of us for the way we dressed.
I had the door to Dan’s car half way open, I stood in between the seat and the door, and chaotically shouted at the jock, “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU FAGGOT BITCH!!! FUCK YOU!!!”
The jock was stood against the building. Forthwith his facial expression turned to WRATH. He shrieked, “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?!?”
And then he charged my position in the open doorway.
I dropped into the seat of the car, but the window was open. The other guys filed into the vehicle quicky, as Dan started the engine. We were about to get thrashed by this jock, his male friend, and the two girls they were with.
Right after I closed the door, and started to roll up the window, I felt a powerful wind graze my face, and saw a fist barely miss my chin. I ducked the blow he sent, before it could reach me.
Dan pulled out the parking space, as the swear-avenger banged on the hood of the car. Dan barked, “holy shit, Daystar, I’m down to fight, but you have to WARN ME, before you do something like that!” Then, we sped back to Dan’s apartment, and passed out drunk as an ostrich sucking thirst away at the waterpond.
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I will make a follow up to this post as more memories pass through my mind.