In my personal dictionary, lost and lonely were the most significant words. On those days, it seemed like all I knew about life has been that we live, grow and die. Elbert is my name, but people used to call me El. Tall, skinny, little boy, I was on my way to the manhood. Nobody understood me and I understood nobody, like a black dot on a white shirt.
Running was a hobby of mine. I ran to school. I ran to the store. I ran everywhere. One foot after the other, making everything and all the pain from the outside world disappear for a certain time. “That’s why you hella skinny”, Grory said. He is my half brother, but we certainly don’t and didn’t have any resemblance. Grory was muscular, short, and “cool” some people said. I always saw him …show more content…
I always wondered what they were doing standing there, on all the time. Uncle Tony used to say that girls are the reasons why many men don’t succeed. But I didn’t know what he meant. Later I understood that they wanted to make mad money. Black eyes, swollen lips, and abandoned babies were caused by their money hunger. The Big Boys and the gangsters always moved from corner to corner as their meeting areas, walking without shirts, writings all over their chests and hands, abandoned by theirs souls with no knowledge of it. They always give the finger to people and usually carried a huge radio that they always carried around. Because of them, there was like a big barrier that made the whole neighborhood invisible on the other people’s eyes. People judged us so much they didn’t acknowledged that some people were different. There were the older men, sleeping in various spots, always drinking and smoking to forget all the pain they’ve been through. They seemed like they’ve been through a …show more content…
It was a sound similar to firecrackers. Everyone was used to it. It always scared me. I realized at an early age that every time there was that sound, a family loses a member. One day, one person laying on the bloody road, one mother pushing an officer trying to make her way to her dead child. Bullets ate some things almost every night. The people with the guns had nothing to do but terrorize us. They called themselves gangsters, the people whose pants always allow their underwear to make its appearance, hanging out in abandoned buildings, and always smoking. The youngest ones were the Big boys. There were so many of them, including Grory. They became the first thing strangers noticed in the neighborhood, and then those strangers would assume that everybody was dangerous. However, I wasn’t. POW, POW! And the neighborhood was