HOLLYWOODS-Chapter 2 The Wrench in My Game

CHAPTER 2 THE WRENCH IN MY GAME

But before we can get to the good and ugly we have to start at the bad. So like I said I was a teenager and felt invincible no matter what I did. The little crew I hung out with were nuckin futs and always up to no good. I had a met a few girls by now but I won’t get to them till later (you know the good and the ugly). Anyways one day my boy and I were chilling at this chick’s house when we meet this older guy, I believe he was 19. The dude had just moved to the DC area and I guess he knew one of the girl’s cousins or something like that, because honestly I have no idea what he was doing hanging out with a bunch of 15 year olds. He was about 6 foot tall and pretty stocky, he just moved here from Wisconsin and was obviously a loser among his peers but acted like hot shit around us kids.

Well the guy was a complete asshole and wouldn’t stop talking and making up all these stories about himself back home, but one thing he said did catch my attention. He told us about he kept hearing that there were lots of shrooms in Virginia (the psychedelic mushrooms that naturally grow in cow shit) and even though he was right, at that point in my life I had never seen mushrooms, let alone know where to get them. What I did already learn in my 15 years on this earth was of a scam to sell fake mushrooms and make lots of money, it was very simple you just buy some Portobello mushrooms and cut the caps from the stems then let them dry out and boom you can make about a 1,000 percent profit on those mushrooms.

This scam had already proved lucrative for my friend Mikey and me when we did it to some eighth graders a few months back. Although this only works if you’re selling to an idiot and you don’t care about the repercussion of seeing that person after they don’t trip off what you sold them, which was exactly the situation I was in. So I tell that douche bag I can get him some of those precious mushrooms and as we are going over the details of our soon to be transactions the weirdest thing happened, the guy just starts getting stranger and stranger. I mean he was odd when we first met him an hour ago but by now you could see it in his eyes that this guy was a little off his rocker and he was acting like a complete asshole, then he proceeds to tell me that he doesn’t want to deal with me because I was a sand nigger, and a dirty Arab and all this shit.

Just out of nowhere, this was really the first time I had ever heard anyone say these things to me because I grew up in the Northern Virginia and DC area which is one the biggest melting pots in the nation and even though I was born in Iran I moved to the states at the age of three, so with no accent and mainly light features most people think I’m Caucasian anyway. It was kind of funny that he kept calling me Arab when I was really Persian, just like in the movie Crash except that movie had not come out yet.

So how the hell did he even know this and more important why was he so upset, at first I did not know how to react, as a kid I was a little scrapper but far from a big fighter and anyways I'm a little on the small side so obviously I would prefer to talk this out with this big old redneck that wants to kill me all of a sudden. But he wasn’t having that. He just kept pushing and pushing. He was rude and extremely demeaning, what seemed to start off as just a joking sessions of races (we call it Jonin) eventually ended up with him getting in my face and pushing me until my friend Ryan who was a pretty big guy himself grabbed the dude and broke us up. This is when I take a step back and realize how serious this psycho is and I actually start to lose it myself. This guy was a bully and fucking mean one at that, he had four years five inches and about 90 pounds on me but he still wanted to fight. And like I said as a smaller guy I’ve always had a bit of a Napoleon complex and I get angry in a way I have never been before, almost a calm anger.

I remember my boy Ryan looking over at me while he breaks us up, almost as if to ask me if he should help me beat this dudes ass but I didn’t want that, that was never my style to jump someone, it wasn’t fair it wasn’t manly. I tried to talked it out with this guy but he was not feeling it, every minute he was getting angrier and more threatening. So then I freak out and become not so calm anymore. I just walk out of the house, it almost seemed like I was being the bigger man and just walking away from the fight but I guess it’s deep how shallow I was.

I go over to Ryan’s Chevy Nova and look for the first deadly weapon I see which happened to be a monkey wrench on the floor in the back seat. To this day I don’t know why I did what I did but I go back into the house with the wrench just barely holding on in my back pocket and of course the tough guy is still talking shit to me, he gets up in my face pushes me I just grab that wrench and whale it right in his head, and this big brute took the hit fairly well it didn’t even knock him out but it was over right there. He was bent down and just barely mumbling and I come down with another thunderous hit right on the back of his dome.

See when you are a calm person that completely loses your cool like I did it’s very hard to remember all the details of that emotional breakdown. I kind of have just flashes of everything that happened that day. And the final flash I have is that last hit on that guy’s head, the blood splattering everywhere, it was on my shirt, it was on him, it was all over the wall it was even on my fucking neck just oozing down. The blood was thick nasty blood too not like you see in most movies it reminded me of some good homemade marinara sauce chunky and thick in some parts, loose and sloppy in others.

Well obviously this was a decision I would regret in the very near future. About two seconds after that hit Ryan and me leave the house; as for the guy he was just pretty much laying on the floor the last I saw. I will never forget the adrenaline rush we had as we went to our friend’s house to store the bloody monkey wrench in his tool shed. I had such a mixed feeling of emotion all at once. On one hand I put some dumb racist bully in his place but on the other I could feel the trouble lurking in the corner. This was not going to end well.

In a court of law I was convicted of malicious wounding which is a third degree felony (luckily I was tried as a minor). But even more important than that, what about the code of ethics of men how was I judged then? That was my question, the guy was bigger and older but does that justify me using a weapon. Well what I tell myself that helps me sleep at night is that I didn’t just hit him in the head I hit every bully that thinks he can take advantage of those who are smaller than them. In adolescence society there are no weapons there are no rules except that bigger beats smaller. Well I broke that rule and I’m sure that guy is going to think twice next time he sees some small kid or some foreigner and wants to mess with him.

To tell you the truth I felt bad for what I put my family through. I felt bad for what I put that guy’s family through. I even felt some remorse for those poor girls who were at the house and had to witness that scene. But I have no sympathy for that jerk, if we were alone he would of pounced me, if he had the chance I’m sure he would of hit me with a wrench. It wasn’t just that I had to protect myself it was more like I had to prove myself. It’s actually funny after this all went down nobody was really interested in having confrontations with me. Unfortunately there are consequences for my actions. Just the five months it took to finally get to my twice delayed court date was hell. I was placed on house arrest for that whole period and it was a quick snap back to reality. That was actually the first time I started writing, personal writing that is, not a book report or something someone told me to write. It’s a shame because back then I thought it was weird to write down my thoughts so after writing and later reading my notes I would destroy all the evidence, very Inspector Gadget like.

Well eventually I was tried in court and I ended up with a lot of fines, some community service and probation for a year. Also, I had to meet with an outreach counselor every week. My probation officer and the outreach counselor were both very cool and seemed to like me a lot. Especially my PO, we really got a long. He was a laid back guy that you could just see had a very crazy side buried deep down in him, but I always felt that he dealt with so many scum bags in his line of work that I was a breath of fresh air. Besides it never hurts to tell a black man that you beat the living crap out of somebody for calling you a sand nigger. So after house arrest, after probation, which I was let off six months early for good behavior I was finally ready to be a teenager again. Only problem was I was now trying to make up for lost time and unfortunately time is never lost only wasted and in my adolescent mind I figured I would just party extra to make up for all that lost time.

This was the first time my grades started to slip at school but I didn’t care. At least I was out of my house and finally I didn’t have to worry about a court date coming up. Besides the only thing I was worried about was the next party and the next girl. I start hooking up with a lot of girls at my school, especially once I realize how much easier it was with the underclassmen. And that I don’t give a damn mentality was stuck in me, the girls were just objects to me I never had any intentions of becoming serious with any of them. Most of the time this was a mutual feeling but in the cases it wasn’t I always just ignored the girl or got in some bullshit fight and then ended things. The consequences were not important, but little did I know all this was ruining my karma and also the Goddess of love was watching me. Sounds weird? Well I hope it does because if it doesn’t than you are probably a little crazy.

Well later on you will find out about the Goddess of love and her role in my life. But as for now I was living it up. Still I was steadily selling pot just to keep up with my habit and still I was trying stick my penis in every exhaust pipe I could find. Actually there really are only two things of value to say about the next two years of my life. I transferred high schools because my mom got remarried and we moved, but it was just to the school up the road and I knew a lot of the students already from middle school, parties and drug transactions, so this was an easy transition for me. And second I graduated high school though to this day I’m still not sure how I pulled that off. My entire senior year was just one smoke out session after another. Honestly I don’t even remember much; I guess that’s why I’m not going to even try. Now obviously with the life I was living and the grades I received in high school I could not get into any college. So I do what all lost 18 year olds do, I enroll into community college.

I quickly learn that this is basically just a high school that you can smoke cigarettes outside of, it seemed to me that the whole school was filled with a bunch of middle to upper middle class lazy kids that were just there to keep their parents off their back. Well I fit right into this shit hole. And it truly was a good way to keep my parents quiet. A quick little catch up on me is that I’m still living at my parent’s house but I spend almost all of my free time at my friends’ apartment. I work part time at pizza place as a server and even though I am attending that community college it is pretty much the farthest thing from my mind. That first semester I took three classes; I dropped out of one and actually made fairly good grades in the other two. The point being that I was still caught up in that party lifestyle thinking to myself if not now, when. The cycle of wild young bachelor life continued for about a year, but then out of nowhere, things changed. We’ll call her Luisa and she shook up my world.


CHAPTER 3 THINGS GET SERIOUS