At that age, I read the stranger by Albert Camus and that
book changed my life. Since that first
reading, I have read that book about fifteen times. I was working at my first job, which was at
the Greenwood Public Library, which is now known as McDonald’s. Go figure, huh. I had a car, a brown Buick; a Somerset was
what it was. It was a cool car; I used
to go all over the place with it, with my friends and girls. I remember going to the beach a lot and
smoking a lot, and hanging out with these high school girls from my class at
Moody High School. The weird thing is
that me and my friends used to hang out with these two girls, two cousins who
were very beautiful. One of them was a
skinny girl whom I like a lot, but her cousin, was thin, but had a body that
was rocking and rolling. I remember
being at the beach with these girls and I took off my shirt and the cousin, I forget
her name, would stand next to me and rub her hand into my hairy chest and tell
me how much she liked my hairy chest, because all these other boys she knew
from school, were that, just boys. And me,
I was weird about it all. I was their
friend, their close friend when we were not in school. But when it came to school, for some reason, I
was ashamed to be seen with them. Why, I
don’t know, and I still think about that, about why I acted like I did not know
who these girls were when I would see them in high school, but outside of
school, I was their best friend. I think
that is very strange, indeed. At high
school, I was taking calculus and smoking lots all the time. My hair was long; it went to the middle of
my back. I used to shave my head and
only the top of my head was long. I knew
all these girls that had a crush on me from high school, but I did not do
anything about it. My anxiety was really
bad and I did not talk to girls because I was afraid or I was a big pussy. That is all I can think of when it comes to
my relationships with girls. It was no
until a couple of years later that I would lose my innocence and I would think
differently about girls. At this time, I
was a philosopher and a poet. Girls were
very far from my mind. I read Nietzsche
and Camus and Sartre. I discovered
Baudelaire in my life and started to read lots of popular fiction, like Grisham
and Crichton. When I was seventeen I was
in charge of my life, and all I wanted to be was a poet. Kind of like J. Keats, but little did I know
what my life had in store for me? I was
taking classes at Moody that were audio visual video tape classes. I used to make commercials, produce them for
my class, and I used to snap lots of photos with a bad-ass camera that I bought
with the money I was making from working at the library. I used to play piano very much, and my piano
teacher had me accepted at the Berklee College of music, located in Boston,
Mass. I was into Nirvana and Pearl
Jam. I really enjoyed Pearl Jam a lot. I was getting into that underground indie
scene, which would only lead me to even better music in the years to come. I remember I bought this collection of compact
discs, which was everything that John Lennon had recorded as a solo
artist. It was a compilation compact
disc which consisted to four separate compact discs. This was the most important buy that I made
in my young life. I loved these
recordings so much. I remember these
crushes I had on certain girls, who would come in and see me at the library all
the time. They would look at me and ask
my questions, and they would wait for me to ask them out. But I was a naïve and stupid little boy, not
realizing that these women were throwing themselves at me, so I ignored their
advances and wondered late at night, why I did not have a girlfriend, and I wondered
if I would ever have one. My sexual
tastes were questioned, and I wondered if I was a homosexual, not that I have
anything against them, but I was curious about myself at that time, because I could
not talk to girls, but I was able to talk to boys, any boys without any
trouble. Later on in my life, I discovered
I was not gay, but that is at another age in my life. When I was seventeen, I was already snorting
things and popping pills like nothing. I
remember shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I had smoked a reefer, a
marijuana stick, and I locked up my door, and when inside to my calculus
class. About twenty minutes into the
mathematical lecture, by a teacher who thought he was the Jaime Escalante of
South Texas. My calculus teacher had all
these sayings on his wall, from ‘poder es querer’ to a bunch of sayings that
screamed Chicano pride. What I do
remember most about my teacher’s wall, was this long picture from M C Escher
that always caught my eye. Well, twenty
minutes into this mindless number game called calculus and the security guard
came in and asked for me by my name. I went
outside and saw police searching my car.
I was asked to open the car and the police dove in and searched my car
thoroughly. Fortunately nothing was
found, except for two little seeds in the back seat. My car smelled like weed because I and my two
friends had just burned one on the way to school. The vice principal at that time, told me that
he did not know what was going to happen to me, but he sent me back to class
and told me that I had better change. That
night was a Friday night, and I decided to cut off my beautiful long hair, to
show the principal and all others who know about my predicament that I was capable
of changing and that I needed a chance to prove to them that I was a good
person. Obviously it worked, for the
vice principal called me into his office and told me that they were not going
to pursue the case against me because for one they were just seeds, but also because
I had shown initiative that I wanted to change my life. This was the first time I lied about my
usage, and it would not be my last. I guess
this was the first time that I was able to lie and get away with it, and use
the knowledge to my ability, and get what I want. It was not until four years later that I found
out that what I was doing had a name already in the philosophical world, and
this knowledge was very acute in my actions.
There are a lot of other things that I did at this age, but I’ll save
that for next time.
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