I just finished watching the Shawshank redemption. It wasn’t the first time I watched it. But it must’ve been 10 years since the last time I’ve seen it.I don’t know if I cried the last time I saw it, but I have tears flowing down my face now.

I don’t know why I’m crying. it’s not really the movie. although it was a great movie. It just, that I can’t help but to think about my own life and what I’ve come through so far.So much pain. so much sadness. so much failure.I don’t know what my mother’s life was like before. me. I don’t know if she was poor, or lived in homeless shelters, or went some nights not eating. I truly don’t know. but I know that with me and my brother (and later my sister) we struggled. we struggled hard.

I can remember houses with no toilets. just a pipe sticking out of the floor, and every time you flushed the toilet upstairs, downstairs shit would spew up from the bare pipe like a fountain . I know that was the first and only time I can remember us having a 2 story place to live. we were so happy that we had an “up stairs”. to me it felt like what you see white people on TV had. it was so nice to me. unfortunately the shit flowing out of the pipe was just like everything else in our lives; for every step forward we made, we made a step backward. nice house, but if you shit upstairs it comes out of the pipe downstairs.

I remember staying at a homeless shelter during my first year of high school. It hurt so much to not be like everyone else. It hurt. I remember the roaches that would crawl through the light fixture on the ceiling. the fixture was plastic, shaped like the top you put over a cake plate; flat cylinder like. it hid the bulbs underneath. as I laid in the bed I could see the shadows of dozens of roaches crawling around in that light fixture. If I focused, I could even make out their little antennae in their silhouette. what saddens me the most when I think about it is my accepting of the roaches as a part of life. maybe not everyone’s life. maybe not even normal life. but certainly our lives. being surrounded by roaches was normal to me. we just followed certain rules. You can’t put your plate down, not even for a second. because if you do a roach would get it.

I remember the food at that shelter. cheerios for breakfast. in a long cafeteria tables, no different than the tables at a schools lunch room or in a prison. same florescent lights too. They give off that harsh, sterile light. A dead light. For some reason I liked the food. I think it’s because I could feel the satisfaction that my mom had from being able to feed us.thinking back on it now, the question of how would we eat was probably a daily worry for my mom at that time.

and I remember toys. I’m guessing we were in there for Christmas. because every child at the shelter got toys. So it couldn’t have been my birthday. Not sure why we got those toys. Or even why at that age I was so happy about toys. Wait. it wasn’t toys. It was candy. Some lady passed out candy to all the kids. even me. Yes, that’s what it was. It was like, all the families in that palace were, kinda nice. and one lady, homeless with her own kids, passed out candy to all of us. That was nice of her.

I don’t remember anything else of that homeless shelter. really I don’t remember much of anything fromt he time when I was 10 years old to the time when I was about 17.I think I blocked most of those years out.

I hear a lot of stores from poor kids all grown up. people my age that grew up struggling. and all the stores are the same. they can remember a time when it all started going downhill. first everything was fine. they weren’t always poor and struggling from what they remember. then something happened, and they never recovered. for my girlfriend it was the death of her father. leaving her mom to fend for 4 girls alone. for us and our family, it was our apartment going condo. We had a beautiful place. on Malden and magnolia. North side of Chicago. mixed neighborhood. beautiful neighborhood. and a big apartment. we weren’t rich by any means. hell, the problems were there even then. I know we bar-b-q’d everyday one summer because we had no gas. I specifically remember a kid walking by and pointing that fact out to me. “You bar-b-q every day ” he said in a ridiculing tone. I remember that because before he said that, I thought we were the coolest people on the block. Hell, most people barbq every onece in a while. On special occasions. We were lucky enough to do it everyday. how cool were we? everyday was a holiday. I think it’s my father (really my step father, but fuck that, he’s my father) who made me feel like that. Damned kid walking by made me realize the truth. We weren’t doing it because everyday was a holiday. we were doing it because we were poor and couldn’t (or didn’t) pay our bills.

But still, I loved that apartment. I loved it a lot. maybe I loved it more because that was the last nice place we had before we descended into homelessness and gypsy-ism. that was the last place, were I felt like my family wasn’t always in trouble. the last place I at least felt normal.

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 Kingdom. High School dropout. Network Administrator. Pimp. Next…???

Posted by kingdom on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 5:45 am.