rewrite:blood-ch1

Chapter 1

The first half of my life, if I'm being totally honest, was a living hell. Sure I had my dreams. I had my passions. I was a shitty person, and so was everybody around me.

During my senior year in high school, I had been put in the counselor's office twice. It was because of my sense of humor, that I had said I was going to kill myself in class. It was all fun and games until one of my friends got actually worried about me and told the teacher. Apparently my school has, like, some kind of weird code for this kind of shit, because my teacher straight up talked into a radio to tell the counselor that I had “a dentist appointment.” Two months and $4000 later, my psychiatric evaluation was complete, meaning that I could go to a normal fucking class again.

I probably should have mentioned that they had put me in with the special ed kids while this shit was going down. That probably would have been a good idea.

Anyway, according to the great state of Florida of which everybody loves and absolutely nobody wants destroyed, I was somehow different.

My calculus class had 40 kids in it. Nobody liked anybody. People were constantly throwing shit, one time actual physical shit, at each other. People would break out into fights in the middle of class, just to be escorted by school police. My teacher was the shittiest person I've ever met. Like, if i had a ranking board of shitty people I've met, it would probably be the people who were my friends who stole from me in second grade, this drunk guy on the bus I had to deal with because he would always sit next to me, and then, the queen bitcMs. Feldman, 12th grade calculus teacher and part time bitchy mc fuckface.

When I got back, everybody in the class was under the impression that I was a fucking lunatic, almost definitely because of my teacher, like for the last two months I had been in the special ed class because I was too stupid to comprehend what a life was and how I shouldn't kill myself, or, like only a handful of people believed, the entire state system was totally fucked and we should all just get on with our lives.

High school, from that point on was overall keeping my head down. I had like one friend, who initially I was only friends with because I thought he would shoot up the school, but ended up being a pretty cool guy. He was cool with me, I hung out with him and only him, because he had the same sense of humor as me, so he would never snitch.

Shit didn't totally hit the fan until I went to college.

I went to Florida State University, which, as luck would have it, was a shittier place than high school. Everyone was a dick, and no frat wanted me in.

I was majoring in culinary arts, because I have always wanted to be a chef. You would think that all the classes that I took would be stock full, but, either the school was hard to go to, or nobody in the state of Florida wanted to go to their own state college, because it seemed like it was me and my friend in every class, with only like two other kids.

This meant that there were still two cliques in the classes. Don't ask me how, but there was.

At least the two cliques didn't talk to each other whatsoever.

In college, you aren't treated like you are in high school. People aren't in each other's business, even in a college like the one I was in, where there were barely any people, and the only way they made profit was through charging starbucks up the ass to have one of their stores on campus. Everybody went there all the time.

The dorms were shit. I didn't have a roommate, which was actually fine because I only paid $150 a month, cheap as fuck, just like the rest of the city.

At some point I did get a roommate, his name was James, I think, and he was always blasting metal. He was a cool guy, he just sorta pissed me off. I mean, I’m an open-minded guy, but that just sounded like shit after hearing it in the background for long enough. We ended up being friends. I have no reason to say why we were friends except for that we were both cheap enough that we would rather pay $75 a month and share a room with a total stranger, than live alone and pay full price.

People started to look in my dorm, specifically children, because, like I said, we were in Tallahassee Florida, and James was black, and I was mexican. What a fucking coincidence.

Anyways, we started taking the same classes, because James was just going to college to get a masters in anything, so he switched his major to mine, and we, we being me James and that other shallow character, were in the same class.

So you've got a clique of a white kid, a mexican kid, and a black kid, all in Florida, trying to get master's degrees in culinary arts. What are they going to do after classes? Nothing. We did nothing. At some point, the white kid moved into our dorm, and we just went home and played video games and ate ramen in our spare time.

The white kid and I got jobs working for 9 bucks an hour at the subway nearby, like the sandwich place, not the underground train, and James was jobless, but it didn’t matter because we were still pulling in a lot of money. Believe it or not, the white kid and I were stealing from the subway, just because we were already serving so many customers that the subway was making a huge profit anyways. I mean, it wasn’t like too much money, just about an extra $50 each every week. I crunched the numbers.

Needless to say, we were shitty people for doing this.

But the worst part is, we did it for the 2 years and nobody had the slightest clue.

This sort of sparked us wanting to steal on a larger scale. We started taking more every time. Then more. And more. The point is, we ended up stealing about $500 each week, each. Which is a shit load of cash. And this was in fives and tens. When the lunch rush rolled in, every goddamn day, we would be taking about $20 every five minutes.

We started, of course, becoming suspicious. Since our manager had no evidence, however, we were just fired.

For the rest of college, we didn’t have jobs. That was fine, because me and the white kid had about $7000 in our checking accounts, and at some point we stopped checking our savings accounts. We had way too much money for it to be normal in the first place. We only bought cheap food, until we actually started getting into cooking.

We cooked fucking everything. We bought a new stove so that more of us could cook at the same time. Everything was good. ‘Till we ran out of cash. Then we were always on edge.

Buying nicer food meant that we were spending more money. Spending more money meant that when my checking account ran out of cash, my savings account started putting in cash automatically. I was notified that I had ran out of money the first time after about three months after it happened, and then I got the notification that both of my bank accounts are overdrawn about one month later. Thanks United States Postal Service for getting me that shit on time. And what do you do when you are notorious for stealing money from your job and paying up the ass for college? You join a gang. So what did we do? We joined the bloods. Huge mistake.

The bloods have this certain joining process that you normally have to go through. They explained the whole thing to us. First you have to throw fucking knives at rats and see if you hit I think like five out of six. That was supposed to happen in this huge warehouse that one of the boss’ owned or some shit. But first you’ve got to find a blood. That was easy for us, because James’ brother was a blood. So we called him up on this badass rotary phone we bought. First, James talked to him for like ten minutes until he was caught up with everything that has happened in the last 3 years. He explained where to meet him. It was like, one of the biggest cliche of a place to meet. It was in an abandoned park, in the slums. And everybody was a cliche there too. It was all red bandanas and sunglasses to conceal identities.

“What’s up bro,” James said to his brother, Jamir, “how you been?”

“Totally fucked.” Is all that Jamir could let out before his boss standing behind him whacked him in the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper.

“Who the fuck are these people Jamir?” He said, borderline ready to pull out his gun.

“Man, shit” said Jamir “these are the new recruits I found! Goddamn.”

His boss looked over at the white kid and pointed using the newspaper in his hand. “Why the fuck is one of them white?”

Jamir finally looked over at the white kid, and said “He didn’t sound white on the phone!”

Jamir was confused as he got hit in the back of the head again. His boss looked at us, intently. Got right up in my face. I was gonna hit him, if he wasn’t backed up by one of the largest gangs in the country. “What you do?”

“What do you mean.”

“For cash. Dollars. Money. Change. What do you do for it?”

I had a job at subway that I stole from. That was it. Nothing manly. Nothing cool. I didn’t work in construction. I wasn’t a retired navy seal. Nothing. I was boring.

“I cook.”

“Then that’s what you’re gonna do for me.”

So, that’s what we did. Our job was simple. Make food taste good, while still putting drugs in it. Easy, especially when they were already high.

That didn't stop them from stiffing us every step of the way, and we couldn't do anything because we didn't want to get shot.

We made that cash. We made that coin. We paid off credit cards. We kept cash in a safe.

James was still always angry about not getting paid as much as we should. We were making good money, but, we weren’t getting paid as much as they said we would. They would always say something like, “oh it wasn’t very good.” Or “it didn’t even get me high.” Even though we knew we packed it full of drugs and that they couldn’t taste the difference between bacon and toilet water when they were high. One day, James was complaining again. “Why aint they just pay me? I put in the work, now I want that money.”

“They’re assholes.” I said, agreeing with James.

“Would you keep it down, they’re just over there.” the white kid said, worried and scared of getting hurt.

“Shut the fuck up, they can’t tell what we’re saying.”

“What do you mean.”

“They’re out cold.”

“Show me.”

As we looked in the other room, we saw the gang members, sitting with bloodshot eyes, watching Alex Jones scream about sandy hook being a false flag operation. They all had expressionless faces as they ate raw corn chips.

“The stupid bastards have no idea where they are,” said James, “they can’t even hear us.”

Sometimes I forget that James is black.

I went back to stirring my now burning Sauce, trying to season it so they, or at least I, couldn't tell that is was burned. I was frantically scraping the bottom of the pan, as I poured in salt and italian seasoning, and tasting. “I think it’s bullshit that these mother fuckers aren’t giving me the money I fucking earned.” James was escalating his tone. Getting angrier. “I want out of this shit.”

“No,” I said, with genuine concern “They’ll kill you. You won't come back.”

“So?” James said, calming down at the thought of me caring, just to try and shut me down, “what do you care? If I die, how would it affect you?”

“I need a prep cook,” I told him, “and the white kid already does cleaning.”

“Ha,” he decided to say, after a moment of silence.

The point is, he wasn’t happy about our situation, but neither was I, or the white kid. In fact, it seemed like the white kid was the most bothered, but he has a hard time showing it. He would subtly hint at what he was mad about without ever actually saying anything. But, he was rarely sober anyways.

That didn’t mean that we were sober often. Me and James would pass full bottles of fireball to each other while the white kid smoked crack.

You might be wondering why I’ve been calling him “the white kid,” and I guess that the only reason I could give you would be that nobody knew his name, not me, not the officials, I don’t think that the government even knew his name. In fact, one time he was talking to me about how he was actually an illegal alien from Canada, but I think that that entire story was just bullshit.

If I was on drugs, I’m pretty sure that the rest of the bloods would have killed us already. I have to hold back these two assholes, just because if I don't they'll start trying to hit people.

One day, I couldn't hold them back.

James was talking about how he wanted to get paid again. “If one of these mothafuckas don't pay me by next month, Im’ma start knocking some fuckin’ heads in an’ shit.”

And the white kid was fed up with James trying to start some shit, so he took a long drag from his crack pipe, took a long, drawn out, exhale out, looked at me, looked at the drunk, high, and otherwise dead leaders in the other room, looked at James, stood up, walked over to James calmly and surreally, put his hand on his shoulder, and said “if you weren’t such a little bitch, you would do something about it,” before walking slowly back to his chair. When he sat back down, he just picked the pipe back up, and took another drag.

James looked at the kitchen knife on the table, picked it up, and walked in the other room. As this happened, I was staring at the white kid, who was taking long drags, blowing huge clouds of smoke out of his nostrils after every single inhale. I didn’t realise the gravity of the situation until James walked back in with the same knife, blood going all the way up his arm.