The Key to Winning at Gambling

No, not really This is an sample of the book I am currently editing, When I Grow Up To Be a Man.

KUNG FU SHOES

Mum and I were like a sitcom featuring "wacky mismatched roommates.” In our case, the 65 year old lady from Arkansas and her pretenious, self absorbed 18 year old grandson.  On Barnabe I had been stuck in a Catch 22: I needed a car to get a job and a job to get a car. Aside from the breif tenure at the Lagunitas Store, I hadn’t had a job—

Hadn’t worked or socialized for the most part. Hadn’t gone to a party, hadn’t kissed a girl since 8th grade. All the things normal teens did I had missed out on. I had escaped the Hill but not my lack of real world experience. Being in a city anything was possible but I had no idea where to start.

I was kind of a Goth but was too goofy to ever get deep into the subculture; the only thing I took seriously was myself. My clothes were an odd mixture of black sweaters, blue jeans, and—inexplicably—kung fu slippers, canvas shoes with thin rubber soles. They wore out fast but were only a few dollars at K-Mart. It was summer in Carmichael, a grim suburb of Sacramento, but I had an image to keep up and wore a black v-neck on my walks to the library. Mum would see me marching out and shake her head.

“Oh, Zaaak; it’s too hot for a sweater.”

“I’ll be okay,” I’d smile. I loved Mum but she drove me nuts with her Southern accent and habit of dropping the ‘g’ on ‘ings.’

So, I spent a lot of time in the library or in my room. Mum didn’t have central air back then so got stuffy fast.

“Oh, Zaaak; it’s too hot, you should keep your door open.”

“I’ll be okay.”

I was but I wasn’t. There was the stress of understanding that, to move my independence forward, a job was required. Find work, get a car, start a band, and make friends---all the things I had planned on the Hill. There was so much to do, so much to achieve, it was overwhelming. Some days I just sat in my room reading or listening to music, unable to face it all.

A Christian family lived next door. Among them was a boy who was a year younger than me, his name may have been Mike or it may have been Kyle. The family would lend me a bike so Kyle and I could ride around, escaping the heat by seeing a matinee or prowling a shopping center. I was leery around Kyle for the same reason I was leery around other Christian teens: They’re nuts. You lead these repressed lifes with all these rules and the second you’re away from the church, from your family, you’re packing a gun, having sex in phone booths, and snorting PCP.

But I was bored and needed something to do so I rode around with Kyle and it was alright—

Until he got nutty on me.

That day we didn’t have money for a matinee nor any interest in walking around a mall with other bored teens. Besides, Country Club Plaza was a three mile bike ride and it was nearly a hundred degrees. Instead, we rode to the nearest elementary school, rolling up and down the shaded corridors.

“Let’s check out that field,” Kyle suggested.

I shrugged and we set down our bikes. Checking out the field meant hopping a six foot chain link but kids are like monkeys and we were over it in flash. There wasn’t much to the field, just a couple of acres of brown grass—grass that Kyle started setting ablaze with a lighter. He’d light a tuft, and then stomp out the flames.

“Uh, I don’t think you should do that,” I suggested.

“I’m putting it out,” Kyle replied, shaking his head. “Don’t be an old lady."

Kyle kept lighting and extinguishing fires until he didn’t.  I was watching birds, not watching him, and then I was hearing this frantic stomping and muttered curses.

Kyle was trying to put a fire out but it was too big. 

This is why I usually didn’t hang out with Christian kids, they were always getting into nutty shit like that.

“Come on!” I grabbed him.

There was no way we were getting the fire out, if we tried we’d get caught and in the sort of trouble we’d never been in before.

Oh yeah, and I was 18—legally an adult.

I hustled Kyle over the fence and we booked to our bikes. You could hear the sirens of the fire trucks as we sped away from the school.

I had been a bad kid a few years earlier. My friends and I had done our share of vandalism but didn’t start fires, more like broken windows and scraping cars up with screwdrivers. One day I looked at what we’d been doing and felt disgust—fuck it, I’m done.

And I still felt that way at 18, which is why I stopped hanging out with Kyle.

I didn’t have a place in my life for stupid kid behavior; there was too much to do and experience.