Once upon a life

There’s a version of me that never left the block. He’s still out there—leaning against a graffiti-tagged wall, hood over his eyes, pistol in his waistband, a syringe in his pocket, pain in his chest. That version of me never learned to sleep easy. He twitches when doors slam. He sees ghosts where others see shadows. He doesn’t know peace. He just knows survival. But me? I live a good life now. I wake up in a real bed. I open my eyes without having to count the dead. I work. I help people. Sometimes I even laugh without guilt. I go to meetings, church, and community boards. I build things now. I fix what I can. But no matter how far I’ve come, I still hear the old me calling. He doesn’t yell. He whispers. “You remember, don’t you?” he says in a voice roughened by smoke and sorrow. “You remember who we lost, what we did, what we had to do.” And I do. God help me, I remember everything. I remember the blood on my shoes. The sirens that came too late. The homegirls crying in alleyways. Th...

CRACK I've been surrounded by addiction my whole life. It’s in my bloodline—grandma, grandpa, uncles, aunts, my father, my mother. Heroin. Cocaine. Marijuana. Alcohol. Pills. PCP. You name it, someone in my family used it. I didn’t just stumble into addiction—I was born into it. My first tastes were alcohol and weed, the usual suspects. They were always around, always easy to reach. But those were just the warm-up acts before I met my true poison: heroin. Still, before heroin ever wrapped its cold grip around my soul, I had a full-blown affair with crack cocaine. In the early 1990s, crack hit East Los Angeles like a plague. Just like it did in every Chicano neighborhood across the city, it tore through our community like fire. I was still in high school, already knee-deep in an addiction that had me breaking into cars on the weekends to keep up with my cravings. I wasn’t a kid anymore—I was a fiend in a classroom. I’ll never forget one night in '94, taking a fat hit and suddenl...

July 1st. A Day I’ll Never Forget. Thirty years ago today, the streets gave and the streets took. My right hand man, Alex Dopeman, welcomed his firstborn son, Dee—30 years young today. A blessing, a light, a reason to keep pushing. That same day, my homeboy Sotelo lost his brother, Derek. Gunned down way too young. A real one. Gone but never forgotten. It's crazy how life works—joy and pain, side by side. I remember the celebration and the heartbreak, all wrapped in the same 24 hours. One life entering this world with promise, another taken by the violence we were swimming in. Dee, you were born into a world of chaos, but you’ve made it 30 trips around the sun. And Derek, your memory still rides with us—every block, every moment we think back to those days. You were loved deeply, missed always. To both of you—Dee, the living legacy, and Derek, the fallen brother—this day belongs to you. That day started like a celebration. Me, Dopeman, Lil Man, and Stomper were posted up with some ...