Once upon a life

There’s something about a West Texas sunset that makes a man tell the truth. February 16th, 2026. I was driving through Abilene, watching the sky catch fire the way only West Texas knows how. Out here the sunsets don’t fade politely. They testify. Orange like a burning bush. Purple like bruised velvet. Gold spilling across the flat earth as if God tipped over a paint bucket and said, “Look at this.” And just like that, I thought of Ruby Mesta. When I was homeless. When I was strung out. When I was the version of myself that even I didn’t believe in. Ruby did. She would let me sleep in her yard. In her car. In Eddie’s car. No speeches. No lectures. Just, “Mijo, you hungry?” She’d feed me like I belonged at the table. Let me shower in their house so I could wash the street off my skin. Her grandbabies, Cassandra and Carlos, loved me without hesitation. Kids have a radar for authenticity. They saw me before I could see myself. Ruby would hear gunshots in the neighborhood and go looking fo...

I carry three sets of people in my heart who are already waiting for me in heaven: my blood family, my gang family, and my recovery family. Each group holds pieces of my story—pieces that made me who I am. When I imagine the moment I finally see them again, it isn’t a quiet walk through pearly gates. It feels more like baseball under the lights. It’s the ninth inning, two outs, the crowd holding its breath. Then—crack—the bat connects, and the ball soars. I’m rounding third after a walk-off home run, the way Kirk Gibson limped and pumped his fist or the way Freddie Freeman grins when he knows the game is over. The stadium erupts. Joy hits you so hard it almost knocks you over. November of ’95 is burned into me. That was the first time I was shot and then run over by a car. I woke up sprawled behind my homie’s truck with Wicked gripping my hand. When my eyes opened, he slammed his fist on the window and screamed, “He’s alive! Big Mike’s alive! Drive faster!” But before that moment, I wa...

There are nights that never leave you, no matter how far you travel or how much time has passed. For me, that night was Veterans Day—1995. Or better yet, Veterans Night. The night I got shot. The night I got ran over. The night I died—and somehow lived to tell it. Woods and Verona We were deep in East L.A., at a Maravilla party on Woods and Verona, kicking it with the homegirls from the Rascals, the music thumping, the streetlights painting everything gold and shadow. It was one of those nights when you thought nothing bad could happen—until it did. Steve wanted to smoke some of the Indo I had come up on in Hollywood. Two pounds of it. “Let me go grab it,” I told him. “Then we’ll roll by your pad and pick up some skante.” I was about to leave with my .380 when my homie Corn Nut stopped me, begging for that strap. At first, I told him no, but he kept pushing, wouldn’t shut up. So I handed it over just to quiet him down. That turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. Because if I’d s...

God, In moments when my name is spoken in darkness and my character is questioned, I ask You to stand with me. You know my heart. You know the work I do, the love I put into this community, and the intentions behind every step I take. When others come against me, protect my spirit from bitterness, anger, and retaliation. Let no lies take root, and no negativity steal my peace. Cover me in grace. Give me the strength to respond with wisdom, the patience to stay grounded, and the courage to keep walking in the light You’ve given me. Turn every attack into fuel, every shadow into testimony, and let my character speak louder than any rumor ever could. Bless those who misunderstand me or speak on me without knowing my heart,  for I will not curse what You may still be trying to heal. Keep me humble, keep me focused, and keep my feet planted in love, truth, and purpose. Amen.

Letter to My Younger Self The night I write this, the wind outside my window sounds like a memory, restless, alive, a voice from the past whispering through the cracks. I can almost see him again: the kid I used to be. Baggy pants, flannel open, eyes full of bravado and pain. He thought he was untouchable, thought the block would last forever. We used to post up under flickering streetlights like kings of concrete, young and reckless, ready to die for streets that never wrote back. I wish I could pull him aside, that seventeen-year-old me, before the cops, before the bullets, before the funerals. I’d sit him down somewhere quiet, maybe behind the liquor store where we used to tag the walls, and hand him this letter. --- “Hey Tiny,” You don’t know it yet, but that anger you wear like a jacket isn’t armor, it’s weight. You’re carrying your father’s silence, your mother’s tears, the echoes of every homie who said they’d never leave but did. You think respect comes from fear. You think lov...

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...