From the Tomb to the Throne pt. I

Want to get high? “Are you’re crazy” I said to Pirulí, but then I remembered that several days in the park of the 189st. Amsterdam Avenue, while Mighty Mouse was smoking a joint, I said, “Let me try that.” Several tokes later I did not feel anything and thought, “but this is nothing.” So I said to Pirulí, “let`s do it”.When I see that what Pirulí does is that he squeezes two tubes of glue to a paper bag, I asked him, and what is that? You will see, he says. When he puts the bag to my face and says, “breathe through your mouth and inhale the smell of the glue,” little did I know that was the beginning of the end. The next thing I felt was a sense of twilight, something surreal for my tender senses I was only twelve years old. And the problems was, that I liked it and had not yet even finished, when I was already asking: We gonna do this again, right?

My sister confronted me one day and told me: “You`re smoking, right? All that I had done was the couple of tokes given to me by Mighty Mouse, I said proudly, “yes.” She then lights up a joint and passed it to me and when she sees that I didn`t know how to smoke, she takes it away from me and says, “But what you`re doing is wasting the high,” “Look at how it`s done, and she tells me to take a toke and takes a long toke and then open your mouth and inhale the smoke in and pass it to me again. Then I did the same thing: “COF, COF, COF, COF. Oh s ** t, what is this? My eyes were slanted and red as a vampire, everything started to be funny and a sense of sillyness was taking over me and I started to laugh at my own sister. That day I had to go to school and my strengh was drenched from me and I could not lift myself out of the chair. Soon I had the most incredible appetite I had ever experience soon to find out these were the famous munchies.

When I finally had the strength to go to school, I noticed that my walking was not the same. Now there was a gangster lean on my steps with a sense of superiority, like if I had discovered the cure for the nerds. When I got to school that day and I ran into some gang members, I felt equal with them, “Yeah niggas wassup”. All had changed and immediately notice that I was accepted into their inner circle.

Pirulí then takes me to the basement where the Savage Killers had their headquarters and when I heard Manny asked, “And that s**t is what you bring here? They called Moreno and said, “go see if this kid knows how to fight.” Right then and there the battle of Troy took place cause I was known for fighting even at that age, it was not that I won, but showed that I had the heart to fight, because Moreno who was older and bigger, just wanted to see if I was a warrior.

Then I got drunk for the first time in my life until I lost consciousness and vomited all over the basement. But without realizing it I had already been initiated in one of the most violent gangs of Dominicans in Washington Heights it was 1977 … to be continued………

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