Читать книгу Not By Chance By Choice - Desmond Richardson - Страница 5

Damn. I wake up from a nap, and all I hear is screaming all throughout the house. Kids were being loud, and my sister and grandma were arguing. I could not hear what the conversation was about, so I got closer to the room. I tried to hide behind the door and listen, but by the time I started listening, my sister opened the door. I asked Christain what was wrong. Long story short she was getting ready to run away from home. I laughed at her and walked away. Christain was only thirteen with no job and nowhere to go, but Christain stayed true to her words and ran away. My grandmother, Richey, and I stayed up late that day, and to our surprise, Christain did not return home.

Richey and I were both shocked. Richey proceeded to tell me about a time in her past when she ran away from home. Richey had been upset because her mother was not giving her enough attention. One day, her mother was talking to her friend, and Richey walked out the house, never to return. Once Richey ran away, she went to a friend’s house to play. She was having a good time, but Richey’s friend got called in for dinner. With no friends to play with and nowhere to go, Richey walked back home. To Richey’s surprise, her mother never knew she left the home. She was still sitting and talking to her friends. Richey and I ended up having a good laugh that night. I never knew my grandmother was so funny until that day. I went back to bed, but in a few hours, I would end up waking up again. I heard my grandma shouting “Lisa! Lisa! Lisa!” I got up out my bed and ran to my grandmother’s room. She was breathing heavily, telling me to go find my mother, but she was nowhere to be found. Then Richey passed out in the bathroom. I called 911 and told them the situation. The ambulance arrived and rushed Richey to the hospital. In a few days, Richey would pass away.

It was a long year, and it got even longer once I was forced to move in with my mother. I did not like living with my mother. My mother’s money was always tight. She was a drug dealer and more importantly, she did not graduate from the eighth grade. I won’t get into who my mother was, but long story short, she was the type of woman people do not like to live with. Months would go by and struggles with my mother’s finances would increase. My home would eventually go through short periods without lights, gas, and water. Living without gas, started to show on me at school. I just could not continue to take a bath in cold water, and it took hours to boil water. Being filthy was a bad way to go through middle school. I could not take it anymore. I called up my friend Randy from Kansas. Randy and I had been close friends since birth. Our families knew each other. Randy and I played sports day in and day out. We started discussing plans on how we would elevate who we are and make our lives better for the future. A few days would go by and a good idea never crossed my mind. Then, it came to us. Randy and I would use our five-finger discount.

I grew in an era where men wore baggy clothes. Someone’s waist size could be a 32, but he would buy jeans in a size 38. This gave me a plan on how we could walk out the store undetected. We would take a lot of clothes into the fitting room and put the clothes we wanted under the clothes we already had on. It worked like a charm every time. Now that we had clothes, we needed shoes. Randy had a shoe store he believed we could steal from. Randy’s plan was to walk out the store with the shoes in his hand. I thought we would get caught doing something like that, so I suggested a different plan. I told him I thought we should take off our old pair of shoes and put them in the shoe box, then we would walk out with the new shoes on our feet. Both plans worked.

I finally had clothes and shoes, but more importantly, I did not live with my mother anymore. My older sister allowed me to stay with her. I even had a girlfriend now. Her name was Alissa. I felt good about myself. One day, after school, my girlfriend and I would take the bus down to my sister’s school. Christain wanted to meet my girlfriend. Christain’s school was down the street from my girlfriend’s house, so we would walk Alissa home once we got down talking. Out of nowhere, a guy comes and pulls up my sister’s dress. Immediately he and I started fighting. Then he yelled, “Y’all come help!”

I woke up and everything was a blur. Honestly, I cannot remember what happened after that. When I came to, I was at a friend’s house who lived close by. My sister and her friends where talking about a fight. I was thinking to myself, What fight? Then my sister told me to go look at my face. The left side of my face was normal, but the right side looked like someone had run me over with a tractor. I was ready to fight. Then my older sister came into the house upset. She was upset with me because I got my ass whooped. She was right. Losing is not an option, so we went back to fight again. We found them and there were thirty dudes and one girl. I see why I didn’t remember a thing when I got to my friend’s house. It was four against thirty, and I was the only boy. Long story short I got my ass whooped again.

It was a lot going on in my community. I needed a change, so I started looking for a job. My uncle ended up showing petty on me and let me work as a cleaner at his club. He was tough to impress. If he found any trash on the floor after I cleaned, he would charge me for the mistake. I tried my best not to make a mistake.

It was my junior year of high school. I made a few new friends, but my best friend was Tom. Tom and I met by playing basketball. I also got the opportunity to play varsity basketball. I could not play sports before my junior year because my school canceled the athletic program. Juniors were not supposed to play, but I had enough credits to be considered a senior. I averaged fourteen points per game, and I was the starting point guard. My jersey number was 12. Tom played on the team with me, but he left because the coach did not let him play the first two games. Tom and I did nearly everything together, but more importantly, he had the drive for money like I did. The one thing we did not have in common was our faith. He was a person of religion and I was an atheist. I never understood why Tom talked about Jesus so much because he lived a lifestyle of an atheist. I paid Tom’s faith no mind. I thought people of faith were weird. Because there were so many ways to believe in a higher power, I never thought any way could be right. At less once a week, I would clash with a believer because of the many questions I had about religion.

One day, Tom texted me while he was at church and tried to convince me to come to church with him. Tom would try to talk to me about how heaven is real, and, to get into heaven, I must obey the Lord Jesus. I would ask Tom if he thought of Jesus as an idiot. Both Tom and I had done indecent act against the scriptures, and Tom believed he still would receive the crown of life. I told Tom there was no heaven, and if Jesus was real, we would both go to hell. He disagreed with what I said. I never understood why. If the odds of Tom getting into heaven was better than mine, I would reject Jesus even more. How could a Lord continue to love someone that continually disobeys Him? Faith was a weird subject. Tom and I would disagree for hours about faith and belief.

I could see the problem with the world clearly at a young age. People continually waited on the Lord to make them better and blamed their insecurities on being a sinner. In all honesty, I thought Muslims where the right Faith. It seemed to me that Muslims were stern and focused on their God, but it was weird to me how Muslims were willing to sacrifice themselves for the Lord. I knew one of two things about the Lord: either he was the Lord of Christianity or Muslims. The Christian and Muslim faiths were the most spoken about as I was growing up, but for the time being, I would choose to be an atheist and make money. I had a multitude of people around me who believed in Jesus.