The Thug Life Chose Me

Fear: It's that feeling you got when your mother started off dinnertime by saying "Now, this is a new recipe so you will have to tell me what you think."

In the past, I've shared some rather silly stories and I would now like to share the story of the time in my life that I was most afraid. Prior to telling that story I might as well just admit that, as a child, I was absolutely terrified by those cheesy Halloween cassette tapes and the part of the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas song where David Seville is screaming at Alvin to pay attention. Despite my childhood aversion to music which featured screaming, I grew up to become quite the fan of bands like Linkin Park and Rise Against. Now I feel as though we can begin.

During the first semester of my freshman year in high school I spent five weeks at Children's Hospital in Boston. At birth, my spinal fluid was not circulating correctly and as a result the buildup was doing something that the Pelham public school system could never do, creating pressure on my brain. The only remedy for this was to have a tube placed in my head to create a pathway for the excess fluid. The fact that the tube is man-made means that it has a tendency to break quicker than Glen Whitmann in an interrogation room. A surgical procedure is done to replace the shunt and after a few weeks of recovery, I am back to normal (whatever that means).

One would think that the most stressful part of a hospital experience would be dealing with pain or ones general sense of sadness at being in the hospital, this was not the case for me. Much like all of the problems in a teenagers' life, my anxiety was caused by something totally out of my control.

One night, I was woken from a drug cocktail induced slumber by the sound of a patient being wheeled into the room on the other side of the curtain. I was pretty doped up, but there are certain hospital hypnosis buzz words that tend to cut through the pharmaceutical fog, these words include: gang member, drugs, knife fight and gunshot wound. As I would later find out, the kid next to me was put in the hospital as a result of gang violence. While I won't claim to have researched much on the topic of healthcare in the United States, I do believe that if we are going to pair college roommates based on their compatibility in majors, music and schedule preferences, hospital roommates should at least be separated based on two Yes or No questions:

1. I am here as a result of something that happened prior to or during my birth which was completely out of my control
2. I am here as a result of a series of poor personal decisions I made following the time-frame mentioned in the previous question

The worst part of this entire ordeal was that, despite my non-existent record of bad-ass behavior, I knew that members of a gang viewed a hit in a vastly different manner than they viewed a high school education in that they do not like to leave the former half finished. 

While I spent most of my time eating french toast and watching my spinal fluid drip into a bag, the crip keeper to my left filled his day on his cell phone daring rival gang members to come and finish what they had started. I don't know if this was caused by him being exhausted from the lifestyle and he just wanted it to be over or maybe it was an arrogant sense of pride that drove this behavior. I just didn't like how specific he was getting about his location:

"Ya know what? I wish you would! I wish you would come up in here and finish the job! Do it! I'll be right here, homie.  Right here at One Hospital Drive in Boston, Massachusetts room 834 on the other side of the curtain from the scrawny kid with the glasses and the pee stains on his johnny."

Sure, he couldn't identify the state of Maine on a map the third time he failed United States geography, but if you dare call his toughness into question, he can pinpoint his location with latitude and longitudinal precision. So I freaked out, because I knew if someone came in the room to take him out, they're not going to leave any witnesses. 

Now, my experiences in the hospital have allowed me to travel to many different places both wonderful and woeful. I have been high atop Morphine Mountain. I have dined in Percocet Palace and I have drank of the Oxycodone Oasis. Nothing has EVER gotten me feeling more prepared to leave the hospital than being in close quarters with a criminal. My hope is that you, as the reader, don't know what this situation feels like, but for the sake of allowing you to be included in my anxiety, imagine you are on a plane and there's a baby that is crying uncontrollably. Now imagine that that baby wants you dead. That is what that feels like and that is the time in my life I was most afraid,