Interesting Events in Our Lives!

A memory of events past popped into my head this morning. Here it is for you to read, if you like.

When I was 16, my mother convinced my brother and I to join Job Corps. It was sort of like volunteering to go to prison. There were a lot of people from Queens, Chicago, Miami and even the Virgin Islands. Most of these guys were into gangs.

Race has never been an issue with me, but in Job Corps it seemed to be an issue with a lot of the other guys there. The ratio was something like 80% black, 15% Hispanic and 5% white. The black guys were divided by groups coming from New York, Chicago and the Virgin Islands. They defined their own group and seldom mixed.

This uneven ratio caused my brother and I some problems at first. The black guys would pick some random white person and start messing with them. Some of the whites would take a beating, but not me or my brother. We always fought back. After a while they learned this and stopped messing with us.

One other thing that helped was, the Job Corps we were in wasnâ??t very far from our home in Indianapolis. On Friday night, after the last bed check for the weekend, we would skip out of there and hitch hike home. While there, we would buy an ounce of pot and a case of Wild Irish Rose wine. Then we would roll 100 pin joints out of the ounce. Yeah, there wasnâ??t much weed in them joints. That was the norm.

When we got back to Job Corps, we would sell the joints for $1 each, and the wine for $6 a bottle. The wine cost us 98 cents. The guys who were messing with people had even more reason to leave us alone. If they messed with us or our friends, we would cut them off. Also we had a couple toughs who, for the price of a couple pin joints, would take care of our dirty work.

Once when my brother and I were walking to class, some Hispanic guy got in my face and said, â??Youâ??re the guy who was yelling at usâ?�, and then he hit me. Of course I promptly landed one back in his mouth, and blood did flow. In seconds I was fighting off a hoard. My brother jumped in and joined the fight. We must have been fighting 15 or more people at the same time. Things were not going well.

All of a sudden, some black guys jumped into the fray, and started fighting on our side. Soon the fight broke up. Afterwards, one of the black guys walked up to me and said, â??We didnâ??t help you cause we like you. We just hate themâ?�. That didnâ??t matter to me. The help was welcome any way.

One of the Hispanic guys then approached me and told me, it was all a big mistake. That they had mistook me for some asshole who was yelling racial slurs at them. He then invited my bro and I into their group, and we all smoked pot and got to know each other.

The years have erased the memory of his name. We turned out to be good friends, and even invited him to our home in Indianapolis for Thanksgiving dinner.

Funny how memories, not thought of for many years, suddenly surface. Get out of this story what you will. It is just a little part of my life I thought I would share.

You got any interesting story of some events in your life? I would like to read them.