User:Wolffystyle

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[edit] Awesome Guy

I grew up the archetypal rags to riches story. Hailing from Elmhurst, a town dubbed by the locals, a breeding ground for people who should not breed, I managed to survive through the horrors of each day. Although we had our own slave, our mother, we were merely at the highest point of the bottom of the well. I taught myself to speak French by reading the backs of discarded shampoo bottles I found behind the local liquor store. My brother used those same bottles to construct our pet dog, named Paul Mitchell. Although we, and by ‘we’ I mean my father, mother, my brother, Paul Mitchell and I, lived with little material possessions, we lived with a lot of love. It mattered little that my father lost his arms in the Vietnam War and was unable to collect enough pension to purchase passable fake arms, we made due of what we had. With our love, we constructed for our father, a set of arms, made with shampoo bottles and old bubble gum we scraped from the rusty and pointy trash can in our school’s playground. But that is giving it too much respect. It was not a playground, but rather a play ‘one-fourth acre of property entrenched with shards of glass, rusty nails and rotting squirrel carcasses’ ground. That’s what the schoolboys and I called it. We often found ourselves playing capture the broken bottle of Jack Daniels, or a happy game of four-triangle. Our public school could not afford the squares. Our public school could not afford desks, texts or even teachers for that matter. Most of our time was spent staring at the sun, scathing our corneas. Yet, we all trudged on and managed to endure the painful life, that is, with the exception of Alex, who died tragically and slowly from a gangrene infection covering his whole lower torso, and with the exception of Emily, who found herself skipping her A.A. meetings at a young age of nine. She was found in the gutter mangled by her own addiction and choking on her own tongue. That happens a lot in Elmhurst. Not the choking on the tongue thing, but the struggle thing. Everyone battled something as they grew up in the E-town. Whether it was a drug addiction, their crack-whore, tyrant mother, their oppressed emotions, or the man at the train station named Goliath, their fate was sealed, they would never emerge from the abyss of a Chicago suburb that they called home, and also called hell… and also called anytown, USA. But the reality was that Elmhurst was not like anytown, USA, it was closer to Berlin in the 70’s or Chernobyl in the 80’s or Waco in the 90’s. There was pain all around. Pick a random child from the streets, and ask her what she had witnessed in Elmhurst, and odds are it was more then Helen Keller had witnessed in her entire life. Not just because Helen Keller was blind, but because Elmhurst was a pretty rough place. By the age of 6, I had learned to shoot a handgun to protect myself from the systematic killers and oppressors that we call the Elmhurst Police Department. I had a strange naïve belief until the age of 5, when a cop sexually assaulted Paul Mitchell, that the EPD was out to protect us from harms. By the age of 8, with formalized street fighting and drive-by training under my belt, I had 4 notches above my bedpost, and the EPD’s fascist regime was 4 pigs lighter. Please don’t tell anyone. So, there I was, I knew two languages, three if you count the street ebonics that I picked up from my drug-dealing friends, but I prefer to call it a procrastination of reality, I was the smartest child in my class and I began to question my life. I will never forget the day that I asked the wrong question.

Chapter 2: False Hopes

It was either October 14, 1991 or April 32, 1998. I was working on a lab assignment for my science class. Our class was huddled around in the play ‘one-fourth acre of property entrenched with shards of glass, rusty nails and rotting squirrel carcasses’ ground. Some of us were dissecting sticks and some were dissecting each other. I, personally, was performing a half-life test on the drums of radioactive material only half-buried in our school’s lot. I always excelled. Yah Elmhurst School system! Soon after the fire-truck that came to subdue the flames coming out of Mr. Ryan’s classroom was overtaken, ransacked and scoured for food by the second graders, I looked up and saw that our teacher, Wade, who had been in and out of the local psycho ward several times in the last week, had just locked himself in the school bus, which was actually a big yellow piece of plywood with three flat tires and a flashlight, no batteries. I knew at this point that our edumacation was in a tight spot. We were no longer flowers in a flowerpot, but rather weeds vegetating in a pile of trash. We weren’t even vegetating anymore we were rotting. This is when I looked towards the sky and asked quite an profound point of inquiry for a third grader, I said, “Yahweh, the most holiest of hosts, as I look towards the sky with my already burnt corneas, I ask if you have forgotten us. Sometimes I think that you have another world to take care of and you neglect our world.” I asked, “Lord, will you lead your people from this misery as you had with Moses and Abraham and our fathers?” Suddenly I felt something. I looked down from the smoggy sky with disbelief and looked for my Lord, but I only saw Wade throwing rocks at his students, while sucking on his thumb. God had not heard me. All I could do was mope. But had I known then what I know now…I would have still moped. There was nothing for me. There was nothing for my family. Our lives had been miSerable with a capital S. The best thing we had going for us was that publishers clearing house form that dad had saved from 1983 that said we were finalists and in the running for 2 million dollars. Other than those hopes, we could only dream of a house with a white picket fence that wouldn't roll down the hill in a “Tornader”, one with flowers and butterflies and hookers miles from our corner… All I could do was dream. Or so I thought… I lay on my bed of cracked shingles. The water dripped from the ceiling next to my face and splashed in my ear. It wasn’t raining, we simply did not have upstairs plumbing, and let the bucket of toilet water drip away. We were lucky to have two floors. I had some friends who weren’t even fortunate enough to have one floor, they simply had a box. Don’t get me wrong, these were big boxes, they came from the shipment of an old television set. A 12-inch television. So, yeah, I lay there on my shingles and gazed through the holes in our ceiling which made the sky look as if it has stars. The only stars we saw in Elmhurst, however, we those that lit the strip clubs and the dens of sin. Speaking of ladies of the evening, I rarely saw my mother. She often came home just after I had gotten my brother and I up for school. Normally she was asleep on the lawn, sometimes with two bagged lunched for my brother and I. They often contained pills and mushrooms. But that’s my mom. Swallowing pills to get vitamins was so much easier than chewing slugs and cockroaches. We would often trade our lunches and foodstamps. My father would give me expired welfare checks to trade with the blind kid, Bradley. Because Elmhurst was so dramatically diverse, it was easy to trade. What was junk to one person was gold to another. Take for example, the whale blubber that I had acquired, I didn’t need it, but I traded it to the Aleutian kid for a surfboard, which he didn’t need. (It was covered in Exxon Valdez oil, however). So I was lying there staring at the stars and from the ozone depleted sky, came a bright light. A voice shouted down at me. I will never, ever forget what it said. It said something like to watch for something and then to get someone something, eh, I kind of forget. Anywho, It was amazing, it must have been some supreme deity. But then when my dad repeated, “Ya had better wa’ch tha’ ass of you’s befur’ I whip it boy if you don’ git me a sand’ich!”, I knew it wasn’t God talking to me after all. I kind of just figured it. Well, I done got my dad a sandwich and he only backhanded me softly enough so that the bruise would disappear by school the next day. I love my dad.

Chapter 3: My Run In

The day started like any other. I woke up to the sirens blowing past my window, or lack of a window therefore, and the bullets being fired by postal employees down the street. But it ended like none other. It was in fact second only to the day my dad threatened to quit his job at the flea market and make his children sell ‘Chicle’ on the streets. You see, I was in my bedroom, monotonously recounting the bullet holes in the door when I got a phone call. It was more of a clattering if the syrofoam cups in my room, which were suspended to the neighbor’s cups by a string, but it was passable as a call. “Chris!” Dale cried, “Hey wake up, I’ve some news” Speaking into the cup I replied, “Why Dale, what is the news?” “I’ve word that our governor, Jim Edgar, is coming to town to visit on a campaign, perhaps you can enact your plan”. Ah, yes, Plan C. Plan A was to give all the people in the middle east puppy dogs so that they would stop fighting, and Plan B was to set up my own Socialist/Imperialist government at the same time, while controlling most of the world’s oil and petroleum, whereby setting up a monopoly on exports I could gain control of the Atlantic seaboard and limit trade though the Baltic, Gibraltar and the Gulf of Mexico, make trillions and score all the superficial women I wanted. But plan C was just as important. It was to finally exploit the tragedy that we called home and make it known to the public and moved up on the agenda of the state legislature. Yes. Now was my chance. Down in the center of town, “ground zero”, banners and flags had been put up welcoming the governor to town. One banner read; “Hell Welcomes Governor Jim Edgar”. It was supposed to read “Shell Welcomes…” but like the Shell station in downtown Malibu, the ‘S’ was not working. I took a seat next to “Crazy Beaver’s Hot Loggin’ Liquor Store” and waited for Jim Edgar to roll in on his Gubernatorial-Mobile. Crowds began to form around me. Uncle Spiff, who reeked of formaldehyde and urine sat behind me, and Mr. Rogers, the neighborhood cokehead sat to my left, Mr. PeeWee sat to my right, he wasn’t wearing any pants and he was screaming “The word of the day is ‘little boy’”. I kind of got a little scared. Soon, the crowd gasped and high school band began to play jingle bells on their recorders. (They had just gotten new uniforms that read; I'm not a beaver, I'm an otter!) Immediately, like a crowd of Indonesian Strumpets, the townsfolk gathered around the governor. I was anxious to see what kind of a man Edgar was, but I was too short and could not see him for the crowd; so I ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to catch a glimpse of Edgar who was to pass that way. When Edgar reached the spot He looked up and spoke to me: “Chrissaeus, come down. Hurry, because I must stay at your house today” (Lk. 19:1-5) Thinking today would be my salvation, I welcomed Edgar in to my house. The camera crews followed and reporters swarmed in. They ate our last box of croutons. They broke our coffee table, and they ran over Paul Mitchell. Edgar spent most of the day, stepping over my passed out father, while flirting with my mother. It wasn’t until later that evening that I had a chance to sit down and talk with him. Finally, the attention was on me. The cameras had been set up! We sat on the sofa that my dad found while garbage picking in Cabrini Green. A few springs were sticking out here and there, and there was blood on the corner, but it was the nicest piece of furniture we had. I was ready for salvation. I began to discuss with the governor my plan. He seemed to be thoroughly listening to each of my details. I told him about how our school needed more than $60.00 a year funding from the state legislature. He told me about his adventures in ‘Narnia’. I told him how the HIV/AIDS rate was growing faster than it was in Botswana, where a 15-year-old boy had an 85% chance of dying from AIDS. He told me about his aunt who had asthma. And, I told him about the death of my best friend, Michael John, who had been caught on barbed wire, while swimming in our town’s pool (of mud), his lifeless body sucked to the bottom and is still there, rotting. He told me how he thought Barney was egocentric. After I had finished my tragic tale, he took his eyes off of my mother, cooking behind me, and said “Hey! Great story, let’s eat!”. Imagine a piece of paper, industrial weight, giving you a papercut across your eyeball. That’s how it felt to me. My Plan, plan C, had just been grabbed from my sky, thrown to the ground and stomped to crumbs of faded dreams by our governor Jim Edgar. He was no savior. It is funny how society, today, creates those “American Idols”, those worthless pieces of crap that we look up too. I now know that no sports player, no politician, no actor or actress is my idol. I understand that my family and my God are the ones who we should really love and respect. The others? Well they’re just selfless ‘god kissing carrions’ that are merely bumps in the road for those who want to achieve their dreams.

Chapter 4: October Sky

I finished grade school a poor, and tousled child. My fifth grade teacher, Mephistopheles (Mr. Mephisto for short), had told me that I would not amount to anything. It was particularly difficult hearing that forecast, but it was much better than what he told Greg: “At the rate you’re going, you’ll be lucky to be killed by Beowulf and thrown to the depths of the seas where you and your IQ will fit right in with the corral.” Regardless, I had planned on going to the flea market and working for my father since the day he developed the black lung. Working deep in the trenches and shafts of the flea market, my father often worked hard, long hours. As foreman of the Flea Market, he would wake up before the sun raised and glowed over the radio-active horizon. His breakfast would be drinking the dead parakeet that had died in the mines of the swap meet over night. Of course he would add sugar and cream. Straight parakeet is quite bitter. I knew that I would follow my father’s footsteps on that same path until one October night. I had just begun the sixth grade, and the comet Hale-Bopp was to cross the October Sky. I gathered the townsfolk in my backyard and we sky-gazed for hours. Unfortunately, the smog (and perhaps the smoke from Nikita the Eastern European Mobster’s beacon fire) prevented us from viewing the comet. But high in that sky, I knew it was there. I knew that somewhere, far from Elmhurst, there was opportunity for me. I finally knew that the barbed wire, surrounding town, was no longer the limit, rather the sky was. Dale peeked over the fence, it was odd that I never saw his face; it was always hidden behind a rake, a hat or a 5’1” narcissist General from France. We spoke about the comet, and the dreams we had. He gave me some great insight into how I could build dreams beyond Elmhurst. I could construct rockets. Nah, that’s a pretty stupid idea... Becoming taught by the tangled rope in my head, I decided to take a walk into town. I could tell you that I ventured into town and learned a few things and I was cleared from my woes. This, however, is not the whole story. It's like shortening the new testament to "Jesus did stuff". No, the long story is much too important to be made short.

Chapter 5: Commencing the Journey

It all began on one gusty evening. The dew had already formed over the scattered plants emerging from the cracks in the pavement. I sat there, on a curb, gazing at the neon signs above the empty parking lot. The signs, which read, SLUTS, SLUTS, SLUTS and THIS ROAD IS STILL SLIPPERY WHEN DRY, were the only sources of light other than the silver slipper of a moon, on which I would make my wish, to regain my paradise lost, to leave home.

Our town was empty. Everyone but the gangsters, prostitutes, town drunkards, and tattoo'ed fiends had been tucked away in their cozy sheets, and Serta mattresses. Alright, so maybe it wasn’t empty, it was a full as usual. But that night, however, I saw the second face of our lonely streets. I was the unfortunate one to witness the horrors that had been under our snoring Zzz's in the middle of the night. That night, I found the hidden mercies in every footstep taken on this broken ground called Elmhearse.

"Bring out your dead!" Cried the cart master, "Bring out your dead. Ninepence."

"I'm purchasing souls for the facade of a good life!" cried Mephistopheles as Dr. Faustus stepped up.

"Cocaine! Coke for sale! Buy an eight-ball get the nine-ball free!" the opium-eater police officer yelled.

"Tickle-me Elmos! Sing and Snore Ernie! The must have Christmas gifts for sale!" all around me I saw and heard these street vendors working hard to survive, I saw one man attempting to pawn off an Ace of Base album he got for his birthday years before. I mean, these people were pretty desperate. I, too, became desperate. All my years, I had been working hard to feed my family and I had been studying for nothing other than to pass time. The occasional Sunday night, my friends and I would pay a quarter to go to York theatre to stare at the blank screen for two hours. A tear drop rolled down my face. I hopped off of my curb, and I just began-a-running.

I ran to the edge of the town. I figured that because I ran that far, I might as well run to the end of the county. When I got to the end of the county and had reached the higher-class Berkeley and Bellwood area, I figured I might as well just run to Lake Michigan. By the time I got that far, I didn't even figure stopping and turning around, I ran straight into the lake where I near-drowned until a swashbuckling fisher-man with a parrot and one leg netted me from the water.

"Argh, Matey. You near-almost draRwned 'dere fellar'" The pirate said. He introduced himself as Captain Kirk and he welcomed me into my new profession of indentured slavery while he spat all over the deck. 'Hell, I guess it beats sharecropping,' I thought to myself.

"Welcome aboard the 'Queen Charles", Matey. It's time to wreck havoc on the high seas!" All of a sudden an orchestra of music began playing out of nowhere in the background, a quartet of pirates began shuffling, snapping and doo-wapping behind Kirk.

To the tune of Lionel Richie's 'Just To Be Close to You'

"I've seen you around (Doo wap, doo wap) You're my heart, your my soul, you're my little slave boy now...Teddy Bear! (Doo wap, doo wap) Oh Oh Oh Ohhhhhhhh! Just then I noticed that all the pirates had their big, looping earrings in their OTHER ear. "We're but a happy bunch of pirates! Perhaps we're even a bit too jolly! (jolly) But we'll continue to sail the high seas with our pink parrot named Polly! (Polly) WELCOME ABOARD THE DANCING 'QUEEN CHARLIE'!

Their stockings were up, they were clicking their heels, prancing and swinging from the eagle's nest. "Come join us for a fruity Daiquiri, We're going to ravage the unstylish Christians, We'll go Martha Stewart on their tooshes, Perhaps we'll Feng Shui their Kitchens!"

The rainbow Jolly Roger should have tipped me off, but as soon as they brought the leather out, I knew I had to leave. Suddenly, I was pulled into one of the cabins by a pirate. Before I could object to anything he began whispering with a lisp; "Hi. I'm Bruthe Pederthen. I juth have to get you out of here. You don't want to know what they did to the lasth kid." He was right. "Here, take thesthe." He handed me an inflatable strong man and a box of cereal. I asked, "What do I do with this inflatable strong man?"

"Whoopth, thsorry. Take thisth," he gave me an inflatable raft instead, "Now, do you know where you're going?"

Of course I did. "I want to go to that place where little boy's and girl's dreams go when they die. To the happiest place on earth.

"Well honey, you want to go to San Franthisco! It'th thataway! You go kiddo!" With that he threw me off the stern of the boat so no one else would see. He blew me a kiss goodbye and merrily waved me off. Just in time too, I felt, it seemed as if Queen Charlie had just started to do the limbo.

Chapter 6: Carpetbagging

Whilst floating on my raft in the middle of my perilous voyage across lake Michigan, eating my Fruit Loops, I became distraught. I thought to myself; "Would my family miss me? My father had asked me to spit-shine dinner that evening" and "Why are there little munchkins all around me, and why is everything in color all of a sudden?" Damn the sun and its hallucinating effect. I shook my head, splashed some water in my face and looked all around me. Infinite nothingness, vast wasters surrounded me 360º and I knew little of what direction I was heading. The lack of funding in the Elmhurst school system resulted in the 1st grade teachers only teaching us North and South. This was respective to the 'sides' that fought over territory in town. As a member of the 'South Side Bryan Sandburg Hustlers', I fought the 'North of North Avenue ChurchHell Crips' for rights to such landmarks as the Frank Lloyd Wrong house on Kenilworth, Bob's Maggot Shop and (no, I'm not kidding about this one...) Lizzadro's Rock Museum. Regardless, I was on the lake now, where there were no sides, no gangs; only me, the sun, the water, these crazy little munchkin people and a big bubble floating my way.

The sun was getting to me, so I put my head down, closed my eyes and dreamed of finding my way to the other side, where the grass was greener, and where the lead counts were not 12,000 per million. "HEY KIDDO, YOU ALRIGHT?" I heard the fisherman shout. I pulled my head up to look around me. The only difference in my view was now the tiny fishing boat sitting on the vast waters surrounding me. Looking over the edge of the tiny wooden ship was a short, weathered man who appeared to have been on the lake for days.

"Hey, you're alright! Grab hold of the rope." He called as he through a massive rope over the side of the deck into the near freezing waters. "We thought you weren't going to be alive" said the rugged fisherman. 'We'? I thought. We? Who else was on the boat? "The name's Louis, how do you do?"

"Well, I guess, a little cold"

"With no doubt. That water has to be just barely 32° Celcius. Are you hungry? I think I have some cereal somewhere."

"No. No thanks. What I really could use is to get to land. The seascape, as you can imagine has made me just a bit sick."

"You know it wasn't everyday that I dreamed of becoming a fisherman, sailing lake Michigan. No. In fact it wasn't a single day I dreamed it. From the age of two I had been a golf phenom. My father, who is Canadian by the way, I get made fun of a lot for that, began playing golf with me in the house. After a few smashed lamps and broken cats my mother made us practice outside. But we kept at it and by the age of 6, I made my first hold in one. I can remember the hole exactly. Well, one thing led to another and the endorsements and interviews piled down our door. I was ranked the number one amateur in the United States and I was sure to head pro. Then one day at a book-signing, a jealous fan knocked me over to the ground and began kicking at my head. I had a brain hemorrhage. My career was over. My dad took all my money and spent it at the race track. He bet $6 million and his firstborn, myself, on a horse named “Misfortune”. Unfortunately, he lost. I became a famous Canadian Trapeeze artist before another tragic accident that left me limbless...I escaped from The Cirque du Soleil with the help of the little people and their amazingly spacious volkswagon beetle...