I remember watching Easy Rider as a kid. The desert. The dirt. The open nothing stretching forever. That soundtrack humming like a lazy rattlesnake in the heat. Something about it crawled into my blood and never left. I fell in…

When I was high on acid at 15, lost in the swirling neon haze of my own mind, surrounded by the wreckage of sorry lives and illusions of happiness, I had this thought—the kind that cuts through the chaos like…

She was never my stepmother. Let’s get that straight right now. That was a title she never wanted, and one I never offered. She was never someone I could call family, no matter how many years she played the role.…

I don’t remember the first time my father abandoned me. I was too young—barely two, a toddler, a memory trapped in the bodies of others who were there to witness it. My mother told me later, in bits and pieces,…

There’s a place up in the Sierras, somewhere in the folds of California’s forgotten beauty, where I learned to fish, learned to survive, and learned the fine art of shitting in the woods—badly. The road there wound past the ghost…

The Man My Organic Father Could Have Been When I moved in with my organic dad, he made full use of me before the other kids came along. I was his little buddy, his sidekick—so long as his wife wasn’t…

The Pregnant Woman Who Baptized Our Cigarette in a Toilet Full of Hell We fucking knew. But we lit up anyway. Because when you’re young and dumb and chasing the kind of high that makes the world blur at the…

My organic father—tight-fisted, tight-assed, and wound up so tight with his own financial schemes that he could shit diamonds—had a brilliant life strategy. He’d buy a rotting shack in a decent neighborhood, spend six years fixing it up, making it…

Back in the days of Artesia High School, nestled between the contrasting worlds of Lakewood and Cerritos, there were three of us: the self-proclaimed “Three Amigos.” Cerritos was the polished, higher-end neighborhood, while Lakewood had the gritty, working-class vibe. The…

Luis’s old man had a strange tolerance for kids like me. Maybe he knew we had nowhere else to go. Maybe he’d just given up. Either way, he let me crash on the floor of Luis’s room, a place that…

At sixteen, the plan was simple: find a place to crash. Something temporary. Something to buy time before the world figured out another way to kick you in the teeth. I had no strategy beyond that. I was too stupid…

Two weeks after my father’s cold, indifferent invitation to “family dinner,” I found myself skating back to that house. The wheels ground against the pavement like a slow, deliberate countdown. My body ached from days of sleeping wherever I could…

A skateboard wasn’t a toy. It was a goddamn survival tool. My wheels, a way to cut through the cracked, perfect-looking pavement of Cerritos, California—a place built on the lie that if you watered the lawn enough, the rot underneath…

There was a girl back then. A senior. She wasn’t just a girl; she was a goddamn religion, and none of us were believers—we were just the sinners staring up at the stained-glass window, knowing we’d never get inside. She…

At fifteen, I had nowhere to go. That wasn’t some teenage melodrama; it was a hard, physical reality. The man who’d played the hero, the one who pulled me from my mother’s fire, had just tossed me back into it…

Luis’s father must have felt sorry for me. Or maybe he just saw what was left after catching me sleeping under the lemon tree in his backyard one morning. He saw a teenage kid who’d gone from surfer boy to…

The good times with my organic father were like rare coins you find in the dirt—precious, fleeting, and always threatening to slip through your fingers. At thirteen, I was already six-foot-four, a goddamn man trapped in a boy’s body, which…

Little did I know, my organic grandmother—my father’s mom, a woman who’d lived through wars and ration books and men who never came home—was about to unravel the neat little lie my father had been feeding her. He told her…

Her name was Mercy, but that was just some cruel joke the universe decided to play. She had none to give. She was a walking, breathing contradiction. Soft, painted lips that spit hard, ugly truths. A body built for sin,…

Punk rock wasn’t just music—it was a goddamn middle finger aimed at the heart of everything polite society wanted me to be. The world was neat, orderly, and smelled faintly of bleach and hypocrisy, and I wanted to tear it…

It felt like a lifetime since my organic father had walked me out of his house, casting me into the world with nothing but resentment and a skateboard. In the months that followed, I’d changed. The Hollywood Dead Kennedys gig,…

At fifteen, you still have a few illusions left rattling around in your skull. You think life is about skating through the cracks, keeping your head down, and not making enough noise to get noticed by the people who run…

After I landed at my grandparents’ house, things started to get… normal. And normal was the strangest damn thing I’d ever experienced. Mornings were slow and warm. The smell of chorizo and eggs would snake through the house, mixing with…

The thing about being unwanted is that eventually, you stop asking why. You just accept it. The silence from the other side of the locked door becomes the only answer you’ll ever get. You start wondering if you were just…

I was seventeen years old and utterly, hopelessly alone. I found myself standing outside the Army recruiting office. It smelled the way all government buildings do: desperation, stale coffee, and quiet regret. The walls were a liar’s collage of propaganda—men…

After that long goddamn walk from Whittier to Huntington Park, I finally stood in front of my grandmother Bertha’s door. When she opened it, she did it the way she did everything else in her life—without hesitation, without pause, with…