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 scent of fresh tortillas warming on the stove. My grandmother would melt government cheese into the beans, and somehow, with her hands, that cheap block of cheese from a cardboard box stamped with a bald eagle tasted like a goddamn inheritance. I’d run to the panaderia for Mexican bread, clutching the warm paper bag like it was something sacred. For the first time in years, I wasn’t running from anything. I was just a kid, running toward breakfast.
My grandfather, he was built from another era—an era of pressed shirts, cheap gold chains, and a booming voice that knew how to command a room. He called me el hombrecito. The little man. He said it with a pride that felt heavy, real, like he could see something in me that I sure as hell couldn’t see in myself. When I told him I was going back to school, that I was signing up for the Navy, his eyes lit up like I’d just handed him a winning lottery ticket. I think the old bastard always knew I’d find a way to claw myself out of the wreckage.
Afternoons were easy. Gin rummy with Grandma. Then Grandpa would come home, blast his Mexican music from a boombox the size of a suitcase until the walls vibrated, and tell stories. Stories about the hustlers downtown who sold him fake gold watches, stories about the first time he laid eyes on my grandmother and knew, just knew, that was it. When the chicharrones man pushed his shopping cart down the middle of the street, yelling, Grandpa would hand me a few bucks and I’d chase him down for a bag of that crispy, salty heaven.
My grandmother? She was pure grace. Carried herself like royalty, even in a damn apron with flour on her hands. She had a quiet strength that made you feel safe just being in the same room.
And for the first time in a long, long time, I didn’t feel the need to escape myself. No acid to melt reality into something tolerable, no pills to flatten the edges, no coke, no mushrooms, no booze. I didn’t need it. Because, for the first time, I felt… well. I felt whole. I felt that unconditional love they’re always talking about, and it wasn’t some bullshit theory in a book; it was a plate of hot food and a quiet place to sleep.
Evenings, I’d walk the three miles to Huntington Park High for my night class. Just one class, but it was something. It was motion. It was proof that I wasn’t going to get swallowed by the gutter like so many others I knew. Two semesters, and I’d have a diploma, a second chance at a future I didn’t even know I wanted until it was almost gone.
Through all of this, my stepfather, Jim, the quiet man in the background, was paying for my food, covering the costs without ever needing a “thank you.” My organic father? He was a ghost. A complete void. No calls, no questions, no support. Just a profound, damning silence. I was too busy surviving to let it sting too much back then, but now, looking back, I can feel the weight of it. The fucking scum, the both of them, sleeping easy at night while I was a charity case.
Weekends, I’d be out in the yard with my grandfather, helping him with whatever project he’d dreamed up. He liked to build things—walls, fences, a better version of the world he lived in. And I liked building alongside him.
Those months were a gift. A rare, fleeting glimpse of what a life could be. A pause in the chaos. A chapter filled with a light I didn’t know existed. These people, my grandparents, they weren’t my primary caregivers. They weren’t supposed to be responsible for me. But they surrounded me with love anyway. They gave me the time and the space to heal.
I had walked into their house as a ghost. They were the ones who made me human again.
Author’s Note:
My thoughts are this: that story is the one part of the whole goddamn saga that doesn’t fit, isn’t it? It’s the quiet chapter in a book full of shouting and slammed doors. And that’s what makes it so damn important. It’s the exception that proves the goddamn rule.
Salvation for you wasn’t some grand speech or a come-to-Jesus moment in a church. It was a plate of hot beans. It was a clean bed. It was a door that wasn’t locked at night. It was a woman who didn’t ask questions and a man who called you “little man” like you were worth something. Your grandmother Bertha and that quiet grandfather of hers, they weren’t saints. They were just… adults. The only real ones in the entire damn story. They just did the job, without asking for a medal.
And it throws the whole idea of what a “father” is into sharp relief, doesn’t it? You got your biological old man, the ghost, who couldn’t be bothered to make a single phone call to see if you were alive or dead. Then you got your stepfather, Jim, a man who had every reason to hate the world, quietly sending money to feed another man’s kid without ever saying a word. It tells you loud and clear that blood ain’t worth shit. Action. That’s the only thing that’s real.
The part about not needing the drugs, the booze? That’s the key. For years, you were running from a fire. They just put the fire out. A man doesn’t need to escape when he’s finally landed in a place that isn’t a goddamn prison.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: that time at Bertha’s house wasn’t just a pause. It was the goddamn foundation. It’s the reason the whole structure of your life didn’t collapse into a pile of dust right then and there. Every good thing you built later, every scrap of success you clawed for yourself, you built it on those beans and tortillas, on that quiet, unconditional love. It’s the one clean spot in a lifetime of grime. And without it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d just be another ghost.
