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 born rotten, if you came out of the womb with some invisible Mark of Cain that set the defaults for the rest of your goddamn life.
You sit on the porch in the dying light of another day. You trace the cracks in the concrete. You wait for a voice to call you inside, but it never comes.
Cerritos. One of those vanilla suburbs where people go to pretend they’ve made it. A place that felt “safe” at night because there were no Mexicans, no blacks. A neighborhood where fathers came home at five and mothers had dinner on the table. I didn’t belong. I was the stain on their perfect white carpet, the mistake someone was too ashamed to own, the jagged piece that didn’t fit their goddamn picture frame.
I got kicked out for breaking the sacred rule: be home by 5:00 p.m. My father’s wife, you see, had been “slaving away” all day, a monumental effort that usually produced a single, sad-looking chicken leg for my dinner. The woman was the original Jenny Craig, a warden of thousand-calorie rations. When I agreed to come back after being homeless, these two well-fed adults hammered it into my skull: be home at five. It was supposed to be my path to redemption. Bullshit. It was exile by another name, a rule designed to be broken.
They didn’t give me a key. Sixteen years old. They wanted me outside, out of sight. And she, my father’s wife, would make a point of it, staying out late, just to fuck with me. Just to make sure I knew I was locked out in the dark.
When I had to piss, I pissed in the dirt behind the house like a stray dog. And when I had to shit, I’d dig a shallow grave near the fence with my hands and unload, listening to the soft thumps of my own turds hitting the ground near my ankles, feeling the strange warmth of it in the cold night. Who in the fuck does this to a sixteen-year-old kid? Those fucking people, in their thirties, complete assholes.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I had finally become exactly what they wanted: something that lived outside. This wasn’t neglect; it was a goddamn strategy.
Back when I was homeless, I still tried to play their game. I was high as a fucking kite on acid most days, a ghost floating through the school halls, but I still showed up for that one class, a single act of compliance. Then the numbers came in. My father gets the call: one hundred absences. He got mad for about five minutes, then just gave up. For them, it was an opportunity, a way to accelerate the final plan. He signed the paper that pulled me out of high school for good. Fifteen and a half years old, officially released with no diploma, no plan, no future. When you have a goal, you just push the narrative, right? Both my organic father and his cunt wife wanted me out.
“Get a job,” he told me. “Figure it out.” The kind of shit he would never say to his kids, the ones he made with her. She wouldn’t have allowed it. She’d have intervened. But I didn’t have that option. She was driving him.
After weeks of looking for a job that wasn’t there, the rule changed: Don’t come home before 5:00 p.m. Don’t make us deal with you. And for that, I will never forgive his cunt wife who engineered all of it.
I did what they wanted. I left for good. And I will never forgive them for making me do the unthinkable. I can’t tell you how hard it was to make that call. Calling my real mom was like flipping a coin you knew was rigged to land on the wrong side. But I was out of options. She came, her green VW Bug rattling like a tin can full of loose screws, her eyes full of a lifetime of exhaustion. Her home in Whittier was just a different kind of hell—white cross-top pills and roaches, stale beer and fresh bad decisions. I stepped inside, took one look at the wreckage, and walked right back out.
Then I just started walking. Gunn Road to Telegraph. Telegraph to Florence. Florence to Huntington Park. By the time I showed up at Grandma Bertha’s door, I wasn’t sure I was even a person anymore. Just a body running on fumes.
When she opened the door, she didn’t hesitate. She didn’t ask questions. She just pulled me inside. She saved me. She fed me frijoles, arroz con pollo, fresh tortillas. Food that tasted like a reason to live. And then she gave me rules, but her rules were different. “No drugs. No trouble. Get your diploma.” That was it. No mind games. No locked doors.
I told her yes. Maybe I was lying. Maybe I wasn’t. I just knew I was tired of running. She gave me a place to stay. And sometimes, that’s all a man needs to keep from going under for good.
…But that’s the story I tell myself. That’s the clean version. The one where my mother is the villain and my father is just a weak man who got led astray. It’s bullshit. All of it.
You want the real story? You want the goddamn truth I’ve been choking on for thirty years? Here it is.
My old man, my organic father, the one who signed me away. I spent years letting him off the hook, letting myself blame her, his second wife, that cunt. But it was him. It was always him.
You let me tell these stories, you let me call my mother a piece of shit, and you hid. You hid like the fucking coward you really are. You let everyone think she was the monster, while you were the poor, put-upon husband.
You want to talk about damage? Look at your other kids, the “real” ones. Look at Seth, who hates his own mother with a passion. Look at Jorge, your little momma’s boy, whose own wife saw the same goddamn shit stains on your family’s soul and ran for her life all the way to Wisconsin. Your sister, my aunt, just plays games with all of them, the same manipulative bullshit. You didn’t just screw me up; you poisoned the whole goddamn well.
So let me just sa it, plain and simple, for the record. For the part of me that’s still that sixteen-year-old kid digging a hole in the backyard to take a shit.
FUCK YOU.
FUCK YOU for your weakness.
FUCK YOU for your silence.
…fuck you. (tears)
Author’s Note
This is the story you write when you’re finally done telling all the other ones.
For years, it was easy to point the finger at the women. The crazy mother, the cunt of a stepmother. They were easy targets—loud, obvious, and spectacular in their destruction. That was the clean version, the story you tell yourself so you can sleep at night. It was bullshit. All of it.
This story isn’t about them. Not really. It’s about the quiet man in the background who let it all happen. The coward. It’s about finally turning the gun around and aiming it at the one ghost you’ve been protecting your whole goddamn life: your own father.
And that ending? The screaming, the rage, the goddamn tears? That’s not just anger. That’s thirty years of misdirected poison finally finding its true north. It’s the sound of a boy, still sixteen years old, still digging a hole in the dirt behind a house that isn’t his, finally yelling at the right person.
This isn’t a story about forgiveness. It’s not about healing. It’s about setting the goddamn record straight, if only for yourself. It’s the autopsy report on a lie you’ve been living your whole life.
