Brothers, Sisters

We'd take the bus out to Ocean Beach to surf fish. Seven and eight years old running gear sized for grown men. Might as well have been gear for storybook giants. Sometimes it was a forearm, a leg, an eyebrow. Catching a bad cast instead of a fish, a thick-gauge hook buried past the barb. We learned hook extraction the hard way.

We'd push it through the eyelet side, backing it out the barb was worse. Eventually we figured you could snip the barb end or the eyelet. Easy out after that, as long as someone remembered heavy duty cutters. People pay money for piercings like that now. Talk about a missed business opportunity.

Bikes broke, chains fell off, tires went flat. Figuring it out wasn't optional, it was what you did. Answers from adults: You broke it, you fix it. No, that costs money. So you did odd jobs, mowed lawns, whatever paid. You learned to fix your own gear.

Once you learn to work early, you don't unlearn it. You got used to figuring things out, fixing what breaks, engineering improvements. And later, we quietly became exceptional at our jobs, because that's what you do. No fuss, no recognition, no back pats needed. A lot of us ended up in the trades from building those skills early. Myself included.

If you got slung off the merry-go-round, we did that on purpose, that was the whole game. If you cracked your skull open, school nurse handed you a brown paper towel run under some water. Ratched sent you back to class with...

You'll be fine, just walk it off.

When no one is coming, you stop waiting, Independence wasn't a virtue, just Tuesday filling the gap supervision should've occupied.

Once you're on your own, hurting or struggling, scared or helpless aren't options that help. So they stop being options. Toughness isn't a personality trait, it's the real-time adaptation to no one around.

Eventually it closes into a system. It's not just I can handle it, but I will not ask. At least until it's really bad, dire. That fierce self-reliance is a skill and a trap in the same motion.

Late-70s East Oakland was where it sharpened. Not dramatic, just the way a place teaches you what's required to move through it. You learned to read a block before stepping onto it. Keep your voice low, awareness high.

Passing a friend on the block, we'd say "hard as ten," the way others say hello. Our ritual well-wish, a salute. To being harder than the ten guys jumping you all at once. And to surviving it, on the regular.

Functionally, we didn't have parents. They were more of an idea, one that only materialized after the streetlights came on. And even then, you had to be invisible, or there were real consequences, some harsher than others. If you lived it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This post isn't that. I speak to that elsewhere.

There was a group of us who would've gone to jail before we'd forfeit our freedom to be there for each other. I got rolled up over that shit, three times as a juvenile. Never crossed my mind to weigh it. Just the shape of things, the physicality of life in the hood, without adults to protect us.

By my teens a lot of those friends drifted, went to jail, or passed. By the early 80s East Oakland looked like tiny a dot in my rear view mirror. Always rode dirt, later street. That's when I found my way to that same kind of group again, through motorcycles.

Same kind of people, just a little older. Hood, trailer, suburbs, didn't matter. Same way of solving, if a bike was down, you didn't wait, you tore it apart and fixed it. If someone needed something, you handled it. No speeches, no ceremony. Just the same getting after it.

People get nostalgic about the hose water, the music, the movies. All part of it, and still awesome. But for me the real richness came from finding chosen family. That's what gave it meaning. Without that, the rest feels like background noise.

This isn't about the costs, I talk about that plenty elsewhere. This is about what came out of it: what we became individually, and for each other. The capability, the steadiness, the way we showed up.

That's the part that lasts. The good parts.

Some peeps go back almost forty years, some twenty, some less. Same same, all family. We don't have a lot of them left, or much hang time these days. Life has a way of doing that, but we'll still show up in an instant. Same fierceness, same readiness.

We were thrust into being our own last line for each other, because no one else was holding it down. We grew up fast, raised each other, picked up the pieces. That's our thing. And we do it like no one else since.

Brothers and sisters.

This piece emerged in part from losing one of our peeps a month ago. Gone too soon.

It's good to remember and celebrate the ones who are gone. On one level, this is that. It's also a celebration of the ones still here.

If you got a circle from the block, say wassup hommie.

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Connective Tissue:

→ The DR650
→ Fieldcraft for the Feral Generation
→ Stone and Weather
→ Oh, The Water

Related:

→ Grind-Induced Zero Day
→ Aliveness at the Edge
→ And It Stoned Me
→ The Light on It

Also:

→ Everything at Once
→ What Regulation Made Possible
→ Close Enough to Be In Them
→ Defended

← Back to Field Notes

* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *