Who’s Q.?, by Q. Reyes – Artistic Warfare #7
January 25, 2009 Q. Reyes 0 Comments
I’m the son of a missionary Pentecostal Preacher, so he wasn’t just a preacher – we would actually travel around Puerto Rico and start up new churches in places where there wasn’t any plumbing or electricity.
I grew up surrounded by chicken coops, kids without shoes, and street dogs. I’m grateful that my mom divorced my dad and we moved to the United States, or as we call it in Puerto Rico, “Nueva York” – which is not New York at all because we moved to Florida, but to Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, the whole US mainland is considered New York.
So I had to learn English… fast… Middle School in the United States was a cultural shock unlike any other… I survived. I survived High School as well, even though it was a lot easier once I understood what the hell the teacher was saying – not that I went to class much – but it made a difference anyhow.
I graduated when I was fifteen. Completely graduated from high school. I’ve had a job since I was like twelve – for real. I lied and said I was sixteen and I worked at a place called Krystals – which is a burger joint in the south, kind of like White Castle in the northeast.
So at fifteen, done with school, a job, my own car, I was living large. No one could tell me a damn thing. I had it figured out. I was the man. All my friends were twenty-one and up. I could go anywhere and do anything, and for the most part I did.
This made my mom’s life miserable. My friends weren’t exactly your college bound young men. We all grew up in the same government housing and got the same government cheese – no joke. We really got big blocks of cheese and cans with a white label that only read “Apple Sauce” or “Beans”. That’s how we lived.
I actually did have some friends in Orlando that didn’t grow up in roach-filled old-Army-barracks-turned-low-income-housing. While venturing out of my environment, I met some friends that were on TV! They were on the Mickey Mouse Club for real! We would watch them tell kids not to do drugs on TV, while getting high laughing about it. It was so ironic.
Yeah, sure, I tried to start a gang. That didn’t work. It was called The Bandits. It was hard to do, since we didn’t really have a purpose or mission. We would just hung out.
I also tried selling weed a few times, but I was too paranoid to make any money. How do you market yourself and let everyone know what you’ve got, without letting everyone know what you’ve got. That obviously didn’t work either.
So after making my mom cry each and every night because she was so uncertain of my future, I would quiet her down by telling her I was leaving to the military one day. That was my excuse for “having fun” at the time, until one day she really called me out on it — she’s like “if you’re serious, lets go right now”. I was like… “’Ma, I’m sixteen. I can’t go yet”. She’s like “lets try”.
I was so certain it wouldn’t work, still we took a drive to the Armed Forces recruiting offices. All the military branches had offices in that building. It was a Sunday – I was so sure it was closed. It wasn’t, though.
I wanted to go to the Air Force. I figured that’d be the least dangerous place to go in case a war broke out. We walked all the way down the hall to the Air Force suite and the recruiter wasn’t there. Wheu! I was lucky.
On the way out of the office there was a Navy recruiter leaning against the wall throwing a coin up on the air and catching it – like something straight out of a movie. “Can I help you with something?” That was the question that changed it all.
Two hours later, after signing what seemed to be hundreds of papers I was enlisted in the Navy. I was due to ship out shortly after my seventeen birthday to Great Lakes, Illinois for boot camp. That… was the moment that changed my life for the better…
TO BE CONTINUED…
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Q. Reyes is just a nut trying to get a squirrel. Q. enjoys long walks on the beach, horseback riding, and looking for ways to get out of poverty for good. Q. is also a creator of the Ceasar and Chuy program on LATV.