CHAPTER 1 - THE BEGINNING
Just so you know I'm not one of those idiot "self help" bullshit fucktards that fills your head with incredibly trite phrases and terms that I will probably never figure out, and in the end will never use. I am writing this from my tiny bedroom in my Grandmother's house...where I live. That's right, I am 30 years old and living with my mother and grandmother, yeah I have it ALL figured out. But hey, the rent is cheap the food is good and I have a free babysitter so I might as well take advantage of it. But I digress, let us start from...well where else...the beginning...
I was born on January 17th 1981 at 12:07 am at Sharp Memorial Hospital and much to my parents surprise, I was a boy. You see, back then you really didn't need a sonogram unless they felt the pregnancy was in trouble. So, the Dr. always assumed I was girl, yeah..I know...it's pretty fucked up. So instead of being born as Shanna Marie Stewart my Parents scrambled and came up with the name Adam Christopher Stewart. Sounds pretty fucking American doesn't it? So that's me. The son of an Irish redneck and former Navy mess cook from Fresno and a Portuguese, Mexican devout Christian woman who was raised in the most strict house I could ever imagine. Needless to say, that carried over into how my brother and I were raised as well. My brother, Daniel, is two and a half years older than me and we couldn't have been more opposite, in fact I questioned on multiple occasions whether or not I was either switched at birth or adopted.
We grew up just like any other family that struggled to get by did, we focused on what mattered most, FAMILY. It wasn't until I grew older that I realized that we lived across the street from the welfare office and government housing. It never occurred to me because my parents did everything they could do to make sure that they instilled in us that your financial status isn't what's going to make you happy but your family and the friends you keep in life brings about the real happiness in this life. We never went hungry and we never went without and for that I could never thank my parents enough. I know you're probably thinking to yourself "shut the fuck up about all this backstory bullshit and get to the fucked up parts already!" But in order to understand how shit got so fucked up it's important to look at the root of it all, right? So shut up, sit down and either put this away, or bear with me on this, fuck!
The first place I could remember as a kid was our duplex that we lived in, in Chula Vista. At the time it was a small town on the outskirts of San Diego. To put it in a geographical sense If San Diego was a pair of tits and Mexico was a Vagina...We would be the belly button, small useless and just in the way. But it was and always will be home to me. Our neighbors were the Garcia Family which consisted of Karen and her son Alex. I was two when we moved in and Alex was three...so there was a two year old a three year old and a four year old all living technically under the same roof. My brother and I shared a room for nine years while living there, I'm just glad we had a rickety old ass bunk bed set so we didn't have to share a bed. I have fond memories of that shitty little place and it's weird thinking back that far now it has almost has this mythological sense to it, in a way where you look back and think "did all that really happen?" Camping in the front yard, playing kick the can till midnight, building a fort with our own bare little hands, playing Nintendo til our eyes bled, sleepovers, and playing countless board games until we'd pass out. You know, the kind of shit kids are supposed to do today but are too fat, lazy and dumb to know what it's like to get out and be a fucking KID! ( we'll get into this more later as well)
As we grew older we began to make friends with a couple kids that lived across from us in an apartment complex, it was literally across from our front door with only a chain link fence separating us. The first friend we made was Pugsly, actually his name was Luis but he looked like the mexican version of Puglsy from The Addams Family so the name stuck. He was a short, round little shit, chubby cheeks and what we called the hair helmet, his hair was so thick it literally looked like a helmet and he had these faint black sideburns that looked like a strap that connected under his chin. I seriously feel that if he ever were to fall it would be impossible to sustain ANY kind of brain damage or head trauma, but he was a good friend, and he had a hot sister...need I say more?