In the spirit of Punk Rock:
I was born on a Thursday in a country we didn’t belong to, to parents who never belonged to each other; and I got a tattoo of the Virgencita on a Friday the 13th in a tattoo shop somewhere outside Oklahoma City, even though when I was 10 I lied to the priest at my First Communion, unwilling to admit that I’d begun watching porn 2 years earlier after stumbling across a video of Ash Ketchum penetrating Misty while trying to illegally download music onto the family computer; and when I graduated high school I wept like a baby in my father’s arms, and wept even more when I felt his tears falling on my shoulder; and I cheated on my ex-girlfriend with a young woman who had a unicorn tattooed on her thigh somewhere in St. Louis while on tour “selling” merch for my friend’s band; and I lost my virginity in a Honda Civic next to an electrical substation on a dark desert road, sweating profusely, beause it was early June, and maybe also because I was nervous; and I used a razor blade from a carpet knife to slit my thighs open and relieve some of the pressure that had been building inside me while lying prostrate on the shower floor; and I mercy killed a mouse with a hammer after it had gotten caught in a glue trap my friend had set out for it, and I was left uneasy at the sheer unremarkability with which the mouse departed from the plane of the living; and I never wore ear protection when my band and I ripped off Cream in my neighbor’s bedroom during high school; and I smoked my first cigarette on a park bench in Madrid, shaking as I lifted the cigarette up to my lips; and I had a dream in which a man performed oral sex on me and I bludgeoned him in the face with a stone immediately after I finished, still naked; and the first time a man performed oral sex on me in real life I enjoyed it and came in his mouth and kissed him immediately after I finished, parked next to a canal, the only light coming from an orange hued streetlamp; and I worked in a bakery with a man from Veracruz who told me stories of climbing up mango trees to harvest fruit for an international distributor when he was my age; and I was vegetarian for one month on account of ethical concerns regarding the meat industry; and most of the time the music I listen to is too loud, and leaves my ear ringing, but I don’t want to stop it; I don’t have a choice.
AMEN!
Sergio Brito is a construction worker and writer working in Los Angeles. Born and raised in the Coachella Valley, he enjoys dry heat, the sun, and quiet desert nights. Look for his other work published in Where Meadows, and follow him on twitter @Bskergio