DaCrizzow

    It's 1975, Im nine years old and in the third grade. My two previous years of "education" I was being bussed to a more "inner city" school surrounded on three sides by Nashville housing projects. Those were a couple of intense years, all for another day, only to be challenged when I would start buying drugs in those said projects nine years later. Again, that's another story. Now, back to third grade at my new school.     It was only a couple miles from my grandmother's house so I could finally walk to school. This meant two things. "Adventure" and "freedom." It should've also meant "responsibility" but that sounds boring right now writing it, I can only imagine how it would've sounded then.     There were only two other kids walking as far as I was, Larry and Eddie Johnson. Two brothers that lived a couple blocks over but I'd never met them before. Larry was in my class but Eddie was a grade ahead...but th

    When I was 12 years old, me and two friends, Mike L. and Ryan S. were three kids testing the boundaries. We had started shoplifting and had gotten pretty good at it. We could walk into a department store with an empty shopping bag and leave with it full, no problem. We were getting so much shit that we couldn't take it home without some suspicion so we had to sell a lot of stuff we were stealing. Then we had the problem of explaining the money. Most of the time it just went to pinball or fast food but pretty quickly it went to buying pot. Ryan was the one who started that. He even had more cash, as he got a $40 allowance every week while we might have gotten $5 here and there. Looking back, he was the bigger risk taker. He was the first of us to get a job (construction), quit school and start his own contracting company. He was also the guy who in our late teens would pass us in a car at 100mph while he was riding a wheelie on a motorcycle with a girl on the back.     One of t