I come from a hardscrabble neighborhood in East Oakland, known to the police as Ground Zero. With all the poverty and crime, the culture is very macho. People went to great lengths to avoid looking poor. For example, during my teen years, the pimp look was in, so guys spent large sums of money on lime green silk socks, purple velvet pants, alligator shoes, fur hats and jewelry that sells by the pound. Few actually were pimps, since they usually got around on the bus. The real pimps drove Cadillacs with gold plating and wire wheels.
I remember one guy in particular. He couldn’t afford to look like a pimp, but seemingly wanted to appear important anyway. I was at a bus stop, in front of a motorcycle shop, on my way to school. He had a proposition for me. Would I help him break into the motorcycle shop and steal some motorcycles? I suggested this was a poor idea, since neither of us knew how to hotwire a motorcycle, we didn’t know if there was gas in any of them and we had no place to keep them after a day of joyriding. But he wasn’t deterred. He circled the building what must have been about ten times, looking for a way in. He finally seemed to agree with me at about the same time the owner showed up. He ran off, and I never saw him again.
I grew up with my mother and my sister, living in a small apartment. We didn’t have a car or much money. My mother had to work long hours to make ends meet, and we had few luxuries. I usually wore hand-me-downs, so if I wanted didn’t want to look poor, which is bad form, I had to get a job.
My first job was a paper route with about 40 customers. I would deliver newspapers after school and collect for my services at the end of the month. I had to pay for the newspapers, and the remaining cash was my profit. The problem was some people didn’t want to pay me. They had plenty of excuses, such as “I didn’t get the paper” or “I cancelled my service”. If excuses were money, I could have retired by age sixteen. Maybe after buying all those alligator shoes and fur hats, people were short on cash. One night, while making collections, somebody tried to rob me, poking his finger at me under his jacket. We got into a fist fight, somebody turned some lights and he ran away.
While I was still young, I took a variety of jobs, from Fuller Brush salesman to sheepherder. Sheepherding was a smelly, boring job, but the upside was, at least, I got paid. Then I had an epiphany; I could make more money computer programming. So, I went to school, and later worked at a software company. The future was bright, until my job, along with about 100,000 others, was outsourced to India. My next epiphany bought me here to Lincoln University to learn ultrasound.
Growing up in a tough neighborhood can be beneficial later in life. The experience made me more self-reliant, hard-working and ambitious. I learned that it is important to see the bigger picture, to value friends with good character, that trust is the foundation of relationships, that you should embrace your uniqueness and that alligator shoes are hard to keep clean. But most importantly, I learned that misery is no virtue, and happiness is no vice.
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