I grew up in this town and left when I was pretty young. I definitely romanticized my childhood and romanticized the desert. I especially held fondly to the images of my neighborhood which was bordered by the freeway on one side and a large park on the other. My friend lived across the street from me and her mom was a drug dealer. They were a nice family and I spent a lot of time there. Everyone in the neighborhood called her "Ms.T" even though her real name was Theresa. She had a group of men that were loyal to her because of her influence in the crystal meth trade. They served as a sort of goon squad and would do her bidding. She carried a hot pink gun that wasn't made of metal but rather molded plastic. The gun was plastic but it was a real gun. It fired real bullets and the bullets weren't made of plastic. The casings were metal and the projectile itself was made from lead alloy like any bullet fired from a metal gun.
Because of her goon squad and because of the pink pistol, Ms.T wasn't the person to cross. One time an associate of her's fell out of her favor. She had the men who were loyal to her pick him up on the ruse that they were going to go to a local bar. They took the man to the desert in Ms.T's car and shot him 3 times in the chest and the head and then buried him. When they returned, Ms.T asked if he was 6 feet under. "We put him a lot further down than 6 feet" one of the men said. It wasn't until 3 days later that the man finally dug himself out and found his way back to town. I saw him at Mike's Deli, which wasn't really a deli but a liquor store. A lot of us from the neighborhood would hang out around Mike's, so I wasn't too surprised to see him there. I asked him how he managed to get out of the hole and back to town. He said he dug his way out and walked back across the freeway and into the neighborhood. He confirmed that he was in fact a lot deeper in the earth than 6 feet. His hands were still caked with dirt to his wrists from his grueling resurrection and the bullet holes in his chest and his head were still plainly visible. I told him I was sorry about what happened and I was glad he had found his way back home. I couldn't stay to chat too long because I was on my way to work and I had a long walk ahead of me.
I worked at a bargain super-store called MacFrugals. Before that it was called Pick 'N Save. Nowadays it's called Big Lots. It wasn't a very good job and that may be one of the reasons I left so young to try my hand at big city living in Los Angeles.
I just came back about 3 months ago. Nothing too exciting was going on in the old neighborhood and I grew bored quickly. I went Downtown to see if there was anything stirring. I passed Circles Records which was a hopping record and tape store when I lived here the first time. Circles had since closed and the building was pretty well boarded up. I found a door that looked like it could be breached easily so I wrestled with the knob and found my way in. Once inside I saw that there were a handful people, maybe 20, who had taken up residence in the abandoned record shop. I talked to a nice man that seemed to me to be the leader of the lot. He told me that they had been there for several years and a couple of babies had even been born in the squat and the babies were now toddlers. I saw a Circles toddler playing with a Transformers toy on a yoga mat that had been fitted with sheets and was apparently being utilized as a makeshift bed. I asked the man why they had decided to live inside of Circles Records. He told me they had chosen the location because the vinyl record, as a medium, was dead. I knew he was wrong about vinyl being dead, but I decided there was a possibility that he was right about a lot of other things.
