Last Stand at Crack County (part 1)

Certain combinations of events are bound to be a disaster. Take for instance, this little gem of a bad recipe: one dead aunt, a predator half-cousin, a bar full of Crips, crack, guns, caddy’s, ho’s, and me. *Note: Dear cousin Jesse if you ever stumble across this, I love you but that weekend was a fucking nightmare.


At the Church of Rock:

Funerals are never fun, and not just because someone you loved dearly just died, but also not fun on a whole entire different plane of existence when you are surrounded by gangsters and toothless crackheads who are also, in their own way, mourning as well. That being said, it’s hard enough to deal with the pain of loss when you also have to fear for your own life at the same time.

It’s been about 6 months now and I still can’t even get my head around this one yet.

I guess I should give you a little background history leading up to this event.
My mom’s little biker-babe sister, Aunt Marty, lived in a trailer in the mountains in Washington with super-creep Uncle Ken.
They sold drugs and had a beautiful red-headed baby girl named Jesse.
Uncle Kens drinking habit was as bad as his never-ending beatings on my aunt.
Cousin Jessie rebelled against her wasted meth-head-white-trash upbringing by getting knocked up by a Crip and had a wonderful little baby boy at age 16.
Alcoholism had gotten the better of Uncle.
He died after getting out of prison for trying to kill Aunt Marty.

Fast-forward 4 and a half years.

Mom gets a call from Cousin Jessie, Aunt Marty had just died of a lung and heart failure. It’s not said out-loud, but it’s from crack. That week Jessie spends the night in jail with a DUI, while her boyfriend also is in jail for a fight. Both her parents are dead. Someone else has to take care of her son and his 3 kids. All this and she’s only 21.

So my brother and my parents and I head up to Washington for the funeral. I hadn’t talked to my aunt for so many years she didn’t seem real to me anymore. I had to pull from old memories of her drunken late night phone calls and lessons she taught me on picking psilocybin mushrooms in the wild. She was my favorite aunt.

We show up late to the funeral home. I know my aunt had been religious, but I guess she ended up as a Born Again, or a Baptist. There was a strange tension in the air. I walk up the aisle and sit in the second row behind Jessie and her boyfriend and son. The sermon starts and immediately the preacher is going off. He’s telling us we did my aunt wrong. Who is this guy? He’s staring us down. The audience is agreeing. Adding in “hallelujah’s” and “Amens!” Most of them are missing teeth and have crazy eyes. I’m thinking who the fuck are these people? It’s psycho-babble time.

And boy are we white. I guess Aunt Marty had followed her daughter in taste in men after Ken died. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a shit about any of that, but what I do give a shit about how people treat each other. You really don’t notice the color of your skin until people MAKE you notice. I still don’t understand how opportunist-racism works, but found out later why we were the enemy. This was a room full of hate.

///More to come////