Chapter 1 - F**k You

I don’t understand. I don’t understand. What do they want? Do they want me to have been the top graduate from my class? Or have had already established my own multi-million dollar company?

You know when I was in college, I would always asked the seniors if they were scared. They would always “Yes”, but of what, I didn’t understand. Now, I do. I understand that they were afraid of rejection, of not meeting the status quo of a graduate, of not making their parents proud, of not choosing the right major or the right connections. It was the fear of establishing your future.

Don’t get me wrong, not everyone had this fear. I didn’t have this fear, because I knew what I was going to do in life. I was graduate a year early, and then I was going to start my career at a marketing department. There I would have worked for three to five years, and then I would move back to Austin and gotten my M.B.A. After that, I would gone back to work, and eventually started my own company or business. It was perfect.

I was going to have my own house, my own job, my own car. Then I realized in my junior/senior year that finding this job was not going to be easy at all. You know, when I was a kid my father would always say that if you don’t want to end like your mother and I then study.

You know what my parents do for a living? My mother has been a waitress since she was a teenager. She grew up a poor and uneducated Mexican from Reynosa, Mexico. She had thirteen siblings, three of which died due to poor health. The rest, married and had kids. My mother moved to the states when she was fifteen. She worked as a waitress and ironically met my father at the restaurant she was working at. I still haven’t met all my mother’s siblings. My grandparents, either, but that’s mostly because my grandmother died from severe diabetes and my grandfather was found stiff as a board in a park bench with severe alcohol poisoning.

My father, on the other hand, is a different story. He lived with four brothers and three sisters. He had loving parents that worked hard for their family, regardless of situations or instabilities. The oldest, we call her Tia Weda or Aunt Blondie was born with both depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. The others have rough backgrounds, too. Tia Blanca, gave up her life after she was tricked and kidnapped to become a prostitute in Las Vegas. My father saved her. Now she spends her life quietly at home doing paperwork for the youngest, Tio Omar, who has recently established an impressive trailer company in Monterrey, Mexico. Before his established company, he was a bum who lived with my grandmother and had a bit too much to drink. Hated by the whole street, which is impressive in our culture, for being loud, aggressive, and a showoff. I don’t like him either, but that’s for other reasons.  

Tia Carmen, had a similar faith like Tia Blanca. She was a party girl, beautiful and with a mind of her own. She was drunk when she got raped. She later to abort her child. Years later, she had to undergo numerous surgeries to have her first welcomed child. We called him Juan Angel, and just between you and me, he is a pain in the a*s. Maybe he’ll grown out of it; maybe not. Tia Carmen is now fighting against dormant ovarian cancer.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you anymore information about my boring family. Except about my father. Yes, I have daddy issues. No, not in the way you would think. My father, as told by my grandmother, woke up one morning and decided to live his home country and move to the states. He was eighteen, my mother was twelve and still wouldn’t meet him for another nine years. He left, and had absolutely no money to his name. He was a migrant worker, and as the word says he was a worker that migrated all over the country to do odd jobs. Most of them, as he explained, was a fruit picker. Sometimes, it was chiles, but that’s another story. When he was older, he settled in Dallas, Texas and worked as a construction worker. Met my mother, I was born, my sister was born, and then he had his accident.

I don’t remember much. I just remember that it was cold as hell, if hell was cold. I was seven, when my mom got the phone call. My dad, had left earlier that day…so around three in the morning to drop off a shipment from his eighteen wheeler. He was on a bridge when the car accident happen. Some other eighteen-wheeler driver was drunk or asleep and crashed into the other ones. Due to the icy morning, the bridge was slippery. A row of eighteen-wheelers crashed into each other. The drivers suffered to faiths that morning. One, they had their seatbelts on and stuck. They burned alive. Or two, they forgot to put on their seats belt and flew across the windshield to an eight-foot drop. In addition to, slide on the ground a few feet before they settled into sweet unconsciousness. My father was the latter. He broke his leg, his arm, and his back. To this day, he has scars everywhere as a constant reminder of that day, but yet he went back and worked in construction and transportation.

The rest of my aunts and uncles have simple domestic fights and problems. Nothing, you guys wouldn’t understand.

You would think that because of these hardships, my family would have been bitter and dead. But they weren’t. They were the opposite. They were enthusiastic and alive. They measure their days, not by hours, but by laughs and good food. Which probably explains why I was so fat kid until high school.

This is common for a Mexican family. This is common for a Mexican-American family. We stick together, to help each other, but sometimes it feels like you can’t unstick yourself from them. I love them, but my normal American dreams that I stated in the previous paragraphs, becomes so unattainable sometimes when my parents want me to do their paperwork for their future businesses. My mother, ironically, wants to establish her own restaurant, and my father, like his youngest brother, wants his own trailer business…but do they know what I want?

Do I have your attention now, recruiters? Answer me this, how come you never ask us where we grew up or how we grew up? We may not have experience in our professional life, but GOD DAMN IT we have experience in our own personal lives. Shouldn’t that F*****G count for something, especially if most businesses and industries today are putting as much importance in their workers, as they did, to their customers.

The customer is always right, and now the worker is too. But what about the unemployed? The inexperience? The new graduate? Are we not right, or are we not important enough to be right?

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but f**k you. Especially you businesses who think marketing is sales. GOD DAMN IT, marketing is NOT just sales, but sales is a PART of marketing. In other words, NOT all fruit are apples, but apples are fruit.

Got it? Good.

 

Author's Note

Ignore grammar problems, I'll fix them when I give a damn.

Reviews

[kyam]

Great story1!! I love it!! You are incredible. I love the story of your family, the sisters, brothers, father, yeah. Very interesting, could have read more......Kyam