I mostly don’t remember high school ‘cause I was mostly on drugs, but I’m pretty sure— not certain— that I did not meet Flavor Flav when he walked around our local mall. My best friend was there and saw him, clock chain and all. He said he’d seen Flav there every day that week, which must’ve been a lie, same way I lied to him about my family being of royal Mexican blood. Really my family was farm workers, factory men, refugees. Their names were like the names on jerseys hanging from the rafters outside the school auditorium, where I sat and waited for my buddy to come pick me up after rehearsal and go smoke— names I didn’t recognize. My mother was worried sick all those years, her fears worse than she could dream. I snuck past her TV-lit bedroom and out the back door every night. Weed was illegal and narc cars stayed circling the parks, so our nights— me and my friends— were paranoid and hysterical, set to deafening Odd Future. My grades were great, so our days— me and my ma’s— were happy. My friends and I made a Vine about my dad walking out on us. It was actually funny, but sad and wrong and I went along with it ‘cause it was actually funny, just like when I swallowed the bitter tab of acid in a strangers’ basement years later. Or when they filmed me licking the ash out of a dirty car seat. Or— I don’t like talking about drugs so let me move on. I didn’t mean for this to be sad. It wasn’t. It was awesome. Yeah, it was fucked up sometimes, but not as fucked up as me or any of my friends’ twenties. I forgive the teenage cruelties done from a place of fear in the face of love. I hope the cruelties I subjected my friends to can be forgiven, too. I wish I could go back in time, not to relive it but to see how hard I was beaming, walking to the school parking lot with my pals, to hear how loudly we laughed about God knows what. How, long before it was a viral meme, my best friend shouted, “YEAH, BOY!” out the shotgun window of a Pontiac Aztec as it peeled off towards the local mall, us hoping to meet Flavor Flav ‘cause my best friend promised he was for real really dead serious not lying about there still being time.