WOODY I MISS YOU

It was 12 years ago January 19, 1993 that i found my best friend of 27 years dead on the floor of our apartment in Grand Prairie between Dallas and Ft Worth. He was 49 at the time and i was 46. I thought I was going to die that nite because as me and him used to say ... end of an era when something would close down or stop that had gotten under our skin over the years. Like our favorite Meskin food restaurant 'El Gallito' down on Ross Ave. That place was such a dive that people used to break in and steal their tortillas, and all the food on a regular basis. You had to show your money before you could even order and you had to pay before they would walk away to the kitchen with your order. Everybody stole their silverware so you had to ask for a knife and you had to turn it in when you finished eating. But man was the food good. So was me and Woody's lifelong friendship. Its when i start missing him so much that i begin to reflect on my life after him. i feel sometimes, well most of the time that i am here now in a sort of dreamlike state trying to do good for all the bad i did when he was alive. i was known back then as Dangerous Del and he called himself Wonderful Woody. People were always afraid of me and we just laughed about it - girls would flock to him because he called himself Wonderful Woody! - His family hated me because we moved here to Dallas to get away from Arkansas where at least I went to HS with Billy Clinton (who yes always was stuck up and he was not poor he drove a Convertible Buick because his parents owned Clinton Buick) - so anyways... my life was always doing something adventurous which meant skirting all kinds of danger and havoc. I'm so lucky just to be alive no wonder i work so hard to save others from the streets of adventure. i really think kids join gangs because it seems like one big adventure. i was trying to sleep while ago and i saw Woody saying goodbye to me and I was wondering where all these new people came from in my life... they seem to come and go and go and come but none last like he did - 27 years. He used to tell me that he did not know how he could live without me in his life. Now i know what he meant. I think this whole thing started because I'm reading a book about yet another new friend and he wrote a book about his life in Chicago - his gang life. from the time he was a little boy growing up in Puerto Rico. his life and my life are so similar yet so distinct that it is haunting me. i'm thinking what if i hadn't done all the things i used to do? i'm thinking what if 'he' didn't do them either - although his were much worse than mine - i still gave these streets hell 24/7. My later nickname after prison became Del from Hell. Now people talk to me and never see that - i'm very glad - it took years to wash that image off my exterior and interior...
My new friend is known to me only by his pseudonym Reymundo Sanchez - at www.nogangs.com - i'm reading his first book right now and i'm trying to 'live his life with him' to walk his streets and run his life with him and his friends if thats what you call them. He made the best of a screwed up life. But its haunting me. I wish i could have been there for him, or here for him. so he never lived the life he has led. that is what i'm doing for all i can get ahold of while there is still hope in their young lives. i see what happens to the ones who fall through the cracks of society and fall onto the streets of hell and devastation. society is sweeping up the streets and throwing them into prison cells to hide them away - when really they are boys and girls fighting for their lives in the battlefields of modern America. it is nobody's fault - we have to put our guilt behind us and the stop the blaming. we just have to SAVE MORE CHILDREN NOW! i began to see that my life after woody has had a purpose that is much higher than the one me and him had for ourselves... we were street driven, money driven, power driven, adventure driven and destruction driven through violence, thieving and drugs as well as taking advantage of persons that woody used to use up like kleenexes... women. what i heard women did for him for only a pack of cigarrettes or a ride across town. but that was woody. and i always loved him as my dearest brother and confidant. times have changed now though and reymundo sanchez is now my friend, and i'm reading this book about him and its haunting me. i'm seeing that my life after woody has been a heaven and a pure unadulterated hell of hells. i never dreamed i would have slogged on this long alone without my sidekick. its as if i have been in a socially induced stupor all these years and i'm not even sure if i have awakened yet or if i ever will. i see that in my path along the journey to the next world that i have walked a million miles and encountered the same amount of lives out here wandering around in the world. children, elderly, alcoholics, drug addicts, convicts and exconvicts, wife beaters, drug dealers, murderers, rapists, drive by shooters, armed robbers, gang leaders, gang followers, prison guards, cops, teachers who by the way i have since found out buy and sell drugs with the kids they teach - so do parole officers and prison guards of course - all folks who do not have to take drug tests and the school bus drivers who also provide a great distribution network for drugs... in dallas... as well as around the country. the whole world is in on it - but they just don't say anything... Me? Whose side am I on? i'm on the side of the kids - the gangs and the prisoners. Why? they have no voice in society, where they also have no place. I know i was there. i'm still there because i still care.
So in this dream i see myself reaching out to everyone i come in contact with - i reach out but some are not the good people.. they are the takers or the liars or the 'smiling do nothing fakes' that really hurt my soul. oh and the ones who when i reach out to them they look at me like i'm insane for caring about the ones who are so appreciative for me having touched their soul and led them into the light. we are doing it - slowly and one life at a time. i pray that wherever you are right now that you will turn to someone and begin reaching out to them and planting seeds of hope and love - you never know which ones will be the 'savers' and who will flourish because you were there and you care.