Not By Chance By Choice. Desmond Richardson
heavily, telling me to go find my mother, but she was nowhere to be found. Then Richey passed out in the bathroom. I called 911 and told them the situation. The ambulance arrived and rushed Richey to the hospital. In a few days, Richey would pass away.
It was a long year, and it got even longer once I was forced to move in with my mother. I did not like living with my mother. My mother’s money was always tight. She was a drug dealer and more importantly, she did not graduate from the eighth grade. I won’t get into who my mother was, but long story short, she was the type of woman people do not like to live with. Months would go by and struggles with my mother’s finances would increase. My home would eventually go through short periods without lights, gas, and water. Living without gas, started to show on me at school. I just could not continue to take a bath in cold water, and it took hours to boil water. Being filthy was a bad way to go through middle school. I could not take it anymore. I called up my friend Randy from Kansas. Randy and I had been close friends since birth. Our families knew each other. Randy and I played sports day in and day out. We started discussing plans on how we would elevate who we are and make our lives better for the future. A few days would go by and a good idea never crossed my mind. Then, it came to us. Randy and I would use our five-finger discount.
I grew in an era where men wore baggy clothes. Someone’s waist size could be a 32, but he would buy jeans in a size 38. This gave me a plan on how we could walk out the store undetected. We would take a lot of clothes into the fitting room and put the clothes we wanted under the clothes we already had on. It worked like a charm every time. Now that we had clothes, we needed shoes. Randy had a shoe store he believed we could steal from. Randy’s plan was to walk out the store with the shoes in his hand. I thought we would get caught doing something like that, so I suggested a different plan. I told him I thought we should take off our old pair of shoes and put them in the shoe box, then we would walk out with the new shoes on our feet. Both plans worked.
I finally had clothes and shoes, but more importantly, I did not live with my mother anymore. My older sister allowed me to stay with her. I even had a girlfriend now. Her name was Alissa. I felt good about myself. One day, after school, my girlfriend and I would take the bus down to my sister’s school. Christain wanted to meet my girlfriend. Christain’s school was down the street from my girlfriend’s house, so we would walk Alissa home once we got down talking. Out of nowhere, a guy comes and pulls up my sister’s dress. Immediately he and I started fighting. Then he yelled, “Y’all come help!”
I woke up and everything was a blur. Honestly, I cannot remember what happened after that. When I came to, I was at a friend’s house who lived close by. My sister and her friends where talking about a fight. I was thinking to myself, What fight? Then my sister told me to go look at my face. The left side of my face was normal, but the right side looked like someone had run me over with a tractor. I was ready to fight. Then my older sister came into the house upset. She was upset with me because I got my ass whooped. She was right. Losing is not an option, so we went back to fight again. We found them and there were thirty dudes and one girl. I see why I didn’t remember a thing when I got to my friend’s house. It was four against thirty, and I was the only boy. Long story short I got my ass whooped again.
It was a lot going on in my community. I needed a change, so I started looking for a job. My uncle ended up showing petty on me and let me work as a cleaner at his club. He was tough to impress. If he found any trash on the floor after I cleaned, he would charge me for the mistake. I tried my best not to make a mistake.
It was my junior year of high school. I made a few new friends, but my best friend was Tom. Tom and I met by playing basketball. I also got the opportunity to play varsity basketball. I could not play sports before my junior year because my school canceled the athletic program. Juniors were not supposed to play, but I had enough credits to be considered a senior. I averaged fourteen points per game, and I was the starting point guard. My jersey number was 12. Tom played on the team with me, but he left because the coach did not let him play the first two games. Tom and I did nearly everything together, but more importantly, he had the drive for money like I did. The one thing we did not have in common was our faith. He was a person of religion and I was an atheist. I never understood why Tom talked about Jesus so much because he lived a lifestyle of an atheist. I paid Tom’s faith no mind. I thought people of faith were weird. Because there were so many ways to believe in a higher power, I never thought any way could be right. At less once a week, I would clash with a believer because of the many questions I had about religion.
One day, Tom texted me while he was at church and tried to convince me to come to church with him. Tom would try to talk to me about how heaven is real, and, to get into heaven, I must obey the Lord Jesus. I would ask Tom if he thought of Jesus as an idiot. Both Tom and I had done indecent act against the scriptures, and Tom believed he still would receive the crown of life. I told Tom there was no heaven, and if Jesus was real, we would both go to hell. He disagreed with what I said. I never understood why. If the odds of Tom getting into heaven was better than mine, I would reject Jesus even more. How could a Lord continue to love someone that continually disobeys Him? Faith was a weird subject. Tom and I would disagree for hours about faith and belief.
I could see the problem with the world clearly at a young age. People continually waited on the Lord to make them better and blamed their insecurities on being a sinner. In all honesty, I thought Muslims where the right Faith. It seemed to me that Muslims were stern and focused on their God, but it was weird to me how Muslims were willing to sacrifice themselves for the Lord. I knew one of two things about the Lord: either he was the Lord of Christianity or Muslims. The Christian and Muslim faiths were the most spoken about as I was growing up, but for the time being, I would choose to be an atheist and make money. I had a multitude of people around me who believed in Jesus.
Checkmate
My senior year was coming up, and everything in my life was going according to plan. I had dreams of going pro in basketball, but my high school canceled out sports on me all my years of high school. I was upset at first, but I picked up a second job to pass the time. I started making seven to eight hundred dollars every two weeks. Tom and I would shoot dice to make money too. Shooting dice was a second language to me.
With graduation coming up, I would check my GPA and see I had a 1.9. My grades were no bother to me. I knew I had done enough work in high school to just get by. I did not plan on going to college because it was too much work. I had two jobs, so I figured I’d save a little extra money over the next four years and skip out on college. I would end up getting a one-bedroom apartment after I graduated. I was young, just out of school, and I already lived on my own.
I was impressed with the things I had accomplished in my life. I would ponder on my past and how poor we were. I never wanted to go back to having nothing. I would choose to be in the cooperate world. My mother and father both hustled to make ends meet, and ends would never meet. Failure on top of failure for their businesses. I learned one thing from my parents: get a stable nine-to-five job. I also learned to save more than I could spend.
I was at work, at the club, the next day, and while I was picking up trash in the parking lot, a stranger walked up to me and asked if I wanted a job. He was the general manger at NAPA. He told me I was a diligent worker. Now I would have three jobs, making more money than I could have ever imagined. On average, I made $1,500 every two weeks. I was thankful. There was only one problem. On average, I worked eighty-six hours a week. But it was prime time for money, so I saved for a few months to plan for my future. Not only did I work around the clock to kill my hours in a day, I also worked at a fast-food restaurant. That meant all my food was provided for. I had no wants or needs, so I invested in enjoying myself. I bought a truck and painted it lime green and royal blue. Tom and I would hit the streets. Everyone knew I was making money at this point. Then I went and bought another car. I needed to have a casual car I could ride around in.
I had two cars—one nice car and one causal car—but I needed more. This next project would get me the ladies. I bought a Mustang and put a paint job on it, but this was no regular paint. This paint was called candy paint. It would make my car sparkle, so to speak. Tom and I would ride back-to-back in my cars and pick up women day to day.
Decision,