Shit I'd head out in the the morning and spend all day working the docks. I was 8. I'm 60 now.

I'd come home at dinner, my dad required it and because he worked from 4am to 4pm 5 days a week he wanted to see us for rhe meal time. We were poor as dirt even as hard as he worked.

I jumped out of a car once after hitching when I was 14 to get away from some perve. Younahd to be street smart, fight at the drop of a hat and never cry no matter what the bastards did to you. You always responded with all fight you could muster even if you bushwhacked the fucker the way he did you. I once took out this boys knee with a bat. He was 17 I was 13. He would beat me up merciless and because I would not cry he wouldn't stop. So I took his knee with my Louisville slugger #28. I loved that bat but my dad took it and sawed it into 20 pieces. Plus I worked all summer to pay my dad back for the hospital bill.

But he knew why I'd done it and never punished me. That kid crossed rhe road if he saw me after that, mostly because I heard my dad tell his dad that so much as a scowl toward me he would come down there and beat them both. Kids dad probably ordered it. My dad was an animal when it came to family and injustice. He's a guy who's lived in a basement of an apartment building when he was a kid. Lived behind the furnace because of alcoholic parents. We grew up pretty tough