Salvador, Chapter 1

When I was young, I couldn’t wait to grow up.
After a while, I was dreading it. Unless of course, I could be just like him.
See, I had this neighbor, Johnny Hoskins. He was a bitter old fuck of a guy that drank and cussed like a sailor. My parents were idiots to let me hang around him.
I swear he lived through more shit than anyone else on the planet. Born sometime late in the forties, the dude had seen it all. The cold war, Vietnam, the hippie revolution, the punks when they tried to take over the city. He had literally seen it all. For a long time it felt like God entered the room whenever he walked in. I still don’t know why.
Johnny Hoskins was the kind of guy that didn’t give a rats’ ass about anything. He’d sit on his porch and spit at any lady walking by with her kid, only to get shouted at in Chinese. See, we lived in China Town. They all hated him, he said, because he’d been living there longer than any of those “damn immigrants” had. There’s no denying that the guy was a racist bastard. But he didn’t care, like I said. He’d sit on his porch playing his old records and smoking and drinking and disturbing the peace, causing a riot. Hell, he’d even sit out there reading a copy of the Bible, or the Mein Kampf, or any other number of books. People called him a hypocrite for it, though he always shot back with, “how the hell can you know shit ‘till you’ve heard the sides of the story?” That’s what he said.
I don’t think he stuck to that too much.
Sometimes my dad would let me stay at his place after school, when I was really young, because he was too busy working. I don’t know why—I was probably better off alone than hanging around with him. But I never once complained. The bastard probably would’ve hit me. For a long time, I resented him—he said everyone did at one point—and I wanted to beat his old ass into the ground. I wanted to hurry up and grow up so I could give him an idea of what was on my mind.
But one day I woke up and he gave me a listen to Don McLean’s American Pie, and after that, I didn’t care about growing up. Unless I was going to be just like him, I didn’t wanna. In an instant the guy turned into my idol.
As I got older and he got more bitter and more drunk he started telling me these stupid pointless stories. Stories about when he was livin’. He said he wasn’t living anymore, that he was waiting for his time. That scared me. Death, I mean. Back then I was just a little prick that was afraid of dying and going to hell. “There’s no hell when you die, Ivan,” he spat at me once. “So don’t look so worried.” It was like anything I ever thought, he made me un-think it. It was the weirdest sensation in the world whenever he did that.
But enough of that. See, his stories were the best part. I never listened. I hated them until I was old enough to appreciate them.