Between The Lines

Soft More

I was born Tanya Nichole Wild at San Bernardino General Hospital. My mama, Tatiana Nicholette Wild, was only 15 years old at the time. Perhaps the last name Wild alone sealed my fate. It is amazing how history repeats itself. Because I found myself giving birth to my first child at San Bernardino Hospital my sophomore year of high school. I guess you can say after that first hit of that glass pipe things really got wild. Particularly, my sex life. On the way home that first fateful night, I ran into a group a neighborhood gangbangers wearing their durags and sporting their colors. It was all so surreal to me. They kept calling me baby, and i heard one of them say, look at her man, she is cranked up. They led me to some house, I am not even sure how far we walked? But I do remember them holding me down on a mattress in a garage and injecting a needle in my arm. After that, I had sex with each of them over and over, again. I didn't consider it rape, or I was too naive to understand what exactly was happening to me. I even enjoyed parts of it, which was confusing. The leader, I guess he was, whispered things in my ear.....like....i am gonna take care of you, baby....doesn't this feel good to you?.....It did, it felt really good. Especially, when he injected me the second time....and all I remember is him saying, time to speedball, my dear.....I didn't know whether I felt cool? Or ashamed? guilty? Maybe numb? It is like my feelings were all stuck into a blender and spun around. When, I finally woke up. I was ???Tattooed and welcomed into their gang. It was never an option. It was just the way it was. I Ajust fell in line and learned to cook up that same crystalized substance that I had smoked with my boyfriend in the same garage where I was I guess what you call sexed into the gang. I often questioned my sanity and wondered if that had actually happened or if I had imagined it all. It was never spoke of, again. Nor, did any of the other gang members act that way towards me, again. In fact, the seemed to treat me with this odd form of respect and if anyone messed with me, the leader threatened them and then they fell in line. This may explain my warped sense of what love was? They all had nicknames. They covered their faces. I wasn't even sure which ones had sex with me? I am not even sure if they all had sex with me or just the leader? Of course, I didn't dare ask. I just played along and had practically an unlimited supply of dope, and i knew the secret recipe, a mixture of household chemicals. A recipe for disaster. I desperately tried to identify the ones I had slept with on that bare mattress by their them by voices. But, they all seemed to sound the same. I finally gave up and just put the incident behind me. I coped by getting high. I soon became my boyfriends supplier of the drug, and one of the gangs suppliers of coke. Not to mention I was also 14 and pregnant. I gave birth to Trenton Nicholas Wild at 15 years old. I vividly remember holding him close to my chest in the hospital. He was so soft. He was my little soft more. He was perfect. A round little face. A wrinkled nose. Big blue eyes. I never knew you could love someone so much....I was a teenager, a gangster, a dope dealer, a meth cook, a drug addict, and a new mother. Sooner or later, something had to give.....