Reminiscences (II) / The Rise Of A Family

“When I say that I lived in the outskirts, I literally mean between public housing: I had a small apartment in a I-don’t-know-how-many-floors complex and all the people around me were either involved with criminality or had multiple works, normally the lowest types of works you can ever imagine. Even though I have never met them. It was a place from where you only wanted to escape, only not to look back ever again. Plus, it was full of foreigners: people from countries such as Timor Est, Thailand, Cambodia, China, from Europe and South America… It was really a melting pot of cultures, which also meant that it was a bomb of violence that could have exploded anytime because of the diversity of the many cultures that lived together inside it. When I was forced to stay there, I was in a complicated situation: I had to start middle school - also because I lost a year between all of the hereditary fights that there had been in the old boss family -, I needed money to buy food, pay bills and, in general, survive. The only thing I hadn’t to pay was rent: that apartment had been used back in the days to hide persons by the organisation the old guy managed, and apparently it was still under his name. I presume that it was an unsellable apartment and that was why they gave it to me… but that is not important right now. In any case, all of the things I had to do would have been impossible for a child, as you need to be adult for the majority of them, but apparently, when they sent me away, the children of that old guy thought about that: they gave me all the information and the documents that certified the existence of the Chinese businessman that should have lived there so that I had no administrative problem. That was probably the only thoughtful thing they did for me. Anyway, I started going to a public middle school – one of the least expensive I could find in the area – and found myself some part-time jobs. However, that was when problems started. Remember I told you that I had fight during my years in elementary school? Well, my middle school years can be considered a big and continuous arena: ever since day one I was involved in a lot of fights, also because, being in an area with a relatively high criminal rate, there were also gang members between the students. That meant that there was friction between the different gangs and also between them and people who weren’t part of any gang, which were considered only worthy of being shook down every now and then. But the problem wasn’t the school: it was the outside. Almost all of the people that went to that school also lived in my same neighbourhood, and while at school you still had to behave yourself a little in order not to get expelled - even thouhg many of them were students repeating the year that had not so much interest in school, being expelled was still seen as a negative thing, strangely enough -, outside of it people can do what they want, even if it breaks the law. I was assaulted various times while going to the convenience store or while also returning home from my part-time jobs: sometimes, they wanted my money, sometimes they only wanted to kill me for no reason whatsoever, just for an old thirst of blood that it is inside every human being. Still, forged by my years of fights and of practicing kendo and fencing, I normally just beat their ass without any problem, so much that my name was quite known in the area: or better, not my name, but a surname that was given to my figure. It was “The Silent Check”: apparently, that was because, after every fight, I would contemplate in silence the remnants of the fight, in order to see if all of my opponents had given up on fighting me. Hence why the “Silent Checker”. Still, that reputation caused me more trouble than anything else: I was the one everyone wanted to fight, and more people just tried to assault me without a logical reason. Heck, there were times when I really risked dying because of that shit. During that time, I also got in contact with some criminal environments: at school, many of my classmates made show of pricy things, making it obvious that they earned that money through illicit activities, mainly from drug dealing, where youngsters were the thing for motives I won’t be here explaining. Once, one of the third year guys arrived at school with a sportive moto, just like those you see in racing categories. That was when the police arrested him: he made it too obvious that he was doing things he shouldn’t have. I honestly despised them and their stupidity: if you want to do things like that, at least do not try to show off your newfound richness, unless you want to make everyone around you understand from where you acquired that money. Still, I was envious of the amount of money they made: I worked my ass off with three part-time jobs and all I got was enough to make me survive for another month. However, I also didn’t want to have other problems: I already had mine, they were enough, even if you didn’t add having to deal with illegal stuff. However, life had other projects for me. One day, when I was in my first year of middle school, while I was returning from school, I saw this gang of ten people surrounding this group of four people, three males and a girl, with one of the guys bleeding from his hand. It was obvious what they were trying to do: however, that didn’t mean that it was ok for me. I stepped in and, needless to say, beat them like you beat a slice of meat before cooking it. When I finished the job, I turned towards the four poor souls that I just saved, as if to see that they were all right, and I took my leave, but, before I could do that, I heard four voices behind me, saying at the same time “Thank you”, words that I hadn’t hear since a lot of time. That was how I made the first friends I ever had in my life: the four of them were Eduardo, a high school student with Brazilian-Portuguese origins; Hana, Eduardo’s girlfriend and classmate, which instead was of full Japanese origin; Sergio, a Mexican boy two years older than me, and finally Cho, a little Korean boy that was a year older than me. Since that moment onward, the five of us would meet whenever we had the chance: outside of school, inside of it, in a short period of time we all became inseparable. They became like a family for me, a thing that I had even forgotten could exist. That friendship also gave me some opportunities to return to some of my old habits: Cho’s parents had a gym with all the things needed to practice fencing and kendo, so, once every now and then, I went there and practiced by myself. I also started doing a bit of boxing, just to keep myself fit, even though the fights that I had to take every day helped me already in that. However, with time, all the other four joined me in my training routine, learning how to defend themselves under my supervision: it was like I was a military instructor that had to train new recruits. Still, under my supervision they improved and improved, until they could easily defend themselves without getting seriously harmed in the way. That was also when a thought started flourishing in our minds, because I wasn’t the only one to have thought about this: what if we created our own gang? We could have been respected by others, we could have been left alone and in peace and we could have tried to make a little money by defending those who, like many in those types of neighbourhood, couldn’t defend themselves. We wouldn’t have dealt with illegal actions; we would have only offered our protection to those that needed it: behind the payment of a small sum of money, that is. My name was well-known in the area, so it would have been fairly easy to convince people, and my companions were also good fighters, which would have contributed to our reputation. One evening, around the end of my first middle school year, while we were eating out because of Sergio’s birthday, we discussed about the possibility of making this idea a reality: a few days after, we found ourselves in an abandoned little building that was near Eduardo and Hana’s high school and, after talking the details out, we established our own gang: it was called Anemakai. The name came from the Anemone flower, which, according to Hana, the expert in flower language, meant "hope" – even though a few years after I would have found the real meaning behind that flower, one that made me bitterly smile at the irony of the flower we chose -, and the word that in my language means “red”, taking inspiration after the colour of a rose: beautiful, but at the same time dangerous. We started things little by little: we established our headquarters in that abandoned building and also created a logo, a simple red anemone with a white centre in it, then we decided to whom to talk in order to offer our protection. We started with a few shops near the school that we knew had some problems with some local gangs: we didn’t threaten them in any way, all we needed was for me to show up, ask if they needed any protection and they were very willing to give us some money for a bit of security. That money was divided between us: we thought about having a collective treasury, but in the end we found that pretty much useless, as we didn’t have any exit managing the gang and all of us needed money. Things went well for the first months: the shops we defended were left in peace, but we weren’t left in peace by other gangs. They started fighting us, and we started fighting back for our territory. Still, we smashed some gangs and succeeded in getting a bit of territory near our headquarters, which provided us also ground for an expansion of our business, which became a bit bigger, which meant that we needed more people in order to help us. That was when Hana and Eduardo presented us to some people from their class – a few Russians and some people from South-East Asia, both females and males –, who, after a bit of training and selection, were put to work. Plus, some members of the gang we beat joined us, increasing the amount of people that could give us a hand. All of this meant that our exits got higher, but so did our income. In fact, with my share, I could live a far decent life, so I stopped doing my part-time jobs and concentrated on the job and on school, even though I wasn’t that interested in studying. However, that was when Sergio died: apparently, he was hit by a hit and run driver and died in the hospital, after bearing an unfair amount of suffering for a guy whose dream was only to go to university and study architecture. At the first glance it could have easily seemed like an accident, something that could have happened to anybody, but all the four of us that remained thought the same thing: someone was starting to act against us. That meant that we were starting to get known, and that it was time to start thinking about the future, but at the same time it meant that we had to be careful, because that was a warning for us. A warning that we had stepped in someone’s territory, and that we had to watch our backs. That was when an old acquaintance knocked at my door: it was a member of my father’s organisation that apparently succeeded in not getting caught. He apparently got word of my position from some talks in places near him and decided to check up on me and to see if he could help me in any way. He offered me help with how to manage a criminal organisation and advices about how to, for example, corrupt the bureaucracy and the right people to turn a blind eye on your existence, plus how to manage money and make them appear legit, if we ever needed, and other stuff. Still, that was a strange time to appear, and I had started to become a bit paranoid after what happened to Sergio, so I asked him why he was helping me.

“I am in debt with your father, like many other people on this earth. I think he would cry, knowing that you are getting in the same life he tried to abandon in order to not make you meet his end, but I don’t blame you: your situation is extreme, this is the only way someone can survive if he is alone in life. Trust me, I know that”.