Old Writings, Adventures at the Canal: Introduction
What follows is the introduction to a series of short stories I started writing in high school many years ago. I recently came across these and felt they were good enough to post. They are unedited and come exactly how I found them or rather how I left them when I wrote them all those years ago.
Enjoy,
It was always there, down at the end of the street, all dirty and filthy with the runoff water from the mountains. It was dug by the Hohokam indians a couple lifetimes ago. It was fifty feet across and thrity to forty feet to the bottom. The walls weren’t concrete like the other canals in Phoenix, these were dirt. You might call it a canyon or something of the sort. I didn’t like it much to begin with but after passing it about a thousand times I got used to it. I was always curious about what a kid my age could if he owned a canal like that. I figured out soon enough that you didn’t have to own it to use it. Sure, I saw people using it all the time. People would jog along the sides, kids would throw rocks in it, ducks would live in it and bums made use of it as a restroom.It ran past my good friend Tom’s old house and where it did we used to go into it and play around. That was five years ago and that is when the adventures started.Tom lived at his dad’s house on the weekends. He actually resided at his mom’s. I would live at my dad’s house one year and at my mom’s the next. I got used to it. Every weekend he would spend nearly the whole weekend at my house. We would go on our little adventures and they usually wound up at the end of an alley or at the canal.
I remember one day we were seeing how far down the side we could climb and Tom went down pretty far after me. started to climb up and Tom couldn’t because he weighed a little more and the side started to give way. had to help him out and he started to climb past me. He got out of the canal when was just ten feet from the top when all of a sudden, AHHHH!!!!! I slipped. I was holding on by a mere clump of grass barely rooted to the ground. I couldn’t get a foot hold because I was panicking. I was yelling
“TOM,TOM HELP ME! I DON’T WANNA DIE!!!” Tom reached down, grabbed me by the hand and helped me get a grip.
It’s kinda funny now that I think about it.
I smoked my first cigarette at the canal. Tom and I had gotten our hands on a pack of cigarette’s somehow and decided to see what it was all about. It was New Year’s Eve 1993 I was 13 and Tom might’ve been 12. We snuck out of the house that night and went to go bang pots and pans in the street. We ran up one street banging pots and down the other banging pans. It was fun, I miss those days. We stopped to light firecrackers and also decided to light cigarette’s. We didn’t know what the big deal was about them. They smelled bad. They tasted bad. What was the big deal?
I found out about nine months later when I moved to Reno which is the place where I started smoking. In Reno, there was nothing to do except for sex, cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and gambling. Ooh La La.
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Leav’n on a jet plane.
Don’t know when I’ll be back again