He used to smoke pot like a motherfucker, all the time and loved metal, that boy had cassette after cassette of metal from all kinds of bands from all over the world. He was a head banger if that term still exist. Somehow he used to maintain his cool which used to bring bouts of jealousy from my part, I wanted to be like him, off course, I wasn’t. He had everything: money, no work, just fun and play. He was good at math and came from Bolivia, he was a Chinese of sorts and spoke Spanish, if you took a good look you couldn’t figure him out for Bolivian, gringos from Redwood City wouldn’t make him out for a Latin American, no way in hell they figured that out, fucking gringos they can’t see the world in more than black and white, for all their color naming they are actually color blind when it comes to Latin Americans, for that matter I’m too, but once you see’em hanging out with the Hispanic crowd then you know he’s gotta speak Spanish, besides, there’s this vibe all Hispanics feel when one of theirs is around, so it didn’t fail to turn up in my radar once I spotted him. So I used to go his house ‘cause of this Spaniard from Basque country that bought himself American citizenship with false papers once an amnesty for illegal immigrants kicked in 1988. He claimed to have worked in the fields, picking tomatoes or what not, stuff gringos don’t usually do. The now defunct INS bought it, it only costed him 500 bucks, he had bought the letters from a crooked farming business that made tons selling letters ascertaining that said person worked there then and then, motherfucking Spaniard, never seen a field in his life, that’s all, two years later he was a full blooded American Citizen, anyways, I knew him that way, he was a roommate of the Spaniard. There are only two things I remember about him, he used to brag that he didn’t know where or how his parents earned their money and perhaps the most revealing part he left me, he said once to me: how can you explain the color orange to a blind person, describe it then!

I was impressed …