Friends, Trust, Fun and Excitement...

written by Cliff Rodriguez;

for:

     Angel, Salvador Leal, Richard Ramos, Shelly Irvine, Melody, Jonathan Torrealba, Ricardo Torrealba, Vanessa Torrealba, Brandon Cruz, Anne Cruz, Brian Sirin, Sergio, David White, Kolby Peterson, Brian Gurtis, Chris Gardia, Connie Flores, Jonathan Davis, Elisha, Joey -----, Joe, Sean Cosby, and Stephane Cosby.

                I am writing this to you all, enemies (Brian Gurtis, Chris Gardia), and friends.  Through my life time I have done many stupid things.  I cannot begin now, as to even go into the deepest of them.  I can only explore the main topics, of what I have done and in some cases, but not all, regret.  It is not my intention to offend any of you, in the context of what I am about to write.  It is my goal, however, to let you know, about what is happening in my mind.  I have had so much fun in my days of living here in California, that it is unbelievable.  Consequently, not everyone knows every detail of what has happened in my little escapades, in Fontana, Twentynine Palms, Yucca Valley, and Joshua Tree.  That is why, from here on out, I will try to somewhat explain what has happened for the benefit of yourself, and the enjoyment for you in the future, when your sitting around the campfire with your wife/husband, and children talking about the olden days that so few people have ever written about.  So enjoy this, and remember it in your hearts, for whoever witnessed these events with me, has made my life, the utmost enjoyable.  This is for all of you, my dearest friends.

-CHAPTER 1 "The Beginning"

                You see, I used to live in North Carolina, on the coast of the Neuse River, with my Step Grandpa, Grandma, and mom.  It was a nice little water front property, in which I could go out on our peer, go fishing, catch a big nice trout, or whatever, bring it in, clean it, and beg my grandma to cook it for me.  You’re probably thinking to, to yourself, he had it good.  Well you partly correct, that is without mentioning the fact I spent approximately 2 hours a day playing the piano in our foyer.  This is while I watched everyone out side on the river with their sea-doos, and sailboats.  This really sucked especially on those nice warm days.  Ok, back to why I moved out here.  I was getting poor grades in my classes at the high school.  Pamlico County High School was where I spent half of my freshman year, before moving to Fontana, Ca.  My grandparents thought it would be better for me to move out here, to further my education, and "visit" my relatives, since most of them lived here in California.  My mom and I moved to Fontana, in February of 1999, to live with my grandpa, on Citrus Avenue.  Little did I know that this was to be start of the best years of my life.  When I lived In N.C. there weren't any kids or anyone that I could "play" with, because, it was a summer town, and hardly anyone lived there, in addition to me living on a private street, and going to school 15 miles away, in a county that only had one stoplight.

-Chapter 2 "California"

                California was kind of boring at first because I didn't know anyone at all.  It was really weird going from a High School that had 500 students to one that had 5,000.  I remember having an agriculture class that was my last class of the day, sixth period.  Agriculture included farming, livestock, horticulture and welding.  Well, my fifth class was Agriculture, and my sixth was welding.  This is funny.  One day, my teacher asked if anyone wanted to voluntarily clean the hog pens there on campus.  Low and behold, I volunteered.  I was out there shoveling the urine and poop out of the pens into the corner when my shoes lost traction, the shovel fell out of my hands, and I landed right in the middle of the crap.  That was not a good thing.  I had to pick my self up and drag myself to the teacher’s class, which was about 200 feet away, sopping wet.  This was embarrassing because I had to walk through the class, which was full, to the teacher’s desk and tell her what had happened.  All the kids were laughing at me and stuff, which really sucked.  It did make for good conversation the next day.  I didn't have another change of pants, so she took me outside and told me to follow a few instructions.  She told me to go to the teacher next door, and have him dry my pants, since he was the welding teacher.  I had to strip down to my boxers, and walk next door and beg him, after I washed them in the sink, to dry them for me.  He did, and well I went back to class, with a little more enthusiasm, and some clean pants.  All he had to do was start up the acetylene welder, and use the torch to dry them after they were washed.  That is only one of the things, which I have yet, had to live down.  That was the last time that I ever cleaned those pens.

-Chapter 3 “First Friends”

                My actual first friend was a guy named Angel that lived about 3 houses north of me on Citrus Avenue.  He was a pretty nice guy, even though I found out later he was part of a gang in "South Fontana".  We used to walk to our bust stop approximately a 15 minute walk away.  We would try to always leave our houses at the same tiem so we could walk to the bus stop without being bored.  That lasted a while until he didn't catch the bus anymore, and I didnt see him anywhere.  We got along really well, and were alwayssharing stories and stuff.  He wasn't very talkative, but I eventually got some information out of him.  It's been so long that I honestly have forgotten it all.  I do know that I talked to him about four months later.  It turns out that his mom was shot in the stomach, his brother in the chest, and him in the foot during a drive by, Halloween night.  My second friend that I had there was Salvador Leal.  I knew him at Fontana High School, when we had the same bus stop together.  It was cool because, when we switched from FoHi, to Kaiser High, he and I rode our bikes to school together.  We would meet at his place since it was on my way to the school anyway.  We got on our junky bikes and rode to school, each morning, at the same time.  It was really boring to ride to school on those cold winter days, because you hands and face would get so could that they would go numb.  We would always park our bikes away from the school, about a block so people wouldn't mess with them.  We didn't really do anything stupid while we knew each other.  It was just a basic, day to day, thing.  One thing he did do was introduce me to Age of Empires.  That was a fun game, and at first I thought it was stupid, but as I learned the rules it got more interesting.  That lasted for a while until it started messing up my grandpa's computer color configurations.  Sal dropped out the next year, and until recently was working for the FDA, in Fontana.  He is now employed at Iron Mountain, which is, to my knowledge, the largest record keeping company in the world, which is also located in Fontana.  He still lives in Fontana, and we keep in touch, despite our distance barrier.  Angel, from what a friend told me, moved to another part of Fontana, but I have no evidence to prove or disprove that, nor do I know any more about him.

-Chapter 4 "Break Dancing"

                That same year, I met a guy by the name of Richard Ramos.  We had the same History class together, and we would sit in the corner with another of his friends, and play quarters.  We became good friends over the course of the class.  I sometimes would go to his house and hang out because he was a break dancer, and mixer.  He had linoleum tile in his garage, and turntables, and a killer stereo.  He taught me some break dancing moves, and through time, even though he was "cooler" than me, let me in on some of the things he did.  He at one point in time had stolen some parts from some downhill mountain bikers, that were racing about 3 miles from me.  He gave me a shock, and some bike frames/parts that he got from there and other places.  I still have the shock, in my possession.  I don’t have the frame because I cracked it and had to fix it to get home, with some duct tape, which is another story.  We knew each other those years and we graduated together in June, 2002.  We were the first class to graduate from Kaiser High School.  We had a lot of fun together messing around, but most of all, was the feeling of actually graduating with the people that you grew up with.  I haven't heard from Richard, since our graduation in June, 2002.

-Chapter 5 “Good Girl”

                There was this girl that I knew named Shelly Irvine.  Shelly was the kind of girl that every guy wanted, that I knew of.  She was captain of the Cheerleading Squad.  She was a pretty blonde, about 5'8", thin, and smart.  By looking at her you would think that she was teh most stuck up girl that would you ever meet.  Well, this was just looking at her.  She actually was the most caring, respecting girl, not the 'most', but you get the point.  I liked her so much, and everyone knew it too.  I never had the guts to talk to her so one day, Jonathan Torrealba, another friend of mine (mentioned later) and some friends of his, dragged me to the bathroom that she just entered.  Well I broke free of them and well never talked to her.  This wasn't good for me, but there was no way that I was ever going to talk to her.  Eventually a couple years later, prom rolled around, and everyone finally persuaded me to ask her out.  Well I went up to he one solemn, warm summer day and did, indeed ask her, but in simpler terms got an answer of no.  Why? you ask, well it seems that had I asked her earlier, instead of waiting two years, we most likely would have been going out, and I would have been dating the cheerleading captain.  This all sucked for me, but I got over it through time, about a year ago.  We still keep in touch and as of a couple weeks a go she was still going to college in Irvine, Ca.

-Chapter 5 "Bad Girl"

                In the course of all this time at school, our area of hang out, moved from the computer lab to outside..joke..Our group got bigger, and other groups got bigger too.  Eventually totally diverse groups of peopel were hanging out next to each other. A prime example is as follows.  I usually wore a stupid helmet to school that I had to wear because I received a 435 dollar ticket for not wearing a helmet on my way to school one day with Sal.  A friend of mine, Brandon Cruz gave me a helmet to wear, for the first time on September 09, 2001.  I will explain the details of this later.  It was a BMX (bicycle motocross), full face, red helmet.  One day while hanging out during lunch with friends, this girl and her friend start hanging out next to me.  This seemed rather odd, and through time I got to know her.  She seemed to like me, and when I left to go somewhere I would leave my back pack, and helmet there on the concrete around the planter.  Whenever I would get back, there would be fresh picked flowers in my helmet.  It never occurred to me that this girl was putting them in there.  One day I'm talking to Jonathan, and I asked them how they got there, and he said he didn't know.  I at the time, failed to notice a beautiful girl picking flowers and putting them in my helmet. When I turned around and asked her if she knew who was putting these flowers in my helmet. She said it was her, and for the first time, did I actually, look closely at her, and see her real beauty.