05: War Zones

Hear heart-breaking and heartwarming stories from people who have experienced and escaped some of the worst situations imaginable as Ian interviews two friends that grew up in war zones.   Stories about a young murderers life on the run, a boy’s survival of the Bosnian War, and the brutal reality for teenagers on Chicago’s South Side show that so much of what shapes us is out of our control.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hey there, welcome back. Before we dive into this episode,
let's do a quick recap. It all started out with
that crazy night my uncle Chris's trailer. I learned how
to kill people with my bare hands. I got to
see some guns up close, and I got to listen
to my uncle Chris's roommates Glenn and Kittycat make sweet

(00:33):
love while I fell asleep watching Frasier. We spent some
time with my mom, learning about her and my uncle's
side of the family and their ties to Spanish and
Panamanian high society. We met my friends Marcus, Bill Turner,
and Matt learned about their incredible adventures floating down the Mississippi, hitchhiking,
train hopping, and biking cross country, all the things that

(00:54):
inspired my own dismal failure of a bike trip. So far,
everything we've covered is on the lighter side, with a
few exceptions here and there. So I feel like I
should warn you that this episode is going to get
pretty dark. You're going to hear some stories that aren't
exactly easy to listen to. A lot of violence and

(01:16):
a lot of death. But I think these stories are important,
and the people you're going to meet today are amazing.
Up to this point, we've heard about adventures from people
who went out into the world on their own terms.
Today's episode, we're going to learn about people who were
forced into the world, whether they were ready or not.
This is a segment from when I was interviewing my

(01:37):
friend Marcus, the guy who went down the Mississippi. While
we were talking, I brought up a conversation that he
and I had had a few years ago. We were
talking about just growing up and the way we grew
up or something, and I remember you saying I'm glad
I didn't grow up the way you grew up. Do
you remember that or do you still agree with that?

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:54):
I do.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
I do. I feel bad having said it, so Chiley.
But maybe I was dissecting in you some light tone
of like idealism about the way that you grew up.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Probably. I think it was more not a lot of
thought into it, more just like, yeah, that's what you're
supposed to have.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Like the way I grew up. You know, my parents
were divorced. Dad had money that my mom didn't have
access to. We lived full time with my mom. She
was pretty broke all the time, and yet we'd go
like spend weekends at my dad's and he had this
like nice house and stuff. There was kids there in
my age, and we'd build forts and play in the woods,
go canoeing and things like that. But there's a lot

(02:29):
of stuff about growing up in the city and being
broke that while some of it may not have been enjoyable,
I just, you know, I think was super valuable.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
One of the things I noticed about Marcus when I
met him in college was that he could be very
pragmatic when he needed to be. He seemed to have
a lot more common sense than the rest of us
art school kids, common sense that he picked up from
growing up the way he did. For instance, in second grade,
Marcus was taking the downtown Chicago city bus to school
all by himself. That's a harrowing feat for a lot

(03:01):
of adults that I know. As he and I were discussing,
my childhood was very different, So how did I grow up?
When I was seven, we moved from Virginia to Minnesota.
My dad was an ideologist and he started his own practice.
In case you don't know, audiologists specialize in ears. He

(03:21):
would test hearing and sell hearing aids. The motto for
his office was haven't you heard? We can help? My
parents are still married, and while my dad went to
the office every day, my mom was always home to
take care of my sister and me. We grew up
upper middle class in a suburb about thirty minutes outside
of Minneapolis. Five minutes east there was a target, and
five minutes west it was pure farmland. I grew up

(03:45):
in a big, brand new house with a big backyard
and acres of woods to play in with my friends.
My sister and I had plenty of friends and plenty
to do. In the winter, we'd go sledding, ice fishing, skiing,
or hang out at the Mall of America. In the summer,
we'd swim in lake, go out on friends boats, up
to friends cabins, or hang out at the Mall of America.

(04:05):
We went on lots of family trips Disney World, Disneyland,
the Grand Canyon, and road trips to pretty much everywhere else.
I grew up very privileged, loved, taken care of, in
a very stable environment. I can honestly say that I
had nothing to worry about. Listening to Marcus compare our childhoods,

(04:27):
I can understand what he's getting at for Marcus. Growing up,
there were struggles that he had to deal with that
me and the other kids I grew up around would
have never even considered. And now he can look back
with pride because he managed to overcome those obstacles and
make it through the other side better for it. The
environment I grew up in was so stable and so

(04:47):
nurturing that there really wasn't anything serious I ever had
to struggle with. The Only thing I ever needed to
overcome was being bored. When I would look back at
my childhood, words and feelings would come to mind, but
pride was never one of them. That right there probably
explains why I felt like I needed to go on
a bike trip so bad. My four years in Savannah

(05:08):
were my first exposure to life outside of a suburb
in Minnesota, and it was truly eye opening. I met
and became friends with people from all sorts of different backgrounds,
some similar to mine, some far more privileged, and many
more that were far less. I had friends that were
in the Army and went to fight in Iraq and
came back with heartbreaking stories to tell. I worked at
a Quizno's with a bunch of guys who lived in

(05:29):
the projects, that were only a couple of blocks away
from where I took film classes. The restaurant I worked
at that hired people directly out of prison, hired a
drag queen named Queen Solomon or Sister Girl Tuesday, depending
on his mood. He and I got along great, but
he really got into crack, stopped showing up for work,
and ended up living on the street. Meeting all these
people in Savannah gave me a real taste for how

(05:51):
different life is for everyone, and how kind or cruel
the world can be depending on where you are in it.
I know that's very obvious and corny thing to say,
and it was something that I already knew intellectually, but
it was completely different to feel it and experience it
for myself firsthand, especially during those formative college years. During

(06:12):
that time, I took my life in Minnesota for granted.
I thought it was normal, even boring, compared to the
more interesting and exciting stories I'd heard from folks in Savannah.
But as I was driving home after my bike trip
failed miserably, I began to feel differently about how I
grew up. I began to feel guilty. On the last episode,

(06:36):
I mentioned that Glenn told me his life story on
the day I started my bike trip, when he and
I drove down from my uncle Chris's trailer to the coast.
That night, when I was sitting on the park bench
in Georgetown, South Carolina, I wrote down every detail of
what he told me, and I've decided to recreate it
in his own words as best I can. Unfortunately, I
have no way of tracking down the real Glenn, so

(06:56):
I've done the next best thing and found an actor
to tell his story for him. And trust me, this
guy nailed it. As we drove down the coast, I
was behind the wheel and Glenn sat shotgun drinking hot beers.
Early on in the drive, I asked him how he
knew my uncle Chris.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
I only met him a couple of weeks ago when
I got out of prison. I'm from Chattanooga. But when
I got busted in Greenville, don't worry now, I didn't
do nothing. I was just working at the brothel, just
the front desk. I mean, I wasn't pimping at nothing.
Then one day the cops come crashing in and arrest everybody.
I may have had an outstanding one or two. The

(07:38):
next thing I know, I was spending four years locked
up at the labor correctional institution store.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
My life boy.

Speaker 4 (07:46):
So anyways, it was about time for me to get out.
I wasn't quite sure what I was gonna do. When
my sale mate he was passed with the uncle Chris,
and he put in.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
A call to That's pretty much it. Glenn moved in
with Chris. As soon as he got out of prison.
I asked him how Kitty Cat got there.

Speaker 4 (08:06):
Kitty Cat's hooking up and Chad and Nuga. What you
hear as they got out, and he says, come to me. Hell,
she starts sucking off truckers making her way down here.
Turns out the last trucker didn't care for it too much.
He ended up slashing her face with a razor blade.
So there's man Chris striking at his place in the
middle of the night, and then there's his knock on

(08:27):
the door. Right, it's Kitty Cat standing in the pouring rain,
her face all covered in blood. Hell, I ain't seen
her in years, but I knew it was her right away,
so I turned her uncle. I says, Chris, this is
my woman, and we got to get her to the hospital.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
So what does Chris do.

Speaker 4 (08:46):
He marches off into his bedroom, comes back with a
loaded shotgun pointed at both of us, makes us both
stand there in the rain, so we're standing on the
stoop and he says, if either of you try to
fuck me over.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'll kill you.

Speaker 4 (09:03):
Then he asked if we understood we told him what death.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
He drove us to the hospital.

Speaker 4 (09:07):
She got patched up, and that was that. Ah, your
uncle is a guy you do not fuck with.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Do you know?

Speaker 4 (09:17):
He killed five men, two with a gun, one with
a knife, and two with his bare hands.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
Glenn was cheerful and talkative, and I didn't feel like
challenging him on anything. But I didn't believe that Chris
had murdered people. If he had, I'm sure my mom
would have known about it, and I'm sure I would
have found out, and you know, it probably would have
caused a lot of drama.

Speaker 4 (09:42):
Chris, don't tell you, mama shit. Every man hat killed.
Hey kill on self defense. South Carolina's got to stand
your ground law. If you can prove it self defense. Hell,
it ain't against the law. The cops they tried to
lock him up, but they was all bar fights. There
was always a bunch of witnesses claiming that the other
guys already your uncle Chris boy, he never starts a fight,

(10:05):
but he'll damn well finish one, all right.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
I'm not sure if I should believe him or not.
They said something like, oh, that's crazy. You can't go
around killing people.

Speaker 4 (10:15):
Sometimes that's exactly what you gotta do. First time I
got locked up, I was seventeen. I was big for
my age, so they put me in with the men.
My first day in this big fella comes over to
me and starts rubbing on my back and saying all
sorts of shit. So I told him, you touched me again,
I'll kill you. Next day, they got us all lined

(10:37):
up outside of cells and the same motherfucker comes up
behind me and squeezing my ass. So I turned around,
pushed his ass over the railing. He fell two stories
down to the concrete. His head popped. It was so
damn loud it echoed off the bars.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
I asked him what happened after that? Nothing. I went
and got breakfast. The guard didn't see shit.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
All the other guy saw is that I'm a guy
you don't fuck with, and that was that.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
So there I was driving my grandpa's car through miles
of swamp, next to a man that I had only
met the night before, an ex con weeks out of prison,
chugging hot morning beers and telling me how he nonchalantly
killed someone when he was a teenager. Yes, I was
very nervous, but I was also fascinated, and despite looking

(11:27):
and sounding terrifying, Glenn had a certain charm to him.
He had decided that he liked me, and he was
able to make me feel at ease. I think from
his point of view, he was having a good time
going for a drive and was happy to have an audience.
He cracked open another beer and went on to tell
me his life story.

Speaker 4 (11:44):
When I was twelve years old, I come home from
school and say my dadd had bating a shit out
of my mama with a baseball bat in the kitchen.
He baited the shit out of it all the time,
but this was excessive. So I walk in the same
bashing away, and I go grab the gun and keeps
in the bedroom a little six shooter. I walked back

(12:04):
in the kitchen and I don't say nothing, I just
point and shoot. I got him right in the gut.
What does my mama do? She makes me a sandwich,
gives me five dollars and tells me to go away
and never come back. Then she goes back to hugging
him and crying all over the man it was beating
her with a baseball bat.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
I asked her if his dad had died.

Speaker 4 (12:28):
As far as I know, I didn't stay around and
find out. You know what, I do feel bad about them,
but I didn't ask. My mama wanted to brought me
up from being a little baby before I left that
house forever. I just wish I would have asked my
mama for two sandwiches. I got hugger fast hell, but

(12:50):
I didn't need out of no dumpsters, No sir, that
shit boy, that's your department.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
For the rest of the ride, Glenn told me a
story after story. After he shot his dad, he made
his way to New York City, and even though he
was only twelve, he said that he looked old for
his age and was able to get an apartment with
the money he made from stealing car stereos. He would
spend the next few years living in New York, stealing
car stereos and breaking into houses for money. He learned
how to play guitar and was in a few bands.

(13:18):
He got arrested a few times and spent a lot
of time in juvie. When he was seventeen, he had
been arrested enough times that they put him in actual prison.
When he turned eighteen, they gave him the option to
serve out his sentence or go fight in Vietnam. He
chose Vietnam. He claimed to have been the only survivor
of his platoon after a sniper took them all out

(13:38):
one by one. They sent him back to the States
after that happened. Once he came back, he played bass
in a Black Sabbath cover band and started selling wheed.
That turned into selling coke, which turned into all sorts
of other illegal activities. He would go on to spend
the next few decades in and out of prison, traveling
all over looking for ways to make money. He particularly

(13:59):
enjoyed working in I don't know if any of his
stories were true. All I know is that from sitting
next to him and listening to him, he certainly believed
that they were, and I really have no reason to
think otherwise. A couple of days later, after my trip failed,
it was Glenn who picked me up at the Greyhound
station and I was really struck by how nice he
was about everything. Sure, maybe Uncle Chris pointed a shotgun

(14:22):
at him and told him he had to pick me up.
I don't know, But that night, as he drove us
back to Chris's trailer, he didn't gloat or rub it
in my face. He tried to make me feel better.
When we got back to the trailer, Kitti Kat gave
me a huge hug and was incredibly warm, And the
next morning she made me breakfast, And when I left,
I was struck by how sweet and kind. The two
of them were literally criminals, a prostitute and a guy

(14:45):
who'd spent half his life in prison, but I could
sense that deep down they were genuinely good people. They
were victims of circumstance. And that's when the guilt showed
up there. I was the product of privilege and stability,
born and raised in a bubble, a naive kid with
fantasies of entering the real world, and after just dipping
my toe into it, experiencing the tiniest bit of discomfort,

(15:08):
I was ready to retreat back into the bubble. Meanwhile,
Glenn and Kittycat were born into the world. There was
nowhere for them to go back too. They came to
embody the whole idea of nature versus nurture For me,
if I were to switch bots with Glenn and if
he grew up how I grew up and vice versa,
would we turn out the same or would we be
completely different? How much of me do I actually get

(15:30):
to take credit for or does it all just come
down to luck and what you're born into. I really
started to wonder if I deserved the life that I had,
because I don't think that Glenn deserved his. As I

(15:56):
said earlier, it would have been amazing to track down
Glenn and Kittycat for this podcast, but I have no
clue where to find them. I remember talking to my
uncle Chris on the Christmas following my bike trip, and
I asked him how Glenn and Kittycat were doing, and
he responded with who. I reminded him that they were
there when I visited it, and then he remembered he
had caught them stealing from him and chased them out

(16:18):
of the trailer with a shotgun. He hadn't seen them since.
Like I said, they were good people, just deep deep.

Speaker 5 (16:27):
Down, I know about good people that make bad decisions.
I knew that they had a good soul once upon
a time.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Well, like, I know this one dude.

Speaker 5 (16:35):
He's a really, really good dude, sweetest dude ever. Will
get you to shut off his back. Whatever you asked for,
if he got it, he'd give it to you. But
a half a blink of an eye he would snap
off in the whole room and be on the floor.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
This is my friend Demetrius. He and I live in
Forest Park. It's a suburb right outside of Chicago, about
eight miles west of downtown. It's the best of both worlds,
the perfect mix of city life and suburban life. We
met because our daughters were in the same class at school.
I'm ten years older than Demetrious, but since our daughters
are the same age, we've been going through a similar

(17:08):
existential crisis at the same time. We've spent a lot
of time hanging out talking about how hard it is
to find the balance between being a dad and pursuing creativity.
Demetrius is a rapper. He goes by the name Pooky.

Speaker 5 (17:21):
That's one thing I feel like nobody could tell me
that I'm not good at Somebody could be like, man, yeah,
you you suck at basketball, and I'd be like, Okay,
But if you say I suck in rap, I could
prove it.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Like I could turn on a nice song for somebody.

Speaker 6 (17:36):
I'm gonna jut out with this paper. I'm gonna just
that with this paper. You know you're gonna step in
you babis. Yeah, been up in a lab lately. Twist
it up, blame it up, double cup, sit on that money,
make it double up.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
I was down, baptist and run it up. How does
en enough ship the puck?

Speaker 6 (17:52):
Atomic up pussy boy's mouth more baying us boy about
its go and get your numbers up.

Speaker 5 (17:57):
I could be a hood rap, a city rap. I
could be a family man rapper. I could be a
husband rapper. I could be a dad rapper. I can
make a song about mathematics, teaching a kid how to
read and write and do math and count. I just
want to show people how I get down, Like this
is what I do.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
As we got to know each other, I learned that
Demetrius and I come from very different backgrounds. You grew
up south Side Chicago.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
I've never been to south Side Chicago. I've driven by
it on the way to Indiana.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah, that's about okay.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
Demetrius is the middle child of seven siblings. He spent
his early childhood living at his grandma's house before moving
to Chicago's notorious South Side.

Speaker 5 (18:40):
We used to live on one hundred and eighth of Truth,
and it was this big, vacant field full of wooden
planks just everywhere.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
He and his brothers would go out into the field
and lift up wooden.

Speaker 5 (18:52):
Planks and it was like hundreds of snakes used to
just be like just going everywhere, underground, just everywhere. We
started going over there just to see the snakes. Lift
it up, see the snakes run.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Then we like, I guess we grew courage to just
lift it up, catch the snakes now.

Speaker 5 (19:09):
And we made it a daily thing, go over that,
catch snakes.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
When Demetrius was ten, he and his brothers moved in
with his mom and stepdad on the South Side.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
That's when the rough stuff came around.

Speaker 5 (19:20):
Will you moved my mom, And that's when, like, you know,
we wasn't playing with snakes no more.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
It was a new neighborhood and a new school, and
Demetrius was quick to notice that things were different.

Speaker 5 (19:33):
You know, everybody's a good person until you get like
some type of influence to change you or something. So
that's typically what somebody would go through that live on
the South Side.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
You could be an eight plus student until.

Speaker 5 (19:46):
You move on the South Side because you're going to
get influenced by somebody.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
As he got older, he became more and more aware
of the violence that was happening around him. Do you
remember like one of the first times you kind of
saw what was going on or got a sense of.

Speaker 5 (19:58):
One day, it was mom my friend birthday and we
had just got off the bus and this car rides
up behind us, and we were like freshmans, and these
guys supposed to be like probably twenty at the time,
so we're looking at them like, oh, these the big
bad dudes. You know, these are the dudes that we
don't need to be around. So we just started running.

(20:20):
They started shooting at us, and I'm just like, bro,
this is my first.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
Time ever getting shot at.

Speaker 5 (20:25):
That's what letting knew, Like, Yo, this this real life
right here.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
For Demetrius, there was a clear line in his life
from before that day and after.

Speaker 5 (20:35):
Me and my friend Avery, we used to ice skate,
we used to shoot pool, we used to sell candy,
we used to run around, ride bikes, play tag.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
But then you know that one day when we.

Speaker 5 (20:46):
Got shot at, it just like turned you to a
different person, and it just made you like, don't want
to do none of that fun stuff no more, because
now you like, I ain't gonna walk over here no more.
I'm not gonna walk over there no more. You getting
shot at. That's how I make you think.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
As Dimitrius explains that you have no choice. You're going
to get involved with the violence, whether you want to
or not. You can become a target for simply living
on the wrong block, walking down the wrong street, or
even knowing or talking to the wrong people. As he
laid it all out, I was reminded of when I
first moved to Chicago in two thousand and six. I
worked as a delivery guy for Jimmy John's and one

(21:23):
day my manager asked me to give him a ride
somewhere in the neighborhood. And it was just, you know,
these streets where I'd been delivering sandwiches for months, and
I'm just like, oh, yeah, this is damon, this is
a gusta whatever. And then he would like have to
like drop down and hide for one block yeah, and
then he would get back up and he was like
explaining me, like this street belongs to the Vikings. It

(21:43):
was like some Harry Potter shit. Yeah, he had this
whole different like map of what was actually going on.

Speaker 5 (21:49):
Yeah, certain streets, like some people can't get seen on
a certain part of Chicago.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
That's how deep it is.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
And how do you like figure out the rules?

Speaker 5 (21:59):
Figure it out as you go, And it's really no
rules none. Like it's really unfair in Chicago because you
could be with your kids and somebody probably would still
do something to you. I know a couple of people
who dropped their kids off at school and got killed,
like right after people who got killed with their kid,
or their kid got killed.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Because they were walking around with their kid.

Speaker 5 (22:24):
I've seen like high speed chase goes from the East
side of Chicago and comes on the South side and
then the suspects hit a newborn baby in the stroller,
moms waiting on the bus stop for a bus to come.
Things like that happen, and you could just be chilling,
like me and my friend was chilling. We were smoking

(22:45):
and we's like, bro, what's all that noise coming from
this way? And we seen the police chasing this car
and we've seen.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
A car hit the baby. Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 5 (22:55):
That's the type of environment I was in living on
the South Side. You could be this guy that's going
to school, going to work, coming home.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
You still in that.

Speaker 5 (23:05):
Like, let's just say, if you stay on the block
where all these guys that sell drugs and gang bang,
and you know, you stay on they block and this
is what they post up every day at you're gonna
make friends with them or you're gonna be enemies with them,
because either you're gonna be cool with what they're doing
and you're gonna be like, hey, what's up, y'all, or
you gonna man your business, go to work, go to school,

(23:26):
or you're gonna be in told with them because you
might not like what they're doing. Like, hey, y'all in
front of my house standing right here all the time
every time I come outside.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 5 (23:34):
That's how it is, you know, especially if the school
is down the street from where you stay at.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
That's how I got cool with a lot of people
when I moved over there.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
Rather than making enemies, Demitrius took the approach of being
cool with everybody and got to know a lot of
the people in the neighborhood. Because of that, he experienced
what was happening from every angle.

Speaker 5 (23:53):
I can blend in with whoever. Tough people, soft people,
gentle people.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
How do the gentle people do in that environment?

Speaker 2 (24:01):
They did good.

Speaker 5 (24:02):
Like those are the people that like mad at their business,
but they were still cool people like me.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
I mad at my business. I'm cool.

Speaker 5 (24:11):
I didn't put myself in bad situations. Bad situations came
to me.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
An example of a situation that he didn't knowingly get
himself into happened shortly before he moved out to the
suburbs where he lives now.

Speaker 5 (24:24):
I had a friend that was my real like one
of my real friends, and he got shot in the
neck this one particular night.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
We was together and for some reason, unbeknownst to Demetrius,
his friend thought that he had something to do with
the shooting.

Speaker 5 (24:40):
Since I was with him when he got shot. We
were super drunk too that night, so you know, he
probably don't remember everything but getting shot in who the
last people he was with, So that's probably the conclusion
he came up with. Like that, We hung out maybe
like two or three more times after he got better.
Whatever was going on in his head this particular night
when we was hanging out out he tried to retaliate.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
One night, Demitrius is hanging out with this guy at
another friend's house and noticed that things felt kind of weird.

Speaker 5 (25:09):
We was drinking, you know, and he was arguing with
this one dude that we was with.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
They was arguing the whole time. We was at my
other homie house.

Speaker 5 (25:17):
And when we left, I did not know he was
driving with a gun under the bumper of his car.
I was driving his car and he was in the
passage to see and his friend was in the back.
His car was real dirty because we got stuck in
my friend backyard that was full of mud. When we
was on our way back home, we seen a car
wash out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
Demitrius was driving and his friends told him to pull
the car into a car wash. His friend got out
and started washing the car.

Speaker 5 (25:44):
I wasn't thinking nothing of it. I'm just like, it's
late while you want to wash your car, you know.
But it was meant to happen the way that it
was happening. It was a manual car wash where you
put the soap and stuff on yourself. He put the
soap on the windshield. I'm not like, I didn't pay
attention to why he was putting the soap on one
ship because it's my friend. In my head, I don't

(26:05):
think of his friends in his head, he got this
vandatta out against me.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
As his friend was spraying the windshield with soap, Demetrius
was sitting in the driver's seat looking at his phone.
What he didn't see from the driver's seat was that
his friend, as he was soaping up the window, was
also reaching under the bumper for a hidden gun. Suddenly,
Demitrius hurt a gun shot.

Speaker 5 (26:28):
I don't know what he shot at, but wherever he
shot at, it got my attention and I hopped out
the car so fast, and I look at my friend
and he's aiming a gun at me. But in my head,
I'm just like, why is he aiming a gun at me?
And I'm thinking like, I hope this dude don't kill me.
Ooh ya, I hope you don't shoot me. I hope
you don't shoot me.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
I ran. Then he started shooting, and then I got away.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
After that, the next day, he was still confused about
what happened and was unsure if the friend was trying
to shoot him or the guy he'd been or arguing
with all night. It was only later that he found
out that the reason that the two guys were arguing
is because shooting Demetrius was their plan. You thought I
had nothing to do with it. Yeah, it was a surprise.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, I was at a surprise party for me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
So what's that guy up to now?

Speaker 2 (27:18):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
Ye, you lost touch.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Lost touch.

Speaker 5 (27:21):
That scarred me for a long time, you know, because
I wasn't able to trust a lot of people after that.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
Demitrius grew up in the world completely different than the world.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
I come from.

Speaker 5 (27:31):
I got a lot of friends that's in jail due
to gain violence or just like police violence. Probably over
one hundred, probably two three hundred people from my neighborhood
that I was friends with, probably did half of my class,
my high school classes did and in jail. My class
just had a reunion high school class right here in

(27:52):
ten years, and I started just going through like old
stuff from high school.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
People that I graduated with them are dead or in jail.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
I just went to my twenty year high school reunion
and half the people are lawyers, they're still alive though,
you know, we're alive, and I can't think of a
single person from my high school class who's dead. Yeah,
Demitrius made it out and now is thriving in Forest Park.
One of the friendliest people I've ever met. He's known

(28:27):
by pretty much everyone in town and it has become
a fixture in our neighborhood. But even though he's out,
he still knows that he needs to be careful.

Speaker 5 (28:35):
You don't really make it out, to be honest, because
until you turn eighty years old and you die from
natural cause or something, because you know, it's been years
since we seen people that we grew up with that
was fighting back and forth. They might see you today,
it's been ten years since I seen you. But haha, gotcha.

(28:55):
When I was younger, my friends that and some of
the people they friends that too. So anything can happen anywhere,
no matter who you with.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Oh and that's like it just sounds like a war zone.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, it's a war zone.

Speaker 1 (29:08):
So yeah, so that's why people.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Move far out.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
After I finished interviewing Demetrius, I was struck by the
way he compared growing up on the South Side to
growing up in War I thought it could be helpful
to talk to another friend of mine, someone who lived
in an actual war zone. This is Augie.

Speaker 7 (29:54):
The proper name is Agnion, but it's always been Augie.
Even back at home, it's always been Augie.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
I had him a few years ago at work. I
was there making videos and he was doing graphic design.
One day, it was just the two of us in
the office and we were just hanging out talking and
he ended up telling me all about his experience in
the war.

Speaker 7 (30:11):
I was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia. I was
probably about twelve or thirteen at the time. Early to
mid nineties in Bosnia conflict broke out. It was a
civil war of a pretty large scale. I think at
the end of it all a million people died, so
it was a significant conflict. What felt to me like

(30:35):
the conflict began overnight.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
One day.

Speaker 7 (30:38):
My dad was coming from work and all of a
sudden he called and he said he couldn't get home.
The city streets were closed, they were all barricaded, and
he couldn't move from one neighborhood to the other. And
we couldn't quite understand the magnitude of what was coming down,
right that day he made it home and after that
he never went back to work. Within probably a week,

(30:59):
we lost power or telephones didn't work, started living with
candles and supplies that you have at home, and it
just sort of escalated from there.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
As the war escalated, Aggie, his four year old sister,
and his mom and dad had no choice but to
stay inside the apartment.

Speaker 7 (31:16):
There was a lot of fighting at night, so much
so that I would walk outside in the morning and
people shoveling empty gun shells. There's just like full on
weapons left around.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Right.

Speaker 7 (31:26):
I found a hand grenade. I found it like a
bazooka launcher. You know, I was a twelve year old kid.
I only seen this stuff in movies, not realizing what
was happening around me. We lived in a part of
town that was, without going into too much detail, that
was basically occupied by the aggressor, let's call it right,
So we were not being attacked, but the city's being

(31:48):
attacked from our location. My dad was required to join
the aggressor because he was employed by the National Army,
who was at the time. Depending who you ask to
this day, they're going to say, well, you guys who
are aggressor we were aggressors, but like, I know what happened.
I was there, so so my dad refused to do

(32:09):
that because he was like, I'm not going to fight
my neighbors purely based on different religion and these other
people that I grew up with. That I knew, I'm
not going to go shoot at my friends. That's insane, right.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Oggi says that it's still very unclear to this day.
People argue over who started the war and who was
and was not on the side of the aggressor. So
here's a sloppy Wikipedia summation of the main details. The
war lasted from nineteen ninety two to nineteen ninety five
and was part of the breakup of Yugoslavia. What started
as a dispute between armies developed into an ethnic war

(32:44):
between Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics. Regardless of who started what,
Oggi and his family were innocent civilians stuck in the
middle of a full on war.

Speaker 7 (32:54):
One day, somebody knocked at the front door of our
condo building, and my dad happened to answer the door,
and he was sold that we had one day to evacuate.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
Or all of us will be killed.

Speaker 7 (33:06):
We just start grabbing some suitcases and things that we
felt we needed, and left with two pieces of luggage
in our hand, and we walked with a white flag
on a stick because on top of the hill behind
our accountability there was a church and there was a
known sniper sitting at the very top of the church
bell is, so we waved the flag so they wouldn't shoot.

(33:29):
And we crossed this field that felt like miles to me,
and I've never never been so terrified in my entire life,
because you're hoping they don't shoot, but you don't know
if they will. And we just four of us walked
in complete silence. My sister probably had no idea what

(33:50):
was happening. We made it to the different part of
town where the Bosnian army was centralized, so that would
have been the army that was formed to defend the city.
We went from the enemy side to now the side

(34:13):
of the army that would protect us, right, that would
protect the city, that protected citizens from this invasion. When
we got there, we moved into a building that we
previously lived in about five years prior.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
Oggi and his family would stay in this condo for
the next six months. During that time, the war continued
to escalate, and Aggie began to see and experience real war.
The thing that you told me that just stuck with me,
which I thought so crazy, was the sniper signs that
people would put up nice neighborly like, hey guys, there's
a sniper on this corner, be careful. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (34:48):
On certain major intersections in city center, they would be
the signs on one side of the street that would
say watch out, sniper, pose sniper.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
You could actually google pase sniper and see lots of
pictures of the science that people put up all over Sarajevo.
As Aggi describes it, Sarajevo is a city surrounded by
mountains on all four sides. During the war, the forces
of the aggressor were up in those mountains, firing into
the city from north, south, east, and west. Snipers would
line themselves up with the streets in the city and

(35:18):
take out targets as they crossed the street or waited
in lined for bread.

Speaker 7 (35:23):
You would reach the corner of the street and then
when you have to cross it, you ran. So what
would happen is younger folks who usually dodge the snipers.
The problem is the senior citizen and the elderly, and
I've seen a lot of them being gunned down in
these intersections just because they can only move so fast. Obviously,

(35:44):
sad to see that, but the saddest part is that
no one would want to go help. For early teenage
kid to see that, it is it's eye opening, and
it's just it's a shock that I can describe vibe
because you're seeing someone being gunned down and you you

(36:04):
see that they're you need to help, but nobody's willing
to risk their lives to go in the middle of
the intersection to help this person, and you know, and
I'm getting shot themselves. That was that was hard to digest.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
How many times do you think you saw stuff like that?

Speaker 7 (36:20):
In that one month when we moved to the city center,
it was happening almost daily because I was in the
downtown area where a lot of these signs were almost
at every intersection. To see casualties on urban streets, just
sitting there, decomposing with nobody being able to do anything
or pick them up or put a sheet over or anything.

(36:42):
It's a grim sight to live your life and just
go about your daily things like oh, I have to
go get water, and bread. Oh, by the way, there's
a dead person on this corner.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
So I watch.

Speaker 7 (36:51):
You know, it's just it just becomes this this weird
part of this norm that you just sort of become desensitized. Unfortunately,
like you just see so often that the shock value
just gets diluted over time.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
Aware of everything going on outside, Oggi and his family
stayed inside their condo building. The building was full of families.
There were children all over.

Speaker 7 (37:18):
The place, so you became friends with all the kids
that lived into that building. So there's a lot of
kids running up and down the stairs, different floors, playing chess,
playing cards, doing whatever you can in a day to
day basis, just to not to go crazy. And one
day the fighting sort of calmed down, and it was
beautiful outside, and I saw these kids playing outside, and

(37:39):
I begged my dad to let me out, and he
was like, okay, fine, I'll let you off just for
a little bit. I go outside. I meet these kids
and where we're just playing, running around being kids, and
all of a sudden, it starts to rain.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
Oggi had been outside playing with these kids for less
than ten minutes, but once the rain started, his dad
waved for him to come back into the building.

Speaker 7 (37:59):
And I'm like, I don't want to go inside. We
just got out. We've been inside for like three months straight.
It's the first time I actually seen sunshine and been outside.
He's like, no, no, no, let's go inside. The moment I
got to the door of the condo building, the moment
he closed the door, an explosion that I've never felt

(38:24):
in my entire life. You know, like in the movies
when something explodes. You watch a war movie and all
of a sudden, you just hear that ringing and almost
it shows you a perspective of a soldier who's getting out,
but he's all disoriented and his ears are ringing and
everything's moving super slow. It was exactly that same feeling.
I was completely this oriented, and I looked up and

(38:45):
my dad was on top of me. All the glass
shattered all around us.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Oggie went back into the building with his dad, and
that's when they found out that he and the other
kids were the targets of the attack.

Speaker 7 (38:56):
Found out that someone called in the coordinates and that
they was a coordinated attack onto that specific area where
all of us kids were playing. So had it been
even a minute later, I wouldn't be sitting here talking
to you. So that was that was wild. That was
probably the first time where I was Okay, this is real.

(39:16):
This I could have legitimately died right here.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Did any of the other kids you're playing with get
hurt or killed.

Speaker 7 (39:22):
Or Yeah, there were definitely some casualties. I can't remember
exactly because it was one of those summer moments where
it's sunny and all of a sudden, it's like a
downpour and then like kids scatter, So it was instant
from having thirty kids out to no kids at all
within probably like fifteen seconds.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
How crazy that it started raining.

Speaker 7 (39:41):
So all these scenarios who played him, I had years
and years later thinking like why didn't I escape here?

Speaker 1 (39:54):
For a year and a half, Oggiy and his family
were trapped in the middle of the war. His mom
made some connections found a way for them to escape.

Speaker 7 (40:01):
My mom ended up getting a job for the Bosnian
Army to work as a cook for the soldiers.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
Right there were convoys of buses that were taking people
out of the war zone, but the buses were located
in the city center downtown. Since Augie's mom worked for
the army, she knew that there were armored trucks that
would often go from where they lived to the city
to load up on supplies. She made arrangements for the
family to get a ride in one of those armored trucks.

Speaker 7 (40:26):
And the day came in and we loaded up in
one of these armored vehicles. And this was probably the
wildest experience I've ever been part of. It was one
of those armored vehicles where there were five soldiers in it.
There was a one guy standing in the center of
it on a fifty caliber gun at the very top,
and there were two guys on either side, two on

(40:48):
the right, two on the left. It was fully bulletproof
on all sides. It's just completely enclosed in.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
With black like dark in there.

Speaker 7 (40:55):
Like I mean, it was dark. The only lights were
coming from those small open where these guys on the
sides had their machine guns through, so that was the
only opening to let light in, so you were able
to see inside. So I had no visual reference of
where we were going. I could just sort of feel

(41:17):
this armor vehicle move, but I had no idea where
we were. At one point halfway through this trip, I
just hear the guy that fifty caliber like cocked the
gun when you cock a fifty caliber gun, it's like
you hear that. At that point, I think I knew
that we were about to get ready for something. And
then all of a sudden, you just hear the pings
of well, let's hitting the armor vehicle and bouncing off.

Speaker 1 (41:39):
Do you hear the gunshots or just the pings.

Speaker 7 (41:41):
I just heard the pins. Then I hear the two
guys on either side open fire, and then the guy
up top when he started shooting. All these shells, these
massive shells were just pouring inside the cabin this armored
vehicle at the bottom of my feet, and they were

(42:05):
piling up so fast. They were like knee hi by
the time we were done, and I'm just looking at
these things and I was like sort of kicking it
with my feet because they're just sitting in this one
spot and the sound was deafening.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
It was unbelievable. Oggi and his family made it to
the city and would end up spending the next month
living with some friends of theirs. This was the month
where Aggie got to experience the daily sniper fire. Eventually,
their names were selected and they were next in line
to get on a bus that would take them out
of the war.

Speaker 7 (42:37):
Zone, this bullet riddle bus that was barely standing. It
was literally like Swiss cheese. I mean this thing had
bullet holes everywhere.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
The bus would take the fleeing families outside of the
war zone to Croatia.

Speaker 7 (42:50):
The normal scenario, the distance that we were trying to
cover you could probably cover in a car in about
five hours. We were on this bus for thirty six hours.
We were going through wooded areas, newly carved roads. It
was completely like this ad hoc war zone. We're gonna
take it through these woods and this gravel road, and
then you're gonna go across this field. Like I'm talking

(43:12):
about in like a Greyhound bus.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
How many people on it packed?

Speaker 7 (43:16):
I mean every seat was taken.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
During the three day trip, the bus would stop at
numerous small towns and checkpoints along the way.

Speaker 7 (43:23):
We get to this town just outside of my hometown, Sarajevo.
It's like war never happened. We walked out of the
bus and the first thing I saw was a fruit
stand and I'm like, I'm looking at this, I'm looking
at my dad, and I just almost couldn't believe. Because
for a number of months we ate like a slice

(43:43):
and a half of bread a day. And then I'm
now walking into this into this town that's let's say,
fifty miles outside of my own town. And here's all
the shops are open. People are sitting heaven espressos, there's that.
People are selling produce and grapes and and and all
the things that I haven't seen in like a year.
And I look at my dad and I'm like, I

(44:05):
want everything. And he brings us like grapes and brings
us these like sausages with bread and cheese, and we're
sitting inside this bus and like eating like like we've
never seen food before. It was mind blowing to me.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
After three days on the bus, Oggi and his family
finally made it to their destination, a resort town on
the coast of Croatia.

Speaker 7 (44:26):
You know, you leave in a war zone and now
you're on this resort town and you almost feel like, oh,
I just went from war zone to vacation, like in
a three day span.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
They spent the next few months living with family in
Croatia until they were granted visas to move to either
the Netherlands or Italy. Aggie's parents let him and his
sister decide where they should move. They both picked Italy,
even though they already had an aunt who was living
in Amsterdam.

Speaker 7 (44:50):
She used to send us these birthday cards from Holland
and these things would have one word that's fifteen letters
with like four a's in the middle, and you know,
two l's and two ms and I we could never
pronounce any of it. I remember us looking at each
other and we just realized as like, oh, no, no,
we're gonna have to learn that language. No, we can't

(45:11):
have that, and we're like, Italy it is.

Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, half the words are food that everyone already knows
pretty much. I'll wrap it up here, but there is
so much more to Aggie's story. It's incredible. He spent
his teenage years in Italy until his family was granted
refugee immigration status and came to the United States. It's seventeen.
Aggie had to learn English, teach his parents English, and

(45:34):
get a job to help the whole family get on
their feet, and he succeeded. There's a lot to take
away from talking to Demetrius and AUGI. First off, I'm
amazed by how vibrant, funny, and cheerful both of them
are On a regular basis despite having experienced the kind
of things that I've only ever had nightmares about. If

(45:56):
there's anything to take away from their stories, it's knowing
that you can go through some pretty extreme shit and
still come out the other end a great person. Another
thing to take away that's much more of a bummer
is how similar living in a neighborhood in Chicago is
to living in an actual war zone. I think about
Oggi's experience arriving in the town that was only fifty

(46:17):
miles from Sarajevo, but there was plenty of food and
people were living their lives without a care in the world.
It reminds me of Chicago, a thirty minute drive from
the South Side and it's nothing but restaurants, museums, and
yoga studios. But whatever commentary might come with that observation,
that's for somebody else's podcast. What I found most similar

(46:38):
in most heartbreaking about their stories is that everyone involved
was put on a side, whether they wanted to be
or not, and being on the wrong side could cost
you your life.

Speaker 7 (46:49):
Your neighbors became enemies simply for being Muslim, or being
Catholic or Christian. It was purely based on your religious preference.
A lot of people that belong onto one ethnic group
felt that their group was in danger, so they had
to go and fight the other ethnic group.

Speaker 5 (47:07):
It's like a past down generational thing. If you move
in a neighborhood and you're twelve, you're going to be
part of the stuff that's going on because your family
is going to stay in this neighborhood for the next
ten years. So when you live on a certain side
of the town, that's a group of friends you're gonna choose.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
It's a war.

Speaker 5 (47:27):
Whatever side you're rolling with, you can't go on out
of the side, no matter what, no matter how many years,
no matter what type of white flag you try to throw.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
In, it don't matter. It stays with you.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Being forced to choose the side meant that they really
had no choice in determining who they were in the world,
and that reality controlled how they had to act and
think in order to merely survive. They were robbed of
all agency and forced to play a game that they
didn't sign up for. Amazingly, both Aggie and Demetrius managed
to escape and are now living their lives on their terms.

(48:04):
In two thousand and nine, Augu made a trip back
to Bosnia for the first time, and despite the risks,
Demetrius often goes back to the South Side to visit
his mom.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Don't nuts and stop me from saying, my mom, it's
just traffic.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
So those are their stories you've already heard mine. Part
of sitting down with AUGI and Demetrius was telling them
about everything I was going to cover on the podcast,
especially the adventures that my friends went on and my
very own disaster of a bike trip. I wasn't sure
how either of them would react. I figured they'd roll
their eyes at the stories of a bunch of middle
class college kids going out and roughing it in the world,

(48:41):
like my uncle Chris and Glenn. I thought they'd both
find it all ridiculous. Instead, they both said it sounded
pretty awesome.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
Me.

Speaker 5 (48:49):
I wish I could have done things like that when
I was twenty one. I was still on the same block, smoking,
getting shot at, getting locked up, chased by the police.

Speaker 2 (48:59):
That's tragic. Only low class people want to hear about
that type of stuff.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Criminals or listeners of this podcast.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
Right, But it's criminal.

Speaker 5 (49:09):
I got a lot of friends that come from that,
you know, I happen maybe like four friends including you
that don't come from that, Like you say, you privileged.
You grew up in a nice neighborhood. You got your
mom and dad in the house with you, they're married,
you got your whole family and all that.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
That's good. You better glorify that right there.

Speaker 5 (49:30):
You know a lot of people wish they had their
mom and dad in the same house and siblings and
getting stuff for Christmas and all that. I'll be telling
people glorify that, Like, don't try to glorify Chicago in
the South side of the streets and all that stuff.
I'm trying to escape that to become my real self
and actually be myself. I'm still learning how to leave

(49:52):
that in the past.

Speaker 7 (49:54):
Just because I had this journey that was very unorthodox
in a way doesn't mean that look at other people
and say, you know, my life is so much harder,
and you never made it through the war, so your
life is easy, right Like it's it's not something I
wished either, you know, it just sort of happened. Right
prior to the war, we were sort of this like

(50:15):
middle upper class family. We've lived an okay life, like
a comfortable life. I'm more by product of this war
that happened that I never wanted to happen, more so
than I'm like remembering of the times before that.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
Right, it's this weird thing where living a comfortable life
did not shape who you are. Being forced into a terrifying,
uncomfortable situation actually shaped you.

Speaker 7 (50:39):
One hundred percent. That's definitely true.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
And that's a weird thing to realize. You and are
both parents. You want to give them all of the
good things to shape them into the best person they're
going to be.

Speaker 7 (50:49):
But are you just providing this sheltered life where there
are eventually not going to be able to fend for
themselves because everything was sort of handed to them. You
want them to fight their own battles and work for things, right,
because you want him to kind of like learn to
appreciate that. Right, I can relate the stories of the
war to him, but like he wasn't there.

Speaker 5 (51:08):
When you don't tell your kids about the real world,
they grew up and they found out theyself. I didn't
have anybody to warn me about the real world. My
daughter is very nice, her kindness, somebody could take that,
so sometimes I give it to her straight.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
The main reason Demetrius moved out to forest Park was
so we'd have an opportunity to raise his kids in
a completely different environment than the South Side, the chance
for a life that he didn't have. If they do
grow up exactly how you're hoping, what do you think
they'll be missing because they didn't grow up where you
grow up.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
I would think that they'd be missing common sense, because.

Speaker 5 (51:46):
Look, when you grow up a little rough, you have
some type of common sense.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
I have a lot of privileged friends.

Speaker 5 (51:53):
They graduated from college, but when it comes to real
life situations, it doesn't click, and it is so hard
sometimes getting through to them. And that's one thing I
hope my kids have as common sense.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
The common theme between all of these stories for Marcus, Glenn, Demetrius,
and Aggie seems to be common sense. The world is
full of obstacles, and if the stakes are high enough,
there are certain decisions that are actually a matter of
life and death, and that's where having some good common
sense can really come in handy. I'm guessing that most

(52:28):
of you who are listening to this right now aren't
living a life where you have to make numerous life
or death decisions on a daily basis. What I've come
to learn is that that in itself is a luxury
not to be taken for granted. The problem that my
uncle Chris and Glenn had with me going on my
trip had nothing to do with the trip that I
had planned. Their problem was with me. I was a

(52:52):
naive college grad who had taken everything in my life
for granted, with a romanticized vision of what going out
into the world would be, and they saw that I
had some ridiculous expectation that I could take the world
and my place in it for granted. As well, they
saw a kid who didn't have enough common sense to
know that it would be important to be able to

(53:12):
fix a bike wheel while biking cross country. Here's my
mom again.

Speaker 8 (53:20):
Despite some of the abuse and some of the sadness
and horrible things that happened in my growing up, I
feel like I have had a very fortunate life. I
feel very very lucky. I just wanted to give you
a safe environment, make sure that you had good memories,
that you didn't have some of the sad things that
I had. But it wasn't necessarily what a lot of

(53:41):
people say. I want my kids to have a better
life than I had, because I thought mine was fine.
If you have as good a life as I'd done.
I'm happy for you and al.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
I'm happy to report that over the years, and especially
after having kids of my own, I no longer look
at the way I grew up as something to feel
guilty about. Instead, it's something that I have an incredible
amount of gratitude for, and I actually do have feelings
of pride. Pride not for anything that I did, but
pride for what my parents were able to give me,

(54:11):
because I know now that a lot of what I
took for granted was the result of a lot of
hard work and sacrifice on their part. Eventually, I did
go out into the world, and I had to learn
some things the hard way and developed some common sense
of my own. And now I'm a parent trying to
impart that wisdom and common sense onto my kids, knowing

(54:31):
full well that these are the things that only the
world can teach them. So I'm doing what I can
for now, and when they eventually do go out into
the world, they'll know that I've got their back in
case they ever need to take a breather. On the

(54:57):
next episode, we're going to look at the life of
mine uncle Chris. Where does he fit in with all
these stories I've shared and who was he in the world.
We'll figure it all out next time, but first I'll
leave you with Demetrius aka Pooky with his track for Everybody.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Yeah, we grew up fastest.

Speaker 6 (55:18):
Yeah, we came along way from flipping on a mattress.
I was a young, shorty witness and a lot of
stabbings came from them red buildings, a lot of action.
Then we moved over east. A lot of tramping niggas
getting that belt put on them, anybody stepping on them. Yeah,
we grew up reckless year. Well we smoke put it
in the earth. Ain't nobody really asking while we moved
like this? Me and my pills. Man, we've been doing

(55:40):
some shit. We don't drop tears. We done lost friends
of this shit. They don't drop tills. They done lost
pears of this shit whole time. This shit it ain't
for nobody in the streetshit ain't for nobody.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Then, this shit it ain't for everybody. Man, This shit,
it ain't for everybody.

Speaker 6 (55:57):
Manistration shit it ain't everybody special.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Thanks to Travis Martin, the actor who played Glenn, and
a huge thanks to Marcus, Demetrius and Aggi for sharing
their stories. Uncle Chris is a production by Will Ferrell's
Big Money Players Network at iHeart Podcasts. It's created and
hosted by me Ian faff I, wrote, directed, scored, edited
and mixed this episode. The show is executive produced by

(56:24):
Hans Sanhi and Will Ferrell and co produced by Olivia Aguilar.
If you want to see what else I'm up to,
go to ianfaf dot com or check out my Instagram.
Spring Break nineteen eighty four. Thanks for listening.