I AM DESTINED TO SURVIVE

ARTIST, MUSIC PRODUCER/ARTIST, FATHER, GANGSTA, POET, LOVER, FIGHTER, AND 120 % REAL DOWN TO EARTH PERSON

My mom told me I was destined to make it since birth. I was born in 1980 in Naples Italy in the middle of a massive earthquake, a lot of people died that day, a lot. My dad was in the military so we moved around a lot so i never had the luxury like most Americans to grow up with friends from the neighborhood for years on end and all that. It was me, my sister my mom and day and the family. pet. At 5 we moved to the Philippines (a small tropical group of islands off the coast of Japan. The Philippines was a beautiful place its basically all rain forest! I grew up no different than the locals and was raised with a different sens of values. All we had was each other no.. money or cars or nice shoes or anything like that. I grew up very morally driven. I'll skip a few years of running in the sun and being a typical boy with rain forest for a backyard to 3rd grader.

This i will probably never forget lol. i remember a strange feeling as i waited on the bus to take me and the rest of the kids around to school. The bus pulls up and its not our normal driver but i shrugged it off. on our way to school (about a 20 minute ride). Almost half way to school he begins to swerve heavily they the bus stops. He gets on the radio calls it in and stumbles out of the bus that's when i noticed his flask and i knew what the problem was. He was stone drunk at 7:30 a.m.! We made it to school OK, another bus picked us up but i never saw him again after that.

shortly after that, maybe a couple weeks later(its been a while work with me lol) we had a field trip to the capital, Manila to go to the zoo. I had no idea of the tension between local Filipino's and us Americans who live on the base but i was about to find out.
So we pull up at a huge shopping center and our chaperons got off the bus to go do whatever they do. right then a little man with no shirt on ran on the bus screamed something i couldn't understand. he threw the driver off the bus and began to pull off. Only thing that stopped him was the gears for the bus. i had no idea we were being followed by the military police (we were about 2 hours off base). An M.P ran on the bus and the stranger jumped out of the side window, now we are all glued to the windows watching in amazement when he pulled out a machete and ran at the M.P. its was at least 6 M.P.'s and they opened fire and dropped him right under my window.
The man was not alone and his partners in crime opened fire at the M.P's. there were holes in the bus and people screaming and crying everywhere. That was the first time I saw a person die from a gunshot. I never looked at things the same after that. Life was smooth and we took a couple trips to Korea, Japan Taiwan etc. then one day playing outside i have no idea how lol but I had a piece of bamboo go through the right side of of neck. I almost died, again. i healed up with a nice big scar on my neck which is much smaller now.

Lets jump to 1991. We got called in early from recess early and have an assembly notifying us our parents were coming to pick us up. When i got home my dad, who was active duty was gone. and there were bags and personals packed up. That's when my mom told us we had to be ready to leave at any moment because Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano, became active again and it was just a matter of time. My elementary school happened to be at the base of the mountain, that's why we left so abruptly.
I'm having the time of my life not grasping the concept of what is happening, i was just too young to really understand. a few days later the sirens go off and Clark Air Force Base began its evacuation to a naval base further south on the island. A normal 4 hour drive took a bout 16 hours, a long grueling 16 hours. people were falling out because it was so hot and the thousands of cars all headed the same direction didn't help. We arrive right outside of Subic naval base and were placed in camps. There was no shade, very little water and the military was struggling to keep people calm. we actually lost one of our dogs on that trip, it was just too hot. The next day we found a family kind enough to take us in along with another family and a few hours later that's when it happened.
There was a massive earthquake and we heard a low boom. Now mind you we are over 20 miles away from ground zero. We lost power and the sky started getting black In about 2 hours it was literally pitch black outside but its was about 2:30 pm, then it started raining severely, we were have a class 3 typhoon, equivalent to a category 2- 3 hurricane. so, we now have earthquakes probably every 10 15 minutes some major some not, a volcano erupting, and a hurricane basically. The darkness lasted a few days and when we finally got power back and could see what the damage was...I still to this day haven't seen anything like that except for the tsunami a few years ago and Katrina. What we didn't know was that there were massive amounts of ash falling mixing with the rain which made this clay type substance. shelters and houses had caved in trapping a killing people all around us and we we never heard or saw a thing. cars, everything was grey...it looked like a blizzard left 10 inches of snow but its wet ash and rock. It looked like a movie scene or something out of the mist...all grey nothing moving. we stayed there a couple more days and then we were called back to the big field where we started at.

We were loaded onto army land crafts, basically a big barge with a door on the front and were jammed like sardines. There was no room to sit, no cover... I remember going down this river in the middle of the jungle and seeing a huge dead rat floating by, then a village built on the river just appeared. The people stopped and watched as countless boats trolled through there village. I'd never seen people like that and they looked at us the same way but there was an underlying feeling of serenity and sorrow when i look in their eyes. Not for them but for us.

We arrived at another base living in military tents off of rations trying to figure out whats happening. My dad came in and talked to my mom and i could tell by her face that it wasn't good news. Being that he is active duty, he has to stay but the rest of us are going to be evacuated to Guam.
We said goodbye to my father and we were loaded onto an empty oil tanker(US Polar Bear) with old mattresses lined up in rows in the cargo holds, no sheets no privacy but we were finally able to take showers and eat real food after about 10 days. My dad was given orders to stay and help with the recovery efforts and was loaded on the USS Enterprise(air craft carrier).
So here I am, 1 of thousands of people with massive sunburns, dehydration etc in the bottom of an oil tanker! My mom and sister both got sea sick so I wandered around the ship for a few days, the crew was really nice and treated me like a little brother. I remember standing on the deck and seeing the open ocean, flying fish and dolphins and whales, it was a truly spectacular sight.
Now for the fun part, its time to get off the tanker and get onto the land in Guam. We didn't have a dock or anything like that, we had helicopters...so we were loaded up in groups and flown to Guam and finally we had actual houses to stay in ,hot water and stoves! Most people don't even think about not having stuff like that.
We stayed there for about 4 days and were notified that shortly we were going to flown to Hawaii and then to LA. This was probably the worst flight I've ever had. We were loaded onto C-130 cargo planes, the military planes that hold tanks and stuff like that. now the bad part was that the plane isn't air conditioned 1, all the pets were placed in the front of the plane and we were seated behind them so it smells like an unkept kennel for the hundreds of dogs and cats in front of us and the heat didn't help. Now we are in Hawaii but I didn't get to see anything ,we never left the airport and were put right back on a plane and off to LAX in Los Angeles. I remember LA because it was freezing! I been in a rain forest for years and now I'm in LA and it's 50 degrees!

From there, our group of refugee's was disbanded and flown to family across the country. My dad still hasn't been accounted for and basically nobody knew what was going on with the officers that had to stay behind.
We were flown to Houston Texas because that's where my mom was from and we spent about 2 weeks there at my grandma's. hen one day a car pulls up and my dad steps out! Of course it was an emotional time I thought he was dead honestly and I brought my self to accept the loss. Fortunately i didn't have to deal with it for the rest of my life because he was alive and well and that, was how I came to America.

P.S. BE ON THE LOOK OUT FOR PART 2-LIFE AS AN AMERICAN

Peter Tosh, J.F.K. Malcom X, Tupac Shakur, my Parents, The school crossing guard, all service workers, social, firefighters EMT's etc.