Narrative Essay Essay, Research Paper

August 2, 2000

Narrative essay

Growing up in the streets of Los Angeles one will be caught into the temptations that are out there. One of the biggest temptations being caught into gangs. It is pretty hard not joining one especially when you see all your friends joining a certain crew or gang. This temptations are brought upon you during your junior high years, when everyone wants to fit in and find all the friends on can find. Fortunately for me a incident occur that would change my life forever.

It was a hot summer day in September; just two days before my birthday, I was only twelve years old. I was just a little kid not even in my teens. A couple of friends decided that after school we were just going to hang out in front of my building. It was five of us and we were just sitting and watching the girls come out of school from a near by high school. The friends that I was hanging out with were newly friendship that I had come into. We were hanging out and whistling at girls and making jokes

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about each other.

After a while we saw a blue Ford Mustang pass by. We didn?t pay much attention to it. We figured that there wasn?t anything to worry about. Then it passed a second time and as I turned and looked at the car my friend just to the left threw out a gang sign with his hands. Since I wasn?t looking at him I didn?t see him throw the sign out.

A couple of hours passed by and my friend brought up an interesting conversation. He mentioned that I should join a little crew that he had recently joined; the funny part being that I was stupid enough to give it a lot of thinking into it. He was giving me a lot of lies on how if you join that you would have a lot of friends and people would respect you. But, he left out a pretty good part out; he forgot to mention what would about to happen next.

It had gotten dark and at that age one doesn?t worry about doing homework, so we were still outside. We heard burning tires from the corner and we turned around, it was the same blue Mustang that we had seen before. As it approached us it turned out its lights; as young boys we didn?t know what was happening, all the sudden the oldest in the group yells out ? Drive By ? and started running. What would happen next is the

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worst experience of my life. I heard gun shots to the left of me to the right of me, I heard them hit the light post and ricocheting of them. I felt as if I were in a war movie as if I was trapped and had no where to go.

After it was all over I was crying my eyes out. Especially when I saw two of my friends on the floor, one was shot two times and the other was shot once. After the cops came and asked us a series of questions, I had to face the worst part my parents. They had asked me if I had joined a gang I told them I had not. My dad told me a very good quote, he told me ? tell me who you hang out with and I?ll tell you who you are ?.

I am not going to lie, after my friend had asked me to join I was leaning towards joining. I don?t know if it was a sign that this had to happen as I was going to join as telling me not to do it and if I did that this is what was going to happen to me in the future.

From that day on if someone would even have the nerve to ask me to join a gang you wont see me speaking to him or her in the future. One must learn from experiences if you don?t you wont amount to anything in life.

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