Bringing It All Back Home Read Online Free

said, “Holy shit; I think these are the Stompers coming back and this guy might be with them. I don’t know who the fuck he is.” And he comes up and he says, “Do any of you motherfuckers jitterbug?”
    And I panicked … just took off because I … didn’t know what these guys were going to do. So he yelled out, “Get that motherfucker,” and I was running. I was like sixteen years old or something, and I was running like crazy. And they started chasing me, and I ran into a building and I ran up to my apartment and I didn’t have the key and they caught me. But when they saw me, they saw I wasn’t the Buccaneer. But they got pissed because I had made them run and chase me, and he said, “Let’s kick his fucking ass.” And the other guy said, “Nah.” Anyway, they argued about it for like a second or two, and they just took off.
    I knew people who died of ODs and stuff like that. But most of my closest friends and I stuck to playing softball. We didn’t get into any heavy drug use or gangs. We had a softball team, and we just kind of stayed out of that kind of trouble.
    Blanco attended the local junior high school and had the gift of a math teacher, Mr. Gibson, who had a tremendous impact on his life. Mr. Gibson wanted more minorities to get into one of New York’s selective high schools, Brooklyn Tech, in Fort Greene. So he identified several young boys to groom for admission into the school. He took these children under his wing and tutored them, gave them additional homework, and tried to push them academically. They took the admissions test in the eighth grade and failed. So he pushed them twice as hard. In ninth grade, Blanco and three others passed the admissions test and started Tech in the tenth grade.
    It was me, this guy Jeff, and Arthur; we went to Brooklyn Tech, which was a very good high school. I didn’t realize it at the time. I mean, I didn’t even think about those things. But it made a difference.
    While World War II stories did influence Blanco and push him toward military service, he remembers that his father’s story probably involved as much invention as truth.
    I would visualize that he was in action, but later on I realized he didn’t really see any close-up action. He may have been on an island that got bombed or something, but … he had a little vaccination scar here. And when I was a little kid, he told me it was a bullet wound.
    He also links the images of war on the silver screen to his own interest in the service.
    I would watch a lot of World War II movies, you know, John Wayne and everything. And then when the news started talking about Vietnam, it caught my interest and I was in high school. In ’65, I was just graduating; it was my last year in high school, and that’s when the Marines landed [in Da Nang] in March of ’65. And I was just paying attention to it, and even before that I was paying attention to it. I was just, “There’s something going on here.” And I kind of was getting interested in joining.
    By the time Blanco graduated, a lot of his slightly older friends from the neighborhood were already gone. They had either joined the service or been drafted. While Blanco could have gone to college, he decided not to. Everyone in his class at Brooklyn Tech was planning on college, and they thought he was crazy. But Blanco wanted to serve. At age seventeen he asked his mother to sign the papers to allow him to go into the military. She refused. He had to wait until he was eighteen.
    He got a job with ITT, bringing in $72 a week—good money at the time. He also took the test to qualify for work at the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), and while he did well on the exam, he found he couldn’t work there until he was eighteen. He returned to the MTA when he turned eighteen and got an offer for $112 a week (it was the starting salary), more than his mother