Chapter 3: The Gang Wanted Me Dead

For some time, I have found it rather repulsive when celebrities brag about their success, as if that validates the things they say. You want to hear bragging?

One of my videos is nearing a hundred million views, all by itself. My collective videos over the last decade have gathered nearly two billion views. This fact could be observed in 2016, right before YouTube cracked down on content, blindly and recklessly flagging millions of innocent videos from countless creators and making them unprofitable.

Before YouTube furthered their crackdown, I deleted thousands of my own videos to prevent unfair actions being taken against my channels for their brand-new made-up rules. I saw a friend of mine nearly lose his channel because of a harmless video he had made some time back. He was a YouTube icon, and YouTube showed him no mercy.

Basically, imagine everyone has been fine with alcohol being legal for the last 10 years, then suddenly, alcohol is magically illegal. What I did was got rid of all my videos that may not fit the advertisement standards, before YouTube pounced on me like I had seen them do to other comedians. If alcohol became illegal? You'd probably destroy your stash, save yourself from the new fabricated morality of your government.

However, before that, yes, I had over 2 billion video views on YouTube. When you delete your videos, your collective view count on your channel goes down as well, sad.

Does the fact that possibly a quarter of the planet has seen my face? Does that make me cool? No. Does that make me smart? No. Does that make me better than anyone? Nope, not unless you consider working day and night instead of having friends, for a decade, better than actually having a life and building something, like, a stable career. What it makes me is pretty much nothing. Because even if I had made better choices with the foundation of my life, we're all, still, nothing.

To confirm how many video views, I gathered on all my channels, Onision, OnisionSpeaks and UhOhBro, all you have to do, is use an archive site, that records everything you ever did online, permanently. You, reading this, could probably look up your old MySpace profile on an archive site, right now, it's kind of cool.

I also was featured on America's Funniest Home Videos, Ridiculousness on MTV, Tosh.0 on Comedy Central, and repeatedly featured on MTV Italy. I actually made a decent lump of cash thanks to Italy's MTV before I was even out of the military yet. It paid for my washer, dryer, fridge and stove later in life.

But looking back, at the classic YouTube channels I had, you'll see over 600,000,000 views on one channel, hundreds of millions of more views on another channel and so on, till, you get to over 2 billion. Again, this was back then, now? All the deleted videos reduced that number, painfully.

Why did my success happen?

It happened because I was an algorhythm god. What that translates to: I figured out how to make the system work in my favor, and milked it for all it was worth, till, 2016, when it all changed. If you had to map my success, my rise was 2010, my grand fall was 2019.

The beginning of the end, however, was when we all found out, a reality TV star, was going to be our next president. Talk about dark days, and the worst time period of my life. I'm not even saying anything about his ability to be president, I'm just saying, while the country was losing their minds politically, I was losing my mind financially, and career wise as well.

But why am I telling you all this, here, now? Because it occurred to me that many people, throughout their books like to talk about how much money they made, how many people care about them existing, how much success they've found, and reference how special they clearly think they are as a result of the fruits of their labor. And yet, behind all this talk, we're all just little people. Sad, scared, hopeless individuals questioning why we exist or why anyone should care about us.

Congratulations, you learned how to play the guitar and made millions. Congratulations, you figured out how to push numbers in the stock market in your favor till you turned your tiny bank account into a fortune. Congratulations, you were born hot and now you're a famous model. To all this, who cares? I just don't give a crap. I've met your type, you're a drug addict, or an emotional wreck, you're a people user or a shallow jerk who only thinks of yourself. I'm not impressed by folks who live to serve themselves. My heroes? The people who live to serve others.

Do you know how many celebrities, who had it all, wind up face down in a hotel room, veins pumped full of drugs? Do you know how many millionaires wind up with a broken home, and angry ex-wife and one hell of monthly alimony payment to make ever month? Do you know how many people are the center of the world's attention, yet feel like they are completely alone?

Envy, no one. Because everyone, is a messed up, fearful, and fragile human.

Speaking of fragile humans, let us allow 4th grade to begin. My school, in Auburn, the same school I had attended since 2nd grade, was in the middle of the woods, literally surrounded on all ends, but the entrance, by evergreen trees. It was my favorite school ever. You had to drive through a suburban oasis to get to the school, and once you arrived, a new building, with massive fields and gorgeous vegetation complimented the campus, almost like the mountains made Hogwarts that much more magical in the movie/book series Harry Potter.

We had fresh air every day, stunning playgrounds and structures for basketball and dodgeball surrounded. Just a lovely place for me to enjoy my childhood while at school.

My 4th grade teacher? I actually have no idea (so I thought when originally writing this). I was listening to an audiobook by the drummer of the band Nirvana today, and over the last week. David, the drummer, stated he also doesn't remember much of his childhood. So essentially, take that, to everyone who said I was diddled as a kid and blocked it out. Maybe, I just don't remember my childhood well, it's not that uncommon of a thing, right? I mean, a drug abusing rock god doesn't remember his childhood well, so that must mean I'm ok right? What is an anecdote?

Going to class at my Auburn elementary school was pretty cool in general. I say that because I didn't have much to complain about. I had a really cool music teacher, in every grade, who encouraged us to sing and be happy. I was in a play where I played a strong man. I think my role was "Strong Man #3", also known as Bakki, who stood next to Auto and Lava.

I won a poetry contest where I wore a cardboard box, poorly designed to look like a refrigerator, and said that there was a polar bear in my undies. All the while, holding a polar bear stuffed animal behind the box I was in, to reveal him through a makeshift door at the end of the poem. God I loved the attention.

Reading poems in front of crowds, participating in plays, it was so fun for me. It felt like I was special, and I adored that feeling because it took me away from my normal feeling of being completely unseen wherever I went, to actually mattering. And that's part of the problem, isn't it? I'm just a little egomaniac who needs to feel like he belongs yet doesn't fit in with most anyone... public praise is my validation, and yet I don't respect it, or even, part of me doesn't want it, because that means I'm the same as everyone else. What a headcase.

Much of my childhood consisted of sitting in my tiny bedroom/laundry room, playing video games on my 13-inch VCR television, feeding my chickens and playing on my rope swing, up on a vegetation-covered hill behind my Auburn house.

At one point while swinging on this massive rope, my stepfather had mounted on a massive tree, I had released myself from the swing at peak swing to land in a pile of leaves. Unfortunately for me, in those leaves sat a well-grounded sharp stick that was about an inch in diameter. What did this mean for my chest, which had made direct contact with this stick? A bloody wound for weeks to come. Thank goodness for my rib cage, that could have been much worse.

At school I had never had a problem jumping off the swings, so I thought, it should be fine at home as well. But at my home, there are no groundskeepers to clear dangerous items, and I very well could have mortally injured, had the circumstances been slightly different.

A good example of worse harm would be a time when I was asked to take out the trash. I did just that, but in our neighborhood, no trash man ever came to pick our garbage up week after week. Instead, we had to get our big, orange pickup truck and haul the trash to the dump ourselves. This reality would result in massive piles of trash piling up outside our country home. When I was asked to take out the trash on this fateful day, the trash can I chose was full, so I did what most people would do, I pushed down on the trash can to make room for the new bag.

The problem?

When someone threw away a metal can, now devoid of the food it previously contained, the razor-sharp metal lid was not stuffed into the can, instead, it was sticking up, ready and willing to slide into my flesh, cutting my hand wide open.

I don't know if any of you have suffered deep cuts before, but when you do, it's not like the bright red blood you're used to seeing. For me? My blood was nearly purple.

Realizing I had just deeply sliced the lower left area of my left palm, I immediately began screaming and ran in to tell my mom. Without much hesitation, my mom piled my sisters and I in the car, and we rushed off to the ER. At the emergency room my middle sister (you know, the monster, half joking) would mock me, laughing at my condition. She commented on how my face was green and I looked like I was miserable. You now, just sadistic psychopath things.

But that's all I remember from my hospital visit, oddly, I don't recall seeing the doctor, I don't recall getting stitches, in fact, I'm pretty sure I didn't. I do however have a scar to this day, sitting on my left hand, reminding me of the fact that yes, my memories are real. I did have a life before, and I'm not just some science specimen with implanted memories.

The only time I ever recall wiping out on my bike, was pretty intense. It was on a gravel road, right next to an old man's house, who I had gone to repeatedly because he was nice, and we had nothing better to do.

Next to his house, I wiped out on the gravel, probably because the road leading to my house had a ton of potholes, and clearly, I didn't anticipate one of them. As a result, I slid in the gravel, causing my leg to rip open, my hand to get scraped up, and blood to pour out from the numerous rocky wounds. With gravel stuck to my bloody body as I walked, and cried, I began to head home, pushing my bike slowly till I arrived at my house. There hydrogen peroxide and band aids were applied.

That was the last time I recall falling on my bike. Time to be more careful.

For more injuries, you can refer to my mom observing me doing something or saying something she did not approve of, so she said, "Gregory come here so I can slap you". Unfortunately, she was not joking, and had every intention of smacking me across the face. I began crying, and my mom demanded I go over to her, so she could slap me regardless. Eventually I did walk over to her, and she did in fact slap me across my cheek and ear.

In that moment, I thought to myself "This woman doesn't love her son. She is the meanest person I know."

Imagine if a man did that to his wife post 2020. Told her to walk over to him so he could slap her, then proceeded to striking her. He would be canceled for the rest of his life, no? Well, not my mom, not back then... it was the 90's after all. And of course, it was fine to slap me, right? I was a child, not an adult woman, if I was an adult woman, who could leave any time she wanted, then we'd be offended. But a little boy, with nowhere to go, no choice at all? Nah, it's fine. Do you ever find that odd? How we protect women from abuse more than we protect children of 7, 8, and 9 years of age? When do you think we'll start treating women as adults, and not as lesser, weaker, more helpless, than children?

Moving forward, to give you an example of who my stepfather really was, other than a kung fu, pothead, skinny legend fisherman wood master (pretty cool titles if you remove the pothead part). He was also, a great motorcycle rider and an adrenaline junkie. When he was a baby, he chewed on an electrical cable that was plugged into the wall and that melted part of his mouth. Fortunately, with enough surgery, he bounced right back, and looked normal as an adult. Later on, he broke his back in the middle of a cow-dung infested pasture. As I understand, he said he was hang-gliding, crashed right into a pile of crap. and laid there till help arrived.

Hold on... wow. It just hit me.

Just like that, talking about my stepdad, I now remember my 4th grade year. There's a reason I didn't recall before. I was thinking in the context of my elementary school in Auburn, Washington. But in 4th grade, we actually moved, with my stepdad to Walla Walla, Washington. That was the year a gang of Mexican children planned to kill me. The memories are flowing in now.

Remember when kids use to trade pogs? Do you even know what pogs are? Little circle pieces of cardboard with awesome designs on them? Gas stations, like Texaco, would give you one pog per gallon you put into your car. I hope they come back, they were awesome. Anyway, just before that, as I recall, playing with marbles was all the craze. I played with marbles and had competitions quite a bit that year.

This was the time frame when I believe "I saw the sign, it opened up my eyes" was a big hit song.

We moved to Walla Walla as a result of my mom finding a great job opportunity. She was set to work for a local news network, and we found a two-story dilapidated house, right down the street from a massive prison, which felt odd, but I never even registered what the prison looked like, or where it even was. Were we a block away? Two blocks? My mom's word was all I had.

The new school I went to, in 4th grade, was brand new. It had new computers, new facilities, and yet, the kids at the school were very, well, they seemed like all their dads were gang bangers. You have to pardon me, I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't witness gangs forming, in elementary school, but when that happens? You can't help but assume. This gang-mentality was infectious and came from somewhere. I myself would later in life try to form a gang called "The Mad Cows" which is, a hilarious name for a gang.

What was the policy of the gang? To beat up anyone who beat up members of our gang. But that was 6th grade, and we're still in 4th.

At one point in 4th grade, I brought a knife to school. I wanted to show it off to the others as it was clear, dangerous things made you more cool to the other gang-loving kids. But surprisingly, as a result of my flashing the shiny gleaming silver blade, I was tattled on, and as I sat in the principal's office they said "Gregory, that knife fell into your bag, right? You didn't know about it right?" I replied quickly and honestly, "No, I put it there." The principal paused and said again "That knife fell into your bag, right?" and I, without must hesitation, now getting what he was trying to do, I said "...ok?"

And just like that, I was allowed to go back to class.

I did manage to have a girlfriend in 4th grade, just like in 2nd grade, only this time, it lasted longer than a few minutes and didn't immediately end after I beat someone up in front of her. This new girl was a very small Mexican brunette who liked me a whole lot more than I liked her. She insisted I put my arm around her whenever we were out of school and introduced me to her parents like we were going to get married some day for sure.

The only other memory of her? Well, of course, being nearly killed because a member of a gang liked her as well. I was tasked by a 4th grader to meet him after school for a fight. I was going to go, until my girlfriend told me that he was bringing knives, and other friends to jump me. This little boy, planned to end my life, over a crush he had on a girl. The type of parents you'd have to have, to wind up a killer at a 4th grade level? I'd rather avoid meeting that level of crazy.

At some point my 4th grade year, I was given a box of baseball cards by another kid at school. I'm pretty sure we threw them all away promptly after, but had I kept them, I'd probably be a millionaire today. They had every card imaginable to me, and yet, they had no value to me.

Back then I was obsessed with the song about being kissed by a rose from the grave. It was a song by Seal of for the recent Batman movie, which I thought was very cool at the time. That was also around the time the first PlayStation was released. I remember the console coming out because the leader of the gang who had planned to kill me, kept bragging that his dad had gotten him a "Play" (dragging out the word) "Station" (also dragging out that word, to make it sound super groovy.

It was in 4th grade when I came up with my first parody song. "Bad dogs, bad dogs, what are you going to do? What are you going to do when we put a leash on you?" I performed that in front of my class, and they seemed pleased. It was, after all, the perfect audience. We all lived near the prison, we all had parents who watched COPS, and rap was a growing genre at the time, that this community might have loved.

At some point, I went through something pretty embarrassing, I felt something crawling and scratching its way up my butt. At least, that's how it felt. I was at home, sitting on the couch, when something sent a jolt of pain near my anus. So? I ran to my stepdad and asked him to take a look at my butt. He awkwardly obliged, I ran into the bathroom, spread my cheeks in front of him, and after a short look, he said "Well, I don't see anything other than a little redness." I thanked him for looking to see if anything had crawled up my butt, and to this day, feel that was one of the most awkward times in my life. You must ask however, what was the alternative? Ask no one? Just, hope you don't have a creature squirming up your bum? Peace of mind is worth it sometimes.

During this time, my mom states my stepdad had physically abused her. She also states that my stepdad was angry at us for watching too much TV. Allegedly he had us kneel in front of the TV and pray "I love you Satan" over and over to make an example of what he felt we were saying when we watched too much TV.

I, however, have no recollection of this happening, ever. I don't even remember them fighting with each other like my mom claims. And I don't recall him smoking anything, or any other abusive behavior, again, ever.

I mean, he did let me try alcohol one time, but that was a sip, and I wonder why I would remember that, but never a moment of aggression from him?

You might ask, well, if your mom might have been lying about your stepdad, what about your real dad? That brings me to this: It wasn't just my mom making claims about my real dad, it was the bulk of my family, with different experiences that all lined up. They had nothing to gain from these stories, there was no fame, money or ego/spite involved, they all liked his personality. With all that considered, this, was clearly, who he was. All smiles on the surface, and all evil underneath.

It's the friendly ones you should be scared of, they're often, clearly compensating with their charm and squeaky-clean attitude.

My father even responded to the criticism of him by my family with an apparent level head. When my uncle threatened to kill my father on the phone, he said "Well I would feel the same way if I was in your shoes." or some variation of that sentiment. Which makes me ask, to this day "If you know that everyone is right about you, and you agree with them, how can you live with yourself?"

My take on my father's super friendly persona? God, I've had the polar opposite personality of my father for decades, often on camera, sometimes behind the scenes as well. Almost as if I was always being the black swan, the outcast, the embarrassing freak, just to piss him off.

Let's get back on topic. The 4th grade I thought I didn't remember at the beginning of this chapter? With a little bit of memory jogging and context clues, I found I actually remember quite well. How about that? It's like there was a dusty box in my mind, and I was walking around a pitch black nearly empty warehouse with a flashlight. Me walking in that warehouse with the light was like me typing up this chapter. Slowly, but surely, I found my way to a red arrow in that darkness, light gleaming to highlight the cracked red paint, and that arrow, it pointed to an old box full of my 4th grade memories. How strange our minds are.

Here's what's inside.

My mom and stepdad divorced a time after Walla Walla. Which was sad because I would miss my stepdad. There were still some memories to be had and his story wasn't quite over yet, but he was the most functional dad I had ever had to that point. I mean yes, there was that time he duct taped a dead duck around our dogs' head to "teach him a lesson" for killing the exact same duck. And there was the other time he shot, and killed, the same dog (according to my mom, who again, who knows) for biting my distant cousin so badly he ripped his whole lower leg open, nine inches of skin peeled back an all. But guess what? I didn't see anything... no dog shooting, or other animal abuse, other than the duct taped duck, which, clearly didn't stop my dog from attacking others.

I would miss him putting me on his motorcycle and carting me around on it. I would miss him taking us to his parents hundred-acre property in another area of Walla Walla and letting us snowmobile, ride miniature four-wheelers, horse ride and enjoy other elements of life, like observing him and his brother have kung fu fights.

God they were cool.

Ugh, why do I have such a pile of trash for a real father?

Why couldn't my real dad be the kung fu master I knew for only those few fleeting years of my childhood?

Sure, my stepdad was imperfect, but he was also, a legendary badass. And my mom? She ran into him years later, stating he had gotten hitched with an "import bride" who had "whispered in her ear" that she "could have him back if she wanted".

You know what? I'm really questioning what the hell is and isn't true these days.

How much of my life, is a hilarious lie?