When you wake up from a dream crying….Storytime…Back in college I was in Army ROTC for over 2 years. If I’d signed up I would’ve gone in as a 2nd lieutenant in the military. The training on campus wasn’t easy. It was intense hearing McRae! McRae! Shuffle your ass! But I had a choice to make. Girl raised in the south who ended up in Brooklyn and already had PTSD from the horrors of the streets could go IN or go OUT. I had a different calling though. Was I a great soldier? Probably not. Was I fucking fearless and rose to every challenge? Absolutely. Because since I was a kid nothing has scared me. I’d already seen the worse. What a dead body smelled like in the concerte jungle. An ambulance and cops just living in your neighborhood. That was real. Seeing people out run cops, me stealing a meal from stores, hopping turnstiles, drinking 64 oz bottles of St. Ides like water, smoking blunts like cigs, having men climb thru windows to get to your cut parties with a glock 9 in their hands, putting M80s into payphones to blow them up for quarters and watching grown men get beat down until they were running butt naked in the streets in the afternoon leaking blood. That’s just the shortlist. So did I want to go Army? Not particularly. I’d seen enough to want to just write about it instead. Tell my story so any little kid reading it would want something else in life. I put an Army uniform on for a short time. But my weapon instead became the pen. It’s pretty fucking deadly if you ask me. – Vonti