I met my neighbor Gene when my family moved to our new house in North East Philadelphia. Gene was in his mid-eighties then, a short, older guy wearing his old-school clothes and eyeglasses. He loved to play chess, and he would always ask me to play with him every time he saw me around. 

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gene. I am just a little busy today, maybe we’ll play next time?”

“Ok, sounds good. We’ll play next time.” Gene would say with his signature older men’s smile on his face. He was already excited to play a game whenever that would be. He was old and lonely, even back when his wife was still around. I never told him I have no clue how to play chess, but I always thought, what the hell, eventually, I will play with him. The old man might teach me a thing or two. He had 80 plus years of experience after all, and I was just an asshole, his next-door neighbor, who was trying to figure out what to do with my own life. 

I worked full-time then for the finance company in Southern Jersey at the time. I hated fucking it. I hated that company, financing, leasing, bullshitting, people who worked there and bullshitted their customers and bullshitted each other. I hated all people who stuck in the daily morning traffic over the Palmyra bridge driving to Jersey; I hated my colleagues, my asshole boss, and myself for working there and contributing to the great evil. It was around that time, back in 2016, when I discovered and was reading a lot of Charles Bukowski, and my world has changed along with me and everything I was about in this life. I loved his honesty, sense of humor, the ugly truth of the brutal reality, and the never-ending drunken shenanigans he lived through, and wrote about in his poetry and fiction works. But there was something else to it. There was the real-life feeling of hardship and misery, an enormous passion for writing, the close feeling of life and death with all this living on the edge full of despair and failure. Bukowski’s work inspired me to become a writer, and I remember that powerful feeling from the deep-down: “Fuck that finance company, I want to be a writer!”