School taught me that slavery in America was abolished in 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment. Killer Mike taught me that, if you are a prisoner, it still very much exists. But there still is another form; a form that is not often spoken of as many are ignorant to it. I lived it starting in my junior year of high school.

My father was a textbook piece of shit. His mind was addled by alcohol and he swung with a punishing fist that was faster than his thoughts. I was told that wasn’t always the case, but I never knew him when he wasn’t.

President Bush sent him on a trip to Iraq in 1990 and everyone says that he came back different. That’s how family and friends that knew him would all describe it as they sadly watched him spiral. He struggled to maintain a job and always had us in and out of welfare. He couldn’t get the help he needed on time when he went to the VA for his night terrors. When they got too bad, his patience waned. When his patience waned, someone was getting beat. Even on a good day, someone was getting beat. But on a bad day, someone might go to the hospital.

My own three-year old head was opened when it got knocked against a door knob. Nobody remembered what he was angry about that day, not even him. I’m sure it was something important to him like the Falcons losing. My mother said he cried in regret as my blood pooled on the tile. Not that that changed much. My stupid, battered mother covered up the entire thing and pretended it never happened; so did he. And, like clockwork, the next drunken stupor brought the next round of aggression.

It was the reason I hardly saw Kenny. The kid had his room locked down like Fort Knox with massive headphones over his ears to block out the noise. Usually, he was forgotten about. He may as well not have existed.

One Saturday night, I was relaxing on my couch and watching a football game when my bloodied father was escorted into our home with a large man on each arm. They deposited his drunken body onto the carpet in front of the coffee table with a loud thud.

My mother, instead of rejoicing, screamed and rushed to my father’s side. She wept and screamed incoherently at the two men.

But, a third man walked in wearing a wine colored Burberry suit and black rimmed sunglasses that covered his eyes. The scent of whiskey soaked oak and expensive cigars wafted from his regal form. He clutched a document in his leather-gloved hand.

“Which one of you is____?” He asked with an unnaturally deep voice. His eyes drifted my way and made me feel uncomfortable in a way that I rarely felt.

“That’s me,” I said hesitantly as the man approached me. He leaned over and inspected me closely. He poked and prodded at my muscles before nodding in satisfaction.

“That will be acceptable,” he said with a nod, unfurling the document.

“Who are you?” My mother screamed at the man.

The man ignored her for a moment. He pulled a pen from a chest pocket in his jacket and scribbled his signature onto the paper.

“My name is Charles,” he introduced. “As you seem to be surprised, I regret to inform you that your husband has been gambling. He now owes me a large sum of money. A sum that he is hopelessly unable to pay back. He has agreed to allow me to use your son for work in exchange for paying off the debt. After seeing him for myself, I now accept his terms.”

Gambling, the final refuge of the loser too proud to admit it. For the past several months, my father had been wasting away his disability and my mother’s meager savings in illegal poker circles; convinced that he could win it all back on one win.

His story ended the same way that the innumerable dipshits before him ended; sat on the curb in front of a bar, drunk, blank eyed, and with a cigarette in their mouth. He had to have watched it burn away as though it were the last embers of his life; preferring to sell off another possession than to admit that he was a failure.

A lifeline appeared in the form of Charles. His money paid the bills while the rest swirled with the roulette wheel and the toilet that my father vomited in after he failed to win big again. And, now that his life was on the line, he sold his son.

Bonded labor: slavery with a nice name. My blood, sweat, and tears would never reach my pocket. Instead, it would disappear into the tens of thousands of dollars of debt that slowly drowned our entire household.

If I were an only child, I would have run away to leave my parents to suffer the consequences for their failure as human beings. But, there was Kenny. Whatever my parents had done to me, they did worse to him for being a regular kid. He would certainly perish under these conditions. When I thought of my parents being beaten to death, I felt very little. Only Kenny and Miranda were the ones that moved my heart in a way to suffer for them.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I accepted the role given to me. Charles gave me a flip phone that I must answer whenever it rang. To my school, friends, and extended family, I was a freelance laborer that sometimes had to leave at a drop of a hat to attend a job. In a rural community like mine, I was only met with nods of understanding and a few words of commiseration.

For a while, much of the work was simple: move crates, watch motel rooms from a car in the parking lot, and collect envelopes from behind various bars and nightclubs. There were only two rules to my work: do not ask questions and do not speak unless spoken to.

I did not need much motivation to follow both rules. Charles showed himself to be an evil man from our first introductions. It did not take much to learn that he was a man of many illegal enterprises. The most profitable of which, he liked to call “transport services.” I heard a rumor that my state was a pipeline for human trafficking, but I did not realize just how mundane it was. Once I learned what it looked like, I saw it constantly.

And now, I was a cog in that great banal machine of evil. Was the survival of myself and family justification to perform jobs that guaranteed their suffering?

I didn’t have the luxury in thinking more abstractly. I had money to earn. I received a text from Charles as school ended to meet up with Terry at the usual spot. I was a little pissed as I was told that I wouldn’t be needed and made plans with Miranda.

“You, promised,” she pouted as our movie plans would need to be postponed.

I was just as disappointed as she was. But, the ability to blame work and my worthless parents went a long way to fade the heat I’d get whenever I blew her off. I look back on that time with great bitterness.

I met her as a party girl; someone who always did the opposite of whatever her parents ordered her to do and I was the complete opposite of the kind of guy her parents liked. Carl’s inflexibility in his parenting brought her to me, but it also brought her to the ruin that would shatter her life only a few short years after. If I could have gone to more parties with her, to keep her away from the hard shit that would hook her in an instant, I would do that every time.

Of course, I now know that either Kenny or Miranda had to be sacrificed to make the other happy. In the path I chose, Kenny made it; he got his degree and a great job on the West Coast and a partner that would treat him with kindness. His success was something I couldn’t regret.

“I’m sorry, I’ll try to drop by on Sunday,” I called as I hurried down the street.

After abandoning Miranda for the thousandth time, I made my way from the school and skateboarded three or so miles down the road.

I kicked my board into my hand and walked up to a red and white 1991 Ford F250 blasting classic rock in the parking lot of a Popeye’s. A weathered man on the wrong side of fifty sat in the driver’s seat with chicken grease on his fingers and a wad of chewing tobacco lodged in his gums. He turned his head my way and motioned for me to hop in.

I shimmied the door open; the old beater required a sequence of pushes and pulls to pry open. Used cans and empty soda bottles filled with dip spit almost tumbled out onto the pavement.

“Hey, fucking watch it,” Terry chastised as he gestured to his impressive pile of trash. It had grown since the last time he got in the truck. “Can’t any of you kids get in a damned car without fucking everything up?”

“Hello to you too, Terry,” I replied sarcastically as I climbed in and closed the door a little too hard and deposited my board into the back.

My nose crinkled as the shaking of the truck dislodged all the worst odors to assault my nose. Terry’s truck always reeked of old tobacco, French fries, diesel, and ass; a potpourri of odors to a man fully on the downswing of his life. Unable to handle the smell alone, I took my vape out of my pocket and inhaled the berry flavored fumes.

“Roll down the window if you want to huff that gay shit,” Terry admonished as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. “Can’t anyone just smoke a cigarette anymore?”

I roughly rolled down the window with the truck’s prehistoric crank that squeaked the entire time. My feet kicked the empty bottles into a small pile under the seat.

“So, what does Charles have for us this time?” I asked with an exaggerated yawn. “I hope it’s a quick one, I had to cancel my date tonight.”

“Overnighter out of town,” Terry replied gruffly as he spat into his bottle. “We’re on big shit this weekend, kid. Do this right and your payouts will only get sweeter. Your bag is in the back. Change of clothes and some other shit that I picked up for you from Charles.”

I almost choked on my vape at the news. Puffs of berry flavored vapor sputtered out of my lips. Finally, I’m going to get some actually progress on this fucking debt. But why the hell did it have to be this weekend?

“What big time job am I on?” I questioned, thinking about some of the jobs that other guys did. “Are we doing a Rest Stop job this time? Or maybe staking out a halfway house? Runaway? Auction Hall bouncers?”

“Nah,” Terry said, shaking his head. “We got a guy that won’t be paying back his debts. We’re going to take him from whatever hole he’s crawled into and shake him for what he’s got. If he’s short, then you may be getting bloody. Goes that way, we will have to hoof it over to Okefenokee to take care of it.”

I sighed. This aligned perfectly with Charles’ modus operandi. My first real job would also be a reminder of what happens if I abandon my post.

I pulled out my phone and began to assemble the perfect apology. What combination of emojis would get the most pity from her? I perused all of the options to pick out a few sad faces that didn’t look too sad.

“What are you doing?” Terry asked.

“I need to let Miranda know that I can’t meet for the rest of the weekend,” I replied. “If I don’t, she’ll start texting me during the job.”

“I have two words that I would use to describe guys like you,” Terry said with the same look of derision that he gave everything that came after 1995. “Pussy whipped.”

“Shut the fuck up, Terry,” I snapped back at him as I fired off my text. This was the last man I wished to impress with anything but the quality of my work. “This is basic shit. No wonder you got divorced.”