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I wanted to be a rockstar

Turned off my dreams

My story starts in Castiglione del Lago, a very pleasant village, immersed in the green hills of Umbria. Both my parents are from Calabria, my father worked for an insurance company and my mother was a teacher, they were both really cool parents, affectionate, loving, always present and since I was their only child, all their attention was directed to me.

Suddenly everything changed. We had to transfer back to Calabria, I abandoned everything, friends, home, the hills and all that was important to me.

I changed school and it wasn’t easy at all. I was the new guy and I was picked on, they teased me, I was excluded and their perception made me suffer so much. Fortunately at this time my passion for music was born, considering that since I was a kid, music had always been constantly played in the background, my parents were very keen that I had found something.

I joined High School, where I made friends with Emanuele, a boy of my age, like me he had a great passion for music and that was the link that made us inseparable friends. We wanted to look like our idols, we began to immerse ourselves in their garments, increasingly partying so that we would be true rock stars who had to transgress, getting high and trying experience everything and push it to the limit.

After high school I decided to go with my friend, Pasqualino who was a musician too, we went to Florence. We started to play seriously, at least that was the intention, the problem was that I continued to smoke and drink too much, so slowly the money I earned ended, then we started arriving late for gigs and we often missed notes this was not normal. So a few months passed and I was kicked out of the group, and not having the money to support myself, I returned to Calabria.

I had no more drive, the guys I played with before had made their own lives, I got play some gigs … but it wasn’t helping. I felt misunderstood and dissatisfied. I was 20 years, one night a friend told me that he had heroin, like all the other times I did not think twice, even thinking about it today, the scary thing is that it did not make me neither hot nor cold to hear the word heroin, indeed I saw in her a novelty, it was a solution to all that fog, because joints and alcohol were no longer enough to give an answer to all those disappointments and dissatisfactions. I remember that we went to this guy’s house, he took out the stuff, I told him without hesitation that I wanted to inject it and not smoke it, because I wanted to punch its full effect. Having said that I prepared the syringe and it gave me something big that wrapped me in that tight sensation where I vanished altogether.

From that day onwards I began every day, my dreams of glory had died and my days became all the same, I stared waking up later and later, I went out to buy the stuff and then returned home. The relationship with my parents had faded even more, even for my sister Angela whom I always used to really care about. I started doing burglaries, scams and dirty work for drug dealers in the area, allowing me to get my daily dose. My only friends, if you can call them that, were addicts, the snitches of town and the drug dealers. With that kind of lifestyle, with all that crap…one does not go far, in fact I got arrested for theft.

The police came to my house to search for drugs, I still remember my mother’s face when she saw the policemen, who began to rummage through their things, she was pale with two eyes full of hopelessness and helplessness, my father was speechless. I do not know if he wanted to shoot me or if he would have rather shot himself, and my sister, crouching in her bed, terrified she could not stop screaming.

It was a scene so squalid that only on movie I had already seen.

A family kneeling … destroyed.

With the last voice I had left I told him that I was tired and I wanted to change and so I accepted their help. Then I came to San Patrignano …


25 March 2017
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