Memories

We always hear people saying it is sad to lose someone, someone as a friend, or someone who is a family. Often we see funerals with people wearing dull coloured clothes, put up gloomy faces, some even cried and everyone seems to be sad even some don't even know who is in that box.

The guy in the box is one of our Family's wild card, Alfonso Romano, at the age like that he would be in there in a decade more or so anyway. I was working under this great guy ever since I was pulled into the Family for my accidental crime. This funeral reminded me of one of his lessons to me afew years back when I did my first "Icing". We rigged something up and someone will accidentally die and that would serve a reminder that how unlucky one can be if they offended the wrong company. While we were doing our job, he grinned and told me, "Hey Kid, you know, death is always imminent. There is no way you can escape from death. However, ways of dying could be arranged, but for me, I prefer to do the choosing.."

Few years later, perhaps we can say "what goes around comes around", but he did, in some way, chose his way of death. We got an icing of a typical underling substandard job of car rigging, our brakes didn't work hard enough when it should. When he found out that after reaching 60km/h won't stop the vehicle, he smiled at me and told me our car got rigged. I was confused as the brakes were working when we initially drove out, and he answered my qualms with a bunch of "Car Mechanism for Dummy" explanation, and asked me to hang on tight. At times like these I thought we should be scared and really focus on the situation, but Uncle Alfonso just maintained a smile and turned on my favourite track "La Lola" by Cafe Quijano to maximum volume, a CD we "bought" the other day with the money we extorted from the same store.

We had a Hell Ride towards the Highway, we went pass light traffic, frequently back and fro against the traffic, and his main aim was to get to an open land with grass or sand. We just happen to have one not far from us across the highway, but that land coincidentally belongs to the family of the guy who received our icing perfectly. I was asked to make a phone call for and request for a pick up, and when that was done, he laughed and joked "A decade ago, there were no such detonators which can be used as phones, we had to go to the nearest public phone and make a call and get back into the car and pretend we were in the midst of being iced! Still, it is better than a century ago when they have to release pigeons!"

The roller coaster ride feels more like a police chase than our car being rigged, Uncle Alfonso always make Dreadful Situations into something fun, or something less dreadful atleast. The cops seems to have gave up the chase the moment we were in the vicinity of the other Family's private property. We rammed through the barricades, gave the joker who was guarding it a shock in his life, and we steered towards the vast grassland and circled randomly in it, and the car gradually lose its stamina and finally decided to rest.