This will be chronicled in a few other posts, just to really capture the metric ton of shit I’ve gotten myself into. So I’d need to start from the beginning and work myself up to the present day.
Growing up, my family wasn’t very wealthy. I wasn’t born in the USA, rather down even further south, in Colombia. Getting official DVDs of movies, TV shows, even games was far out of my families financial capabilities.
Unless you went elsewhere! And that’s how I got myself so intertwined with the world of bootlegs. Bad rips of TV shows, movies, shitty renditions of games made for cheap, sold for cheap, and poor parents bought. I don’t blame my folks—they were always just trying to make me happy. This sparked my fascination with them, once we eventually moved into the US. Getting the real thing, and comparing it to whatever the hell I got, that didn’t repulse me from that world; infact it sparked a flame of curiosity! What could I find from the most second-hand of markets?
Come my teen years, working minimum wage, spending half on that on this interest of mine. I usually find them off cheaper than cheap listings on Ebay, flea markets, thrift stores, garage sales—anything not from official means. Not so much for the content that’s labeled on the box, more what it actually was.
Now, this comes with a catch of course. Finding the really interesting stuff is kind of hard? Like, crude re-animated episodes of a cartoon show, or bad reenactments of popular films. That’s not common to find, as usually it’s just insanely low quality of whatever it says on the box.
Or gore. I’d say that these were the times I first experienced death, but I grew up in 90s-era Colombia. I have already grown desensitized by even my teen years. All of that is not what I’m talking about, though, because there is another, even rarer form of this. Something that would have made the regular person stop following such a stupid hobby, which now continues to follow me to this very day.
The first time this happened was back in 2007, on a Tuesday when I was 16. My dad was still in the navy, so he was out at sea doing god-knows-what. And my mom was trying her best to get us by day by day. I had recently picked up a DVD copy of what was supposed to be United 93 from a fleamarket, and like always, I was hoping it was going to be far more interesting than some shitty rip of the movie on the cover.
I certainly got that.
Mom was out at the time, leaving me home alone at our house. It was one-story, located in a suburb and clearly the cheapest house on this neighborhood, which was already on the more criminally shady side. The odd screaming match of dysfunctional families or the sirens of the police nearby wasn’t an uncommon thing here.
Shutting my blinds, cutting the lights, I popped in the DVD, and got myself comfortable. Nothing…? The player seemed to be struggling to read whatever the hell I had put into it. Right when I was about to get up from the beanbag chair to check if the thing had scratches, which is something I should’ve done beforehand—it started.
But it wasn’t even attempting to be a movie, because it was the local news station, on its weather forecast. They were initially reporting on the weather, going over the temperature on Wednesday night.
Wednesday night…? That caught me off guard. It’s Tuesday. I know it was Tuesday, it had been Tuesday, and yet this weather anchor was going off about today being Wednesday. Was it a past broadcast? It couldn’t be, the time and date on the bottom of the scrolling newscycle all fucking said that it was tomorrow, and not current day Tuesday.
As I was pondering over this, a breaking news segment cut the forecast short. A fire in a suburban neighborhood, apparently, a house had burned down, taking the lives of two. It cut to camera crew on the ground, as they rattled on about the calls from neighbors, the firefighter response. All of it coming into my ears as a static ring, the only thing I could focus on is…
That’s my house. That’s where my house was. This didn’t make any fucking sense, was this an elaborate joke? The only thing that cut me out of my trance was the sudden flashing of two photos on the screen, intensifying the growing ringing in my ears. The nausea spiking in my throat as I saw my yearbook photo. And the profile picture of my mom’s MySpace page, the ringing subsiding for the words “…The charred remains of two were found; 16 year old…” was all that came through.
I was fucking losing it, wasn’t I? This couldn’t be happening, this is a news broadcast from a DAY in advance, how COULD it be fucking possible?! As I was nearing the point of a total panic attack, the broadcast stopped. Dead silence filled the air, my gaze quickly focusing back on the screen. A low quality photo of the stove was on it. It then hardcut onto bold, white text.
“Don’t forget.”
And then onto another set of text, that made me realize what this supposed warning was really meant to be.
“Much planned for you.”
I heard the sound of my bedroom door unlocking, and then the secondary lock soon after, in such rapid succession that it was impossible for me to react before the door SLAMMED open. I had my hands up, ready to plead for my life from whatever was messing with me.
Nothing came in. Nothing happened. I looked back to the TV, and the words, “Got you!” Was what I saw.
And then United 93 started to play. In stunned silence, I didn’t dare to touch the remote for a full 5 minutes, but I had to see if I could show that broadcast to the police, or my mom. All I could do is rewind to the beginning of the film, I ejected the disc, put it back in, still nothing.
My mom didn’t even cook that night, she was too tired to do so. I stayed awake the entire night to check on that piece of shit stove to see if the warning was true, but nothing ever happened to it. The day passed, Wednesday passed, and nothing happened. The warning never came to pass.
What happened that night stook with me, festered within me, appeared in my nightmares. I could never get the courage to say anything to my mom about it, how could I? She had enough on her plate, some dumb story about something that had apparently fabricated a future that never came to pass, and then slammed my door open for no reason; was not something I wanted to introduce.
I couldn’t move on. I couldn’t get what happened out of my mind. For most people, this is where they’d call it quits. You reached into the unknown, and it bit you on the hand—that’s a sign to not do it anymore. But not for me. Fear was not the only thing burning within me then, curiosity had joined in on the ‘fun.’
After a small hiatus, I had decided I wasn’t going to stop on pursuing this hobby. Putting my hand inside the mouth of a crocodile and seeing if it will bite, basically. I was determined to see if I could catch another glance on how this thing worked, if I could communicate.
Of course it was dumb, even I knew it was dumb at the time—but I needed something! Anything to explain what happened, how it happened, who or what did it. It’s not like I had an amazing high school social life, or some after-school program outside of work, I was by all accounts; alone. For the same reasons thrill junkies are determined to get themselves killed while climbing the most impossible peaks, I continued on.
Just like those people, I know it might get me hurt, or killed. Or fuck me up so bad to the point of an invalid. Whatever this was, had found me in that cold Tuesday night of ‘07.
And I was determined to find it again.