Blood in Blood out

Blood in Blood out

By Glen Flensoz

I was nine the last time my father hit me.

He had rules, and I broke them. That was all it ever took. He was a soldier long before he was a father—and never really made the transition. Pain was how he spoke, and silence was how you answered.

So I ran.

By twelve I was living under a bridge and answering to a gang that didn’t care who I used to be. They gave me a new name—“Flen”—and a place where my fists were currency and fear was a kind of love. I lived fast. Fought harder. For a long time, I thought I was free.

But freedom has a cost.

Years later, the gang had rotted. The old codes were gone. Now it was muggings. Home invasions. Stripping copper off church roofs. No one flinched anymore. Desperation wears down shame.

Then came the night we targeted an old man shuffling home from the store.

It was my father.

He didn’t recognize me. Not at first. He was older, but still stood like a man expecting war. One of the kids behind me snorted, “Easy pickings.”

I turned and told them to back off.

They didn’t.

Fists flew. Blades flashed. I dropped two before I hit the sidewalk. Then the sound of something heavy splitting cartilage.

I looked up and saw him—my father—wielding a steel pipe like it was 1968 in a jungle somewhere. He moved like someone who’d waited a long time to be useful again. The rest scattered. Cowards, all of them.

He offered me a hand.

I took it.

That night, we sat in his kitchen eating canned peaches and not talking. But something passed between us. Not forgiveness. Not yet.

Purpose.

In the weeks that followed, word got out. Flen was back. And he brought a real soldier.

We didn’t rebuild the gang. We replaced it. We cleaned the corners. We offered work. We broke every jaw that forgot what community used to mean.

Violence, channeled, became order. Fear became respect. And for the first time, peace lasted.

Longer than anyone expected.

Long enough that people started whispering about the old man with the straight back and no nonsense. Said he should run for something.

He ran.

He won.

Say what you want about methods. But the streets stayed quiet. The people ate. Kids went to school.

And I—once a runaway, once a thug—stood beside my father the day he took the oath.

He never said he was proud of me.

But he wore the same boots he’d kicked me with all those years ago.

And that was enough.

—
Until next time, remember: even the broken can build something unshakable. — Glen