Chapter 3: Foreign Ground

This chapter explores the themes of drugs and the impact of life choices. The theme of drugs is explored in this chapter because Other Wes falls into the drug game after being tempted by the money he could earn by doing so. Other Wes also exemplifies the theme of life choices because choosing to take part in this dangerous business as a means to earn the money he desired would lead him to face serious consequences in his future, and the fact that his older brother was also involved in this dangerous game, which Other Wes witnessed but chose to ignore, speaks to the power of life choices. Author Wes shows the theme of life choices as well as he chooses to let his insecurities lead him to take part in a fight with his neighborhood friends and school friends.

When Other Wes was beginning to slip into the drug world, he began to make excuses for his behavior: "But Wes rationalized. I am not actually selling drugs. All I'm doing is talking into a headset." (Page 58) He was making life choices that would lead to his eventual lifetime sentence and he used these justifications to try to make himself feel better and tell himself that he wasn't really doing anything wrong. Drugs and life choices were linked in Other Wes's world, as he started to stop making excuses for himself and simply went with the direction that he felt his life was headed, just as Tony, his older brother, did. With his mother, his supposed role model, doing drugs, it seemed an almost natural thing to do and was easy to rationalize: "He had just found his mother's weed stash. After a moment to think about whether he should take it, he came to the obvious conclusion: he was going to turn this barbecue into a real party." (Page 59) At that party, Other Wes tries the drugs for the first time and gets sick, but he sees the appeal in doing them because of how they made him feel, which was to forget things in his life he did not want to deal with. When his mother and her boyfriend saw how sick he was, they laughed it off and did not take action. Other Wes started to see the possibilities of what he was doing and made further choices to continue: "He understood, faintly, how addictive that feeling could be, and how easy it would be to make some money off selling that feeling to people who needed it." (Page 62)

Author Wes also makes life choices in this chapter that will affect him later. Author Wes, arguably more so than Other Wes, saw the reasons not to become a part of the drug game or crime scene in the Bronx. His mother worked very hard to make sure that he got the best education possible and the exposure to a new world outside of his homogenous and often dangerous neighborhood; however, sometimes Author Wes wasn't sure where he belonged: "Every time I looked around at the buildings and the trees and the view of the river, I was reminded of the sacrifices my mother was making to keep me there. And every time I looked at my fellow students, I was reminded of how little I fit in." (Page 52) Author Wes struggled internally with whether he should make choices that propelled him to fit in with his more familiar Bronx life, or his richer and more educated school life: "I was becoming too rich for the kids from the neighborhood and too poor for the kids at school. I had forgotten how to act naturally, thinking way too much in each situation and getting tangled in the contradictions between my two worlds." (Page 54) It all boiled up at the baseball game his uncle organized when the two worlds clashed and Author Wes felt caught in the middle.

Overall, the themes of drugs and life choices were explored in this chapter by showing how they connected to each other and led the Weses to make further poor decisions. When the Weses get involved in the drug game or crime scenes, they start to question their decisions. However, they ultimately continue to go down their respective paths which would lead them to two very different futures.