“You have to get off the fence and decide. The writing is on the wall, Richard,” Darlene told me.
I had never had John and Darlene become frank and assertive with me before—they had always been supportive, but they’d known next to nothing about my past. Now, with the little I’d told them, I had disappointed them as if they were my parents. I desperately wanted to be accepted and loved. I was ashamed of my actions. The big fear I had was that I lacked the courage to stop. In fact, I knew I couldn’t handle going straight—not alone. I was still faced with the dilemma that had hounded me for a few years now: I didn’t know what to do or who to ask for help.
I had to either let someone answer my cries for help, or stop crying for help. I had to do one or the other; Darlene was right.
I decided to revisit the recommendation of the temporary foster caregivers and determine if the YDE program of Salt Lake City was my answer.
I called the local office for the details of joining the program. YDE would interview and accept into the program certain kids under the age of eighteen who either couldn’t or wouldn’t live at home anymore. Kids who needed the support of adults without the stigma associated with other “programs.” I set up an interview and got the answers to all my questions. It took less than ten minutes for them to decide if I could be a candidate. I learned what was available and what I had to do before the deadline to enroll.
YDE operated two programs based in Hawaii, and provided the opportunity for young people to get jobs and learn the basic skills of being on their own. By the end of the week I had decided that I was getting into one of those programs if it killed me—before I killed myself.
I knew that I needed to not only get away from the house but out of Sandy City, Utah. If I stayed there much longer my self-destructiveness would plumb new depths. I was afraid of myself and of what I might do. There was no fear of embarrassment left in me, or of the consequences, the costs, or the effects of my overindulgence in drugs, booze, sex, or anything else.
I made the arrangements and was ready to leave for Hawaii. Gram had bought me a fifteen-dollar metal chest at Kmart and a few clothes. The day I left, when I told Mom I was leaving, I felt that it was the beginning of the end for her and me. I was now on my way to my new life. The cost of the trip out was not difficult to manage. I had no car, no social life, and no real expenses, other than the habits that shadowed my life. Gram had convinced Mom that the four hundred dollars I was short for the cost was worth the investment to get me out of the house. I have no idea how she arranged it or how she paid it, but she did.
Gram was waiting outside. She had said she would drive me to the airport and make sure I got on the plane. I think she knew that I wasn’t trustworthy and wanted to make sure I really got to Hawaii.
“I’m going to the airport now,” I said, standing by the front door. I waited for a response. Anxiously, I waited, but Mom said nothing. I closed the door behind me.
“So be it!” I said.
I’m sorry, Keith, but if I don’t get out now, I never will. God help you, because I can’t
, I thought, as I walked away.
In an odd way, I felt sorry for her. I had told her that I was going to find a way to get out, and I had. Now that it was a reality, she simply didn’t acknowledge me. It was as if I were already gone, already out of her life.
The ride to the airport was quiet. As we drove I couldn’t get Keith off my mind. I felt so bad that he was being left behind. I wondered if David ever felt that way about me when he was rescued.
The more I thought about Mom’s simple, emotionless reaction to my leaving her, the more I understood that I was dead to her, just like “It” was when he left. There was no need to speak to me—to her, I didn’t exist anymore.
I thought about the lives that had dissolved in Mom’s corrosive presence, the lives that she had changed forever. My father, who simply stopped coming home one day; my oldest brother Ross, who ran as far as he could the first chance he got; David and what he went through; and now me. I so desperately wished I could take Keith with me. But I couldn’t. I had to leave him behind. I couldn’t understand myself, I couldn’t take care of myself, so how could I help my younger brother, whom I loved?
I spent the five-hour flight to Hawaii thinking about Keith and what I feared he would now endure: a life of pain, shame, and fear that most people couldn’t imagine. During the flight, in between my worries about leaving Keith behind and the thoughts of a new life, I desperately tried to sleep. It was no use.
My destination was the island of Lanai. By the end of the day, and several thousand miles away, the plane had landed.
On Lanai, I was placed with a stranger, another kid from Salt Lake named Kyle. The house I found myself in had two dorms, each dorm had six rooms, and each room had two teenagers. There were eight or so dorms in the place altogether, and all had the same kind of kids from all over the country—from Michigan, California, Utah, and Idaho—all with their own issues and their own reasons for being there. Like I had at the foster home, I could look at the kids and determine who had emotional issues and who had personal issues. Before long I befriended a couple of them and we started to share a little about the reasons why we were there.
In each of the dorms lived a group leader we called Luna. They were adults trained to deal with troubled kids, and from the first day they seemed to focus on a few kids in particular. These were the ones who were either shy or holding back from the group atmosphere that was created by all of us sharing in the household duties and working together.
As I expected, my turn soon came to talk to the group leaders and go through an analysis of my issues and my shortcomings. I wasn’t very comfortable with talking to Luna Craig, our group leader. He wasn’t very receptive to the feelings I was relating. When I mentioned the very few events that I felt I could share about my past, he told me that I had more issues than even I realized.
“I don’t know why you think you have to make up such outrageous stories to get accepted here, Richard. There is no reason to make your mother out to be some kind of lunatic,” Craig said.
I couldn’t believe it—I had finally found the courage and the setting to open up, even if only a little. Sitting in front of me now was the first man in the world to whom I had ever confided what Mom was like, and he didn’t believe me. I’d told him about one of the times I ran away and ended up in an ambulance and then the hospital,
and he didn’t believe me
.
I needed to find out whether or not
I
was the one who was crazy.
For as long as I could remember, I’d always wondered if
I
was the one that was “over the rainbow,” “had toys in the attic,” “bars on the windows.” From my earliest memories I always believed that I
was
. As a young child, I just couldn’t understand how someone you loved could turn on you in a heated rage and hurt you so badly that at times you just wanted to die—and then instantly turn back into “Mommy.” I knew of no other kids that ever went through one tenth of what I had been through except my older brother, but he was gone. It had to be me that was the deranged one. That must have been why I wanted to self-destruct. It was me the whole time, not Mom. I was the one who caused her to become outraged. I knew that she didn’t treat the other boys like that, so it
had
to be me.
Yet I knew what I was telling Craig was true.
Our conversation was cut short when I refused to talk anymore about my history. I knew that the more I said the more I would be branded a liar and a troubled kid. Our conversation ended with Craig saying: “I think you need to speak to Clay.”
Clay was one of the camp senior leaders. He was a gentle, kind man; he was able to listen and talk
with
me—not
at
me. But it wasn’t long before I got a similar response from him. It was just too outrageous that a mother could actually do those things to her own kids.
As I fully expected, I was labeled “a storyteller,” and it was clear that I needed “special attention.” Word was spreading throughout the camp. I was furious that Clay, one of the few people I’d started to open up to, would even think about breaking my confidence.
I was asked to attend a counseling session after working the pineapple fields and to speak with different leaders in the group to try and find out why I was so angry with my mom. I discovered that several of the camp leaders had written to her asking for some background information, to try to get some notion of what it was that made me so angry. The weeks went by, and I was told that Mom had not yet responded, but I was not to take it personally.
I knew that she considered me out of her life for good, and that she would never respond. And she had good reason not to speak to any of the leaders or the counselors.
As the months went on, I found that here on Lanai, Hawaii, I was the same person I had been in Daly City, California, and in Sandy City, Utah. I had the same confused feelings and the same anger that I had known for years now. My hopes that a new setting might change my outlook faded just as fast as my hopes that the counselors would help me. I was the same teenager, in a new part of the world. I had accomplished nothing by leaving home. No one in Daly City would have believed me, no one in Salt Lake believed me, and now no one in Hawaii believed me, either. The main thing I learned from my counseling sessions was that no matter where I was, I was still me, and no one would ever believe what I had to tell them or help me understand any of it.
By now I was back to my old ways and starting to make friends with the kids that I thought would have experience of drugs and alcohol.
Each week we were allowed to take a specified amount out of our checks and spend it as we desired. Some of the kids would spend it on movies and some would spend it on junk food. I finally found kids who had connections with some of the most outrageous drugs I had ever known: hash- and-opium-laced Thai sticks.
After work and after we had settled in one Friday night, two of the kids from another dorm and I snuck out and walked the short distance up to the top of one of the nearby hills. Not far from the dorms was a patch of bamboo growing wild, untouched and completely natural. The smell was incredible, and the eerie feeling as we walked through the little forest added to the heady atmosphere and to our intoxication.
We had managed to pool our money and purchase several Thai sticks. I had used hash before, but it was nothing like what I experienced in that bamboo forest. One of the kids had brought with him a bottle of vodka that he had swiped from the local liquor store the night before. On the way up to the bamboos we passed the bottle from one to another.
By the time we had made it to the middle of the forest, we had finished the bottle. For a while we sat around talking about the others in the group. Then one of the kids pulled out a Thai stick and passed it around. I was told that it was made of hashish from Thailand and laced with opium. I quickly realized what made it so special. As I stared through the forest into the light beyond, I had no idea who or where I was. I couldn’t tell if what I thought was happening around me was reality or not.
I was soon out of my mind with paranoia, and the other two kids were, too. We were all so high that at first we couldn’t even find our way out of this patch of bamboo that we had been to a hundred times before. It was several hours later that we finally made it back to our dorms. A few of the other kids noticed me as I stumbled in. They assumed I was either drunk or high.
All I remember from that episode is the early morning hours, when a few of the other teenagers thought it would be funny to play games with me. From time to time one of them would open the door to my room and make some funny comment, then close the door quickly. I laughed and laughed. It wasn’t really funny; it was just the effect of the drugs, combined with what I thought was happening around me. Again, I couldn’t tell if it was real or if it was part of the high.
By the time morning arrived word had gotten back to the counselors about what had been happening during the night. I woke, hungover and hungrier than I’d been since I arrived. Usually I made it to the mess hall before nine in the morning, but today I got there just before they closed the doors, at eleven.
As I walked the quarter mile to the hall, I met up with one of the kids I had been out with the night before. We walked along the road together, reminiscing about our night out. We laughed at each other’s stories of what had happened when we returned to our dorms.
Just outside the doors to the mess hall stood Clay, the senior counselor.
“I want to see you in my office now,” he barked at me.
My friend and I looked at each other.
“I’ve got to eat something first. I’ll be up in a while,” I said.
The two of them walked back to the camp, and I sat down to my breakfast. When I’d finished, I went outside and sat on one of the benches in the courtyard just outside the mess hall. I knew that the counselors would probably send me packing, as they had with other kids who broke the rules. Without reservation or remorse I walked back to camp and up to the offices, to find Clay. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I was sent home.
What would be so different?
I thought.
Dale, another group counselor, was in the office. He had a reputation for being the camp’s hard-nosed disciplinarian. He informed me that he’d called my mom back on the mainland and told her that I was being expelled, and that she’d have to pick me up at Salt Lake City airport.
“The problem we have here, Richard, is that your mom doesn’t give a damn what happens to you. She told me that you’re not welcome in Salt Lake—ever. Since you’re not eighteen and we’re not your legal guardians we can’t send you back without permission.
“What’s wrong with your mother? She said she didn’t care if you died and were buried in Hawaii.”
I simply looked at him. “You’re the ones who thought I was out of my mind. You’re the ones that thought I was making up what she was really like. Now you’re asking
me
?