“I don’t care if you send me back home. You can drop me off at the airport and I’ll take care of myself. Either one, Salt Lake International or San Francisco, it doesn’t matter to me,” I yelled.
The look on his face was nothing less than total bewilderment. He was shocked to think that he had me under his control one moment, then a moment later was powerless to discipline me the way he was used to doing with all the other kids who messed up. He asked me to sit where I was and wait for him to return.
In a moment he came back with Clay, and closed the door.
“I spoke to your mom and she really doesn’t care what happens to you. She won’t give us permission to send you back alone. She won’t pick you up and she doesn’t want you back in Salt Lake,” Clay calmly told me.
The first chance I had to get a word in, I blurted out: “I don’t care what you want to do. I’m not going back to Salt Lake. I’m getting off in San Francisco and staying there. Since you’re not my legal guardian you can’t stop me.”
Clay asked Dale to step out of the room, then closed the door. He said softly: “Listen. I was wrong when I didn’t believe you during our talks. I didn’t believe you when you said that she was completely uninterested in you and your brothers’ lives. I just can’t understand how she can completely write you off as if you were dead.”
“Let me guess. She said, ‘I don’t care if that son of a bitch comes back in a pine box.’ She’s told me that a thousand times before,” I said.
The look on Clay’s face was beyond shock. He was dumbfounded. Silence filled the room as we stared at each other.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “We’ll make some changes and we’ll both start over fresh. But I’m telling you, any more alcohol or drugs and I’ll find a way to get you out of here. Deal?”
“Deal!” I agreed.
By the time I left the office, I felt I had finally got somewhere—reached someone that I could talk to and that would try to understand. I could tell Clay was really interested in helping me understand who I was and what I was doing to myself.
Within the next week I was to move to the island of Maui with a whole new group of kids, and Clay. I was told that they had to move me and tell the other kids that I’d been sent home, or they wouldn’t have any control over them. It was okay with me. Soon I was on a small plane to my new home just a few miles away. It seemed like another world, another chance.
A S
ECOND
C
HANCE
Finally I came to the conclusion that I was the one that had to get my life in order—not God. It wasn’t God that needed another chance from me; I needed to give
myself
another chance. I had to find the courage and the strength to forgive myself and allow myself another chance to grow up.
T
HE NEW SURROUNDINGS WERE
almost what I had expected. The plantation house was larger than the dorms on Lanai. Maui was a much larger island. Having Clay there made it easier for me to fit in. The first day, I was asked to meet him at the main house, where he introduced me to the other counselors and the other teens. Clay and I, in a private talk earlier, had agreed that we had made mistakes on Lanai and we should both try to understand each other a little better and work toward a common goal.
“What I need you to do is to find out what you want to accomplish here on Maui and how the two of us can work toward it,” he told me.
Now I had another chance to seek help, to try to understand why I was comfortable with being so self-destructive. I now had someone who wasn’t
too
close to me, yet was close enough to see and understand what I was going through. I felt comfortable with Clay and his desire to understand and help me.
I left the main house to walk back to my room. I strolled out into the fields behind the house and through the pineapples, then down the red clay road. I would probably never again have a chance like I had now, I decided. I knew that Clay would be able to help me get past the issues I had. I knew that I could confide in him, and had confidence that I would be able to leave when I was ready and never see him again. It had never before struck me so forcibly that what I’d needed all along was the security of talking to someone that wasn’t too close to the situation. That way I wouldn’t feel as though I was being judged. John and Darlene were too close, I felt too much emotion for them. I was so afraid of disappointing them that I seldom shared much more than a few minor problems. Finally I had the desire to open up and see if I really was as crazy as I’d always thought I must be.
I walked about a mile into the fields, and found myself completely alone. One of the many times I’ve acted on the need to talk to God was at that moment. I knelt down in the clay at the side of the road.
I’m sorry. I didn’t get the message the first time
.
If you help me understand I will quit the drugs.
If you help me learn who and what I am or why I’m here, I’ll listen.
Please?
As I awaited a response, a feeling of comfort came over me. I recalled the previous times that I felt this kind of emotion. I thought back to when I was much younger, holding a gun in my hand, and the voice that had scared me into backing down, making me lower the gun and walk away from Mom’s bedside. I recalled the time I begged God to take my life the night before I met Darlene Nichols. The same emotion came over me now. A voice seemed to tell me that I was going to be okay. In my privacy and my solitude, among the fields that stretched for miles, I began to cry.
With a feeling of great relief, I cried. I cried for the fear of not knowing if I could do it. I cried with gratitude that God had finally heard me. I cried about all the time I had wasted. I cried because it had taken me so long. Most of all, I cried because I simply hadn’t cried in years. I had vowed to myself never to let anyone see me cry for any reason, ever again.
After a while I regained my composure and lay back on the soft red clay. I looked at the sky. Either I hadn’t noticed before, or I had refused to see, the incredible clearness and deep blue of the sky, the warmth of the breeze, and the smell of the salt air from the ocean that surrounded the islands. I had been in Hawaii, one of the most beautiful places on earth, for over six months, and I was only now appreciating its beauty. I was so comfortable in my spot by the side of the road that I stayed right there, and before long I faded off to sleep.
I awoke to the softness of the rain as the fresh drops fell on my face. Even the rain seemed warm and inviting. I wondered as I stood up and started to walk back to the dorms, just what else in life I had allowed myself to miss. What else had I refused to see as I had gone about my selfish and destructive lifestyle?
I’m three thousand miles away in Hawaii!
I’ve finally found someone I can talk to
.
“I want to go straight!” I said aloud.
For the first time I truly felt like I wanted to live a morally clean and drug-free life. As I walked I pondered, taking an inventory of what I had been through. Then I recalled all those times I spent crying and wiping the tears off the pages as I wrote in my journal as a small child. I wondered where those old journals were now. I vowed to start again and capture on paper all that I had been through.
At the age of eighteen I’d been living a lifestyle I once feared. Back in middle school and early high school I had feared the kids who used drugs. Looking back I knew that I had not only passed that point, but I had become the one that even “stoners” would walk away from. I was finally ready to put a stop to my childish and irresponsible ways.
By the time I made it back to the dorms, the rain had stopped and I was happy with myself. In the courtyard, I saw that the ground was dry: the rain hadn’t reached the house. Perhaps the rain was an acknowledgment from God, perhaps it was his way of washing away my past and giving me a chance to start anew.
Over the next several weeks, Clay and I spent just the right amount of time together. We always did so in certain settings, so that the other teenagers had no notion of how much he was counseling me. We would take walks around the compound, or sit at the back of the atrium during a movie and talk quietly. Over time, Clay and I were able to tell when either of us was becoming insensitive to the other’s feelings—we could read each other’s face.
By May 1982 I had been clean for a month and felt better than I had in years. I was able to sleep at night with my eyes closed—most of the time—and wake with a sense of purpose. All the time I spent as a child training myself to sleep with my eyes open was very necessary at the time. But now I found that I had to remember the fact that Mom was nowhere around me and that I was not in danger anymore. My health improved and I no longer looked like death. I had regained the weight I had lost over the last few months.
I felt like I was becoming me. I was more than comfortable with myself, and I was feeling pretty good about life. I was working on the issues that Clay suggested for me, and I was making progress with finding the answers to the whys that had eluded me for so long.
Everything was going smoothly until Saturday, June 5, 1982, when I received a letter from Mom. She had apparently heard from Clay, asking her to take a few minutes to think about reconciling her feelings toward me, in the hope that we would be able to rebuild a halfway normal relationship.
I usually received no mail, and was excited to get something from Sandy City, Utah. I opened the letter, and was shocked to read what she had written.
In a few short sentences she reiterated what I had known all along. She had no intention of seeing me come back to Salt Lake. As far as she was concerned, she said, I was dead. What really upset me was what came at the end of her letter: She was able to get on with her life, she informed me, now that she had finally got rid of the last thing in her life she regretted after Dad and David—me.
She acknowledged she had “issues,” but brushed it off as due to the great strain of being a single parent. She went as far as to say that she accepted she was an abusive parent, but since it was only me and “that other one” (David), it was okay. She now intended to focus on Keith and make sure that he had the things in life that David and I had never had. Her closing words suggested she was being sincere. But I didn’t really know if I could believe her or not. I had no way of knowing.
She closed with a simple: “Go to hell—don’t come back to Salt Lake.”
I kept the letter to myself for a while. Over the next few days Clay and I talked about how I was feeling. He asked if I had received anything from Salt Lake yet.
“I did receive a letter from Mom, but it was nothing I really want to talk about. Why?” I said.
“I asked your mother to take a few minutes to send you a small present for your birthday. I didn’t want the chance to pass by for her to let you know she loved you. What did she send you?”
I handed him the letter I’d kept in my pocket. As he read it, I could tell where he’d got to by his facial expressions. Once he got to the end he simply handed it back to me and said: “I’m sorry. I had no idea that she could do that.”
“I did. I’m not really worried about it, I just deal with it,” I snapped.
We talked about the letter from Salt Lake, about how I was doing and where I was in my struggles. As we talked, I faded in and out of listening to Clay. Mom’s letter was preoccupying me. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. Then the way Clay reacted, as if he was shocked to read her words. Hadn’t he learned
anything
?
Within a few minutes I started to feel that same feeling I got whenever I wanted to just get away from it all and get as high as humanly possible—and beyond.
When our conversation was over, I took a stroll out to the pineapple fields. For over two hours I struggled with the urge to go off the deep end again, while at the same time wanting to show not only myself, but Clay, too, that I could master this continuing relationship with Mom. I knew in my heart that she was simply a drunk, and a mean one at that. I knew she had no self-respect and enjoyed dragging others down to her level to make herself look better, and I wanted no part of that.
I had to find a way to get over her either constantly being on my mind or the reason I went off on some tangent. I had to find a way to just let her go, fade away. All along I’d wanted to rebuild whatever was salvageable and take another shot at making something of our relationship; but I also wanted just to end it altogether and walk away for good. I knew in my heart that somehow I loved her as a mother—but I wouldn’t give her the time of day. I had vowed to myself that, if it ever came to it, I would make sure she wasn’t homeless, but I wouldn’t do much beyond that. In some overriding way I loved her; and I hated her for it.
As I walked, I pondered the fact that these two feelings had been bothering me down the years: on the one hand, loving someone who was evil and completely devoid of any conscience, while at the same time hating her. Perhaps the issue that I had been fighting all this time was really with me and not her.
For the next several weeks I put more effort into staying clean than I had ever done before. I was able to control the desires and the feelings of failure, once I understood what caused those feelings. It had been nothing more than a lack of understanding, and a lack of desire to understand. I had been planning on the possibility of failure in my new attempt so that I wouldn’t be overly disappointed. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay in Hawaii forever. I was finishing the last few weeks of the season and looking forward to taking some time off. Before I left I was able to take a couple of weeks to tour the main island and a few others. The places I saw were so beautiful; I was sure I would never have the chance to see them again.
The two weeks passed and I had prepared myself for one last confrontation with Mom. I was now ready. And it had all been made possible by one man who cared enough to provide me with one more chance to learn what I should have learned ten years before. Clay gave me more than a second chance, he gave me hope.