Just before my sixteenth birthday John and Darlene inquired whether I was thinking of getting my driver’s license, not knowing that the subject was at the core of many nights of argument between Mom and me. Since I was not yet eighteen, I needed her to sign for a minor’s license and, of course, she refused.
Darlene wanted to know why Mom wouldn’t allow me to get one. Having no idea that she was falling right into the trap Mom was so used to setting, Darlene called her on the phone to convince her I should have a license. I knew Mom would paint the blackest picture of me possible. And of course I couldn’t tell Darlene that even though Mom had the names of the drugs wrong and the brand of liquor wrong, I was very deeply involved in both. I played ignorant and hoped Mom would eventually disgrace herself.
When I walked into the house one afternoon, I heard Mom on the phone talking. I wondered if she was calling the Nichols family again and making me look as bad as usual. Once she noticed I was in the room, she turned abruptly in the other direction and continued: “You just don’t know how violent he can be. Putting him behind the wheel of a car is too dangerous. He’s always high on something.”
I knew who she was talking to, and what she had planned.
This went on for several months. I started to withdraw from the Nichols family, embarrassed over the way Mom was treating them. It came to the point where she would call them more often than she would argue with me. Since I found myself once again caught in one of her devices for keeping me down and depressed, I began to look for another outlet, another way of passing time.
Some of the students at the high school I attended had similar issues at home, and I found a sort of comfort in knowing that I was not the only one in Sandy City, Utah, who lived like this. Many of them looked as if they lived the way I did, surviving from one day to the next. The way they looked, dressed, and spoke, they—like me—stood out from the normal teens chatting and laughing in the hallways.
Other teens in the school knew that the “stoners” were different from the rest of the various cliques. Everyone assumed that all we did was hang out—skip class and drink and use drugs during school. They weren’t exactly wrong—they just didn’t understand the whys of our situation. I guess each clique made assumptions about what it would be like to be in a different one, but no one ever bothered to ask. Both the students and the staff simply labeled us as “trouble.” None of us were
real
trouble; we just had issues that we didn’t understand or know how to deal with. We were all just like each other, really. Whether we were “jocks,” “geeks,” or popular, we were all often confused and insecure—all of us.
Once I started to associate with more of the students, I found myself under difficult social pressures. Before long I was skipping all the classes and going to parties during the day, returning to school just in time to catch the bus home. Several times I tried new drugs and found that I had no idea how to hide what I was doing, or how other teenagers got away with hiding it. Up till then I had thought I knew exactly what I was doing when it came to girls, drugs, and alcohol, but I soon realized I had no idea.
I spent less and less time with the Nichols family, and after a while joined a particular small group of students. One of them, Nathan Bennett, took me under his wing. His father had long since taken off. His mother had become an alcoholic and was barely able to keep the two of them together. Within a few weeks I was familiar with his lifestyle, and more specifically with the effects of various hallucinogenic drugs. I experimented with far more drugs than I had ever done before.
I always had a liking for the combination of cocaine and alcohol. Many times during school I was so tired and so sick that the only way I could function at all was to keep the high going. Thus I was feeding a vicious circle of destruction that would eventually come to a head.
My schoolwork was long past the point of recovery, and this soon became apparent to the school’s vice principal. When it became obvious that I was not going to earn enough credits to graduate to my sophomore year, the vice principal called home and informed Mom that I had missed over half of the school year in partial absences. He also told her that I had been sent home several times for smoking behind the gym.
All of this played into Mom’s hands—yet another reason to make me look like a seriously troubled loser, not only to the Nichols family but now to the other neighbors that had become friendly to me—Robert and Judy Prince. Rob and Judy lived across the street from the Nichols family, and they, too, had showed an interest in my behavior. Occasionally when I needed to talk to an adult about my issues I would confide in Judy.
This couple, like Darlene and John, allowed me to share in their lives, at the same time attempting to teach me that my current lifestyle left much to be desired. Whenever I needed to talk to someone and was uncomfortable sharing with John and Darlene out of embarrassment, I found that Judy would be able to understand and show that she could still care for my safety and health without demonizing me.
As the school year ended in the summer of 1981, I found that the friendships I thought I had made had evaporated. All that kept us kids together was the constant partying.
At the age of seventeen, I felt once again that my life had no direction, that I was caught up in my own vacuum of self-destruction. There became less and less of a need for Mom to exaggerate my flaws—they were becoming more than apparent to those that now knew me. I didn’t care anymore what Mom told the neighbors.
I didn’t care anymore about anything. I stopped beating myself up over the conflict between trying to be a “good kid” whenever I was around the Nichols or Prince families and the reality of the life I was really living. It used to tear me apart, knowing that I could be exposed at any moment and would have to explain everything to John, Darlene, and Judy. But not any longer. I just didn’t care anymore.
Most parents don’t understand anything. They never know as much as their own kids and never understand what it is like to be a teenager: Somehow, they forget. Mom was worse than that, with her outrageous stories. But the worst of it was that I found myself living them out. The more outrageous the lie, the more I would turn what she said into the truth. I had become nearly everything she told any neighbor who would listen: a thief, a cheat, a drunk, a drug addict. I was methodically working my way through the mass of names she labeled me with—one at a time.
It gave me security, being one person around some people and someone completely different around others. It gave me power and control over who I was and over what I would do and when. For the first time I was really in control of my life by allowing it to be completely
out
of control. It was all my own doing, and no one could tell me otherwise. No one really knew me—including myself. But this multiple personality became difficult to manage.
By Thanksgiving, I had stolen several gallon bottles of Mom’s vodka and had them hidden away for my own use. Within a week the stash that once comprised eight gallons was now reduced to one last bottle. I reconnected with the same friends from last year at school and followed the same patterns as before. I fell back into the void that was the acceptance of my peers and of the girls that associated with us. By now, my morals were just about nonexistent. I became more involved in drugs, alcohol, and girls. I was becoming, just like Mom, horribly miserable.
I found better drugs and better parties. My inexperience with girls was a thing of the past, and I was now just one of the group. I’d spend many afternoons in a girlfriend’s bedroom, then off to a party in the early evening. As time went on it became sort of expected that as I showed up with a girl from the pack we would get hazed over what everyone already knew we’d just been doing. It became a contest to see who could “hook up” with the most girls during the year. I had no remorse over the loss of my pride, my morals, or my dignity. We all shared with each other—the same group of guys and girls. When one couple broke up, each would hook up with someone else within the group, even if they had already been an item in the past. I had dated several of the girls more than once.
Like the rest of the group, I was just seeking the comfort of someone to be with, physically.
By Christmas, Mom and I had had several heated arguments over my escalating drug abuse and drinking. She had now started calling Grandma in Holiday, Utah, to let her know that I was serious bad news and that she didn’t know what to do. She needed another outlet to reach out to, as the Nichols and Prince families had begun to ignore Mom and her stories about me, whether true or false.
Christmas was both one of the hardest times and the best of times for me as a child. I recall the magic that surrounded Santa, and the traditional Christmas lineup where each of us boys would arrange ourselves by age in the hallway just outside my room for the procession to the front room to view the mounds of toys and other presents that Santa had left each good boy. But as I got older, I remember fewer and fewer gifts for me and even more for the other kids.
One year I learned the reality of Christmas for me. Mom had taken me down to the basement. I had been crying under the Christmas tree, clutching my two comic coloring books—my only gifts from Santa. That Christmas, she made it very clear to me that she was the only reason I even got that much.
I thought back to the wonderment and yet the utter disappointment of those memories. They had all left me behind—Mom, the old neighbors, the old school, the nurses and doctors I’d encountered, even Santa—they all pretended I didn’t exist. I promised myself that I would learn from my mistakes, and renewed my vow never to believe in anyone.
Past experiences had taught me that I was better off distancing myself from the family during the festive season.
Oftentimes, during the month of December that year, I would leave the house after dinner and walk up to Mesa Park near the top of the street and sit there for hours. Christmas Eve, I snuck out my bedroom window and found myself at the park well after midnight with another bottle of vodka that I’d stolen from Mom. I sat in the park and drank as much as I could.
Many nights I had slept in the park, and no one ever noticed. I knew when the police cruisers would patrol the area, and I knew when and where to hide.
As I sat and pondered my life, I realized that I was becoming a person I loathed, even more than in earlier years. I was becoming mean and aggressive. I was drunk more often than I was sober, and I knew I was using alcohol as a means of dealing with my lack of self-pride. I was becoming like Mom, and I knew it. The only difference I could see between Mom and me, at that point, was that I used a greater variety of drugs.
By 3
A.M
. I’d had more than my fill of vodka, and I was freezing. Thinking about what I was doing, and just the fact of being alone, made me angrier and angrier. The trip back to the house was less than a mile, and I usually made it in about twenty minutes. As I walked down Mulberry Way and past the houses, I took in the Christmas lights and the feelings of the season as the street quietly slept. Stumbling along, I passed Rob and Judy’s house and felt sad and resentful as I imagined them anticipating the arrival of Christmas morning and the excitement of their kids as they discovered what Santa had left them. I sat on the curb outside the Prince home and stared at the Nichols home opposite, wondering just what traditions
they
had and how excited their kids would be that night.
Before long I began to cry. I felt so out of place, so desperate and misunderstood. I was so far from being the nice kid down the street that I wanted to be and felt so distant from what others expected of me. I was lost inside. I had no direction and no idea how to get it. Unsteady on my feet, I stumbled as I tried to stand up from the curb, and fell. I rolled over and looked up at the sky—snow had started to fall.
As I walked back to the house, I couldn’t tell whether the dismalness inside me was coming from my emotions or from the vodka. Either way, it was the same to me. Not for the first time, I knew that I couldn’t continue with this lifestyle and that I had to ask for help.
The trouble was, I just couldn’t find a way to ask either the Prince or Nichols families to try to understand what I had been through and to help me get on the right track. I knew, as I had always felt I knew, that none of them could possibly imagine what the last twelve years had been like for me and why I would deliberately and desperately self-destruct. Their lives were so different, and what I had been through would be so foreign to them, that they simply wouldn’t know how to help, or even if they could.
After all,
I
was
living
this life, and I didn’t know what to do. How could I expect that anyone else would?
G
OING
O
VER THE
E
DGE
Real love is very difficult to understand. For me, as a teenager, it was all but impossible to understand. It was so foreign to me; I just didn’t know what it was. During those years, I managed to bury my emotions and my fears even deeper than I had done as a child. I was cold and heartless. My heart was filled with years of abuse and shame. There simply wasn’t room for any more hurt.
The first time I actually attempted suicide, I’d failed. I had failed at everything I had ever done. This time it was a mistake—I didn’t know what a heroin-cocaine mix could do.
O
NE OF THE HARDEST
issues I faced as a teenager—like most teenagers—was trying to sort out how to deal with my confused emotions and thoughts. I had no idea who I was or where I was going in life. Whatever the Nichols family could give me in love, respect, and confidence, Mom would strip away within moments of being around her. It was as if she couldn’t bear that I was moving on and she was being left behind. It didn’t matter what direction I was taking—just the fact that I was now moving anywhere away from Mom made the situation more unstable.