The following is a first hand, true account of my life, as derived from what I can best remember. It is as true as my memories allow me to portray. I cannot guarantee that 100% will be entertaining. More than likely, some parts will bore the hell out of you, the reader. But something tells me I have to write this story, and I will write this story in accordance to what I believe is entertaining, but most of all in accordance to what I believe to be the truth.
Also, what you are about to read is my opinion. It is kind of hard to write a self-biography without any opinionated pieces within it, as memories are fickle things and can often be misremembered and otherwise lost. Inevitably, I will offend someone with my description of them within these pages, so I plan to head that off now.
DO NOT TAKE OFFENSE TO THESE WORDS. What you are reading are my own words and thoughts, and nobody is forcing you to read this drivel anyway. If you do not like what you are reading, put the book down and get another one, or turn on your TV, or play your Xbox or your Playstation or your Wii, or go outside, or go for a drive, whatever. If a few words and one person’s opinion hurts you that much, perhaps it is time to grow some tougher skin.
---
This chapter is my attempt to put the timeline of the events of my life in to a nutshell format. In future chapters, you will notice events added to this timeline. This is natural, as the events expanded upon and added to said timeline will be because I was just trying to nutshell it at this point in time.
You’re not going crazy.
December 22nd, 1985. Roughly eight o'clock in the morning. A young mother lies, exhausted, in a hospital bed in Denver, Colorado. In her arms, she holds a small male child, whom she has just given birth to. Next to her stands a man who she intends to marry, but is not the young boy's father. As the young woman stares into her sleeping child's face, she can't possibly imagine the kind of life he'll lead, but she'll be sure to raise him to the best of her ability.
I do not remember anything about my time in Denver, even though it's the city of my birth. It's a city I'd like to visit some day, and possibly even go on a 'birth tour' of sorts. I'd like to visit the hospital I was born in, even if it's just the waiting room. I'd like to see the apartment complex my mother lived in. I'd like to walk the streets of Denver, just to feel what it would have been like had I been allowed to grow up there.
Alas, I am unable to do that sort of thing as of right now. The economy prevents me from doing so. Money runs the world, and if one has no money, one cannot run anything, no matter how nice that person might be. Still, it's a nice dream.
My immediate family has always looked for the cheapest places to live. Like I stated before, money runs everything, so after my birth, there began a long line of episodes of moving, house to house and state to state. From Denver, my family moved to St. Louis, Missouri. It is in St. Louis that my mother had my first sister Kaylee, on May 24th, 1987. As I was still much too young to remember much of anything, the only memory I have of my time in St. Louis is of the man posing as my father covering me to protect me from... something. It is a vague memory, and I've been told I could be remembering a small earthquake, though it hasn't been confirmed yet.
I've visited St. Louis since I lived there. Well... I drove through it. The Arch is nice, and I wouldn't mind going up into it, but other than that, there's not much to the city that makes me want to visit and stay for any long period of time.
Again, the time came that we had to move. From St. Louis, we moved to the small town of Alabaster, Alabama. It is here that my mother had my second sister, Mercedes*, on June 5th, 1989. It is here that I grew old enough to actually have memories of my life. And it is here that my mother had her first divorce, from the man that had tried to call himself my father, and failed miserably.
From what I remember of Alabama, I liked it. Alabama holds my first real memories of my life, from spankings to tonsillitis, to getting over my fears of the Boogeyman and the dark. Memories are triggered by things like footie pajamas and red leather suitcases. More memories are triggered by things like 24 packs of Bud Light and lamps with no covers on the light bulbs. Fortunately I've learned to push the worst memories into the back of my mind so that they aren't triggered as easily. It allows me to get through life.
After living in Alabama for a few years and watching my mother try her hand at dating again, we moved to Virginia Beach, VA. It is here that my mother had my final sibling, my younger brother Tony, on September 6th, 1991. Being a single mother with four kids and a horrible taste in men, my mother was forced to put my younger brother up for adoption, where he was adopted by my aunt and uncle. That whole story is for another chapter.
I liked Virginia. I'd go back if given the chance, though in today's economy finding a job that would sustain living in a city with a beach would be nearly impossible. And though it may sound selfish, the way my body works with my sleeping pattern (this will be explained in a later chapter), I do not think I could hold a suitable second job. But it's a nice dream, the thought of living in Virginia Beach again.
It is in Virginia Beach that I experienced my first bit of bullying in schools. There is no telling how much of my time was spent in the counselor’s office, trying to control my tears after kids my age and older pushed me through the halls or spent their energy calling me names. When you're in elementary school, the teachers force you to walk in alphabetically ordered lines. Once you're in a nice and neat line, and the teacher feels they have a suitable amount of control over the class, they ignore the children and focus on the direction they are traveling and the small amount of respite they gain during the walk. They do not pay attention to the kids in their charge, who are pushing one kid and whispering names in his ear. They're completely indifferent to the behavior of the children they're being paid to watch and teach. Attitude adjustment isn't in their day planner.
I honestly do not think I would have made it through elementary school had it not been for the tireless efforts of the guidance counselor. I was a soft-hearted kid who instinctively opened up to everyone and gave everyone a chance, nay, multiple chances to be friends. By the time I moved from Virginia Beach and started middle school, I had begun to learn to close myself off from the rest of the world. I began to build my own little society on the inside of myself, and this society would be the way I kept sane for the remainder of my public school career, when I hit schools that didn't have guidance counselors.
From Virginia Beach, I moved to Kentucky. I've lived in far more cities in Kentucky than I have in any other places. This state is filled with bad memories, and I hate it with an absolute passion. This is one of those states where you can tell what county or city a person is from just by their attitude.
I believe the first city we moved to was Lewisburg. My mother was of the notion that home schooling was “all the rage” and that making her kids spend all day sitting at a table copying books of the Bible would make them into well-raised, Christian children. Her brand of “home schooling” was for us to wake up, do morning chores, then spend 8+ hours a day writing from the Bible. About the only thing she managed to do that helped relate to public schooling was instill a love of reading into me, somehow. I would return to public school in the middle of the 7th grade year, after spending the second half of fifth grade and all of sixth grade in her rendition of “home school.”
Somewhere in the middle of my 7th grade year, my mother decides to move the family to the town of Central City. It was found in the middle of Muhlenberg County, and would be filled with the stuck-up, self-entitled brand of people. If you weren't someone who had lived in the county all your life, then you were permanently branded an outsider and pretty much punished for it. I entered Muhlenberg North Middle School in the middle of the 7th grade, my self only half closed off and desperate to make any friends at all. I was the New Kid for the entirely of my time at that particular school. I was the guy that suddenly appeared and shot straight up to the top of the Honors’ List, seemingly without effort. I was the quiet kid who made high grades but didn't like to answer questions in class because it made me stand out. But my refusal to join in made me stand out anyway. I kept quiet, kept to myself, and held back any forms of rebuttal or reaction to the bullying I received at the school. This made me the perfect scapegoat; bullies could target me without fear of punishment.
I’ll get further into the bullying in a later chapter, but suffice it to say that the hazing and such got pretty bad. I wouldn’t get any respite until my mother moved us to another city in Kentucky: Earlington. We moved in the middle of my 8th grade year, and I managed to finish the rest of my grade at South Hopkins Middle School, at near the top of my class. I made friends easily at SHMS after I had closed myself off, so I figured that the best was to get friends would be to never let them see the real me. It would be at this point in my life that I begin to develop another side to myself, one that I would hold close to me through the rest of my high school career and into part of my military career.
I actually started my high school career in Hopkins county, moving directly from South Hopkins Middle School to Hopkins County Central High School. I continued to hold myself closed off except for my closest friends, and it would be here that I felt my first dating rejection because I was too shy and too quiet to move in. That same type of situation would follow me for years. And, as you can guess, those will be covered in a later chapter.
After spending a successful full first year in 9th grade and moving into the 10th, my mother felt it necessary to move again, back to Lewisberg. I was allowed to go to a school that one of my best friends was also attending, which was situated some 50 miles away from where we lived, and I managed to go until our car died. I spent a month at the school before it happened, and then spent another 6 weeks out of school while waiting hopefully for the car to be fixed. I would be greatly disappointed, having to move to the local school instead.
It would be during this 6 week “break” that the September 11th attacks happened. Originally I thought the reports on the radio were a joke, but obviously I was sorely mistaken. Around 3pm of that same day, I had tried to call in to the radio station which we were listening to (it happened to be a Christian radio station) to request a song to obviously give the general public hope, and was flatly refused. Obviously spreading fear and hopelessness and asking for God to bless us while doing absolutely nothing to calm the fears of the public is the way to gain the blessings of God, eh?
It would also be during this six week “break” that the man that, for some odd reason, considers himself my father, would offer his full-blooded daughters the option of going to live with him when he decided to move closer to Kentucky. As far as I knew at the time, my name or being never even came up in conversation. The general consensus of opinion of both my sisters, at the time, turned out to be ‘maybe,’ but it would be at that moment that I flatly decided never again to willingly speak to the man. Maybe he’d get the hint.
When it was finally decided that the car wouldn’t be fixed, we were enrolled in the local schools. My oldest sister was just starting high school, I was in my Sophomore year, and my youngest sister was still sitting in seventh grade. We started in the middle of the year, so that meant that when winter intersession hit, we were required to go.
Intersession was a neat program set up by the school, wherein students who were having trouble with their studies could spend one week of their two-week vacation off of school in a sort of summer-school setup to complete work and raise their grade. Since the two main classes were I was behind were Geometry and English, and English wasn’t all that hard to make up, I was instructed to go to Intersession to make up my math grades. I finished a packet that normally takes a student a couple weeks to finish in 4 days. I am still pretty proud of that.
I would spend the remainder of my high school career in that one school, although in the middle of my Junior year, my mother would see fit to move us again. This time we’d move to a town called Russellville, within biking distance of the high school. So guess what? On some days, I’d insist on riding my bike to school instead of the bus, which would allow me to catch a whole hour more of sleep. I was beginning to suspect I had something wrong with me since I was finding it hard to sleep at night and even harder to wake in the morning, but I chalked it up to normal schoolboy stress.
Once I graduated, I joined the United States Air Force. I left for Basic Training on July 6th, 2004, intending to do my Basic in the middle of summer, at Lackland AFB, in the middle of Texas. To this day I have no idea why I chose to do that, especially considering I’d had very little experience with the kind of heat that Texas gave off during the summer months.
I was a chubby kid going in to the military, so I ended up taking 8 weeks to complete the 6-week course required at that time for the Air Force. I was in one of the last groups that were given the 6-week training, with the next groups being given a 9-week course instead, adding more gas mask training to the regimen. My problems with the training were in the required PT test, with my pushups being far under par, and my running suffering as well. My original run time sat at 13+ minutes, when the required finish time for the mile and a half needed to sit under 11 and a half minutes.
I was held back two weeks, which allowed me to push myself harder in preparation for the test. The flight I was assigned to was, apparently, very lazy. In comparison to my original Drill Instructor, the DI I had in my second flight was much nicer, and a bit more understanding. Then again, my second DI was a male, my first was a female. But I will expand upon that in a later chapter.
Upon completing Basic Training, I was moved directly in to Tech School. My original job in the military was Nuclear Weapons Maintenance, which required a three-to-four month training program at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas. I say “my original job” because I got in to some trouble during training. My sleeping pattern was way off kilter, and one day I fell asleep during class, while using a rather large and dangerous machine. The base I was originally assigned to heard about it, and so they denied my application. I was ordered to do another list of jobs, which I did, and somehow ended up with a station in Security Forces. Security Forces was NOT on my list.
So I packed up my stuff and was sent BACK to Lackland for the Security Forces training. Now, I will be the first to admit that the training for the job was FUN. I would definitely go through the training again if given the opportunity. But I should have listened to my gut when I was still at Sheppard, because I was given the choice to get out of the military or choose another job, and I should have gone with the discharge instead of continuing on. I completed my Tech Training and was given my base assignment: Osan AB, South Korea.
After a two week vacation with my family, I packed up and went to Osan. I was at Osan for 8 months when disaster struck, and I will expand on that in a later chapter. I was discharged from the military after the incident, went home, and spent roughly three months feeling sorry for myself. Then I managed to secure a job.
I began working for a factory in Russellville, KY, by the name of Ventra Plastics. Ventra was in the business of making plastic car parts. I’ll admit, I enjoyed the job, but the management and organization of the plant was absolutely atrocious. I spent a little over a year at the plant before I started going stir-crazy, then finally made an agreement with a friend and moved from Russellville, Kentucky, to Omaha, Nebraska.
I lived in Nebraska for a month. It’s a month I’d rather forget, but I will expand on it at a later time. I may dedicate a chapter entirely to Nebraska. I haven’t decided yet. But after a month of living in Nebraska and being entirely unable to find a job, much less being able to put up with the so-called “friend” I had moved in with, I made different arrangements and moved to L’Anse, Michigan. The “friend” I stayed with in Nebraska is no longer my friend, and declared our “friendship” to be over the minute I moved away. To be honest, it was over within the first couple of weeks of my staying with her.
I lived in L’Anse for almost a year. I enjoyed my time there and would have stayed longer if I could have secured a house for myself, since for pretty much that whole year I was staying with a friend, but alas, the time came for me to have to move away. Where did I go? Back home, to good ol’ Russellville, KY.
Once I was home, the job circus began. Nobody in the town was hiring. I couldn’t really find a job outside of the town because I didn't have transportation. But I was sure that eventually I would find a job.
Thus concludes the nutshell of my life, at least up to the current point. I am not dead yet, and if I was, this wouldn’t be an autobiography. I have been told by multiple people that my life deserves a book or a movie, so who better to write either then the owner of my life? If you have seriously read this far into the story, then I encourage you to continue reading. You might actually like it.
---
The earliest I can remember of my life is being covered by the upper torso of a man in a white shirt. I am laying in the middle of a carpeted room with white walls, and a small window with bright sunlight shining through is located on the wall directly to my left. The sun is bright enough that it is causing me to squint, or at least want something to shield my eyes. On the wall next to the window is a bookshelf filled with books, and in my memory that bookshelf seems to be rocking a bit back and forth. There is a fan whirling on the ceiling, and the fan seems to be moving sideways back and forth as well. It’s as if the entire room is shaking.
I can not remember if the floor was shaking, and the more I try to drudge up details, the more my head begins to hurt. This is the earliest memory I have, and with all the details that I do remember, I have reason to believe I remember an earthquake. But every time I bring it up with my mother, she tells me that she can not remember the incident, so I really have no way of knowing what it is that I am remembering, or if it’s a real memory and not one I planted in my head myself to make me seem cool. Memories are finicky things, sometimes.
I have talked with my mother about this particular memory, and she believes that I am remembering a trip to the hospital, and the subsequent stitches that I had to get right over my left eye. She believes that I am remembering Mark* holding me down on the doctor’s table, to allow the doctor to put the stitches over my eye.
She can not understand where I would have gotten a bookshelf from, nor the ceiling fan, but if my memory and her guess are the same, there’s a good chance that the extra details I see in my memory are planted there by my own brain. Why that would happen, I have no idea, but I suppose it is a good possibility.
After the possible earthquake memory, the earliest memory I have is of living in Alabama. I remember the two story house we had, with the backyard fenced with wood. I remember my bedroom being on the second story, with a window that opened up to the roof covering the garage. For some reason I never really wanted to open that window and climb out, and that may have been because I knew I would have gotten my butt blistered if I had tried it.
I remember the general layout of the house. Coming in the front door, you were greeted immediately by a staircase, holding roughly 13 carpeted stairs. If one turned left, one would come into the hallway, with the first room on the left being a playroom. My mother was in the process of knitting the alphabet into circular holders as decorations for that room, so as to teach us our ABCs while at the same time being unique in her decoration scheme. Past the playroom was the parents’ room, and after that was the kitchen.
I liked the first kitchen I can remember. It had two entrances, a pantry, and a dishwasher. If you continued around the circle from the door, the kitchen would exit into the dining room, which featured a back door leading into the back yard, and a wall covered with plants. My mother has always been big about plants. The table sat directly under this shelf of plants, and the lowest shelf held cactus, so if we had any heavyset guests, they were instructed to sit towards the front of the table and not on the bench under the plants.
From the dining room, a bar led out into the living room, with a door on the far wall leading in to the garage. The front door could be seen from the living room. If you followed the stairs up to the upper level, you were greeted immediately by the door to the bathroom. To the left of the bathroom but on the opposite wall in the hallway, a door opened up to a closet holding towels and sheets. If one turned left from the stairs and continued down the hall, one would make their way in to the master bedroom, which my sisters shared. It was a large room, and was plenty big enough for two girls to share.
Exiting the girls’ room, on the other side of the hallway was my own room. It was a bit smaller, but plenty big enough for me. I do not remember much about my own room or my sisters’ room, but I remember the bathroom.
Opening the bathroom door, immediately to one’s left was the toilet, and to the right lay the tub. There was a sink and counter space directly across from the toilet, and to the left of the toilet was a latched door leading to a crawl space/attic. I believe the reason I remember this room so much is because my mother had me and my sisters convinced that the boogieman lived in the door, and that the latch was the only thing holding him back. One day I became brave enough to open the door to the crawl space, and a ton of pink insulation started pushing out slowly because of how packed it was, and I ran screaming from the bathroom, declaring the boogieman was going to eat me. I do not remember if I got in trouble for unlatching the door, or if I got an explanation that the boogieman wasn’t real.
I don’t remember our backyard very well, except that to a child of the age that I was, it was rather big. I do remember having a dog in the backyard at one point, but that dog went to my sisters’ father’s parents not long after we got it. If the subject of the dog, whose name was Spirit, is ever brought up in my sister Kaylee’s presence, she’ll be sure to remind you that Spirit was her dog, but if my memories serve me well, the dog either belonged to me or to the family.
Another feature of the backyard was the scattered ant hills. We had problems with fire ants, and they were one of the reasons why my sisters and I tended to stay out of the backyard, and tended to gravitate more towards the front yard. Some of the other reasons were itchy, unmowed grass, and the fact that the neighborhood kids couldn’t see past our high, wooden fence.
Across the street lived one of the first friends I ever made, Hunter. He was a blond boy, well built for his age, with an interest in hunting and all things outdoors. I was an insider kid, myself, preferring videogames. Of course, at the tender age of 4 or 5, I held a small interest in being outside, but my love of videogames and things electronic often overpowered my love of physical activity.
Next door to Hunter lived a husband and wife who were heavy beer drinkers. My sisters’ father was good friends with them, and though I could talk easily with the people in that house, I believe the most interest I really had in them was the gigantic stuffed swordfish that they had hanging on the wall in their den. I am pretty sure the fish was bigger than I was, and I always wanted to hear the story of how it was caught, but I could never build up the courage or the patience to ask for the story.
Down the street, left from our house and on our side of the road, lived another friend of mine. He was a pale white boy with dark hair, much like me, and he too shared the love of videogames. But his parents didn't much like me, for some reason, so often when I went over to his house we were forced to play outside instead of staying inside, though I was well trained in the art of staying quiet, and had proved that on several occasions.
Down the street, right from our house, was a cul de sac, where lived a friend or two who used to borrow games from me, and vice versa. His parents were of the more lenient sort that allowed him to play as many games as he wanted, but they didn't allow him to have many people over, so our main form of communications consisted of videogame trading details.
“Dude, lemme borrow Zelda.”
“Can I get Excitebike from you?”
“Sure. We’ll trade back in a week.”
“’Kay. See ya at school.”
The yard in front of our house contained a mailbox and a single tree. It was a plum tree that was lucky to get fruit once every couple of years. I vaguely remember tasting a plum from it once, and then never again.
Facing our house, if one looked to the left, one would see a gravel road that lead down to a fenced off rock quarry, and the entrance to the sewer next to that. If you continued to follow the gravel down to the fence, you would see that the fence blocked off the quarry, but cut off when it met the woods, and there was an opening into the wooded area directly behind the house.
The wooded area was used mostly by teenagers as a place to hang out and party without being seen by parents. I remember one day when my sister Kaylee and I were exploring in the wooded area, we stumbled across an old fire pile and an unopened 24-pack of Bud Light. Seeing as how we were still kids, and had just hit the ‘Drugs Are Bad’ part of our schooling days, we did what we thought would be both fun and would teach whoever it was not to buy beer, or at least not to leave beer out in the open: we opened the 24-pack, and threw each can of beer at a large, pointy rock near the campsite.
It took us nearly half an hour to smash open and drain every beer in that pack. By the time we were done, our hands and clothing smelled of beer, and the ground around us was rather flooded. We left the wooded area and went back to the house, where we explained what the smell was from, and were told not to go back into the wooded area.
Obviously at the time I didn't understand why we couldn't go back, but as I thought on it later in life when I began to understand the importance of money, I began to realize that she was afraid that whoever had left the beer in the woods would come back and find out what we had done, and then figure out it was us and take their revenge.
The sewer entrance on the other side of the gravel road, between the road and the next door neighbor’s house, was big enough that a full-sized six year old could walk in to it without hunching over. Being the age I was, I was a major fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so obviously what did I think I was going to find in the sewers?
One day I was playing around the sewers, and my sister decided she was going to go exploring in it, even though we were told not to go into the pipe. We couldn't be stopped from playing at the exit, obviously, but the parental units had told us to never actually go fully into the sewers. My sister went in despite my vocal objections, and she walked all the way to a fork in the sewers, which was at about the middle of the street. It was at this point that she turned around and started screaming because she was afraid of the dark and the light was so far away. Obviously I had to retrieve my mother, who went into the sewer and retrieved my sister, then lead us both in to the house, where we were both grounded: her for going in to the sewer, and myself for not making more of an effort to stop her.
The back yard of the house was pretty much empty, save for the grass growing in it. At one point in our time there was had an above ground pool, and during the summer I learned to swim in it. The entire family pretty much learned to swim in that pool, save for the smallest sister, Mercedes*. Of course, during the days in summer when we couldn't swim, we were told to stay outside in the sun anyway. Alabama summers were absolutely sweltering, and rather than have us stay in the house where it was cooler, we were stuck outside, unable to really entertain ourselves because of the heat.
I remember that pool. It was one of those six-foot pools made of blue plastic with white trim. It featured a metallic ladder with four white rungs to match the siding, and it clipped on to the side of the pool so that it couldn't be moved while you were climbing in or out of the pool. It was one of those ones where the kit came with its own litter net that had to be put together before it could be used, and where you had to fill it by hose and drop a disc or two of concentrated chlorine and wait for it to dissolve before you could swim in it for the first time of the year. It wasn’t the first pool we had, but it was the most memorable.
It was memorable because of the horrible memory it brings back to me, of a time when I was young and had absolutely no idea of the consequences of my actions. While living in that house in Alabama, both my sister Kaylee and I had our own pet cat each. Both cats were female. I had named my cat Rainbow, both because I was a fan of creative names, and because the black and gray striping of the cat resembled a monotone rainbow. My sister named her cat Sarah.
Those cats were tortured by us. To this day, because I remember the way we treated those cats, I am of the opinion that a child should not have a pet until their age hits double digits. We used to get mad at the cats when they scratched us because we pulled their tails, or when we called them and they hid from us. We were fascinated by their claws, and by the myth that cats always land on their feet, and I remember once we were testing that theory by throwing the cats at the ceiling. My cat hit the ceiling and then the floor, not landing on her feet, and then stumbling away as fast as she could, bleeding from the nose. The sight of her bleeding haunts me to this day, and I believe it wasn’t more than a week later that she found a way to escape the house. The cat ran away, and I was sad, but my mother felt that not getting me another cat was a good idea.
My sister’s cat, however, managed to get outside one day, and came back a couple days later. More time passed, and she had a litter of kittens. Those kittens were the most adorable things you could ever have seen, and while my mother desperately looked for houses for them, I took it upon myself to protect them and teach them the ways of the world.
It was mid-July, and the kittens were finally walking well and not getting stuck in places where they knew they shouldn’t be going. My mother kept them all in the garage, and kept the garage door closed, so that they wouldn't overheat and die. I went in to the garage with the intent to play with the kittens, or at least pet them, but the sight of the animals lounging around with open mouths and stuck out tongues gave me the idea to cool them off the best way I knew how: teach them how to swim in the pool out back.
For some reason, I was the only person in the house, so I had nobody to ask about the idea or tell me if it was good. I figured it was a good idea, so I grabbed a plastic bin and gathered up all nine of the kittens, and took them in to the back yard towards the pool. I set the plastic bin in the water and watched it float for a moment, then went back in to the house to put on my bathing suit.
Coming back out in to the yard, I climbed in to the pool and steadied the plastic bin to that it wouldn't leave my side. Then, grabbing a single kitten at a time, I gently lifted it’s mewling body from the plastic bin and set it in the water. I watched it paddle for bit, then grabbed another kitten, doing the same with it. While the second kitten paddled, I grabbed the first and placed it back in to the bin, allowing it to rest.
I managed to do this with all the kittens, and took the bin back in to the garage when I was done. Being the young age that I was, when I saw that all of the kittens weren’t moving, I figured they were all tired. I set the bin next to their mother, and began lifting the cats out of the bin and setting them on the ground next to her. But Sarah sniffed the first kitten, mewed, and then ran off. I thought she’d be back, so I continued to lift the kittens out of the bin until the bin was empty.
My mother came in to the garage looking for me by the time I had finished putting the kittens on the ground. They were all still soaked with water, and most of them weren’t moving. I told my mother I had given them swimming lessons and that they were all sleeping because they were tired. My mother took me into the main house and, from what she’s told me (since I can not remember the punishment), threw an absolutely hysterical fit. She’s told me that she doesn’t remember punishing me for my actions, but believes that the hysterical fit she threw in front of me was probably punishment enough. She’s convinced that she scared me, and this is why I remember the incident so well, but I have to ask: If her hysterics are why I remember the kitten drowning incident so well, why don’t I remember her hysterics?
I was young. I had no idea what I had done wrong. I thought I was helping the cats out at the time. My mother, to this day, feels like she overreacted when she found out what I had done, but I think I understand why she acted the way she did. I had just killed off over half of the litter of kittens, and now she couldn't get as much money from them as she may have been able to originally. Out of nine kittens, three survived my “teaching methods.” That was my first experience with death.
I was five or six when it happened, so obviously I had no real idea about what I was doing at the time. But it is this incident and a couple others that make me currently not trust myself to own a cat.
Talking to my mother also reveals that my memory is a bit skewered when it comes to the incident. While I did, indeed, try to teach the kittens to swim in a pool, my mother is convinced that the pool that was used for the incident was more of a kiddie sized wading pool, and not the five foot deep family pool that I remember. Considering I’m dredging up memories from nearly twenty years ago, there is a good possibility that she is right and I am wrong.
Cats weren’t the only pets, though. I had an aquarium in my room, and my mother’s favorite pet for me were newts. A newt is a little black and orange lizard that normally doesn't get longer than about six inches. It lives in water, pretty much, and needs to stay hydrated to stay alive. I think the most I ever had at one time was three, and every single one of them have died at my hands.
Nothing so cruel as taking them out of the tank and squishing them, or throwing them at the ceiling. No, the way they died is during tank cleaning. I would take them out of the tank, stick them in a covered fishbowl or something, clean the tank, refill water, whatever. The next day the lizards would be gone, because stupid me, I filled the tank too high and they were able to easily climb out. So the lizards would escape from the tank and go explore for a few hours before they shriveled up and died of dehydration in a corner somewhere.
I was always, always the one that ran across the body. And being unfamiliar, really, with death, I was too afraid to pick them up. They’d usually be underneath one of the my pieces or furniture and I’d have found them because I was looking for something else, all stuck to the carpet, and I remember once trying to pull one from the carpet and ripping it’s dried body in half. So yeah, a bit of a traumatic experience there.
For some reason my mother never got mad at me for losing the newts. And she always saw fit to buy me more, even when I didn't ask for them. I wonder if I ever asked her to stop buying them for me… I have no idea, really.
The kitten swimming incident happened in summer, while we were out of school. That same summer, it turned out that the kittens were not the only ones in need of swimming lessons. A popular spot for our family was a small beach right on the Gulf of Mexico that not many people knew about. It wasn’t right on the ocean, so there wasn’t much chance of being dragged away by the undertow. I believe we had found the spot purely by accident, and would often go there to relax and stay cool during those hot Alabama summer days.
I loved the water, and I loved the days when we went to the beach, because I was able to swim as far as I wanted, having proven myself to be an excellent swimmer. On one of the beach days, I was swimming pretty far out, and I guess my sister Kaylee had tried to follow me, but she wasn’t as good a swimmer as I was. I heard her yell for help, and I saw her floundering in the water a bit. I quickly swam over to her side, and saw that she had slipped into one of the deeper areas of the water and was having trouble floating and swimming. She was panicking, and couldn't really call for help because she was having trouble keeping her head above water.
I couldn't grab her and swim towards shore because she wouldn't let me, and I am sure I wouldn't have been strong enough to do it anyway. I told her to calm down and to jump forward every time she sank under the water. When she came back up, she’d take a deep breath and then sink again, still half panicking but able control herself a bit. I called for mom every time she went under, and every time she came up I told her to keep jumping. Eventually our mother heard my cries for help and came running, having believed for a bit that we were playing before realizing my voice was filled with panic.
Kaylee was safely pulled from the water, and I followed because I was worried. She was scared to death and still half panicked, but other than that, she was fine. My mother remarked that had I not heard her cries and instructed her the way I did, she very well could have drowned. I forget if this was before or after the kitten incident, but I would have to say it was before, since I decided that everything around me needed to learn how to swim. I stayed with my sister for five minutes to make sure she was okay, then I went back to the water to swim on my own. After that, I declared that I would learn how to swim while carrying another person, to make sure I could be of more help should another similar situation arise.
When school started back up and I was going to, I believe, first grade, the neighborhood we lived in was struck by a nasty case of chickenpox. Day by day, friends were pulled from school and quarantined at home, unable to come out and play, and the kids that knew nothing about what was going on (ie: me) began to wonder if they were okay and if we would ever see them again.
I was able to avoid the sickness for the most part. It finally boiled down to the fact that my youngest sister Mercedes* caught a mild case of it, and I volunteered to sleep in her room just so I could catch the illness and get it over with.
Why is it that when you volunteer to catch the one-hit wonder sicknesses, you’re hit with, like, the worst case ever?
I remember parts of being sick. I remember having pox everywhere, from my eyelids, to the inside of my mouth, to the bottoms of my feet. I remember laying around in my underwear because wearing anything made me feel like I was on fire. My mother coated the couch in sheets and I laid on the couch, miserable, staying away from my bed so that I wouldn't have a relapse when this was over. When it got bad enough, my mother turned the upstairs bathtub into a giant tub of oatmeal, and I soaked in that once or twice with the oatmeal drying out the pox and relieving the itching for a while.
There was one day that I was laying on the couch, itching like crazy and praying for relief, when my bus driver came by to see how I was doing. She brought with her some pink calamine lotion, and rubbed that ointment over my body to help with the pain. I remember most of the application, and being cold while it was done, but being cold was so much better than being consumed with an urge to scratch and not being able to. For a young child, being unable to scratch an itch was absolute torture.
Eventually the pox faded and I was good as new. I walked away from the ordeal with only two pox scars, which I think is an accomplishment compared with how bad I had the illness. One of the scars is on my left foot, near the ankle, and the second one can be found on my arm on a good day. The scar on my arm, as far as I know, is almost fully healed, so it’s incredibly hard to locate, and one day I may just start saying I only have one pox scar.
It’s funny, but it seems that most of my memories of my childhood are marked by some form of pain. My first bicycle ride, for instance. I finally got my training wheels off and was able to ride my bike where I wanted it, and was riding in the yard when a friend of the family pulls up in his truck. My sisters’ father went to talk to him, leaving me unattended with very little stability, but I didn't care. I was riding a bike!
That sense of joy came quickly to a halt when I clotheslined myself on the family friend’s truck’s rearview mirror. I believe I lost control of the bicycle while riding near the mailbox and his truck, and instead of doing the smart thing and hopping off the bicycle and coming to a stop, I thought I could correct myself. I guess not.
Eventually I’d learn to ride a bike with greater stability, but it wouldn't happen in Alabama. What did happen in Alabama, at least related to bicycles, is that for Christmas one year, I received my bicycle in parts. The jackass posing as a father figure thought it would be neat if he gave me a bicycle I had to build before I could ride it. While at the time I may have agreed, I do remember not having all of the parts when I first looked at it, so I do believe that the SOB grabbed my bicycle from a junkyard and tried to put as little effort into the gift as was possible, while my sisters received brand new, completely put-together bicycles for Christmas that year.
This is a trend that would continued for the rest of my interactions with the man, and it is one of the reasons why I despise him so much. … you know, instead of me wasting all my pronouns, let’s call him Mark*. Obviously Mark* is not his real name, but it is a suitable faux name.
Now, Mark* was my “father” by adoption only, and he let it be known almost as soon as I was old enough to remember things. My mother believes the same thing that I do: that the man put on a show for nine months and adopted me purely to get into her pants and produce heirs of his own. He’s provided the best for my sisters and showed blatant favoritism for them for years, in plain sight, and it wasn’t until I was a bit in to my teens that I realized how much of an asshole he was and just exactly what it was that he was doing in the first place.
One of the most brutal beatings I received as a “punishment” for my actions came from this man. My sister Kaylee had thrown a fit earlier in the day, while he was at work, and in the process had tipped a good number of her drawers full of clothing out of her bedroom window, and wasted half a tube of toothpaste by smearing it all over a light bulb on a lamp, which she then turned on. I had been safely in my room the entire time, on the other end of the hallway, and had heard her screaming and throwing herself around her room and stomping her feet all over the place for a good half hour.
It wasn’t until she started slamming her door just for the noise that my mom decided to come up to the room to see the damage that she had done. My sister got a good spanking from my mother, who used a switch, and then she was told to stay quiet or she’d get another one. So my sister kept quiet and I tried to avoid making any noise.
It wouldn't matter. Her father came home while my mother was out back doing something, and Kaylee met him at the door after sneaking out of her room when my mother wasn’t around. In the most cheerful tone she could muster, she told him about the fit I threw, and about how I tipped all her clothing out the window and how I wasted half a tube of toothpaste. The man came up to my room red-faced, pulled off his belt and nearly beat me senseless.
It wasn’t until he heard my mother berating my sister and telling her to go back to her room that he quit hitting me. And went down to talk to my mother about why Kaylee was in trouble. He heard the real story from my mother, and he got a berating from her about acting without confirming stuff, and that she should go upstairs and apologize to me.
I never got an apology. And Kaylee never got a punishment for her lies.
That memory sticks with me to this day. I am amazed I never got scars from the belt whipping. His show of favoritism was so blatantly obvious there, and I was young and naïve enough to believe that the man had made an honest mistake. I know better now.
That was obviously the most painful punishment I received while I lived in Alabama. But the most painful of anything that happened to me while I was there was the episode of getting my tonsils out. It was the middle of winter, and I had been sick for weeks because of my tonsils. I’d been generally unable to breathe well and finally my mother took me to the doctor, who said I needed to have my tonsils out. A week or so later I went under the knife with no problem, and was out of the hospital in a day or two.
The night I got home from the hospital, I had some kind of adverse reaction to the treatment I was given. I ended up vomiting up all sorts of things from blood, to food, to a very big amount of mucus. My mother called the doctor who told her to bring me in, which she would have had it not been snowing all day. The car’s tired were literally frozen to the driveway, and my mother ended up having to get an ambulance to give her a ride to the hospital with me.
Vomiting right after having your tonsils out hurts. It hurts almost as bad as laughing soda out of your nose. You’ve got stitches in the back of your throat holding your wound closed so that you do not spent forever swallowing blood, and each time you puke, acid rises from your stomach and washes over the wounds, getting in between the stitches and burning the hell out of your throat. I remember the pain, and not much more after that. I do not remember what caused the adverse reaction. I remember a bit of the bumpy ambulance ride, but nothing of being at the hospital a second time. I remember vomiting and having to hold my head over a Rubbermaid tub so I didn't get it anywhere, and I remember finally running out of things to vomit and just dry heaving for an hour. It was a traumatic experience for me at such a young age.
But just because most of my memories are painful experiences, it doesn't mean they all are. Living in a two-story house with carpeted stairs made for some interesting attempts at having fun.
My mother was a fan of footie pajamas. A good pair of footie pajamas would slide on carpet with the right amount of force. So footie pajamas + carpeted stairs = kids sliding down the stairs on their butts, bumping all the way, then laughing and doing it again.
My mother was convinced we’d hurt ourselves so she never really let us play like that, but we did it anyway. We never really got punished for it. It was fun while it lasted, but eventually we grew tired of the activity and started looking for other ways to entertain ourselves.
One night while my mother was out and Mark* was watching us, after playing hide and seek for the nth time that day, I came up with the nifty idea of getting inside a suitcase to see how long we could stay inside of it without being scared. It was just me and Kaylee playing at this point, and the idea was to zip up the sibling inside the suitcase and wait until they said they wanted out.
My sister went first, and I had hardly gotten the top of the suitcase folded over before she said she wanted out. So I had to beat just a little over ten second, which wasn’t that long at all. I climbed into the suitcase and she got it zipped, and I wasn’t scared.
Until I felt it move, that is.
Kaylee thought it would be funny to push the suitcase down the stairs, with me inside it. She thought I would have fun, or something. I do not remember the ride down the stairs, only the fact that it happened and that I woke up in my bed with my mother there and a massive headache, and Kaylee in her room screaming because her butt had been busted.
She wasn’t punished because we were playing with a suitcase, but because she had pushed me down the stairs and in doing so could have seriously hurt and/or killed me. To this day I wonder if I hit my head on the way down and knocked something loose, because I personally do not think I am really all there in the head.
Perhaps it is this because of this incident (plus my insistence) that my mother enrolled me in Tae Kwon Do. Literally translating to ‘hand foot art,’ Tae Kwon Do is the only experience I have with any kind of self-defense martial arts training. I wanted to do it in Alabama because it was the only martial art available, and because it seemed fun, but obviously a part in the back of my head wanted to use it on my siblings.
Of course, me having this knowledge would lead to my sister using it against me. “You can not use your fighting on me,” she would say. “You’re not allowed, you’ll get in trouble.” And then she’d come at me with a toy or a tennis racket or something, and I knew in the back of my head that if I tried to beat her up for it, she’d say she was defending herself. Oh, and she’d go to her father to say so.
Even though my sister doesn't remember much about her childhood (so far as I know), I think she resents me for it anyway. She is one of those people that focuses on the bad things that happen over the good things, and when things don’t go her way she drudges up all these things that you have done to her and throw them in your face as if she’s been a perfect angel and you’re the worst evil imaginable.
And this isn’t just directed at those related to her. No, this extends to people outside of family influence too. This trend of resentment would follow as we moved away from Alabama, following the divorce of my mother from Mark*.
Now, the divorce was something else altogether. I do not really remember much of anything about it, but the following story I have to repeat in order to give you a good sense of what kind of person Mark* really is, so that you can better understand his influence on my family later on in this novel.
From what I’ve been told, during one of the bigger fights that included the initial proclamation from my mother that she wanted a divorce, Mark* came into the play room while we were all in there, trying to watch TV and do our best to ignore the angry sounds of yelling that were coming from our parents’ bedroom. He began to go to each of us, hugging us and telling us goodbye, and getting us all generally worked up and upset.
Then, Mark* returns to my mother in whatever room she happened to be in (and from what I heard when I heard the story, she was now in the kitchen) and continues the fight with her. While he’s fighting with her, myself and my sisters have managed to calm ourselves down, and returned our attentions to the TV.
About fifteen minutes later, Mark* returns to the play room and again, gets us all worked up, hugging us goodbye and telling us he’ll miss us, and generally causing us to get upset again, before he finally walks out the front door and slams it behind him.
So now the bastard is walking to his car, starting it up, slamming himself inside of it and driving away, while the household of people he claimed to care about have all been worked up and are now crying. My mother is upset from the fight, and we’re upset because we were pretty much told to be upset, instead of really having a reason for it.
Why did he act this way? It’s all speculation, but my guess is that he wanted to feel like he was still in charge, and that he still had people on his side, even if the people were just kids. It’s like a bully that gets into a verbal fight with another boy; he wants his lackies to back him up, and most of them he has to threaten in order to get their support.
The divorce went smoothly enough, I guess, and soon my mother was left with three kids and a huge empty house, but no car, and barely enough strength to work the jobs that were needed to pay the bills. My mother became incredibly depressed, as she was already prone to bouts of depression, and it took a while for her to grieve and recover from the divorce.
Enter Billy. Billy was a redneck as hard as they come, and my mother took a good shining to that guy. There must have been something about him that she liked… either he was charismatic, or charming, or just patient, I don’t know what it was. But I know that their relationship didn’t last long, and it ended rather violently. There was an answering machine involved, I do remember that much, and soon after their split, we moved away from Alabama.
---
So, after a tumultuous divorce where that bastard Mark* played on the feelings of all resident children, our family was ripped apart. Mark* took custody of my sisters, and my mother had custody of me. Pretty sure that I would have gone to Mark* if he had shown any interest in me at all, but obviously he didn't. I do not think I even crossed his mind.
Anyway, my mother and I had to move from the large house in Alabama, and since we really didn't have any money, we ended up moving in with my uncle in Virginia Beach, VA. My uncle offered to help my mother get on her feet, get a job, get a car, and generally adjust to living on her own.
The first few years of living in Virginia are a little lost on me. I remember moving between houses and schools, and I remember living with my uncle and aunt and interacting with them, but specific events are not readily available at the moment. What I do remember from my time in Virginia, I will tell here, but let it be known that the timeline may be a bit skewered. Not all events happened in the order that I tell them.
My uncle is an officer in the US Navy, so he makes a pretty good chunk of change. I do not remember his rank when we moved to Virginia, but he was still living in a nice sized house, so I am guessing that he was a good deal up the chain. His wife was a worker as well, although I am not one hundred percent certain of what her job was at the time.
Currently they have two kids, but out of all my cousins, I am the oldest by nearly a decade. I was six or seven at the time, so they didn't have any kids during this period of time in my life. We moved around the beginning of the school year, and I was registered in a rather mean public school.
Moving to Virginia would jumpstart a long history with me and teasing in schools. I was a studious boy, who cared very much for his grades and not so much for making friends, and my mother had been a fan of home schooling. I was home schooled for a bit, so the entrance in to public school for whatever grade (I am not certain what grade I was in) was a bit of a shock to my system.
I started out as friendly as I could be. I was typically of a shy caliber, but in those formative years I was able to force myself out of what little shell I had. Looking back now, I can not decide whether I should have stayed in my shell, or if I should have reigned back my efforts to make friends a bit. All I know is that some of my strangeness and my habits were looked down upon, and I became the brunt of teasing the minute I reentered public schools.
The most popular insult at the time was one related to my last name. The other kids liked to call me ‘Pardue Chicken.’ It was mainly because I was soft-hearted, and at just about any sign of teasing I’d break in to tears and scurry off to the guidance counselor’s office to be consoled and talked to. I honestly do not think I’d be where I am today if it hadn’t been for the guidance counselors. I’d probably have spent time in JuVie if it hadn’t been for them.
So, I spent pretty much my entire elementary school career getting pushed around by kids because I was different from them. I had a strange last name, I wore clothes I got from yard sales, I was the quiet kid, I was a nerd. I was not up to date on the latest fashions, I was not in to the same things all the other kids were in to, etc. If it was something that could be used to make fun of another kid, it was used against me.
I suppose I didn't really help myself. I was never in the habit of brushing my teeth, so my breath smelled pretty bad. I used it as a defense mechanism to keep the kids away, and it generally worked well. Until it was used against me, as a form of name calling. That and my choice of haircut, which, at the time, was a rat tail.
I say this now: I am proud of my fashion decisions growing up. They allowed me to stand out on my own terms. I wore what I wanted to wear, and I (kind of) didn't care what other people thought of it. I grew accustomed to blue jeans and solid-color shirts, mostly in dark colors, and these clothing habits have continued to follow me since my early school days. I always seemed to be wearing second-hand, hand-me-down sneakers, and jeans that were too big for me so they were rolled at the cuff. The sneakers were always cut higher than my ankles, because I felt like I was going to trip and break my ankle if they were not. So the combined look of the rolled up pants and high-cut sneakers made me look like I was wearing high waters… but the rolling of the jeans were my mom’s thing. I do not do that now.
So school was not the greatest thing in the world. After school was about the same, minus the teasing. I began to realize that I had an immense dislike for homework, not just because of the time it took to do the work, but because I felt like the fact that the teachers sent it home, they thought their students were all idiots. If the student can not be taught everything they need in the class, then obviously giving them homework is not going to do shit for them either. And if you can not teach your students without giving them homework, then maybe being a teacher is not what you need to do for the rest of your life.
Of course, being a kid who hasn’t even hit double digit age yet, I had to do what I was told. If I was told to write a 30 page report on what I did over my summer break, then I would have to write that 30 page report (and would probably swear off writing by the time it was finished). In school, at that age, a single teacher was assigned to teach a class of roughly 20 kids all of the subjects they needed. So the kids in the class, instead of declaring they hated one or two teachers in the school for the amount of homework they gave, declared they hated the same teacher for the amount of homework.
I generally held good grades in school. I considered myself accomplished if I ended up in the Honor Roll or on the Principal’s List for my grades, and usually I was there. It presented more fodder for teasing, but I didn't care. I figured the bullies would be too busy teasing me to make sure they were not held back in classes, but it really wouldn't matter since moving to Virginia also started a long trend of house hopping for my family.
My mother moved me and her to a friend’s house after my uncle was deployed to a sub. She was finally working, and she finally had a car. By this time I had moved up to the third grade, and it is here that I would meet my first real friend. -Andrew- was his name.
Of course, before I met -Andrew-, I would have to get through a period of time where I went to a private, Christian school. My mother thought it would be a good idea to send me to Tidewater Junior Academy. I do not know what possessed her to do that, but again, being so young it was something I had to do.
In my brief time at TJA, I learned a few things: I am very friendly when there are not any kids out to get me, I love fresh kiwi, and apparently I Love Lucy is a suitable type of entertainment for Christian students.
Alright, I can not do this chapter this way. I am trying to timeline my thoughts and it’s not working. Let’s try something a little different, eh?
I remember meeting a woman who, I was told, was my godmother. I do not really remember her all that much, but I think she was the reason that my mother thought it would be a good idea for me to go to the Academy. So I guess I have that woman to thank for the few weeks I was able to go to that school.
I say ‘the few weeks’ because we ended up having a little altercation with my aunt that resulted in her taking away the only mode of transportation we had. TJA was quite a ways away from where we were living in Virginia Beach, and they had no bus transport system for their students. My mother got in to a fight with my aunt over something (I do not really know what), and when my mother was late on the car payment by a couple days, my aunt took it upon herself to steal the car away from us in the night. This resulted in my mother waking up the next morning to get me ready for school, then finding that we had no car, and her breaking down in to tears because of her being so overstressed.
My mother and my aunt didn't talk to each other again for many years. I believe tensions are still strained between the two of them, and even I consider the woman to be the utmost bitch.
So, here we were, no car, my mother having trouble landing a steady job, and I am still in school. This is actually before the age of ‘parents go to jail if their kids miss a certain amount of days’ so we were at least safe from any legal action because of me missing school, but because of the stress, my mother declared I wouldn't be home schooled. I do not know how much school I missed, but eventually I was registered into the local public school system.
I think it was during this time that my sister Kaylee came back to live with my mother for a time, in what would become a habit of house-switching for both sisters. In her first visit back, I could tell that Mark* was spoiling them quite a bit. Especially Kaylee, who, at the time, was convinced her father could do no wrong, and whose answer to everything that she wanted to do but was not allowed to do was, “Well, Dad would let me do it!”
So here we were. Me and my sister were living with our mother, who was living with a friend. School was on the horizon as my mother tried to bring her stress level down. Her friend was starting to get just a bit ragged as it seemed like we were not going to leave any time soon.
The more I think about it, the more I am certain that I have the timeline screwed up, and that the first house we lived in outside of my mother’s friend’s house and outside of my uncle’s place is an apartment complex. It would be the first apartment complex of two that I live in during my stay in Virginia Beach.
The first apartment complex I lived in, the house was an upstairs apartment. Walking through the front door, the first thing one wouldn'tice would be the living room with a large sliding glass door overlooking the courtyard. Right next to the living room was the kitchen, with a wall separating the two. After walking through the living room, you would get to the hallways where three bedrooms and a bathroom could be found; these would be my mother’s bedroom, my bedroom, and the bedroom both my sisters shared. They were relatively big in size, at least by the guess of a younger child such as myself, and were big enough to suit our purposes.
The reason why I think I have my timeline skewered is because I distinctly remember my mother having a guy friend over while at her friend’s place, and she didn't meet this guy friend until we moved into this first apartment complex. His name was Rick, and he would be one of the biggest banes of my mother’s love life, and ultimately a scar on my own life.
He was the typical guy that you’d expect a high schooler to fall in love with. One of those bad boys that put off the biker persona. He had long hair that curled naturally, constantly wore sleeveless shirts that showed off his tattoos, and his only form of warmth in the winter consisted of a black leather Harley Davidson jacket, and civilian-style BDU pants.
He was also a constant drinker who didn't know when to stop. He was a violent-type of alcoholic, and very rarely did I ever see him without a beer in his hand. He was one of those guys that never really grows up, always lamenting about how he wants to do this or that, but all of his dreams are the kinds you’d expect a freshman or sophomore to have.
My mother fell for this guy after meeting him one day at a party, and within a week the two were dating. I didn't pay much attention to it, since I was dealing with teasing at school and the like and was getting into a habit of keeping it all to myself. My mother didn't really know much about the torture I was going through in school, and I wanted to keep it that way. It was one of those pride things, you know… being known as the kid who went crying to his mommy when the other kids were being mean to him would just be more fodder for the cannon.
My mother had finally found a job as a cashier at a local supermarket, so she was able to keep rent and other bills paid, but was still saving for a vehicle. Her hours made it impossible for her to be at home for us when we got off the bus, so she hired a babysitter to watch us when we got home from school.
Here’s some advice to all you babysitters out there: past the age of six, a pack of crackers and a juice box are NOT a satisfactory after-school snack. Also, if you’re watching a pack of siblings that are all different ages, do not treat them all the same way, alright? I am all for equality, but to a younger child, being treated as equal to a sibling that they “outrank” in terms of age makes them feel insignificant.
It’s also the middle of the afternoon when a child gets home from school. The last thing they want to do is their homework, and some children will throw fits in order to not do it. Compromise with the child. Let them do half of the work that is required of them, then allow them to go outside for a bit. Some children won’t realize that by the time they get half their homework done, either their parents will be there to pick them up, or they’ll only have an hour or so of play time before it gets dark. It’s a neat little compromise.
All I remember of the babysitter is that she was a woman a little older than my mother, and that I dreaded the days where she was watching us because they were flat out BORING AS FUCK. Of course, In my young mind I wouldn't have described it that way. The word “fuck” was not even part of my mother’s vocabulary at the time. But it doesn't make it any less true. The woman was a borefest. I’d come home, have a packet of crackers or some celery and peanut butter and a juice box, do my homework, then have to sit there and wait until my mother came to pick me up. Seriously, I was not allowed to go outside, even on the best days, even though the babysitter lived in the same apartment complex, and the only place I would have gone would be the courtyard in the middle of the complex.
I actually didn't have trouble making friends when I lived in those apartments. I was starting to grow out of my “stay in the house all the time” stage, and was getting into sports. And being a daredevil. And a little thief.
Behind the apartment complex, there was a long fence that separated us from the busy street. Directly beyond the fence was an open field that was never mowed down, which lead to a hardware store. As a young child, I had a yearning for acceptance, and gum. So when the local kids of the apartments and beyond told me they wanted me to join in on their little bubblegum-stealing mission, I hesitantly agreed.
I am not 100% certain that they’re sold anymore, but I remember when you could buy pieces of grape-flavored Double Bubble at gas stations for a nickel. The hardware store also had them, and the way we’d steal the gum is some kids would cause a commotion in the back of the store, then the leader of our group would load pieces of gum into my pockets (for some reason I was the only kid that wore pants or shorts with pockets in them), and then we’d escape out the door before the old man who ran the place realized anything was missing.
We succeeded in this plan only twice before we were caught. The other kids got off easy because none of them had any of the stolen merchandise on them, and they all blamed me. Of course I was going to get in trouble because the gum was all in my pockets. When we were caught, the old man called the parents of the kids that didn't get away, and we were all sent home. My mother grounded me for a couple weeks for the thieving, and I got to sit in my room and listen to the other kids screaming and playing in the courtyard, having gotten off scot-free after blaming the entire thing on me. After that, I was desperate for acceptance, and had to find another way to impress the kids in the apartment complex.
There was a good twenty feet from the upstairs portion of the apartment I lived in to the downstairs, and I can remember at least three different occasions dropping from the top floor to the bottom floor on a dare. I never broke anything, but you know how sometimes when you land on your feet you get that sharp pain that shoots up your leg and makes you limp for a bit? That happened on the last dare I took to jump down, and I was afraid that if I ever did it again I’d land wrong and actually break something, so I never dropped from the upper level again.
This left me looking for more things to do that expanded upon my daredevil side. I tried climbing the walls around the complex, but that didn’t work. I managed to climb on to the roof of the Laundromat, but that lost its novelty very quickly, almost as soon as I got in trouble for it. So instead of climbing on top of the Laundromat, I went inside of it.
One day during a neighborhood game of hide and seek, I went into the Laundromat looking for a good place to hide. I was checking the dryers for an empty one, and I stumbled across one that was empty save for a five dollar bill that had obviously fallen out of someone’s pocket during the dry cycle. As a young boy with no allowance, all money was special and “sacred.” I pocketed the money, just as the seeker came into the Laundromat and spotted me.
Damn, I lost.
There were also trees behind the complex that could be climbed, and the most popular tree for myself, my friends, and my sisters to climb was known as the “red leaf tree.” And that’s what it was, for all intents and purposes: a tree whose leaves were red year-round.
There was one day that I was alone climbing the tree when a group of older teenagers came to it. I stayed in the upper branches because, at the time, I was not scared of heights. I was actually more scared of the teenagers, simply because of my experiences at school with bullying. They looked mean and strong and I didn't feel like getting beat up at the time.
The one that looked like the leader pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to his buddies, and the group began smoking. I didn't like the smoke; my mother was a smoker, and the smoke made me cough and made it difficult to breathe. So obviously, the smoke drifted into the higher branches of the tree and reached my perch, so I began to cough. The leader looked up in surprise, as I had somehow carefully hidden myself in a tree that was losing leaves as the days got colder, and then a creepy smile filled his face and he offered me a smoke as well.
Public schools are good at one thing, and one thing only: instilling a fear in younger kids that smoking is bad and that doing drugs means you will go to hell when you die. So I refused the smoke, jumped down from the tree, and ran home as fast as I could, which was considerably faster than a group of lazy teenagers. I disappeared into my house and stayed there for the rest of the day, after telling my mother everything that happened. I didn't want to go outside and be beat up by this group of teenagers who were probably not old enough to be smoking and figured I had told someone that would get them caught.
So, apart from climbing into the dryers in the complex’s Laundromat and climbing the trees behind the complex, there was not much stuff to do that was daredevilish, so we neighborhood kids had to occupy ourselves the best way we could otherwise: sports. There were often enough kids out to play most any sport, but the most popular sports were baseball and kickball.
Okay, so playing baseball in the courtyard of an apartment complex probably is not the best idea, especially when the apartments all have windows facing the courtyard, but we made sure to use a tennis ball when playing so that no windows were broken. And, amazingly, no windows were broken.
I can remember one day, while playing our game of baseball, I was up to bat. I hit the pitch that was thrown to me and took off around the bases. Now, I used to be a pretty quick runner, and that day managed to pretty much beat the ball to second base. Or, almost.
The rule of the game was, any balls hit that went over the apartments were automatic home runs, but everything else was fair game. This meant that if a ball that was hit bounced off of a wall and was caught, the hitter was considered out. If the ball bounced off a wall and hit the hitter (as unlikely as that scenario was), the hitter was considered out.
This particular day, the ball bounced off the far wall and had enough bounce to it that it met me at second base. Well… it met my groin. I was hit by the ball directly in the groin, and was considered out, but I considered myself out of play for the rest of that day. I still remember the impact. That hurt! I had to have laid on the ground for a good ten minutes after the impact, and obviously play was halted. Laughs were had later, but at the time, there was silence and more than a few winces in my direction.
After that game, I only bunted. I didn't want a repeat of the tragedy. I preferred kickball, really, and was unbeatable at the game. I was usually chosen as the team’s pitcher, and was able to roll the ball perfectly towards the kicker that anything they kicked would fly wildly off into foul territory, or it would fly straight up and make itself easy to catch. My own kicking abilities were okay, but I tended to not kick as hard as I could to keep from breaking windows; a soccer ball is considerably harder than a tennis ball.
It was the early nineties at this point. I distinctly remember going indoors near dusk on one day and overhearing a television in a neighbor’s house say something about Michael Jordan’s father dying, and MJ himself announcing his foray into baseball. I didn't follow sports teams much, as I didn't really watch much television, but the announcement that MJ was leaving basketball is what got me interested in the Chicago Bulls, at least for a small time. Well, him, and the fact that their team logo was so cool looking.
Pogs were popular at this time, so while I was collecting anything Bulls, my friends were collecting and playing Pogs. To this day I do not understand how the game was played, or if it was even a game. I just know I never got into it.
On the tail end of my fascination with the Bulls (and not the actual game of basketball), I began to really get in to videogames. At this point in my life, my sole experience with videogames was with the NES system. And let’s face it, the NES was not exactly top-of-the-line in graphics and games by the time the early to mid nineties rolled around, you know?
I suppose my interest in graphics and games started when my mom, me, and Rick went to Pizza Hut. While we were waiting for our food, Rick challenged me to a game of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition in the little arcade area of the restaurant. This was my first foray into realistic (at the time) graphics, and videogames that used more than two buttons.
I think the thing that really got me hooked was the music. The music was so much nicer in the arcade game than it was in an NES cartridge. Where I was expecting blips and beeps and high notes, I got rock music and actual voices. The announcer declaring, “He’s on FIRE!” will stay with me forever.
Of course, my first time playing the game was basically me mashing buttons and trying to keep up with what was going on onscreen. Halftime rolled around and I was finally getting the hang of the game, so I was only behind by ten points or so. I was not being a sore loser, either; I was having the time of my young life.
The game continued after the halftime stuff ended. I remember that I had chosen the bulls, but I do not remember what team Rick had chosen. The buzzer was counting down for the end of the game, and at the last second I mashed a couple buttons and, as my guy had the ball, shot the ball towards the hoop. From half court.
And made it.
The game ended with a score of something like 33 to 34, me. I managed to claim a bit of beginner’s luck to beat Rick at an arcade game I had never played before. It was fun, and it felt good, but the thing that was often brought up after that was not the fact that I had won, but the half court shot at the buzzer that managed to actually make it into the bucket.
I’ll admit, I liked Rick. To a young boy, having his mother date a biker was cool. Had I been willing to talk about it with my peers, I probably would have earned some cool points and they may have let up their bullying, but as I was keeping things to myself, I never said anything about it.
Rick stayed with us for years. I believe that he was my mother’s second longest relationship (at the time), if not her longest. And though I liked him, the things he did to my mother when he was drunk off his ass would chip away at that like for ages. But he was the closest thing to a father figure I had at the time.
It was at some point during the stay in the apartment complex that my sisters were carted off to their father’s. So for a while, I became an only child. I was an only child for the remainder of the stay at the apartments, and I was an only child for the majority of the time when we lived at our second house in Virginia Beach: a trailer.
Oi. The trailer park in Virginia Beach brings back some painful memories. It was the site of the second worst bullying I ever received, second only to bullying I received when I moved to Kentucky, but that will be covered at a later time. I got in to my first fight in the trailer park, and was pretty much the scapegoat of everyone there. I also got my first crush while I lived there.
My first crush was a girl named Jessica. She was a raven-haired white girl with an overprotective older brother who absolutely despised me, for the sole reason that his sister had taken an interest in me. Because of him, I became the punching bag of the park. His best friend, a blond-haired kid named Jeffery, was the leader of the band of kids that lived there, and all too often they’d be doing something in the open grass area in the middle of the trailers, spot me, and chase after me. They would literally drop everything they were doing and chase after me.
I got pretty adept at losing the gang of kids chasing me. There was an area of woods directly behind the trailer I was living in, and in the first week I had already explored pretty much the entire area, so I usually went into those woods when I was being chased. The kids of the park were convinced that there were some kind of wild animals in there, so the place suited me just fine. I do not remember how long we lived in the trailer park, but in all my time there, I only ever took one person into the wooded area, and we shared the little secret that the place was absolutely harmless.
I had managed to procure a bicycle while I lived in this trailer from a yard sale at some point, so often I would be seen out riding this bike around. More often than not, my being on the bicycle meant that I was faster than the bullies that wanted to tear me apart.
I had my first taste of BMX while living here. I got in to jumping ramps on bicycles after watching the other neighborhood kids do it, but my first experience with it turned in to a huge disaster. I always tried to be friendly to the other kids, even if their reactions to me were always (with the exception of one or two people) hate-filled lashing out. The rest of the kids were gathered around a makeshift ramp one day, and I happened upon the group of kids while out on my bicycle. I asked if I could join them in whatever activity it happened to be that they were doing, and after a little bit of talking among themselves, they told me no.
I was rejected and moved away from the group, laying my bike down next to me and watching them instead of participating. Not ten minutes after I settled in and was watching them, they dispersed, leaving the wooden makeshift ramp in place where it was.
The ramp was a simple thing. A three feet long, two feet wide, and one inch thick wooden board was placed atop two cinder blocks, and the goal of the ramp was to jump the small pile of red bricks at the peak of the ramp. I had seen every kid that had a bicycle jumping over the pile of bricks off the ramp with absolute ease, and I figured I wouldn’t have any problem doing the same.
So I checked the ramp to make sure it was secure, grabbed my bike, started a good ten or fifteen feet away from t he ramp, and rode towards it at a high speed. I hit the ramp and stopped pedaling as I had seen the other kids do before me.
I must have missed a step in my plan because I remember my front tire failing to clear the pile of bricks in front of the ramp. The bike toppled, and I toppled with it, being flung from my seat and landing on the street a foot or so in front of the brick pile. I slid a few inches and came to rest, my arm and leg burning; I had scraped a good deal of skin from both limbs. My bicycle, still in one piece and still able to be ridden, now had a slight wobble to the front tire because of the wreck.
I picked myself up from the ground and brushed off the dirt as best as I could, tears forming in my eyes. I picked up my bike and got on it, slowly riding home so that I could get my wounds cleaned and bandaged. I had failed the jump, and if anyone was around that I couldn’t see, I had made a complete fool of myself. Looking back, I know exactly what step I missed in the jump: I didn’t pull my front wheel up as I came off the ramp, to give myself the extra air I needed to clear the pile of bricks.
Thankfully, nobody was around to see me make a complete ass of myself.
I made one friend initially when I moved to the trailer. His name, as far as I can remember, was Michael. It was because of this kid that I became a fan of the Sega Genesis, and wanted one so very badly. This kid would also be the source of my first experience with the RageQuit technique of videogame players.
Michael had a Sega Genesis, and he had the game Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The second game in the Sonic series had a split-screen 2-player mode, where you and a friend raced head to head in stages from the game, to see who would complete the stages first. When I was first introduced to the game, he would always win. But as my gaming expertise flourished, and when I was finally able to get my own Genesis and my own copy of the game, I was able to turn the tables on him. I was completing stages in record times, and it made him mad that he was not the best anymore. It got to the point where, if I finished even one stage ahead of him, he would yell and me and turn the console off. It got on my nerves, and eventually his raging tendencies is what ruined the friendship we had.
I remember that day. He got mad and turned the console off, and I was finally fed up with it, so I started yelling at him about it. I told him it was just a game, it was not serious, it was meant to have fun, and a few other things, and his answer was to throw his controller at me and tell me to go away.
I had a bruise on my shoulder where the controller hit me, but I was too angry at him to feel the impact. I grabbed my controller and left, and when my mother found out about the fight and him hitting me with the controller, she got ahold of his mother, and he was grounded for a month for it.
They ended up moving before that month was over. Which was fine, because less than a month after they moved, I moved too.
I got into my first actual fight while living in that trailer park. The kids of the neighborhood were playing kickball or something in the park behind the trailers, and needed another person. I was sitting in my yard, where I was able to watch them and lament the fact that I would be target practice if I tried to join in. So imagine my surprise when the bane of my existence, Jessica’s older brother, came up to me and asked me to join their game.
The rules were simple: kick the ball that was rolled to you as hard as you could, and run around the bases as if you were playing baseball. If you were hit with the ball during your trip around, you were out. If the ball you kicked was caught in mid air, you were out.
I was hesitant to join them, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I soon found out that thought they did need me to play, they were not being friendly. At my first kick, during my run around the bases, one of the other kids, who was playing second baseman, picked up the base and refused to keep in in my reach, which allowed their other teammates time to retrieve my kick and throw it at me. They beaned me in the head.
The strike hurt, and knocked me dizzy for a bit. I dropped to a knee a regain my senses, and as I was standing up another player grabbed the ball and hit me in the face with it.
It felt like something had broken in my face, though I was lucky that nothing had. But I’d had it. I turned and walked off, heading for my house. Jessica’s older brother yelled out to me, saying he was sorry, and the rest of the kids followed suit. I was naïve enough to believe them, so I came back to the game. But it was just a repeat of the previous treatment the next time it was my turn to kick. The first baseman this time moved the base so I couldn't touch it.
All I did was look him in the face, then turn around and walk towards my house. I never said a word. And then I felt the ball hit me in the back of the head, and Jeffery’s voice call out, “You’re out!” I heard what sounded like Jessica’s brother reprimand Jeffery for his actions, and then the guy offered me his hand on behalf of his friend.
I never even saw it coming. I took his hand intending to shake it, and he brought his other hand up in a fist and clocked me in the ear as hard as he could. I grabbed my ear and hunched down to protect myself, and the guy tried to kick me. Everything moved in slow motion from there. I managed to block his kick, and saw the rest of the kids running at me. I could tell from their faces that they all intended to gang up on me at once, so I did the best thing I could think of: I stood, pushed Jessica’s brother as hard as I could, and took off running towards my house.
I am pretty sure I pushed the guy hard enough to knock him down, because I heard a grunt behind me and the soft thud of someone landing on grass. But by then I was already in my panic run and I didn't dare look behind me, lest I trip over my feet and fall, and then I’d surely be overtaken by those thugs.
My mother was worried about my well-being, but usually didn't do anything besides let me hide out in the house. That was her usual modus operandi: do nothing, unless it was her own child’s fault; then, punish her own child. She’s always been insistent on the “do as I say, not as I do” principle.
As far as punishments go, my mother was always down with the times. She’s always been a big supporter of ‘Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child’ and usually her preferred method of punishment was a spanking. But it would be in the trailer park that she tried out a new method of punishment: writing sentences.
This form of punishment was one I hated the most. It was worse than grounding and spanking combined. You take an active child with a ton of energy, sit them down at a table with a notebook and a pencil, write out a long sentence, and tell them to write that sentence out so many number of times, and call it a punishment. My mother’s intended use for sentences was to teach us to do or not to do whatever it was that the sentence writing was for, but the actual effect was that we did or didn't do the action because we wanted to avoid the boring routine and associated hand cramps of writing the sentences.
So after the incident with the fight, I learned to avoid the other kids like the plague. I was still able to hang out with Jessica a bit, but we had to hide whenever we hung out since her brother pretty much had it out for me. I also couldn't hang out with her unless she was already outside, because her family didn't like me either. I think her brother was spreading lies about me to his family, and his family was pretty much writing off Jessica as a liar and her brother as the “angel child.”
I hung by myself quite a bit, though. I was able to secure a bicycle from a yard sale, and that thing got plenty of uses. Its brakes were not the best, however, so I gained the skill of stopping with my feet, which meant I went through shoes quicker than most kids. Some days the brakes worked, and I was excited about that, but other days the brakes didn't work worth a damn and I had to be careful about my speed.
I remember one day, while my mother was at work and Rick was sitting out in the front yard with a buddy of his drinking, I announced that I had fixed my brakes, and wanted to show my audience. So I took off towards the trailer at a high rate of speed, and when I wanted to hit my brakes, I did so. The stop was too sudden for me, and it caused me to leave my seat and fly over the front of my handlebars.
The trailer sat on an upward slope of grass, so my landing zone was also sloped upward. This meant that any landing of the kind I was about to initiate should have hurt less than landing on a flat surface. The key words here are should have. There was a large rock positioned right in my path, and when I landed, the rock happened to be stationed where my crotch was.
My crotch seemed to be the target of a lot of sports accidents. I lay there in agony, unable to move and feeling sick to my stomach, and what did Rick and his buddy do? Not a damned thing. They laughed and continued drinking their beers, not even thinking to offer me a hand up or ask if I was okay.
After about ten minutes of laying there, I finally gained the strength to move again, and gathered myself up and went inside to lay down. I think ti was at this point that I started to dislike Rick. I saw him as immature, which was a bit of a revelation for a kid at 10 years old.
While I was the only child of my mother for a time, I got to live in the master bedroom of the trailer. It was at the front most of the trailer, with large windows and its own bathroom. I had a bunk bed in my room for the unlikely possibility of having a sleep over, and I slept on the bottom bunk, my mother afraid that I would roll off the top bunk in the night and end up seriously hurt.
I think her fear of me being hurt is what ultimately lead to my immense fear of heights. I never did roll off the bed during the night, but that didn't stop my mother from having the fear. She was a little irrational like that, for some reason.
As well, it also didn't stop her from projecting that fear on to me, and her continually telling me that I was going to fall off the top bunk whenever I went to climb up there eventually registered in my mind the following train of thought: It’s high enough to fall from and get hurt. Therefore, I should be afraid of the fall, and I should be afraid of gaining enough height to fall in the first place. Basset hound!
This irrationality lead to many episodes of belief flip-flopping over the years, too. My first Halloween in the trailer, for instance, came just after she had read somewhere that the holiday was evil and that participating in it meant you were worshiping the devil. So naturally, she didn't want me to participate in the holiday festivities.
The day before Halloween, when I had already known for a week that I was not allowed to go out and participate in it, I managed to pull one of my own teeth out. It was a loose baby tooth, already on its way out, and I showed my mother. During the night, my mother took my tooth and traded it for two big buckets of candy, in an effort to make me feel better about not going out to trick-or-treat.
It had the opposite effect: it made me feel worse. I had to have been the first kid in history to turn down the chance to eat all the candy I wanted, just because I could not go out and earn that candy. I didn't consider losing a tooth to be earning candy, and thought that my mother was silly for thinking that a bunch of candy was a suitable reward for losing it. After all, is not candy what makes your teeth fall out in the first place?
So Halloween passed, and my mother came to her senses about the holiday a couple months later and apologized to me for depriving me of a harmless holiday tradition. A couple months later turned out to be December, and that year I received a Sega Genesis for my birthday.
Remember when consoles used cartridges instead of CDs, and your typical new console came with a game to promote it? The Genesis I got came with Sonic Spinball, a pinball-type game meant to be a side-story in the Sonic franchise. I remember setting the Genesis up in the living room after figuring out how to hook up all the cords (and needing to go to Walmart for a specific adapter because our TV was weird), gently placing the cartridge in the console, and turning it on. That first view of Sonic on Tails’ plane, flying past the SEGA logo in the center of the screen with a MIDIfied version of the Sega jingle sent shivers up my spine. Not because it was the frist Sonic game I had ever played, because obviously it was not. No, the shivers came because it was the first Sonic game I ever owned.
The last console I had ever really used and played on extensively was the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short. But that console originally belonged to my mother, and I only owned one or two games on it. And generally whenever I was not playing it and my mother was not busy, she would be the one playing it, collecting hours by the truckloads into Tetris and Dr. Mario. So the notion of owning my own console was an amazing concept to my young mind.
It would take me a couple years to get good enough at Sonic Spinball that I could beat it. The game was amazing, even if it completely ignored the general Sonic mythos in order to tell a story. Every Sonic fan can tell you that there are seven Chaos Emeralds, and only seven, with one Master Emerald (that wouldn't be introduced until Sonic & Knuckles, but that’s beside the point). When Sonic Spinball came out, Sonic 2 had already been out for a while and there were rumors about a third Sonic game in the works. So the seven Chaos Emeralds ideal had already been rooted into our minds.
Sega completely ignored the story of seven Emeralds in order to give your character something to collect in Sonic Spinball, and allow the story and the game to move forward. The number of Emeralds was nearly doubled for this game; three Emeralds in the first stage, three in the second stage, five in the third stage, and a whopping six Emeralds in the final stage. Not to mention that somehow Dr. Robotnik stood something like four times the height of Sonic himself, when it was shown in both Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 that the heroic hedgehog was a little over half as tall as the evil doctor.
Okay, I’ve done enough nitpicking. Though the bits of the story that were changed bugged me a bit, I managed to ignore them in order to play the game. The music was incredibly awesome, and Sonic Spinball became one of the first games I played of which the music would continue to stay with me, years after I last played the game.
Rick turned out to be a videogame fan, though his interest was more into violent games like Mortal Kombat. The Valentine’s of the following year, one of the things I got as a present (a family tradition which I may or may not explain later) was the chance to play Mortal Kombat 2, which had just come out. Rick had rented the game from the local Blockbuster Video, and had included a six-button Genesis controller with it, which was mine to keep.
Mortal Kombat 2 turned out to be a preteen’s wet dream of blood, violence, and gore. The Mortal Kombat series is the reason why the ESRB videogame rating system came into existence, and with good reason: a game that promoted blood, violence, fighting, and brutally descriptive ‘Fatalities’ was deemed, in the eyes of parents wishing to blame their kids’ behavior on something other than their own parenting skills, too mature for their children, and they wanted a service that would agree with them.
My interest started to revolve less around sports at this time, and more around videogames. My interest in art dwindled as I inwardly and unconsciously declared that I would never be good enough to draw anything other than stick figures, and I began to amuse myself with other things. I gained an interest in science, specifically the earth sciences such as weather, and began to study weather patterns. I balanced my love of science with my love of videogames, and soon became the go-to guy in the trailer park for hints and tips to various favorite games.
By the time Michael moved away, I was no longer the scapegoat of the park. I was no longer a target. I was still hesitant about dealing with the other kids, but Jeffery had taken a sincere interest in me and seemed to be hanging around with me more than he hung with Jessica’s older brother. Jessica came outside a lot more and began to be a bit more open about her like of me, and I gained my first near experience of “dating.”
At that age, girls were just barely out of the ‘gross’ stage, and beginning to enter the ‘friendship and maybe more’ stage of boys’ points of view. I am of the opinion that no person should begin “dating” before the age of 15, but that’s just because today’s view of “dating” is so much more physical than it was while I was growing up.
It was during my stay in the trailer that I had the chance to attend the Old Donation Center, a special school that met once a week for those who were considered “gifted.” Now, I am not talking about the typical call of special or gifted when in reference to someone that has a learning disability. While I believe that each and every one of those kinds of people are special and gifted in their own way, ODC was meant as a place for kids that showed higher levels of learning and comprehension than their classmates. It was a place where kids could let their imaginations soar, and actually pursue their dreams, rather than sit back in the classroom and be told that they can do anything they want, and then be bred for average associations.
I enjoyed my time at ODC. It was there that my interest in weather really took flight, and I can not count the number of weather projects I was allowed to take on. Every presentation I made had something to do with atmospheric sciences, and each presentation was different, so I was able to get away with doing the same subject over and over and still not bore my classmates. The fact that I was allowed free reign over my interests was inspiring and invigorating, and I truly wish that all schools taught in the same manner as ODC.
While in the trailer, my mother often received assistance from a local church for things like rent or food. One of the most popular food items we received was pizza from the local Pizza Hut. Eventually my mother was receiving regular donations of food from the church, and all too often we had no room in our freezer for any frozen foods because it was filled with Pizza Hut pizza boxes.
This would be the time in my life when I declared that I no longer cared for Pizza Hut style pizza, and that I didn't like pepperoni anymore. The church always, ALWAYS delivered pepperoni pizza to us, and never once delivered from a company other than Pizza Hut. I think it was their fall-back decision. I remember our first Thanksgiving after beginning to receive food. The church gave us cans of vegetables, some cranberry sauce, and a pizza.
At some point in the summer between my third and fourth grade years, my mother saw fit to move us from the trailer into a halfway house for battered women. Her relationship with Rick had turned abusive, and her moving was a way for her to run from her problem and hide from Rick, rather than confront things. I, of course, ended up moving with her.
There was a point in the trailer life that my sisters had returned from living with their father, but since my mother was actually into raising her children and not spoiling them rotten, they didn't last long. Not long after we all moved to the halfway house, both my sisters were screaming about wanting to go back with their dad, and about how my mother was a horrible parent, and eventually they wore her down and got their way. They both went back with their father, and I was left wondering if I would have turned out the same way as them if the man had actually cared about me for once.
So my moving with my mother into the halfway house didn't make me change schools, which was a good thing, but I ended up on a different, overly-crowded bus route. I’ve always wondered why bigger cities only have single schools, but smaller cities and towns have multiples? It doesn't make sense sometimes.
My attendance at ODC continued, as did my interest in the atmospheric sciences. I had declared that I wanted to grow up to be a meteorologist for the military, an idea that would stick with me until I graduated from high school in 2004.
However, the bullying also still continued. The only place I seemed to gain any respite was at ODC, and I only got to go to ODC on Fridays. So there was a large chunk of my time at ODC where I spent it in the guidance counselor’s office. She would be the first counselor to recommend I actually go to my parents for help in my issues, whereas the other counselors from previous schools would recommend I got to an authority figure within the school. While going to a teacher or the principal would have effectively done the same thing, doing so would have labeled me a tattletale, and made me catch even more slack from the other kids, not to mention a possible reprimand from the teacher/principal I talked to, since for some reason telling on other kids is looked down upon.
This always bothered me. In a world where obeying the law and reporting those who broke the law was encouraged, why was doing the same exact thing in schools so discouraged? This twisted set of rules made me think that maybe, just maybe, public schools were ran by the children that attended them, and not by the adults that taught in them. Consider, for a second, the most popular punishments for a trouble maker in school: suspension or expulsion. wouldn't that be a reward? What trouble making child is going to consider the fact that they can not attend school a punishment? Are they not trouble makers because they do not want to be there in the first place?
I finally broke down and told my mother about all the bullying that I had been receiving in the schools. Her first reaction was the ask me why I had waited so long to say anything. When I couldn't come up with a suitable answer, she told me to just ignore it and continue on as usual, which made me wonder if she thought I was lying for attention. Looking back on it, I realize now that she was recommending to me to solve my problems the same way she was solving hers: to ignore the problem until it built up to be too much, and then running from it.
I believe I reminded her about the kids from the trailer park and their general treatment of me, and she dismissed it as a one-time thing. I felt ignored, but wrote it off as her being stressed out from work and Rick’s treatment of her. Besides, that feeling of being ignored by an adult figure was nothing new to me.
So nothing was done about the bullying at school, and it continued. I started to practice holding in all the feelings rather than wear them all on my sleeve, and so my visits to the guidance counselor began to lessen. I still went at least once or twice a week, but compared to the once or twice a day, it was a major improvement. The counselor figured I had found a way to resolve the bullying, and I started to keep from her that the bullying was the same level. I guess I did it to keep her from worrying so much.
Even in the midst of intense bullying, my grades remained high. I think I maintained high grades as a way to compensate for failures in other areas of my life, namely friend-making and defensive capabilities. So naturally, if I came home with a report card and grades in one subject or so were lower for that quarter than they had been for the previous quarter, I was punished for it. At least during my elementary school years, my mother held a very high respect for letter grades, and used punishments such as grounding, or withholding things like television or my Genesis, as motivation for me to keep my grades high and my behavior pristine.
Such stress wore down on my mind. There was one day that I was late for the bus to school, which means I got to school late, and missed the bus from school to ODC. It was the final straw. I retreated to the bathroom, took hold of a loose roll of toilet paper, and proceeded to redecorate that bathroom by rolling that toilet paper all over the place. I was angry at myself for waking up late, angry at my mother for refusing to let me stay home, angry at the ride for not taking me to ODC instead of the main school, angry at the bullies that I hadn’t even seen that day, and pretty much hated life in general.
Naturally, a teach came into the bathroom and spotted my mess, and me in the act of desecrating the bathroom with my ‘art.’ I was taken by the upper arm and led to the principal’s office, where I got to sit in a chair in front of his desk and explain to him everything that was going through my head, including why I was acting the way I was. Though he tried to feign interest in my troubles, it was obvious to even a boy of my age that he just wanted a reason for my actions. So I gave him short answers, which would inevitably render me in even more trouble, though I really didn't care at the time. Eventually, I would be suspended from school for a couple days, and my mother would be notified.
do not ask me why I remember this event. It’s a relatively insignificant event, considering I’d been suspended from school a few times in my career. Nothing really bad happened at home that day beyond a week’s grounding or a few sentences, and I suppose the only thing that would really make it worth standing out is that it was the first and only time I was punished for something I considered to be related to ODC.
So we lived in this halfway house place for a while, before the owners saw fit to send us to another one meant for women who no longer feel threatened and are looking for a way to get back on their feet. So we were uprooted and moved to another part of Virginia Beach, in a nice neighborhood with kids that were actually friendly as compared to the last neighborhood where kids were pretty much non-existent.
We lived with another woman and her son who was a few years younger than I was, and I am not kidding when I say that this kid had absolutely no idea what the meaning was behind the words ‘personal space.’ He was caught more than once in my mother’s room, and at least once in my won, rooting through our stuff. I think eventually his mother stole about $700 of hard-earned money from my mother, and pretty much proved exactly why she was running from her ex boyfriend/husband/mob boss or whoever it was.
We lived through another episode of “My Sisters Return and Declare It Unsuitable” which actually managed to outlast the previous episode. I wonder if their father didn't put them up to it at that point, to torture my mother and make her hurt emotionally. Both sisters were obviously spoiled, but Kaylee was more so than Mercedes*. The way she acted and went on about her father, you would almost think they were lovers (but they were not. I’m saying that right now, straight out. The phrase I’ve used here is an analogical exaggeration, meant to be read and taken in a joking manner).
I believe it was here that I began to get into more music than just videogame original soundtracks. I was stuck listening to whatever my mother had, and she specialized in classic rock and Christian alternative. Mainstream radio was not generally listened to in our household. So the majority of my childhood music tastes were inspired and influenced by bands like Boston, Styx, Steve Miller Band, and Fleetwood Mac, as well as artists like Michael W. Smith, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Carmen.
How does this relate? Well, it turns out that at this second house/apartment, I found out that my mother had been talking to Rick again. He had charmed his way into her heart again, and she had plans for moving out of the current halfway house and into his place, once he got a place, as he was back living with his brother again. So some nights, Rick would come to the house/apartment while my mom’s roommate was out, and my mom would sneak out to go talk to him or whatever. On the nights where I realized who was at the back door, she would tell me not to say anything before she slipped out, and of course I remained quiet. It would be years later that I realized she was acting like a lovesick high-schooler, or a woman desperate for attention or acceptance.
Nothing of real importance happened while at this house, and soon enough we moved out and into another apartment. Rick managed to find a place he could afford that had enough bedrooms for all of us, and we moved in with him. At the time, Mercedes* was living with my mother as well as myself, and Kaylee had moved back with her father. I believe that Mercedes* was the more mature of my sisters, in a way, and had managed to realize that the way they were being raised by Mark* was not healthy.
As stated in the previous chapter, while we were still in Alabama and my mother had had enough time to grieve and recover from the divorce, she had found another man to date that didn’t care that she had three kids already. The man was incredibly immature, about the same level of immaturity as Rick displayed, but I guess my mother saw past that. This man managed to get her pregnant because they obviously were not watching what they were doing, and didn't use a condom. Though she couldn't afford another child right then and there, my mother still wanted to have the child, so she had my little brother Anthony while we were still in Virginia. There was a long, drawn out battle over custody decisions and whether or not my mom wanted to put him up for adoption because she literally couldn't afford to keep him, but eventually she decided to keep him.
Because the father of Anthony was a guy that Rick had met in prison and absolutely hated, Rick treated Anthony like absolute shit. Rick treated Tony as if the kid was the lowest thing on earth, like spanking him for the smallest things that obviously a toddler wouldn't know about, using Tabasco hot sauce as punishment for repeating cuss words that he himself says in front of him, and generally behaving like a bully.
I believe it was at this point that I started to not really like Rick. I found his treatment of my little brother to be childish and immature, and completely believed that the man only did what he did because he could, and not because he had to. My mother saw the treatment and berated him for treating her son that way as well, but not often enough and not with enough force.
After living with us for a couple years, Anthony ended up being put up for adoption anyway. My mother couldn't afford to keep him as well as care for me, my sisters, and her lazy good-for-nothing boyfriend. The adoption process went alright, and he ended up adopted by my uncle Ron and his wife (at the time), Brandy. What we all thought was a good idea at the time would quickly turn sour, but this chapter is not the time to tell about that.
So this new apartment we lived in for a time contained myself, my mother, Rick, Mercedes*, and Tony. Kaylee would return again, and this time she would stay because her father was having other problems and couldn't take care of her satisfactorily. We would live here for a few months before giving Tony up, then moving on again, and I believe my mother started considering home schooling for all of us at about this point, considering how much school we were missing because of moving.
In this house, my sister Mercedes* would get a pet that would follow us for quite a few years: a pet rabbit. This rabbit was a black and chocolate dwarf bunny with a bit of a spoiled temperament. What possessed my mother to get her daughter a rabbit is beyond me, but Mercedes* loved that rabbit like nothing else, even though it was usually my mother that had to clean its cage.
The rabbit came to be part of our family around Christmas time of an unspecified year. Within six months, that rabbit had received the name Thumper, bit every single one of us at least once, had found his favorite places to hide (behind the upstairs toilet and underneath the couch in the living room), and had gotten ear mites at least once. Oh, and Rick had gotten him drunk.
One day, Rick had some of his buddies over and they were all drinking beer. I was vegged out on my videogame, and usually I zone out and ignore pretty much everything that’s going on around me including conversation when I’m playing a game, but Rick started talking about feeding the rabbit and my ears perked up. I paused my game and got up from my seat under the pretense that I had to use the bathroom, and when I got back, Rick had poured about half a can of beer into a glass bowl and let the rabbit out of its hutch.
The rabbit jumped over to the glass bowl and drank for a good while from it, and I watched him intently when he finally moved to get away from the bowl. He now moved sluggish, veering off in a direction and unable to hop and land straight. Thumper would take a couple hops in a direction and then stop, lose his balance, and stand in one place for a second, then repeat the movement. Finally, he managed to hop over to a corner (since he looked to be too dizzy to find his hutch), rolled over onto his back, and passed out, kicking his legs every once in a while to show that either he was dreaming, or he just wasn’t dead.
It is at this point that my memory becomes foggy. Where it picks up again, me and my mother are now living by ourselves in another apartment complex, literally walking distance from the store in Virginia Beach where she works as a Supervisor. Rick is nowhere to be seen, so I believe this was another one of the breaks that he and my mom took. And since my sisters are gone, I believe this is another part of life where they went to live with their dad. They would stay with Mark* in whatever state he was in until after my mother and I moved to Kentucky.
I liked living in this apartment complex. I was finally on the same bus route as my best friend, and I made another good friend who lived in the same complex, whose name was Kelven. I got another bike to replace the first one I had after it was run over by a large truck, and I often rode that bike all throughout the complex when I was not at school.
Living there allowed me to practice another useless skill: highway hopping. The complex was on the main street of Virginia Beach, which was a six or eight lane street that may as well have been a major highway, as fast as cars drove on it and as busy as it always was. One day I managed to cross the street and it allowed me to explore the neighborhood on the other side, which resulted in me meeting some more kids my age and making more friends. They were home schooled, which is why I never saw them at school, but it didn't matter to me. I still enjoyed their company, and played over at their house as often as I could, which was not really very often because I had to keep my highway hopping secret from my mother (sorry, mom!).
Along with the kids across the highway, there was a car lot nearby, and on cold days I would go over to the lot and browse through the cars, as well as go inside and get free popcorn from the machine. I was a regular browser, quiet and never causing trouble, and I think the salesmen actually liked to see me around.
Also, walking distance from the apartments, there was a privately owned restaurant that sold breakfast at all times. They also sold candy bars, and at times my mother would send me to the place to get her a couple Snickers bars. She used to be pretty much addicted to them, and I actually got sick of them after a while. My favorite candy bar at the time was Butterfinger, so often when she sent me out for candy, she gave me enough to get myself a candy bar too.
After the bank of businesses that contained the restaurant as well as a Kinko’s, there was an open plot of land, and then the supermarket my mom worked at. Some days after getting home from school and finishing my homework, I would walk down to the store to see my mom and find out when she was getting off of work. Sometimes she didn't tell me before I left for school, and sometimes she was called in on her days off while I was already at school.
She used to work for a store chain called Farm Fresh. They had the greatest policy pertaining to out of date food on their shelves: if the customer found anything on the shelf that was out of date, the customer could bring it up to the register with another of the same item that was in date, and the customer would receive the in date item for free. There is no counting the number of times that my mother and I would go shopping for this reason alone. Usually you’d find cereal or bread that was out of date, as well as canned food like vegetables, but a couple times we lucked out and got a hold of out of date eggs, and even milk.
We were not the only ones who went ‘shopping’ for this reason. But the store didn't mind it, since selling out of date food was a good way to get a lawsuit against them, or something.
There’s no telling how many people tried to scam the store, too. My mom told several stories about her days at work, and two have always stuck out with me to describe the dishonest nature of the world.
In the first story, a teenager comes up to my mother’s register while she’s taking over fro someone on lunch, and complains about how a gumball machine has taken their money. My mother, who has a lull in her line, follows the boy to the gumball machine, which appears to have, indeed jammed. When my mother looks at it, she noticed a piece of paper on the floor, which she picks up. It has tape around the edges, and it reads “Out of Order.”
My mother asks the teen if he removed the sign from the gumball machine, to which the teen replies that he didn't. My mother declares that she knows he’s lying, and the teen indignantly asks her how, since he declares that he’s telling the truth. My mother tells the teen that she knows because SHE is the one that wrote the sign. The teen looks at her dumbfounded, then runs from the store, embarrassed.
In the second story, my mother is running the service desk for a coworker who has called in sick. A woman of about fifty comes up to the desk with a carton of orange juice that she says was out of date when she bought it, but has no receipt. When she shows my mother, my mom tries to tell her she can not accept the orange juice, so the woman declares she wants to talk to the manager. My mother exasperatedly goes to get the manager, and the manager talks with the woman.
The woman says she paid four dollars for the orange juice, and both my mother and the manager argue against that. Eventually, the manager concedes and gives the woman a four dollar refund, but politely tells her not to return to the store. Why? Because not only did the store not sell orange juice at any price higher than three dollars, but they also didn't sell that particular brand of orange juice. The lady basically robbed them.
I do not know how long we ended up staying in those apartments. I do know that school was finally looking better by the time. I was in fifth grade, and the other kids were less bullying and more friendly to me. I began regarding just about everything under ten miles away to be ‘within walking distance’ and began to walk everywhere.
This is relevant because I remember one day when I woke up late for the bus, and I figured my mother was already at work, having figured that I had already caught the bus before she woke up. So I got up, got dressed, grabbed my backpack, locked the front door as I left the apartment, and took off walking in the direction where my school was located.
The fact that it was snowing didn't register in my mind.
It took me at least an hour to walk there, but I got to the school. Everything was closed and there was only a single car in the parking lot, but the doors were locked and the lights in the halls were off. I thought about waiting around for a bit, but decided against it since it was cold, and I headed off in the direction of the church that I attended regularly. I figured that since it was a church dedicated to God, it would be open for His children whenever they were in need, and I was in need of a place to warm up and possibly call my mother or a friend.
I was right in the fact that the church was open, but it was only open because the janitors had it open for cleaning. I was allowed in to use the bathroom and use the phone, and I called the store where my mother was working. I told her school was closed for today, and she said she knew, which was why she let me sleep instead of waking me up for school. I told her I thought I had missed my alarm clock and had walked to the school to find it closed, and then walked to the church, which was where I was currently calling her from. She nearly panicked.
I told her I would call my friend Andrew and see if they could pick me up and take me home, and after a moment she agreed with that, since we currently didn't have any money to call a cab. I hung up the phone, then picked it back up and called Andrew.
His mother picked up and I explained the situation to her, and she also nearly panicked, then agreed to let me come over until my mother got off of work. Since the church was so close to t heir house, I didn't wait much more than about ten minutes for her to arrive in their van, and on the way back she told me that I should not be walking so far alone like I did today. I told her I was fine and that I knew what I was doing, and that if anything happened I could run and I could defend myself, but I do not think she was reassured.
I spent the better part of that day at Andrew’s house, and we got along as best friends usually did. Conversation topic revolved around things like videogames and school, new music that we’d heard, and whether the other person had finished whatever projects we had for school. Every now and then the subject brushed teachers that we didn't like, but for the most part we stayed on safe zones.
I say safe zones because I remember my teacher(s) from fifth grade. The school I went to began preparing its students for middle school by making its fifth grade classes split between two teachers. One teacher taught English, Social Studies, and Art (I think), and the other taught Math and Science. The teacher I had that taught the first three subjects was a black teacher named Mrs. Jefferson, and I hated her with a passion. Not because she did anything major against myself or any of my friends, but because she believed that the best way to take control of a class was by screaming at them, and she was LOUD. I especially hated the days where I was quietly doing my work, and she stood by my desk to scream, at the top of her voice, at two kids who were whispering back and forth. The headaches were the worst.
While we still lived in the apartment complex, I began to show an interest in playing the drums. I think this may have come from a trip to see my grandparents in Illinois, because the majority of my uncles lived in Illinois as well and one of them played the drums in a band. I’d always been a fan of hitting things and making noise, and there was a way to do that without getting in trouble? Hell yes, count me in!
So I expressed my interest in the art of drum playing, and my uncle helped to fuel that fire by sending me his practice pad set. It looked like a normal drumset, except that the drums were replaced with flat pads, so you got the effect of sitting at a drumset and playing, but it wasn’t nearly as loud.
Included with the practice set was a pair of drumsticks, two cymbals, and a hi hat. The cymbals and the hi hat had pads to muffle the sound, but considering that we lived in an apartment complex, hitting even a muffled cymbal would be producing too much noise, so my mother had me keep the practice pad set in its box until we moved. But I didn’t care, I was happy to even have the practice set. It meant that if I got good enough, maybe one day I’d have my own real set of drums. It was like Christmas had come early.
Speaking of Christmas, what’s the one thing you think of, weather wise, when you think of Christmas? Snow, right? And you’d think that living in a coastal city, we wouldn’t get much snow, correct? Well, that’s where you’re wrong.
I remember the Nor’easter of 1996. This was a winter storm that dropped several feet of ice and snow on top of the city of Virginia Beach, and caused power lines to snap, trees to break in half, and electricity to shut off for thousands of people all over the city. The apartments were no exception, and we ended up living without power for the better part of two weeks because of that storm.
It was I who came up with the ingenious plan to save our refrigerator food. My mom began to lament about all the food that would go bad if we left it in the fridge for too long, and I suggested that we put it outside in the snow. Obviously for the snow to linger and not immediately melt it was very cold outside, and I was sure that it was cold enough to sustain one family’s perishable food items.
My mother thought for a while and agreed to the idea, taking a laundry basket and filling it with the items in the fridge that would go bad if we didn’t move them. She covered the basket with a towel, then placed the food outside of our house, and put some snow over the top to hide it. The next morning, when I wanted cereal, I had to wait for my milk to thaw a bit before I could use it.
That year I came down with an awful bout of flu. It was during the winter storm, so my mother was unable to correctly care for me through my illness, because we lacked power. Some caring people from out church took us in for a while, until the power cut back on and I was healthy again, but I don’t remember much from staying with them, because of the fever. All I really remember is being warm, and then finally being healthy again and going outside to measure the height of the snow with a ruler. Ah, to be a kid again…
Then again, there were other things I did as a kid, with childlike curiosity, that got me in a ton of trouble. For instance, there was the time I decided that playing with matches was a good idea.
My mother had a box of matches that she used for lighting candles on days where the power went out (and aside from the winter storm, the power didn’t really go out that much), as well as a box of popsicle sticks used for arts and crafts. I knew where both of these were, and one day while I was bored, I grabbed both of them and sat out on the back porch, lighting matches and burning art sticks.
My mother found out when she smelled the smoke, and I got my butt spanked good for that. I was informed that fire was dangerous and that I shouldn’t play with it, and that I “should have known better.” But I was still a child, and I was frequently privy to my mother using fire to light her cigarettes, so if fire was so dangerous, why was she allowing it so close to her face?
Then there was the time I was caught stealing money from my mother’s purse. My little thieving instincts still hadn’t died out, and now that I was technically an only child and my mother had a job, I felt I should receive an allowance. I mean, considering I was generally a good kid, I made pretty high grades, I didn’t get into fights, I kept my room pretty clean, and kept all of my stuff from scattering about the house. I had to have been the only kid in my school without an allowance, and what else was my mom really spending the money on?
Oh, right… cigarettes. Well, she could quit those, they were bad for her. And the smoke that emanated from them and from her mouth made me cough and hack and choke, so there was a one hundred percent guarantee that I would never pick up that habit. If the indirect smoke made me cough and generally feel terrible, I could only imagine what directly inhaling the smoke would do.
So for a while, I began to steal five dollar bills from my mother’s purse while she was asleep. I did my best to hide it from her, and used the typical kid response when my mother caught me playing with something new that she knew she hadn’t bought for me: “I found it.”
Of course, eventually I would get caught. My mother’s birthday rolled around, and I wanted to be the good son and get her something for her birthday. So I took the five dollars I had recently ‘received’ from my mother and walked to Farm Fresh, the store she worked at, looking for a suitable present. I bought her a five dollar personal cake.
Upon returning home, I wrapped the cake loosely in a plastic bag and presented it to her. She smiled a bit when she saw it, and then her brow furrowed and the following conversation took place (or an approximation of it):
“Where did you get the money for this?” she asked me.
“I found it,” I replied.
“Where did you find it?” she followed up.
“It was on the ground near the dumpster,” was the answer I gave, with shaky voice.
I think it was the shaky voice that did it. My mother told me she was going to take the cake back to the store and get the money back, and when I opened my mouth to complain, she stopped me and told me she knew it was her money, and not some money I stole. But I didn’t get in trouble, be truthfully she couldn’t prove it. However, I was far too timid to call her bluff.
I was always too timid for anything, really, except for when it came to exploring the area around the apartments. During that big ice storm in 1996, the part of the local creek that flowed through the apartment complex froze over. This would be the first time I had ever seen an iced river that was thick enough to stand on, so what did I do? I went and stood on it.
I took my prized wooden baseball bat and a friend, and went down to where the creek was the most accessible, which happened to be close to my apartment. I used to hang out here when it was warm, and it was obvious. There was a couple bricks set up with a board placed over them, much like a seat, and the place where reeds and bamboo grew had a hollowed out spot, almost like a clubhouse. There was a concrete divider between the club and the creek, so I was never playing in the water, but getting to the creek was incredibly easy.
So starting from the clubhouse, with my friend watching, I stepped on the iced over creek. Except for a slight crackling noise, the ice held my weight perfectly. I motioned for my friend to join me, but he declared he was too scared to do so. I nodded, and took a few more steps, eventually making my way to the middle of the creek. I didn’t dare jump on the ice, because I was afraid I would fall through, but I was amazed at how easily it was holding my weight.
Then I went closer to the side of the creek, where the ice was a different color. I got close to the ice and gingerly placed my left foot on top of it, and my friend was shaking his head the whole time, motioning for me to get away from the side of the creek and come back onto the firm ground. I shook my head and stepped down on the different colored ice.
FWOOSH!
My leg fell through the ice, all the way to my hip, and almost instantly I felt frozen to the bone. Luckily it was just my leg, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here today. The moment my friend saw me fall, instead of offering to help me out or shouting for help, he ran home, to his house.
I managed to grab my bat, and placed it on the ground next to the ice, then pushed myself on the bat. This allowed me to lift my half numb leg out of the freezing water, and then lay back on the ice. Five minutes later, I stood up and hobbled back to the clubhouse, still unable to really feel my leg. I hobbled home and told my mother what happened, and she instructed me to remove my soaking wet pants, and ran a warm bath for me so that I could warm up.
Luckily there was no lasting damage on the nerves of my leg after falling through the ice. I didn’t get frostbite, I didn’t pull anything, and I can feel things fine in that leg now. The experience was incredible, even if it was a bit scary, and it made me rethink the friendship I had with the guy who ran away. Not long after the incident, though, he and his family moved away.
Also, remember the kitten incident from the last chapter? I had another incident concerning animals that happened while at these apartments. While nothing died by my hand, something definitely came close.
The apartments were occupied by geese. If you’ve never had an experience with a goose, all you really need to know is that those things are MEAN. A goose doesn't care whether the human around it is bigger or smaller than it is, and it doesn’t care if it is dealing with an adult or a child. A goose will chase a human away from its nest, or away from what it might consider to be its home, without a second thought.
There was one day where I became a victim of a goose chase. I don’t honestly know how I managed to stay away from the thing, but it chased me for a good five minutes before it was satisfied, and after that point I learned which parts of the complex to stay away from, but I always had an inkling in the back of my mind that I wanted to get even.
So one day I’m on my back porch, bored out of my mind, but I had nobody to play with because my only friend in the complex was grounded for behavioral issues. As I’m sitting there, the goose I got chased by come around the corner, leading six or seven little goslings in a line. Either the bird didn’t see me or it didn’t care, but it walked right past me without so much as a shuffle in my direction. I was tempted to get up and chase it away, but I thought of a different plan.
I went into my house and retrieved a shoebox. I took the lid off the shoebox, and went back outside. The goose and its children were still marching along, and weren’t hard to locate. I tried my best to sneak up on the group, but I guess they heard the crunch of leaves or a stick under my feet, because with a sharp cry, the group scattered. I threw the box and managed to trap one of the goslings underneath it.
My revenge was simple: get a pet goose and train it to fight for me when it was older. When I retrieved the gosling from the box, though, I was moved and didn’t feel like keeping it from its family. I carried the petrified bird towards the creek, while still in the shoebox, and without touching it, placed the box in the creek water with the bird in it, and walked away. I was sure that the bird would be fine, considering I had seen that same group of goslings with its mother goose swimming in that same creek.
I then went home and swore to myself that I would never hurt another animal as long as I lived. The cries of the gosling still haunt some of my dreams.
So obviously, I survived fifth grade, and it was soon after getting out of elementary school that my mother laid upon me the worst news I could have heard.
“We’re moving.”
---
We packed up our belongings, rented a U-Haul truck, and tearfully (at least for me) left the coastal city of Virginia Beach. For me, I was leaving behind the greatest chunk of my life that I could remember, because I spent so much time there. I was very unwilling to leave my friends, as well as totally unwilling to start at a new school. I didn't want a repeat of the things I went through as a new kid in elementary school.
The year was 1997. I would be starting sixth grade in whatever state it was that my mother was moving us to. That state turned out to be Kentucky. We moved in to my grandparents’ summer home, a doublewide trailer on Lake Malone. We lived directly on the lakeshore, at the bottom of a hill that would make it incredibly hard to drive up should it snow. All of our stuff went into storage, minus clothing. Because where we were living was supplied by family, we didn't have to pay rent or any bills. This meant my mother could save all her money, should she go out and find a job… but she didn't. She was content to live month to month on Child Support from Mark*. We also got food stamps, which we had been getting since we lived in Virginia Beach.
My sisters returned from their father’s sanctuary permanently this time, he having to move himself (for reasons I’ll cover later) as well as pursuing another intimate partner. Mercedes* came back relatively peacefully, but Porsche* was a whole different story altogether. She came back spoiled, a bit overweight, and completely unwilling to try to compromise on anything. She portrayed herself as independent on everything- as long as it didn't have anything to do with her getting back to her father.
I suppose my mother didn't make things any better. In my mind, she was convinced that now that she didn't have a job, she could stay home and home school us all. Myself and Porsche* were against the idea, but Mercedes* was all for it, for reasons I do not understand.
My mother was (and is) heavily religious, but she goes through phases. In one phase, she had been against everything that gave an influence that was other than godly, so she had us get rid of everything that was not Christian in nature. This was how I ended up having to throw out a sizeable Goosebumps collection I enjoyed reading, and how we managed to stumble across a popular Christian radio station to listen to while in Kentucky, instead of getting to listen to normal, mainstream music.
Of course, we didn't always listen to her ranting and raving about things. When she went to the store and left us alone, we shifted the radio to the more popular stations and listened to our hearts’ content. We had to turn the station back to the Christian radio by the time she returned from the store, but in the meantime we could stay up to date on the rest of popular society, since the lake we were living on was quite a ways away from the rest of the world.
My mother’s idea of home schooling went as such: we were to wake up at eight in the morning. We were to make sure our beds were made and our room was picked up. My mother slept in the main bedroom, and my sisters slept in their own room, so I had the couch. It was not too bad, it just meant that I couldn’t have any of my stuff with me; it all had to stay either in my sisters’ room (which I didn't want) or in storage.
After breakfast and teeth brushing, we were to sit down at the table in the dining room and copy books from the bible. And that was just about it. Sometimes we would be sat down and given reading and comprehension exercises from a home schooling booklet my mother bought from time to time, but for the most part, we would copy books from the bible, starting with Psalms. We would do that for the greater part of the day, maybe getting half an hour to play outside. It was boring, and beyond satisfying my mother’s urges of raising her children on the bible (literally!), it was relatively worthless.
After copying the parts of the bible, our mother would look at our work. If we made any mistakes with our words or punctuation, she would throw our work out and make us start over. She was far more strict than any English teacher ever was, and still it made no sense. What did copying parts of the bible word for word do to help us prepare for the outside world?
“I can quote Psalms word for word.”
“Yes, but what can you do for our company?”
I made a friend or two while living on Lake Malone. The only family that had kids that lived in the neighborhood lived at the top of the hill from where we lived. I am not kidding, our house was almost a direct line from theirs, if you knew which part of the hill to climb, and how. Luckily for me, I knew which part of the hill to climb, and how.
I still remember the first meeting with the family on the top of the hill. My mother had been talked into bringing Rick to Kentucky to stay with us, and did so while we were still in my grandparent’s trailer. While we lived there, Rick had taken to walking around the area and exploring the people there almost as much as me and my sisters had taken to exploring the woods. He made friends with a nice guy down the road from us, who drank beer nearly twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. His name was Buck.
My guess is that Rick and Buck were talking, and Buck mentioned a guy named Richie who lived at the top of the hill. Rick went and met Richie, and started hanging out with him. One day my mother decided to go meet Richie and his wife, Lawana, and myself and my sisters came along. This was when I met John and Ashley, Richie’s kids.
I used to be incredibly heavily into the Christian philosophy, and following in my mother’s footsteps. During the time that we were all playing outside, John used the Lord’s name in vain in some way, and it angered me. I told him it was against what I believed, he said he didn't care, we got into a verbal argument, and I told him I wouldn’t be his friend as long as he refused to apologize. I promptly left their yard, told my mother I was going home, and home I went.
I look back on the situation now and realize I was a huge prick when I was a kid. I was very self-centered and a bit prejudiced, and so very unlike the Christian I said I was. Nowadays, that pretty much defines any Christian you run across: people who are Christians as long as it benefits them in the long run. It took a few weeks, but once I realized that aside from John there weren’t any other kids in that neighborhood, and that I was in the wrong from the way I acted, I returned to his house and apologized (and he told me he had completely forgotten about the entire ordeal), and we became friends. And we’ve been friends ever since.
Being home schooled meant that myself and my sisters were under a far stricter eye of my mother than we would have been had we been allowed to go to public school. Some of the worst sentence writing I ever did was done here. Oh yes, my mother hung on to that punishment like it was going out of style, and even made it worse, if that’s possible: sometimes she went as far as making us repeatedly write paragraphs instead of sentences.
If you are trying to teach your child a lesson, the last thing you need to do is make them write sentences over it. They will not remember the lesson. They’ll remember writing the sentences, but they won’t remember the lesson you were trying to teach them. Not only that, but you run the risk of them getting bad grades in school because they hate to write after getting the punishment, and do whatever they can to make the writing pass quicker.
There are things I do nowadays still that I wrote sentences for back when I was a kid. My most vivid memory is sitting at a table while it’s snowing heavily outside, having to write the following sentence fifty times in a row, while the rest of the family is outside sledding down the hill and returning to brag about it:
Anything worth doing is worth doing right the first time.
Here’s something to chew on for a bit. I don’t remember what it was that I did wrong. I don’t remember what it was that caused me to be sitting at a table, long into the night, writing that particular sentence. I just remember writing the sentence, over and over, until my hand had passed the hand cramp stage and entered the “my hand is so numb I bet I could give myself the best Stranger I’ve ever had” stage. Writing sentences as punishment is an excellent way to give your children Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
I vaguely remember trying to rush writing those sentences because I wanted to get out with the rest of everyone and have fun sledding, knowing that it wouldn’t happen again. And then I got in trouble for trying to rush and shorten sentences about not rushing. So obviously I didn't learn anything from the punishment except that my mother didn't care if I liked to write or not.
We had our first dealing with a cat since Alabama while at the trailer as well. At some point during our stay, my mother had found a job and found a car, so we finally had transportation into the town of Lewisberg. On one of our visits to the grocery store, it was either Porsche* or Mercedes* that noticed a stray kitten behind a cola machine. We coaxed the cat out and my mother decided we should take it home and keep it.
It was relatively calm for a stray kitten during the car ride. We didn't get much trouble out of it until my mother decided that it needed a bath. Cat plus water equals blood. My mother ended up with a ton of scratches that needed to be cleaned after the bath, and I got a pretty good scratching myself when I tried to help her, but we managed to get the cat cleaned.
While it was dirty, the cat resembled a gray and white tabby. When it was finally cleaned, the kitten was revealed to be a calico kitten. It was malnourished, but after a nice bath, a good nail clipping, a nice meal, and a long nap, the kitten turned out to be incredibly friendly and playful. We named her RC (because we found her behind one of the soda machines, and because we couldn‘t remember which machine it was, we finally decided on RC), and she learned very quickly to stay away from Rick’s ferrets.
I didn't mention that yet, did I? When Rick came to Kentucky, he brought with him a couple ferrets. Ferrets are long, skinny rats with furry tails that walk with hunched backs, that have been historically used for hunting rabbits. They are normally colored black, but Rick had managed to find an albino ferret as well. They stayed in a two story cage in the living room, and though they and their cage were cleaned regularly, they still stunk up the house. The smell of a ferret is nearly as unforgettable as the smell of marijuana.
Ferrets normally love the water, so giving one a bath is usually pretty simple. You fill a bath tub about a quarter of the way full, and place the ferret into the tub. You have to make sure the water is warm, but not too warm. Let the ferret swim about for a while, then pick a time to lather it down with its own shampoo. Let the shampoo sit for a bit, then rinse the ferret. Drain the water, and towel dry the rodent.
After bath time and a good dry down, the ferret would be let loose in the living room and walls would be put up to keep them from escaping that room. After a good towel drying, Rick’s ferrets either got really playful, or really aggravated. To this day, I can’t tell which it was that they were. They were allowed to roam the living room and roll around on the carpet, letting their fur dry and tiring them out, after which they were scooped up and put back into their cage.
Winter passed that year, and it was well into the next year before my mother finally deemed herself sick of living in the trailer. Her, Rick, me and my sisters packed up what stuff we had, and moved on to Central City, Kentucky. This was Muhlenberg county, the site of some of the worst school hazing and bullying I would ever come to know, because my mother finally broke down and allowed us to go back to public school at this point.
But before I get into the public school crap, I need to touch on the death of RC, our cat. At some point during the move, we of course had to bring the pet with us. We didn't think to keep her in her pet house, and she ended up getting out of the new house and evading us outside. She disappeared for a couple days, but according to both my mother and Rick, we didn't have to worry because she would come back.
I’m pretty sure that if the majority of the people found in Muhlenberg County weren’t selfish pigs looking out for their own amusement and well-being, she would have come back to us alive. But it’s not so. One day after finally getting everything moved in, I was outside climbing one of the trees in the yard and happened to spot a dead animal on the side of the road, in the shoulder between the white line and the grass. I climbed down from the tree and wandered to the end of the driveway, not going into the road, but getting close enough that I could identify the animal… it looked like a cat, and the markings were incredibly familiar…
I went inside and got Rick, and told him I thought I’d found RC squished on the other side of the road. I guess I said it too loudly because my sister Mercedes* heard me and burst into tears, and I remember getting scolded for saying it out loud. Rick went out and asked me to point it out to him, but I just told him where to find it instead. He went and examined the cat, then came back and grabbed a shovel from the shed. He dug a hole in the yard, then went and grabbed the remains of the cat.
That was a dark week for our family. The loss of our cat took a heavy toll on us all. For a while, the mention of any type of animal would bring my sister Mercedes* to tears. I was upset too, but I hid it better, so I must have come off as an emotionless, uncaring bastard to my sisters. We marked the spot in the yard, near the border where the fence would go, and tended to avoid that spot when mowing the lawn or playing outside.
The ferrets, however, remained for a time, so we still had a family pet.
The house we first lived in when we lived in Central City was one of the oddest shaped houses I think I’ve ever seen. It looked like it would have been big enough for all of us to have our own rooms, but that wasn’t the case. It was a two bedroom house, so it wound up that I was given an egg mattress and a curtained-off part of the living room to sleep it. Naturally, having such a small space meant that I couldn’t have all of my things with me, and that my dresser was to be located elsewhere.
I didn't complain, though. Sure, it was small, but at least I had a place to sleep, right? And sure I didn't have all my stuff with me, but that was okay, because this house allowed me to set up what I really wanted to use: the practice pad set.
We had a walled-in porch like area of the house, which wasn’t very well insulated, but the door was relatively soundproof, and when the door was closed, it prevented any winter months’ cold air from getting into the rest of the house. It was in this room that the practice set was set up, as well as a table and any art supplies we had. It was, essentially, our playroom.
Rick and I both played the practice set often. So often, in fact, that the drum throne’s adjustor bolt that stalled the seat when it was raised or lowered, as well as the adjustor bolt that held the top cymbal of the hi hat in place when we were adjusting the gap between its cymbals, both stripped out at around the same time. Since Rick was taller than I was, he sat higher on the seat and often had to adjust the seat because he would play the drums after me, while I was at school or outside.
Rick had prior drumming experience, so he taught me some of the basics, and I just went with what I knew and wailed on the drums when I could by the time we moved and I had to put the practice pads back into storage, I was at about an intermediate level of playing. Rick would always be better than I was, but I really didn't care. I thought that if I continued to practice, perhaps I would eventually be good enough to find friends and create a rock band. Oh, such high hopes I had.
Aside from the playroom, we also had a couple of large buildings on the property that we could use. One was completely wooden and looked like a barn, and it was used for storing most of the tools we had, as well as the ladder and shovels, the pickaxe, and some assorted boxes, once it was confirmed that the building was waterproof. We also had a covered building that was barely big enough to store the car in, if you pulled the car forward enough that the front bumper touched the back wall. I pulled the car in on occasion, usually when there was a big storm coming, as it was an excuse for me to both get a tiny bit of driving experience and to stay outside and watch the rain; I was still heavily into meteorology at the time.
The third building on the property was one made entirely of sheet metal. It had a base made of concrete at least eight inches thick, and no power or anything, so there could be no lights put into it unless you wanted to run an extension cord to it from the house. In fact, all the buildings weren’t powered, save for the house itself. This third building was used by myself for a clubhouse, and my mother put a couple extra tools inside it when the wooden barn-like building ran out of space.
There was a mess of bricks behind this clubhouse building, so myself and my sisters often used these bricks to climb up on top of the building some days. Usually it was done on clear mornings to watch the sunrise, as if that was an interesting thing to do, but often enough we were bored. Doing small things like this were our attempts to forge some kind of closeness to each other. It didn't really last.
The roof of our house was not made of normal roofing material. I figured that the house designers used their leftover aluminum from building the shed outside to put a roof on the house, because that’s what it was. The roof was made with sheets of aluminum that hung straight out from the height, with absolutely no attempt to curve them down whatsoever. This made for a very interesting experience.
One day, while outside, my sister threw one of our Frisbees over my head, and it caught a gust of wind and ended up on the roof. My sister gave up easily seeing it up there, but I told her I could get it down, because it really wasn’t all that high up in the first place. The roof was about a foot and a half higher than my head, and I figured I could jump up and swipe the Frisbee down using my right hand.
So I did so. I made contact with the Frisbee and swiped it off the roof, and as I landed I took a look at my wrist. I had made contact with the aluminum roofing, and had cut a large gash into my wrist. It was deep. It was deep enough that I could pull the skin apart as see the fat layer underneath, still yellow, but peppered with small spots of blood, and growing.
I pinched the skin together with my other hand and went inside to tell my mother, who promptly began to freak out because she thought I had slit my wrist. The cut wasn’t that far over, but only missed the vein by about three quarters of an inch. I was actually more calm than my mother was. She calmed down enough to take a look, realized she was overreacting, and cut out a butterfly bandage for my wrist. Once applied, it was wrapped in gauze, then I was sent back out to play with the explicit instructions to take it easy on my right arm.
We lived right on a main road, and directly across the road from us was an open field, but it had a large ditch separating it from the road, so we couldn’t get to the field. Down the road to the right a bit, right next to the open field, was the local elementary school. My sisters would both go to the elementary school, while I would be moving into middle school, courtesy of Muhlenberg North.
Right next door lived a family with two kids, whose names I have currently forgotten, so I think I’ll call them Bart* and Lisa*. I became friends with Bart*, who was older than I was and already in high school, and Porsche* became friends with Lisa*. Bart* was tall and skinny, a bit of a troublemaker, and Lisa* was shorter and a bit overweight, but generally had good behavior. Lisa* was younger than I was, but not by more than about a year.
Their father was a bit of a drinker, and if I am remembering correctly, had only been married once. His kids lived with him because their mother couldn’t really support them. Their father (let’s call him Bill*) got along pretty well with Rick, and my mother generally avoided him in favor of the woman that lived behind us, with whom she was friends.
Porsche* would go on to build a crush on Bart*, and would try to date him. They would last a day or two, before she really knew what dating was or what all was involved, and then my sister and Bart* would mutually split, and Porsche* would just be content to crush on the guy from afar.
As luck would have it, Bart’s* sister Lisa* would come to have a crush on me, much like my sister had a crush on her brother. But being the logically driven emotional thinker that I am, I would refuse any and all advances the girl would make on me, because I didn't like her in the way that she liked me, and because I didn't know anything about what was involved in something like ‘dating’.
That, and I didn't feel like being beat up by a high school aged guy for hurting his sister, no matter how much he may not have gotten along with her.
As stated before, our neighbors directly behind us were friends with my mother. The lady’s name was Kelly, and she had kids herself. Two, in fact. The oldest, named Travis, was a couple years younger than I was, and the youngest, whose name I can not remember, was just a toddler when we met them.
I tended to stay away from Travis, because he was generally an annoying, selfish, self-absorbed brat, not unlike my sister was at the time. I’m pretty sure that the reason my sister and him didn't get along was because they were so much alike as well. I preferred to hang out with Bart* rather than with Travis, but I couldn’t really be mean to the kid, so I hung with him sometimes too.
Across the street from Travis’ house, another family moved in not long after we moved to our house. That family had two kids as well, and though I can’t remember the name of the sister or the parents so well, I do remember the name of the oldest son, who would be one of my best friends. His name was Kevin.
I think he was one of the reasons why I joined band in middle school. I saw that he played the saxophone, and though I myself wasn’t interested in instruments played with one’s mouth, I was still interested in reading and playing music. But I’ll touch on that more later.
The year was 1998. Between Bart* and Kevin, I would have my first taste of 3D, disc-based gaming, because the both of them owned a Playstation. The original Playstation came out in 1994, but I either ignored the announcements or I was happy with my Genesis, which was becoming an aged and dated system by then.
Through Bart*, I played my first ever RPG. I took a liking to the game Breath of Fire 3, which was the only RPG he owned, and though I didn't play it much, I was still content to watch him play the game too. The vibrant colors, sweeping musical score, and bits of voice acting are what sold me on the game, but it would be my experiences of playing NFL Gameday ‘97 with Kevin that sold me on the Playstation altogether.
I remember the game very well. I remember being able to create your own players, and sometimes you could give the player a name that the in-game announcer would actually be able to say. It was an incredible feeling to create yourself in the game and hear the announcer call your name when you scored a touchdown.
Kevin also introduced me to the franchise of Cool Boarders, with the game Cool Boarders 2. Cool Boarders was a snowboarding game series made without the extra pomp and circumstance of having a big name athlete on your game label, and so the game company could concentrate on making the gameplay fun instead of trying to mask horrible gameplay under a lot of pretty graphics. This would be a game I absolutely loved and would have borrowed from him, had I been able to get my own Playstation system. As it were, I had to be happy with my Genesis, at least for a little while longer, before it finally broke and I was left with no videogames for a time.
My time of no videogames was short-lived, however, because Bart* had an old Sega CD system that he was getting rid of, and because he couldn’t find any buyers, he gave the system to me, along with the two or three CD games he had, and his copy of Sonic 2.
The Sega CD was an add-on for the Sega Genesis, that was sold in a bundle, already attached. It was, I believe, Sega’s first foray into disc-based consoles. I am not sure if it was the first disc-based console on the market ever, but needless to say, it kinda sucked. The games selection wasn’t so good, and the games that were good were hard as hell to actually find.
So, moving on from videogames, Kevin’s family also had a trampoline out behind their house, and I think that’s how I first met him. He was jumping on his trampoline, and I asked him if I could join him. He went and asked his parents, who came out and queried me about who I was and where I lived, and after giving them honest and satisfactory answers, they gave me permission to join Kevin on the trampoline.
I was never much of a gymnastically talented person. Where Kevin could do front- and back-flips with the relative ease of a ninja or similarly trained person, I was flopping around like a fish out of water. We took turns that first day doing flips on the trampoline, and I perfected my “dive flip.” In it, you basically bounce off of your back, do a half flip on the way up, and then dive into your landing, which is back on your back. If done incorrectly, you run the risk of landing on your neck and seriously hurting yourself, so DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.
I know I was a bit of a bad influence on Kevin. Not long after him and I started hanging out together, Travis came over to his house. Kevin didn't want to hang out with Travis at all, and neither did I, really, but since it was Kevin’s house, I really couldn’t say anything in the vein of “go away” or not. But Kevin could, and repeatedly he told the boy to go home and find someone else to bug.
So Travis continued to ignore Kevin, and Kevin didn't want to go inside to ignore Travis because I wouldn’t be able to follow him. So I told Kevin where a pressure point was on the body, and Kevin, in turn, chased Travis off by applying pressure to that point on Travis’ body. (Before you start getting any ideas, it was a point near the collarbone on one’s neck.)
Kevin’s father witnessed the entire ordeal and had Kevin go inside, and me go home. Kevin turned out to be grounded for a week because of the “attack,” and after that I don’t think they liked me very much. But after that week we were able to hang out again, and after that incident there weren’t any other incidents of the sort because Travis pretty much learned to stay away from both myself and Kevin.
Kevin helped to introduce me to another activity as well: K-Nex.
K-Nex were a more creative form of Lego blocks. Most connecting pieces were in the form of circular piece that resembled gears, and you would build things out of K-Nex using long stick pieces connected together with these gears. It’s hard to explain exactly what K-Nex were without using pictures, so let’s just say that they were a lot of fun. Myself and Kevin would come up with things like ships and buildings, and act out things we imagined or picked up from other videogames.
And speaking of acting things out from videogames, Kevin was the first person I knew to tolerate my overactive imagination when it came to the subject of a videogame series called Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat features ninjas with different colored gi uniforms, who each control a different power. My favorite ninja of the series was a blue ninja named Sub Zero, whose power was that of cryokinesis. In other words, he could control and shoot ice, and freeze the items and people around him.
In videgames, I was generally unbeatable once I got my hands on Sub Zero. Sure, I didn't know how to do any of the really advanced Fatalities, but as far as fighting and not spamming the same move over and over, I was pretty good. My sisters never wanted to play Mortal Kombat with me because I generally beat the snot out of them in the game and nearly always chose Sub Zero to do so.
So my mother started me on home schooling in the beginning of my seventh grade year. The year was 1998. And the home schooling lasted a couple months, but my own insisting, and the fact that home schooling turned out to be so stressful, finally got my mother to let me and my sisters attend public school.
Big mistake.
I was older, but I hadn’t forgotten the abuse and teasing and bullying I had been subjected to in Virginia Beach. But in the back of my mind, I figured that the bullies were all in Virginia and that I’d be treated like an equal in Kentucky. I would be going into seventh grade, which was the first of two middle school grades in Muhlenberg County. Granted I’d be going into middle school in the middle of the year, but in my naïve mind I figured that wouldn’t matter.
It mattered. From day one I was pushed around, threatened, teased, and bullied to no end. And it was made worse because though I came into the school in the middle of the year, my studying habits and general intelligence put me at the top of the class. I was the smart quiet kid who wore his heart on his sleeve, which made me an excellent target.
The difference between my experiences in elementary school and my experiences in middle school is the fact that middle schools do not provide one with access to a counselor. So I had to bear my teasing and bullying in silence. I reported the ones that were bullying me to the principal and vice principal, but nothing was done about them. In fact, I was scolded for telling on them on more than one occasion, so I learned to keep my mouth shut instead.
Despite the fact that the majority of the people at the school were absolute dickheads, I did manage to make a couple friends there, and successfully had my first real girlfriend there. I met one of my best friends at this school, by the name of Clayton Quisenberry. Him and I started talking on the bus during a field trip, the day before the worst bullying or hazing of my life happened.
I always refer to this incident as The Knife Incident, and whenever Muhlenberg County is brought up in conversation with anyone I know, this is the first thing that pops into my mind. It defines the mindset of nearly every kid I met at that school, as well as the thought process of nearly every Muhlenberg adult I have ever met.
The Knife Incident occurred as such: on the day before it happened, there was a class field trip to an amusement park. I attended this trip wearing a fanny pack, which included a little bit of spending money, a couple packs of LifeSavers, and some other odds and ends I just felt like bringing along with me. Clayton, who I had never met before this day, decided to sit next to me on the bus for the trip to the amusement park. I emptied this pack out in front of him, so he could vouch for me that what I said I had in the pack is what I had, no more, no less.
So the trip went well, and the next day (which happened to be a Friday) I was sitting in class when the Vice Principal came to the classroom door and requested I step out into the hallway. Now, like any child, I got that strange feeling in the back of my throat like I had done something wrong, but I dismissed it because I didn't know of anything that I could have done wrong. The Vice Principal took me aside in the hallway and had me place my hands on the wall, then spread my legs apart and stare up at the ceiling.
He then took his hands and patted me down, giving me a body search, as if looking for something I could have had hidden on me. I had no idea what was going on, and after the search was done, he asked me if I had any knives or other sharp objects on my person, which I said I didn't. And I didn't. Those kinds of things weren’t allowed at school, and I was a good little boy who always obeyed the rules of the school.
So the Vice Principal took me to his office, told me to take a seat, and closed his door. Shutting the door obviously meant that the student inside the room was in trouble, and I was already pretty scared and confused about what was going on, so him shutting the door scared me even more. Again, he asked me if I had any knives on me, and if I had ever brought a knife with me to school. Again, I answered that I didn't have any knives or sharp objects with me, and that I had never brought any with me. He told me to stop lying.
I asked him why he thought I had a knife, and he told me that on that morning, he had been approached by two older boys who said that I had brought a knife with me to school the prior day, and that I had threatened them with it. He wouldn’t give names. He said that they told him that I had threatened to “slice them open” with the knife if I told anyone. He said that I had carried the knife in a fanny pack, and asked me if I had a fanny pack with me the day before. Well, the day before was the field trip, so I told him that I had the fanny pack, but that I hadn’t brought a knife to school. He told me to stop lying.
I told him that I emptied the pack in front of a friend, and he asked me who. I gave him Clayton’s name, and he told me to go back to class, and come back to his office near the end of the day, before my sixth class. I went back to class.
At lunch, I asked Clayton if he’d been to talk to the Vice Principal, and Clayton said he had. I told him what it was all about, and Clayton said he gave the Vice Principal his side of the story, along with a list of everything he saw me dump out of my pack, and that a knife was not included. I had turned the fanny pack virtually inside out, and a knife was nowhere to be seen. Clayton then said that the Vice Principal didn't believe him, which made sense considering he wanted me to return to his office at the end of the day.
So the beginning of sixth period rolls around, and I return to the Vice Principal’s office. He has the Principal in his office with him, and they both quiz me and tell me not to lie, and I tell them straight out that I didn't have any sharp objects or knives on my person, that I had never brought a sharp object or knife with me to school, ever, and that I didn't even own a knife. They both told me to stop lying. I was then sent home on the bus with explicit instructions to not return to school for a couple weeks.
Obviously I told my mother about the incident as soon as I got home. I was nearly in tears, as scared as I was. My mother was furious that they’d take me out of class and give me a pat down without thinking to call her and inform her of the charges leveled against her son. On Monday, she took me with her to go confront the Principal and Vice Principal, and after a meeting of nearly two hours, my mother took me home, saying that they had both pretty much told her that the school has its own laws, and fuck what the parents think. My mother wanted to get a lawyer and press charges, and she took me out of the school, Instead of being out of school for a two week suspension, I was out of school for over a month.
A lawyer turned out to be more expensive than my mother could afford on her “no income, just child support” salary. She didn't want to put me back in the school, but it was too stressful for her to home school me, and even though the treatment I was getting in that school was absolutely atrocious, I wanted to go back. I believe the reasoning was that if I continued to stay out of school, I would look weak, and that anyone that ran into me on the street wouldn’t hesitate to use that against me.
So after a little more than a month, my mother decided I could go back to the school. She reregistered me at Muhlenberg North, and made some kind of agreement with the Principal and Vice Principal about bringing a lawyer into the incident. I was never bothered about knives or sharp objects again, but it seemed like the higher ups of the school were continuing to watch me like a hawk.
For instance, I brought a plastic bottle of cream soda with me to school one day, intending to drink it at lunch. I pulled it out of my bag at that day’s lunch, and within seconds the Vice Principal was on me.
“Is that beer? You’re not allowed to have beer here.”
“No sir, this is cream soda.”
“I have to make sure you’re not lying, let me see that.” He takes the soda from me and sniffs it, then gives it back. “Okay. Next time put a label on it.”
Oddly enough, any other student could pull out a bottle of something, be it a glass or plastic bottle, labeled or not, and nobody would say shit to him. It’s like I was the troublemaker, simply because I was the perpetual new kid, the guy who didn't seem to need to make an effort to get good grades, the strange quiet kid that moved too often to be trusted.
After The Knife Incident, I retreated into my shell inside myself. The only person I would talk to was Clayton, otherwise I was a mute. Kids still pushed me around, and I took it all in silence, hoping that the advice to “not retaliate” that I was repeatedly given by Clayton and my mother would take hold, and that the kids would stop teasing because they’d be bored with it.
It never happened.
I’ll tell you right now, bullies will NEVER grow bored of bullying just because their target stays quiet. The target being quiet means that they’ll never get in trouble, and what better person to bully than one that will never tell on them? Every professional that tells you not to fight back are absolutely wrong. A child needs to fight back. Bullies target the kids that won’t fight back, because of the fact that they won’t. And telling those kids to continue to not fight back just makes them bigger targets.
What advice do kids need? Travel in packs. Bullies target singular kids. Bullies travel in groups in case their singular targets actually do fight back. They do this both so that they can hold down the target, and because they’re too stupid to realize that anyone who helps in beating up a kid will get in trouble, even if it’s as little as holding on to their jacket and preventing them from moving forward.
The people, kids and adults, that stand around and don’t do anything to help the bullied targets, need to get their asses in check. Indifference is the biggest blight on our schools today. Schools teach you to stand up for what is right, to stand up for what you believe in, and then turn around and don’t promote it in everyday school behavior. I have met few teachers who were actually willing to protect their students. All other teachers were walking hypocrites who expect their students to do as they say and not as they do. /end rant
Okay. So, Muhlenberg North Middle School, aside from being home to some of the worst teasing I ever experienced, was also home to the beginning of my band experience. I had originally joined band with the intention of being a percussionist, or ‘drummer,’ but the band director was in need of a tuba player and wanted to try me out on that first. So for the first couple of weeks, he loaned me an older tuba, set me up with a music stand and a practice book in the back room of his office where my squeaks wouldn’t disturb the rest of the band, and had me practice reading the music and learning the instrument.
I’ll tell you right now: I had absolutely no idea how to read sheet music. I didn't know what clefs were, what each note was, how long to play each note, nothing like that. And it’s not something you can easily teach yourself. I spent that two weeks learning to play the tuba as far as getting my fingers to work in time with my breath, and to try to sustain the notes as long as I could, but after the time passed I still had no idea how to read sheet music, and I still had no idea if the notes I was playing were correct according to the book or not.
I made sure to tell the director that I had no idea how to read sheet music, but he didn't listen. So at the end of the two weeks, when I still couldn’t play for longer then two minutes without feeling lightheaded and dizzy and wishing I had a bucket near me, I told him I couldn’t play the tuba. I told him I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and that putting me on tuba was a bad idea. I didn't have the lung capacity to handle playing an instrument that needed air, and I didn't have the patience to teach myself how to read sheet music. I told him I was better off being a drummer, because I picked up reading rhythms a lot faster than I picked up reading notes.
After proving to him that I still had no idea what I was doing by being completely clueless when he set a new piece of music in front of me, he sighed exasperatedly and went ahead and let me be a percussionist. And it was here that I received even more hazing. The most bullying of my entire time at Muhlenberg North came from a fellow drummer, whose name I can not remember, so I will simply call him Roger*. He was boy that stood about five foot six (to my five foot four at the time), with blue eyes and brown hair cut into a constant bowl cut. He teased me using everything from what I wore, to my last name, to my hairstyle, to my grades, and everything in between.
But the biggest bit of hazing he did to me came from band class itself. He was not a team player, at least not when it came to me. During practice, I never got to play a single instrument. I was lucky to snag a sheet of music, so the only way I learned what I needed to play was through the music and using my hands. But when the performances rolled around, Roger* had me play instead of him.
But I didn't mind. I was attentive enough that I learned what I was doing through the use of my hands on my legs, and learned how hard or soft to play the drums through watching Roger* and the rest of my bandmates. After the first performance, Roger* stopped hazing me in that was, either impressed that I had managed to work around his bullying, or disappointed that I had done so and he needed to come up with a different plan of attack.
I was a percussionist at this middle school for half of my seventh grade year, and half of my eighth grade year. Despite the constant teasing of my fellow drummers, band turned out to be the one class I looked forward to every day. Compared to my other classes, band was a place to relatively relax.
Consider my math class, for example. I was enrolled in an advanced algebra class in seventh grade that would have, if I had managed to stay in that class through both seventh and eighth grade, given me high school credit and made me not have to take my first algebra class in high school. But the teacher that taught the class was an absolute idiot if she didn't have the book of answers directly in front of her.
How can I say this about one of my teachers? Well, let’s see… in the summer between my seventh and eighth grade years, my family went to a local cheapo water park on Lake Malone, and my math teacher was running the front gate. She messed up a simple monetary transaction while using the calculator, and nearly charged my family ten dollars more than we should have been charged. Needless to say, I didn't pay much attention to her teaching during my eighth grade year, and I still ended up with top grades in that math class.
There was a program in that middle school that had certain classes rotating every six weeks. You could sign up for the classes you wanted to rotate into, but it wasn’t always guaranteed that you would get into the class. Some of the classes, like a simple shop class, were incredibly popular, and some of the classes, like a home economics class, simply weren’t popular at all. Since I was brought into the school in the middle of the year and I didn't have any computer experience due to having been home schooled for such a long time, my first rotating class turned out to be a typing class.
I learned the basics in that class, but even after spending six weeks working in there, I still couldn’t type without looking at my keyboard. Even now, typing this up, I have to look at the keyboard the majority of the time, but I consider it to be better than typing with a ton of cell phone abbreviations as if it’s completely natural to make yourself type like a reta- er, sorry, mentally handicapped person. I wonder how many people type out papers in school and complain when their teachers give them low grades for not spelling out their words. “Txt tlk” is not a viable language, the same way as “l33t” is not a viable language.
Alright, so, seventh grade turned out to be the grade in which I began to take an interest in girls. Being your typical male and not having any very good role models to learn from, I typically crushed on girls based on those that I thought were pretty, or those that would simply give me the time of day. And though I was by far one of the shiest people you could ever meet, I often tried to ask girls out. Usually it was done by note, and usually I was shot down and/or laughed at.
So after a while, I started admiring girls from afar. And I began to notice that I had a habit of crushing on the snobbiest ones. The ones that cared more about their appearance were also the ones more likely to be incredibly vain and mean spirited. I mean, sure, there were the girls that didn't have to work on being pretty, and normally they were rather vain as well, but once in a while I ran into a girl who I thought was absolutely beautiful who had a heart of gold too. It was the heart of gold girls that I tended to stay quiet around after being shot down so much, because I considered myself not good enough for them.
My first girlfriend became so because I put aside that feeling of “I’m not good enough” and actually asked her out. I remember it, too. It was one of those school dance functions, where teachers commandeer the school cafeteria and invite all students, then turn off the lights and play loud music and expect the kids not to grind on each other. It was my first school dance function, and I went because I really didn't have much else better to do. I generally avoided functions like that because of my tendency to be a target.
I didn't know who she was when she walked through the cafeteria doors. I think I was in the later part of my seventh grade year at the time, and was generally being a wallflower, but when she walked in I happened to glance over and time pretty much just stopped for me. I had to ask an acquaintance (you know, those people who aren’t quite friends, but they aren’t as against you as everyone and their groupies are) who she was, and I got a name: Kim.
I thought she was beautiful. I got laughed at for expressing that opinion, but I didn't care. There’s more to beauty than what your eyes can see, and by this time I knew that. So eventually I was able to make my way over to her, and struck up a bit of a conversation. Her voice was wonderful, and she didn't have that attitude within it that usually follows me around, so either she hadn’t heard of my reputation, or she just didn't care. I was hoping for the latter, but figured that it was probably the former.
So eventually I got up the nerve to ask her to dance, even though I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. She agreed, and when a slow song came on, I led her to the dance floor. I ignored the piercing stares that seemed to be boring themselves into the back of my skull, and I ignored the pointing fingers that I saw from the crowd of wallflowers. She smiled, I smiled back, and I’m pretty sure my face was glowing red by the time the song was over, but I didn't care.
We retreated back to a dark corner when the song had finished, both too nervous or embarrassed to do that again. We talked a little bit more, and then I worked up the nerve to ask her out, figuring that if she had agreed to dance, maybe she’d agree to being my girlfriend. It was a long shot, and I honestly had no idea what I was doing, but it worked, because she told me yes. It wasn’t long after that that the dance function ended, and we agreed to find each other at either breakfast or lunch on the next school day.
That first relationship lasted a good while, but eventually it ended on a misunderstanding. I’ll explain more on that later.
So what did my mother think about me having a girlfriend? Well, when I started to show an interest in girls and dating, her response was, “Go read this book, and then decide if you really want to start dating.” So I read the book, and it was relatively entertaining, but it didn't deter me from wanting to date. After all, my mother was dating, and she was as ‘happy’ as I understood her to be, and I wanted to know where that happiness came from. So after reading the book, I told her I still wanted to do the dating thing.
Granted, at that age ‘the dating thing’ amounted to little more than holding hands in the hallways and being closer to one another than you are with your best friends or your parents. I was happy, she was happy, and I finally found a reason to keep going back to school even though the bullying continued. I didn't have any classes with her, but we always managed to find each other in between classes, at lunch, and on the way to the bus. We sat by each other on the bus on the days when I was going from school to Clayton’s house. We were close.
So, I started school while in a house directly on the main road. During my time in that middle school, we moved once, to the house directly behind us. Yes, we moved into my mother’s friend’s house, and my mother’s friend moved into a trailer park. I can not remember what the reason was for us to move, but I can say that the move was perhaps the easiest move I have ever participated in, before or since.
Of course, moving into the new house meant I lost the shed that we had in the original house that was being used as a storage area as well as a clubhouse, but that wouldn’t take long to be replaced by something… I think we ended up carving out a place in Kevin’s bushes to use as a clubhouse instead.
Kevin’s house was, as stated before, directly across the street from my second home in Central City, formerly Travis’ house. His house was also right next to a second road that ended in a circle. We didn't venture down that second road very much, but I specifically remember an older male that lived down that road that trained dogs for a living. He had plenty of dogs penned up behind his house, and if I’m not mistaken, the way we met the guy was that we were playing in the road construction site seen directly behind the circle, and he called for help to chase down one of the dogs that had gotten loose from him.
Kevin and I both had previous experience with dogs. I also had previous experience with cats, but that is beside the point. Kevin owned a female chocolate lab that had recently had puppies, and I’d had some experience with a puppy that Rick had gotten, which was a mutt of lab, retriever, and another specie of dog which I can’t remember at this time. So the both of us knew how to treat a dog, and more importantly how to chase one down. But the catching of the dog wasn’t the problem, it was the chasing.
The older man couldn’t run very well, which is why he needed help. And the dog couldn’t be caught by the collar, because he had taken the collar off the dog in order to bathe it or some such deal. So what had to happen was that we had to chase down the dog, and then keep it in one place while we waited for the man to get to us so that he could pick the dog up and take it home. I think it took us fifteen minutes alone to catch the dog, and five minutes at least for the man to get to where we had finally gotten it to stop.
I can’t remember what kind of dog it was, but I remember the man saying we were welcome to come back to his house at any point to pet the dogs if we wanted to. We didn't take advantage of that offer much, but being kids with a love of animals, we didn't completely ignore it.
What road construction, you say? There was a road leading to an abandoned coal mine down the street from where both my own house and Kevin’s sat. The Peabody coal mine was a popular hangout for teenagers, and the lake upon which it sat was a popular destination for fisherman looking for catfish. There was a myth that circulated through the town about a catfish living in the lake that was big enough to swallow a bus and go looking for seconds, and though I didn't believe the story, I still stayed away from the lake itself.
The abandoned mine was good for a couple different things. The first was it was a neat place to play, and playing there made one feel like a secret agent, spy, or a ninja. Secondly, it was a neat place to explore, and one often found neat things that didn't really belong there, like beer bottles left over from secret parties, or other things… There was one time I happened to find a pair of underwear in one of the offices on the catwalk. And if one was really brave (or really stupid), they could climb to the very end of the catwalk that overlooked the lake, and jump into the water from a good sixty feet up.
There was one day that myself and Travis were walking along the main coal mine road, looking for something to do. It was in the middle of one of the hottest, driest summers I’ve ever experienced in Kentucky, and because of the heat, the both of us wanted to stay inside, but our parents declared we needed to go outside. This was during the time that I lived in the first house, on the main road. I don’t remember where Kevin happened to be during this time, but I think he was at a summer camp.
So we’re walking along, picking up rocks and pits of coal and throwing them, and I hear a crackling sound to my left, in the overgrown shrubs lining the road. I look over, and there’s this fire that had started from t he heat, the flames beginning to grow bigger, burning the dry leaves of the plants that had died without water.
So I do what any kid who wants to be a hero would have done: I attempt to put it out, while at the same time telling Travis to run home and call the fire department. Travis takes off running, and I take off my shirt and swat at the fire in an effort to smother the flame while at the same time keep my shirt from catching on fire. When that doesn’t work so well, I pick up dirt that is sitting on the side of the road and begin throwing huge handfuls of dirt and coal at the flames.
Okay, so coal dust plus fire usually equals bigger fire, right? I’m guessing there was more dirt here than coal dust, because the amount of dirt I was throwing managed to actually quell the flames and put out the fire. There were some minor flames left that I stamped out with my foot, and once I was done, I listened closely for more crackling noises. Hearing none, I put my smoky-smelling shirt back on and headed back home, hoping to get some water and tell the fire department where the fire was located, so that they could spray down the bushes with water and prevent more flames from popping up.
I was covered in sweat, soot, and dirt. My shirt, as stated previously, smelled like I had rolled it around in a freshly used charcoal grill, but without the black marks. My feet were incredibly hot and sweaty, which was to be expected after using them to put out a fire. I felt like I needed a bath and to head straight to bed to sleep off my heroics, but first I wanted to regale my mother with the tale of my firefighting prowess and to explain why Travis needed to get a hold of the fire department. It took me a while to get home because I was walking slowly, exhausted, and the amount of time that passed made me wonder why I didn't hear sirens.
It turns out that Travis never called the fire department. His mother had told him not to go to the coal mines anymore, for fear that he would do something stupid and hurt himself while he was out there, and she wouldn’t know and subsequently be unable to help him. Travis hadn’t told me this, as my own mother didn't really care at the time. So when I told him to run home and call the fire department, Travis instead ran to his house, got a drink of water, then left with his mother to go to the store, without saying a word about our activities or the fire that had popped up.
Instead, I told my mother about what happened, and asked if I should call the fire department. She said no, that more than likely the fire wouldn’t start again, and that I needed to stay away from the coal mine from now on. I don’t think she believed my tale about the fire, even though I had the smoky smell to prove it was true.
So the city deemed the road to the coal mine important enough to have another street branching off of it, and around the time that my family moved to the second house in Central City, they began construction on a new road. They didn't work on it very long before they ran out of money, so the workers pretty much left their construction vehicles there until more money could be raised for the project. Can you guess what we did after the workers were gone?
If your guess was “get into the heavy construction vehicles and mess around” you’d be half right. Kevin didn't do much, but I was daring enough to get into the seat of a bulldozer. I was tempted to try to turn it one and drive it, but my fear of getting caught as well as a fear of not knowing that the hell I was doing and the possibility of driving the thing over a cliff and into the lake near the coal mine (which was at least a football field away, but that’s still pretty close) resulted in me doing the next best thing: stealing the keys.
That’s right, the idiotic workers left the keys in their vehicles, and their doors unlocked. In a county in Kentucky that had a nickname of Methenberg, this was by far the most moronic thing the city workers could have done. I distinctly remember taking the keys out of the bulldozer, and then throwing them down the uncompleted road where they landed in the dirt a good distance away from where I was standing. This was probably done to prevent my mother questioning me where I got the keys, considering it had been proven before that I’m not a very good liar. Then again, some of my truths sounded like lies too, so maybe it was just that I wasn’t very trusted to begin with.
Why was Muhlenberg county known as Methenberg? Because this county was beginning to become famous purely for the amount of meth lab drug busts that would appear in the newspapers each year. It was like nearly every neighborhood had one or two meth labs that would pop up, and the most popular way for one of those labs to be found was when it exploded. Drugs were (and are) very popular in Muhlenberg county, Kentucky.
And speaking of drugs, Central City would be the place where I had my first experience with marijuana.
During the summer between my seventh and eighth grade years, around June, my mother and Rick got married. The ceremony was a simplistic one done at the courthouse and not a big elaborate church wedding, since we couldn’t really afford such a wedding. My mother and Rick had been living together for six years by this time, and they figured that they could get married and be happy.
Almost immediately after the marriage, the fights began. My mother and Rick fought almost constantly, and over the simplest stuff too. I think it was during this time that I declared I would never get married, simply because it looked like it made even the nicest people in the world turn on each other almost as soon as they’re known as husband and wife.
As previously stated, Rick had a problem with alcohol abuse. It hasn’t been stated, though, that he was also an avid marijuana smoker. He’d had problems with his back and his spine, and suffered from chronic back pain as a result, so he used this pain as his excuse to smoke weed. But the truth of the matter was that he had started smoking it before he was even a teenager, and had continued to smoke it through his teenage years and well into adulthood.
My mother knew this, and sometimes participated in smoking it as well, but not often because she said it made her sick. It would be years later that she’d figure out why it made her sick, but at this point in my life she didn't know the why.
We had, by this time, adopted my grandparents’ dog, an older Pomeranian by the name of Buffy. This dog was given to us because, if I remember correctly, my grandparents were moving, and the house that they were moving to didn't allow pets, or something like that.
The dog was nearly thirteen by the time we got her, which is incredibly old for a Pom. Normally Pomeranians don’t live past the age of twelve. She was very healthy and very well taken care of, but she suffered from epilepsy and had to take medication for it.
Why am I giving you all this backstory? It’s relevant.
One day during the same year they were married (though I’m not entirely sure if it was during the same month), still during summer, Rick was headed out in his car to take a drive, and my mother wanted him to take Buffy with him so that she could get the house deep cleaned. I volunteered to go as well, so myself, Rick, and Buffy went for a drive that ended up at the shore of the lake upon which the old coal mine sat. Once we were there, Rick took out a slingshot he had bought for himself from the local Walmart and began shooting pebbles at the windows of the mine offices.
The loud noises and unfamiliar surroundings scared and shocked Buffy, who started going into an epileptic seizure. I got worried and scared for her, so Rick took a joint out of his pocket, lit it, took a deep breath of smoke, and blew that smoke into Buffy’s face. Almost immediately, Buffy calmed down and came out of her seizure.
I was curious about the joint that Rick had pulled out, so I asked about it. He told me that he was smoking marijuana, and I replied that marijuana was against the law and bad for you, like the good little school boy that I was. Rick’s reply was that the school was lying to me, and that it was perfectly safe. And then he told me that all the cool people smoked it.
I was twelve at this point, attending a school where nearly everybody hated me, and nearly desperate for good attention. The idea that doing something as simple as taking a hit off of a piece of rolled paper with something in it would make me cool very much appealed to me. I trusted Rick quite a bit, and so when he offered the joint to me so that I could take a hit and try it, I hesitantly agreed. My pleas for attention and acceptance were battling inwardly with my habit of listening to my superiors about the dangers of drugs, but Rick was also a superior, and he was telling me that the drug was a good thing, and not a bad thing.
I took two pretty good sized hits off the joint, and began coughing. Rick said that the coughing was a good thing, because it let you know that the smoke had reached your lungs. I sat there waiting for something to happen, having been told at school that marijuana made you hungry, made you laugh at anything, slowed down your reflexes, and made you hallucinate. When I started feeling tingly, I got scared. I voiced my fear, and Rick started laughing.
His laughing made me laugh, and alleviated my fears for the moment. Then I held up my hand in front of my face.
Now, I’ve had quite a bit of experience since then with marijuana. I have not hallucinated since then, and I’m completely convinced that I’ve had stronger weed since I’ve been older than I had when I was twelve, but at the time, when I held up my hand, I saw what looked like a white, fuzzy outline surrounding my fingers. I dropped my hand and looked around, and everything had a white, fuzzy outline. I was convinced I was hallucinating.
Now, years later, I’m convinced that my brain was playing tricks on me. I think that because I was so convinced that I was going to hallucinate, my mind began projecting images and made me hallucinate so that I would stop being afraid of it. I guess it worked, because after then I wasn’t afraid of hallucinating.
Buffy was asleep in the backseat by the time Rick finished his joint, and I was convinced that I didn't like the experience of marijuana. He told me to promise never to tell my mother what happened between us, because she would get incredibly mad and possibly make him go away forever, and I promised him that I wouldn‘t.
Eventually the body tingles and white outline passed, and one of the secondary consequences of being high on marijuana hit me: sleepiness. I was suddenly very tired and just wanted to go home and take a nap. So I voiced my concerns, and Rick agreed with me (though his reason was that he was hungry… guess from what?), so we returned to the house. I don’t remember much after that, so I’m pretty sure I passed out.
Aside from starting eighth grade that year and endure even more teasing, nothing of consequence really happened for another few months. My mother and Rick continued to have their fights, and eventually worse came to worse and they decided to get a divorce. Their marriage lasted, at most, seven months.
I, of course, was probably the only child of my mother’s three that could have remembered all the pain and anguish that followed her divorce from Mark*, so this might be why the divorce from Rick affected me as much as it did. I hated to see my mother go through so much pain. A lot of the fights her and Rick had were because he was keeping a lot of unmentioned secrets from her, and acting like anything but a respectable husband should. These particular arguments gnawed at me more than any of the others simply because I had a big secret I was holding from my mother as well.
So on the night of my thirteenth birthday party, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Between a minor mental breakdown while watching Kelly’s youngest (which I’ll get into shortly), constant bullying and teasing and such at school, a recent breakup, and the guilt of keeping a secret as big as having smoked marijuana from my mother, something was bound to snap.
Kelly’s youngest boy was a handful and a half. In my first meeting with him, when he was still a toddler, he had managed to pick up a metallic ball bearing and threw it as hard as he could at me, hitting me directly in my right temple. The pain was incredible, and I had headaches due to the impact for days afterwards. Obviously I tried not to cry, but I couldn’t help it. The pain was that bad.
When my mother and Kelly both came running to find out what the crying was about, Kelly instinctively started scolding Travis. It seemed that the boy was a real troublemaker. And when I told her that it was her other son that had done it, she initially didn't believe me. Then I found the ball bearing he had thrown, and Travis corroborated my story, and the fact that the kid was trying to hide to stay out of his mother’s wrath finally made her believe that her ‘little angel’ perhaps wasn’t as angelic as she thought.
So one night, after Kelly and her family moved to their trailer and we moved into their old house, my mother and Kelly went out for some reason (I think it was shopping), leaving me to watch her youngest child. Travis was either staying with his father or was at a friend’s house, I don’t remember. I also don’t remember much about the babysitting night, except that it ended with me absolutely bawling while laying on the couch, the kid getting into things he wasn’t supposed to be getting into while not listening to me at all, and my mother concluding that I was incredibly stressed out to the point of near exhaustion. And that was my minor mental breakdown.
Another point that contributed to this mental breakdown was something happened with a kitten my mother had received for her birthday. Someone had given her a small, white kitten as a birthday present, but it literally looked like it had been picked up off the street. This cat, which she named Rachel, wasn’t white; it was a dark grey. It had some strange something or other going on with its eyes because they were covered in gunk and refused to open completely, and the cat smelled horrible.
Well, my mother went to give the cat a bath, and called me into the bathroom to help her because the kitten began giving her hell as soon as the water had been turned on. I went into the bathroom and closed the door, and helped my mother hold the cat so that she could scrub it down with shampoo and rinse its fur. That’s when disaster struck.
The cat clawed my hands as hard as it could and bit my mother’s hand. She let go and the cat then bit my hand. This caused me to let go before my mother could grab onto the cat again, and the cat fell into the tub and took a deep breath of water. The cat immediately stopped struggling and my mother plucked it out of the water, and you could tell the cat was having trouble getting a breath. Its lungs had filled with water.
I dried my hands and escaped to my room, where I hid for the hour or so it took for the kitten to drown. There was nothing that could be done for her. I was reminded of the ‘Kitten Swimming Lessons’ incident in Alabama, and blamed myself for the death of the kitten, even though my mother said she didn‘t blame me for it. So when I had my meltdown while watching Kelly’s kid, this incident was the first thing that came to my mind.
Anyway, back to the party. While everyone was having fun, I pulled my mother aside and told her everything about the day at the coal mine. I was nearly in tears and expected her to punish me because I had kept it a secret from her for so long, but she didn't. Her reasoning was that I had been told by an adult that I trusted that it was okay, and was basically doing what I was told, but she also told me that and adult giving an illegal drug to a minor was a major offense, and I was right to come to her at all.
Obviously, because of the length of time between my smoking the weed and her finally finding out about it, there was no proof that it had happened beyond my emotional state, and it would basically be my word against Rick’s. And apparently (in the case of law, anyway), an adult’s word is more trustworthy than a child’s word, even if the child is more frightened of authority than an adult is. So nothing was really done, except that my mother decided that now would be a good time to move. So we packed up our belongings and moved to a house in Earlington, Kentucky.
Earlington is located in Hopkins county. This meant that I would be starting in a new school in the middle of the year, again. And considering my experiences with starting in a new school at Muhlenberg North Middle, I was incredibly apprehensive about the entire ordeal.
I needn’t have been. It turns out that people in Hopkins county are actually friendly, and don’t really care whether you’ve been there your entire life or just a couple of days. With the exception of a bad incident within the first week of my being there (which the student got in some major trouble for and I actually got an apology for afterwards), I did incredibly well at South Hopkins Middle School.
The incident? Four days into my new school, I’m standing in line for lunch, and a boy is joking to his groupies about being able to take a hit in the testicles and still be able to stand, and I happen to overhear that if you can take a hit and not cry, you’re tough. Obviously I wanted to be known as tough, but I didn't particularly want to take a hit to the balls, but the kid took it on himself to swing his arms at random people and test them for himself anyway.
He swung at me, and I managed to see it before it connected, but I wasn’t fast enough to dodge out of the way. His hand grazed my crotch area, and for a full ten seconds I tried to ignore the pain that welled up from just barely being touched, but I couldn’t. I was hit all at once with a pain that made me want to scream out bloody murder, curl into a ball on the floor, and vomit my intestines out through my mouth all at once; it HURT. I only managed to crumple to the floor and curl up, and the kid started laughing, talking about how I was weak.
He was the only one laughing.
One of his groupies reported the incident to a teacher who came to see what the commotion in the lunch line was, and the kid received a week’s suspension and a month’s detention after that. I must have laid on that floor for a good thirty minutes before I felt good enough to move again, and I was allowed to stay in the cafeteria and eat after the bell for lunch ended, the lunch ladies and teacher being sympathetic to my case. When I felt good enough to return to class, I was sent on with a note about the incident, so I didn't get in trouble.
After the week’s suspension ended, the kid returned to school and sought me out during lunch. He apologized of his own free will, saying it was wrong for him to act the way he did, and that he hadn’t singled me out in the line, even though that’s what it felt like at the time. I forgave him, but that was the only interaction I had with that kid during my time at that school.
My participation in band continued when I moved. My participation at South Hopkins Middle band introduced me to the world of Marching Band, and though I was teased and prodded a bit (but all in good fun) because I didn't know what a cadence was, I was soon informed and educated in everything there was to know about Marching Band.
And I liked it. Marching Band appealed to me quite a bit, and that appeal would be one of the deciding factors for me to continue with my band participation when I graduated into High School the next year.
South Hopkins also had a reading program that they endorsed at the school called Accelerated Reader. How the program worked was a book was assigned a certain number of points, and after you read the book, you would take a computer test consisting of anywhere from ten to twenty five questions about the book. If you passed the test, you got the amount of points the book had assigned to it. If you didn't pass the test, you pretty much wasted your time with the test and the book.
These points could be accumulated and used to ‘purchase’ prizes that were set up in a display case in the middle of the lobby as you first came through the school’s front doors. The higher the point amount, the more valuable the prize that you could buy.
My Language Arts teacher at South Hopkins Middle encouraged us to read. Part of our curriculum in the class was to read and earn a set number of points every six weeks. The encouragement to read came from the fact that she would take any extra points we made from the AR program and apply them to our six week grade.
When I started out on the AR program, I didn't enjoy reading very much. What got me into gaining points was not the grade boost, but the fact that one of the prizes was a Gameboy Pocket. My sister Porsche* had had a former friend of hers leave a copy of Pokemon Red Version at our house, and because my sister was convinced that the girl would return to being her friend, she kept the game.
At the time, the Gameboy Color had just come out, and I wanted some kind of handheld gaming system that I didn't have to ask my mother to play (because the Genesis/Sega CD took up the only television in the house). Since my birthday had just passed and I hadn’t received any handheld gaming systems, I set my sights on the six thousand, four hundred point Gameboy and forced myself to read the longest books that the school’s library held.
I started with their highest scoring book: The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks. This book was worth a whopping one hundred and four points, and held nearly nine hundred pages. It was my first time delving into the realm of high fantasy, and I enjoyed myself so much I finished the book in a couple of days. The librarian of the school couldn’t believe it when I came in a couple days after borrowing the book, returned it, and aced the test on it.
I continued with the Shannara series, and after that moved on to classic books, like The Grapes of Wrath. Grapes was actually the only book I ever failed the test for, simply because I couldn’t follow its story very well. I missed out on seventy-two points for that book, but it didn't stop or discourage me. Within four months, I managed to earn more than seven thousand points.
My Language Arts teacher pulled me aside one day during class when a test was scheduled and flat out told me I didn't have to take the test. When I asked her why, she said that I had amassed enough reading points that I could get zeros on every test and assignment from then until eighth grade graduation and still get a hundred percent in her class. Though amazed, I told her that I preferred to take the test so that I didn't seem lazy, and so that it didn't look like I was cheating my way through school.
At the graduation ceremony for eighth grade, I was called to the stage to receive an award and a prize for the mass of points I had accumulated in the Accelerated Reader program. I managed to get the second highest amount of points in the entire school, with the first place reader having only six hundred points more than I did, as well as a two month head start.
What was my prize? A book.
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, to be exact. It was one of those inspirational books that got really popular, and it was a spin off of the original Chicken Soup for the Soul book. I managed to read the entire thing in the first night that I got it, because it was actually pretty easy to read.
Aside from my exploits in Language Arts, I met the first Science teacher I ever had who didn't believe in the evolution theory that he was required to teach. He was also the first male Science teacher I’d ever been assigned, at least in my elementary and middle school careers. He spoke with a kind and gentle tone, and made learning fun, even for eighth graders. I say that because I keep hearing that once you pass sixth grade, school becomes monotonous and boring.
I had two male teachers at South Hopkins, in fact. My band teacher was also male. In fact, aside from the female teachers I’d had in elementary school that were required to teach ‘Music’ in their classes, every teacher I’d had for band was male.
Band class was something else. At Muhlenberg North, the band hall had been set up in coliseum style, with the director on the floor and the instruments on rising levels in front of him, as if he was the main attraction and the instrument players were the audience. The floors there were linoleum or the equivalent, and white, built with the intent to be a band room.
But at South Hopkins, the band room was a flat, singular room, carpeted in brown, and seemed to have been built for storage purposes and had been turned into a band room as an afterthought. The instruments and their players sat in chairs that curved around the band instructor. The percussion section was split here, with the louder drums on one side of the band room, and the xylophone and other toned instruments, as well as the crash cymbals, on the other side.
Since I didn't have my own snare drum, and because I wasn’t really all that good on the snare in the first place, I was in charge of playing the crash cymbals. For those of you who have no idea what crash cymbals are, they are a pair of large cymbals that have hand grips on them, that you have to manually crash together in order to make a sound. This particular instrument is more popular for use in marching band.
My first use of this instrument was not for class purposes, but to pay back a kid for crashing them together directly behind my head when I wasn’t expecting it. My first guess was that he had done so out of some kind of initiation purpose, but then I heard from another kid that he did this to pretty much everybody and it paid to be alert and pay attention to my surroundings so that it didn't happen to me more than once.
I got him back, though. His name was Brad*, and he was a trombone player. One morning about a week after he crashed me, he was pulling out his instrument and tuning it for the coming class, and wasn’t paying attention to the area around him while he did so. I went into the storage room where the cymbals were being kept and grabbed them, carefully picking them up without making any sounds. I snuck up behind him, opened my hands wide, and…
CRASH!
He must have leapt a good foot and a half off the ground. I laughed, he got angry, he chased me for a bit, I chased him for a bit, then we both calmed down and called a truce: I agreed to not crash him anymore if he agreed not to crash anyone else anymore, and I clarified that I was included in the ‘anyone else’ part of the agreement.
Both of these guys would become friends of mine, and this friendship would last through the rest of eighth grade and well into our high school careers. Not only this, but Anthony* would eventually meet, as well as get a crush on, my sister. I believe they ended up dating for a while, but the relationship between them didn't last very long. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anthony* had a sister who was in the same grade as I was, and we became pretty close friends. She didn't play an instrument herself so I couldn’t talk to her during band class, but she did have the same art class as I did, and if I remember correctly she was the one who initiated our friendship in the first place. On my first day of art class, she was the one that sat down at my art table while I sat there alone, too shy and too afraid of rejection to go ask to sit at any of the other tables.
We may as well have been boyfriend and girlfriend. She told me so many of her secrets that I wondered if we were dating sometimes. I told her my secrets in return. By the time high school rolled around, I found myself wanting to ask her out but being far too shy to even attempt it. I was afraid that I had dug myself so far into the friend zone that she wouldn’t be able to see me as any more than just a really good friend.
I didn't let that shyness deter me from continuing to talk to her, though. I rode the same bus as her and her brother, so I got to see where the two of them lived. This would come in handy later in life when I attempted to visit her at her house during the summer, but while I was still in middle school I just filed it away in the “things I know about the girls I happen to be crushing on” cabinet.
I don’t think I told anybody about my crushing on her. I’m pretty sure I hid it well enough that not even her or her brother Anthony* knew it or even guessed it. While it was obvious that Anthony liked my sister, I was better at hiding behind my wall and closing myself off from the world around me. It was a skill I had begun developing while I still lived in Virginia, and had been given the chance to perfect and master while attending Muhlenberg North Middle School.
The first house we moved into in Earlington was a drafty, two-story monstrosity. I couldn’t tell if it was old, or just built to be cool in the summer, but winter in that house was a horrible excursion. As you came in through the front door, the first thing you would see would be the staircase, with a total of sixteen stairs leading into the second floor of the house. To the right of the front door was the living room, with a massive vent in the floor meant to heat the entire downstairs area, or so was my initial thought.
Passing through the living room, one would come to a little hallway that gave way to a bathroom on the left, and a bedroom on the right. This was my mother’s bedroom. Past the hallway lay the kitchen on the left, and a door leading outside directly in front of you if you didn’t go into the kitchen.
Heading back to the stairs, when you reached the second floor, you stood in a lobby-type place with doors all around you. The first room on the second floor had a door that didn’t close right, so it was always a struggle to get it open. We used this room as the game room, and game consoles went in there. It had a hard wood, non-carpeted floor, a single vent for heat or air, and two large, extremely drafty windows that rendered the single vent absolutely useless. During the winter, we closed this room off and I about froze to death whenever I wanted to play a videogame.
The next room was a bathroom, with a toilet that stayed clogged more often than not. In fact, it finally got to the point where we refused to use the upstairs bathroom, and just used the downstairs bathroom instead. After the bathroom was my sisters’ room. They shared a room because most of their stuff was at their dad’s still, and the game room was far too drafty to use as an actual bedroom.
My sisters’ room was unique in the sense that it attracted the most wasps in one house that I’ve ever seen. There was never a nest to be found, but they had, on average, three wasps in their room per week. I hate wasps. They hate wasps. But because their fear of wasps was greater than my own, I was often the one who had to kill the damn thing whenever it found its way into their room.
After my sisters’ room was a window, and then my own room. We got to pick our rooms when we moved to the house originally, and I picked my room purely because of the carpet. I didn’t care that it was the smallest upstairs bedroom, or that it was the only bedroom in the house that didn’t have a closet. I didn’t care that I had to walk the farthest from my room to get to the stairs. I didn’t care that the door stuck on this room almost as much as the door on the game room stuck. This room had a shag carpet, and I wanted that room to be mine.
The prior tenants of the house had left some of their furniture there, so we inherited a table and a waterbed from the prior renters. I also managed to procure a seaside painting in my room, but that’s irrelevant at this time. This would be my first experience with having a waterbed, and except for the fact that I had to alternate between leaving the water heater on or turning it off throughout the year, I liked it.
Because I didn’t have much space in this room, I wasn’t able to set up my practice pads. I tried for a bit, but I just couldn’t move around efficiently enough, so I packed them away. Instead of my practice pads, I ended up making a table out of four-by-fours and aluminum roofing. I had Baldy* to help me with that, though.
Baldy* was a guy my mother met not long after we had moved that she ended up dating for a long time. He was divorced, with three kids, and his fat slob of an ex was doing everything she could to try to weasel her way through life without working for a single penny. Even though Baldy* was the main one taking care of the kids, somehow he still had to pay his ex Child Support.
When my mother met him, Baldy* was fighting his ex for the custody of his children. He had a job, he had a house, he was taking care of himself, but because he was relatively spineless and pretty much a wimp, his ex was gaining the upper hand. So for the majority of the time that we lived in the two-story house in Earlington, his kids were with his ex, and Baldy* was with my mother, and he got to see his kids twice a month, on weekends.
Baldy* made himself out to be a mechanic, and though he knew the basics of car repair, he instead chose to be a thief. More often than not, he would take a person’s car into his ‘shop’ and have them give him the money for the parts they needed, then installed the parts. However, he would quote prices for parts that were ridiculously overpriced, then he would pocket the money and clean the part that was already on the car so that it looked like new, and then return the car. The most popular part that he would do this with was spark plugs, though sometimes he would go to a junkyard and pick up used part there for roughly half or even a quarter of what he told the person the part would cost.
Baldy’s* ‘shop’ was the garage that we had behind the house. It was a two car garage that needed a deep cleaning when we moved in because of all the junk that had been left behind. Behind the garage, too, needed cleaning, because the previous renters had been stashing bricks and glass and old parts behind the garage when they ran out of room inside of it, and hadn’t been mowing the yard like they should have. So now there was a bunch of bricks and glass and old parts that were covered up by tall, un-mowed and unkempt grass.
The cleaning stage was fun for a while. We didn’t touch the garage because we didn’t really have any need for it before Baldy* came along, so most of the cleaning was done by him. The four-by-fours and aluminum roofing that I used for my table was found amongst the junk in the garage, as well as a cast iron, wood-burning stove. The stove was actually set up with a vent that filtered the smoke outside, so I guess it wasn’t junk.
But the majority of the items that we found while cleaning (because I obviously helped a bit) were empty oil containers, broken wooden pieces to things like chairs and benches, rubber hoses that didn’t go to anything, snapped rubber belts that seemed to have been removed from motors and just tossed to the side, and piles upon piles of old screws and nails. We even found a large wooden log that had us stumped (lol, pun) as to why it would be in there in the first place.
As far as cleaning behind the garage went, aside from all the trash, we uncovered the chassis and half the motor to a 50cc Honda dirt bike. Baldy* mentally went through all of the things we threw away from the garage and concluded that we hadn’t thrown away any of the dirt bike’s parts, and from that day forth he kept an eye out for possible parts at junkyards.
It turned out that we had no place for all the junk behind the garage, and that it would be dangerous to try to work through all the broken glass. We eventually just left the stuff where it was and rearranged it so that the grass was all covered, in order to get it to stop growing and make it so that we didn’t have to mow behind there. There were also wooden slats that we hate here up, and along with a lot of other burnable trash we gathered from t he yard and inside the garage, we piled it up in the back yard. I can’t remember if we had a bonfire with it or not, but I do know that the pile sat there for a pretty good amount of time before it disappeared.
Remember the dog I mentioned something about back when we lived in Central City? We brought that dog with us when we moved to Earlington. He was an outside dog now, and was chained to a tree with a metal drum/barrel for a house. In hindsight, that probably wasn’t the best housing idea, especially during storms, but the barrel was never struck by any lightning, so it did the trick.
Once the dog was placed outside, Baldy’s* cat Charlie came to live inside with us. I know what you’re thinking, ‘Oh no, another cat.’ Fortunately, though, nothing really bad happened to this cat. I mean, sure, my sister wrapped a hair scrunchie around one of his paws and caused it to swell up from lack of circulation, and sure, one of Baldy’s* kids pulled a tuft of fur out of the tip of his tail so that it looked like the tip had been chopped off and the tail ended flat instead of curved, but other than that he was treated well.
We actually treated Charlie better than we treated the dog. The cat never had bottle rockets shot at him during the Fourth of July. The cat never got teased and made to run at us until the chain around his neck went taut and he ended up doing a backflip when the chain halted his movement. I think the worst the car got was either the scrunchie incident or whenever we put a sock on his head and watched him stumble around blindly trying to remove it.
I was becoming my computer-centric self at this time, spending more time with videogames rather than with the animals outside. It would be at this house that I received my first mainly disc-based console, an original Playstation. My mother bought three games with it when I got it as a late birthday present: Tetris Plus, Spyro the Dragon (the first one), and Gran Turismo 2. If I’m not mistaken, I got the Playstation before I rewarded myself with the Gameboy Pocket, so I spent quite a bit of time on the PS1.
Of the three games, Gran Turismo 2 was the game I played the most. The Gran Turismo games taught me how to drive, rather than having a parent allow me behind the wheel on open roads in the middle of nowhere. Within the first week of having the game, I had successfully found a couple glitches that allowed me to do tricks in the game. It was a wild sight to see a car hit the apex of a turn at high speeds, then hit the wall and begin saucer-spinning into the air. Then the car hit’s the ground and you spend a minute or so watching it tumble front bumper to back while the game refuses to let it flip. By the time it’s done spinning, you’re dizzy and the game it trying to decide how much damage was done to the tires, but the rest of the car is pristine.
Tetris Plus was an interesting game. Besides its basic Tetris mode, it had a story mode where you had to play Tetris and remove blocks to get this little guy to the bottom of the level before a set of falling spikes reached him and killed him. The thing was, if you set any blocks on top of the guy, he would climb them all the way to the top. In some of the later levels, this became a huge and annoying problem. It was especially annoying when you cleared out the bottom of the levels where the guy was with a Tetris, only to have him grab a hold of the blocks that fell to his eyes level and climb his way to his death.
The first Spyro the Dragon was my first introduction into platform RPG games. I was familiar with platform games with Sonic and Mario, and I was familiar with RPGs by the way of Breath of Fire III, but this would be the first time I ever played a game that combined elements of both genres. It was a fun game, but severely annoying in a good number of parts. The most annoying parts were trying to chase down the egg thieves. You could run just a little bit faster than they could, but you had to be really tight with your controls in some places, and you had to know the levels like the back of your hand.
But enough about the games themselves. Eventually I got a Gameshark, and began to get into coding as far as cheats were concerned. I never considered cheats to be game breakers. In fact, cheats could make a game more fun, especially if it was a game that was aggravating the hell outta you. For instance, the unlock all cheats for Gran Turismo 2 helped out a lot because I was having trouble with the S-Class license tests. Once I was able to get the S-Class license, new cars and higher monetary prizes opened up for me.
Messing with Gameshark codes is ultimately what broke my Playstation in the long run. I used to use the codes to mess with the coding of the games directly, allowing me to add greater speed to my cars in the game, or mess with the way they looked. I once had a Dodge Viper stored in my memory card for GT2 that could get up to 500MPH going in reverse… and reverse was the only direction you could really drive the thing if you had any hope of controlling it. But messing with the game coding also messed with the memory cards’ coding, and eventually it broke the machine and corrupted all of my memory cards. I was unable to save anything to any memory cards, and the ones I did try to use became corrupted. But I had the Playstation for over a year before this happened, and even after that I was content with it.
I got in trouble a few times for playing the Playstation too long. My mother was convinced I was going to rot my brain out, and to this day I have no idea where this urban myth came from. I’ve found that videogame playing, while fueling the stereotype of fat gamers and nerds, also helps to develop problem solving skills and hand-eye coordination. Some games help kids in math, such as role-playing games where you have to keep up with statistics such as Attack and Defense, as well as Health Points. First-Person Shooter games, for instance, help develop alertness and reaction times. Gran Turismo and other racing games help a person to develop driving skills and hand-eye coordination, as well as alertness and recovery skills. And all that exposure to flashing images can help to strengthen one’s eyesight.
So long as the child knows that things learned from videogames in the essence of violence should be kept solely to the videogame fantasy land, just about any videogame out there can develop skills that can be used in the real world. And if a child is angry, a great way to blow off steam is to shoot some aliens or blow up fantasy cars, maybe even use your ninja to beat the tar out of another ninja.
There are far too many people nowadays who are more willing to blame the images their child interacts with rather than to blame themselves and take responsibility for their action (or inaction) in raising their child. If you don’t want the kid to grow raping women, stealing cars, or robbing banks, then teach them that these things are bad, rather than blaming the videogames that they play that allows them to do these things. Because, you know, the videogames are fake, and the same crap happens on the news that your child watches or the movies you rent and own; I don’t hear parents blaming any of that shit. Instead of taking responsibility for not ensuring that their child knows that what goes on in the video gaming world should stay in the video gaming world, they blame it on anything and everything else. Take some fucking responsibility. /end rant
The neighborhood we lived in by this time was okay. I didn’t really have any friends in the neighborhood because I was reclusive and kept to myself. My sisters, on the other hand, seemed to become friends with nearly every other girl that lived in the neighborhood. Porsche* especially.
Porsche* had this really bad habit of gaining friends and keeping them until she was finished with them. She and her friends tended to fight over nearly everything when it came to be near the end of the friendship between them. Sometimes things ended up broken, such as hairbrushes, and sometimes things ended up stolen, such as combs, clothing, or jewelry.
This attitude/personality spilled over into family life as well. It got so bad that eventually Katie was admitted into Foster Care because my mother just couldn’t control her. Apparently Porsche* did exceptionally well in Foster Care, but it is my belief that she did so well because the Foster Family never really got to see Katie’s* dark side because she acted like she was on vacation with friends. Instead of seeing the Foster parents as her actual parents, it’s my opinion that Porsche* saw them as parents of a friend, and she acted like a guest, because the moment she was relinquished from Foster Care and came back to my our mother, she exploded back into her old, uncontrollable ways again.
Our next door neighbor was Katie’s* Foster Care worker, and though she was a generally nice woman, she always talked to my mother as if she was the one who had done wrong by Porsche*. Porsche* received therapy of the sort that placed the blame for every act that happened to her and everything she did squarely on the shoulders of those people around her, and basically told her that she didn’t have to take responsibility for a single thing. And what child doesn’t want to be told that they don’t have to take responsibility for their own actions?
Of course, my sister ended up going to the same school that I did for a while before being shipped off to Foster Care, and there were some mornings where she would get on the bus with me and sit by her friends and brag about how she threw a toddler’s fit the night before because she wasn’t getting her way. There was at least one person that was her friend when she started bragging about these fits that told her that she needed to grow up and take responsibility for her actions, and possibly get help, and needless to say, that person was shunned by Porsche* afterwards. Their friendship fizzled, and Porsche* blamed them for it.
Now, yes, I was treated better in Hopkins county, and teased and bullied less, but that isn’t to say that I wasn’t a target. It would be here that I actually received my first physical targeting, and it would be the first time I would be punished for doing nothing.
I remember still being in middle school when this happened. I was sitting on the bus on my way back home from school, and I had my hands on my knees with my chin in my hands, my forehead against the seat in front of me, and my eyes closed; obviously I was trying to catch a little sleep on the ride home. I was obviously minding my own business, when I felt someone or something hit the back of my head with great force. Twice, in rapid succession.
I was not familiar with physical pain like that. My first physical response was to grab the back of my head, curl my upper body to my legs, and protect myself, while my emotional response was to start crying. It hurt. But I managed to hold back my tears and listened for laughing or anything that would reveal that this was a hazing prank.
There was no laughing from anyone except from the guy who hit me, and he did so because he felt like it. In fact, this would be the excuse he gave the bus driver. I got the back of my head to stop hurting as much, though I had a hell of a headache, and I whipped my head around to find out who my oppressor was.
… I don’t know how to say this without being racist. My oppressor was black, male, built like a football player, but dressed like a gangster poser. It was still the nineties, and he hadn’t been informed yet that saggy pants with no belt had gone out of style. He spoke with forced slurs in his words like he wanted to be a good kid but that being “popular” with those of (this sounds so racist, and I’m sorry) his type was more appealing to him.
He was one of the kids that was capable of being at the top of his class, but believed that the world owed him something and that he shouldn’t work. He believed that the world should be handing him everything on a silver platter, and should allow him to take the silver platter too. He was of the mindset that he was owed good grades rather than working for them. And I would find out later that because I made it seem like I received my high grades with hardly any work, that it made him jealous, and that was part of the driving force (other than boredom) that led him to hit me on that ride home.
So here’s the scenario: one kid, sitting in the back of the bus with his friends, who has just managed to walk up the aisle on a crowded bus while it was moving and without being seen doing so by the bus driver, has hit another kid as hard as he could, twice, in the back of the head for absolutely no reason. The other kid, sitting at about the middle of the bus, taking a little bit of time after being hit to try to get his rational thought back in place rather than being driven by emotion, has now stood up in the aisle, looking behind him and towards the back of the bus to find out just who has decided to pretend he’s a punching bag.
The bus driver, who is supposed to be more attentive than this, sees the kid who has just been hit for no apparent reason standing up in the middle of the aisle while his bus is moving. So From the front of the bus comes a shout of, “Sit down or face a suspension from the bus!” The bus then stops to let a kid off the bus, and the kid who has just been hit uses this opportunity to move up to the front of the bus where there is now an empty seat, to tell the bus driver exactly what has just happened.
What response did I get from the bus driver? “I don’t care if you didn’t hit him back, you must have provoked him somehow, so you’re both suspended from the bus.” Thank you, blind bus driver, for absolutely nothing.
Luckily, this happened on a Friday. Come Monday, after I’ve told my mother about the incident and we’ve had the chance to calm down and think rationally about it, I’m taken to school via car rather than on the idiotic bus, and we both head to the office. The intent was not to get the bus driver in trouble, but to get some actual resolution to the problem rather than allow a blanket punishment to stand.
The bus driver has already talked to the principal, it seems. He knows all about what has happened, and has viewed the video from the camera on the bus. The camera shows that I had done absolutely nothing to provoke this kid, and from the scheduling in the computers, I didn’t have any classes with the kid either. We were complete strangers, and I was basically targeted for kicks. The principal was going to call me into his office that day anyway to give me a note to give the bus driver, but since I had come to the office first thing, that eliminated the need for calling me there later in the day.
The kid that hit me would be suspended for a week from school. In that particular school (and just about every school that I’ve heard of since), if you’re absent from school as a punishment and miss any tests, you’re not allowed to make up those tests. I almost felt sorry for the kid because he was absent from school during eighth grade finals.
Almost.
I’ve felt for a long time that kids that are allowed (or encouraged!) to act out in violence against other kids or adults because they don’t have everything they want and don’t want to work for the other things they want should not be pitied when their actions deprive them of the chance to advance and succeed. The kid that hit me because he was bored and claimed to be jealous of my grades had to repeat the eighth grade because his suspension made him receive zeroes on his finals, which dropped his low C average grades into the F category. And he blamed everyone but himself for it. So I was pretty thankful that this kid wouldn’t be following me into high school.
That wasn’t the only trouble I had with black kids, though. I also very nearly got into a fight with three smaller black kids and their older brother, once. It was winter, and one of them had thrown a snowball at me and hit me in the face for no reason. So I walked up to them and we got into a verbal fight.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t very smart when I used my final retort. F-bombs were slung, “momma” insults were used, and my retaliation at the end was cursing their race. I went from being a harmless white kid who was mad about being beaned in the face with a snowball to being a smarmy white kid who just signed his own death warrant. I looked like a hell of a racist, and it was me versus three black kids.
So we started negotiating the rules and terms of a fight. I wanted one rule, and one rule only: no backup. My rule was that I wanted to fight them one on one, and didn’t want them all to gang up on me. But they misunderstood me and thought I was saying that nobody could back out of the fight, and pretty much told me deal and all came at me at once. When I actually managed to fend them off, the smallest one went to get his high school Sophomore brother to help them fight me.
I was still the eighth grade. The youngest of the trio of troublemakers was in the sixth grade. And they were the ones who started it. Of course, what was the only thing they told their brother? My “screw your whole race” comment. Which, of course, made the older brother angry, and he came out looking for blood.
But I managed to get my side of the story out, along with an apology for my use of words, and the brother told me it would be best if I went home and left them alone, to which I agreed. As I was retreating to my house, I heard the older brother smack one of the younger brothers and scold them for attempting to throw another snowball at my retreating figure. I’m pretty sure that if he had succeeded in actually throwing the snowball, the older brother would have let me return and kick the younger brother’s ass.
Not quite ready to get into high school right now. I think, instead, I’m going to concentrate on my first experience with a little thing called Band Camp.
The name is a little bit deceiving. When you thin about [Anything] Camp, you probably get the picture of a group of people at some place away from home, staying in rented buildings for a week or two while they train, right? Some people remember the scene in the movie Remember the Titans where the football team is at a college away from their home, training themselves to get along with each other and to be more like a family than just a team… Band Camp for the high schools I went to (and the majority of high schools out there) isn’t like that.
Band Camp is a grueling two-week course of eight-hour days, in the middle of July, dedicated to teaching the members of the band- both incoming and those left over from the year before- how to march, how to play their instrument, and how to do both at the same time. The band members also begin to memorize the three or four pieces of music they’re going to be playing, along with the places in the field that they will be marching to during those pieces of music.
While a good bit of emphasis is put on playing the music correctly, more emphasis is put on form rather than on function. Nearly everything about marching band (which is what Band Camp was really for) is about appearance and presentation. To get high scores during competitions, the band had to be spot on with all of their movements. Their lines had to be perfectly straight, their spacing had to be completely perfect, and each band member had to march at the same speed, with the same spaced steps.
Band Camp was also about becoming a family. You learned to watch out for each other, and to encourage each other when you were feeling down. During my first Band Camp, I was approached by the mother of one of my female band mates and asked to protect them from another of my band mates. Apparently they had been dating but had broken up recently, and he had threatened to harm her.
I don’t know for sure why I had been picked to watch out for this girl, but I said I would. I didn’t know who the girl was, really, but the ex boyfriend turned out to be Anthony*. That might have been why I was chosen, because I was a close friend of the ex and possibly would have been able to calm him down and prevent a fight. Or maybe it was because Anthony* was beginning to show actual interest in my sister rather than just talking about it, and I could act as a mediator. I have no idea, really, but I agreed to act as a bodyguard, simply because I believed that Anthony* wasn‘t stupid enough to actually act on his threats. No confrontations ever happened.
At the end of the two week Band Camp, I asked out the girl that I was playing bodyguard for, because I had grown to like her, and because we had a lot in common. She said yes, we both smiled, and pretty much were an item after that. I’m not going to give her name here, so I’ll call her Sally*.
The relationship between Sally and I was pretty smooth. She was a Sophomore, so it wasn’t bad for her to date a Freshman, as I was at the time. I was a Percussionist in band, and she was Color Guard, but outside of marching band, she didn’t play an instrument. In fact, she was in Chorus.
I couldn’t do Chorus, myself. I couldn’t sing. I still can’t sing, to be honest; I just don’t have the lungs for singing. So marching band practice, marching band competitions, lunch time, and bus rides home after the marching season was over were pretty much the only times we could get together, aside from some other special times like birthdays. We were in different grades and she was a good student, so we didn’t have any classes together.
Oh, look at that. I moved into high school before I was ready to. Heh.
---
At the turn of the millennium, I started my ninth grade year at Hopkins County Central High School, forever more abbreviated as HCCHS. I thought things were going pretty good for me at the time, too. I considered my classes to be relatively easy, I had a wonderful and beautiful girlfriend that I believed I was falling in love with, and this would be my first year of Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (abbreviated JROTC), which would prepare me for the military service I was determined to do after I graduated from high school.
Ninth grade would be the year I slept through Biology and still aced the course. I actually let a guy cheat off of me on a test once and we got caught, and when we had to retake the test, we took a harder version that I managed to score higher on than I did the first version, while the friend… failed miserably. My Biology teacher noticed that I slept every day in class, and he always said that he didn’t care if you stayed awake in class or if you slept the class away, it would be up to you to maintain your grade in the class.
He also told me that I was the first student he’d ever had that slept every day and still scored as highly as I did. He said that he’d always thought that I cheated on my tests, until the day when I was caught letting another kid cheat off of me, and had to retake the test for it. Since he was there to watch us take the test and nobody would have been able to cheat under such watchful conditions, he was convinced I was just that smart.
Marching band was going well. That year would be the first year that HCCHS band made it to state in the competition season. I was carrying the fourth bass drum that year, and the fourth drum is the largest. I was about five foot nine at the time, broad shouldered, but scrawny and bony. All this extra weight I was carrying was something I wasn’t used to, so for the majority of band camp during the summer of that year, I had to practice taking the pain of carrying the drum on my shoulders and chest for long periods of time without complaining.
There’s a specific tradition that was followed at HCCHS on the first Friday of every year that I ended up being a part of at the school. Technically it wasn’t allowed to happen, but because there were so many kids at the school that took part in it, there just weren’t enough teacher to keep it from happening.
The event or tradition was called Fresh Meat Friday. On that first Friday of the year, the new Seniors would crowd the front doors of the school and catch new Freshmen as they were leaving to get on their busses to go home, and with a washable marker they would write FRESH MEAT in big, bold, capital letters on their arms. It was a hazing tradition or initiation rite which had been going on for nearly six years at the school at the time. I almost slipped out the doors before getting caught, but a final Senior managed to stop me before I made it out the final door, and I had to do my best to get the marker off of my arms before I got home.
I failed to get all the marker off of my skin.
So naturally, when I got home and had to explain to my mother why I had blue marker ink on my arms. She was horrified, and started ranting about how she was going to report this to the principal, and for once I talked her out of it, intent on not becoming a target again. She listened to me and didn‘t pursue the issue, and a quick shower was enough to get the ink off of my skin.
Ninth grade would also be the grade that I began to get into computers and the internet. There were quite a few days during the week where I could be found in the computer lab of the school in the morning before classes, surfing mainly video gaming sites for codes to the games I played. It was online that I heard about the Gameshark and finally decided that I wanted one, and most of the codes I came up with were ones I wrote down while researching them in the HCCHS computer lab.
During this time of computer use, I stumbled into a site called GameWinners, and it was this site that I used the most for my codes. It would be nearly a full year after finding the site before I joined their forums, but I remember being a fan of the site for a long time. Aside from GW, another favorite site was GameFAQs, with FAQ standing for Frequently Asked/Answered Questions. This is a common term used for information pages or manuals of certain websites, including rules and navigation.
Aside from playing the fourth bass drum in marching band, I was trained on the timpani in concert band. The timpani is a percussion instrument that combines drum playing with instrument tuning. It’s a set of four drums with pedals that adjust the pitch of the drum so much that the notes that the drums play changes as well. The original player didn’t really know what he was doing and didn’t want to play the timpani, so I volunteered and was taught instead. This knowledge would follow me to my other schools.
I made a pretty good number of friends at HCCHS, but aside from the one girlfriend I had, I don’t really talk to them anymore. I use a social networking site or two, and I have a couple of schoolmates as friends on these sites, but I don’t really talk. I’ve never been much of a talker, and I’ve been even less of one since my time in the military and after what went down there, which I’ll expand upon in the next chapter.
There aren’t very many things that happened to me in ninth grade that really stand out, besides my experiences in band and my experiences with Sally*. The relationship with her didn’t last all year. I think we lasted five months, and then she broke up with me. A week or two later, I thought that maybe we could work out what was wrong and try again, and we did, but it didn’t last nearly as long as the first time. The second break up would be on my part.
Her break up with me was with a note. We did this often, passing notes to each other in the hallway as we passed each other on our way to class, not really able to stop and chat within the two minutes we were allotted. And it figured that my break up with her was very nearly the same way, with a written letter instead of a note. But her response to my breaking up with her led to me misunderstanding her intentions and getting into an unneeded altercation with her.
She sent me a reply letter with thank you written in big capital letters, and ended with a couple exclamation points at the end. Her intention behind the response was to convey that she felt the second shot at the relationship wasn’t going anywhere, but she didn’t want to break my heart again, and she was thanking me for doing the break up this time instead of her. But I misunderstood her reply, since she was only my second ever girlfriend, and I felt incredibly betrayed, for some reason. I don’t really know what was the driving feature behind my feeling of betrayal, but I do know that when I confronted her about the reply, I used the wrong word, and we got into a huge fight that ended up with me avoiding her for a while.
I don’t think I’ve ever really apologized to her. I need to do that the next time I’m able to talk to her, but I haven’t talked to her in a rather long time. I have her as a contact on one of my social networking sites, but she’s rarely ever on, and is usually online when I’m not online.
So in the middle of my ninth grade year, my mother and our landlord got into some kind of fight over the house, and we ended up having to move. By this time Baldy* was living with us, and he had all three of his kids with us as well. We ended up moving into a house in the same town that was almost literally the same distance from the railroad tracks on the other side of town that the original two-story house was on the first side of town.
The new house was smaller than the two-story house, and we now had two adults and five children to house. I needed my own room, and Baldy’s* kids (two boys, one girl) could share rooms, but the house only had three bedrooms. Baldy’s* boys shared a room, and Mercedes* and Baldy’s* little girl shared a room, and my mother and Baldy shared a room. I shared a room with the washer and dryer for a time.
My sleeping in the laundry room didn’t last for too long; it lasted just long enough to be able to get the basement cleaned out and to get some heat going down there. By this time I was deathly afraid of spiders, so I wanted to be sure that there were no hidden infestations down in the basement that I would inherit when I moved in, and there wasn’t by the time I ended up down there.
I liked it in the basement. I had my waterbed down there, sleeping right next to a window. I had enough space to set up my practice pads, and the floor was thick enough that I didn’t have to limit my volume very much if I wanted to “rock out,” so to speak. I wasn’t allowed to have a television down there, otherwise I would have set up my Playstation, and I believe my mother wanted to make sure I was getting up every morning and going to school, and I couldn’t do that if I was allowed to stay up every night as late as I wanted playing videogames. Not having a television didn’t really matter, though, because I had my Gameboy.
My Sega Genesis was moved into the main house, into a side room that my mother originally wanted to use for her enormous plant collection. She ultimately decided that the room was far too drafty, and a cold draft on a winter’s day is deadly for a plant. The biggest player of the Genesis went from being me to being Baldy’s kids, who used the gaming system, as well as normal television, as entertainment devices for his kids, instead of spending time with them. He was pretty much raising couch potatoes, and refused to listen to my mother’s suggestions on childcare.
This house is most memorable, though, because it’s where I found out that my grandparents had found my biological father, someone I had been looking for for a couple years by then. I was fourteen, almost fifteen when I found out, and was told right before I had to leave to go to a required basketball game for Pep Band.
I remember that night because I really didn’t know how to react. I knew I was happy, but I didn’t really know how to be excited for it. I think I pretty much sat in silence for the majority of the game, and didn’t really participate that night, mostly just sitting there in shock.
I had pretty much begun to cut off all contact with Mark* by this point. He got plenty of talking to done by my sisters, and he rarely ever mentioned me, so I found myself better off pretending he didn’t exist. And now that I had found my real dad and could now bond with him, I really had no need for Mark*.
I wouldn’t get to meet my biological father (who I’ll name Zack*) for almost a whole year, but just knowing he was there and having an email to use to talk to him was enough for me. I used this as an opportunity to register an email address at Yahoo and began to send weekly or monthly email updates to him as a way to get to know him. I still have the first few emails I got from him saved and in a folder somewhere. I read them every now and then, and they still make me smile.
