This is the second half of my son's 8th grade year. He's 13. So was I, I think. It started when my cat got killed by a car outside the apartment and my sister, ten years older and broken inside, gave me a vodka & OJ to "make me feel better."
It was Mother's Milk. I got drunk. I felt whole, and safe and happy...instantly...by my own hand. The world could throw a car at my cat but I could make myself feel better. I had power. I had found The Answer.
Didn't take long for me to work my way through my Mom's rarely-used liquor cabinet and replace the vodka and gin with water and the bourbon with paint-thinner and brown oil paint. When I ran out of booze the disease really kicked in. I told my sister that if she didn't hook me up with another gallon of Popov, I would tell Mom that she gave me the booze and her and her toddler daughter would be kicked out. She did. By the end of 8th grade I had a bottle of Scope in my locker; 1/2 vodka and 1/2 Scope. I would fill my mouth, swish it around, drink most of it and spit out just enough for camouflage. Never got caught. Drank about a quart a week until summer. Then I got a paper-route for money. A free-shopper rag. I'd get the bundles, wait until after dark, and the throw them in the dumpster. Made $30 a week lying. used Older Kids to buy me quarts of beer, if I bought them one, too. Then I figured out how to steal beer from the 7-11. Kept my stash in the attic of my apartment, the access was in my closet. One day I went up there all the way, with a flashlight. The attic trusses went from one end of the building to the other, and each apartment had an access hatch in the closet...just like mine.
I started going into people's apartments through those access hatches. Stealing booze. I got baby-sitting jobs in other buildings so that I could do the same thing in those buildings.
Never Got Caught...but It Had Caught Me, sure as a rat in a cat's mouth. I belonged to my disease. Grades 9-12 were a blur. School was a place I had to go to every day (unless I could ditch) and a handy place to score dope.
My son is in the last half of 8th Grade now. I'm kind of glad that he doesn't respect me. Maybe it was for him that I Finally Got Caught enough times that the whole family knows that Dad Is Sick.
Hey Rob. Your son will respect you again if you stay on the side of light and right. You now have a few years of "reconditioning" under your belt. Like me and most of us here, its a refinement process. I try and keep the path uphill, but sometimes there is a valley of "hollow" you traverse. I have to tell you I respect the shit out of you for the distance you have already traveled! Like Dean says, telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth sets you free. I do not think less of you for hearing what you have done, I think more of you for traveling upstream away from your past. Tom
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"You're in the right place. That's the door right there. Turn around."
Keep working on yourself. We will not regret the past nor wish to close the door on it...No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
Take care,
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Rob
"There ain't no Coupe DeVille hiding in the bottom of a Cracker Jack Box."
