Chapter 1

From Childhood to Drug Use

I grew up in a middle class neighborhood. I was the older of two children. My sister is two years younger than I. I did poorly in school due to my lack of motivation to do well and a learning disability and hyperactivity that was diagnosed when I was 9 years old. Prior to that diagnosis I was tied to my chair by a teacher using a jump rope when I was six because I couldn’t sit still. I was physically abused by another teacher who shook me violently and slammed me against a wall when I was just 7 years old again for acting out and not being able to sit still. I was verbally abused by my fourth grade teacher who constantly told me I would never amount to anything and that I was a waste in her classroom. I started using four letter words at this age.

I had very few friends growing up. Even the friends I did have I constantly questioned if they really liked me or not. My self-esteem was practically non-exisistant. When I was in middle school my dad was the Principal. That made life tough for me. People were convinced that because I was the Principals kid, I could never get in trouble. I intentionally acted out so I did get in trouble.

I was finally placed back into the mainstream classroom when I was 12. I had spent two years on Ritalin and now the drug was making me more hyper than before. I was still a bit hyperactive, but there were no medications available to help me. I did just enough schoolwork to get by each grade. Sometimes I wonder if my dad being the Principal had an influence on the teachers to pass me when in fact I should’ve been held back.

In eighth grade I met a girl named Janet. She had a deep beautiful tanned body. She had gorgeous blue eyes and a brilliant smile. I was attracted to her instantly and tried desperately to befriend her. It was during this time that my last piano teacher had to quit teaching me to play because I wasn’t using the proper finger techniques to play the music. Within two weeks of that I began writing my own music. I wrote my first song to Janet.

Over the course of that year I continued to write more songs to Janet. Whenever I wrote a song to her I would record it on a cassette tape and give it to her. At the end I would ask her to tell me what she thought of it on the other side of the cassette. She never did. I was also writing her "love letters" as many as three or four a day. In the mean time classmates were relentlessly teasing me. I was a very lonely and depressed little boy. One day I had asked Janet if I could talk to her. She agreed. We were standing out in the hallway just outside the cafeteria. I said, "I want to die." Janet seemed confused and asked, "You want a dime?" Frustrated and sad, I said, "No, I want to DIE!" Janet looked at me and said, "Well, do what you have to do." I was crushed. I didn’t really want to die. I wanted attention from her. I wanted her to plead with me not do it and tell me she cared about me.

In the end I realized that Janet would never really like me as a friend, let a lone be my girlfriend. But I stilled cared for her very much.

After eighth grade we attended Anderson Heights High School. I watched for Janet in the halls but we were very rarely in the same classes. She barely spoke to me.

My freshman year was uneventful except for taking up cigarette smoking where I saw older students smoking pot. In the 1970’s it was not unusual for high schools to have smoking areas. As long as the students had their parent’s permission to smoke it was allowed. It didn’t matter that most of the students were under 18 and it was illegal for us to buy cigarettes but that law wasn’t enforced at all. I was never approached about smoking pot with them.

During my sophomore year I was in class when I was approached about smoking pot for the first time. I don’t even remember who he was, but he told me he was going to get me high after class. I told him that I wasn’t interested but he persisted. After class he and I made our way down to the smoking area. He pulled out a joint and lit it. After he took a hit off it, he passed it to me. I was scared. I was afraid that a teacher or principal would catch us. I took a hit and realized…I liked it. He and I smoked the whole joint, but I didn’t get high.

Over the next few days I smoked pot and it wasn’t until the fourth time that I finally got high. The high wasn’t as intense. It took awhile before that happened. Once I started getting high I started looking for more opportunities to smoke. Within three weeks of my first joint, I was doing other drugs. Speed and LSD were the next drugs I did.

During that same time period I was buying my own drugs. Every morning in the smoking area I, along with at least a dozen other people, would wait for the dealer to arrive. It was a mad dash to get the best pick of the joints he was selling. After I bought my joint we would get in a circle at the far end of the smoking area and smoke as much as possible before the first class of the day would start.

The highs usually lasted 4-5 hours. I really started liking the way I felt and wanted to get high more and more often. Pot had become my drug of choice, but would use Speed when it was available. I never really like the high that speed gave me. It gave me what felt like a sore throat.
One day I bought a hit of LSD (Purple micro dot) someone had told me that people using LSD talked to walls and had bad hallucinations. I was a little scared but I took the hit. It was an intensified high. Kind of like a marijuana high. I didn’t have any hallucinations, just a buzz. I liked it, but it was rather expensive. I only used LSD two other times over the five years I used drugs.

My relationship with my straight friends took a turn for the worse. I was hanging out with the "potheads" more often.

By my junior year I managed to get my first job at local steak house washing dishes. Janet was working there, but resigned shortly after I got hired. Coincidence? I don’t think so. I hated the job but liked the idea of having money to buy more drugs. I was now buying pot by the half or whole bag. I was getting high everyday. I can remember going to my hang out in the woods and seeing how much pot I could smoke in one sitting. I was skipping school more often in order to get high. I was isolating myself from the rest of family. I would come home and head straight to my room or down stairs and watched TV.

One day in the smoking area someone I had known since elementary school approached me. He asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him. I, of course, said yes. This joint was different. The paper was red. It was a larger joint than I had seen before. He and I smoked it. It tasted different. I asked him what was in it. He told me that I was smoking pot with Cocaine in it. I was a little scared. Had I really gotten to this point in my life that I was doing Cocaine so soon? About a half-hour later I learned that this guy was arrested for possession. The high was something I had never experienced before. For a while, I was afraid that I might never come down from its effects.

By the end of my Junior year I realized that I had a serious drug problem. It was the only thing I really wanted to do. I had to attend Summer school in order to become a Senior. I even got high in Summer School.

I attended a Christ In Youth Convention in Michigan with my youth group from church. I really needed to get away from the drugs for a while. I rededicated my life to Christ and swore that I would quit doing drugs. But within a week, I was smoking pot again and looking for other ways to get high.

After I relapsed I started getting high while at church functions. One time our youth group was going on a retreat out of town. We stopped at a restaurant to eat. But another guy and I went to the restroom and smoked pot. We were nearly left behind because everyone was back on the bus waiting for us. We didn’t have time to smoke a cigarette to help cover the pot smell. We got back on the bus, knowing we reeked of pot. I was scared and embarrassed when I walked by my sister. No, I have to say that I felt more ashamed of myself for what I was doing. My sister endured a lot over the years as I continued to use drugs.

I worked in the Audio Visual Department at my church. The room we worked in was close to an exit. After the Minister would start his sermon, I would step out to the parking lot and get high. I often times stole cigarettes out of cars in the parking lot.

One day my parents found my pipe and a stone, along with some other paraphernalia in my bedroom. I was scared of what they were going to do. I admitted to them that I had "experimented" with pot and tried speed once. They believed me and told me to stop using. I told them I would.

My senior year saw the addition of more drugs. I was introduced to Downers, Tye Stick, Hash, Rush, and later, Alcohol. Although a lot of these drugs weren’t used on a consistent basis, I use them whenever I could. There wasn’t a drug I wouldn’t do at this point.

I remember huffing Rush in choir. After using it so much I got bad headaches, but I really didn’t care. The buzz was the only thing I wanted.

I got a 10-day out of school suspension for smoking outside the smoking area. That was the longest period of time I ever went without doing drugs since I started. I was grounded and didn’t have an opportunity to get out of the house. When I returned to school I bought as much pot as I could. At this point I was saving as much pot as possible to smoke on the last day of school. I was also attending night school so I could graduate with the rest of the class. I was told that if I failed one class I would be held back another year.

One day my English teacher was giving me a lecture in the hall just outside my classroom. He was telling me that I could be doing so much better in class. I knew what he was saying was true. There were a few times that I really worked hard for the first half of the quarter and get B’s and C’s by midterm. But then I would stop working and slide by with D’s and F’s. While my teacher was talking I began feeling sick to my stomach. I asked if I could go to the rest room. He told me no. The next thing I remember I was waking up on the floor. My head and jaw hurt badly. I was taken to the nurse’s office via stretcher. The Paramedics were called. I remember one of the medics looking concerned. I was bleeding from my ears and mouth, a textbook sign of a head injury. Witnesses told them that I passed out and fell flat on my face. My knees didn’t buckle and my face took the full force of the fall. I was loaded in the squad. On the way to the hospital the medics started giving me a hard time and accused me of being wasted. I denied that I had taken anything, knowing full well that I had. We were stopped at a railroad crossing. I heard one medic say, "It’s a good thing he’s not in full arrest." I cannot remember anything else until I woke up in a hospital room. I had lost consciousness for several hours.

I was kept in the hospital for 5 days while they ran a series of tests to determine why I had passed out. It was then that I learned who my true friends were. My Minister visited me once in the time I was there. I called all my friends to see if they could visit, but none of them showed up. In the mean time my parents told me that they had found the pot I had in my jeans. I was upset about losing that pot.

I called June, a girl that I was taking a liking to. She was a track star on the school team. In fact she later broke the Ohio state record for the women’s 400 dash. She had pretty green eyes and shoulder length brown hair. I thought she was the prettiest girl ever. She showed up just about every day. I asked her out on a date and she said yes. I was the happiest I had ever been since doing drugs. The doctors were not able to determine why I passed out. I left the hospital a little concerned. I knew that drugs were part of the reason I passed out.

But that didn’t keep me from getting high. I returned to school and got right back into the drugs again. No one really said anything to me about my stay in the hospital. But I could hear people talking behind my back. June would try to get me to quit, she was concerned about the amount of drugs I was doing. But I didn’t want to quit.

I lost my job at the steak house but I really didn’t care. As long as I could get my hands on drugs, I was fine. I continued to steal money from my family in order to support my habit. I even broke into a friend’s house one night, and took money from his brother’s room. I was almost caught in the house when everyone came home while I was still there. The terror I felt as I jumped the fence can’t be put into words. An arrest was the last thing I wanted.

Penny, a girl I had often skipped school with was getting married. I took my first drink at her wedding reception. I discovered I had a low tolerance for alcohol. I got sick most of the time. I didn’t even like the taste, but I liked the buzz it gave me. I didn’t drink everyday for a while. I still preferred pot to anything else.

On the last day of school I got really messed up. I smoked pot, drank alcohol, smoked hash, dropped speed, and LSD, huffed Nitrous Oxide, and Rush. I had never been as high as I got that day. During my graduation ceremony I got drunk and high before arriving at the ceremony and huffed Rush during the actual ceremony itself. I was truly a mess that day. I remember feeling scared to even go up to other classmates and say goodbye. I never had many friends and thought people didn’t like me very much. I was lonely and I just wanted to leave.

After graduation I got a job working in a warehouse. I also started attending college. I was going for an Associates degree in Communications. After office hours at the warehouse my boss would allow me and some of the other employees to stay late on the clock and drink as much beer as we wanted. I can’t tell you how many times I drove my car drunk. I am surprised that I was not arrested that year.

I was eventually fired from the warehouse. I got a job working in a body shop washing cars. One of my responsibilities was to clean the interior of the cars including the ashtrays. I found pot in a lot of cars this way. I also found other drugs in glove boxes. I stole everything I found, figuring no one would ever complain about it to my boss. I was really surprised how many drugs I found. I found a film canister with 20 hits of Speed, & several bags of pot. I almost always had something to get high with while I worked there. I was drinking more and at one point I was taking up to seven hits of speed at once. Less than a week later my mom found the speed I had hidden in my room. There were only three hits left.

My best druggie friend, Thomas, who was still in school for another year had gotten kicked out of his house for using drugs. He resorted to living in the woods in a nearby neighborhood. I felt obligated to help him out in anyway I could. I remember the first time I saw him, he had a make shift bed made out of plywood, a small area was cleared for making a fire and a dishwasher rack was used as a grill. He was sitting on a cinder block; he had a plastic bag with some white stuff in it. I was naive and really thought he had developed a respiratory problem being out in the cold and wet weather. I figured the white stuff in the baggie was a prescription drug for his problem. What he really doing was huffing glue. He showed me how to do it. The buzz was fantastic, but I started having some dangerous reactions to it. I would pass out and would wake up crying like I had never cried before. I started huffing glue every chance I got. It got to the point that I would walk down the street with the bag over my mouth and nose and huff it in broad daylight. I didn’t care who knew. This drug nearly killed me. One night I was alone in a park down the street from my house. The park was closed and no one was around. I started huffing the glue. As I was getting high, I started hallucinating. I saw a man on a 10-speed bike coming at me. As he went by me, he hit me in the face. I fell and lost consciousness. I woke up crying. I believe that when I came out of my high from huffing in this manner, I had really stopped breathing. Crying is a way for the lungs to get stimulated and breathing to start again. Much like a newborn needs to cry after it is born to start breathing on its own. This was by far the most dangerous drug I ever did. I quit huffing after this, the fourth incident.

After the first semester of College was over, I dropped out because I failed accounting. I became discouraged and gave up on furthering my education.

One night Thomas and I were driving along SR 34 in Batavian, Ohio. I had smoked a lot of pot and had a few beers. I passed a State Trooper, and he pulled me over. I was a little more than nervous. I was terrified. The Officer believed I was driving under the influence. He gave Thomas & I a roadside sobriety test. We both failed. The Officer’s words caused my heart to drop. "Well, your friend is too drunk to drive, and you’re under arrest." I had never been arrested before and I was scared. How was I going to tell my parents about this? I was taken to the Post and given a Breathalyzer test. I blew below legal drunk but was charged with reckless operation. I didn’t have a choice but to eventually tell my parents what had happened. They were very upset and disappointed in me. I felt ashamed. I lost my driver’s license for 3 months and had to pay a $100.00 fine. Once I returned to work, the State Trooper would stop by work and check on me. I hated that.

One night my parents wanted me to go to a movie with them and my sister. I didn’t want to go. I had an opportunity to buy more pot and so I faked being sick. After my family left, I got in my car and went to Penny’s house and bought a bag of marijuana. I smoke some of it and returned home. A few hours later my parents came home. I could tell they were upset. They insisted on searching my room. They knew exactly what they were looking for. I had hidden the bag of pot in an old box that my grandfathers use to own. My parents found the box and told me to open it. At first I resisted and said no. But after a while I knew my parents weren’t in the mood for any back talk. I finally consented and opened the box. They took the bag of pot and the pipe I had recently bought. My parents were very upset, especially my mom. I wasn’t sure what they were going to do. My parents called of friend of theirs that was a retired police officer and was currently working as a police officer at a local college. When they got off the phone with him, they took me over to his house. I was scared that he would arrest me and have me prosecuted for possession. But when I got there, he took me into his basement and started lecturing me. I despise being lectured to. He got out this pad of paper and started taking notes on what I was saying. I got angry because I thought he was trying to act like some kind of psychologist. That really irritated me even more. It reminded me of the times I was taken to counselors before. I hated it.

I met Denise in October 1981. She was only fifteen and also attended Anderson Heights. She had brown hair, brown eyes and a beautiful smile. We got along real well. My parents seemed to like her too. She and I got high and drunk together often. She was a rebel of a child and had conflicts with her parents. It was rough for a while.

I was fired from the body shop and my supply of drugs stopped. I resorted to drinking since it was readily available. I drank daily from that day on. I would wake up at 6:30am, go to the store, buy two six packs of beer, place them in the cooler and would be drunk by 7:30am. I drank until 2:00pm. I would pick up Denise from high school and hung out with her drinking more beer and smoked pot if she was able to get some at school. I dropped her off at home at 5:00pm. Most of the time I would buy more beer and drink until I got home at 10pm. The next day I would do it all over again.

On the weekends, Denise and I would go out together. One night we went to see a movie in a nearby village. We got drunk on the way to the theater. After the movie we resumed our drinking. I was taking her home when I ran a stop sign. Suddenly I saw flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror. I stashed the bottles of beer under the seat. Denise was terrified! I tried to pretend like everything was okay. But inside I was scared. How was I going to explain this to her parents if I got arrested for DUI? How was I going to explain this to MY parents? The Police Officer told me why I was being pulled over and asked for my license. I gave it to him, and he returned to his cruiser. Denise and I tried to calm each other down. I was getting ready to be given a roadside sobriety test. About five minutes later the Officer returned, gave me my license back and told me to be more careful. I was shocked! I got away clean, not even a warning ticket. I was sure he could smell the alcohol in the car. But I wasn’t going to argue with him. We got out of that village quick.

Another night Denise wanted to run away to Tennessee. I knew that my taking her over state lines could get me in a lot of trouble. She and I went to the local park, smoked pot, drank beer, and made out. When the park closed, I took her to another spot where we continued to make out. I got an idea to call a friend and see if we could stay in his trailer he had parked in his back yard. Denise and I wanted to have sex. I drove to a convenient store and tried to call him. I got a busy signal several times. I got back in the car and was planning on waiting for a while. About five minutes later, my dad pulled up along side me in the parking lot. I was mad. Denise got pissed and was convinced that I had called my parents and told them where we were. Her parents were called and they met us at my house. Her parents, while upset because they didn’t know where she was, were nonetheless relieved that she was okay and that I had taken care of her.

One night, my mom called me into her bedroom. She was watching a television special. It was about a drug rehab in St. Petersburg, Florida called Straight, Inc. The camera cut to a shot of the front row. There was Cathie, a girl I had gone to church with for years. I was a little disturbed by the content and didn’t stay in there long enough to see the rest of the program.
A few nights later, while smoking in the garage, I saw my mom talking in the car with Cathie’s mom. They were in the car for well over an hour that night. I didn’t think anything of it. Perhaps I should have.