A Teenager's Journey (8 page)

Once I arrived at the school grounds, I stuffed as much as I could into the pipe I’d taken from where I kept it under my bed. Just over two ounces was more than I needed.

I knew I was in trouble when it became difficult to breathe and I felt nauseous. My stomach hurt to the point that I vomited. My heart was racing out of control, and my head began to pound; soon after, I couldn’t feel my fingers.

I remember waking in my bedroom, lying on my bed fully dressed and yet still freezing. Every bone in my upper body and legs was in pain. I had been there for well over a day. No one in the house cared—no one ever asked any questions.

I later found out that using that much cocaine when mixed with heroin was bad enough, but when DXM was added it could be lethal. I now had my answer—I didn’t need the gun anymore—I knew how to do it.

After dinner one night I found myself having a particularly acrimonious argument with Mom. I was being just as verbally abusive as she was and getting angrier and angrier with myself. After a while, Scott came upstairs to see what the commotion was about. Normally, Scott would cut himself off from the arguments and slip into his own room. When he heard me yelling and screaming at Mom for everything that had ever gone wrong in my life, he stepped in. Placing himself between Mom and me, he yelled: “Get the hell out!”

By this time Scott had taken on the role of father figure in the household. Mom had rewarded and even encouraged him to take part in my “punishments.” From Scott’s point of view he was growing up, but I knew better—I had been right where he was now. When our brother David was still living in the house, I had been the one who often colluded with Mom to make David’s life hell. It was to save my own skin. I thought she would kill me if I didn’t go along with it. Only,
I
knew that what I had been doing then was wrong.

Shocked and confused, I ran out of the kitchen and down to my room, retrieved my stash of cocaine and my newest escape, “crack,” plus the pistol from behind the baseboard.

I ran back upstairs. When I reached the top of the steps, I opened the glass door and ran out, slamming the door hard enough to shatter the glass and send it scattering all over the steps and front porch. I was angry, and out of control with my emotions and my whole life. I was mad, physically and mentally shattered. My body was wasting away and my mental state was terrible. I had a few bucks in my pocket, and enough cocaine and crack to kill myself. And if that didn’t work, I had the gun.

I ran up the street and across the side street to the school yard—just behind the Nichols family home. I found an open doorway and knelt down inside it. As I crouched there I recalled the few times that my old friends would talk about “going over the edge.” When they said that, they meant crack. Occasionally some of the teens at the school I used to attend scored not only pure cocaine but once in a while crack cocaine.

I thought vaguely about the possible effects and the unknown outcome—none of my friends actually had the guts to smoke crack. Was this perhaps my chance? I was going to get so damn high, so insanely stoned that I would finally find the guts to pull the trigger.

I stood up from the doorway and tried to think about what the drug might do to me. I recalled one of the kids at school who was hospitalized after a botched overdose and how he never was the same after that.

Back inside the doorway, where I had been kneeling earlier, I pulled the stash out of my pocket. I emptied all my pockets, and held the gun in my hand. I stopped. I didn’t want to do that before I’d blasted myself into a drug-induced coma. I had it planned out. First blow my mind with the stash, and then blow my mind with the gun.

I sat in the doorway holding the gun and searched for the courage to use it. I was too afraid. Once again, I turned to the stash in my pocket for some sort of answer. But I chickened out. I knew that if the police found me with the gun and I was still alive, I would be a lot worse off.

I stepped out of the doorway, released the magazine, and emptied the round from the chamber. I carefully placed the round in the top of the magazine and tossed them separately onto the school rooftop, then retreated inside the doorway. Normally I’d use my school ID card to mix and line up the cocaine, but since I had neither a flat surface nor my ID, I simply mixed the two drugs in the palm of my hand with my finger and licked my finger clean.

The taste of the two drugs combined was much like what I would expect powdered cleanser to taste like.

I looked up into the sky and said: “Go to hell!”

Leaning back into the corner, I snorted what I could until I had to stop. Within a moment, I felt the back of my tongue burn as I had never before experienced. A second later, the back of my neck and the base of my skull went numb. I could feel the real effects when my head began to feel squeezed. It was almost as if my brain were being crushed inside my skull. My heart began to pound and my chest was heaving. I’d experienced excessive drug use before, but nothing this harsh—nothing even remotely like this.

I looked in the palm of my hand. I saw drops of blood there, from my nose. I had used a little more than half of the amount. Without hesitating, I lowered my head, lifted my hand to my nose, and took another long inhale until it was gone. The burning in my head was now pure numbness. The skin on my scalp felt like rubber, and my hair was tingling as if it were falling out.

I knew I had finally gone over the edge.

I lay back against the wall. Either it was getting dark outside, or I was losing my sight. The blood coming from my nose was now a constant flow. The reaction my body was showing me was more than what I’d expected. I had used the entire amount of crack that I’d acquired a few days before and only had a small amount of cocaine and heroin left.

I had finally done it. I’d mixed cocaine and heroin and inhaled it directly into my bloodstream. It was a mistake, but I was happy that it was finally done.

The sounds of the school yard and the neighborhood kids playing gradually faded as confusion took over. I was barely able to see or hear and I was finding it difficult to breathe. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. Whatever, it was all the same to me at that moment. I had finally done what I had set out to do all along: end my life.

6

T
EMPORARY
F
OSTER
C
ARE

Every once in a while, something positive comes from something so negative in our lives. At my lowest point, I took one simple step—a step in a new direction. I had to get out of that house. I had to get away from Mom. What I realized later was that in running away from myself I had only myself to blame. At one point I thought Mom was the reason my whole life was a mess. It was all her, not me. I learned the hard way that I was wrong. Looking back, had there been one really good counselor to talk to, perhaps I would have been able to change.

A
S I SAT IN THE
doorway I couldn’t determine if I was awake or asleep. I couldn’t think clearly. I was hazy about the situation I had put myself in. Sitting back, I felt the heat rush through my body, the adrenaline flowing through my arms and legs. I looked down at my feet and realized that I couldn’t feel past my lower chest. All I could feel was the heaving, my desperate attempts to breathe. It wasn’t clear to me at the time, but I believe I fell in and out of consciousness. Not knowing whether it was just after dusk and I had been there for a while, or whether I had partly lost my vision, I lay with my back against the doorway and desperately wanted to sleep.

I had to get rid of the blood-soaked shirt and try to wipe my face clean. I attempted to stand, but fell back onto the cement and was unable to lift my head off the ground. I managed to remove my outer shirt and stash it behind my head as I lay there. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Sandy City police car pulling up to the steps of the school entranceway some thirty feet distant. The officer came over and started to talk to me. I have no idea what he said or how I responded. Shortly after the first car arrived a second pulled up, and the two officers talked for a moment, then came back over to me. As I fell in and out of consciousness, I tried to listen and yet had no desire to. I didn’t care.

Lifting me by the arms, they carried me to the back of the cruiser. As we drove off, the officer kept asking who I was and what I was doing. When he changed the subject and began talking about the seriousness of drug abuse, it became apparent that he knew I was under the influence of something.

As I listened, I understood that I was in grave trouble and would be facing grave consequences, even as a juvenile. Before long we arrived at our destination. As the officer walked me inside and placed me in a chair, I could tell that the effects of the high were wearing off. My head began to pound.

“He won’t tell me his name and I found no ID. He’s going to need some attention. He cut his forehead on the cement and doesn’t even know it,” the officer said.

A nurse came in and looked me over. She cleaned around my forehead and face. Like the officer, she knew the cause of my situation. “He’s high as can be,” she said to him.

As I listened to the officer talking to the woman behind the desk, it dawned on me that I was in some sort of youth detention center. I looked around. Several adults were staring at me. The discomfort of their stares combined with the pounding in my head made me angry.

I knew that my best chance of getting out of that house of hell I lived in and out of the life I had been living was to keep my identity a secret. I was more than confident that it would be several days, if not weeks, before Mom would start to feel concerned that I’d failed to come home. Another thing I knew was that she would never call the police.

Within a few hours I was transferred to a house north of Salt Lake City. We arrived just as I was starting to regain my understanding. Inside, I was introduced to the husband and wife that ran the center. There were over a dozen kids there, mostly teenage boys and a few girls. From the short, direct orientation I was given it became clear that I was being put in a sort of halfway house.

Soon I was assigned a room and a bunk in this place with half a dozen other boys, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. Once I had myself settled—which didn’t take long as I had nothing with me—I was called down to the office and asked to reveal my identity, so my “parents” could be notified.

It suddenly struck me that I was there to stay, at least for a while, whether I gave my name or not. It would be best if, as far as possible, I refused to cooperate, so as to ensure my removal from home. I felt as if I had control over the situation, and could manipulate the system into getting just what I wanted: permanent removal from Mom’s house.

Not long afterward I started to feel the same sickness I had become accustomed to after a high wears off. I was exhausted, hungry, and nauseous. At the dining hall, I saw that I was the new kid on the block and I was among several types of teenagers. Some were there for emotional issues and a few because of unfit home situations. I could almost look at the kids and tell who was there for what reason. As I looked around the hall, I noticed that one of the girls there stood out. I couldn’t determine why she would be in such a place.

I took my tray and walked over and sat down at her table.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Richard.”

I fully expected the “Why are you here?” question, but she simply went on about the conditions in the home and about the couple that ran it. She described them as helpful and accepting.

As I picked at the food on my tray she asked if I had got busted for possession.

“No, I don’t think so,” I replied.

As I thought about what I had just said, I realized that I really didn’t know why I was there. I knew that the police found me so stoned I was in and out of consciousness, but I guessed they had no idea of the amount of drugs in my system.

“I’m not sure why I’m here,” I said.

“When you don’t give them your name, you usually stay until they can find out who you are.”

“Sounds like you’ve been here before,” I said.

“I’m in and out of here a few times a year.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“I’m seventeen now,” she told me. “They’re not sure what they can do with me since I’m less than six months away from my eighteenth birthday.”

I was in a similar situation. I was sure that if they found out who I was and that I was also nearly eighteen years old, they would simply return me back home. As I contemplated my situation she broke my train of thought by asking: “What are you doing after dinner?”

“I’m not sure. What should I be doing?” I asked.

She smiled. I saw straightaway that she had a different idea than what I had anticipated. I’d fully expected to be structured into some routine and strictly limited as to what I could and couldn’t do.

“Come on—let’s get out of here,” she said.

Without hesitation I followed her out of the hall and outside into the courtyard. It was the first time I had really seen the place since I’d arrived. We walked around the courtyard to the opposite side. On one side was the boys’ dorm, she said, and on the opposite side, the girls’. Since there were far fewer girls than boys at the home, the girls didn’t have to share rooms.

When we’d made it to her room, I asked: “Doesn’t anyone care that we’re up here alone?”

“Nope, we’re pretty much on our own here,” she responded. “We just have to be quiet and not get caught.”

Several hours later, as we left her room together, I felt confused. I had slept with someone whom I had never even seen before. I had no idea who she was, or anything about her, I didn’t even know her name—and honestly, I didn’t care.

With some reservation I asked, “What’s your name?”

“J—they call me J,” she replied.

I waited for one of us to say something more, then said, uncomfortably, “Good night.”

I walked back to the opposite side of the courtyard. Once in my bunk I realized that I had stooped to a new low.