Out of Control

October 1984 until June of 1985 has to be one of the toughest parts of my life. I blocked most of it out for many years and still feel there are bits that are still blocked. Most of the memories I'm about to relate to you are my own. I hold them in a box in my mind and try to hold the lid down, so they don't escape. Some of the memories don't belong to me. They've been told to me over the years and added to the box. I have now claimed them as my own. I can almost picture them.I'll do the best I can to keep this linear, but I'm not really sure in which order everything occurred.

In October of 1984, I was still 13 years old. I had fully recovered from my accident even though the scars and fear of walking behind vehicles remained. Actually, I think my brother Eddie was more scared of cars than I was.

I really feel like I need to talk a bit more about my brother in order for this story to make sense, so forgive me for a moment while I stray from my original story.

Eddie was always my best friend and my worst enemy. He is 22 months older than I am. We fought like cats and dogs, but we always looked out for each other. My dad was always trying to make a man out of my brother. Eddie was never manly enough for him. He put Eddie in baseball, which he hated. He took him fishing, which he hated. And over and over again, he compared Eddie to our cousin who was all boy. Eddie never felt good enough for dad, so he retreated into his art.

Eddie is an amazing artist. Whenever I see his work, I'm dumbstruck by the beauty of his creation. His heart can be seen in each drawing. The pain of his childhood, seeps out of the pencil marks. If he learned to believe in himself, he could make something of himself in the art world. Unfortunately, he was put down so much as a child, he never believed he was good enough for anything.

Ok, back to my story...

In October of 1984, my mom was working at Hewlett Packard in Santa Rosa, California. She was making decent money and seemed to enjoy her job. Sadly, she started doing drugs. I'm not sure what her drug of choice was, but I do know that she was hooked. She went to my dad and asked for help. Dad's way of helping mom was to throw her out the back door of our house without any clothes on and lock the door. Mom started banging on the door, begging for shoes. Dad started throwing all her shoes out the door at her then yelled, "Take your shoes, and your kids, too." We moved out the next day.

Mom, Eddie, and I moved into a two bedroom house, directly across the street from the house I was born in. Mom took one bedroom, I got the other, and Eddie threw a mattress on the floor in the laundry room. Our parakeet and Cockatiel lived on top of the refrigerator. The house was never home, but we lived there.

My mom met Mark soon after we moved into that house, or at least that's what I've chosen to believe. Mark helped mom get her drugs. He was young and goodlooking and took up almost all of my mom's time. Thankfully, Eddie and I were both old enough to get ourselves ready for school each day and had bicycles in order to get there.

There were parties several times a week. The house was always full of alcohol and empty of food. Whenever there was a party, Eddie and I were banished to our rooms and ordered not to come out. I didn't listen. I did what I had to do, so we could eat. I played poker.

After my mom's friends had a lot to drink, I would come out of my room and play cards with them. They were all so wasted, that they didn't know what they were doing. Thankfully, I was a pretty good poker player, and they didn't realize what was going on. On at least four or five occasions, I came out and played five card draw, winning their money. This money put food on the table, so we could eat.

My poker winnings didn't go very far, so I had to figure out a better way to provide for my family. The idea came from school, believe it or not. The school was having a canned food drive and offered prizes to the kids who brought in the most canned food. I started going door to door, collecting food, fully intending to turn it in to the school when the idea hit me. I decided to keep the food from the canned food drive to feed our family.

Two or three times a week for the next month or so, I went door to door, feeding my family. I tried to choose different houses each time and traveled further and further from my home, collecting, but there were a few houses that kept telling me to come back. Looking back, I'm pretty sure they knew what was really going on because they would give me things like meat, bread, and eggs then tell me to come back in a few days for more. I truly believe the Lord sent these people to take care of us.

While I was providing for our family, our lives were sinking lower and lower. Mom got pregnant then miscarried the baby. She stayed in bed for a week, crying. My brother was dying his hair all sorts of colors, putting on almost white face makeup, and wearing a trench coat. He had kind of a Boy George look going on. I think he was leaving each night, drinking with his friends, but I'll never be sure.

One night I snuck out of my room a bit early to try and play poker with my mom's friends. She totally went off on me and called me names that I won't repeat then told me to get out of her face. I ran out the back door. As far as mom knew, I didn't come back for four days. However, each night I snuck in my bedroom window and slept on the floor on the far side of my bed, so mom couldn't see me. She was pretty apologetic when I got home. I hoped that things would be different, but they weren't.

One day in 1985 (I'd like to say it was April, but it could've been march), my mom told Eddie and me to each pack one suitcase, we were moving to Maui. Mom decided that the only way to kick her drug habit was to quit her job, sell her car, and move us to Maui to stay with her brother, my uncle Dan. What I didn't know until years later was that she wasn't planning to tell my dad that she was taking us across the ocean. He found out through mutual friends and showed up on our doorstep the day before we left to serve my mom with divorce papers.

I'm going to finish this tomorrow. To be continued....