Knowing all the things you just escaped Life in the shelter started out with the normal checks. Requests for things I didn’t have like proof of age or name. That doesn’t mean that someone didn’t provide that information to the shelter, I just can’t remember who it was. I had to be under 18 in order to be accepted. When the words “Sign here” were told to me by whatever staff member was working there that day, I was happy for the first time since I left Creative Learning. There were other kids staying there, whose names I can remember. I will make up one for someone so that I can use a name instead of a nonperson pronoun. This shelter was a house, with large rooms. We had chores and scheduled activities. I was there between a week to two weeks, and just like my other stories what happened in there will remain unwritten. It involved minors like me that had to deal with similar issues. The normalcy that I needed so badly was short-lived, because I left with someone else. This is why I need to make up a name to go forward with this story. While I was there, I was interested in every girl in the place. I knew them all and became close with a girl named Susan. I don’t know why she was there, or what event had just transpired to make her think that down the street would be better than where she lived. I wanted to leave, because ... I wanted to have a girlfriend. She wanted to leave to go back home. When I agreed to leave, I did so with the idea there would be something afterwards. A long-term rescue that would allow me to forget everything that had just happened to me. As we walked, we held hands and talked. There was a distance growing with every step. Both from the shelter I just walked away from, and from the person that just left me. We sat together and talked on some bleachers. We slept together, and I fell asleep next to her. Sometime later, she got up and started leaving. She asked me to stay that she would be right back. I waited there in the dark, all the while the foreboding feeling growing in my mind that I was back on the street outside Rick’s truck. It was cold, and I waited even longer. Then it started raining, slowly at first. The drops came down like a warning – leaving huge spots on the bleachers. The warning was for the drops that were just a few feet above my head. They all came down – it started pouring, and it kept on raining until the sun came up. The rain helped cover up the tears, as I walked up to where Susan told me she lived. It was early, but I knocked and rang the bell. Her family answered the door, and I asked if she was home. They told me “she doesn’t want to talk to you.” I stood there in shock, and no one said anything. Then Susan came to the door and apologized. I started crying and turned around. I walked down the porch and up the street in the pouring rain. Cars drove by and dumped rivers of water on me. It didn’t matter eventually, and I just kept walking. I ended up at a payphone where I called my parents. I made up a story that someone had raped me. I lied, but I was scared to tell the truth. A woman had just dumped me, the rain from the gutter was covering me with freezing water and my insides were forming ice crystals. I’m even more scared about the possibilities that existed during that storm. With the promise that I might get to stay with my parents, I might have walked all the way to their house on the other side of Tucson. There is no doubt that I would not have been able to stay there, and worst-case scenario they would have called the police as they did when I came home after the smoke bomb. What would have happened could have been suicide. Instead, my lie resulted in action from my mother and father. However, not the kind I needed. They checked me into a psychiatric facility where I stayed for about a week. I never told the truth about what was going on prior to Jesse dropping me off at the teen shelter. If I did, the doctor didn’t believe me probably because I couldn’t I explain it honestly. The therapy sessions were a waste of time, because I wasn’t honest. The doctors put me on Thorazine. Doctors prescribed it for the following reasons: “Additional Medication for Tetanus, Hereditary Liver Metabolism Disorder, Schizophrenia, Manic Phase of Manic-Depression, Mental Disorder with Loss of Normal Personality & Reality, Feeling of Apprehension Before an Operation, Combative and Explosive Behavior, Hiccups that are Hard to Cure, Nausea and Vomiting.” The most common and severe side effects are: • “A Feeling of Restlessness with Inability to Sit Still • Abnormal Movements of Face Muscles and Tongue • Abnormally Low Blood Pressure • Blurred Vision • Extrapyramidal Reaction • Feeling Faint • Pigmentary Retinopathy” I have ADHD and dyslexia, and I’ve had this since I was born. The medication was a waste of time from a therapeutic standpoint. Those two pieces of information might appear to be the focus of the paragraph, but as you’ll see that happens when I find out I have it, which is much later. “In medicine, a contraindication is a condition or factor that serves as a reason to withhold a certain medical treatment. Contraindication is the opposite of indication, which is a reason to use a certain treatment. A contraindication is a specific situation in which a drug, procedure, or surgery should not be used because it may be harmful to the patient.” - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraindication I think I wrote a letter to the doctor explaining as best I could what was actually happening. I don’t recall receiving a response. The day came, however, when my time in this place had ended. I had no place to go, and only my father came to deal with it. I had hoped I was going home. Nevertheless, that was not the case. My father dropped me off at the YMCA in a room slightly larger than a closet. I didn’t have a job and shared a bathroom with everyone on the floor. I had some anti-depressants from the treatment facility. I broke open the capsules and snorted the contents. Then ended up in the hospital with acute anxiety symptoms. This hardly explains the real feeling of what I was going through. A better description would be 20 clamps on each of my organs. It didn’t go away until the nurse administered something that completely numbed my stomach. I slept, but the nurse woke me up and said she needed the bed. I had to leave before the sun came up. When the week my father had paid for had run out, I was homeless again. I do remember bits and pieces of what happened after this, but they are so disconnected it’s impossible to put them in chronological order or even remember them fully to relay them as true events. One day, while visiting this person and his girlfriend, I remember going to the grocery store to steal a steak. I had no money, and I was hungry. I found one of those family-sized, thin cut steaks and stuffed it down my pants, and covered it with my shirt. I walked out without anyone noticing (or at least stopping me), and we all had dinner that night. Another time at that same place, I played a game of pool with someone at a bar. I hadn’t played pool in years. I shot first, and much to my surprise I started running the table. Ball after ball was going in and I didn’t even feel like I had to try. I missed a shot, and it was his turn. He made one, but missed the next shot. I ran the rest of the table until the final shot. The eight ball was directly in line with the cue ball and the corner pocket with a ball in between. Directly in between. The only way to make the shot would be to bounce the ball over the obstructing ball or bank the eight ball in the pocket. Both shots were nearly impossible for me with my limited experience level but I went for the bank shot. I lined up that shot for at least a minute, took a deep breath and let my shot go. My mouth dropped as the ball hit the rail, bounced the eight ball in the pocket and rolled neatly to a stop. The person I was playing with was even more shocked than I was. This 17-year-old kid just smoked him, and did so with the awe and surprise of a child. He asked me if I was a shark, and I said no, this was the first time I had played pool in years. A pool shark at this age? I considered that a compliment as he asked if I wanted to play again. I declined because I didn’t think a miracle like that could happen twice in a row. Many years later, I proved this assumption wrong. Imagine picking one random number between 1 and 100 and guessing the right one – not once but twice in a row. I’ll save that for a later chapter but it happened. It was as if my entire family tree was petitioning those numbers to come up on two twenty sided dice. I met two students from Creative Learning an unknown time later. They offered me a place to sleep, and I took it. I can’t remember if I had a job, but I was there. That too ended when the property owner kicked us out. At around this same time, I received the letter from my step grandmother that stated, “Why would I want your problems up here?” Shortly after that, everything fell apart. I walked from central Tucson to the Triple T truck stop. Part 2 had just begun.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 18:55:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015