How I Lost God – Which Turned Into a Long-Condensed Story of My Dysfunctional Life: Part 6

Back at school I got kicked out often and lived in in-school suspension when I was actually at school, so even while at school I wasn’t normally in my regular classes. This is when my father found God and became a Christian. He tried to change at this time and become a nicer person, but by this time I was hardly ever home anyways, and was already set on the bad path that I had steered down. I always thought seeing him at church was weird; it just felt wrong. He would and still does, cry and get wobbly-voiced when preaching on some subjects or telling his testimony. I always felt like he was faking it. He never showed a tear when he was treating us badly as kids, not even coming in and apologizing after the fact. They made me go to church and join a youth group. I was a very bad influence on those weak-welled impressionable young teens. They were only good when around other Christian kids and throwing me in there definitely wasn’t spiritually healthy for them. I brought out the worst in the weak ones. I always fought to not go and finally my parents realized that forcing me wasn’t going to get me into the Kingdom, so they gave in and let me stop going. I was still made to go on Sundays and occasionally on Wednesdays. During spring break Rick and I lived at the mall. We ended up stealing a car and getting caught. We never even made it out of the parking lot, because like dumbasses we just kept driving around the lot. The guy didn’t want to press charges and we were released to his mom and one of my uncles, who was going out with Rick’s mom at the time. He was my youngest uncle and still in his twenties at the time so he was pretty cool about it. He gave us a 3 hr lecture that night while steadily getting drunker, thus repeating his self over and over. He never told my parents. Rick moved away and I started hanging around with high-schoolers more, who had cars and I got drunk and high for the first time. My first time, most of us did the ole “everyone is spending the night at everyone else’s’ house trick” and stayed out and got wasted. I was supposed to stay with this one kid because mom didn’t have a curfew for him. I threw-up all over myself and the front-seat of his truck. They made me get in the back of the truck, during winter, for the ½ hr ride and dropped me off drunk at my house, saying that he wasn’t letting me get him in trouble with his mom. I remember slipping in and out of consciousness and mumbling how cold I was, drunkenly over and over between chattering teeth, with frozen snot and vomit on my newly-sprouted, extremely thin mustache. I still recall them dropping me off in the road in front of my home that night at 2:30 am and beating on the door. Nice true friends there. I didn’t care about getting in trouble at that point; I was cold and I was mad. I staggered past my mom when she opened the door, yelling, “fuck them motherfuckers,” and b-lined into my room and slammed the door behind me. I didn’t cuss in front of them before that. Not those words anyways. My dad always cussed profusely before the whole reborn thing, but I can still probably count on one hand how many times I heard my mom cuss – and even then I never heard the F-word. I do remember, even though I was 4, my mom cussing tons and screaming the night she found out my dad cheated – but hey, I’ll be magnanimous and give her that day free. A few seconds later my dad swung open the door and turned on the light. He yelled, “what is it dope, blow, hash, smack, reefer,” and a plethora of other common drug terms that he knew so well. I told him to leave me the fuck alone and we would discuss my punishment in the morning and to turn the fucking light off. He must have been in total shock because I figured that he was going to beat the shit out of my near-comatose body, because before that I had never dared cuss at him. But instead he quietly shut my door. I was never home after that and my dad later on in life told me that he knew everything that I was doing, but he felt like a hypocrite and just let me spiral down because he felt helpless to stop it. I failed again that year because I was never at school from either skipping or suspension. A black family moved in a few houses down and they had like 7 kids. Robert was my age and Duck, was 2 years older and we because fast friends. We all smoked. They smoked Newports and I smoked Marlboros. God, did I hate when I ran out and had to bum one of the strong menthols. I stayed around the house that summer and hung with my new friends, especially Robert, which kept me out of trouble during those 3 months. It was a great summer. The Play Station had come out that last Christmas and we played Super Mario Bros. and Double Dribble for countless hrs. They also taught me to play cutthroat “21” on my old basketball goal with no net that hung on a tree in my side yard; we played a lot of hoop that summer. I think Duck maybe won 90% of the time. Duck also taught Robert and I how to play cards. He played some weird versions: Hearts, Spades, and different poker games, usually with wilds cards, In-between, and a game called Tonk. I don’t even remember the rules to that last one. That’s when I found my love of cards, other than loving to watch my grown-up relatives play poker at get-togethers. Sometimes they would let me sit on their laps and put the money in the pot when I was younger. I guess I can give him props for my poker hobby. No one in their whole family knew how to swim, but Robert always wanted to go get in the water. There was a pond on Rick’s old property and they had dumped a ton of sand on one shore making a beach with a sandy bottom in that part of the pond. Perfect place to swim in the hot, hot NC summer sun. Duck never went, but Robert and his slightly younger brother always did. It was so funny; they would get in about 3 feet of water and splash around. I ended up teaching them both to swim that summer. My dog, a black lab, would always go with us. It was already trained when I got it after frisky died. My dad got it from a guy whose kid went off to college and couldn’t take care of it. I saved James’ life that summer in that same pond. You would think if you couldn’t swim you wouldn’t walk out up to your neck on a sandy bottomed pond. I didn’t have to do CPR or anything. I just had to swim out and bring him back in. He almost drowned me by thrashing around while I was pulling him in to the shallows. He did swallow a lot of water though.