How I Lost God – Which Turned Into a Long-Condensed Story of My Dysfunctional Life: Part 8

I had made up with my alcoholic uncle by this time via phone and he was willing to take me back again so I could attend school. I had to meet with the Principle again and she said that if I promised to be a good kid, she would rescind her previous threat and let me back in. She stated that other than that one major incident I wasn’t too bad the last year. I had gotten caught fingering a cheerleader on the school bus on an away baseball game at the end of the year. She still was extremely pissed about that and told me that she wouldn’t even tolerate seeing me kissing on campus, but let me stay, because she said that I was an A-student and that all the kids missed me. I was really worried that she wouldn’t forgive that transgression, but for some reason she did. I was once again back with teens that legitimately cared for me. It was really worth the squalor in which I lived, to be with that group of friends. There was never anything in the fridge but condiments and only sugar, flour, and sometime crackers in the cabinets. Roaches everywhere, and when you turned on the lights at night myriad roaches would flee the scene. I wonder how many I swallowed in my sleep? He lived day-to-day. He bought just enough 40-ounce bottles of cheap beer, generic smokes, gas, and food to make it until the very next day. You see, he didn’t want to mess up and accidentally spend too much on food and gas by buying more than a day’s worth, because when it got towards the end of the week he might not have enough money before his check for smokes and his almighty beer, because it could be sitting in his tank or fridge. That was a no-no. One thing I can say is that he always made it to work; I guess you would call him a functioning alcoholic. Every morning I would hear him in the bathroom puking up the last of his bile and then loudly brushing his teeth. I had to wash every day with dish soap. We almost always ate chicken because it was cheap. Thank God for school lunches - and there aren’t too many kids that would say that. They were the happiest times of growing years though. Everyone liked me and I was the most popular kid in our small school. It was a great place. There were only two classes in that small rural school. It was about 50/50 white and black, but for some odd reason there was absolutely no racial division and everyone hung out with everyone. Well, there was this one Goth kid, back when they just called them headbangers, but he got the shit kicked out of him about once a week, and for some reason still couldn’t stop saying hateful, racist things. After a few months of that, I got tired of seeing my friends get suspended for fighting and seeing him always by himself, so I finally called a meeting in the schoolyard, and talked everyone into a truce. Eventually he even became a semi-welcome part of our large clique, although he was always considered weird because he liked to cut himself. I loved it there. I was the worst kid in school and I was actually on my best behavior. I never got suspended the rest of that year. All the teachers knew that I smoked and turned a blind-eye because I was the unnamed leader of the kids and I never encouraged the other kids to smoke or do the things that I was known for, to all the faculty that read my ever-thickening file. I actually used to get out of class in one period to get coffee for that teacher in the janitor’s room and would sit for 10 mins or so and smoke with the janitor and lunch ladies. I also was an A-student again and the one teacher that I used to give shit the year before was a youth group leader at the church right beside our roach-infested trailer park. We became to understand each other and she let me get away with a lot that other teachers wouldn’t have after I started. The kids talked me into going and although I corrupted them somewhat, I purposely never tried to get them to do anything I was known for, other than having sex with a few of them. I never drank or did drugs that year. I actually went to bible camp for the first two weeks after school got out for the summer. I wasn’t real good there I will admit. I had reunited with my childhood friend whom stole the cigarettes, because my uncle lived close to my original NC hometown. I talked Jason into going to my youth group towards the end of the year and we both went to camp together. We smuggled in a lot of booze and had a party with all my normally good-mannered friends. We didn’t get caught, but I always did feel bad about pushing them towards their repressed inherent experimental teenaged nature.