How I Lost God – Which Turned Into a Long-Condensed Story of My Dysfunctional Life: Part 9

I went back and lived at home for the summer, fully intent on going back to live with my uncle when school started back up. I met a new kid that was also living on campus and he talked me into going to his youth group. I made fast friends with the kids there and they didn’t need me to corrupt them; they were already there. I got into a small group with 2 others there and one of their friends that was already 21 and the debauchery ensued. We thought we were a gang and did some extremely horrendous things together. Put it this way, I stole my father’s gun and ended up having to throwing it in a river. And no, I didn’t kill anyone. They tried to talk me into staying with my parents and attending school there, but I declined. I was going to get into some bad trouble hanging with them and I knew that it was time for me to get away from them before I ended up in prison. I made some phone calls at the end of summer and decided to live with my best friend Cliff, his older sister, and their single mom instead of my drunken uncle at the beginning of 9th grade. I was going to be good I had decided. We had to commute an hour one-way to get to school, which was a different school that consolidated a lot of smaller middle schools from a few small districts into one large high school. I should have already had my license, because I was already 16, but they didn’t have that program in middle school, obviously because kids aren’t supposed to fail twice. It was kind’a cool, because the driving instructor would pick us up, along with 2 other local kids, in the morning a few days a week, and we would take turns driving to school and back. Cliff got his learner’s permit and I got my real license. His sister was out of school and going-out with a college student and we would spend weekends with them at his apartment instead of me going home on the weekends. They would let us get drunk. It was new for Cliff (other than at the previous summer’s church camp,) but not for me of course. His mom left for work before we left for school and got back late in the afternoon so we began skipping school and drinking liquor that her boyfriend would buy us with money that his mom supplied us for school and odds and ends. We started slow, but got to be 3 or more days a week. Things got bad from there and my friend and I had a falling out, for no other real reason than we were with each other 24/7. Oh yea, plus his mom started getting calls from school. I was only there for the first marking period. I left for home that day. During those few months I had gotten pretty close with his uncle Frank that lived next door and visited him on most days. I had always dropped by and said hi while visiting Cliff the year prior. He had a hair-lip and it was hard to understand him and even worse when drinking. He was a bad drunk and was always very depressed and was always happy to see me and have someone to talk to. The only other people that talked to him were a couple that lived across the street. They were shit and only were nice to him because he would give them money that they would never payback, but he kept giving to them because he thought they were truly his friends. One night he called them at 3am and told them that he left a note in the mailbox. They said whatever and that they were trying to sleep and didn’t find it odd, they told us later. Frank then went out to his shed and hung himself. It had a low ceiling and he actually had to hold his feet up to die or the jump off the chair broke his neck; I’m not positive which way he killed himself. I had bummed 2 cigs off of him the day before, until I got to go to the store and get my own. In the morning while waiting for the driving instructor to show-up, I started towards his house to repay him his 2 smokes and almost made it to his driveway, where I would have walked right by the opened shed and saw him hanging. The student driver car pulled into Cliff’s drive, so I had to turn around and get in the car. We got picked up from school later that morning and were told the bad news. Cliff’s father had just killed himself the Thanksgiving prior. He had recently been diagnosed with MS and took losing his strength and muscle control very hard and had become very depressed and distant with his family. He left the Thanksgiving table and went into the garage, put a 12-gauge in his mouth, and blew his head off. Cliff got anything he wanted because he was traumatized. After Frank died his mom was really worried because she thought the men in his bloodline had a faulty gene, because the last 3 men of his lineage had all committed suicide. First was the grandfather year prior and then both of his only sons. (Cliff’s dad and uncle.) His death bothered me because I had gotten so close to the depressed man. It was the first funeral that I attended. The wake was open-casket. He looked like a hollow husk of a human, like the long dead carapace of an insect. The make-up made him appear an imitation of man, resembling a wax mannequin. I stood staring at his body and found myself compelled to repay my debt to this man. I took out my pack of cigarettes placed 2 of them if his front suit pocket and said goodbye.