Warning: This post contains graphic language and situations including sex, drug abuse, child abuse and violence. I urge discretion.

WINTER

That winter, like the one before it, was bitter in the mid-Atlantic. The one that followed wouldn’t be any better.

I drove a 1971 Mercury Montego. I got it in lousy shape as it was one of my father’s company cars. The paint was blue but looked white until I had to prove it by holding a sheet of paper or a buffing cloth up to it. The vinyl top was dark blue. I spent the summer of ’77 polishing, washing and pin striping it. I used Raindance polish until the paint gleamed. For an ugly model, mine looked nice.

On a bitter night after I had been invited to a party by my ex-girlfriend, I anxiously went. It was at her friend Julia’s house, and I was to follow my ex and some upperclassman. I don’t remember where we met up as she was coming from Millersville and I from North Shore in Pasadena. It was probably on Maryland Route 2, Ritchie Highway. It went from the Baltimore City line through Glen Burnie, Pasadena, Severna Park and Arnold, toward Annapolis.

What nobody knew was that I was a user and I took seconal, known on the street as “reds”, and I did it because they calmed me down, and on an empty stomach made me sleepy or left me moving in slow motion. My connection was a dealer in a neighborhood where all the pretty homes and manicured lawns denied any possibility of such things going on. I didn’t know what seconal was for, but my guy knew me, was older by a few years and seemed rather wise. He picked the reds because he thought grass wasn’t enough and I’d get caught anyway, whereas a small film bottle or two of capsules were easy to stash and left no odor.

This was my first party. I can’t count that awful night in a Benfield park when I was so cold, scared and anxiety filled that I really wouldn’t go to someone’s place for a small gathering, and hell no for a party.

It was threatening snow. Back then we had no internet or smartphones. I got the weather from WCAO pop radio; the car had a standard AM only radio. I learned to love the top 40 singles along with that station’s mix of oldies from Sinatra to Bill Haley. Rod Stewart always had a single on the charts, so I listened and hey, good stuff, you know?

The weather forecast was for snow. I was not keen driving in it, but on reds, there were times I could have done lots of things that would otherwise be impossible. I followed them through Severna Park, heading somewhere in Annapolis. Actually it turned out to be Eastport, across Spa Creek from the old town section.

Once inside, Julie showed us down to a finished basement where, like a teen with conservative parents, she had sodas and snacks and a nice turntable spinning Jethro Tull, Rod Stewart and David Bowie. Going inside…wow. I’d skipped supper. Popped a red, driven impaired and stepped out into frigid, moist air with a raw wind, and that wasn’t really too pleasant. My head spun, but I kept it together until we got inside. Julie was in one of my classes but I’d never taken notice of her. Not on my radar at all.

She was blonde, with Barbie doll hair, thin build, and yet during this party, I began noticing something uncomfortable. At first my ex hovered near me and I was still on a bashful footing, so I didn’t mind. She had asked me to come because it was neutral ground, and I didn’t get what that meant. I thought she and Gary were dating. They were not, but they were good friends, and much, much later I realized it. Gary was a great guy, and I wasn’t so jealous because he liked me and no matter how dark my mood was at school, the gallows humor and sarcasm I’d spit out made him laugh. This was a private and elite school, a prep school, and a lot of people I knew were shocked by some of my twisted comments and evil humor. He would often laugh out loud, a genuine laugh, the kind that knots your stomach, and I secretly admired that and appreciated it. Somehow, there were moments when he made my hell a bit easier to take. I wasn’t well liked anyway. Nobody knew I was a head and I wasn’t a jock. I wasn’t anything at all. If someone said “good morning” my response was often “fuck off” or a middle finger. Where did they get off, greeting me after two years of ignoring me? Fuck them.

The worst was when the painted girls sucked up when trying for homecoming queen. Girls who looked right through me suddenly said “hi” and smiled at me. Fake faces. Fake words. Fake smiles. I hated them.

THE CODE OF SILENCE

My ex had shown me nothing but affection the year before and yet couldn’t understand me. I was insecure, and didn’t want to be. I forced her away without intending to.

I wanted to be like everyone else. Worse, I didn’t understand why I felt the things I did and that meant my impulsive behavior and depression couldn’t be countered or compensated for. I’d turned clingy, and no woman of any age and most men can’t handle that. It wears them down and soon they’re bound to skip on you. That’s what my ex had done. I agreed to go to the party because part of me wanted to show her I wasn’t weak like she thought. She’d noticed other things than my insecurities and fear of doing new things. Even if I did think she was dating Gary, I had to go. I’m not really sure if I was positive enough to think I could win her back, and I’m sure I didn’t really intend to. But I had to go.

My dealer was more like a suburban garden shed doctor than the guys in the city. I’d heard about them and my father had used that to manipulate a fear of drugs in me. But I found Dealer by accident. And for a long time I was scared of him. He was older, built for action, and I thought he had a gang. He may have, because back then in suburban and peaceful Pasadena, closer to the upper income neighborhoods, if a teen wanted to go into business, he needed an answer for any challenge. He also needed backup protection from big suppliers who would try to take over the distribution he got, and they wanted him to sell H and PCP, and he refused. He once warned me that he had ears all over the place, and that if he ever heard of me using shit like psychedelics or smack, he’d never help me again. He spoke very little. He didn’t get personal but he had rules. Heavy shit brought heavy attention from the law, but that seemed to coincide with the desire not to lose a customer to what he sold.

He could get you all the grass you wanted, good stuff, too. But in large quantities, he had to know certain things, and if you lied to him, which he warned me up front never to do, he’d send you packing and God help you if you tried approaching him again.

One rule was that you could only call him from a pay phone. If he couldn’t hear the sounds of a mall or highway in the background, he would hang up. Then, and this happened to me, you had a certain amount of time to get to a noisier position and call. Ground rules.

I never saw him or met him in the same place. He would assign you a place and time. If you didn’t show up in a certain time, he’d be gone. It was clever in a time when dealers were getting people killed. Getting busted, doing time or flipping on a distributor to keep out of prison.

Dealer had to meet you on a friend’s or customer’s word of honor that you were for real. Our first meeting was like me seeing a doctor. Oh, he would be okay if you wanted to buzz, get stoned or party with friends. That’s what he did. And he could get anything. He knew what everything was, what it did to a customer and how much money he could reasonably charge without pissing anyone off, and for that reason, I knew he had access to a nurse or doctor, like his mother or father, and he could read up on things.

He asked me, “What’s your deal?” And that meant what was going on in your life. Was I depressed, suicidal, a jagoff? Was I legit? That was what he did. Based on whatever he thought, he’d recommend something and name a price. For example I was insecure and a coward and he saw that. He heard that in my voice. He asked specific questions like was I nervous a lot. In physical pain. If my sleep was off. Any weird shit going on. And that’s when we ran into the Code of Silence.

I was still being abused, although in 1976 I was allowed to “opt out” of the sexual abuse. But I was lost even so; most of the damage was done. I answered that “I can’t tell you” when he asked certain questions. At first he got kind of mad, but he stayed patient enough. “You’re at home?” Meaning with parents.

It was dark. Always, a dark place. I rarely met him after that because he used drops, after I left cash in another drop then called him. But it began to sink in. His face, there in the dark, surrounded by woods and some distant houses, revealed something I never knew the meaning of until years later. I think he guessed it. No, that’s not exactly it. I think he knew. He knew the deal: trouble at home. I was pretty beat up on the inside. Later he learned to tell it in my voice in just a “hey, it’s me” on the phone. He knew my voice, my name, my mood. He knew I had a past and present I couldn’t talk about. He obviously had me followed and asked around about me.

The Code of Silence refers not to some Mafia rule of the Sicilian Omerta, but the one all victims of domestic and sexual abuse are threatened to observe. You tell anyone, and you’ll pay for it.

“I’ll kill you.”

“I’ll kill your family.”

“I’ll send you to Crownsville (insert the name of your nearest mental institution here)”.

And so on.

I had not told my ex. Nobody knew. Dealer knew the nature of my hell. He recommended reds and a few other things for “emergencies”. He told me how to take them and what would be too much. “You ever OD on me, and I hear it, you and I are through. I deal, I ain’t no killer. You die, good luck in Hell.”

Holy shit, I thought later. Dealer had scruples, even religious ones. I can’t remember the street names of the other tablets and capsules I got, but he always asked at intervals how I was doing and what’s happening in my life. By January of ’78, he knew where I worked and lived and even what school I went to. I heard a name once. A bodyguard slipped and said it. I looked in a George Fox yearbook from 1975, the last year I went. Going by upperclassmen and the name, I thought I found him. He would have been familiar to my sister, who was a gossip and knew everyone. I asked if she knew him one night and she gave me this weird look. She never said anything except “Stay away from him” and to this day I wonder about it. Did I really have the right guy? Yearbook pictures in teenage years are deceptive. I wasn’t sure. I’d changed a lot in 3 years. And I don’t know if he was the Dealer, or exactly what way she’d known or heard of him. Then again, I never knew if that one sister out of all the others (4 in all) was ever abused. I never did, but I was of the mind that with her mean Scorpio nature likely with Gemini rising, maybe she’d been abused to some extent but quickly shown resistance and defiance that scared our father. I likened her to the queen of the hive. She got away with anything she wanted.

Dealer came to know everything a dealer could know or figure out. From summer, 1977 on. He became invested and I knew it. But I never did break the Code of Silence. That would come later.

JULIE

The party was okay. I requested a song and my ex told Julie to play it. It was a song I liked, but I didn’t know what Julie was going to take from it, and never thought about that. I was drugged and it was an impulse. But she knew my ex and I had long since broken up. So I think she may have inferred something from the song.

It was on the radio so much that I’d gotten to like the bittersweet lyrics. Julie knew them well. You’ll see what I mean.

Written by Cat Stevens with lead guitar by Joe Walsh, no one ever covered this song with more emotion than Stewart. I don’t know for certain that Julie took it to mean I was still messed up over my ex, who had come with someone else, but that maybe I liked her. But that it meant something to me was obvious.

Someone said the snow was getting worse and Gary, whose car was not built for slippery roads (I think it was a Pinto), wanted to leave. Not remembering how the hell we got there, I had to follow them, so the night was over. On the way back up Ritchie Highway I had to pull over and throw up. The soda, the reds and the fear of the snow because I hadn’t had snow tires put on yet, were all too much for me. I just wanted to go home and sleep. I realized I’d mixed drugs. I wasn’t even fit to drive on a summer day.

Monday morning at school, I walked the plowed asphalt and crunchy snow from the student parking lot through the arch of the century-old building, and waiting at the door of that building which was called “the Great Hall” but was likened to Frankenstein’s castle by someone I knew, Julie opened the door, waved and said, “Hey Mike!”

She had me come up the steps and she said that she really liked me and had asked her father if she could go out with me. I was shocked and wondered if I’d said anything to her, and if she’d taken that song to be for her, but it didn’t matter. My heart was falling already. This beautiful girl wanted me? Hell, I couldn’t remember much more about the party than I just wrote. Except that I was sick and had to work on Sunday. I don’t remember actually working.

I spent a week feeling so good I didn’t need to take anything. Shit, I even had a liking for instant coffee at night. Homework was out of the question. If I did it, which I hardly ever took seriously, and in Algebra wrote numbers at random anyway, I can’t say. All I know is I felt happy. Happier than I had been in a very long time, and in my house, any joy was short-lived as my father slapped it out of us as quickly as he spotted it. Being in a good mood made him suspicious. But that week, I was in a place I never wanted to leave. She told me that her father had to meet me first and then he would give her his answer. That was set for the following Saturday night. I was getting seriously nervous by quitting time on Saturday, but I showered and dressed and took two reds. That was a big mistake. They’d kick in before I arrived and I thought it was okay. But it wasn’t okay. Her dad sat me down at his kitchen table and in a friendly manner asked questions. It was very traditional and I was a wreck but I respected him. I really started getting sleepy. But I was zoning out more by the second and that was wrong. It didn’t work like that. Well, mostly not, and I did everything wrong. I saw a rough chunk of red crystal as a decoration on a lower shelf of an island counter, picked it up, and it was beautiful. Rough cut but polished. I put it to my eye and looked through it. That should have been it right there. He should have thought anything except what he did: “Hey, I never thought of that.” And he looked through it too. How he couldn’t tell I was drugged (“on something”) I’ll never know, but he liked me. He found me respectful and amusing.

Outside it was snowing again. I had parallel parked out front. He heard my wheels spinning uselessly and came out to help. I felt bad about that but on Monday, Julie was waiting inside the Great Hall and came out to tell me her dad liked me and said we could go out. Here was another week of heaven, but this time the infatuation had me sleepless.

My heart pounded. It ached. I dreamed while lying awake. I worried and I called Dealer. Somehow, he knew who I was seeing and where she lived, and that scared me. He could tell and he said he needed to see me before we could do business. This one time he met me in a public area. The parking lot of Gino’s on Mountain Road. He said, “Fuck, kid, you look like shit. What the hell you doing to yourself? You’re gonna call down heat on me lookin like this. You better get yer shit together!” He asked me about the girl. I said I think I’m in love and he says love ain’t supposed to make you sick, asshole. He had just the thing, though, and he gave me a couple of samples. A one time deal on something he said he’d never offer me again. He said, “Now go home and get in the sack and if you gotta stay home tomorrow and sleep, do it. Don’t you never let me catch you lookin this shitty again.”

I don’t remember if I stayed home the next day. I slept like a baby and I don’t know for how long. It’s possible I did miss a day and don’t remember. But that was the best drug high and then drop I had until I got a mixture of morphine and valium. That was heavy. The universe made perfect sense for two hours. The comedown was gentle, slow. I knew why people liked the needle. That didn’t come from my dealer; he never mentioned it. He wasn’t everywhere.

Dating Julie is a haze. I remember the night I told her I loved her. She said, “The crazy thing is, I think I’m starting to love you too.” It was snowing and as we made out, this obscure song was playing. It only fit because I only heard the words I wanted to.

Then came sex. In the car. Parked in the darkest corner of a parking lot where nobody ever parked. It got heavy and it happened fast.

PSYCHO

Want to know what happens when a 17-year-old high school junior has PTSD, a drug abuse problem, a beautiful girl, is getting laid, and should be enjoying life?

Well I’ll tell you.

Bad things happen and it’s like a cartoon snowball rolling down a mountain. It gets faster and more dangerous with each hundredth of a second.

Insecurities about our relationship, about myself, began to haunt me. You know what that’s like? It’s like you’re gonna die. Your whole world is gonna end any minute. And there’s nothing you can do about it. It never even crossed my mind that I was right or wrong. It was always in my mind that I was different. That I had something wrong with me. And the more I felt for Julie the less secure I was.

I began to badger her over it. She was a bit bothered at first but it got old and I could tell. It was going south.

SPRING

In the same month I was grounded, Julie was grounded and my dealer wouldn’t answer my calls. He had a guy screening them. I went through agony withdrawing. I was dependent. My insides shook. On weekends I had to clean the offices at my father’s warehouse. It was an all day job. Not because I was slow or withdrawing but I was never dismissed until it was fucking dark.

Unknown to me, because Julie and I had broken curfew one night, her father had called mine. Julie had a decent guy for a father. I didn’t. The night we were late, he called looking for his daughter. My father hated him or his children being called out. Getting any negative attention. Appearances were everything to him, always is to a monster who leads a double life. Control and dominance are integral to child abuse. I got home that night, the lights were out, and usually that meant everyone was sleeping. Not this night.

My father was behind the front door, in the dark. As soon as I closed it my head exploded. I was knocked loopy and had moved a few feet to the top of the stairs leading down to the den and my room. He clocked me again, knocking me unconscious. I don’t remember how I got up the steps, or him knocking me out again and back down the stairs. One of my sisters told me later that she was up, saw it, and was yelling to dad that he was killing me. And then I got grounded.

I already hated my life. I hated myself way more after that night than ever before. And I hated everyone in the world for what was being, what had already been done, to me. Hate and anger filled my soul, my head, and every cell in my body.

Well. My older sister, the one who I thought knew about Dealer, was away at her first year of college. I hated her, too. But for Spring Break, we went and picked her up and went to Myrtle Beach. It seemed pretty far from Buies Creek to me, but I didn’t know fuck all what was going on. I was miserable. I didn’t fucking care about any of them. I hated them. My insides crawled and twisted. I had spent one afternoon throwing up. I was dizzy but had a constant headache and I shook like a leaf all the time. Sometimes so badly that everyone saw it. Good thing my parents knew jack shit about withdrawal. They never knew –suspected, but never knew –that I was hardcore. Thinking back now, I abused the reds to the point where I was lucky to have lived through the use and the withdrawal. Either could have killed me.

THE COP

After a miserable rainy week in South Carolina, or was it just a weekend? I went one morning, a saturday, to work. My father reminded me to call Master Alarm Company and tell them I was going to open up. There were no keypads back then. I was so sick I forgot to call. Next thing I knew, Anne Arundel County police officers were running into the building with shotguns or with police specials drawn. I told them what happened with my heart pounding in terror, but one of them was an asshole. He threatened to arrest me for a false alarm next time. And that was the beginning of something I should never have been put through.

I knew his name because another officer who knew my father later told me. He made no bones about telling me everyone hated the guy. Al knew who I was talking about because this cop had the first Ford with a big light bar across the roof; the rest of the cruisers were bigger, Pontiacs with a single blue dome light on the roof. Truckers called them “bubble gum machines”. The cop was known as a dick who would not hesitate to write tickets to old ladies who couldn’t afford repair orders. In fact, I saw him doing that on Crain Highway. I had a focus for my hate. It was him.

Then he began to show up in my rearview mirror. He’d come out of nowhere like some fucking demon and ride my bumper to intimidate me and probably to get me to make a mistake so he could write a ticket or handcuff me. I didn’t know how he was in so many different beats all the time. How did he explain that to superiors? I’d see him in northern Glen Burnie, Southdale, Pasadena, Lake Shore, Riviera Beach, Millersville (police department headquarters was there), Severna Park and everywhere in between. My nerves were wrecked.

I only got to see Dealer once after that. He’d heard I had the fuzz on my ass and told me never to look for or call him again. It was some cold shit so I hated him, too. Another name on the hate list. I actually never ratted on him even though I considered it. My anger, insecurities and anxiety just kept swelling up in my heart and in my head. He didn’t know how close I had already come to dying from his reds. One night I couldn’t breathe. It was terrifying and I got up and forced myself to go for a walk. All I knew was that I had to get my heart rate up or I was a goner. It was dark and nobody was out. No cars passed me. I walked Dutch Ship Road down to Edgewater and then did it again, never realizing I was so fucked up that I was walking kind of like you see on Walking Dead, or Sean Of The Dead, but like a drunk zombie. Yeah, a guy I knew saw me. Where he saw me isn’t clear but he said he laughed his ass off. I otherwise probably wouldn’t remember it. I do know he thought I was drunk because he saw me puking in the middle of the road. It seems I had no trouble puking in the middle or the shoulders of roadways.

Julie put up with me the best she could, but when it came time for the junior prom, I could not and would not go. I was drug free, and that wasn’t any good for me. I was back to panic attacks and sleepless nights and I was permanently depressed and exhausted. I was too scared to go. Crowds, a tux, oh hell no.

Besides, one night I almost told her about the cop. But I stopped short because he had never followed me when she (or anyone else) was with me. Evidently he was senior enough to be daylight shift, the dickhead. But I knew she would tell her father, and if he did anything, anything at all, I knew I alone would pay for it. If he told my father, well, my old man would have gone through his cop friend, and I knew where that would lead.

So I changed my mind and made it a stalker who drove a green import. I acted up and I acted out. I was scared enough to need to get it off my chest but too scared to tell the truth. Her father knew there was no green import, but by the time came for the prom and I refused to go, I knew it was over. He hated me, and she did, too. She had to have felt betrayed and insulted. The school year ended with my teachers all ganging together and complaining about me to the headmaster. I wound up in his office way too many times and he started calling my mother, who immediately called my father at work, daily. And no matter how high the tuition was, the truth was that they decided some students were not worth the trouble. One administrator said I was the worst student the school ever had. I had six credits. I wouldn’t graduate until I was thirty, she said. The headmaster, a shithead who liked touching female students, concurred. He was Navy reserve, but he was a douche. I heard the news from my father after the last day of school: neither I nor my sister would be enrolled for the following year. I said, “Dad, that’s not fair. Lisa ain’t done anything wrong! She’s a model student.” He said, “Michael, you’re too dumb even to go to public school. Lisa will, but you won’t. You’re going to drop out and come to work for me full time.” He told me I was retarded, stupid, called me everything in the book. I believed him.

I wouldn’t know until the following summer that my father knew things I never thought anyone knew. Julie and I had been seen having sex on campus. Holy shit.

SUMMER

The summer began with me working at a satellite warehouse my father owned. One day, an overhead door was off the rollers on two panels. My oldest brother and a truck driver stayed late to fix it and therefore, I had to stay. My brother handed me something that came to the house in the mail that day. My mother had taken it to the main office, given it to my father, and he had my brother bring it to me when he came in the late afternoon that day. It was July 4th, 1978. The item was a postcard from Ocean City, New Jersey. Fuckin Jersey shore. It was a “Dear John” letter on a fucking postcard. I deserved it and I knew it but couldn’t face it. My heart was broken. I wanted to die but was too cowardly for suicide. I just suffered. Acted out. Used only when a driver was able to give me a few pills.

I had behaved like a fool. I was embarrassed, felt guilty for hurting Julie, and yet hated and loved her at the same time. It hurt. Always, with no relief. I was running on empty. I listened to that song a lot. But Clapton had this song charting earlier and it was getting typical overplay on AM radio and it haunted me to death.

Even the fuckin radio was my enemy, a tormentor I hated but couldn’t turn off. That song reminded me of a party we had gone to.

So many times I wanted to die. If not for my best friend, I would not be here. Eventually I’d have done something like hang myself. So we caroused a bit (Heineken) and cruised, but mostly we talked. I was smoking by my 18th birthday but had to hide it from may father. He knew better. When he got mad enough, he’d have his reckoning. He always did.

I didn’t try to contact Julie again. It was the most mature thing I’d ever done for her.

The heartache wouldn’t stop. She’d left a hole in me. A terrible thing I couldn’t patch up or medicate. Dealer was a no go. I sure wanted his doctoring, though. Some pill to raise me up out of this mess I had in my heart.

FAll

School started. My sister went to Chesapeake and I kept putting on a work uniform at 6 every morning. 15 hour days weren’t unusual.

One night I was supposed to go with my friend for pizza. It was really early but because of the time chage, very dark. I got to my car and didn’t have my keys. I had to go back to my room. So I went downstairs through the den and into my room.

I knew my keys were on my desk straight ahead across the room. It was very dark but I didn’t need to see to get them so I left the light off. Halfway across the room I stopped dead. Frozen with the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. The air felt weird, as if it were charged with something.

It was pure evil. Like what I felt years earlier when I was in an upstairs room and that tiny shadow was on the walls by the ceiling. Only this was much worse. Far more powerful. I remained still. I couldn’t have moved if I had the runs; I’d have made a mess.

Everything was quiet. Deathly quiet in a house full of people. I was not aware of time passing. I just stood there.

When the energy around me seemed to vanish, from behind me and to the right of the door, from inside my closet, I heard my father say, “Yeah, I’m in here.”

What the fuck!

All these years, I’ve thought that night I sensed my father’s true self. But what I felt was something around me. He wasn’t alone. A younger sister later told me she saw a shadow, much bigger than the one I had seen all those years ago. Maybe that’s what I felt. The demon who urged him to give in to his sick tendencies. He’d raised us with his fucked-up “wisdom” and twisted “insight” about Old Testament laws. He never lived by them. He fucked up our heads, and perhaps I got the worst of it because I’m in an ongoing treatment and rehabilitation program and the rest of my siblings still have spouses, and children, and only one gets counseling, or was, last time I talked to her.

But a real Christian doesn’t beat and rape his children. Real Christians get help or find some way to resist. Besides, he wasn’t penitent and my mother was even worse. Losing your cherry to your own mother fucks your head up for life.

I never forgot that night. I never will unless I go into dementia. And I wonder: did I really sense demon, or man?

He was in the closet looking for hidden drugs and Playboy magazines. He fucked his own daughters but hated porn. He would always find it and trash it, but rape and incest? Those were backed up by scripture. He was a fucking animal.

WINTER

The year’s end I don’t remember. On December 7, I wrecked the car. Rear-ended someone on mountain road and my father was merciless. I don’t remember Christmas. I don’t remember much of anything except the constant pain I felt over Julie. I bottomed out. I just bottomed out.

EPILOGUE

It’s only one year out of the sixty I’ve lived, yet so traumatic and so painful. Yeah. Even now. I knew this day would come, when I had to write about this whole year. I dreaded it but now that it’s done, I’m going to be okay. This story was necessary to show you how indecent I was, the result of ongoing violence and abuse. To tell you what happened when my life was so hard to live, the dysfunctional relationship I had, what it did to me and what I can only guess it did to Julie.

I had to include every ingredient, my job, drug abuse, the rogue police officer, my intense fears and inability to go to the prom, my deceit, the failure to be brave enough to tell the truth, what my teachers thought of me and how that unfairly affected my sister, and that it was no small miracle that I survived that year.

Today, reds are impossible to get on the street without big dollars. Most dealers never even heard of them. There’s plenty of stepped-on coke, skunk weed, crack, crank, fentanyl, scramble, percocet, benzos and a few others. Fentanyl (street name “fettie” or “fenny”) is instant death, or a visit to intensive care, and a ticket to an NDE. If you survive, you’re not going to be the same. Heroin is major league trouble. You’ll never find anything pure. You dont know what’s mixed in, or if it will kill you. ODs are still common.

If you’re on a drug or drugs, my suggestion is to stop. You can’t just do it yourself, though; you could die. You need help, detox, and that requires things most aren’t willing to go through.

As for the cop, he fucked with me straight through to 1980. I got back together with my first ex, and told her. She accused me of lying. I couldn’t win. I was always a fuckin loser.

But my best friend. He believed me. Want to know what he told me? Because he knew the guys this happened to.

The guys were horsing around on the parking lot of the White Coffee Pot Jr. on Ritchie Highway one night, but someone called it in as a fight. Guess who the first cop on the scene was. Oh, yeah, and he roughed the teens up, seriously beating one of them.

That boy’s father was a man with a rep, the kind you wanted as a friend, or else went out of your way to avoid. They called him “Big Joe.”

Well, Big Joe wasn’t the kind of man who could see his son in the hospital and not do anything about it. He called in a massive order, about a two hundred dollar tab, to Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. When he got there, he refused to pay. The manager threatened to call the police and Big Joe encouraged him to go ahead. He further told the manager to request a certain officer and promised the guy that this particular cop would definitely see to it that justice was done. The manager did so. When the officer arrived, Big Joe proceeded to hand him a beating the man would never forget. He left before backup came but it wasn’t clear whether they ever arrested him. I dont know. But in a way, justice was served.

When the cop got back to work, a few years went by and one day I read about him in the paper. He had been disciplined for sexual harassment and was riding a desk. Yes, there are bad cops. There always were. But most I’ve ever met were eager to help and didn’t like injustice.

I was messed up. But Julie? Lee Ann never left my heart but I was never involved with her. I have loved every single woman I was ever with. There was never anyone I wasn’t serious about. Julie keeps a secret place in my heart. I’m grateful I knew her.

AFTERWORD

You have to measure this story against yourself, and if you’ve survived sexual abuse, physical abuse, or sexual assault, domestic abuse of any kind, then perhaps you see something of yourself in this story. PTSD has different symptoms and no two victims are the same. If you’re in a situation or just got out of one, you’ll need help. My treatment includes drug and other therapy. That’s a good mix once you get the right meds dialed in. Talk therapy is hard work. You relive everything, and the next day you may feel exhausted. But the truth is, you’ve had a part of yourself torn away and replaced with an insidious and crippling affliction. You do not deserve to live that kind of life. I survived decades with it, but those years were full of torment, nightmares, dysfunctional relationships and guilt.

Of all these, the worst is guilt. I’ve carried guilt over how I treated Julie for years. I looked for her on Facebook. I just wanted to apologize. Same with my other exes.

But I had to come to grips with one sad, ultimate truth.

I did the best I could.

And none of it was my fault. I was hurt. I didn’t know about PTSD or the price of drug use.

I didn’t know.

Do you? Do you feel guilt from something that wasn’t your fault? Because you need to see that you were a victim, damaged by heinous acts, and that guilt is a toxin.

https://www.healthline.com/health/sexual-assault-resource-guide

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9988513?p=crisis_prevention_info&visit_id=637349288905136315-534163626&rd=1