Never Too Late (4 page)

Even now I end the days like that, lying there until three in the morning with my headphones on, always with two hundred songs in my iPhone I can zone out to when I feel like it. My little-kid love of my dad’s records turned into a real connection with music and the way it could speak to me, all thanks to some annoying CD of my brother’s. So I have to give them both credit for that.

Maybe I should have been a music critic. Who knows? Anyway, I got caught up in a little more than music as I headed into my teenage years.

There are about fifty-six thousand people in Anderson. It’s one of those towns where it feels really small when you live in it, but it’s still big enough to have a pretty substantial dark side. I mean, pretty much every place in the world has ugly parts to it. Show me a village with five-hundred people and I bet there’s a pretty good chance it’s got its share of illegal activities and shady people you wouldn’t want your kids hanging out with.

Sometimes I think the medium-sized places like Anderson might be even worse than really small towns or really big cities. All I mean by that is, towns of that size have their fair share of shady parts, bad neighborhoods, and sketchy people, but those parts aren’t big or crazy enough to get a ton of attention like they get in places like New York or Los Angeles. They’re kind of easier to overlook and ignore, if that’s what you want to do, but they’re just as dangerous if you end up falling into them.

Which is surprisingly easy to do, because a place like Anderson is still small enough that there’s not a whole hell of a lot in the way of entertainment. Which means young people end up bored out of their minds. Bored to death. I mean, look, it’s not like everybody from Anderson ended up starring on
Teen Mom
and going to jail, okay? I’m not talking shit about the place. I’m just saying it’s a recipe for disaster when bored kids get too close to the shady side of a town that gives the illusion of safety. And I’m definitely not the only one who knows that from experience.

When I was in middle school, I was hanging out with people I knew from elementary, the same kids I’d grown up with back in my old neighborhood. And everybody in that scene was into drugs. That was just the way it was. I couldn’t tell you how it started with them. I mean, nobody’s born a druggie. We were all cute little kids drawing horses and rainbows at some point. But you remember middle school, right? It’s right around then that you start to see the first kids fall into stuff they shouldn’t be doing.

My friends were the druggies and bad kids, and they were pretty wild. I think the most telling thing about it is that they all hung out with older people. Every last one of them. When the girls dated, they always dated older guys, and not just a couple of years older, but guys well into their twenties, sometimes closer to thirty. So right off the bat that’s not a good crowd you’re dealing with. People who are that much older shouldn’t be partying with kids who are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. It’s just not a normal thing to do, and nine times out of ten those people come with trouble.

The other big issue was that we were unsupervised all the freakin’ time. Between everybody in the group, there was always a house to go to where there was either no adult around, or the adult who was around didn’t care. I don’t remember it ever being hard to find a place where we weren’t going to be supervised. We had a lot of freedom. Or we were just so good at getting it we made it look easy. Either way, my friends were the type that were having sex early, drinking early, doing drugs early. They’d bring pills to school and come to class high, meet up with their older friends afterward, and get rides out to parties they were way too young to be at. And of course I was right there with them. The funny thing is though, as crazy as it sounds considering my reputation these days, back then I was the sober one.

Let that soak in for a minute, right?

But I’m actually serious. Back in those days I was kind of a little goody-goody. I was so against all of the drinking and drugs, and I had very good reasons for feeling that way. Coming from where I was coming from, seeing what addiction had done to my dad and my family life, I didn’t want anything to do with alcohol or pot or pills or any of that shit. To a bunch of young kids, it was just fun and partying. But even back then I could see little glimpses of chaos that came with that lifestyle, the violence and the sketchy situations, and I knew it wasn’t my scene. Even aside from that, just the idea of being messed up all the time was the absolute last thing I wanted. I didn’t want to be like my dad, or even like my mom. I didn’t want to be wasted and acting bad. I just wanted things to be good and peaceful in my life.

My brother had the same outlook as me. Both of us were dead set on ending the cycle, staying on the right track, and not repeating any of our parents’ mistakes. We used to keep an eye on each other and what was going on, and neither one of us liked to see the other doing anything remotely approaching the party life. Of course we loosened up a bit as we got older. Some of us loosened up a little too much, obviously. But even when we did start experimenting with standard teenager party stuff, we didn’t like to hear about each other doing it. It bothered me to think of my brother flirting with things that could lead to addiction, and he felt the same way about me. We just really didn’t want to be like that.

So that was the reason I stayed away from that stuff for a long time, even when it was going on literally on all sides of me sometimes. I used to sit around and preach to my friends, trying to clean them up. And if you wonder why a bunch of druggie kids would put up with me nagging them to stop what they were doing, I’ll tell you why, straight up. It was because they really were good people, and they knew where I was coming from. Obviously, the friends I’d known for years had been to my house. They’d spent the night and heard my parents screaming, and they totally understood all the reasons I hated alcohol so much. You’d have to be kind of an idiot not to. They knew I just wanted to keep the peace with everything and keep things all good. They respected how I felt.

But I was still an impressionable kid, and obviously when it came right down to it, they didn’t think they were doing anything really terrible or wrong. They were just being wild and having fun. Now, I’m not going to sit here and call it typical kid stuff, because you better believe if Leah is out running around in strangers’ houses popping pills at age twelve it will be over my dead body. But it wasn’t like they were shooting up under bridges or anything. The way I see it, they were goodhearted kids who got mixed up in stuff they shouldn’t have been mixed up in, because that’s what their childhood friends started doing, and because nobody was watching them close enough to catch on and step in to stop it. And honestly, I didn’t even think about that deeply at the time. Even if I didn’t like what they were doing, they were my friends and that was how they were having fun with each other all around me. After awhile of me sitting there being the odd one out, my resistance started to fade away. And they still always offered me whatever they were doing, which in that kind of group is really just the polite thing to do.

After awhile I was so used to being around that stuff and having weed or pills offered to me every day, eventually it started creeping in on me. I had already tried weed when I was all of nine years old, thanks to an older friend and her friend who was even older than her. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. How does a nine-year-old kid end up in that kind of situation? If I had to explain it, I’d say it was always that combination of friends of friends plus no supervision. This world of ours was going on right under every-body’s noses, and it was so easy to get away with it we barely even thought about getting caught. At the same time, as my friends got older and more experienced with what they were doing, they had more and more to offer me. By the time I was thirteen, I was getting offered pills almost every day at school. I’d say no, and I’d say no again, and I’d keep saying no. But one day, for some unknown reason, I finally said okay.

Adderall was the first pill I ever took. You probably know what Adderall is, but just in case, it’s a really common prescription for people with attention deficit disorders. But it’s a stimulant, so like every other stimulant, it gets abused by people who don’t need it. Some college students do it to stay up late to study, and some people I knew would just take it to party around the clock. It’s easy to abuse.

The person who gave that Adderall to me was a close friend of mine, this beautiful girl with a body and an attitude that were way older than they probably should have been at that age. She and I were together all the time, and she was always dating these older guys who gave her this stuff. Again, the same pattern. That night we were at a laundromat when she pulled these pills out and told me it would be fun. I guess I was bored enough to try them out.

I don’t know how many milligrams were in each pill, but I took two of them. It took awhile to kick in, and I didn’t know what to expect. I had never taken anything before. After forty minutes I was still shrugging my shoulders and saying “This isn’t even working.” She just kept telling me to give it a minute. We ended up heading over to my house, where she was going to stay the night. That’s when those things suddenly kicked in.

I was freaking out. I remember standing in the living room ranting a mile a minute at my mom, demanding to drive her car. I was pacing around, running in and out of the place, and talking ridiculously fast. It was so bad. My friend wasn’t much better off. We got so hung up on driving this car we started talking about stealing it. It was so bad! We stayed up late into the morning, babbling and scheming ways to get away with stealing my mom’s car. We didn’t actually do anything, but damn that was terrible. Afterward I wasn’t really sold on the experience. Of course, in a way it was sort of fun to experience a different kind of feeling, especially since I’d never really been affected by something like that before. But basically it was too much for me.

At the same time, though, you could say the seal had been broken. Adderall wouldn’t be the last pill I’d swallow. Not by a long shot. What I didn’t realize yet was that there were a lot of different kinds of drugs out there to take, and it would only take me a couple more tries to find something I actually did like. There was even a feeling of false safety that came with that first experience, because once the Adderall had worn off I didn’t feel tempted at all to do it again. That kind of reinforced the idea that pills were just something you took for fun, and they lasted a little while and then they were over. But we all know that’s a dangerous outlook, and it was the bigger and badder pills that ended up hooking me. It was those opiates. Hydros, Oxy . . .

It’s hard to think about it and talk about it in depth now, having been to prison. It’s hard to remember what a grip they had on me. Thinking about it gives me a fear of the life they led me into and the person I became when I was on them. And I have every reason to be nervous about that, because from the time I got my very first taste of opiates, the pull they had on me was incredibly strong.

I just loved the way they made me feel. And remember, all I had ever wanted was to feel different. I didn’t want to be depressed all the time, feeling alone, feeling like I might as well be dead. And there was other stuff piling onto it back then, too. Turning into a teenager is hard on anybody’s self-esteem. I didn’t feel pretty or special or smart, and I didn’t feel confident around other people. So when I took these pills, it was amazing to me that I could become like a whole other person. I was outgoing. I was friendly. I was talkative. I was hanging out with people without a care in the world. When I was on opiates I became this fun, crazy, “anything goes” kind of person, and I loved it because that was how I had always wanted to be but never could.

Looking back on that, I get incredibly frustrated by how obvious it was that part of the reason I got wrapped up in drugs was that they made me feel like I was fixing some of those depressed feelings I’d had since I was a kid. All I wanted was to feel better, and the pills were the first thing that did that for me. I fell in love with them. I just didn’t have the maturity to really grasp what a love affair like that really means. I almost did. I almost sidestepped all that shit when I was so determined to stay clean and sober and live my life right. But as we all know,
almost
doesn’t count.

Still, I have to go a little easier on myself at that time. Looking back on it with the knowledge of what those pills did to me years down the line, it’s easier to see the signs. But I wasn’t an addict yet back in those days. Just a typical dumb kid. And even though it’s completely appalling to think that I was doing stuff like that when I was so young, or that any of us were, the fact was I was still pretty straight compared to the people around me. I was never a pothead—weed just didn’t really do it for me. And I never drank alcohol. I literally had a hate for alcohol because of my dad. Everything else was game, though. And with all the older people who were always hovering around my friends, there was no shortage of options. Influences like that make a huge difference in how you spend your teenage years. We obviously weren’t thinking of these older people as deadbeats, or even questioning why they wanted to hang out with a bunch of junior high school kids. Why would we? Hanging out with older people is one of the coolest things you can do when you’re at that age. And to take it a step further, you’re almost always gonna jump on whatever chance you get to imitate their behavior. I was no different. I don’t consider myself an impressionable person now, but I definitely was at that age. Eventually, it got to where if some kid I thought was cool wanted to share drugs, “No” wasn’t my automatic answer anymore.