Leaving Cloud 9

by Ericka Andersen

  This was the beginning of the end of her relationship with her kids. Even though it would still be years before Rick and Jenny moved out and onward, the real deterioration of their relationship with their mother started with the drugs. As they grew older and more wise to what had been happening their entire lives—and what other kids’ lives were like—they realized their lives weren’t normal after all. That their mother’s behavior wasn’t okay.

  What was it like to live in a clean kitchen with dinner on the table, or breakfast for that matter?

  What was it like to deal with the mounting pressures of adolescence in a peaceful, nurturing environment?

  What was it like to begin the day with a mom who wasn’t hungover—or inviting you to have a drink?

  Introducing a preteen to alcohol is abuse of a different kind. It is evil and awful and could have been the end of any potentially healthy life Rick and Jenny had. But here, too, God’s grace was at work. Looking back, Rick doesn’t take that for granted for a moment.

  It was the music that began to provide a soundtrack to how the evening would go in their household. Rick never got used to the dooming possibilities that might appear after he walked through his front door in the afternoon after school. Whatever music was drifting out of the house began to clue him in, though.

  At Rick’s house as a kid, music playing meant Sylvia was drunk—and the kind of drunk could be determined by which type of music it was. Every kind of drunk had a different spin, and he soon learned to distinguish them with expertise.

  “We would walk home, and . . . before we even got to the door, you could hear Patsy Cline or Jim Reeves or Hank Williams,” says Rick, recounting the dread of hearing an old country song. “And automatically my heart would sink to my gut. I knew it was going to be a horrible night . . . fighting, keeping me up all night, possibly the cops would show up.”

  Sometimes it wouldn’t just be a day. It would be weeks turning into months of sad country music soundtracking a drunken existence day in and day out. The bottles were everywhere, the drugs strewn about the kitchen table like after-school snacks. It was like a nightmare that never ended. It would perpetuate, like the movie Groundhog Day, each day the same as the last with no end in sight. Sylvia’s depressive substance binges, he would later realize, were similar to the down periods experienced by those with bipolar disorder, though she was never formally diagnosed with such.

  Things were a little better, though, if Rick came home from school and heard Michael Jackson or one of Sylvia’s old favorites, Culture Club. That meant she was drunk but happy. Then she was fun. She’d try to dance with Rick or be overly sweet and ask how things were going with him.

  At any rate, Rick far preferred it over the depressive, country-music side. But he also knew to walk on eggshells because the slightest bump could change the situation. An argument with his sister, an unexpected irritation like spilling something on the floor, or a bit of bad news about something or other could end in the music screeching to a halt. As a result, Rick tried everything he could to stay out of his mother’s way and keep her happy.

  He absolutely hated when she tried to dance with him—in an overly pushy way that communicated he had no option. He had to smile and pretend to enjoy the facade to make her happy, or she’d erupt in anger. If she was having fun and you weren’t—that was a no-no. He was forced to adapt to her false sense of joy in the moment, something that would later create a deep sense of hatred for parties and social events and anywhere he felt he had to be fake for others.

  No matter how hard he tried, however, Sylvia’s mood could shift within seconds—from silly to hellish. It would be a swift turn from laughing and dancing to sudden, instantaneous rage and anger.

  Rick never had the choice to be anything but a loner, though he did have one good friend in high school who provided comfort—as well as stark contrast to his life. Making friends didn’t come easily for him, so he has had few friends over the decades. No one wants to bring a friend home to a filthy trailer and a mother who never leaves the house except to go bar hopping—or who could embarrass him at any turn, depending on how much she’d been drinking or drugging. Never mind the fact that random men came in and out of the house—and the older Rick got, the more embarrassing that was.

  Life with Sylvia was all he’d known, the only safety he was aware of. But as time went on, the bleakness of his life became clearer and clearer. Sylvia was uglier to him by the day, and his bitterness grew.

  “Part of me wishes we could have been taken away and put into a good foster home,” recalls Rick. “But Jenny and I might have been separated, and my mom’s big thing was to keep us together.”

  The one thing Sylvia did instill in her children was that family was all there is in this life. That was why she fought so hard to keep them with her, why she followed her parents around the country so they could take care of her kids when she could not. It was her sad, unhealthy way of ensuring they weren’t lost to her forever, the one loving action she could take. Somehow she thought she was enough. In her mental state and the throes of addiction, perhaps it really was the best she could do. As long as Rick and Jenny could stay together, she could live with herself at the end of the day.

  She often told them, “You guys don’t need to fight, because family is all you have in life. You’ll grow up and be adults, and you’ll have each other, even if you don’t have friends.” It was a distorted view of reality, but having been abandoned by her own siblings because of her unhealthy habits, she was determined her kids wouldn’t face that same alienation. But she didn’t know what it was like to have friends either, because it wasn’t something that fit into her life.

  Plus, she had a deep distrust of the foster system. She used to tell the kids they had better not get “caught” by social services, because kids got raped in foster families. They needed her protection, she said. They believed her and were appropriately terrified at the time. Only later, as they grew older, did they begin to wonder which would have been better.

  Foster care is indeed a gamble, so we don’t really know that Rick and Jenny would have been better off in a foster home. They could have been shuttled back and forth between his mom and dozens of foster homes, put in all kinds of precarious situations, creating even more instability than they experienced with her. The life they had, bobbing between their mom and grandparents, at least kept them in the same neighborhoods and schools and with some familiar faces.

  And despite Sylvia’s many abject failures, her purpose in keeping the kids together proved to be a good one in the end. Jenny was all Rick had as he bounced through life after childhood. And though she had her babies and her husband very early on, Jenny’s attachment to Rick was also really important in helping her grieve her lost childhood and heal from the pain of neglect and abuse.

  “I think our shared experiences—me and Jenny—were like going through basic training,” Rick remembers. “When you go through and experience something so dramatic and traumatic together, you have an everlasting bond.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE MOLDING OF A MAN

  Rick’s teenage years, spent in Arizona, blur together like a string of bad dreams, so many moments melted into the others like a nightmare replayed over and over again.

  The older he got, the more he recognized the strangeness of his life. His mom’s behavior was more troubling, embarrassing, terrifying, and downright dangerous. His mom’s lifestyle had deteriorated even further as she got deeper into drugs, and he began to lose hope that she’d ever get better.

  As soon as she started with the cocaine and crystal meth, it was all but over. The new drugs, compounded with alcohol and probable mental illness, brought about a frantic obsession, complete with paranoia and a new crop of unsavory “friends.”

  Even at this time, she would have brief periods of trying to get clean, but they never lasted. She always relapsed. Unfortunately, a lot of people attending those meetings for addicts were the same as she was. Depending on wh
o fell off the wagon first, the others would soon follow—and possibly be introduced to new ways of getting high.

  The truth was, without cutting off complete contact with old drinking buddies or boyfriends, it was impossible for Sylvia to avoid temptation. This is a common problem with many alcoholics and addicts. Living in a small town without much support, Sylvia had little hope of staying sober—and she didn’t.

  Sylvia had been numbing her problems with alcohol ever since she was a child. She drank beer, liquor, wine—nothing in particular and everything the same. Alcohol—often supplemented with pot—provided a short-term blanket of numbness. It gave temporary relief from the inadequacy, the endless need for validation, approval, and worthiness that sucked the sanity right from her. It fueled her nightly rendezvous with the radio, the constant stream of invisible lovers, dreamy dramas of a life she’d never live.

  Hard drugs amplified all that to the nth degree. Alcohol and marijuana seemed like child’s play once she got her hands on crystal meth, cocaine, and possibly heroin. She wasn’t scared of anything, and her addictive personality fueled the fire. She was hooked almost immediately.

  She didn’t take pains to hide her drug use from her kids. They were aware of it and only knew instinctively they weren’t supposed to do drugs themselves. At that point in his life, Rick generally just tried to stay out of her way. He preferred not to speak or interact with her at all. It seemed that anything said or done always led to accusation, criticism, or screaming and yelling. But one day, he happened to be in the kitchen to get a snack after school and accidentally addressed the universe—which she of course, took to mean herself. (Addicts believe everything is about them.)

  Rick was around the age of sixteen, standing at the kitchen sink after a long day at school, preparing to head to his part-time job bussing tables at a restaurant. It wasn’t that he was striving and achieving as a successful young man. School and work were more of an escape from reality, which is why he spent so much time outside the house. But he did have to come home to eat and sleep, which is why he happened to be there. And he made the mistake of complaining out loud about how tired he was, how he didn’t want to go to work.

  “Why don’t you come try a bump of this?” Sylvia proposed. She pointed to her drugs, which she’d been preparing on the kitchen table.

  At this point, Rick had smoked pot and had his share of alcohol, but hard drugs were new.

  He paused for a moment, his hands on the sink, and thought, Why not? Some kids have hot chocolate with their moms; others get high. Plus, he knew that if he said no, she’d get her feelings hurt. By saying yes, he also avoided dealing with that irritation.

  He didn’t want to end up like her, but he had no dreams in life at this point either. He thought maybe it was inevitable that he’d become a poor, drug-addicted alcoholic. Where could he go to get away from his small Arizona town?

  Sylvia prepared the drugs in a small piece of tinfoil, then folded the foil in half, the rocks settling in the middle of the fold. They set the rocks on fire and used an empty pen shell to inhale the smoke—up one side of the foil and back down the other.

  He took his first hit of crystal meth before his shift that day. It immediately felt incredible, like drinking five Red Bulls, but far better. His exhaustion disappeared, and he headed to work feeling—temporarily, of course—like a million bucks.

  Imagine the insanity of a mother inviting her son to try hard drugs with her—but that’s the way it was. Rick could see the gleam in her eye—she was thinking that this was something they could share together. It would make them laugh and feel good. Finally he was old enough!

  That could have been the second when it all changed for Rick, the moment that predicted his death or a life of complete tragedy. Meth is highly addictive, after all, and it’s very difficult for meth addicts ever to become clean for the long-term—there is a 90 percent relapse rate. And Rick met all three of the criteria listed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse as key to the development of addiction: biology, environment, and development. (Development refers to the fact that the earlier drug use begins, the more likely it is to lead to addiction.)1

  And yet somehow, miraculously, Rick never became addicted. If you were still wondering where God was in Rick’s life, here’s another piece of evidence that He was fighting for this fatherless kid.

  After that first hit, Rick and his mom never did meth together again, but he certainly liked the drug well enough to go out and find his own. He could have tried to bum it off of her again, but he knew well enough that she’d start complaining that he was stealing her drugs or taking too much. It was better to avoid altercations with her over anything, especially her precious substances, than to save a few dollars. Finding drugs at his high school was easy enough, and he secured them regularly—but not every day. Somehow he held on to a healthy dose of fear about becoming dependent. He wanted to feel good, but didn’t like the idea of it becoming a daily habit. Some force of self-control and wisdom stood out strongly in his mind, perhaps preserving him from the ravages of addiction.

  There is some memory of trying to get his mom to quit drinking and doing drugs, both before and after that mother-son “bonding” moment. And from time to time she actually seemed to try. He especially remembers a time when he was in third grade. She was trying hard to get clean and would head out the door to AA meetings almost every day. But that attempt was short lived, and so were all the others. It was never long before a new man came into the picture and broke her down.

  That was always the downfall. Sylvia’s addiction to love throttled her addiction to substances. It was a powerful cycle that felt too difficult to get out of, especially once she started using the hard stuff.

  Rick eventually began to realize that he needed to find a way out of the life he was living. The thought of staying in this depressing town with few job options was one he could hardly stomach—plus, getting away from Sylvia sounded like a dream all on its own. But he really had no idea of what he could do to get away. College was out of the question. He had no way of paying for it. Besides, he hated school and made terrible grades. He would barely graduate from high school.

  Around this time, he met a girl who would become his only close friend: Katie was one of the only sources of joy in his bleak environment. Though they would lose touch later, she served a meaningful purpose in his life.

  When your home life is precarious from the time you are born, you’ve got to find something else to hold onto. For Rick, it was his friend, Katie. He had never gravitated toward or felt comfortable with male friendships so it was much easier for him to talk to girls, even just for friendship. Outside of Sylvia’s long-term boyfriend, James, Katie was the only semi-stable thing in his life, and was there for him amid the crazy. Rick would escape the drug and alcohol-laced environment of his house to hang out at her house, sometimes for days. Though their relationship wasn’t romantic, it was a comfort as Sylvia began to sink deeper into addiction. The insanity of his home life increased, and as he grew older the experiences seemed even more desperate. His mom never changed for the better, and the pathetic nature of her life became more apparent by the day.

  He remembers walking home from school to his house one of the rare times he allowed Katie to come over, but hearing the country music blaring, they turned right back around. The few times a friend came to his trailer, it was humiliating, especially once he’d seen how his home life compared to others.

  The truth was, until he hit middle school, Rick hadn’t even known that everyone else’s family wasn’t like that. His normal was a mother who gulped screwdrivers and left heroin out on the table. He didn’t even know it was wrong or illegal until later in life, when he realized that other people’s parents waited for them to get home, cared about where they were, made them dinner, didn’t disappear for nights at time, and didn’t get arrested.

  Having a friend to lean on for a couple of years during this time was invaluable, and God used it to show him that
a different life was possible. He had someone to count on, even temporarily, and her presence provided a salve for his anguished existence.

  In those days, Rick’s life became increasingly unbearable. Sylvia even kicked him out of the house multiple times, leaving him to sleep outside on the sidewalk, in his car, at a friend’s house—wherever he could find shelter. It wouldn’t be abnormal for her to pull a knife on him if he tried to come back or for her to sick a random guy on him to keep him out of the house. The men she brought home wouldn’t know the truth about why Rick wasn’t allowed back in—Sylvia just spouted out lies. Life was all about Sylvia, what she wanted and what made her angry.

  The night Rick slept on concrete next to the bugs, dirt, trash, and empty liquor bottles was the night he determined he’d never sleep outside again. That night drilled into him a driving ambition to always take care of himself without relying on anyone. But that ambition also fueled in him a constant and nagging insecurity. He was always keenly aware that he had no one to turn to if things went sour.

  Rick knew the only way Sylvia kept a home in the first place was because of Steven’s pension payments, and even with that assistance she could barely keep up with her bills. They were always on the verge of getting an eviction notice, even though they lived in a cheap trailer.

  It’s tough to shake that feeling of possible homelessness, especially after having lived from motel to motel for weeks at a time as a young boy. Today, even with a great family and a relatively high two-person income, Rick will still say things like, “I am imagining having to live in my car” or “I just don’t want to end up homeless.”

  The fear is very real, even when it’s irrational, as nearly anyone who has lived it can tell you. And there’s something especially terrifying about going it alone, without the backup of parents or siblings or even friends. The sense of walking a tightrope with no net persists even when you’ve long left the circus and are walking on solid ground.