A Teenager's Journey

by Richard B. Pelzer

  All of this played into Mom’s hands—yet another reason to make me look like a seriously troubled loser, not only to the Nichols family but now to the other neighbors that had become friendly to me—Robert and Judy Prince. Rob and Judy lived across the street from the Nichols family, and they, too, had showed an interest in my behavior. Occasionally when I needed to talk to an adult about my issues I would confide in Judy.

  This couple, like Darlene and John, allowed me to share in their lives, at the same time attempting to teach me that my current lifestyle left much to be desired. Whenever I needed to talk to someone and was uncomfortable sharing with John and Darlene out of embarrassment, I found that Judy would be able to understand and show that she could still care for my safety and health without demonizing me.

  As the school year ended in the summer of 1981, I found that the friendships I thought I had made had evaporated. All that kept us kids together was the constant partying. At the age of seventeen, I felt once again that my life had no direction, that I was caught up in my own vacuum of self-destruction. There became less and less of a need for Mom to exaggerate my flaws—they were becoming more than apparent to those that now knew me. I didn’t care anymore what Mom told the neighbors.

  I didn’t care anymore about anything. I stopped beating myself up over the conflict between trying to be a “good kid” whenever I was around the Nichols or Prince families and the reality of the life I was really living. It used to tear me apart, knowing that I could be exposed at any moment and would have to explain everything to John, Darlene, and Judy. But not any longer. I just didn’t care anymore.

  Most parents don’t understand anything. They never know as much as their own kids and never understand what it is like to be a teenager: Somehow, they forget. Mom was worse than that, with her outrageous stories. But the worst of it was that I found myself living them out. The more outrageous the lie, the more I would turn what she said into the truth. I had become nearly everything she told any neighbor who would listen: a thief, a cheat, a drunk, a drug addict. I was methodically working my way through the mass of names she labeled me with—one at a time.

  It gave me security, being one person around some people and someone completely different around others. It gave me power and control over who I was and over what I would do and when. For the first time I was really in control of my life by allowing it to be completely out of control. It was all my own doing, and no one could tell me otherwise. No one really knew me—including myself. But this multiple personality became difficult to manage.

  By Thanksgiving, I had stolen several gallon bottles of Mom’s vodka and had them hidden away for my own use. Within a week the stash that once comprised eight gallons was now reduced to one last bottle. I reconnected with the same friends from last year at school and followed the same patterns as before. I fell back into the void that was the acceptance of my peers and of the girls that associated with us. By now, my morals were just about nonexistent. I became more involved in drugs, alcohol, and girls. I was becoming, just like Mom, horribly miserable.

  I found better drugs and better parties. My inexperience with girls was a thing of the past, and I was now just one of the group. I’d spend many afternoons in a girlfriend’s bedroom, then off to a party in the early evening. As time went on it became sort of expected that as I showed up with a girl from the pack we would get hazed over what everyone already knew we’d just been doing. It became a contest to see who could “hook up” with the most girls during the year. I had no remorse over the loss of my pride, my morals, or my dignity. We all shared with each other—the same group of guys and girls. When one couple broke up, each would hook up with someone else within the group, even if they had already been an item in the past. I had dated several of the girls more than once.

  Like the rest of the group, I was just seeking the comfort of someone to be with, physically.

  By Christmas, Mom and I had had several heated arguments over my escalating drug abuse and drinking. She had now started calling Grandma in Holiday, Utah, to let her know that I was serious bad news and that she didn’t know what to do. She needed another outlet to reach out to, as the Nichols and Prince families had begun to ignore Mom and her stories about me, whether true or false.

  Christmas was both one of the hardest times and the best of times for me as a child. I recall the magic that surrounded Santa, and the traditional Christmas lineup where each of us boys would arrange ourselves by age in the hallway just outside my room for the procession to the front room to view the mounds of toys and other presents that Santa had left each good boy. But as I got older, I remember fewer and fewer gifts for me and even more for the other kids.

  One year I learned the reality of Christmas for me. Mom had taken me down to the basement. I had been crying under the Christmas tree, clutching my two comic coloring books—my only gifts from Santa. That Christmas, she made it very clear to me that she was the only reason I even got that much.

  I thought back to the wonderment and yet the utter disappointment of those memories. They had all left me behind—Mom, the old neighbors, the old school, the nurses and doctors I’d encountered, even Santa—they all pretended I didn’t exist. I promised myself that I would learn from my mistakes, and renewed my vow never to believe in anyone.

  Past experiences had taught me that I was better off distancing myself from the family during the festive season.

  Oftentimes, during the month of December that year, I would leave the house after dinner and walk up to Mesa Park near the top of the street and sit there for hours. Christmas Eve, I snuck out my bedroom window and found myself at the park well after midnight with another bottle of vodka that I’d stolen from Mom. I sat in the park and drank as much as I could.

  Many nights I had slept in the park, and no one ever noticed. I knew when the police cruisers would patrol the area, and I knew when and where to hide.

  As I sat and pondered my life, I realized that I was becoming a person I loathed, even more than in earlier years. I was becoming mean and aggressive. I was drunk more often than I was sober, and I knew I was using alcohol as a means of dealing with my lack of self-pride. I was becoming like Mom, and I knew it. The only difference I could see between Mom and me, at that point, was that I used a greater variety of drugs.

  By 3 A.M. I’d had more than my fill of vodka, and I was freezing. Thinking about what I was doing, and just the fact of being alone, made me angrier and angrier. The trip back to the house was less than a mile, and I usually made it in about twenty minutes. As I walked down Mulberry Way and past the houses, I took in the Christmas lights and the feelings of the season as the street quietly slept. Stumbling along, I passed Rob and Judy’s house and felt sad and resentful as I imagined them anticipating the arrival of Christmas morning and the excitement of their kids as they discovered what Santa had left them. I sat on the curb outside the Prince home and stared at the Nichols home opposite, wondering just what traditions they had and how excited their kids would be that night.

  Before long I began to cry. I felt so out of place, so desperate and misunderstood. I was so far from being the nice kid down the street that I wanted to be and felt so distant from what others expected of me. I was lost inside. I had no direction and no idea how to get it. Unsteady on my feet, I stumbled as I tried to stand up from the curb, and fell. I rolled over and looked up at the sky—snow had started to fall.

  As I walked back to the house, I couldn’t tell whether the dismalness inside me was coming from my emotions or from the vodka. Either way, it was the same to me. Not for the first time, I knew that I couldn’t continue with this lifestyle and that I had to ask for help.

  The trouble was, I just couldn’t find a way to ask either the Prince or Nichols families to try to understand what I had been through and to help me get on the right track. I knew, as I had always felt I knew, that none of them could possibly imagine what the last twelve years had been like for me and why I would deliberately and desperately se
lf-destruct. Their lives were so different, and what I had been through would be so foreign to them, that they simply wouldn’t know how to help, or even if they could.

  After all, I was living this life, and I didn’t know what to do. How could I expect that anyone else would?

  5

  GOING OVER THE EDGE

  Real love is very difficult to understand. For me, as a teenager, it was all but impossible to understand. It was so foreign to me; I just didn’t know what it was. During those years, I managed to bury my emotions and my fears even deeper than I had done as a child. I was cold and heartless. My heart was filled with years of abuse and shame. There simply wasn’t room for any more hurt.

  The first time I actually attempted suicide, I’d failed. I had failed at everything I had ever done. This time it was a mistake—I didn’t know what a heroin-cocaine mix could do.

  ONE OF THE HARDEST issues I faced as a teenager—like most teenagers—was trying to sort out how to deal with my confused emotions and thoughts. I had no idea who I was or where I was going in life. Whatever the Nichols family could give me in love, respect, and confidence, Mom would strip away within moments of being around her. It was as if she couldn’t bear that I was moving on and she was being left behind. It didn’t matter what direction I was taking—just the fact that I was now moving anywhere away from Mom made the situation more unstable.

  Once I reached what I thought was rock bottom, I turned to Judy Prince for help. One of the worst feelings I had was the way I felt when I shared some of my lifestyle and my thoughts with Judy. I had confided most of the experiences I’d had over the last few years and was more than ashamed at the lack of modesty I felt when talking to her about them. Judy had known that what I was doing was out of character, something self-destructive, yet she had no idea of the magnitude of it. I shared with her only a tiny portion of the drug use and the alcohol abuse I had fallen into. I certainly couldn’t bring myself to admit to her that I had the morals of a street dog and was more than comfortable going from one girl to another. I was expecting that in some way she would know and it wouldn’t have to be said.

  What hurt me the most was the feeling of mistrust I created between my two halves: the one half of me trying to be a good clean kid, and the other half trying to be more outrageous and dangerous than anyone around me.

  I buried the conflict and the damage it was causing me. I buried it all in that place that held my childhood; that place where no one talked back at me, no one lied about me or tried to hurt me—my diaries, and deep in my soul.

  All the sleepless nights lying in my bed in a state of pure fear were just some of the memories I now tried to keep in check, to reserve for those tearstained pages. When I reread them and really thought about it, I had to force myself to keep control over my emotions. I knew that the more I thought about it, the more I lost my control.

  And it was a battle I could never win. Every time I tried to push those memories out of my mind and into that place in my heart that was now overflowing, I was failing to keep the emotions from surfacing. The more I wrote, the more I recalled. All the memories of crying my heart out in the basement late at night, hiding from Mom in the storage space at the bottom of the basement landing, sleeping in the backyard bushes whenever Mom was even more drunk than usual and needed an outlet and wanted to beat the life out of me—all those horrible, hurtful memories always came back. I tried to convince myself that I was able to keep them in check, but I never actually could. Those memories and emotions always haunted me—in my sleep, all throughout the day, and even when I was stoned out of my mind. I was constantly having to force them away. Sometimes my thoughts came faster than my pen could keep up with.

  The one memory that I could never put pen to paper about was of the china cabinet that stood in the front dining room in California. The base was merely five feet wide, and it was a foot and a half tall and separated in the middle by a small supporting piece of wood. The space I would run to and hide in was no more than twelve inches deep and a little more than a couple of feet long. Each time I tried to get the memory out of my head and onto the paper, I would calculate how little I must have been to fit in such a small space—and simply cried again.

  The vision of that little boy, that little stuttering boy, hiding like a hunted animal, was too much for me to recall—even as a teen.

  My journal had become my only true friend, but it had also become my worst enemy—it had become a true reflection of me.

  I had the ability to hide and carefully keep almost anything from anyone. I was so good at hiding the past from everyone that it hurt. I had to remain loyal: loyal to myself, but also to my expectation that the bottom would drop out at any minute and I would be right back in the same old void.

  That’s what I really wanted, the bottom to fall out, to find myself in some sort of trouble with the law. Or even better, in a foster home somewhere far away from it all: far away from Mom and my family, far away from the kids at school, and far away from my past. I thought it would be a chance to start over. I was running away from everybody and everything.

  I had been able to play the role of the shy one, the awkward, stumbling teenager, for so long that I became a master at it and used it whenever I felt my past coming to the surface.

  I had been so successful at masking what was lurking underneath the surface that I was able to keep the secret of my childhood and my current lifestyle from the Nichols family and from my new friends. I simply allowed them their ignorance of my horrific past. I had outgrown the stuttering problem that haunted me for all of my childhood, but I couldn’t overcome the shame that followed me around day to day. Simply being taller and heavier didn’t mean that everything had changed. There was a lot more that I wanted just to go away on its own besides my stuttering, but that never did.

  With all the care and concern of a true friend, Judy expressed her disappointment when I told her a little about my substance-abuse problems, but also her desire to help me. After several days of talking whenever the opportunity arose, she had voiced her conviction that I needed to understand the crucial importance of “self-worth” and the reason that I was placed on the earth. At this point I was so desperate for an answer that I would have done anything.

  Before long I was talking to a couple of young Mormon missionaries, and with the help of the Prince and Nichols families, we scheduled discussions at one or the other of the families’ houses. I began to understand that I wasn’t alone in my struggles.

  John and Darlene were supportive of my change in attitude and began to share with me their beliefs and the reasons they seemed to hold it all together. Rob and Judy, like the Nichols family, made sure that I had a place to ask questions and that I felt comfortable in asking. I now began to be able to express gratitude, and even love, to those around me. I began to be at ease when Darlene or John hugged me—I noticed that I didn’t freeze and stop breathing every time they came near me. The occasional smile that leaked out of my face was genuine—frightening, but genuine.

  John and Darlene gave me the confidence to speak, the comfort to express my thoughts and not be ashamed of being alive. They never once put me down or reminded me of how pitiful I looked, how bad I smelled, or how stupid I was. With the support and emotional respect they showed me, I was able to slightly loosen that stranglehold I kept on my emotions and feelings.

  I had hidden all my feelings so deep and for so long that it was incredible to rediscover them.

  Judy had warned me of the challenge it would be to maintain my newfound feeling of security and happiness with myself when I was at home. Constantly, she would remind me that whatever happened between Mom and me, I must bring to mind the answers to my questions about self-worth and self-pride so as to overcome the bombardment of emotional abuse Mom powered out.

  Once Mom discovered that I was having discussions with Mormon missionaries, she began to degrade and bad-mouth the Mormon Church as often as she could. Within a few weeks I had learned that she
had been raised Mormon and knew all about it. I was surprised to discover that she had full knowledge of the answers that I had sought for so long. She had simply let them evaporate out of her life. I couldn’t understand why and yet I did understand: She was ashamed, like me, of the lifestyle she now lived—the lifestyle I now lived. The self-destruction, the lies, the disconnection from reality. Mom was a mad alcoholic; I was an angry teen on drugs. There really was little difference between us.

  Once Mom heard that I was serious about the possibility of joining the Church, she confided in me and showed me the years and years of genealogy that she had completed. I was dumbfounded to make the connection and understand that what she had told me as a child was true: Many of my forefathers were among the pioneers that crossed the Great Plains looking for a new home in Salt Lake Valley. She showed me birth and marriage records dating back more than one hundred and fifty years. The Mormon Church had been there throughout our family history. Many of my relatives had organized the groups that made the long trek and had eventually settled throughout Salt Lake Valley. They were the stonecutters that carved the stones for the Salt Lake Temple, the masons that spent their lives building and believing in the teachings of the Church. When Mom showed me the marriage records she told me how I was related to this person and that person.

  Like so much else in my life, it was emotionally crushing to learn that Mom had the means to help me with my quest to understand, and had blindly turned away. Her life had evolved so far distant from what she was once familiar with. I knew that alcohol was what had destroyed her ability to believe in herself and help those she loved. I knew that for a long time she had been drained of her mental faculties as well. In short, she was a different person from the person she once had been. Her mental state was deteriorating further, and her actual body was barely hanging on. Her life as an adult was filled with shame and was void of direction and purpose.