Free A Teenager's Journey by Richard B. Pelzer

me yelling and screaming at Mom for everything that had ever gone wrong in my life, he stepped in. Placing himself between Mom and me, he yelled: “Get the hell out!”
    By this time Scott had taken on the role of father figure in the household. Mom had rewarded and even encouraged him to take part in my “punishments.” From Scott’s point of view he was growing up, but I knew better—I had been right where he was now. When our brother David was still living in the house, I had been the one who often colluded with Mom to make David’s life hell. It was to save my own skin. I thought she would kill me if I didn’t go along with it. Only,
I
knew that what I had been doing then was wrong.
    Shocked and confused, I ran out of the kitchen and down to my room, retrieved my stash of cocaine and my newest escape, “crack,” plus the pistol from behind the baseboard.
    I ran back upstairs. When I reached the top of the steps, I opened the glass door and ran out, slamming the door hard enough to shatter the glass and send it scattering all over the steps and front porch. I was angry, and out of control with my emotions and my whole life. I was mad, physically and mentally shattered. My body was wasting away and my mental state was terrible. I had a few bucks in my pocket, and enough cocaine and crack to kill myself. And if that didn’t work, I had the gun.
    I ran up the street and across the side street to the school yard—just behind the Nichols family home. I found an open doorway and knelt down inside it. As I crouched there I recalled the few times that my old friends would talk about “going over the edge.” When they said that, they meant crack. Occasionally some of the teens at the school I used to attend scored not only pure cocaine but once in a while crack cocaine.
    I thought vaguely about the possible effects and the unknown outcome—none of my friends actually had the guts to smoke crack. Was this perhaps my chance? I was going to get so damn high, so insanely stoned that I would finally find the guts to pull the trigger.
    I stood up from the doorway and tried to think about what the drug might do to me. I recalled one of the kids at school who was hospitalized after a botched overdose and how he never was the same after that.
    Back inside the doorway, where I had been kneeling earlier, I pulled the stash out of my pocket. I emptied all my pockets, and held the gun in my hand. I stopped. I didn’t want to do that before I’d blasted myself into a drug-induced coma. I had it planned out. First blow my mind with the stash, and then blow my mind with the gun.
    I sat in the doorway holding the gun and searched for the courage to use it. I was too afraid. Once again, I turned to the stash in my pocket for some sort of answer. But I chickened out. I knew that if the police found me with the gun and I was still alive, I would be a lot worse off.
    I stepped out of the doorway, released the magazine, and emptied the round from the chamber. I carefully placed the round in the top of the magazine and tossed them separately onto the school rooftop, then retreated inside the doorway. Normally I’d use my school ID card to mix and line up the cocaine, but since I had neither a flat surface nor my ID, I simply mixed the two drugs in the palm of my hand with my finger and licked my finger clean.
    The taste of the two drugs combined was much like what I would expect powdered cleanser to taste like.
    I looked up into the sky and said: “Go to hell!”
    Leaning back into the corner, I snorted what I could until I had to stop. Within a moment, I felt the back of my tongue burn as I had never before experienced. A second later, the back of my neck and the base of my skull went numb. I could feel the real effects when my head began to feel squeezed. It was almost as if my brain were being crushed inside my skull. My heart began to pound and my chest was heaving. I’d experienced excessive drug use before, but nothing this