A Teenager's Journey by Richard B. Pelzer Page A

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 self-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
    G OING O VER THE E DGE
    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.
    O NE 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