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

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