The way the Oklahoma school system works in rural areas like the one I grew up in is, in my opinion, a bit convoluted. Say you have a couple of small towns like mine, whose population is around 600, and which features the triad elementary school, middle school, and high school – and surrounding these towns are a half dozen tiny towns within, say, a 30 mile radius of either of the larger, with populations anywhere between 40 and 200, which only have an elementary and middle school. Once those students finish 8th grade, the school district gives them a choice of going to high school at School A, School B, or School C.
I fell into a relationship with a girl who was a year behind me named Whitney from “Town C” who had chosen to go to my school, almost exactly two years after Andi’s suicide.
We quickly turned into a “power couple” – one of those couples that everybody pretty much expected to just always be together – and as time went on, some of her girlfriends started dating some of my guy friends, and before we knew it there was one big group of four or five couples who all stuck by each others’ sides. We fell in love hard, and fast. It was an interesting phenomenon, this “power couple crew” of ours.
Out of pure habit, I [mostly] maintained my drug abstinence for about the first year of our relationship; I didn’t subscribe to the concept of “alcohol is a drug” at the time because I wasn’t aware of it, nor did I recognize weed as a drug – I still don’t really; I just recognize it as something that I personally cannot reasonably ingest without starting a cycle that’s too hard to get out of for it to be worth it… and anyway, I was a teenager, and “kids will do what they do”, especially in small towns – but it was always in moderation, until the final fallout I had with my mother and grandfather at 17.
To this day, I don’t even recall what the fight was about; I just remember having a hellacious blowout with both of them that ultimately resulted in me packing a bag and leaving rather unkindly. I stayed with Whitney and her mother the first night, and with my best friend Jon for two or three days thereafter, and was finally given a temporary but more-long-term space at the house of one of the school janitors, whose two boys were friends.
In the midst of all of this I hit my 18th birthday, subsequently applied for Food Stamps, got approved, and started negotiations with my parents: my father was legally obligated by the court to continue writing child support checks in my mother’s name whether I resided with her or not until I turned 18 or graduated high school, whichever happened last, and to simply avoid even the possibility of being held in contempt, my dad was unable to start putting them in my name; after debating and arguing with my mother for the better part of a month, she finally agreed to sign each monthly check over directly to me, which I would use to rent my own apartment, put gas in my truck, et cetera.
I found an “all-bills” efficiency within my budget, which was in a larger township about 15 miles south of my hometown. In retrospect, it was a shithole, and the landlord was a slum lord – but I didn’t know any better at the time. I moved in, borrowed some old unused furniture from my dad’s garage, & started being an adult (according to the definition of an 18 year old kid, anyway).
I’d had a job at Braums, a fast-food/ice cream enterprise found only in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri – but I had quit a couple of months before all of this had transpired because it interfered with upcoming football practice (which I ended up dropping out of anyway) – so I looked for work while continuing to go to school.
Once the school administration had learned that I had moved into an entirely different school district, they began to take action to try and force me to enroll in the school district where I now lived, but I wasn’t willing to change schools in the last six months of my Senior year, and made a compromise with the Principal and Superintentdent (both of whom were old friends of my grandfather’s, which is probably the only reason I caught a break): in return for being allowed to graduate with my friends and class, I would be required to drop out of normal school and attend night classes instead.
To me this translated as “sleep til noon, look for a job, go to school, and stay up all night”. Pretty quickly, though, it degraded into “sleep til five, go to school, and stay up all night”, which is turn became, “sleep til 7, go to school, and stay up all night drinking, getting stoned, and screwing”.
I never found a job.
One month after walking across the stage to grab my diploma with my graduating class, I got the final child support payment, which meant I had no choice but to move out of the shitty little apartment. There were empty beer cans and boxes EVERYWHERE, piled two feet high, with sporadic vodka bottles popping up here and there, and an ashtray full of roaches that had long since been spilled onto the carpet. There were bugs all over the place. The place was a disaster. And instead of cleaning it up at all, I loaded up my pickup, snuck out at 3AM, and stayed the night at my dad’s.
My eldest brother, Paul, heard from our dad what all was going on, and offered the spare room he had in his mobile home in Oklahoma City. I grew up as an only child, even though I had three half brothers; and I never really knew any of them at all, Paul included, so I thought why not? It’ll be a good bonding experience. And besides, it’s not like I had anywhere else to go.
So I moved in with him, into his trailer located in a mobile home park off of Northwest 10th Street & Meridian in Oklahoma City – an hour’s drive away from everything familiar, and more than an hour away from my girlfriend.
One of the first things that I learned about my brother was that he was a recovering drug addict (“whatever that is“) and went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. I started going to meetings with him, “but only as emotional support, because I’m not a drug addict – I just smoke weed and drink a lot – and besides, addict chicks are fuckin’ smokin’ hot!”)
It gave me a means of socializing and meeting new people in a city where I knew no one and had tremendous anxiety about the idea of getting to know anyone. If nothing else, it would later become apparent that these early experiences with the Program planted the seed in my mind for me to fall back on later down the road.
Sex, Drugs & Drum & Bass 