Never Too Late

by Amber Portwood

  Even now I end the days like that, lying there until three in the morning with my headphones on, always with two hundred songs in my iPhone I can zone out to when I feel like it. My little-kid love of my dad’s records turned into a real connection with music and the way it could speak to me, all thanks to some annoying CD of my brother’s. So I have to give them both credit for that.

  Maybe I should have been a music critic. Who knows? Anyway, I got caught up in a little more than music as I headed into my teenage years.

  There are about fifty-six thousand people in Anderson. It’s one of those towns where it feels really small when you live in it, but it’s still big enough to have a pretty substantial dark side. I mean, pretty much every place in the world has ugly parts to it. Show me a village with five-hundred people and I bet there’s a pretty good chance it’s got its share of illegal activities and shady people you wouldn’t want your kids hanging out with.

  Sometimes I think the medium-sized places like Anderson might be even worse than really small towns or really big cities. All I mean by that is, towns of that size have their fair share of shady parts, bad neighborhoods, and sketchy people, but those parts aren’t big or crazy enough to get a ton of attention like they get in places like New York or Los Angeles. They’re kind of easier to overlook and ignore, if that’s what you want to do, but they’re just as dangerous if you end up falling into them.

  Which is surprisingly easy to do, because a place like Anderson is still small enough that there’s not a whole hell of a lot in the way of entertainment. Which means young people end up bored out of their minds. Bored to death. I mean, look, it’s not like everybody from Anderson ended up starring on Teen Mom and going to jail, okay? I’m not talking shit about the place. I’m just saying it’s a recipe for disaster when bored kids get too close to the shady side of a town that gives the illusion of safety. And I’m definitely not the only one who knows that from experience.

  When I was in middle school, I was hanging out with people I knew from elementary, the same kids I’d grown up with back in my old neighborhood. And everybody in that scene was into drugs. That was just the way it was. I couldn’t tell you how it started with them. I mean, nobody’s born a druggie. We were all cute little kids drawing horses and rainbows at some point. But you remember middle school, right? It’s right around then that you start to see the first kids fall into stuff they shouldn’t be doing.

  My friends were the druggies and bad kids, and they were pretty wild. I think the most telling thing about it is that they all hung out with older people. Every last one of them. When the girls dated, they always dated older guys, and not just a couple of years older, but guys well into their twenties, sometimes closer to thirty. So right off the bat that’s not a good crowd you’re dealing with. People who are that much older shouldn’t be partying with kids who are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. It’s just not a normal thing to do, and nine times out of ten those people come with trouble.

  The other big issue was that we were unsupervised all the freakin’ time. Between everybody in the group, there was always a house to go to where there was either no adult around, or the adult who was around didn’t care. I don’t remember it ever being hard to find a place where we weren’t going to be supervised. We had a lot of freedom. Or we were just so good at getting it we made it look easy. Either way, my friends were the type that were having sex early, drinking early, doing drugs early. They’d bring pills to school and come to class high, meet up with their older friends afterward, and get rides out to parties they were way too young to be at. And of course I was right there with them. The funny thing is though, as crazy as it sounds considering my reputation these days, back then I was the sober one.

  Let that soak in for a minute, right?

  But I’m actually serious. Back in those days I was kind of a little goody-goody. I was so against all of the drinking and drugs, and I had very good reasons for feeling that way. Coming from where I was coming from, seeing what addiction had done to my dad and my family life, I didn’t want anything to do with alcohol or pot or pills or any of that shit. To a bunch of young kids, it was just fun and partying. But even back then I could see little glimpses of chaos that came with that lifestyle, the violence and the sketchy situations, and I knew it wasn’t my scene. Even aside from that, just the idea of being messed up all the time was the absolute last thing I wanted. I didn’t want to be like my dad, or even like my mom. I didn’t want to be wasted and acting bad. I just wanted things to be good and peaceful in my life.

  My brother had the same outlook as me. Both of us were dead set on ending the cycle, staying on the right track, and not repeating any of our parents’ mistakes. We used to keep an eye on each other and what was going on, and neither one of us liked to see the other doing anything remotely approaching the party life. Of course we loosened up a bit as we got older. Some of us loosened up a little too much, obviously. But even when we did start experimenting with standard teenager party stuff, we didn’t like to hear about each other doing it. It bothered me to think of my brother flirting with things that could lead to addiction, and he felt the same way about me. We just really didn’t want to be like that.

  So that was the reason I stayed away from that stuff for a long time, even when it was going on literally on all sides of me sometimes. I used to sit around and preach to my friends, trying to clean them up. And if you wonder why a bunch of druggie kids would put up with me nagging them to stop what they were doing, I’ll tell you why, straight up. It was because they really were good people, and they knew where I was coming from. Obviously, the friends I’d known for years had been to my house. They’d spent the night and heard my parents screaming, and they totally understood all the reasons I hated alcohol so much. You’d have to be kind of an idiot not to. They knew I just wanted to keep the peace with everything and keep things all good. They respected how I felt.

  But I was still an impressionable kid, and obviously when it came right down to it, they didn’t think they were doing anything really terrible or wrong. They were just being wild and having fun. Now, I’m not going to sit here and call it typical kid stuff, because you better believe if Leah is out running around in strangers’ houses popping pills at age twelve it will be over my dead body. But it wasn’t like they were shooting up under bridges or anything. The way I see it, they were goodhearted kids who got mixed up in stuff they shouldn’t have been mixed up in, because that’s what their childhood friends started doing, and because nobody was watching them close enough to catch on and step in to stop it. And honestly, I didn’t even think about that deeply at the time. Even if I didn’t like what they were doing, they were my friends and that was how they were having fun with each other all around me. After awhile of me sitting there being the odd one out, my resistance started to fade away. And they still always offered me whatever they were doing, which in that kind of group is really just the polite thing to do.

  After awhile I was so used to being around that stuff and having weed or pills offered to me every day, eventually it started creeping in on me. I had already tried weed when I was all of nine years old, thanks to an older friend and her friend who was even older than her. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. How does a nine-year-old kid end up in that kind of situation? If I had to explain it, I’d say it was always that combination of friends of friends plus no supervision. This world of ours was going on right under every-body’s noses, and it was so easy to get away with it we barely even thought about getting caught. At the same time, as my friends got older and more experienced with what they were doing, they had more and more to offer me. By the time I was thirteen, I was getting offered pills almost every day at school. I’d say no, and I’d say no again, and I’d keep saying no. But one day, for some unknown reason, I finally said okay.

  Adderall was the first pill I ever took. You probably know what Adderall is, but just in case, it’s a really common prescription for people with attention deficit disord
ers. But it’s a stimulant, so like every other stimulant, it gets abused by people who don’t need it. Some college students do it to stay up late to study, and some people I knew would just take it to party around the clock. It’s easy to abuse.

  The person who gave that Adderall to me was a close friend of mine, this beautiful girl with a body and an attitude that were way older than they probably should have been at that age. She and I were together all the time, and she was always dating these older guys who gave her this stuff. Again, the same pattern. That night we were at a laundromat when she pulled these pills out and told me it would be fun. I guess I was bored enough to try them out.

  I don’t know how many milligrams were in each pill, but I took two of them. It took awhile to kick in, and I didn’t know what to expect. I had never taken anything before. After forty minutes I was still shrugging my shoulders and saying “This isn’t even working.” She just kept telling me to give it a minute. We ended up heading over to my house, where she was going to stay the night. That’s when those things suddenly kicked in.

  I was freaking out. I remember standing in the living room ranting a mile a minute at my mom, demanding to drive her car. I was pacing around, running in and out of the place, and talking ridiculously fast. It was so bad. My friend wasn’t much better off. We got so hung up on driving this car we started talking about stealing it. It was so bad! We stayed up late into the morning, babbling and scheming ways to get away with stealing my mom’s car. We didn’t actually do anything, but damn that was terrible. Afterward I wasn’t really sold on the experience. Of course, in a way it was sort of fun to experience a different kind of feeling, especially since I’d never really been affected by something like that before. But basically it was too much for me.

  At the same time, though, you could say the seal had been broken. Adderall wouldn’t be the last pill I’d swallow. Not by a long shot. What I didn’t realize yet was that there were a lot of different kinds of drugs out there to take, and it would only take me a couple more tries to find something I actually did like. There was even a feeling of false safety that came with that first experience, because once the Adderall had worn off I didn’t feel tempted at all to do it again. That kind of reinforced the idea that pills were just something you took for fun, and they lasted a little while and then they were over. But we all know that’s a dangerous outlook, and it was the bigger and badder pills that ended up hooking me. It was those opiates. Hydros, Oxy . . .

  It’s hard to think about it and talk about it in depth now, having been to prison. It’s hard to remember what a grip they had on me. Thinking about it gives me a fear of the life they led me into and the person I became when I was on them. And I have every reason to be nervous about that, because from the time I got my very first taste of opiates, the pull they had on me was incredibly strong.

  I just loved the way they made me feel. And remember, all I had ever wanted was to feel different. I didn’t want to be depressed all the time, feeling alone, feeling like I might as well be dead. And there was other stuff piling onto it back then, too. Turning into a teenager is hard on anybody’s self-esteem. I didn’t feel pretty or special or smart, and I didn’t feel confident around other people. So when I took these pills, it was amazing to me that I could become like a whole other person. I was outgoing. I was friendly. I was talkative. I was hanging out with people without a care in the world. When I was on opiates I became this fun, crazy, “anything goes” kind of person, and I loved it because that was how I had always wanted to be but never could.

  Looking back on that, I get incredibly frustrated by how obvious it was that part of the reason I got wrapped up in drugs was that they made me feel like I was fixing some of those depressed feelings I’d had since I was a kid. All I wanted was to feel better, and the pills were the first thing that did that for me. I fell in love with them. I just didn’t have the maturity to really grasp what a love affair like that really means. I almost did. I almost sidestepped all that shit when I was so determined to stay clean and sober and live my life right. But as we all know, almost doesn’t count.

  Still, I have to go a little easier on myself at that time. Looking back on it with the knowledge of what those pills did to me years down the line, it’s easier to see the signs. But I wasn’t an addict yet back in those days. Just a typical dumb kid. And even though it’s completely appalling to think that I was doing stuff like that when I was so young, or that any of us were, the fact was I was still pretty straight compared to the people around me. I was never a pothead—weed just didn’t really do it for me. And I never drank alcohol. I literally had a hate for alcohol because of my dad. Everything else was game, though. And with all the older people who were always hovering around my friends, there was no shortage of options. Influences like that make a huge difference in how you spend your teenage years. We obviously weren’t thinking of these older people as deadbeats, or even questioning why they wanted to hang out with a bunch of junior high school kids. Why would we? Hanging out with older people is one of the coolest things you can do when you’re at that age. And to take it a step further, you’re almost always gonna jump on whatever chance you get to imitate their behavior. I was no different. I don’t consider myself an impressionable person now, but I definitely was at that age. Eventually, it got to where if some kid I thought was cool wanted to share drugs, “No” wasn’t my automatic answer anymore.

  Even if I wasn’t going crazy yet, the scene was getting crazier around me. The stuff we were doing at age thirteen is insane. We were partying like we were in our twenties! Actually, you know what? I know for a fact we were partying a lot harder than a lot of people do at any point in their lives. And I’m not bragging when I say that, either. We were just going way too hard, and we were too immature to see the dangers or the consequences of the things we started getting into. We’d be over at these houses where the parents didn’t care at all, no matter who started coming over or how many people. And of course, drugs and alcohol never come without drama. There was a lot of fighting all the time, both girls and guys, people getting wasted and beating up on each other over whatever the hell pissed them off that night. And I hated that in the beginning, just like I hated the drugs and drinking. I was determined to stay out of any violence. But I fell into that stuff, too, and I ended up fighting, too. I even ended up liking it. As much as I tried to resist it, it just got to me.

  It’s pretty depressing to think about how set I was on acting right, and how I failed at it anyway. But at least I was still a good girl as far as sex was concerned. None of that stuff was happening at all. Of course I thought about it as much as any normal teenager, but I didn’t really want to do anything with it. I was scared! The girls around me were way ahead of me on that front, for better or worse. These girls were always dating older guys, and there were always more dudes hanging around. I’d get crushes on them, and sometimes you could tell one of them kind of liked me. But they’d always end up going for one of my friends in the end, because my friends were crazy beautiful girls with amazing, womanly bodies, and I was just kind of timid and chubby. That was a pattern I was used to. I definitely wasn’t projecting confidence. I’d been feeling unhappy with my body forever, and I had such low self-esteem I didn’t even try to make anything happen. I didn’t think anyone would wanna be with me anyways.

  In retrospect it’s pretty obvious what kind of path I was on. And the transition from middle to high school caused everything to get a lot crazier.

  Big things happened when I was around thirteen and fourteen. The biggest thing was that right when I was starting to mess around with trouble, my parents finally got divorced. It was a long time coming, something I’d been hoping for since I was in kindergarten. It’s not like I celebrated when it happened or anything, but after all those years of being driven crazy by their screaming and fighting, there was definitely a huge relief that came with the change.

  My mom moved out of the house with my brother and me, and we moved i
nto an apartment right across the street from the high school. The change was huge. With my parents no longer living in the same house, it was like the volume finally got turned down and I finally had the peace I wanted. No more having to listen to all that screaming and fighting every night, no more having to deal with my dad being drunk and fighting with everyone. Oh, not to mention the fact that for the first time in my life, I had a home phone. I thought that was pretty much the most exciting thing ever.

  But there were a whole lot of negative things that crept in with the change, too. Some of them I could see right away, and some of them I wouldn’t understand until later. The first and most obvious thing was that my brother was already going off on his own.

  By the time my mom finally packed up and left my dad, Bubby had already gotten so sick and tired of the screaming and fighting we grew up with that he was prepared to leave the first chance he got. One day when he was sixteen, he just packed up his stuff and left to move in with a friend. None of us was really shocked by it. Who could have been? It was probably a peaceful and happy moment for him, getting out of there. I don’t remember him saying much of anything or making it a big deal. It was a big deal to me, though. When he moved out after everything we’d been through, I felt like a part of me was gone. It was one of the few good things I’d been able to count on so far. All my life I’d had him there in the house to talk to about whatever was going on. Every time something happened, he and I would hang out and hash it out. Now I’d be in the house alone, and I wouldn’t have him there to listen to music and talk with. Almost instantly, I felt even more alone than I already did. I was so pissed at him for leaving me! I was so mad I didn’t even go and see him at his place. I don’t even think he realized it. He was off being a teenage boy, and I don’t blame him one bit for it now. I would have done the same thing if I’d been sixteen at the time. I knew exactly why he went off on his own, and so did my mom and dad. Why would anyone stay in a situation like that if he didn’t have to? And for all I know, leaving that house was just something he had to do to keep his head on straight and stay on the right track. When a situation isn’t good for you anymore, sometimes you have to go against the grain and do something drastic to escape it. I definitely know what that feels like, and I can easily accept that being the case for him.