Conquering Chaos

by Catelynn Lowell

  Think of how many “bad kids” out there have that potential to grow and change. You never know! There are a lot of kids out there who are born into the wrong environments, or don’t know how to handle themselves when they’re young, and sometimes it takes them longer to figure things out. But when you see one of those “bad kids,” just remember, they might just be waiting for someone or something to help them be better. That’s why we want people to know that we made that transformation. So we’re being honest about the before and the after. Once upon a time, we were the “bad kids.” But it’s not a permanent label.

  CHAPTER 3:

  * * *

  LIFE WITH DRUGS & ALCOHOL

  Drugs and alcohol have had a huge impact on our lives. And we don’t mean the times we messed around with them in our teenage years. We’re talking generations of addiction, alcohol and drug abuse in both of our family histories. Throughout the lives of our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents, drugs and alcohol have played a huge part in the cycle of addiction, poverty, and violence that we’ve worked so hard to break.

  Wherever there’s addiction, there’s never just addiction. The addiction is just ground zero for destruction that spreads all across a person’s life. It damages anyone who winds up in its path: friends, family, kids. Especially the kids. From the children who have to raise themselves because their parents are always high or passed out, to the ones who have to watch their family members getting wrestled into cop cars and carted off to prison, to the teenagers who grew up thinking being drunk and high is no big deal. We can barely scrape the surface. There’s violence and abuse, screaming and fighting, dirty houses and scumbag grown-ups who don’t give a crap if there’s a five-year-old in the room when they’re lighting up that crack pipe.

  We’ve seen it all. We lived it. And it’s a really sobering thing to look back at all our memories and realize how close we were to following in the wrong footsteps. We walked a thin, thin line, and we’re grateful every day we didn’t cross it.

  It’s All in the Family

  Catelynn:

  I don’t know if I remember an exact age of when I realized my mom’s drinking was a problem. I just know that for my whole life, for as long as I can remember, it was there. She’d drink too many beers, or there would be a party, and I would be the one watching the house to make sure everything was okay. We never talked about it. She was in denial for a long time. I was probably fifteen the first time I heard her admit that she was an alcoholic. My dad tells me she was a heavy drinker before I was born, so it was no secret. She just didn’t call it what it was: alcoholism.

  She definitely wasn’t the first in her family. Her father has been an alcoholic for all of her life, and so far all of mine. And her mom had her share of things she did, too. Those are things everyone knows, but nobody ever brings up in detail. We know there’s a history of addiction there, but no one confronts it like it’s a problem. It just gets swept under the rug, except really you can still see it.

  I know my mom’s life was hurt by her parents’ addictions, from the way she was treated to the irresponsible behavior she could never count on. And then there’s the fear that comes with it, like the time her dad crashed his motorcycle on the way to pick her up from a friend’s house, because he was so drunk. That kind of drama and danger is scary for a kid.

  But they get used to it, and then they sometimes end up doing the same things. My mom started drinking around the time she got her driver’s license, at about sixteen or seventeen. And from then on, drinking was a problem for her. It was a problem before I was born, and after I was born, and all through my life.

  Children of alcoholics end up being caretakers instead of kids. There was always this burden on me to watch the house while she was too drunk, which felt like always. It was never just a few beers. If there was a case of beers in the fridge, she had to drink them all, and then she’d want to go out and get more. And the house was chaos all the time, because she couldn’t keep things straight. She’d hide her keys from herself so she wouldn’t be able to drive drunk, which was a good idea. But then she’d get so drunk she’d forget where the keys were, and then she’d be pissed because she couldn’t find them!

  And it was scary sometimes. When my mom passed out on the couch, you could not wake her up. I could shake her for thirty minutes, I could slap her in the face, but she was out cold. That’s really terrifying for a little kid.

  But even I never really confronted it for what it was, at least not for a long time. The first time I actually sat down and talked to my mom about her alcoholism about it was in couples’ therapy. I hadn’t been living with her for years, and I was never home if I could help it. I was always at Tyler’s house, or a friend’s house. I stayed away as much as possible. She was just so unpredictable. Sometimes she’d be so happy, and I hated when she would cling to me when she was drunk and hang on my shoulder. But as soon as I reacted, she’d turn into a complete bitch. It would change in a heartbeat.

  It did end up getting a little better. She didn’t stop drinking, but she worked not to get sloppy drunk. She married a guy who wasn’t a big drinker, and that was a good influence.

  Addiction is huge on my mom’s side of the family. Her parents weren’t even the ones who started it. They’re all products of their environments, as far back as I can see. My grandma’s dad, my great-grandfather, was an alcoholic to the day he died. We used to go visit him until he was in his seventies, and even then we always had to bring him booze. And there are more relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, who have just destroyed themselves with alcohol or cocaine or meth. So everyone is repeating the same legacies of addiction, over and over. It just infects the family. And with it comes a lot of verbal and emotional abuse, which also trickles down and spreads.

  All the bad behavior, that’s what kids in the family are learning from day one. They grow up and make the same mistakes because they learned all the wrong crap about drugs and alcohol from their environment. That’s how cycles work.

  Memories of Violence

  Tyler:

  Drugs and violence were always connected in my head, thanks to my dad Butch and one crazy week I spent with him when I was eight. He’d just gotten out of prison that summer, and I was stoked to have my dad around. I wanted all the time I could spend with him.

  He was staying with my uncle and my uncle’s five kids, and they didn’t care what went on. They just didn’t give a shit what went on in front of the kids, and the kids were so young, we were oblivious to the details of their partying. We just thought, “This is how grownup guys hang out.” I wasn’t familiar with seeing anybody under the influence, really. My mom would drink at family reunions, but she’d never get drunk. My dad was the first one I saw go all out.

  That week didn’t end well. Why not? Well, one night they were all hanging out, drinking, playing cards, and this woman came in saying, “Butch! Butch! Somebody’s there with a flashlight!” This was kind of a rough place, not the nicest part of town. It wasn’t unusual for people to break into your car and steal your stuff or anything. And that’s what everybody assumed this was. So of course my dad got all tough went stalking out there to whoop some ass, with me following behind, excited to see him lay the smackdown.

  So I was right behind him when we saw the light from the flashlight, and then we heard the dogs barking. Three cops came out from behind the garage screaming, “Get down! Get down!” Four other cops came up from the driveway. They went after him hard. These cops were pissed off. They’d been looking for him for months, and when they got him, they didn’t hold back. They jumped on him and smashed his face into the ground. I mean, smashed him down on the concrete. So when I saw that, I went crazy and ran at the cops. I was an eight year old kid going at the cops, thinking they were the bad guys.

  Of course one of the officers grabbed me, and then my big sister came running out. She was four years older, so she had more memories of my dad. She kind of knew this was the kind of thin
g that happened if you got close to my dad. She put both her arms around me to try and pull me back. She was saying, “Tyler, don’t look at this, just look at me. Mom’s coming to get us.” But I was screaming for my dad to look at me. I’ll never forget that: He would not look at me. That was how I knew he was ashamed. He would not look at me. But that was all I wanted. That’s why I got away from my sister and I ran after that cop car screaming, just wanting to see him turn around and look at me through the window.

  That was a bad weekend. And all that was because of drugs. He broke into somebody’s house and stole something to get some money to go out and buy his crack rocks. That’s what happened.

  My mom was pissed off. Not just because my dad had messed up so bad and made it so I had to see something like that, but also at him and my uncle for letting my cousins and me run wild in that environment. My uncle had caught my cousin and me smoking, and he came clean with my mom about it. She was just pissed. And knowing my mom, I think she was just as pissed at herself for not knowing better when she let me go over there.

  But on the ride home, she talked to me. I was asking her tons of questions. I couldn’t understand what my dad could have done to make those cops hate him so much, or why they’d done that to him, hurt him, and treated him like that. And she had to explain to her kid that my dad had an addiction, and it made him do things that hurt the people he cared about. “That’s why you’re hurt right now,” she said. “He knows it’s wrong, but he has a disease that makes him make these bad choices.”

  I was pissed. I thought the eight-year-old equivalent of, “Fuck that.” Not only had my dad abandoned me for these drugs, but I had to see the cops bashing and smashing him like that. If I wasn’t born with a problem with authority figures, I had a pretty freakin’ big problem with them after that. That’s how I went into second grade. That’s when I started really fighting with teachers and getting suspended.

  Catelynn:

  There was a lot of violence like that around me, too. I had one uncle who had a huge meth problem. I can remember him hallucinating while I was at his house, asking him if I could see the government people flying around his house. He was always in some kind of trouble, in jail or getting bailed out. Once he went on a meth binge, got drunk, got in his car, crashed into a school bus, got caught with a gun he wasn’t supposed to have, and got hauled off in handcuffs. But the worst was when he’d beat his wife in front of the kids. He’d freak out and start to whoop her ass in front of us, until she’d get away, throw us all in the truck and speed off to get away.

  It was like scary movie stuff sometimes. One time, my mom had to go over there because he was screaming he was going to chop her head off with a machete! When she got there, there he was, actually standing there with a machete ready to chop her head off.

  I wasn’t safe from violent addicts, either. When I was thirteen or fourteen, Tyler and I suspected my mom’s boyfriend at the time — the father of my little brother — was doing crack. We found proof when we found a crackpipe hidden in the bathroom, and three days after that, we found out we were suddenly being evicted.

  Because my brother was just a little baby at the time, the landlord gave us a few extra days to pack up and leave. Tyler came over to help, and so he and my mom and my sister and I were packing up the whole house. The boyfriend, though, was just sitting in a chair watching, and he was obviously high on crack. He was running his mouth saying ridiculous stuff like, “We don’t have to go anywhere! I paid everything! We don’t have to pack, we’re not leaving!” But my mom and I knew that wasn’t true. We all just kept working while he sat around, high and talking crap. Then my mom left the house for a bit. While she was gone, I made the mistake of making some remark to the boyfriend about him not helping us pack.

  This guy just lost it. I mean, he lost it so bad he jumped out of his chair and I took off running. He chased me to the bathroom, with Tyler running right behind him. My sister got so scared she had run ahead of me to hide in the shower, so she was in there screaming when he caught up with me. This man picked me up by the neck, threw me to the ground, and pinned me down on the floor between the toilet and the shower and started choking me. I was trying to kick him and punch him, and my sister was screaming bloody murder. Tyler got some burst of Hulk strength and pulled the guy off of me, and we shut the door and called 911. The cops came and took him off to jail. My mom fell apart over that, crying, “How could he lay a hand on my kid? How can I ever be with him again?”

  Tyler:

  I don’t know how that happened. He’s a big guy and I was just this scrawny little fourteen-year-old. But when your girlfriend’s getting attacked by somebody you go into panic mode. Adrenaline, or something.

  That was the first time we looked at each other and said, “Something seriously wrong is going on.” We find a crack pipe in the bathroom and three days later they’re getting evicted and she’s got this guy choking her on the bathroom floor. Obviously something in that household was not right. I mean, that’s an understatement.

  Catelynn:

  Right after that, we had to move to a really bad part of Detroit, right on 7 Mile and Mound, which is a horrible place to live. Our next door neighbor was named Fats. He was a drug dealer and had his four-year-old kid dropping dime bags out the window, like a druggie drive-through. We went to bed hearing gunshots. It was awful. We could barely even go outside. So I got out of there every weekend I could. Tyler and his mom would come to pick me up all the time, just to get me out of there.

  First Tastes

  Tyler:

  The first time I tried cigarettes, drinking, and weed was that week at my dad’s house. Yep, I was eight. I got into everything with my cousin. He was the same age as me, and we ran wild around that house while my dad and my uncle and all their friends were doing whatever they were doing. No supervision. So, big surprise, one day we came across one of my uncle’s bags of weed. We basically knew what it was, but we didn’t know what to do with it. We knew how to poke holes in a pop can to smoke it, but we didn’t know how to break it up or anything, so we kind of just stuck it on top and burned it. Either way, it’s the thought that counts. I was toking up when I was eight years old.

  Catelynn and I were both smoking a lot of pot when we got together. And once we were dating, we did it with each other all the time. We messed around with pretty much anything we could get our hands on — not the hard stuff, but the usual bad junior high kid stuff. For example, air duster. We went through a huge phase of huffin’ air duster. I’d go into CVS and steal four cans of air duster for us to huff.

  That stuff is serious. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen friends collapse and lie on the ground in their own blood for hours after huffin’ air duster. Someone could punch you in the face when you were on air duster. All you can hear is this “WOM-WOM-WOM” sound. It feels all tingly, but you’re out of control of your body. You feel your head turn into a balloon. You feel light and heavy at the same time. Out of every drug I’ve ever done, it was the most intense high and the most messed up thing I’ve ever done in my life. Everyone should be scared of that shit.

  Once I woke up after huffing too much air duster, and I was lying on the floor with chunks of foam coming out of my mouth. I was like, “What happened, dude?” All my friends were so wrecked on air duster they were laughing. They said I started having a seizure and shaking around on the ground, that my eyes rolled back in my head. I even pissed myself. I was so freaked out I had to leave. I thought about it all the way home.

  Catelynn:

  The first time I saw someone doing drugs, not just alcohol, was probably when I was ten. I could smell marijuana in the house. I didn’t see it, but I smelled it. Of course that was one of the first things I ended up getting into when I was a little older.

  We used to get high on the sleeping pill Unisom. We’d pop five or six Unisom and totally trip out. Our feet felt like cement, we couldn’t move, and we hallucinated all this stuff on the walls. Other times we�
�d snort Ritalin or whatever other pill was on hand to try. And there was Robotrippin’, where we chugged a bunch of cough syrup to get high. We did Ecstasy when we had that. Basically, anything we could get our hands on to get high with, we’d do it.

  I was a little behind on the air duster. I watched my friends do it for about a month, but I was kind of scared of it. But then I got curious to see what the big deal was, so I started doing that, too.

  We never really drank much, funny enough. We did everything else we could get, huffin’, snorting pills, smoking weed, we were all about that stuff. But even our friends weren’t really drinking. Why drink when you can huff air duster?

  The stuff was crazy, though. Once my friend Sam and I were riding our bikes in the trailer park while huffing air duster. I huffed some, and then I got on my bike to ride away. Next thing I knew, I was lying on my back on the street with rain pouring down on me. That freaked me out. I didn’t even know how long I’d been there. I could have been run over.

  Tyler:

  We used to have this friend whose mom and boyfriend were... well, kind of freaky people. We used to call them “Mom and Mike.” She was this forty-year-old woman, and she’d let us do whatever we wanted in her house. Not only that, though. She’d push drugs on us. She’d offer us booze and offer us pills and offer us crack. All these fourteen-year-old kids were in this house, and she’d offer it like cookies. “Who wants to try crack?” “I do, I do!”