Conquering Chaos (6 page)

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.

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!”

I never smoked crack, though, even while my friends were doing it, because my dad
was a crackhead, and I wasn’t about that. But one day she asked if I wanted to try
“cocaine.” I thought, sure, why not? I snort Ritalin and Adderall, what the hell?
So I stayed up all night snorting coke with this old woman, coloring crazy shit in
coloring books. And I remember waking up that morning and my first thought being,
“I want more.” There was this crazy moment where I would have done anything to get
it. But luckily, a lightbulb came on, and I got up and left.

After that I told myself I’d never do cocaine again. I was freaked out by how bad
I wanted it, and I was like, I’ll never touch that again. I was even scared to tell
Catelynn I’d done it in the first place, because Catelynn was totally against it.
So I wasn’t going to tell her, but my sister ratted me out.

Catelynn freaked. She told me she’d break up with me if I ever did it again. She told
me, “My life got destroyed by this stuff. My mom’s life was destroyed. I won’t date
somebody who does this stuff.” And then suddenly I realized crack and cocaine are
basically the same thing, and that stuff had destroyed my dad’s life and my life,
too. That flicked the switch. I wasn’t gonna mess around with it anymore. So that
was the last time I ever did it.

Catelynn:

Mom and Mike got me, too. One time I was at that house and she offered me some kind
of anti-psychotic medication. I took it without thinking much of it, because I was
doing dumb things at that time, and I’d taken tons of pills. So I swallowed this pill,
and then sat around with all these forty-something-year-old people. I remember we
smoked two blunts. And then all of a sudden I woke up on the floor, shaking, and my
head hurt really, really bad. All of them were standing around me going, “Oh my god,
are you okay? Are you okay?” Apparently I was standing there in the living room and
I just lost consciousness and fell over backwards, smacked the back of my head right
on the floor. I wandered out of there, but I couldn’t even go home, I was so messed
up. I had to stay at my friend Sam’s and sleep it off on his couch.

Tyler:

All the neighborhood kids stopped going over there after awhile. It got old. They
always felt like since they were providing all these drugs, they could treat the kids
however they wanted. They ended up moving away after awhile. It was very strange.

Catelynn:

Over the years I think I’ve seen drugs and addiction cause so much damage. I’ve seen
people acting crazy and forgetting what’s even normal. After everything went down
with that crackhead boyfriend of my mom’s, she ended up getting back together with
him when he came around saying he was dying. He came up with some fake hospital papers
to prove he had some disease and he only had two years to live. He was my little brother’s
dad, after all, and she was thinking, “Well my son needs to know who he is, he only
has two years to live.” But it was a total lie. He was a con artist and a schemer
and a pathological liar.

Growing up with all of that, seeing all that bad stuff as a kid, is the reason I’ve
never even touched hard drugs. I smoked weed, I dabbled in a little alcohol, and I’ve
done all the typical teenager drugs. That’s not supposed to downplay them, but you
know. The pot, the air duster, the ecstasy, those were all things people pretty typically
dibbled and dabbled in back then. They were little phases for me. But I never touched
the hard stuff, because I’d seen what it could do.

Alcoholism and drug addiction have destroyed people in both our families for generations.
We talk a lot about breaking the cycle, and that means understanding the cycle itself.
What mistakes do we avoid? How did these problems get the best of the people we see
around us? It’s crazy to hear some of the things our parents went through before they
had us, and what even our grandparents went through. We see all this damage caused
to aunts and uncles and cousins and it always traces back to another parent with a
drinking or drug problem. And looking at the ones who got out and did better, you
don’t see the drugs and alcohol taking up a big part of their lives.

We always had that in mind. We thought about our limits and we always told ourselves
not to go too far. There was a hint of maturity there, even in the bad kid days, that
came from seeing all that destruction and wanting to move far away from it.

We just wanted something different than what we had. And lucky for us, we had a few
people in our lives who’d made the same decision. We each had somebody pushing us
to do things with our lives, either a parent or a grandparent, to counteract the bad
examples we were getting. Maybe that was all we needed to boost whatever in us that
made us think, “We’re not going to be like that. Not like them. We’re gonna be different.”

Still, obviously we weren’t perfect. It would have been better not to mess around
with air duster and snort cocaine in middle school. No doubt about that. And we can
never be certain how long that phase would have lasted, if it wasn’t for one little
thing. Once that pregnancy test came back positive, there was no more room for drugs
and alcohol in our lives. We dropped that stuff and didn’t even have time to look
back.

Sooner or later everyone probably experiences an event so important and meaningful
that they start to look at their life in terms of before and after. So far everything
you’ve read in this book took place in our “before,” back when we were just another
couple of poor Michigan kids stumbling (and huffing) our way through teenagerdom.
Sure, we had a sense of wanting to grow up and become something more, but we hadn’t
really figured out how yet. Neither of us had any real plans for life except for whatever
we were doing on any given day. There wasn’t any meaning yet.

Back then, we were pretty reckless: about drugs, about getting into fights, about
stealing. And guess what? We were kind of reckless about sex, too. We didn’t mean
to be. We sort of thought we knew what we were doing, to be honest. And that was probably
half the problem.

Your first experiences with sex are huge, and they can have some serious effects on
you. As kids grow up and take in more and more information about sex from the world
around them, they start to develop their own outlooks, identities, and values. Some
kids are more curious than others about sex, and some are so curious it’s downright
disturbing. Others don’t seem to be interested at all, or have ideas what’s appropriate
and what’s not. And, as much as people hate to talk about it, a lot of kids have learned
way too much, way too soon.

We got together with totally different outlooks and backgrounds as far as sex was
concerned. But we both ended up on the same wild ride. Our decision to have sex —
and the way we handled it — brought about a consequence that changed our lives forever.
In a way, sex and pregnancy are what created “before” and “after.”

Tyler:

Catelynn and I got together by holding hands, but for months and months that was pretty
much as far as it went. She was a virgin and had no interest in rushing into sex.

I was the complete opposite, and that wasn’t a good thing. I had actually been dating
girls since grade school, and I’d broken up with them for not wanting to fool around.
In the fourth grade, I got suspended for pushing a girl against a locker and trying
to kiss her. Looking back on it, it’s horrifying. Why was I such a hypersexual kid?
Well, all I know is it started when I was nine.

The older girl who molested me was a friend of my older sister. She was about four
years older than me, which is a big difference at that age. One day I went over to
her house with my sister and some other people, and for some reason or another, everyone
else left but this older girl and me. For the next several hours, while we were alone
together in her house, it was sex act after sex act after sex act. It went on all
day. She had us doing everything she could think of, one thing after another. There’d
be a break and then it would start up again. And when it was finally over, I didn’t
know what the hell had happened.