Growing up hard

                                                      THE HIGHSCHOOL YEARS



    The year was 1997. Up to this point everything was incredibly surreal. I attended kindergarten through the ninth grade all in the same dismal old school. A rarity considering all throughout those years I was used to making friends and then seeing them move off to better schools, being thrown into juvenile detention centers, or just dropping out of school all together. Mill Creek Public school system, boy oh boy back then and now even today, that was something better kept quiet. A school system practically in the middle of nowhere comprised of maybe four hundred students head start through the senior class. Drug and alcohol abuse was rumored to run ramped through the small town of about five hundred people. I say rumored because at that time I tried to focus all of my time and energy into making good grades, drugs and things of that illicit nature were the furthest thing from my mind.

    Even more than the problem of drugs and alcohol was the issue of bullies. Every school has bullies and just about everyone has to deal with them at some point or another. No I think these bullies were probably worse than others. In a town as small as this one, everybody knows everybody and bullying was taken lightly, maybe too lightly. They would always strike at the most inopportune times, in the gym locker room during physical education. More often than not it was in the classroom when the teacher was “on a bathroom break”. Though looking back now, having to deal with the assholes they did, it was probably a flask of whiskey waiting for them in the bathroom rather than a toilet. My grades more often than not were always substandard. I blame my own laziness and the fact that I was used to getting the shit beat out of me just about every week. It was rather difficult to focus on math and history assignments when I had to worry about when and where the next attack would take place and even if I would survive.

    My home life wasn’t all that bad. Everyday it was the same routine. I would get off the bus and enter my house weary from the day of running from class to class, dodging bullies, and dealing with smartass teachers. My mother was more often than not sitting in the living room watching soap operas or in the kitchen making dinner. If memory serves me correctly at that time dad was working nights as he so often did.

    My younger brothers and sister would be either showing my mother papers with good grades or scrambling to hide the ones with sub par marks. There are four of us in all, my sister Amanda who is two years younger than me. She’s a spunky girl who always had a smart remark and was quick to tattle on myself or my brothers. I think Amanda was maybe a little too sheltered growing up. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was eight years old. After learning as much about the disease as possible, mom and dad constantly hovered over her and questioned her about every days activities. Bringing up the third place spot is my brother David who is two years younger than Amanda. To this day I will have to go out on a limb and say David is probably the most helpful out of my siblings. He is a mechanic by trade, I think his veins might actually contain motor oil rather than blood. I remember when he was five or six years old grabbing a screwdriver and taking the grill off of my dads’ pickup truck. Dad wasn’t mad, I think he was more astounded that a five year old could successfully disassemble his truck so quickly. His only punishment, after dad finally stopped laughing, was to put the grill back on the truck just as he had found it.

    And last but most certainly not least, Buddy, the youngest of my siblings and quite possibly the most insane member of my family. Buddy, who is six years younger than David, has always been able to get away with just about anything as far as mom and dad are concerned. I guess they so were exhausted from raising the first three of us, by the time Buddy came around. More thin and handsome than me or my other brother, Buddy has the most sick, sadistic sense of humor I have ever experienced. If the mood of the general public, family, and friends were sad and down, Buddy was laughing and cracking jokes of the sickest nature possible. Looking back I think now that may be his way of dealing with hardship and tragedy. Most people cry, Buddy sticks his bare ass in someone’s face and farts. Personally I think mom and dad should have kept a firmer hand with him, but overall he is a good kid. Mom always said Buddy reminded her of her brother Kevin with his constant fidgeting, fighting, and overall goofy disposition.

    Getting back on track with the appropriate time frame, little did I know that my mundane everyday life at Mill Creek High was about to change dramatically. At that time dad was working at a rock plant in Troy which was just a few miles outside of Mill Creek. We lived six miles or so away in a small community named Reagan. So home, work and school was a small triangle consisting of about ten miles of old county dirt roads and two lane blacktop. Dad had been working at that rock plant for around ten years give or take a few, when he decided to take my uncle up on an offer to make more money at the rock plant he worked at. The plant my uncle worked at was in excess of thirty miles away. Dad got the job and was happy despite having a sixty mile commute both ways. The money was decent and for a while we enjoyed a few luxuries we were not accustomed to. I wasn’t fooled for one minute. Life in our household had changed because of less than this recent change before, and I was just waiting for the inevitable to happen. Either dad quitting and coming back to his old job or us moving. Boy did I see that one coming.