The two faces of "me"

It had been six months since I moved in with dad. I spent my days trying to build a new life for myself and Lisa. Sarah and Robert (who Lisa had fondly referred to as "daddy rabbit") were still in our lives and they were still keeping Lisa for me on the weekends. Sometimes Friday night. Sometimes Saturday night. And sometimes she would spend both nights with them. My dad had encouraged me to go the welfare office and apply for some sort of assistance since I was getting nothing from Lisa's dad and had no other means of supporting her. I was a high school drop out at age 15 and even if I could find a job I had no car for transportation. Due to my circumstances my application for assistance was approved and I began receiving $176.00 a month for Lisa. I also received $80.00 a month in food stamps. This was not enough money for me to get a place for Lisa and I to live on our own but it was enough to take the strain and obligation off of my dad.


By the end of the summer my friendship with the girls in the neighborhood was proving to be very profitable. I had met a guy who was twenty that had a job and shared a house with a another couple he knew. He had a lot going for him and to top it off he was a "FOX". I'm serious! If you don't believe me ask my sisters. With all that he had going for him I figured the last thing he would want would be a relationship with a seventeen year old girl that already had a child. But guess what? I was wrong. We started going out on the weekends and soon we were seeing each other almost every day. By early winter he had asked me if I wanted to move in with him and I didn't hesitate for one split second. It felt so good to have someone in my life again that I could care about. There were days when I would still think about Lisa's dad. Where he might be. What he might be doing. Who he might be spending his time with. And of course "did he miss and still love me the way I still missed and loved him". But Glen cared deeply for me and Lisa too. He even paid a little bit more in rent to the couple we were living with so Lisa could have a bedroom for herself. Other than the fact that we were living with another couple sharing expenses we "appeared" to be a new little family. He would work Monday through Friday and I would stay home and cook and clean. Then the weekends would come and we would become totally reckless and irresponsible. That is where the two faces of me come in. On Monday through Friday I was a good mother. Lisa was fed and bathed everyday. I did all the things a good mom would do with their child. Then Fridays would come around, Lisa would go to visit Sarah and "daddy rabbit" and Glen and I would hit the streets. We would spend our weekends partying and dancing at clubs like a couple of crazy kids. We were drunk or drinking all weekend unless we were sleeping. And I won't lie about it, we were usually stoned on top of that. He never spent his money to buy marijuana or any other drug for that matter. He would buy enough to sell and make his money back and then have enough left over for us to party with. It wasn't long before drinking and smoking pot wasn't satisfying enough. He had friends who used another drug they called "crystal meth". Nothing more than high octane "Speed". You would snort this drug and it didn't take long at all for it to become one of my dearest friends. One snort of crystal meth and you could stay up for a couple of days. You would have no appetite and all the girls loved it because it was a sure fire way to stay thin. That would be the "WEEKEND" me and taking care of Lisa would be the "WEEKDAY" me. With minimal practice I became pretty good at shifting between the two. In the late spring Glen and one of his friends that he worked with thought they could make more money if they went out on their own and sub-contracted construction work themselves. By the end of June they had been hired to do some work in Nags Head North Carolina. Wow, this would mean we would move to Nags Head so the guys could work. So just like the Beverly Hillbillies we loaded up our truck and moved to Beverly.


I'll now share with you the event that took us out of Virginia Beach in a blaze of glory. I hope those of you who read this understand that everything I write here is the honest truth and because it is true, sharing some of the things that I have done in my life are not easy. I am not proud of everything I did. And revealing these things about myself leaves me very vulnerable to critisism. But I'm going to tell it like it was in hopes that one parent, one teenager, or one anybody will save themselves from some of the self destructive behavior I put myself through. Okay now back to leaving in a blaze of glory.


It was the Saturday before we were going to head to N.C. on Monday. Lisa must have been with Sarah and daddy rabbit. I don't remember where she was that particular day but it was a Saturday. It wasn't raining but it was a cloudy gloomy day. Glen and I were at the house getting high and bored slam to death. We decided to go to Sears to pick up some tools he would need before we left for N.C. On the way home we stopped at the elementary school to sit on the swings and smoke yet another joint. Just something to do outside of the house. The school was in our neighborhood so there were houses across the street from the school. We thought nothing of them at the time. We weren't hurting anyone so what the heck. We had been there for about 20 minutes just talking and laughing when this man came over to us from across the street. He starting telling us we needed to leave or he was going to call the cops and then he made a nasty comment towards me. Well, Glen flew hot and we got in the car and raced home. We had another beer and he was getting more and more angry about what that man had said to me. It was now early evening and it was starting to get dark. All of a sudden he stood up and said "that man is going to pay for what he said to you". He went into the bedroom and got a shotgun and said"we're gonna go blow a hole in that beautiful travel camper he has and maybe he will think twice before he talks to someone like that again. So stupid me, I thought" Wow, he must think an awful lot of me if he would go blow someones camper away just because he talked ugly to me.

In the car we went. And two blocks over we drove. Now I'm not saying this didn't have me a little nervous because it did. Actually I didn't think he would really do it. I mean, we were in the middle of the city. It wasn't like we were living in the hills somewhere. As we pull up next to the camper he rolls down his window, stuck the gun out and pulled the trigger. HOLY MOSES! HE REALLY DID IT! Next thing I knew we were running into our house to hide the gun. Both of us panting and scared half to death. We sat in the den and just waited. Ten or so minutes went by and nothing had happened so I guess we thought we were in the clear. Then I heard them. The sirens. Sounded like they were coming from everywhere but there were really only two police cars involved. Glen told me to turn out all the lights as if no one were home and stay in the bedroom and not to say a word. You could tell they were a couple of blocks away but it didn't take them long to ride through the neighborhood and find his car. By this time I didn't know if I should get my purse and take off out the back door hoping they wouldn't find me or should I just sit there and be very quiet. Being paralyzed with fear I chose to sit there. The cops came to the door and knocked and rang the door bell. We made no acknowledgment that they were there. After a few minutes they left. They were probably going to get warrants so they could come in the house so we figured if we were going to get out of there we had better do it pretty quick. That was when we threw our clothes and a few basic necessities in garbage bags and off we went. We had all planned to make the trip to Nags Head on Monday anyway. We would just head that way a day or two early and meet up with the rest of the group when they got there.


There would be a total of six of us that would make the move. Me, Glen, Lisa, Glen's friend Zack, his girlfriend and one other friend of theirs named Matt. The guys had been hired to do interior trim work in new homes being built in Nags Head. Of course we were not financially prepared to make this move because at our age our judgment was still poor. However with the attitude of a group of hippies we decided we could "live" (more like camp out) in the homes they were working in and we could save our money until we had enough go rent a place to live. How bad could that be? We had our clothes and some cooking items which we girls would use to prepare food on a charcoal grill for everyone. We had shelter over our heads so we were not exposed to the rain. We did not need heat at the time because it was now the middle of July. And you never got tired of living somewhere because by the time we got things "settled in" the guys would finish their work in that house and we would pick up and move to another. Oh, and as for Lisa? What a little trooper she was. We played on the beach during the day while the guys were working and if they needed our help she would play in the sand or in the house where we were working. I had managed to bring most of her toys for her, not that she had more than a few. Lisa was a good toddler. She was very capable of entertaining herself if I had something else to do. At night we would throw a few blankets on the floor and pile in for some shut eye. Other than this nomadic lifestyle we had chosen to live, the only BIG change for Lisa was we were no longer close enough to Sarah and daddy rabbit for her to stay with them on the weekends. Which put her with me and Glen and the rest of the troops seven days a week. I say that because we were more responsible during the week than we were on the weekends but having her there didn't break our routine of becoming those party animals on the weekends. She would just fall right in there and go where-ever we would go too.

"What was I turning into?" I would ask myself. I would justify my actions by telling myself that Lisa was not old enough to remember what we were doing. But "I" knew what we were doing. And way too many times I put her life and mine at risk by living the lifestyle I was living. Had we been caught with drugs on us I would have probably gone to jail and worse yet I would have lost Lisa and she was all I had left that was a part of "HIM" (her dad). So in every moment of every day I struggled between being a good mother and being a teenager whose behavior was becoming more and more reckless. I was behaving the way all the other teens were behaving in the late 70's. The only difference was I had a child I was responsible for and they didn't.

In October I began giving myself a hard look in the mirror. Was this what I wanted for me and Lisa? Heavens no! I wanted a husband. A family, you know, the old white picket fence routine and besides something had happened and I knew I needed to start making some tough choices. We had heard rumor that there had been a big drug bust out off the coast between Nags Head and Sandbridge, Virginia. It was told that the people on the boat had thrown garbage bags and more garbage bags of marijuana over the side of the boat in an effort to get rid of it before they got busted. So the guys came up with a plan. We would all hit the beach in our four wheel drive trucks and ride the beach (which was against the law) between N.C and Va. to see if we could find any of this discarded marijuana. If we found it, we could make a load of money real fast and no one would ever know we had it. We set out sometime after midnight to find our "pot" of gold. It didn't take long, a 20 or 30 minute ride down the beach and there they were. Not one but three garbage bags laying on the beach full of marijuana just hoping to be found by someone other than the cops. The guys jumped out of their trucks, loaded the bags in Zack's truck and we headed home. I say "home" because by this time Glen and I had managed to rent an old house and the rest of our crew was renting the one next to us. We were right on the main highway leading to Nags Head and we were the only two homes with miles. So we felt very secluded and safe from any law. Again, at our age we all felt invincible.

They split the take equally between them and they began bagging it up to sell. As morning rolled around I found myself sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other asking myself "What in the heck are you doing here? Have you lost your mind? This is great fun for now and you have a really nice, " goodlooking" guy here who says he loves you.....and Lisa too, but this is ridiculous. This isn't what I wanted . I wanted a family. Just a normal family. It was only a few days before I approached Glen and told him I couldn't live like this any longer. I had a child I had to think about and I laid out an ultimatum for him. If you have not asked me to marry you by Christmas and agree that our lifestyles need some changing I am going to blow this popsicle stand and Lisa and I will start over again somewhere else. Over the next several weeks I kept my fingers crossed hoping he would pop the question knowing in my heart he wasn't ready to give it all up yet. I was right, and as Christmas came and went with no proposal I began making arrangements for Lisa and I to leave. Now remember, I still had no car for transportation so it made things a wee bit tougher for me to just pick up and move. Besides here I am at eighteen walking out on serious relationship number two. Dad was now dating someone and it seemed to be pretty serious and he wasn't wanting us to come back there. So Lisa and I made that dreaded phone call to my mother to ask if we could come there and stay until I could get a job and get on my feet. My mom, like Sarah, never had a problem keeping Lisa for as long and I wanted her to. It was getting her to let ME come too that was going to be an issue. You know that lesson older people talk about that says "you made your bed now you sleep in it?" Well this wouldn't be the first or the last time I would hear that said to me. The lesson here? "Don't poop in your nest. Eventually you are going to have to sleep there." Lessons better left unlearned