All alone in the world.

I finally turned seventeen.  A moment I had been waiting seventeen years for.   I was as willful as I had ever been. Full of angst, energy, and pent up emotions; I was fearless and completely ignorant. This is not a good combination at all.  I was a senior at the Fayette High School. My mother moved me and my brothers there, to a farm in the middle of nowhere, in order to accommodate her fourth husband. She completely uprooted me, yet again, for another man. 

I was a good wrestler, it was one of the only things I loved to do, and I was extremely aggravated that my mother had moved me to a town where there was not a wrestling team, just so she could be with another man. Aggravated is not the word.  I was furious.  Wrestling was practically all I had.  It was the only way I had to express myself without actually harming others. 

During my senior year at Fayette I took out as much of my animosity on the football field as I could, but it only helped so much. I had lost all my friends again, my girlfriend was now out of my reach, and I found myself once again in hostile territory; that strange and chaotic world of a small town high school, where it was just like it is today, all the guys hated me and all girls did even if they pretended they didn’t.  Silly girls, nothing but drama.  Back then I did not understand all that drama; it was a painful experience for me.  I have always had a thirst for the truth; why can’t people just be honest? 

The tension was mounting between JoAnn and I.  With the coming of my seventeenth birthday she could no longer force me to stay home, and she was losing her authority and her power over me.

That year the football team was having an exceptional year. I don't remember our record but we did not lose too many games. It had been since the 70's or something since a Fayette football team had made it to the state semifinals. I always downplayed our success because it was only a 2A school.  I won't lie and say it was never fun; it was fun to win football games. My previous high school football years had been spent on a losing team, such that we only won one game each year. So playing for Fayette was definitely a change of pace in terms of winning.

The problem was that I knew football wasn’t going to get me into college. Playing for a small town team, at 6' tall and 205lbs, I was one of the three biggest guys on the team. This caused me to play positions I would never play at my size on a college football team. 205lbs guys don't play offensive tackle or defensive tackle on a college football team, so I knew I was not being noticed by any college scouts like some of the other guys.

Being thoroughly convinced of my own worthlessness applying my intellect wasn’t even an option.  I was good with the academic stuff, but my own internal self-talk destroyed any chance of that getting me into college.  In my mind it was all about wrestling. 

My junior year at Fulton High my wrestling record was 23-8 as a heavyweight wrestler. This is significant because at that time the heavyweight weight class went from 190lbs to 275lbs and never in that season did I weigh in at over 205lbs. I must have been somewhat of a good wrestler to win against so many guys that I literally could not put my arms around. My coach would ask me to try and gain weight; I was always the only guy on the team not spitting in a cup on the way to weigh-ins. Who knows what I could have accomplished my senior year wrestling for a state champion coach, but she took that from me too.

This was a major source of bitterness in my life.  I had my parents been nurturing even a little bit regarding my athletic ability I would have been an Olympian.  As I got older, the more aware of myself I became, the more aware of this fact I became; bitterness on top of bitterness. 

Somehow I managed to play an entire football season without any injuries. This was always a wonder to me, even now, considering my angst and extra high energy levels at that time.   My accident prone nature should have been off the charts. I had always been very accident prone, but as you will see, getting through that season without an injury did not mean I had somehow cured my accident proneness. A couple weeks after the season ended, while playing volleyball in a P.E. class, I came down on someone else's foot after spiking the ball and completely rolled my ankle. When I hit the ground everyone just laughed at me, so I bounced right back up to my feet and did everything I could to not limp as I walked off the court.

I walked half way across the gym to a water fountain, trying to play off the fact that I was hurt, then managed to walk all the way back across the court. I sat on the stage that is typical in most small town high school gymnasiums, and patiently waited for class to end. My ankle was really swelling up fast and my pride was flared up as well.  By the time class was over I could not put weight on my foot at all. Ashamed, I called for coach Varner to come help me because I could not stand on my foot.  He also happened to be the head football coach.  I couldn't walk after having sat down for ten minutes. He helped me get down to the locker room and put me on a bench to see how bad it was.

First he moved my toes towards my knee then back towards himself and it didn't hurt much.  My ankle was alarmingly big by this time.  Then he moved my foot side to side and my foot literally just kind of popped completely to the inside.  The bottom of my foot was completely at a right angle from where it should have been.  If you have ever seen the movie Misery based on the book by Stephen King then you can see it perfectly.  It’s the part when she hobbles the guy lying in bed by hitting his foot with a sledge hammer while there was a wooden block between his shins to keep him from running away; that’s what it looked like. It was just like that without the wooden block or sledge hammer.   My foot went completely to the side, where it should never go.

Coach paled a bit and just kind of smacked my foot back into place. By this time it didn’t even hurt really because it was so swollen.  He went and called a doctor immediately. I knew then my mom was going to be pissed, because this would only cost her more money. I was going to hear yet again about how I cost her money.  That ever present feeling of shame that her poverty was my fault somehow. It must have been my fault that she got pregnant at sixteen with no high school diploma too.

So there I was, cast on my right foot, no future, no family, no life. Living in the middle of nowhere, with a woman I despised, whom was married to a man I had no respect for at all, attending a high school that I didn't like or fit in with whatsoever. I had no job and due to my foot being in a cast I was not going to get one anytime soon. This meant staying in a place surrounded by nothing but things I hated, wounded and gimped. 

This was not an option; my will had been bent on getting away from her for a long time now. Nothing was going to stop me, not even my right foot in a cast. All I had was angst, hatred, ignorance and more energy than I knew what to do with. The tension between JoAnne was getting really bad; I was not listening to her at all, not doing anything she wanted. I would come home drunk and high, I would voice my dislikes and animosity openly and it was ruining her sway over my younger brothers.

She finally said the words that I had been dreaming of all my life.  What seemed like forever came down to a single moment; she told me I could move out and that she wouldn't call the police. I called Rachel and immediately made plans to get back to Fulton. Rachel had an apartment there, she was going to college, she was coming to get me; we would be living together.

I could never have said it out loud back then even though I did have the sense of it. I knew I had no future whatsoever. Deep inside I knew this to be true whether it actually was or not.  There really wasn’t anyone even capable of helping me.  I had no self-worth whatsoever. I had been raised like an animal.  Brain washed by step fathers to believe I was worthless, and no one ever to set that right.  Raised by a woman who convinced me that nothing I ever did was good enough, how could I not believe what they said was true? All my experiences verified their beliefs about me.  It really was all I knew and the only thing my mother never failed at was betraying me for another man.

I dropped out of high school.   I had missed a lot of class right before finals due to my ankle and I had to get away from my mother. My life depended on it.  My hatred of her was consuming me alive.  I was convinced that I could not go to college because of money.  She had never helped me do anything else, so why would she help me get to college?  She didn't graduate high school either.  The difference was that I didn't drop out due to pregnancy.  College was never an option in my mind because that was where people with money went.

I knew nothing of life because of the way I had been raised, because of the way in which JoAnne had kept me ignorant. Not willfully, but because she herself was so ignorant.  My life of crime was beginning anew, and even though I didn't consciously know it then, prison was just around the corner. Everyone could see that fact but me.  My self-destruction mechanism was priming up for a full go. I was all on my own now and all I knew was hate.