A Stone's Throw: The True Story of a Wreckful Youth

By Scott A Spackey

A hedonistic descent from innocence to narcissism into the dark culture of IV methamphetamine, psychedelics, organized drug crime and sex in 80’s Los Angeles. Pot & alcohol at 14, LSD by 15 and slamming-dope by 17.

Scott’s high-school friends became a notorious counterfeit & drug-dealing group in L.A.

Intense, shocking and brutal to the senses, A Stone’s Throw teleports you on a journey he barely survived.

A sinister, secret society of sex, crime and intense hybrids of narcotics mostly unknown to society.

Everything is revealed and you vicariously experience it.

As outrageous and surreal as Scott’s story is, it is all true. A Stone’s Throw is a journey the reader experiences. A young 13 year old boy is moved from a calm suburban life to a chaotic existence in Los Angeles. We follow the subtle progression of partying indulgences of youth as it digresses into a dark and twisted life of survival, seduction, excess and drugs that are part of a secret cult existence of crime, drugs and sex. Scott’s life devolves from its once youthful and normal innocence to tragic loss of character and spirit as he and his high school friends become some of Los Angeles’ most notorious counterfeiters, drug dealers and theft rings enslaved by exotic drugs few people know about to this day. The climax of his memoir is a terrifying, suspenseful event that escalates on a trajectory with one of two outcomes: total self annihilation and death or profound and enlightening salvation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Primordial Productions
• Release date: Nov 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996891370

Scott A Spackey

Krishnanand Scott Spackey has had a life of miracles.Fascinated by spiritual mysteries since he was a child, he went in pursuit of enlightened consciousness when he learned to read at five years old.Immersed in books throughout his life, writing came automatically to him as he was inspired from a wide spectrum of authors, from Shakespeare to Vonnegut, Hesse, Gibran, Toni Morrison and Hunter Thompson.He first book was a memoir of his time with crminal dope-fiends on the streets of Los Angeles and the bizarre culture and supernatrual events. A Stone's Throw-Memoir of a Dope Fiend, won 4 awards.He walked away from a succesful, self-owned commercial contracting company desring a career that was more fulfilling. He became a privtate practice counselor and behavioral specialist with clients around the world seeking his particualr brand of self-empowerment. His innovative addiction work and book changed the landscape of recovery by empowering indoviduals with the knowledge and mthods to customize their treatment.After his Near-Death Experience in 2013, he struggled to co-exist in both the spiritual and material reaiities simultaneously, defying the medical prophecy he would wake from his nine day coma a vegetable and never be self-reliant again. His life-long pursuit of Spiritual Enlightenment was intensified by the nine years of an ongoing Near-Death Experience. He decided to dedicate his author career and counseling work to spiritual concepts.He lives in the California peninsula region providing free workshops and mentors spritual seekers through thier own dark night of he soul.

Book preview

A Stone’s Throw

                    The True Story

                            of a

                                 Wreckful Youth

A Stone’s Throw—A True Story of Wreckful Youth By Scott Spackey

Published by: Primordial Productions 24303 Walnut St., Suite A Los Angeles, CA 91321                    Telephone: [phone]   Website: http://www.primordialproductions.net E-mail: [e-mail] Copyright © 2018 by Scott Spackey All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the express written consent of the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Print: 978-0-9968913-2-5 Ebook: 978-0-9968913-7-0 Audio: 978-0-9968913-8-7

LCCN: 2015953968 Second Edition. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Editor: Brandon Pi Bang Cover Photo: Lee H Spackey

                        For:

Captain Tripps—Dark Star Crashes,

Brandon—My resurrection

Maynard—A better friend to me than I ever was to him

Janete—the essence of alluring innocence

JSR—I’m comin…!

Viscera

0. Launch: Speed Kills

1. The Juice of Wrath

2. 4/20

3. In The Garden

4. Lesbians and Whisky

5. Wha?

6. Synesthesia

7. Assume the Position

8. SFW

9. Thick As Thieves

10. Peace, Pot and Purple Microdot (Part I)

10. Peace, Pot and Purple Microdot (Part II)

00. Interlude

11. GTA

12. Suck My Dick

13. Dishonor Among Thieves

14. Life By The Drop

15. A Christmas Brawl

16. Hi-Infidelity

17. Viva, Viva, Bun Boy and the World's largest Thermometer

18. Paradise Tweeked

19. Descent

20. 360 Degrees of Separation

21. Odyssey (part I)

21. Odyssey (part II)

000. Interlude Again

22, Dream A Little Dream

23. Binky

24. Capsize

25. Are You Ready?

26. Crysta X (part I)

26. Crystal X (part II)

27. Torsional Waves

Coda (epilogue)

back matter

0

Launch: Speed Kills

You can get it if you really want it,

But you better off just leave it alone.

You won’t forget it if you ever had it,

So you better off just stayin’ at home.

—Heaven & Hot Rods,

Stone Temple Pilots

I don’t remember the day. But I remember the first time the needle stabbed my skin and the furiously fast rush of dope flowed into my head and knocked me out of existence, transporting me through a collision of time and space—so divine and perfect, such ecstasy and rapture. I knew immediately there would never be anything more beautiful, more extreme and celestial. I had no idea I could feel that good. It did not seem possible. I could have lived—experiencing the pleasure of its rush—catatonically, forever. I knew on my first hit what love was, and I knew I would return to it again and again…

and again…

…and again.

My lover and my enemy.

And it wasn’t a peaceful thing, either. Saying it was lovely might give the wrong impression. That it was somehow sublime and tranquil, unblemished and surrounded with a feeling of inner peace. It’s lovely, yes, like having God at your bedside—but not the God that is so misunderstood and underappreciated by zealots and brainwashed born-agains—this God is extreme—ultimate—fast. This God gets right to the point and does not fuck around. I need to tell you what this has all been like: to somehow try to put words to the indescribable. To communicate rapture. A sensation that is a thousand times greater than free-falling, a hundred times the intensity of the most white-hot love, all of your best, most powerful orgasms smashed into one cataclysmic event that makes you sweat while standing still and naked in a blizzard.

You can’t imagine.

But you can try.

There’s a new dope out there. They don’t want you to know about it. At least not from me. They’ll fucking kill me if I tell their secrets. This new shit is a rocket ship. Getting high is not just about feeling good and having a good time anymore. It’s like seeing God, and it’ll make you cry, it’s so beautiful. You feel it come on quick—all over—and it washes over you, and you feel like every piece of great music you’ve ever heard. You smile, surprised, taken over, unable to grasp the splendor of it. You smile more, you breathe hard—in and out—clench your ass and grab a fistful of carpet as you shed your clothes, grabbing that floor just to literally hold on, because it feels like you just might spin off the earth. You feel wetness between your legs. It’s cum. This shit is so good, it makes you ejaculate—just a little. No one will talk about it.

What the fuck is this shit? I asked, breathlessly, smiling, barely able to speak.

I know—it’s good, huh?

Uh-huh. What’s in this shit?

Whaddya mean? It’s just dope. Regular dope. You’re just not used to it.

Whooew!

I was in the fourth dimension, and this motherfucker’s trying to tell me it’s normal. I’d done over three hundred hits of LSD, eaten peyote, psilocybin, chronic, slammed coke and heroin, speedballs…I’d been slamming dope for seven years. And I’d never had anything like this shit before in my life.

What would happen if you took the most notorious drug and blended it with the most inhibition-lowering substance you could manufacture? What would you call it? Give it a name, and people might talk about it.

It has no name. It can’t be talked about. It’s like Area 51—it doesn’t exist. Whaddya mean? It’s just regular dope.

For thousands of years, powerful people have been in search of the Holy Grail, the Fountain of Youth, the philosopher’s stone.

This new drug coursing through my nerves and blood is a hybrid blend of MDA and high-quality crystal meth. It is the most powerful religious experience one can have without the benefit of dying. And it makes slaves. The ones who control it are slaves themselves.

There’s a revolution going on—quiet and underground—and it’s being led by a bunch of tweekers.

There is no way to understand or be aware of its power or its potential without doing it. Do it once, and you know: it could control the world. It will forever control me. But it doesn’t exist. Right?

There was a me before dope, and there was a me after dope. A me before my crown chakra opened, and a me after. These two singularity events intertwine around me like a DNA strand, defining my reality and giving shape and form to my life—my destiny.

The rest of life’s experiences would be measured and comparatively defined by them. How would anything else ever be good again? By comparison, the world is shit. What am I gonna do now?

Quit smoking,

Quit drinking,

Stop cursing and lying,

Don’t overeat,

Don’t cheat,

Don’t masturbate,

Don’t fuck your friends,

Don’t speed on the highway,

Don’t stay up late or sleep in too long,

Stay out of the sun,

Quit complaining and hating,

Quit dope…

Cut the grass and vacuum the carpet,

Get to work on time and pay your bills the same way,

Rent movies on the weekends,

Clean out the garage and refrigerator,

Stop looking forward to things and quit believing somehow love or money or a promotion or a new car will save you from mediocrity,

Wash the car and hose the driveway,

Take a class, learn karate or how to become a stenographer,

Fight the endless traffic on the freeways for the privilege of living and working…

…And dying.

I want to expose the truths. I want to tell the truth and share what I know. I suspect these profound events have taken place for a specific and divine reason. This suspicion is inescapable to me.

The pieces are beginning to fit.

Reality is not what you think it is. C’mon, let’s strip away the veil and take a look behind the curtain. Let’s get sexy, turn down the lights, light a few candles, get high, and fuck a little…c’mon. The dope will show you the truth, the mind will guide you along, our nudity will give us shelter, and the power will bring you to the light.

We’re going to go into the worlds where tweekers, dope fiends, heads, fuckups, convicts, and spin artists live. Their world is fucking bizarre—like a circus—complete with clowns and freak shows. It is a complete criminal and subversive society. It’s more than a counterculture. A counterculture has significant objectives. Dope fiends only have one objective.

And we stop at nothing to achieve it.

C’mon…

I’ll show you.

1

Juice of Wrath

Cause I heard it in the wind and I saw it in the sky,

…And I thought it was the end

And I thought it was the Fourth of July.

—Fourth of July,

Soundgarden

I hear the soft gushing of water and can almost see it in my mind’s eye, clear and flowing. A dog is barking somewhere in the distance: short yips, evenly paced and monotonous:

yip…yip…yip…

My body feels heavy as lead and like it is floating in a dense solution. It is unthinkable to pick up my heavy skull. The bodiless barking floats in,

yip…yip…yip.

I close my eyes tighter, preferring my leaded sleep to the confusion of consciousness, unclear as to what is real. Am I dreaming or awake?

…yip…yip…yip…yip.

My head lifts lethargically—my neck, stiff and hurting. Trying to focus, I squint and blink, look over the edge of the door and through the window; a moist puddle of drool pulls away from my cheek and lips onto the door handle that has served as my pillow. I can’t see the dog, but still I hear him out there: yip, yip. The blackness outside becomes spotted with blobs of light coming into focus, and my head fugues from sleep.

I see the source of the gushing water: a fire hydrant on the corner, open and gushing a flood into the street. Still no sight of a dog (yip…yip…). The hydrant is in front of a Dairy Queen, next to a bus bench…miscellaneous people standing and waiting for a bus, making conscious effort to ignore the vandalized, gushing hydrant.

Yip…

I take it all in.

It looks like a Salvador Dali painting with audio.

I am clipped with a jolt into the surety that I am awake when the driver’s door snaps open and I twist my neck around to see my dad reaching into the truck’s cab for his maps and papers on the musty seat between us. He looks at me—looking at him—I’m sure he’s thinking he has just woken me. He doesn’t smile but tells me warmly that we are: here.

I knew that. Yip.

Los Angeles. The San Fernando Valley, a.k.a the SFV. It is the Fourth of July, 1980. It is five in the morning, and the temperature is 102 degrees.

My first day in LA: I am with my two brothers, two sisters, our three dogs, and two cats in Balboa Park—grand central recreation to the SFV. Balboa Park is a huge, green expanse with soccer fields and outdoor BBQs and unmovable, stone picnic tables. People fill the park on roller skates, playing Frisbee and picnicking as we loiter near our Ryder rental truck and family station wagon; our pants are saggy in the rear from not changing, our scalps itching from not showering, our dogs and cats tethered to leashes with water bowls on the ground around them. We are scary, like the Joads. We stand out like the Clampett family at a country club, and every time someone looks my way, I hear Flatt & Scruggs playing banjos in the background of my mind. I have been fourteen years old for less than one week, and I know it will be impossible to ever be cool again.

In my head, I do a quick calculation: I have lived in three states, six homes, and attended five schools. We are not army brats, moving every so often to a new post; we’re gypsies, caught up in my mother’s quixotic quest for fame and fortune in Hollywood that no one but her gives two shits about.

The heat is unbearable. We have moved here from the Bay Area where it is so much cooler, like, all the time. Technically, we are homeless: my folks are sooo smart. Before my dad quit his machinist job in San Jose, we all spent months throwing any loose change we had into a giant jar labeled LA—Move to save for a rental truck and McDonald’s burgers for the moving commute. Then we packed the car, the truck, our bags and boxes, and drove to LA: forever. Never to return. Oh, did I mention we have no home? No, no…it’s not an oversight. To my mom, it is a minor detail. Mom and Dad had the good sense to leave house hunting at an as-needed priority. I suppose that means that sometime before the park closes, they will find us a place to live.

After spending the longest day of our lives in the heat-stenched park, we are fetched by our parental units. They have rented us a house. Just like that. Like instant oatmeal for breakfast, they came to LA and found us a house to live in. And I’m sure it’s fine. Well researched, close to a good school and freeway…I’m sure of it. Yeah.

The first person I meet in LA is Mario. A week after our arrival, a Saturday night, and I am stir crazy. I feel LA’s heat and energy buzz through the air like a pulp: every party, kiss, grope, curse, rape, crime, and punishment in the San Fernando Valley spreads out like atmosphere. It is now after eleven, and I am in my room alone; the rest of the family is in their own rooms or watching TV in the living room.

Our new street is a big, four-lane avenue, and, from my window, I can see my dad’s little-shit Fiat parked at the curb. I see the curved back of a guy sitting on the hood. There are other guys and girls walking down the street, and I sense there is a purpose to their presence; they are not just idle passersby.

I leave my room, passing through the living room to the front door unnoticed as a used-car magnate, Cal Worthington, frolics with a tiger on the TV while an a voice over says it’s his dog spot: If you need a car or truck, Goseycow, goseycow to the tune of  If Your Happy and You Know It. For fiftynineninetynine he will sell me a used Toyota that looks like it could make the drive back to San Jose. Outside, groups of older kids walk up and down the street and there’s lots of jacked-up, souped-up cars—some parked, some cruising. Some motherfucker sits on the hood of my dad’s car. I think he notices me when I appear but does not seem to care that this might be my family’s car. Before I can inform him of his trespassing, a raised-up Malibu smokes past a yellow-and-black Nova at rumbling speeds. People at the end of the block cheer as the Malibu comes to the finish line.

That’s my dad’s car, I say.

The stranger gives me a sideways glance across his left shoulder. Iszat right? His speech is drawled together, and his intonation is sarcastic but friendly too. He is atypical Italian: brown and curly, messy hair to his shoulders and dark eyes that look almost bruised. He’s wearing a tank top, something the ex-cons call a slingshot, and Levi’s that look too big but somehow fit him. He looks cool and tough. Like a seventeen-year-old man. He stares back to the street. You got a smoke I can bum?

No. What’s goin’ on?

Heeyy, he says. His words come out musically, like he’s stoned and happy. You’re new here, huh! Yyeahh, I thought so. You guys just moved in. Well, these here are the street races. And we got a front-row seat since we live here on the block. I live down there. His thick arm and finger indicates an anonymous residence down the dark block. You sure you don’t got a cigarette?

Yeah, I’m sure. Do they do this every week?

Well yeah, just not always here. The cops are always breakin’ ’em up, so everybody moves on to different places. If the cops show up here, they’ll all move to San Fernando Road or maybe somewhere on Rinaldi.

San Fernaldi what? I don’t know where these places are and never heard these names before.

The next pair of cars comes smoothly by us at top speeds. The finish line is at the end of my block, a hundred yards or so, but neither car slows down until the edge of it. Our necks and heads follow the cars as they speed by. I see small clusters of people on the corner—guys with beer bottles and girls in halter tops—everyone trying to impress. This is right out my front door and makes me feel cool, like I’m a host or someone who deserves respect.

But at least for now, we get a front-fuckin’-row seat. Mario looks at me like we share this, and I feel we do. He’s cool. I feel like Sal Mineo’s Plato, and he’s Jim, the Rebel Without a Cause. We both look back to San Fernando Mission Boulevard, the corner where the races begin. An Impala and El Camino idle parallel just this side of the traffic signal. Behind them in the distance, swirling, blue lights appear and are coming closer. Man, it’s warm—an ideal summer evening—and it makes me long to be self-assured, mature, old enough to just walk from the front of my house and get into one of these cars with some of these girls and have an adventure through the night.

The Impala and the Elky smoke their tires and race our way as spectators pack into cars, preparing to escape the approaching law enforcers. The Elky beats the Impala; they roll to the corner, let a few people in, and take off.

That’s it. Mario seems satisfied, but I know he can’t be. It has ended too soon. I’ll see ya around, since I live right there. If ya see me, just say, ‘Wha’s up, Mario.’ That’s me.

All right. Bye. Bye? I said Bye. What a nimrod.

Mario walks past me. Later… He pauses just past me and half turns quizzically, smiling. You sure you ain’t got…

No, man, sorry.

I saw Mario the next week at the Highland Liquor store up the street on the San Fernando/Woodley corner, the starting line for the races. I was in the Fiat, coming home from an afternoon errand with my folks. As we passed the corner store, I saw two black-and-white squad cars in the parking lot, three cops struggling (and losing) with a guy in a tank top. A fourth cop ran into the melee, turning the tide to the cop’s favor. Billy clubs going up and down, and I was pretty sure Mario was holding one of them. As we passed, I saw Mario’s curly head and face appear between blue-uniformed knees and elbows, and he seemed to be looking right at me. I could swear he recognized me as I passed. He looked right at me, and he smiled, lost in a new moment and forgetting about the beating he was giving and getting.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

Mario was locked down for a long time after that, but I thought of him every time the street races were on our block. Over the years, I got to know Mario. He hooked me up with pot and acid a few times, and he was the first guy I knew who slammed dope.

September came, dry and hot, and school loomed just a few weeks away. New kid. Bad clothes. No clues.

I dreaded my life.

2

4/20

When I first met you—didn’t realize,

I can’t forget you—or your surprise…

—Sweet Leaf,

Black Sabbath

When I took my first toke of pot, I did it because I was curious. It was a small challenge. Something I wanted to test myself with. I never considered whether it would be something I would do again or not but somehow wanted it to be one of the things in my character arsenal. Like being bilingual.

That first time took place at my brother’s apartment in San Jose, just before we moved to LA. My sister, Christine, and I went there to say good-bye to him, his roommates, and his friends. Most of my brother’s friends had all been surrogate brothers at one time or another. My mom had taken them in like strays whenever their own parents had tired of their bullshit and thrown them out.

The lights were lowered, and Fleetwood Mac was pulled from the turntable and replaced with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. A joint was passed, and then a small pipe.

You feel anything? I was asked.

Yeah, a little.

Christine expertly exhaled smoke into the air, I heard that most people don’t feel anything their first time. I do. I’m feeling it. It’s cool. Then she leaned to me and whispered, I tried pot a few months ago already!

At first, it was a pleasant and airy feeling, accentuated and lifted along by the more ethereal tracks on the Floyd album. A bong was passed, and I learned to carb. Next, a power hitter and plumes of smoke thickened the air. But the airy feeling was elusive and slipped into something more anxious, causing my heart to speed up a pace and worry. When the uneasiness edged in and out like a tide, I used the shadows in the dim room to hide my mind in. The small voices speaking in the rear of the Floyd track grew distinct for the first time: "I’ve always been mad, I’ve known I’ve been mad, like most of us have—you have to explain why you’re mad even when you’re not mad—he was just cruisin’ for a bruisin’…" A hookah was passed. Then, as an encore, a round of marijuana cocktails: a power hitter was used to puff smoke-signal clouds into frozen wine glasses. The thick frost was magnetic, causing the wisps of smoke to curl and spin around, hovering in the glass but never spilling out until tilted to our inhaling mouths.

I don’t think I ever considered whether getting stoned was something I liked or not. It wasn’t bad—I mean, it didn’t hurt me or anything—so I figured it was all right, and I thought that being able to do it could be useful, since so many other people did it. It didn’t really matter to me either way. It was just another way to communicate.

Over the years, there were times, usually on that chronic indica bud, that I got so stoned I felt almost sick: just fucking high—stomach-queasy, room-spinning high. But mostly when I was stoned, it was just a condition, and I didn’t think about it. There were times that were particularly funny or weird because of being stoned, and that was all right. Like the time we raided the Der Wienerschnitzel.

Eight months living in LA. Matt rousts me out of bed at three in the morning to get stoned and go to the Der Wienerschnitzel on Nordhoff and Reseda where he now works. We stop at my new (and only) friend Joe’s house on the way and roust him too.

We smoke a bowl before we leave. We do bowls on the four-mile bike ride there, and more bowls once we get there. Joe and I have not been told why we were here: why we’re at Matt’s Der Wienerschnitzel work. I think maybe Matt has forgotten to clean something or left a door unlocked and we are along for company. So long as Matt is sharing his weed, which he did often and generously, we are not about to refuse him.

Matt unlocks the back door of the store and turns on the lights to the kitchen but not the front dining room. He opens the large, fast-food freezer, waving frozen packages of hot dogs and hamburger patties. You want fucking fries with that?

It’s a munchy fest: fringe benefits for the pothead who has been given a key to the store.

Within minutes, the grill is hot, and a half dozen burgers and hot dogs sizzle. French fries bubble in the fryer, and shakes are blending in the mixer. We all glug on thirty-two-ounce Cokes as we work, Matt giving orders, Joe and I following them like a well-oiled machine, yet neither one of us having worked a day in our lives yet. "Toast the buns and get the condiments. Joe: wrap and bag. This order’s to go!" We clean as we cook, scraping and scrubbing the grill the moment the last patty comes off it. We walk out backward, mopping our footprints away, leaving no evidence of our visit except the missing inventory of buns and meat.

We take our spoils outside, around the wall of the drive-through, hidden from the world. Double cheeseburgers, grilled Polish dogs, and French fries. And everything has cheese on it: the dogs, the fries, the burgers. We even melted cheese over the corn dogs before we drowned them in mustard.

Grease-stained bags and wrappers surround us as we nibble on the few cold, remaining fries. We sit like fat Roman emperors after a feast with our stomachs protruding, our buzz accentuated with the confusion of the just-rising sun among our litter.

We look like aftermath.

Not so high above us, a voice comes: Matt?

The three of us glance back and forth to each other in disbelief, muted and surprised. We slowly turn our heads up to see a face looking down at us from over the wall our backs are resting on. It is Matt’s boss. Not just his supervisor, but the owner.

I immediately look away and straight ahead at my outstretched legs and shoes like an autistic child, silently thinking, There isn’t shit I can do here. I am not going to look at this man. I am not going to look at Matt. I am not going to look anywhere but right here—singling out a crumpled piece of paper with hardened cheese stuck to it. I am not going to say anything, because we are so fucking busted, there is nothing to say. I’m not going to do anything. I’m going to look at this cheese paper.

Matt, however, is forced to reply.

…Um… He mumbles. That’s it. That’s all he can do.

Joe almost bursts out laughing, whereas I think my hair is possibly turning white from the stress.

Matt’s um was weak and lost—almost a whimper. His eyes are wide, and he looks like his dog has been run over. …Um, he repeats.

Matt, the sober voice says, What are you doing here? What’s going on? The disembodied head with the collared polo shirt scans the scene; empty cartons and greasy napkins and cigarette butts are strewn about, and I feel sure that it is a gratuitous question: it is obvious what’s going on here.

Matt stands up slow, smoothing the wrinkles from his Levi’s. His joints have stiffened from sitting, so it is painful to stand, and his knees buckle slightly, making him look fucked up even if he weren’t. He glares at me as he rises with an expression of I don’t know what I am going to say. Matt looks the guy in the eye and tells a bad lie about an unlocked door and how he woke in the middle of the night when it came to mind. So I just knew I better come and check.

I hear the guy buying it and think, What a fucking loser! I am laughing so hard inside, I want to jump and shout to him, "So, how do you explain me, huh? Oh—and how about this other stoner next to me? That is such a bullshit story, and you didn’t even ask him why we’re here—at five thirty in the morning! Fucked up and full of rat hair and nitrates from your subgrade beef, pork, and chicken-lip products. Suckah!"

The guy walks away satisfied, asking us to kindly clean up our mess when we go.

I’m laughing all the way home. Hey, Matt, who do ya wanna be when you grow up, Cheech or Chong?

But now Matt is gone. Amber’s gone, and Michael is gone. Only Christine and I remain at home with our parents. Michael never stayed, anyway. Two weeks after we arrived in LA, his freaky, greasy friend Tommy (who a decade later would transgender himself into a freaky, greasy woman named Katherine) had arrived in his Gran Torino to take my brother Michael back to San Jose. Tommy hung around for two days, getting rashes from everything normal folks call food and leaving oily stains on the sofa cushions wherever his hippy-stringy hair came into contact with it. Then he and Michael prepared to return to San Jose. Tommy always leered at my sisters in a lecherous way that made me want to bury him alive. I couldn’t believe my brother was going to room with this creep. Michael left us all behind, not even offering sympathy for those of us too young to emancipate ourselves and go with him back to San Jose and out of LA.

Amber went next. My sisters led their lives in a mysterious and foreign fashion, their feminine mentality a distant and incomprehensible thing to me. Within a few weeks of being in LA., Amber began going out night after night, breaking curfews and house rules, and Christine started to follow Amber’s example. Amber had dedicated herself to this rebellious path even before we left San Jose, but it now accelerated into a delinquency and self-destructiveness ahead of any schedule and at a magnitude Mom and Dad could not anticipate or sabotage.

It’s scary when it gets late and Amber hasn’t come home. The house fills up with worry as Mom and Dad wait in anger and fear for her. The rest of us try to sleep as the tension builds, knowing when she walks in, the shouting and fighting will start. Amber has always been rebellious, but now, because of the move to LA, a slow and steady revolution has begun among us kids with Amber as our champion, going full steam and bull-horned against our folks. She leaves nothing but fuck-yous in her wake.

It comes to a head one night in the fall, just four months after we have moved in.

The fighting grows loud and sounds like a script from a TV movie. "You will live by our rules while you live under our roof!"

"You don’t like anything I do! Maybe I just shouldn’t live under your roof then!"

I am awake—at my bedroom door, peeking out and listening. Matt is up too, on one elbow in his bunk. We don’t say anything. The door across the hall opens a crack, and Christine looks out at me. She’s gonna blow it! she whispers.

I know it. Matt knows it too.

Matt and Amber are our adopted foster siblings. Matt returned from school to find a note their mom had left, blaming them for of all her unhappiness and informing them she had left with her super-psychotic, super-fly, very Black Panther and paranoid boyfriend. Matt rode his bike to tell Amber on her way home from school, and she replied: Good. Fuck her—the bitch!

I admired Amber’s spirit. Matt was confused and devastated when their mom left, but Amber would give no quarter or satisfaction.

She wore leather and Harley Davidson patches on her jackets and jeans. She smoked and talked about getting laid and getting stoned. I didn’t believe any of it, but she always seemed so irresistibly hazardous. I was a kid; I was impressed.

That fall night, Amber goes to her room, not even looking at us, grabs her shit, and storms out the front door. 86d.

She never came back.

I couldn’t believe they let her go. It didn’t seem real. I knew they were trying to save the rest of us from her influence. Matt and Christine knew it too. But her leaving, and them letting her, changed things.

Our parents’ credibility and our confidence in them was fractured by the decision to move here, and when they failed to keep Michael in LA and Amber from derailing, the remaining three of us began to believe we were on our own. These were not people we wanted to rely on for our futures. Dad, a robot being programmed by Mom, Mom a mad scientist bent on her own unrealistic fantasy of Hollywood success. We felt powerless to stop them. Two gone, three to go.

Matt went the very next month.

Michael comes down for the Thanksgiving holiday, bringing the gnomish little freak, Tommy, with him. They stay over the four-day weekend; Matt sees his opportunity and seizes it: he convinces our mother to let him return to San Jose and finish his senior year at Santa Teresa High, the one he had already attended through junior year. Michael agrees to take him on as a roommate, since his third roommate has moved out. Mom feels hurt that Matt wants to leave. I am confused. If most of us were moving back to San Jose, then why did we come here? It pisses me off Matt is leaving, but I knew if I were he, I’d be leaving too (if I could only get fittynineninetynine). Six months since our arrival in LA.

Three down and two to go.

Christine has adjusted well in LA, making several friends and even a boyfriend. But I spiral emotionally, reeling from all the changes in our family. I feel more isolated by the day. Gone: Michael, Amber, and now Matt—family I had always been able to take for granted. The loss of them, along with the growing feeling of exile, is beginning to affect me. I am confused about what I need to deal with first: the atomizing of my nuclear family or my own social survival. I had always looked forward to my brothers and sisters being gone—having more allowance, my own room, a little attention for once, no more being picked on…now I only wanted them back so I would not feel so completely abandoned. I want to see them functioning in this new world and verify, in some abstract and vicarious way, that everything is going to be all right. I realize that throughout my life, they had been the only consistent things. Home had never felt permanent, but my family had.

Now that Matt is gone, I don’t smoke pot. Michael had turned us onto it, and Matt continued once we were in LA scoring pot a few times over the summer before he left home, and we got stoned many times, but I never really thought about it. I had other things on my mind.

By the time my first LA school year concludes, I am ready to run screaming from the city. It starts out bad and gets worse. I stumble through it awkwardly, my head in a fog of confusing survival as I try to invent myself for Southern California life. Regardless of my efforts, I cannot become cool enough fast enough for other kids to like me. Both brothers and one sister are gone, and it is now only Christine, me, and our folks. This fragmenting makes me feel very alone—like being lost in a forest.

I am nervous about beginning freshman year. There is no proper expression of my rage when I am informed, just two weeks before school starts, that LA high schools begin with the sophomore year. This means that my ninth grade is in a junior high school. I thought I had completed junior high in San Jose—both years of it. I had been anxiously looking forward to the high school my brothers and sisters had attended, confident they would provide a social-security blanket with their mere presence. I was desperate to be out of junior high. Instead, I am forced to take my advanced IQ and maturity back to its halls, the stigma of new kid being forced upon me again—not once, but a guarantee of twice more: upcoming ninth grade at a new junior high and then a new high school all over again as a sophomore. It figures that I am to have as many homes by graduation as schools. And so much for counting on my brothers and sisters to be on the same campus. Is there any question why the kids I wound up choosing as friends were of questionable character? I got so goddamn tired of trying to figure out what was cool enough about me to make friends and fit in that I gravitated to whatever gravitated to me: the most likely to accept the least likely.

When I begin my term at Porter Junior High, I am friendless and hopeless. Being a freshman here would have been better than being a ninth-grade senior since I wouldn’t be expected to have my own friends. Am I a junior-high senior? A high-school sophomore? A junior-high veteran? The lack of a term for my status in the ninth grade is indicative of my entire condition. I am now one