Richard B. Pelzer - A Teenagers Journey: Overcoming a Childhood of Abuse

Names and identifying characteristics of some individuals in this book have been changed to protect their identities.

Copyright 2006 by Richard B. Pelzer

All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.,

Hachette Book Group,

237 Park Avenue,

New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: May 2006

ISBN: 978-0-446-55530-2

The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Also by Richard B. Pelzer

A Brothers Journey

This book is dedicated to my children.

The teenage years are the hardest, but can also be the most rewarding. May you learn not only from what I have been through, but also from what no young adult

should ever have to go through.

I will always be there for each of you.

Love,

Dad

In order for you, the reader, to understand and appreciate what this book means to me, I must provide some insight as to what my life was like prior to my teen years.

We were to all appearances a normal middle-class family in a small city just outside San Francisco, California, called Daly City. With most families in the neighborhood, at least one of the parents worked a middle-class job. My father was no different.

He worked as a fireman in San Francisco. Mom stayed home and took care of the five boys. On the surface, there was nothing out of the ordinary about us. We were just like the restat least, up to the point where I became aware that what happened to us as boys at home was different than what other children experienced in the neighborhoodor the country, for that matter.

We lived like wolves, able to turn on one another at will, able to devour one another when need be. It was necessary. However perverted it may sound, it was nothing less than a matter of survival.

In the early days, I dont think any of us kids felt that what was happening was over the top. It was all we knew. Perhaps my older brothers knew better, perhaps they experienced similar things before I came along. I dont know. I can only speculate about what happened before I was born.

From my earliest memories, life was completely and utterly bizarre. Inside the house and with the protection of privacy, Moms ability to demonize and control her children knew no bounds. Eventually she mastered the ability to terrify a child beyond mortal horror. For many adults, its traumatic to have to come to terms with your own mortality. But when a child becomes conscious of walking a tightrope between life and death, the struggle to survive becomes personal, a matter of endurance; much like a pro athlete pushing himself beyond what he thinks he is capable of just so as to push himself even further. When a child has to constantly endure in order to survive, each accomplishment, each victory no matter how small, gives him the willpower to continue and endure even more.

For me, by the time I reached fifteen, Id found other ways to endure: alcohol and drugs. It wasnt as if I was the only teen who drank in my schoolmost of the kids I knew drank. Most of the kids I hung out with did an assortment of drugs: nothing outrageousmarijuana, speed, crystal methamphetamine, cocaine, or the occasional hallucinogenic.

Alcohol was different. At first it was a matter of desire: a desire to get drunk. Later it was more of a need to get completely bombed. As I look back now, I know the answer to the question most kids asked me: why I liked hard liquor when the rest preferred beer. It was just part of my personality. From drinking to drugs, everything I did had to be harder, bigger, more dangerous than what those around me were doing. As a teenager, I had an addictive and dangerous personality. It was much as Id been as a child. In fact, it was a tribute to my childhood.

I started drinking at the age of fifteen. I never liked the taste of beerit always filled me up and I found it difficult to drink fast. On the routine errands that Mom sent me on to the local liquor store, with a note to the store clerk giving me permission to buy a pack of cigarettes for her, I usually managed to leave with a pack or two of smokes and a bottle of bourbon or vodka for myself. And no, the note said nothing about permission to stealI authorized that on my own. Self-sanctioned destruction. Thats what most of my young adult life was like.

As I turned sixteen, the realization that I was nearly six feet tall and weighed almost one hundred and eighty pounds spared me from any further physical abuse at the hands of my mother. But it meant an intensification of the mental and emotional abuse, which was actually more damaging to me than being beaten unconscious or deprived of sleep for days.

As a teenager, I often wished Mom would make me sit on the hardwood floor again with my hands folded together, knuckles down. The pain of my own weight crushing my hands as I sat on them for hours was not as bad as feeling the eyes of the neighbors on me as I walked past their houses, knowing that Mom had probably regaled each one of them many times with accounts of my faults as a teen. Usually she would get the name of the drug or the brand of booze wrong, as she magnified my misdemeanors to any neighbor or stranger who happened to pick up the phone when she called. I always felt as if every one of the neighbors and even people several streets over knew my every move. It was shameful to feel their piercing stares and their complete disgust as they looked at me. Mom made no secret of who she called and when she called them. The only thing she kept to herself was the neighbors eventual pleas for her to stop. Mom not only embarrassed me at my expense, she also embarrassed herself at my expense. There was no limit to what she would do to ensure I continued to feel less than human.

At first I always drank with at least one other teen, or a few friends. We hung out in the woods behind a small group of apartments just down the street. There we shared many firsts: a first kiss, a first smoke, a first hit off a joint, and even the first sexual experience. But with the move from my hometown in California to a new town, Sandy City, Utah, came my introduction to solitude. I knew no one, no one my age who drank or smoked or did drugs. Sandy City and most of Salt Lake City, most of the state for that matter, was very religious.

It took me several weeks to find the few fellow students who lived as I did: a life of drinking and drug abuse, secretive and out of control. By that time I preferred to drink alone, anyhow. I enjoyed the local park after dark, long after closing. I spent more time alone, after midnight, drinking myself into the Stone Age at Mesa Park than I spent sitting in class at Hillcrest High School.

The world was changing all around me, but everything I did and everyone I came across seemed meaningless and impersonal: everyone except Darlene. At that point, Darlene was the only one who could reach me. She was the only one that even tried. She introduced me to her husband, her family, and a few select neighbors, including Judy Princepeople who werent tainted by Moms negative influencenot yet, anyway.

Looking back, I know that her kindness, her love, and her unsolicited recognition saved me. What Darlene gave me at that time was more than I had ever expected from anyone. What she gave I treasured above everything.

She gave me respect, and the opportunity to speak.

She gave me friendship.

She gave me hope.

From the day I met Darlene my life changedfor the better, but also for the worse.

Now I was exposed to what a real family had to do to function. I was totally confused: my need and my overpowering desire to destroy myself conflicted with the love and respect I was being so freely given.