The Late Bloomer

The Late Bloomer

Chapter One: Growing Up Before I Grew Up

People call someone a late bloomer when it takes them longer than everyone else to figure out who they are.

I think that's me.

But the strange thing is, in a lot of ways, I grew up too early.

When I was a kid, my father was sick. While other kids were worrying about cartoons, bikes, friends and what they were going to do after school, I was learning how to take care of a house and a grown man.

My brother and sister eventually moved on and ended up in foster care.

I stayed.

I stayed home with my dad.

At an age when a father should have been taking care of his son, I found myself helping take care of my father. I cleaned the house. I helped him. I worried about things a kid shouldn't have even understood yet.

It should have been the other way around.

But life doesn't always care about the way things are supposed to be.

School wasn't much of an escape.

I got picked on a lot. I was bullied enough that avoiding school started feeling easier than walking through those doors every morning and wondering what was waiting for me.

So I missed school.

Sometimes I ditched.

Sometimes I just didn't go.

I wasn't thinking about grades or what missing school might mean ten years down the road.

I was thinking about getting through that day.

One day, it got so bad that a counselor actually came and picked me up and took me to school.

I still remember how weird that felt.

Most kids got dropped off by their parents.

I had a counselor coming to get me because getting me into the building had become a problem of its own.

Looking back, I don't think people really knew what was going on inside me.

Hell, I probably didn't know either.

I was just surviving.

Then my father died.

And the little bit of a world I had left disappeared with him.

After spending so much of my childhood helping take care of him, suddenly he wasn't there anymore.

And once he was gone, I started moving.

California.

Florida.

New York.

And every place would leave something behind in me.

---

Chapter Two: Learning to Work

After my father's death and all the moving that followed, I eventually ended up in New York.

New York became the place where a lot of my firsts happened.

My first real job.

My first girlfriend.

I lost my virginity there.

And I went to jail for the first time there.

Good firsts and bad firsts.

Growing-up firsts and what-the-hell-am-I-doing firsts.

For a kid who had spent so much of his younger years worrying about things most children never had to worry about, I was finally getting a taste of independence.

But I didn't exactly have an instruction manual.

Nobody handed me a book and said:

Here's how you become a man.

Here's how relationships work.

Here's how you deal with everything that happened when you were a kid.

I learned by living it.

And sometimes I learned the hard way.

My first real job was at Gowanda Harley-Davidson.

I started at the bottom.

I washed motorcycles.

That was it.

But I stayed there for four years.

Little by little, washing bikes turned into learning bikes.

I started getting trusted with more. I learned more about the motorcycles and started doing bigger and better things with them.

And I discovered something about myself:

I was good with my hands.

Give me something mechanical.

Give me something broken.

Let me watch how something works, take it apart, understand it and put it back together.

That made sense to me.

Maybe because machines were simpler than people.

When something mechanical doesn't work, there's a reason.

Find the reason.

Fix it.

People aren't always like that.

Eventually, I lost my job at Harley-Davidson.

Four years were suddenly over.

And once again, life gave me two choices:

Stay down or find the next thing.

So I found the next thing.

I became a baker at Jubilee in Gowanda.

From motorcycles to baking.

Not exactly the career path somebody would draw on paper, but I worked.

After that, I became a parts delivery driver.

Eventually, I worked for a man named William, with Wolf Run on the reservation.

Then came the Stop & Gas gas station.

Then Taco Bell.

One job after another.

Some lasted longer than others.

Some I liked.

Some were just a paycheck.

But I worked.

Looking back, I can see something about myself that I probably couldn't see then.

I adapted.

That's what I'd been doing since childhood.

Dad gets sick?

Adapt.

Get bullied?

Adapt.

Miss school?

Adapt.

Dad dies?

Adapt.

Move?

Adapt.

Lose a job?

Find another one.

I didn't always make the right decisions.

Hell, sometimes I made some pretty bad ones.

But I kept moving.

Eventually, New York ran its course too.

And once again, I headed west.

Back to California.

Only this time, I wasn't the same kid who had left.

I had worked.

I had loved.

I had gotten hurt.

I had gotten into trouble.

I had learned motorcycles.

I had baked food.

I had delivered parts.

I had worked on the reservation.

I had worked behind a gas-station counter.

I had worked at Taco Bell.

I had learned that sometimes surviving means taking whatever honest work is available and figuring the rest out afterward.

When I returned to California, I eventually found the kind of work that would become a major part of my adult life.

And unlike all those jobs before it, this one stuck.

I've been doing similar work for roughly fourteen years.

Fourteen years of learning.

Fourteen years of figuring things out with my hands.

Fourteen years of becoming the guy people call when something doesn't work.

As a kid, I couldn't fix my father's illness.

I couldn't fix the kids who bullied me.

I couldn't fix my family being separated.

I couldn't fix death.

But somewhere along the way, I became a man who fixes things.

The one thing I never really learned how to repair was myself.

---

Chapter Three: Everything I Built

Back in California, I met the woman who would become my wife.

We got married.

We had children.

And suddenly I had something I had wanted for a long time:

A family of my own.

Here I was, the kid who had once taken care of his sick father, now a father myself.

I wanted to give my children what I had wanted when I was young.

A dad.

A home.

Somebody who was there.

But marriage brought another battle.

I felt like I constantly had to prove myself to my wife's parents.

I wanted them to see that I could provide. That I could work. That I could take care of their daughter and our children.

But no matter what I did, I never felt accepted.

So I worked harder.

I tried harder.

I kept trying to prove myself.

Looking back, maybe I spent too much of my life trying to prove myself to people who had already decided who they thought I was.

Then, when I was around thirty-four years old, something entered my life that I never expected.

Methamphetamine.

According to my experience of what happened between us, my wife was the person who first introduced me to it.

And that decision turned both of our worlds upside down.

I didn't start using when I was fifteen.

I didn't start at eighteen.

I didn't even start in my twenties.

I was a grown man.

A husband.

A father.

And I still wasn't prepared for what came next.

Our relationship changed.

Our home changed.

We changed.

Eventually, our children were taken away.

There are few things that can describe what it feels like to have your children removed from your life.

Instead of that loss pulling my wife and me together, we fought.

Every day.

We were angry.

We were hurt.

We blamed each other.

We blamed ourselves.

But underneath all that fighting was the same thing:

We wanted our kids back.

So I started putting in the work.

Not talking about doing it.

Doing it.

I went to rehab.

I went to counseling.

I did what the court asked of me.

For approximately three years, I worked with my counselor, Judy, and dealt with the court process surrounding my family.

Three years is a long time when you're trying to prove that you deserve another chance.

But I kept going.

Eventually, the work paid off.

I got my kids back.

I got my house back.

I got my car back.

Little by little, pieces of the life that had fallen apart were coming back together.

My wife and I were doing really good.

For a while, it felt like we had actually beaten it.

Like maybe the worst chapter of our lives was behind us.

But rebuilding something doesn't erase every crack underneath it.

Eventually, I started discovering things that, from my perspective, were happening behind my back.

Trust started disappearing again.

I reached a point where I didn't want to keep living the same cycle.

So I separated from her for a while.

I wanted her to focus on herself and the kids.

I wanted to focus on myself and the kids.

Maybe if we stopped destroying each other, we could each become healthier parents.

But during that separation, she became involved with somebody else.

For me, that changed everything.

Eventually, our marriage fell apart.

Then came a restraining order.

And once again, I lost access to my children.

Except this time, the separation didn't last a few weeks or months.

It became years.

Nearly five years.

Nearly five years without speaking to my children.

Birthdays happen.

Christmases happen.

School years begin and end.

Kids get taller.

Their voices change.

Their interests change.

And you're somewhere else knowing time isn't going to stop and wait for you to fix everything.

That became another kind of prison.

After my marriage fell apart, I ended up in another unhealthy relationship.

That relationship became chaotic.

Eventually, I found myself in jail again.

Another courtroom.

Another fight.

I fought those charges.

Ultimately, the charges against me were dropped.

But having charges dropped doesn't magically return the time you lost.

You just walk out and keep going.

And that brings me to now.

Still dealing with divorce court.

Still trying to finish something that started years ago.

Most importantly, still fighting for a relationship with my children.

But before I go any further forward, there is somewhere I need to go backward to.

Because before all of this, there was a little mountain town.

There was a lake.

There was snow.

There was a best friend.

And there were two German Shepherds.

---

Chapter Four: Green Valley

It's funny how memories work.

You can spend years moving forward, putting one life behind you and starting another.

And then something small brings you all the way back.

For me, sometimes it brings me back to Green Valley Lake.

Back before New York.

Before Florida.

Before marriage.

Before drugs.

Before courtrooms.

Back when my dad was still alive.

Back when I was just a kid.

Green Valley Lake was a small mountain town. I couldn't tell you the exact population back then, but it probably felt like there were only about 2,000 people living there.

And there wasn't much to it.

We had a post office, a grocery store, an arcade, a lumber store and a bar.

That was pretty much it.

If you were looking for a shopping mall, movie theater or some big attraction, you were in the wrong damn place.

But as kids, we didn't need any of that.

We had the lake.

I'd walk around that lake all the time.

We'd go swimming.

We'd catch fish.

We'd spend hours outside because that's just what you did when you lived up there.

And then there were the flatlanders.

That's what we'd call the people coming up the mountain from down below.

We'd make fun of them.

They'd come driving up from the city, especially when there was snow, and you could tell immediately they weren't mountain people.

To us, they were flatlanders.

We were mountain kids.

One of the people who shared that childhood with me was my best friend, Jamie Gardner.

Jamie and I were always running around together.

After school, we hung out damn near every day.

At least on the days when I actually went.

We went to birthday parties.

We played soccer at school.

We played Jurassic Park.

When you're a couple of kids surrounded by mountains and trees, pretending you're in Jurassic Park doesn't require much imagination.

Those mountains could become anything.

A forest full of dinosaurs.

A place to hide.

A place to explore.

A whole different world.

And we weren't always exploring alone.

We had our dogs.

Jamie's dog was Sherlock.

Mine was Tally.

They were German Shepherds.

Those dogs went everywhere with us.

Especially Tally.

Tally was my shadow.

If I left, Tally wanted to know where I was going.

If I disappeared, Tally wanted to find me.

That dog wanted to be wherever I was.

One time, Tally actually jumped off a two-story balcony just trying to find me.

Two stories.

Didn't matter.

Apparently, Tally decided finding me was more important than finding the stairs.

That's the kind of dog Tally was.

Jamie had Sherlock.

I had Tally.

Two best friends and two German Shepherds running around a little mountain town like the whole damn place belonged to us.

In our minds, maybe it did.

Then there was the snow.

A lot of snow.

When you're a kid, snow doesn't mean shoveling a driveway, putting chains on tires or worrying about getting to work.

Snow means adventure.

Jamie and I would go pretty damn far.

There was an abandoned Boy Scout camp out toward Snow Valley.

We used to hike from around Green Valley Lake toward it.

It wasn't some little walk down the street.

It was a hike.

But we would go.

Two kids wandering through those mountains, sometimes with our German Shepherds right there with us, heading toward an abandoned Boy Scout camp like we were explorers discovering some forgotten place.

Looking back, I sometimes think:

What the hell were we doing all the way out there?

But back then?

It was normal.

It was freedom.

When I remember my childhood, I see two different kids.

There was the kid inside the house.

That kid had a sick father.

That kid cleaned.

That kid helped take care of things he shouldn't have needed to worry about yet.

That kid missed school.

That kid got bullied.

And then there was the kid outside.

That kid had Jamie.

That kid had Tally running beside him.

That kid played soccer.

That kid walked around the lake.

That kid swam and caught fish.

That kid pretended dinosaurs were chasing him through the woods.

That kid hiked through snow to abandoned places with his best friend and their German Shepherds.

That kid laughed at the flatlanders.

That kid had adventures.

That kid was free.

They were both me.

Pain has a way of making itself loud.

The good memories are quieter.

Sometimes you have to stop and look for them.

And when I do, I remember Jamie Gardner.

Sherlock.

Tally.

Soccer.

Birthday parties.

Jurassic Park.

Fishing.

Swimming.

The lake.

Snow.

Mountains.

And a little town with a post office, grocery store, arcade, lumber store and bar.

Somehow, that was enough.

But childhood doesn't stay forever.

Eventually, my father's sickness became impossible to ignore.

And the next memory takes me down the mountain.

To Long Beach.

---

Chapter Five: Long Beach

After Green Valley Lake came Long Beach, California.

For a while, I stayed with my grandparents.

By then, my father's health had gotten worse.

He was in the hospital, waiting for a heart transplant.

I went to see him there.

As a kid, you hear something like heart transplant, but I don't think you can really understand what it means.

You know your dad is sick.

You know he's in a hospital.

You know everybody is worried.

But somewhere inside you, he's still your dad.

You expect him to get better.

You expect there to be more time.

During that period, I remember my uncle telling me something that stuck with me:

"We all go to hell in our own way."

I don't know if I completely understood what he meant at the time.

Maybe I still don't.

But I remembered it.

Everything around us was changing.

There were plans being made about where all of us kids were going to go.

I was eventually supposed to go to Florida, where my mother was living.

My brother was going to stay there.

And my sister?

At that point, we didn't even know where she was.

Our family wasn't just separating.

It felt like we were being scattered.

Different homes.

Different places.

Different lives.

Then my aunt came to get me.

Just me.

And there is one memory from that day that I don't think I'll ever lose.

My dad was asleep on my grandparents' couch.

He had his oxygen.

Sick as he was, that's where I left him.

I got into the van with my aunt.

And somehow, my dad realized I was leaving.

The next thing I remember, he came running out of my grandparents' house.

He was in his underwear.

This man was sick.

He needed oxygen.

He was waiting for a new heart.

But his son was leaving.

So he ran outside.

He came up alongside the van.

And he put his hand against the glass.

I can still see that hand.

Of all the things a person remembers from childhood, sometimes it isn't the big picture that stays with you.

It's one image.

One second.

For me, it's my father standing beside that van in his underwear, sick as hell, pressing his hand against the window as I was being driven away.

I don't remember some big goodbye speech.

I don't remember anybody explaining what that moment was going to mean.

I just remember his hand on the glass.

And then we left.

As far as I can remember, that was the last time I ever saw my father in person.

I think I talked to him one more time on the phone after that.

Maybe a few words.

Then that was it.

I didn't know, sitting in that van, that I had just watched my father disappear from my life for the last time.

If I had known, would I have gotten out?

Would I have hugged him longer?

Would I have told him something?

Would I have pressed my hand against the other side of that glass?

Those are questions you can ask yourself forever.

But kids don't know when they're living through the moments they're going to spend the rest of their lives remembering.

To me, I was leaving.

That was all.

Another move.

Another house.

Another adult deciding where I was going next.

Some goodbyes don't announce themselves as goodbyes.

Sometimes somebody just puts their hand against a window.

And then they're gone.

From Long Beach, I went with my aunt to Corona, California.

Another place.

Another house.

Another beginning.

---

Chapter Six: Corona

In Corona, I moved in with my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Dave and my two cousins, Patrick and Jeremy.

For a little while, I got to do what a kid was supposed to do.

I skateboarded.

A lot.

I ran around with my cousins.

There was a lot of youth in those days.

A lot of street hockey too.

We'd grab our sticks and play wherever we could.

I was twelve years old, running around Corona on a skateboard or playing hockey, trying to fit into another completely different life.

Because that's what I had become good at.

Getting dropped somewhere new and figuring it out.

I started going to John Adams.

And I didn't like it.

At all.

I had come from this little mountain-town life in Green Valley Lake, and now I was in Corona.

New school.

New kids.

New surroundings.

And unfortunately, one thing followed me.

I got picked on again.

Maybe I was just an easy target.

Maybe I was different.

Maybe kids are just assholes sometimes.

Whatever the reason, school became something I didn't particularly want to be part of again.

So outside of school was where I wanted to be.

Skateboarding.

Street hockey.

Running around.

Being with Patrick and Jeremy.

Being twelve.

But even while I was starting this new life in Corona, part of me was still somewhere else.

With my dad.

Before I left him, I told him I would call him every day.

That mattered to me.

Maybe because after watching him run out to that van and put his hand against the glass, calling him was the one thing I could still do.

I couldn't take care of him anymore.

I couldn't be there.

But I could call my dad.

By then, he had left Long Beach and gone back up to Green Valley Lake.

My brother went up there with him to help take care of him.

And I was down in Corona.

I think it was around my second week there when I remember talking to my dad on the phone.

Nothing about that phone call told me it was going to be one of the last ones.

It was just me calling my dad.

Like I promised.

Then the next day came.

I wanted to call him again.

I asked my aunt.

She told me no.

I didn't understand.

"Why?"

I had told my father I was going to call him every day.

Why couldn't I call him?

But she wouldn't let me.

The day kept going.

And I kept wondering.

Finally, toward the end of the night, I asked again.

"Can I call my dad now?"

This time, my aunt didn't just say no.

She pointed toward me.

Come here.

She took me upstairs.

My sister was there too.

And then she told us.

My father was dead.

He had passed away in Green Valley Lake.

My brother had been there.

My brother was the one who found him.

His heart had stopped while he was sleeping.

I was twelve years old.

It was shortly after my twelfth birthday.

And I remember feeling like everything inside of me just crumbled.

That's the best word I have for it.

Crumbled.

My father had been sick for so long that maybe somewhere in the back of everybody's mind, we knew this could happen.

But knowing somebody is sick and hearing the words your father died are two completely different things.

This was the man I had spent part of my childhood helping take care of.

The man I cleaned the house for.

The man I worried about.

The man I watched sleep with oxygen.

The man waiting for a heart transplant.

The man who ran outside in his underwear when he realized I was leaving.

The man who pressed his hand against the glass of that van.

And now he was gone.

I couldn't call him tomorrow.

I couldn't call him the next day.

I couldn't keep the promise I had made to call him every day because there wasn't anybody on the other end anymore.

My brother had been there when it happened.

He found our father in his sleep.

As horrible as all of it was, I've always been able to take at least a little comfort from that.

Dad was sleeping.

His heart stopped.

And if you've got to leave this world, being asleep and not knowing it's happening isn't the worst way to go.

But try explaining any of that to a twelve-year-old.

At twelve, I didn't need an explanation of death.

I needed my dad.

And he was gone.

Everything changed after that.

Again.

There wasn't much time to understand it.

Life kept moving.

I remember going to Chuck E. Cheese one final time.

There's something strange about that memory now.

Chuck E. Cheese is supposed to be one of those places filled with noise, games, pizza and kids being kids.

And there I was, twelve years old, carrying something inside me that no arcade game could make disappear.

Then it was time to leave California.

Again.

I got on an airplane.

Destination:

Florida.

When I got onto that plane, I wasn't the same twelve-year-old who had arrived in Corona a couple of weeks earlier.

Something had been taken out of me.

Maybe that was the moment another piece of childhood ended.

Maybe that's when some of the anger started.

Maybe that's when I began learning that people can disappear from your life before you're ready to let them go.

I don't know.

I was twelve.

All I really knew was that I had promised my dad I'd call him every day.

And suddenly there was no number in the world I could call to reach him.

So I got on the plane.

And I went to Florida.

---

Chapter Seven: Clermont

The plane took me to Clermont, Florida, about half an hour outside Orlando.

And Florida was different.

Not just because I had crossed the country.

Florida was different because, for the first time in my life, somebody was about to put some real structure around me.

I went to live with my mom and my stepdad, Bob.

They both came from law enforcement.

They had worked at the same police department in Seal Beach, California.

My mom had been a dispatcher, and Bob had been a sergeant and K-9 handler.

So you can probably imagine what happened when this twelve-year-old kid showed up thinking he knew how the world worked.

I had spent years running around.

Missing school.

Going where I wanted.

Doing what I wanted.

Taking care of myself in ways a kid probably shouldn't have had to.

I thought I had this shit figured out.

I didn't.

My mom and Bob made that clear pretty damn fast.

There were rules now.

Expectations.

School.

Discipline.

Respect.

Consequences.

Talking out of line?

Consequences.

Singing and screwing around at the dinner table when I was supposed to behave?

Consequences.

Back then, discipline in that house could also become physical.

I got my ass beat for stepping out of line.

That's what happened.

Looking back at my own experience, though, I didn't see those years as them trying to destroy me.

I saw it almost the opposite way.

They broke down the version of me that had learned to live without structure and started rebuilding me.

And strangely enough?

I loved them for it.

Because underneath all those rules was something I hadn't had consistently before.

Direction.

Bob became one of the most important men in my life.

My biological father had given me one part of who I was.

Bob helped build another.

He taught me responsibility.

He taught me discipline.

He taught me how to work.

He taught me how to handle myself.

He taught me things that stayed with me long after I left Florida.

A lot of what I know today, I can trace back to him.

Unfortunately, years later, I would lose him too.

Bob passed away a couple of years ago.

That's one of the strange things about getting older.

Eventually, the people who helped build you start disappearing.

And you're left carrying whatever they managed to teach you while they were here.

But back then, Bob wasn't a memory.

He was right there.

And he was helping turn me into somebody.

For the first time in my life, I actually started learning how to go to school.

Not just physically showing up.

Actually going.

Getting up.

Being where I was supposed to be.

Understanding that school wasn't optional just because I didn't like it.

I went to Clermont Middle School for around a year and a half, maybe closer to two years.

I also played basketball in Florida.

And I got good at it.

Really good.

For once, there was something at school that I didn't want to avoid.

Put a basketball in my hands and things made sense.

During that period, I experienced other things that were completely new to me.

I went to summer school for the first time.

I also went to Vacation Bible School for a little while.

That was kind of weird.

After everything I'd already experienced, suddenly I'm sitting in Vacation Bible School.

Life has a sense of humor like that.

We also had a Rottweiler.

Dogs had always been part of my life.

Tally back in Green Valley.

Sherlock with Jamie.

And now another big dog was part of this version of home.

Florida became a strange mixture of my life.

Loss and structure.

Fear and discipline.

My biological father and my stepfather.

One man was gone.

Another was teaching me how to live.

And somewhere in the middle was me.

A kid who had lost his father and was being taught that life wasn't going to stop because I was hurting.

I still had to get up.

I still had to go to school.

I still had responsibilities.

I still had to learn respect.

I still had to become somebody.

Looking back, I think that's one of the biggest things Bob gave me.

He didn't treat me like my life was over because something terrible had happened to me.

He expected something from me.

At first, I'm sure I hated some of those expectations.

Eventually?

I understood them.

Florida changed me.

For the first time, I learned what structure felt like.

For the first time, I started becoming a student instead of just a kid who was supposed to be enrolled in school.

And for the first time, I had a man in my life deliberately trying to teach me what he thought I needed to know to become one myself.

Then came another trip.

This time, we were getting in a truck.

And heading north.

---

Chapter Eight: The Road to New York

We drove from Clermont, Florida, to Gowanda, New York.

It took about three days.

And all of us were packed into a Dodge Dually.

There was me.

My brother.

My mom.

My stepdad, Bob.

And our Rottweiler, Brandy.

Five of us—including one big-ass Rottweiler—making our way from Florida to western New York.

Three days on the road.

State after state.

Gas stations.

Food stops.

Watching the scenery change through the windows as Florida disappeared farther and farther behind us.

By that point in my life, traveling wasn't exactly new.

I'd already been moved around plenty.

But there was something different about driving across the country.

When you fly somewhere, one minute you're in one place and a few hours later you're somewhere completely different.

Driving makes you feel the distance.

You watch one state turn into another.

The landscape changes.

The weather changes.

The towns change.

And mile after mile, you realize just how far you're getting from the place you started.

Our destination was Gowanda, New York.

At first, this wasn't supposed to be some permanent move.

We were basically going up there to visit friends.

My parents knew the owners of Gowanda Harley-Davidson.

At the time, I had no idea how important that connection was eventually going to become.

To me, they were just people my parents knew.

I didn't know that one day I'd be working there.

I didn't know I'd start out washing motorcycles.

I didn't know I'd spend four years there.

I didn't know that motorcycles and working with my hands were going to become part of the person I was growing into.

At that moment, we were just visiting New York.

We stayed for about a week.

Then we loaded ourselves back into that Dodge Dually.

Me.

My brother.

Mom.

Bob.

Brandy.

And we drove all the way back to Florida.

Back to Clermont.

And almost immediately, there was one problem.

We were miserable.

We didn't want to be there anymore.

It felt like it rained every damn day.

Rain.

Rain.

More rain.

After being in New York, Florida just didn't feel right anymore.

Whatever had seemed normal before that trip suddenly wasn't.

Sometimes you don't realize you don't belong somewhere until you leave it for a little while.

Then you come back and something inside you says:

Nope. This isn't it.

That's basically what happened.

We had driven three days to New York.

Stayed about a week.

Driven three days all the way back to Florida.

And then decided we wanted to go right back where we'd just come from.

So we packed up.

Again.

By that point, packing and moving might as well have been a family tradition.

Except this time, we weren't going to New York for a visit.

We were moving there.

So once again, we pointed ourselves north.

Back toward Gowanda.

Back toward western New York.

Back toward the friends we'd just visited.

Back toward that Harley-Davidson dealership that, without me realizing it yet, was going to become the place where I got my first real job.

We arrived in New York.

And this time, we stayed.

Not a week.

Not a month.

Not a year.

Fourteen years.

After a childhood of constantly being moved from one place to another, New York became the place where I finally stayed long enough to build an entire part of my life.

That's where I would grow up.

That's where I would get my first real job.

My first girlfriend.

Where I'd lose my virginity.

Where I'd get into trouble.

Where I'd go to jail for the first time.

Where I'd work job after job.

Where I'd start figuring out what I was good at.

And where I'd begin becoming the adult version of myself.

But none of that had happened yet.

For now, I was just a kid arriving in Gowanda in a Dodge Dually with my family and a Rottweiler named Brandy.

---

Chapter Nine: Gowanda, New York

When we finally moved to Gowanda, New York, I was twelve years old.

Not for long, though.

I turned thirteen right around the time we got there.

I remember that like it was yesterday.

After everything that had happened—Green Valley Lake, losing my dad, Corona, Florida, driving across the country and then driving all the way back—I was starting another life.

Again.

Except this time, New York was going to stick.

We moved into this little house that was already more than a hundred years old.

And I swear to this day that place was haunted.

Old houses already have a certain feeling to them.

They creak.

Pipes make noises.

Floors move underneath you.

You hear shit at night and don't always know where it's coming from.

But that house?

That house just felt different.

And apparently my brothers thought the best thing to do with a kid who already thought the place was haunted was to throw me in the basement.

Thanks, guys.

Nothing like being thirteen years old, living in a hundred-year-old house you think is haunted, and having your own family throw you into the basement.

Welcome to New York.

Around that time, I started school in Gowanda.

I went to Gowanda Elementary School, right there on Water Street, before moving on through the Gowanda schools.

And wouldn't you know it?

My introduction to school in New York didn't exactly go smoothly.

I got into a fight my first day.

But there's actually a little more to that story.

Back in Florida, one thing I'd gotten pretty damn good at was basketball.

I'd played there, and I loved it.

I was good at it too.

So here I am, the new California kid showing up at a school in Gowanda, New York.

New town.

New house.

New school.

Didn't know anybody.

Then I found out what we were doing in P.E.

Basketball.

Finally.

Something I knew.

Something I was good at.

I was psyched.

There was another kid in class, a Native American kid, who was trying to play point guard.

And I started defending him.

He'd get the ball.

I'd steal it.

Run down the court.

Layup.

Then we'd do it again.

He'd get the ball.

I'd take it.

Run.

Layup.

Again.

And again.

I wasn't trying to make friends at that point.

I was playing basketball.

And I wanted to win.

By the end of the day, he was talking shit.

So I basically told him:

"Well, at least I took the ball from you and scored."

Which was my polite thirteen-year-old way of telling him:

You suck at basketball.

He didn't appreciate my constructive criticism.

He told me to shut up.

Then he pushed me.

Now, maybe somebody else would have walked away.

Maybe somebody else would have thought:

First day at a new school. Probably shouldn't start anything.

That wasn't where my head was.

I'd spent enough of my childhood getting picked on.

I'd been the kid people messed with.

I'd been the kid who didn't want to go to school because of it.

And now I was this California kid standing in a school all the way across the country in New York.

I had already decided something:

I wasn't taking shit from anybody anymore.

So when he pushed me, I pushed him back.

Except I pushed him twice as hard.

That was me at thirteen.

I wasn't the same kid who used to avoid school because people picked on him.

Maybe I had gone too far in the other direction.

Maybe somewhere between California, losing my father, Florida, Bob's discipline and everything else, I had decided nobody was ever going to make me feel small again.

If somebody pushed me?

I pushed harder.

At the end of the school day, everybody started doing what we were supposed to do.

Putting our chairs up...

And that's where the next part of the story begins.