I believe it was November 1997 when the money to keep me in the Utah Boy’s Ranch ran out, necessitating my departure. Since my mom was a single working parent and less able to keep tabs on me (at least that’s what I’m assuming was the rationale), I was sent to live with my dad and stepmom in Provo, UT.
I moved in the middle of my sophomore year of high school, and though it was November, I didn’t start school at the local high school until the new semester started in January. I want to say I did home study or something until then.
Life was hard for me there. I was shy and quiet by nature with new people, so that didn’t help at all. For example, the youth at the local LDS church I attended didn’t speak to me, perhaps being shy like I was… Either way, it was awkward and uncomfortable.
School was also hard at first. I was honestly trying to transition away from stealing and doing drugs and whatnot to getting my life back together, so to speak. But I struggled. It wasn’t that I wanted to do those old things. It was, I think, more that the kinds of kids who were accepting and friendly and open and who I felt most comfortable around were the drug kids. The other kids, the “good” kids, seemed to be more judgmental and exclusive.
I remember my first day of school at the new High School, when it came time for lunch, a girl from my English class (who I thought was pretty darn cute and who’s name I still remember) noticed I was sitting alone at lunch. She had the courage to come over and talk to me, which I imagine could have been pretty hard to do, but something happened during that brief conversation that I will never forget. As we were talking, she asked where I’d moved from, and I said the Utah Boy’s Ranch, and I think she asked what that was, and I told her it was sort of a correctional place for troubled youth. Her response is is burned in my brain forever. I don’t blame her for anything anymore (though I used to resent her). I’ve just never forgotten.
“Well, I hope you find some friends.”
And that was it. She walked off. I don’t think she ever spoke to me socially again.
I don’t remember at what point it happened in the roughly two years I lived with my dad and stepmom, but at some point, I got really down, really depressed. Each night, I would stay up listening to music on my portable CD player (one I’d stolen from Walmart when I lived in Murray) while I played solitaire on my ancient laptop computer, holding a knife to my chest, trying to get up the courage to kill myself.
This was pretty much my routine, night after night, for… I don’t know how long. I want to say a long time, but I can’t place it chronologically. It would make sense that it was before I started making friends again, but I don’t remember, honestly.
I think my slide back into my previous lifestyle started when as a church youth class we went to visit one of the less-active kids. He was a long-haired hippy-type kid, just like I’d been. I don’t remember exactly how we built a connection at the beginning, but I think it was me who brought some of my old lifestyle into the friendship. I started smoking pot again, and we did that together. I also remember “stealing” at least once (putting beer in a coke box and taping it back up and buying it as coke, just like I’d done once or twice in Murray for my friends. Only this time, it was for us.
It’s funny, though… As I write this, I recognize how much of my own life I’ve defined as bad because of some of the bad choices I made. It’s funny how easily all the good things, which were actually the majority, get muddied over, distorted, lost… forgotten.
He and I became very close friends, and I was glad to have him as a friend. He was a great kid, and we had a lot of good memories together, in spite of some of our choices being poor ones.
I don’t remember how long it took, but I started to make more friends and to become one of the kids like I was before–that everyone knew (although it was a big high school, so it wasn’t on the level at all like it was before at my jr. high, more just in certain circles, I guess). I liked that, being known, the attention, etc., having people want to be friends with me just because they’d seen/heard about me/my reputation.
I started to grow my hair out again. My dad and Stepmom bought me (at my request) a Volkswagon bus for me to drive to school and work.
$800.
Wish you could buy those still for $800. 🙂
It was in high school that I had my first girlfriend as well… (my only girlfriend until college, actually, where I had exactly a total of one more and none since… and with me nearly 38 as of this writing…). She wasn’t even from my school. I met her through a friend of mine, and she lived about 30 minutes away from me, or so. She and I became very close. I was 16, and she was 14 when we met, I think. We hung out together all the time. I’d drive down and spend time with her, but we had a rule, no kissing on the lips (she wasn’t 16 yet, and that was just one of our rules).
Funny… I kissed her arm, neck, cheek… and… we did other things… but I never kissed her on the lips…
Pushing the boundaries… breaking the spirit of the law, really, if not the letter.
My first non-paper-route job was working for an air-cooled Volkswagon shop as a shop hand/apprentice mechanic. I spent the summer working there and earned just a percentage of the shop earnings, which turned out to be about $2.50 an hour for the summer.
Minimum wage was like $5.15 or something in those days. I was pretty unhappy about that. Oh well.
Once I made friends, life was pretty much normal life–school, adventures, more school, fun times. Gas was cheap back then, under a $1 a gallon, so you didn’t have to be rich to find fun things to do, just a tank of gas could free you to enjoy all sorts of adventures, and once my Bus bit the dust for good, and my sister let me use her 1981 Toyota Corolla, filling the tank was like $10.
I have my regrets, from those years. I remember letting someone steal for me and my friends. I tried to make amends years later on that one. I found myself still acting on the peeping tom tendencies I’d had since I was a little boy. It wasn’t as often as it was in Murray. Life was different. There was less opportunity and less interest as well, I think. I had a girlfriend. Though I found myself on at least three occasions over those two-ish years acting on those tendencies, interestingly, my interests were otherwise occupied. Pornography was still an issue, though, and the internet was starting to be a thing, so that made it more easily accessible, though still nothing like the ease of today. Back then pictures loaded a few rows of pixels at a time, and streaming videos? Right… good luck with that.
I hate porn. If I had a daughter and anyone else treated her like a piece of meat… flip.
And yet, at 38, I still am a user of it myself. Go figure.
Classic addiction.
Anyway… squirrel.
I also did some cheating in school as well. I remember cheating at least once in my auto mechanics class, and I remember cheating in my home-study English course, writing book reports on a bunch of books I didn’t actually read myself but had read to me as a child years before.
Yes… some regrets…
Anyway, so much was packed into those two years. When I think of everything that happened, the friends, the adventures, the many challenging and exciting experiences… it’s a bit shocking to think that they all happened in such a short amount of time.
I’ll share two of those experiences.
There came a point in my life again where the drugs couldn’t do it for me anymore… again. I didn’t like what I was doing. I didn’t like my life. I wanted things to be different. I remember one day one of my sisters came to visit. I don’t remember why, but I was sitting out on the curb, and she came out to talk to me. I was having a hard time and was down, and she said something to the effect of “Do you want to change?” To which I replied, something like “It’s too late.” I must be forgetting some part of the conversation because the next thing that I remember her saying was “Do you want to want to change?”
That’s what I remember most to this day. It struck me. I think somewhere inside of me it gave me hope. I did want to want to change. I think that was enough for a beginning.
Another experience I had was when my best friend’s father found out I was smoking pot. Instead of going to my parents first, he went to me and said something to the effect of, if you’ll go to this self-help seminar, then I won’t tell your parents.
I went. It was like a four-day seminar where you really dig in. It was hard. It was good. It changed my life. I started to clean up my life from there. I started to make better decisions. I think I started to have more hope, more happiness.
That’s how I left Provo, on that new note, going that positive direction. Happier. More hopeful, I think. When I turned 18, I moved back to my mother’s house in Murray, where the next brief chapter of my life was written.
All in all, my 1st stay in Provo was filled with happy and painful memories, positive and negative experiences, good and bad choices… and lots of in between…
Lift the World 
Thanks for sharing, brother… I love you… :}