I come from a family of five: two brothers, my mother, my father, and myself. My parents came from South Carolina in ‘57. Both of them worked so I stayed with my grandmother a lot. I had a great upbringing.
But around the age of 10, I began to smoke weed. At first, my smoking was OK. I worked at the Safeway carrying bags for people on the weekend. I was also given an allowance every week. Back then, $5 would get you about 15 joints.
By the time I was 12, I started to break into washing machines. I loved to play sports and was good. But my having started smoking weed meant my life went from good to bad. By the time I was in junior high, my whole life had changed. I never thought weed would change one’s life so much.
See, by the time I was 14, I got my first charge. By now, I was selling weed. And because I was selling it, I was introduced to other drugs. By the next year, I was smoking PCP and dropping acid even though I was a good student in school.
Soon I was using cocaine and heroin. So I was now spending anywhere from $70 to $100 a day just to get high.
In 1982, I got nine to 32 years. I was now 22 and had a two-year-old daughter. So now I’m not going to be there for her. This was not a good time to be locked up in Lorton, VA. I saw a lot of people getting hurt and killed for nothing. The best thing that happened while I was locked up was I got my GED and went to UDC. I now had a new outlook on life. But once I came home, after doing nine years, I was right back to getting high off the same drug I had been using since I was 10. So I kept going back to jail for getting high. I have been to more than 10 jails. If I had it to do all over again, I would never get high because it’s the cause of my life going back and forth to jail.
To be continued.
