I had spent my spring break and my seventeenth birthday constantly working.  I hadn’t been home in a week.  I decided to go home since I had school the next morning.  I remember thinking on the way there that all I wanted for my birthday was more than three hours of sleep. 

When I got home, there were some birthday cards on the kitchen table and a film container filled with pot from my oldest sister, Kris.  I noticed that there were also some suitcases in the living room.  I wondered who was there. 

“Your sister Dawn moved back in.”  She explained that her dad had been raping her and that she was pretty upset.  Dawn was only fifteen.  I was so pissed off at my mom for being such a raving bitch in the first place, making Dawn feel like she couldn’t stand to live with her anymore.

“Why did you ever let her go there in the first place mom?  You knew he used to rape Cindy.”

Cindy is my second to oldest sister.  When I was seven years old, my bed was against the same wall that her bed stood against in the adjacent room.  Sometimes, late at night, I would hear her whisper.

“No. No, please not now,” I would hear through the heater vent as Charles, my stepfather, would try to quietly rape her without waking anyone. 

He did this to her for years.  My mom knew it, but she didn’t do a damn thing to stop it.  I often wondered whether my mom had gone to Cindy’s school and taken her out to lunch.  I wondered if she went just to tell Cindy that she knew how she felt as she did with me. 

I was worried about Dawn coming back to live with us for many reasons, but most of all I was worried that she would have to listen to my mom screwing the men she brought home at night.  I didn’t want it to strike up any bad memories… 

I was so tired from conference, but I still stayed awake that night.  I lied in bed thinking that my little sister Dawn had been through enough, and that I wasn’t going to let mom put her through anymore.  That night I started planning our exit strategy.

A couple months later, the hotel had settled down and my oldest sister Kris had invited me to go camping with her and her friends over Memorial Day weekend.  I had just traded my street bike in for a new Honda XR 500.  This was a kick ass dirt bike that was street legal.  I was certain they had made it just for me.  The thought of riding my new bike while out camping was so awesome that I asked Roget for the weekend off. 

I met a whole different kind of people that weekend.  They were all Vietnam vets, and most of them were at least thirty-five or older.  Vern Chavez was my favorite, and would later become a great friend.  He was a professional drug dealer.  I could buy a pound of Panama Red from him for five hundred bucks and split it with everyone at work. It would end up costing us about thirty bucks an ounce, which was not a bad price at all.  Here was my exit strategy, staring me right in the face.

Vern had brought an orange box full of peyote buttons for everybody to eat while camping.  They were dried up and as hard as rocks.  So, being the chef, I suggested that we boil them in water and drink the juice.  Everyone agreed and I went to work.  However, I was totally stoned and forgot to watch the pot.  The liquid had evaporated and the now black buttons were burning.  I thought I would be in trouble, but everyone just laughed and dogged me about what kind of chef I was. 

We ended up scrapping the pan and rolling up little balls of the black tar.  Since the concoction was my fault, they told me that I was going to have to be the guinea pig and try it first.  I already knew it would taste like shit, so I just swallowed it. 

I decided to hop on my bike and take a ride, but I was only about a hundred yards away on the hillside when I got so high that I couldn’t even think.  So, I just laid my bike down on the ground and sat there, trying to figure out how I was going to get back to camp.  I could not only see the camp, but also I could hear every one laughing down at the camp, but I still couldn’t figure out how to get there. 

After a while, I managed to finally find my way back down to camp.  Everyone asked me where my bike was.  I couldn’t talk.  I just pointed at it up on the hill.  Everybody just busted up laughing while I went behind a tree to go throw up.  I noticed that somebody had gotten my bike for me when I came back.  I was so high, for so long, that it was well past dark before I was able to speak again. 

When I got home from the camping trip, I told Dawn that I had found a way for both of us to move out.