The Story of Channon Rose: Lessons between the Lines (10 page)

Chapter 7

W
hat happens to bad kids when they get kicked out of normal schools? Well they put them where the rest of the bad kids go, a “special” school. I was sent to a “special” school for kids that had been kicked out of public school or could not function well in normal schools. “Special” was code for “where the bad kids go,” and we all knew it. It is called Special Ed, but it is the Special Ed for kids who are bad and can’t get through school without special help. They put all of us in one convenient location.

There were so many desperate, unruly, criminal, violent, and lost kids in that place. The school was called North Hills Prep. Many of the kids were more messed up than I was, if you can believe that. There were heroin addicts, meth heads, potheads, psychopaths and anything else you could possibly imagine. If a kid was REALLY bad, they were sent there. The classes at that school were a joke. The teachers barely taught us anything and schoolwork was rarely assigned because no one would do it anyway. Each class had about six students, and some of the kids even smoked meth in the back of class, to give you an idea of the learning environment and the entire situation there.

The teachers knew about most of the stuff that took place, but I had a sense that the teachers felt like many of the kids were beyond saving. I’m sure a lot of the kids’ parents felt the same way, which is why we were there, and why there are schools like that in the first place. There was even a section on campus where kids could smoke cigarettes, which was new to me. I hadn’t seen that before. We called it “the cage” because it was all fenced in and secure. Between every school period, I smoked cigarettes there even though none of us were of age to be smoking in the first place, but it was nice and convenient for us smokers. By the beginning of tenth grade I was smoking a pack a day. There weren’t very many kids at that school, so friend choices were very limited. Not only that, but as you might guess the kids there most likely wouldn’t have been the best influences anyways in terms of good friends.

I eventually became friends with Celine and Kay. They were both addicted to meth. They were really nice to me though and I didn’t really have anybody else at that school to hang with or talk to. They asked me if I wanted to hang out with them after school, so I agreed since I didn’t have any friends at that school yet. They introduced me to smoking meth, which up until that point I was too afraid to try. I really didn’t want to do it, but I was peer pressured into trying it. Normally, I would peer pressure other people to do things, so this was a first being pushed into doing anything. I took my first hit and my whole world changed. I was hooked. I had never felt so high in my life! I felt so happy, a feeling that I had missed and longed for. I always wanted to feel that way, feel happy and not feel sad anymore. In an instant, and because of the immediate gratification, I was addicted to crystal meth and the feeling it gave me.

I smoked meth whenever I could get my hands on it. I stole from my parents and started escorting again to make more money to buy more drugs. I was in high school and had a handful of clients that I escorted for.

Soon, my drug problem got really bad. Meth is a drug that can ruin your life really fast. It’s cheap, the high lasts a long time, it makes you skinny because you lose your appetite, and it’s extremely addicting. Among other negative effects that occurred from smoking meth, one obvious thing that happened is I had lost a lot of weight. My dad and Misty were completely oblivious to anything that was going on. My mom on the other hand was beginning to suspect that something was wrong with me though. She questioned me and asked if I stopped eating and at first I think she thought my eating disorder was back but then she suspected I was on drugs and of course a drug addict’s response is always NO. I said she was crazy and lied about everything. She was suspicious and rightfully so. You act weird and do strange things when you’re on drugs.

My mom didn’t trust anything I was telling her anymore so one day she went through my things and found a pack of cigarettes in my backpack. She completely flipped out on me, broke all my cigarettes in front of me and flushed them down the toilet. It wasn’t always easy to get cigarettes being underage. I had to wait outside liquor stores and pay random strangers to buy me cigarettes. That night my mom brought a pack of cigarettes home and forced me to smoke the whole pack until I got sick. Her mother had died of lung cancer from smoking, so she was very disappointed in me and lectured me on smoking and how it killed her mother. Making me smoke all those cigarettes and getting sick didn’t make me want to quit smoking, it just made me angry, want to rebel, and do drugs even more.

I didn’t like being told what to do and I hated authority figures. I had lost my trust in authority figures many years ago as a young girl from all the sh*t I had already been put through. I despised them, my mom, and anyone else who wanted to tell me what to do. If they wanted me to do something, I was going to do the opposite just to piss them off. Adults were never around when I needed them, and they didn’t prevent bad things from happening to me in the past so I didn’t care about what they thought anymore. I had lost all respect for them.

I wasn’t happy at home for so many reasons and because of it, I ran away from home multiple times during my childhood because I wanted to escape my life and my circumstances. I was beyond depressed and desperately unhappy when I was at home. I would run away from home and do drugs to feel better. Most of the people I hung out with at this point were older than me. It was a way to escape my life, which I hated. In reality, I hated myself most of all and the drugs made me feel better about myself.

So I kept doing drugs, and it didn’t matter what drugs they were as long as I could escape my reality for awhile, I was going to do them. There was a carnival that a couple friends from school were going to that night and I had asked my dad to drop me off and pick me up a few hours later. While we were walking around the carnival there were these hippies walking around asking people if they wanted to buy shrooms. I bought some but I had never done mushrooms before. They sold us each a bag and I ate the whole bag. I thought it would be fun to be high on shrooms at the carnival. I didn’t realize that you are only supposed to eat one mushroom. I ate the whole freaking bag! I started tripping balls to the wall. At first it was really fun, I was hallucinating and all the colors were so much brighter, and the sounds and smells of everything were much more intense. I must have met some guys that night because I ended up going home with them. I was so high and was really out of it I had no idea what was going on. Once I got to their house I started having a really bad trip. I took WAY too many shrooms and sh*t was not going well. I was starting to see really scary things like the devil talking to me, and cats were attacking me. Light bulbs were being shattered all around me and it felt like the world was going black and it was the end of the world. Then I felt like I was in hell, it was the worst experience I have ever had on drugs. I was freaking out. Then as I was having this horrible trip this guy that took me home started trying to have sex with me. I kept telling him to stop that I was freaking out but he just kept telling me I was fine. It was awful. The whole night I felt like the bad trip was never going to go away. I ended up passing out at this stranger’s house that night and waking up naked having no idea where I was. I was scared and wanted to go home. I felt violated and my dad was probably wondering where I was because he was supposed to pick me up that night at the carnival. We didn’t have cell phones back then so he had no way of reaching me. I asked the guy to take me home and I didn’t even know what his name was. When I got home I walked through the door and my dad just looked at me with a, ‘I am pissed at you face and you are in trouble’ but he never really did anything to punish me. I don’t know if he just didn’t care, figured I was a lost cause or if he was just glad I was alive. I told myself after that night I was going to stick to doing meth. I never did shrooms again after that night. I had a similar experience with acid and never did acid again after that either.

Between the drugs I was doing and the medication the psychiatrists had put me on I was a disaster and should have died many times. I overdosed on Vicodin, and then a few months later overdosed on meth. I was like a cat with nine lives. The meth made me skinny, but I was too skinny, I looked sick to everyone else but I liked the way I looked. I felt sexy when I was high. I would run away from home for 3 days getting high, and when I would eventually get back home I would sleep for days. I skipped school all the time, and I wanted to sleep my life away when I wasn’t high. Coming down off drugs sucks, and you feel like sh*t. Not to mention, when you’re up for several days on drugs, your body eventually crashes and you sleep for almost the same amount of time. It’s hard on your system.

I was basically doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and none of it was good. I can’t imagine how my parents dealt with it. It was just a bad situation all the way around, for them, and for me. If they would try and talk to me, I wouldn’t listen or care, and if my parents did nothing at all, then what? I would just get worse because I would think they didn’t care. It was a lose lose situation either way. It became apparent to my mom that something had to change. None of us could keep going the way that things were headed so my mom decided to take action. One night she came into my room in the middle of the night to give me my prescribed medicine, which wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to do. At least I thought it was my prescribed medicine. I swallowed the pill and told her to leave me alone because I needed to sleep. A few hours later, I woke up surrounded by people. My mom, my dad, and my mom’s friend Sue were all in my room. I felt really weird and drugged, but not high like the drugs I would usually do. I was completely out of it. The whole situation was odd, and I did not know what was going on. Then my mom said, “Chan you’re going away for awhile.”

I tried to move, but I couldn’t. I was very confused. The three of them pulled me out of bed and started to put clothes on me. “Why can’t I move?” I muttered. My mother told me I felt weird because of the pill she gave me. She repeated that I was going away for a while. I had heard her the first time, but I didn’t understand. Where were they taking me? They didn’t want to tell me where they were taking me. I started to get scared but whatever my mom had given me made me so weak and tired I didn’t have the energy to keep asking what they were doing with me. I figured they were sending me back to the hospital, but I wasn’t that lucky. I was going somewhere much worse. My mom had drugged me so that they could put me on a plane and send me to a lockdown facility for all girls in another state. She was sending me away, shipping me off for the state to care for me. She knew if she had told me, I would have just run away. I was so out of it that my dad had to carry me to the car so they could take me to the airport. My dad drove with my mom and her friend to take me to the airport which was odd because my mom and dad didn’t normally do things together so I knew something bad was about to happen to me, I just wasn’t sure what. When we got to the airport my dad gave me a hug, which was also out of the ordinary. He never hugged me. That was the last time I was going to see my dad for a long time and I hadn’t a clue. The airport provided my parents with a wheelchair to get me safely onto the plane. My mom had all of this planned out for weeks. I remember I woke up a few times on the airplane, but only for a few moments, and then would fall back asleep. That one little pill definitely did its job of knocking me out. As a matter of fact, the doctors had told my mom to give me only half of the pill, but she gave me the whole thing instead because she was scared I would wake up and try to run away. I was completely out of it for three entire days. I don’t have any recollection of my mom flying with me or even dropping me off at the facility.

When I finally woke up, I was in a small, cold, dark room that was really stuffy and smelled like feet. I don’t remember getting off the plane, the ride to wherever the hell I was going, or arriving at this dump of a room. There was an African American girl next to me. I had absolutely no idea where I was. I guess the pill I was given makes you forget things that happened. It causes temporary amnesia.

I asked the girl in the twin bed next to me where I was. She sucked her teeth and in the most ghetto voice I had ever heard, said, “Gurrrrrl, you’re in Excelsior Youth Center in Colorado.” I began to freak out, I kept looking around the room, hoping it was a bad acid trip or something, but it wasn’t. It was real. I was in a lock down facility for all girls in a completely different state and far away from home. Stuck in another new place, confused, scared, and angry. I felt so betrayed yet again but this time by my own mother. How could she do this to me I thought to myself? How can you just ship away your little girl when I needed my mother the most?

The girl in my room was Latoya. She was from Philly, and she was ghetto as f*ck. She was my roommate for the next several months. She was such a bitch to me because she thought I was some rich white girl. I was told that I would be spending my life locked away in that sh*thole of a facility, until I was better.

The “center” was a giant old house with 20 different rooms in it, but far from being a mansion, it closely resembled a small, compact prison. I lived there with 40 other girls in one house, locked away from the rest of the world. Every window had bars on it, and we had guards and staff 24 hours throughout the house. We weren’t allowed to use phones and we were only allowed to call home once a week for 10 minutes. Family members weren’t even allowed to visit. This place was worse than jail!

It was a facility for girls run by the state. Girls were to work a program and go to school until they were better and could leave. Some girls had been there for 5 years! I knew there was no way I was going to be there for five years and knew I would do whatever I needed to be able to get out of there in the least amount of time possible. When I initially arrived at the lockdown facility, my therapist that I was assigned to took me off all my medications. I went into withdrawal from all the street drugs I was on, and also withdrawals from my prescribed medications. Cigarettes weren’t allowed either, so that was another withdrawal to deal with. I was so sick for the entire first month I was there. My body physically had to deal with so much all at one time. Emotionally, I was dealing with just as much. I felt sick that I was betrayed and that my parents had drugged me and shipped me off to this place. My parents had just handed me over to the state to deal with, not to mention in another state. The psych wards and hospitals I was used to were at least near my home, and I never spent too much time in those places, at least not longer than a month at a time. This place was no joke; I was very far away and for a very long time. I felt trapped. I had never felt so low. It took me months to adjust and get used to living in a place like that. I really just wanted to be good so I could get out of there. So that was what I really began to focus on and put my energy towards. I can say I did the very best I could. I finally started to feel normal and level headed again because I was finally off all the drugs. My head could start to function on it’s own for the first time in what seemed like forever. Even before I was using illegal drugs, the doctors had me on so many psych meds that were wrong for me which distorted my thinking and behavior for years. Since I was free from all the meds, my assignments and classes were making more sense and I got straight A’s. I was in an environment that knew I had issues and worked with me so I was doing well, and I worked the program and did everything everyone told me to do. For once, I actually obeyed the rules and paid attention and it was paying off.