The Story of Channon Rose: Lessons between the Lines (9 page)

I kept on cutting myself and it was liberating. The pain inside was finally coming out. It made me feel a little better even if it would only last a short while. The horrible depression and pain that had stuck with me for so long suddenly vanished for a few moments. Each time I dug that blade into my skin and watched my blood spill out I couldn’t think of anything else and that was a good feeling.

Most people think that someone cutting themselves is for attention or an attempted suicide. For me, it was neither that night. I was focused on me and trying to rid myself of pain. Young, confused, and on medication I’m sure had a lot do with my thinking and mindset at the time as well.

Soon after, my evening dose of Seroquel must have kicked in as I was done cutting myself because I recklessly unlocked my bathroom door, walked down the hall to my little sister’s bedroom covered in blood, and stood in the dark with my arms dripping blood at my sides. I stood there for a while and then turned on the light to wake her up. “What are you doing?” she asked me. I held my arms up to her and said, “This is because of you; this is all your fault.” I knew what I was doing was wrong but I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. Her eyes grew big and she just sat there quiet and in shock—she was so scared. I have no idea why I went into her room or why I said that to her. It made no sense to me or to her. Nothing was her fault. I had just traumatized my baby sister and I knew what I was doing this time but it was as if my body was working but my brain was controlling me to do things I knew I shouldn’t have been doing.

Something inside me snapped, and I ran back to my bathroom and sat on the floor and started crying hysterically. What had I just done? I hit myself in the head over and over again. I felt so stupid. I felt really bad about what I had just done to my sister. I was just adding to my list of f*ck ups and feeling like the sh*tiest person on the planet. I just sat there rocking back and forth on the floor of my bathroom crying until I was carried away in restraints and loaded into the back of another ambulance. I was heading back once again to another hospital.

Each time I went back to a hospital, I died a little more inside each time. My youth and my spirit were being stripped away. I was no longer a child; I was a psych patient now—even when I was home. Everyone treated me like I was crazy with serious problems but they hadn’t seen anything yet.

Chapter 6

I
was released from the hospital before entering high school and was getting ready to start ninth grade. Before even setting foot into high school I thought I was a lost cause, and I don’t blame any of my family or friends for thinking that way about me. I attended Granada Hills High School. New school, new people, and the same scenario as always it felt like. I didn’t know anyone who was going to be going there. I had given up on trying to be “normal” or “good” and instead decided I wasn’t going to follow any rules and I was going to have shitty attitude because I really didn’t care. I felt like nobody was going to respect me, so why should I respect them? Besides, everyone thought I was crazy…because I was.

A month into Granada Hills High and I was already skipping school and flunking all my classes. I didn’t care about anyone or anything…including myself. I started getting into drugs. Not my prescriptions drugs, but illegal street drugs like acid and ecstasy. The first time I tried drugs I was hooked. I immediately loved them. They made me feel good. All this time of feeling bad and depressed and on my regular meds making me feel so terrible, these new drugs made me happy. How come the doctors weren’t passing these drugs out, these actually helped me I thought to myself. I had finally found something in life I really liked. Drugs. You know how all parents warn their kids about hanging around the wrong people? The one kid that is a bad influence on everyone else? That was me, I was the wrong person to be around. Parents did not want their kids hanging out with me.

My freshman year was also the year I became sexually active. I got a boyfriend named Miller, and I lost my virginity to him. You know how that goes—I believed it was love, and thought I was in love with him. Every year my dad would take our family to a lake called Buena Vista to go camping and have fun waterskiing, jet skiing, and knee boarding. That year I invited Miller to come with us. My dad was called back into work and Misty was also working (the lake wasn’t too far from where we lived), so it ended up being one of my friends, Miller, and his friend alone at the lake. My father always kept alcohol in his motorhome for entertaining friends and parties, so of course once he had left we snuck into the motorhome and raided the cabinets. There were gallons of hard liquor and we all got really drunk that day. I have to admit it was a pretty fun day. While the parents are away the teenagers will play. That night, in our tent—I had sex for the first time…on an air mattress…with one of my friends sleeping next to us on the same mattress. It wasn’t romantic at all, special, or my ideal first time experience but nothing else was ideal in my life so I didn’t really care. From that night on, I loved sex and wanted to do it all the time. Our relationship didn’t last long after that. We eventually broke up because we went to different schools, and it was hard to see each other so we ended it. I was now doing drugs and having sex with a lot of different guys, mostly guys older than me, but I was far from grown up. In fact, because of doing drugs, having sex all the time, and the influence that drugs have on you, I began a new path that I really didn’t expect or see coming.

One day when I was walking home from skipping school, a limo driver pulled off to the side of the road and stopped his limo next to me. He rolled down his window and asked me if I wanted a ride home. It was a nice limo, and I had never been in one before, so I got in. The driver asked me where I lived, so I gave him my address and we headed in the direction of my house. He was asking me all these questions and then out of nowhere he asked me if I wanted to make some money.

“Sure,” I said, excited that I would be able to afford more drugs. It was becoming increasingly difficult to steal money from my parents. The limo driver pulled into a grocery store parking lot near my house and parked there. He got out and joined me in the back of the limo. Then he locked the doors and told me that if I gave him a blowjob, he would give me $100.00. I was shocked at the proposition and didn’t expect it at all. I thought he was going to ask me if I wanted to wash his limo or something. He was a lot older than I was and he was overweight and sweaty. I was really disgusted by him but I wanted more drugs and with $100.00 I could buy a lot more drugs than I was used to buying. I asked him if anyone could see us inside the limo and he said no. The windows were tinted. He unzipped his pants and pulled his pants and underwear down to his knees. Then he put his hand behind my head and pushed it down onto his already erect penis. I was hesitant at first, but just thought about how good I would feel when I had those drugs in my hands. I started giving him a blowjob and he fondled my newly developing breasts and said things like, “Oh yeah!” and “You like sucking older men’s cocks?” I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Fortunately he came really fast so it went by quickly. When he was done, he handed me $100.00 in twenties. He had baby wipes conveniently located in the back seat, like he did this kind of thing all the time. He wiped himself off and gave me a baby wipe to wipe my mouth off and then he jumped back into the driver’s seat and drove me home. It all happened so fast. I felt really dirty but I had also made $100.00 in less than a minute so I was excited about that. So I had my first escort experience at the young age of 14. This went on for a few months. One day I invited my friends after school to come home in the limo with me to get a ride home. I ended up having sex in the back of the limo with the old guy in front of all four of them.

Some of my friends thought it was cool that I had made $300.00 for having sex with him, but one of my friends was crying when we got out of the car and was really upset by all of it. I didn’t care what she was thinking or that she was upset, all I cared about was making money and doing drugs. Drugs will have that affect on you; once you’re addicted you will find a way to get them even if that means doing things you would never normally do.

I began attending a church youth group with a bunch of teenagers that met for Bible study. I wasn’t into it, but my parents made me to go in an attempt to keep me out of trouble. I met a boy named Jason there and thought he was so cute! I was going to make him my boyfriend. I was obsessed with him. We ended up dating and hooking up, even though he went to another high school and was two grades above me. I thought I was the coolest girl in the world because I was dating a high school junior. I was one of the only freshman girls at my school that was dating a junior, which made me feel pretty awesome. I was still getting in trouble at school and I was such a bad kid, so naturally I hung out with other bad kids and decided to start my own girl gang. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, a little blonde white girl starting her own gang? Well before you get ahead of yourself let me just say we were some pretty bad ass white girls and if you ask anyone at our school they were scared of us and knew just how crazy we were. We, well I especially, wasn’t scared of getting in trouble, dying, or anything for that matter. Those are types of people you should be scared of, as they think they have nothing to lose. Our little girl gang was called AS2. It stood for ‘Ain’t Scared of Sh*t’ and it consisted of around 7-12 girls. We keyed cop cars, would graffiti school property, stole makeup from stores, ditched school, stole Slurpee’s from 7-11, smoked cigarettes, did drugs, and partied hard. We were ridiculous to say the least. We were bored and troubled teenagers and really enjoyed causing trouble. It kept us entertained.

I remember one night we all went over to our friend Julie’s house, her parents were super cool and let us throw parties there all the time. We would all sneak out of our houses at night and steal money from our parents to pitch in to have Julie’s dad buy us a keg, vodka and whatever drugs we could get our hands on. This particular party I happen to get really wasted at. I remember a couple of us climbed onto the roof and took ecstasy pills and mixed it with acid. Let’s just say some really weird shit happened that night. We were talking to aliens and riding on UFO’s it was pretty awesome to say the least, until my mom came into to the party with one of her friends looking for me. That was one of my most embarrassing moments for me in high school. My mom found me at the party and dragged me out of there making a big scene in front of everyone there, what a buzz kill. I was so mad at her. She told me I was never allowed to go back over there again. But of course that didn’t stop me. I kept going to Julie’s parties until one night some guy I had never seen before pushed me into the bathroom and tried to rape me. I never went back there again after that night.

One day a new girl came to our school, Jill. She was very pretty, had blonde hair and blue eyes, and wanted to hang out with us. Our group or ‘gang’ was popular at school; especially for only being ninth graders and everyone knew us as the troublemakers and partiers. They knew we all did drugs and did whatever we wanted. No one in our group liked the new girl Jill. They said she was a fake bitch, but I gave her a chance and let her in our ‘gang’ because I knew what it was like being at a new school with no friends.

We became best friends and did everything together—until the day I found out that she had hooked up with my boyfriend behind my back. I was hurt, angry, and really unpredictable because I was mixing street drugs and my psychiatric medication. I was the last person Jill wanted to betray. I didn’t care about getting in trouble for anything and I certainly didn’t care about Jill anymore. I was going to make her pay for what she had done. I was infuriated with her.

I got one of my other friends in AS2 to steal my mom’s car with me in the middle of the night. I was going to burn down Jill’s house with her whole family inside it. No one has sex with my boyfriend and gets away with it, especially not my “best” friend. The fact that this happened brought up a lot of bad memories from childhood, my dad and my mom and the cheating, and the hurt that it caused my family. It just added to my hatred and anger.

There was a slight problem with my plan because I was only 14 years old and didn’t even know how to drive but I somehow managed to drive my mom’s car in the middle of the night to my friend’s house who was going to help me. While I was backing out of my moms parking spot where we lived I accidentally ran into a cement divider as I was trying to figure out how the car worked. I really didn’t care that I messed up my mom’s car. I was on a mission. I picked up my friend and we headed to the store to buy gasoline. They didn’t sell any at the drug store, so we stole some spray paint and a lot of nail polish remover instead. It was the most flammable stuff we could find or knew of at the time. We weren’t the brightest of the bunch I will say that. When we arrived to Jill’s house, I spray painted SLUT and WHORE all over her garage and the front of her house. Then we doused the front bushes with nail polish remover and lit a match. Once it lit, we ran back to the car as fast as we could so we wouldn’t get caught. I never did see the damage from lighting Jill’s house on fire because we weren’t going to stick around to get caught. The damage must have been pretty bad though, because there were a ton of police officers at our school the next day. I was called to the principal’s office and questioned on where I was the night before. I denied the whole incident and they had no evidence or proof against me, so they let me go. Jill’s home wasn’t enough for me though; regardless of how much or how little damage had been done to her house. I hadn’t personally confronted her yet. During lunchtime, I planned for my friends to lure Jill to the bathroom. My plan was to get her in the bathroom, cut her hair off really short with a pair of scissors and beat her over the head with a wrench for having sex with my boyfriend. I wanted to teach that shifty bitch a lesson. As planned, my friends got Jill into the bathroom but she must have had an idea that I knew what she had done because she was terrified to see me in the bathroom. As soon as Jill entered, a friend of mine locked the bathroom door so that no one else could come in. I didn’t say a word to Jill, I just punched her as hard as I could in her pretty little face. She fell down to the ground and I drug her by her hair into one of the bathroom stalls. I hit her over the head with the wrench and then I pulled out my scissors from my hoodie and started chopping off chunks of her blonde hair. I cut about half of her hair off before I shoved her head into the toilet and tried to drown her. One of my friends saw that I was taking it too far and pulled me off her and she ran out of the bathroom crying.

Later that day, while sitting in my English class, some police officers entered the room. They asked if there was a Channon Rose in the class. I raised my hand and said, “Yup, that’s me.” I knew why they were there and I didn’t care. They handcuffed me in front of my whole class and said that I was under arrest for arson, battery, and attempted murder. They read me my rights and took me to juvenile hall. I sat in handcuffs and ankle cuffs in a holding cell for a few hours. Then I was put into juvenile hall. They called my mother and once they found out that I was bi-polar and had been hospitalized in the past, they released me to the mental institution instead of staying in juvenile hall. In addition to going back to another mental hospital, I was now kicked out of the entire Los Angeles School District for what I had done. I was then placed in Special Education for being emotionally disturbed.