E9 - Knowing Better

"They were brother and sister and they were doing things they definitely should not have been doing."

This week's episode is all about the things we do when we should know better. Whether as children or adults, sometimes we do things that we know we shouldn't. Or maybe we don't know we shouldn't. How do you know the difference between right and wrong when you've been taught that the wrong things are okay your entire life?

The journey continues as we explore life after my mother's release from jail. When the system failed to recognize the dangers of returning me to her custody, we found ourselves starting over in one of the roughest parts of downtown.

The neighborhood itself was a microcosm of extreme urban poverty – chain-link fences, homeless people on doorsteps, and neighbors whose living conditions defied imagination. The family next door, perpetually dirty and living in hoard-like conditions, became my playmates in good and bad ways. These relationships crossed boundaries that, looking back, reveal how childhood trauma and neglect reshape a child's understanding of normal behavior.

When a neighborhood bully targeted my friend, my protective instinct manifested in shocking violence. Was this extreme reaction the product of undiagnosed anger issues, or simply the natural response of a child who'd learned that adults couldn't be relied upon to maintain safety?

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey listeners, thanks so much for tuning back in this week. This is going to be a video episode If you're watching somewhere with video, if not, you know, keep enjoying the audio. We're on episode nine now. I think Kind of crazy. As always, I want to thank all of you for being here. I appreciate it so much. Keep sending me that fan mail, find me on social media, send me a message. I just I love hearing from you guys. I love hearing from you guys. I love helping you out with your own situations. Recap the last episode.

Speaker 1: 0:27

You know I was sleeping in the car while my mom and her boyfriend were upstairs partying and the cops got called. They arrested them. I had to go live with my dad for a little bit and his psycho girlfriend Wanda. So let's just jump right into this week's episode. Let's just jump right into this week's episode.

Speaker 1: 0:50

So we talked a lot about me living with my dad and all of the random things that he was trying to get me to do, you know, going to this coin auction and like trying out with the Cub Scouts and all this other stuff. That just wasn't me and he was really trying to get me into these things and I think I might have painted an unfair picture of this a little bit, because I really described it as like him forcing these things on me, and for sure he was. You know, these weren't things I was interested in. He was trying to turn me into something that I wasn't, because he wanted a more traditional boy, I guess not like an introverted nerd type kid, but his priority was always his kids being happy. I guess and that probably sounds weird because he was so absent and didn't, like, do anything with his kids. Right, he was never a real father, but at least later in life, you know, he just wanted his kids to be happy. However, they were happy, like he doesn't care that I'm a huge nerd. He's not like some big jock who hates nerds and things like that. Right, he's happy that I'm happy. But he was trying to expose me to all these things that I just didn't care about and so I don't know it's um, you know there's some things to think about there in terms of like, who he was, who he is and what he wanted for himself and for his kids, I think. But I think I also misspoke a little bit on the last episode, because I talked about going to the Cub Scouts, meeting with the baseballs and everything, and like having never done anything like that, but I remembered that I was actually on a t-ball team for a while when I was a kid. I don't remember what age I was, it had to be younger than 10 but I was on some t-ball team in Kentucky called the Orioles, and I just remember you know a couple of think, and of course I wasn't very good at it because I'm not a sports kind of guy, but yeah, so I guess I did play a sport at one point in my life.

Speaker 1: 2:52

Don't really have any memories of it, though, but eventually it was time to leave my dad's, because my mom was released from jail at some point, along with her boyfriend Earl, and you know why didn't my dad try to keep me? Because his house was definitely more stable than anything I had ever experienced before. Of course, putting aside his psychotic girlfriend and those living conditions that I definitely didn't want to stay in right. It just kind of seems to me like he probably should have tried to like fight for custody of me, and it seems like it probably would have been pretty easy for him to get custody of me, like my mom had just gone to jail for neglecting her child, being high, being drunk Seems like it probably could have taken me and kept me away from those things and, you know, thrown me into more things with him selling drugs, doing drugs, his girlfriend always being high. But I probably would have been a little bit more stable if more stressful. But that's not what happened. My mom got out of jail and I went right back to living with her and, of course, going to jail. She obviously lost her job if she had one at the time, who knows and she lost whatever place that we were living in at the time.

Speaker 1: 4:02

Not even sure if we had a place at that time, but the next place I remember living with her and Earl was this tiny little house on Smith Street. And again, this is in the middle of downtown, like really, really rough part of downtown, probably rougher than anywhere I had actually lived previously, which is kind of saying a lot. So when we moved into this house it was again kind of like that apartment that we had lived in before, where my uncle threw up on my things. It was just sort of like straight front to back, you know, all the rooms were in a row. There were no side rooms or anything like that, but it was a standalone house, from what I remember, and we had a decent sized backyard. But again, it's in the middle of downtown Terrible area and, as always, this place was filled with roaches. And I talked in one of the previous episodes about how the roaches get into all of your electronics and they just destroy everything. They leave, like these little roach poops all over the place, these tiny little brown flecks, and it's terrible. But here we are again. Roaches are back and I had a PlayStation still at this point and I remember the roaches getting into this thing and like they just completely destroyed it, it completely stopped working. I feel like there had to be a few other places we lived in between my mom getting out of jail and this place, but I can't really remember them at all. So we're going here to Smith Street.

Speaker 1: 5:27

One thing that I remember about us moving into this place was that we needed, like all new stuff. I'm assuming that when she went to jail, like anything that we had remaining in, whatever place we might've been staying, had gotten completely thrown out and we had nothing left whatsoever. So when we moved into this house, we went to a rental company, you know, like a rent-a-center or errands or one of those places where you can rent to own like furniture and things like that, except it's always a terrible deal because you end up paying two or three times more than what the item is actually worth. But you know, these places target poor people because, one, they don't have the money to just buy something outright. Two, they probably don't have good enough credit to put it on a credit card or something like that. And back then credit cards still weren't huge, I think. I mean maybe they were, and my mom just never had one because she had no credit to speak of, but that wasn't really an option for her. I mean, actually, when I was a kid, layaway at like Walmart and Kmart and places like that was still an option. If you don't know what that is, go look it up.

Speaker 1: 6:36

But we went to like a rent-a-center and maybe my mom had like just gotten a tax return or something because it seemed like she was flush with cash at this point and, of course, having the poverty mindset that she did, that we all did. When you get cash, right, you need to spend it immediately on the things that you want, the things that you don't have, because that money could be gone the next day and you don't know when you're going to get any more money. There's no saving money in situations like this, you spend it immediately. Money there's no saving money in situations like this, you spend it immediately. So she had the cash. We went to Rent-A-Center and we rented a bunch of furniture and stuff, but two main things that I remember getting were a bunk bed for me, which I feel like it was every kid's dream back then. Like everyone wanted a bunk bed. Of course it was just me, right? I didn't have anyone sleeping in the bed with me, but having a bunk bed was super cool. It was just me, right? I didn't have anyone sleeping in the bed with me, but having a bunk bed was super cool.

Speaker 1: 7:28

And the other thing that we got was a computer for me, finally. I had no idea how to use a computer whatsoever, and when we were in the rental place getting this computer, the woman who was selling us or renting us this stuff behind the counter she was like I guess she had to put in a ticket to get this computer set up with IT people or something, I'm not sure. And so she was like asking what I wanted my Windows username to be, and like I had no idea what this even meant really. And this was maybe this was the end of 2000, probably. But she was like, oh you know, do you like Pokemon and stuff like that? I don't think she like phrased it that way, or maybe she just asked my mom what I liked and that was the answer. But she ended up making my username on this computer PokenMan2000. What's that? That's nothing. Those are just letters you put together, woman, like do you have kids? Or I don't know. But my username on this computer was pokenman2000.

Speaker 1: 8:30

And she also set up this computer somehow to be internet capable, get on the internet. I'm not sure what she did. I was too young to really understand back then. But of course this was still back in the days of AOL. And you know, you had like the disks that you would put into your computer and you'd have like X amount of hours of free internet before you had to start paying for it. And then you needed like a credit card or something. And again I said we didn't have a credit card, we didn't have any form of payment for that, so you couldn't even do like the free trial and like I had no idea how to set this up, and so I was like just messing with the settings on the computer, like trying to figure out how to get internet to this computer, to the house. And of course I never figured it out because the company wasn't providing internet to the house, but I didn't know how that worked at the time. So like I had this computer and it just kind of sat there gathering roach shit because I didn't know how to use it, I had nothing to use it for.

Speaker 1: 9:22

But we lived in this small house on Smith Street and I know I keep saying it was a rough neighborhood. But I just I need you to understand this was a rough neighborhood. You know we're talking like chain link fences everywhere. There were homeless people like out front of the house sleeping there, and this neighborhood was actually primarily Hispanic. There were a lot of white people there. There were actually no black people in this neighborhood that I can remember. So just white people and Hispanic people and obviously just extreme poverty everywhere. And so there were neighbors next door. The house right next door to ours was this white family and they were for sure from the country.

Speaker 1: 10:06

The mother was illiterate, I don't know about the father. They were obviously very poor. They had, I think, four kids. One of them was an adult, two of them were around my age at the time, and then there was one boy who was a few years younger and so, like I would play with the three that were, you know, younger. I didn't play with the adult kid, obviously, I played with the other three. It was one girl and two boys and so I'd play with them all the time because they were next door neighbors and the mom, like had this huge fixation, I think, with Chuck Norris, you know, walker Texas Ranger, and at some point, like we had gone to a pawn shop and my mom had bought me this little portable TV. You know it had like a battery pack or something in it and it was like a tiny black and white TV you could carry with you and like pick up, you know, antenna channels, because that's what you had back then, right, and I remember going in the car with the parents of the family next door and my mom was there and like all the mom from next door cared about was like could I get Walker Texas Ranger on this little TV so she could watch it in the car? It was, I don't know it was funny. She was quirky, that whole family was quirky.

Speaker 1: 11:19

In trying to help you picture this family, I just want you to think of like a stereotypical country redneck incestuous family, country redneck incestuous family, and then you'll probably have a pretty good picture of both what this family looked like and how they acted. I was friends with the kids, like I said, the three younger ones the girl was the oldest of the three and I think she was like my exact age. Her younger brother was like a year-ish younger and then the youngest one, like I said, was a few years younger than that and I was around 10 or 11 at this time, probably like 11. The kids and the parents were always dirty, like they didn't shower or wash at all ever. I mean they were always caked in dirt and this was the first time I had ever really experienced that specific part of poverty. You know I feel like I've run the gamut of all these poverty experiences, but like having people with literal dirt caked on them was a new one for me, and I mean like you could just see it on their skin. You know it was like they were white. I mean they were like pasty, pale white. They didn't have any sun and you know you've got this brown dirt all over them. It was gross. I didn't care about that because, like I was an 11 year old boy, I was probably covered in dirt a lot of the time too, but I mean they never washed, it was just always all over them. It was so gross. And their house, of course, like the parents, were hoarders. There was stuff all over the house. You, of course, like the parents, were hoarders, there was stuff all over the house. You couldn't walk through this house, stuff everywhere. Yeah, it was just a bad situation for these kids.

Speaker 1: 13:02

The middle-aged boy who I was friends with, you know, like I said, he was about a year ish younger than me and there was like a really shitty park down the street, from the house to like two doors down or something, and you know, this place was like surrounded a chain-link fence, I think it had a swing set and like maybe a slide, I don't know. It was pretty shitty, but whatever, it was a park, we could go to it and we would go down there and play. And there was this other kid in the neighborhood and I think he was maybe a year or two younger than I was, but he was a bully for sure. Again, extreme poverty. And he wasn't being raised right, of course. He was like the type of little boy who always had his head completely shaved and he was running around in a white wife beater all the time and so he was always picking on the neighborhood kids and so we went to me and the other boy went to the park one day and this bully shows up and he starts picking on my friend there and I've always been very protective of my friends, even with like as small and scared of everything as I was.

Speaker 1: 13:58

He's picking on my friend and like he wasn't even doing anything crazy, he was just like being an annoying little kid bully. He was like calling my friend butterfingers because he dropped something, I guess, and it was really upsetting my friend in the way that stupid things like that upset little kids right. And like I wasn't having it, I had had too much of this kid. I didn't like bullies, even though I wasn't really bullied, I just didn't like it. I didn't want someone picking on my friend.

Speaker 1: 14:22

So this kid's over here bullying my friend. I go pick up this huge rock and walk over to this bully. I just smash him right in the face with this rock like huge gash on his face. He's bleeding everywhere. He runs away home crying, screaming. That was bad. I fucked that kid's face up. Yeah, I never heard from that kid again and he didn't go around bullying people and like like I never heard from his parents, like complaining about it, who even knows if he had parents at home, I don't know, but that's the kind of stuff I would do if someone was picking on my friends or if someone pissed me off, I don't know. I probably had some anger issues that really needed to be diagnosed and they never were. But these kids would come over to my house and you know we would play outside, run around roughhouse, who knows? Just doing kid stuff and, of course, them being in extreme poverty and the things they had probably been exposed to and things I had been exposed to. You already know where this is going. We're going into sex stuff.

Speaker 1: 15:25

I did a lot of stuff with those three, probably more than I had done with other people in the past, and again we were all like around the same age. The youngest one wasn't right, he was a few years younger. I don't think he was ever really around for any of that. But that was some really bad stuff, because the brother and sister definitely did a lot of stuff together and, yeah, that's, I don't even know what to say about that. Right, you've got this brother and sister doing sexual stuff together and, yeah, that's, I don't even know what to say about that. Right, you've got this brother and sister doing sexual stuff together and I'm there doing stuff with them because do I know any better? I'm 11 years old.

Speaker 1: 16:00

I probably knew better at this point, but was it just ingrained in who I was by then? Did I really think that it was that wrong? Or did I just think that this was completely normal because I had done it so many times before and seen it done so many times before? I don't know. I was talking to someone recently about this subject and I feel like they were really harshly judging me for all this stuff, because they were like, well, you know, when you were younger, like six years old or so, like sure, you didn't know any better. But then, by the time you're like 10 years old, you should know better, and you know, I don't know if I agree with them or not, because I was still a little kid. I don't know. That's a question for a psychologist somewhere to answer. But regardless, we did these things, they did those things. I am quite certain they were doing those things at their own house. They had their much older brother, who was an adult. I'm sure he was doing those things to them as well. So I don't know. It's a whole fucked up situation and I was there for it.

Speaker 1: 17:02

We still had our cat. At this point I told you we had that cat that we picked up on the way to Bowling Green and we still had it. We had it for its whole life, like I said. And around this point we ended up picking up another cat because, again, that's what poor people do they get more pets that they can't afford to take care of. So we got another cat. This one was just black and white, you know, a regular street cat, and we had it for a while at least.

Speaker 1: 17:27

Through living on Smith Street. I remember one time we had like a bonfire going in the backyard. You know we were all just sitting out there and of course the adults were drinking and getting high, because getting arrested for neglecting your child while you're high isn't going to teach you a lesson. What I'm fucking American Like you're not going to tell me what to do, right, like these fucking people. So they're out there, we're all sitting around this fire. It's it's a cold night had to be like fall or winter and this black and white cat that we had comes out there and gets like too close to this fire and burns all of its whiskers off. Why did the cat get that close to the fire? I don't know, but it burned all of its whiskers off getting close to this fire. But you know where all of this is going.

Speaker 1: 18:11

Of course we eventually got kicked out of this place that we were living because couldn't pay the rent, I'm sure. And of course, getting kicked out of this place meant that all of those things we had rented went away as well, because I imagine, like my mom, had paid the initial deposit to rent these things and then probably had never paid a single month to continue renting them. But all that stuff was gone my bed, the computer that I didn't even know how to use, all of it was gone. It was time to move on. At some point my aunt Gail had moved in down the street from us in this neighborhood and she was in like what would best be described as a shotgun house, probably. I mean, it was really really small, and I think we went to stay with her for a little bit after we got kicked out. I guess we're getting kind of towards the end of this episode, so I'll kind of just leave it off talking about my aunt a little bit, because I don't think I've really described her too much.

Speaker 1: 19:02

She was older than my mom, like just by a few years, and I think I've said before that her and my mom were like always together. They were really close. It was a weird sort of antagonistic sibling relationship, I guess, but like more so than I think regular siblings get to relationship, I guess, but like more so than I think regular siblings get to, like they would be really close for a few months and then, like something stupid would happen, something that didn't actually matter, right, just something that, like, poor people get upset about, right, someone said the wrong thing, or they bought pills and they didn't split them up evenly, or like some stupid shit like that, right, just something that doesn't fucking matter. And then they wouldn't talk for months. They would hate each other Like, oh my God, if you mentioned the other one, that was a death sentence, right, this was their relationship my entire life To this day. That's their same relationship. I don't understand it, but that's how they are.

Speaker 1: 19:51

For a while, when I was a kid, like for many years, my aunt was a pharmacist, or like an assistant to a pharmacist, right, she would work at, like the pharmacy in Walmart or Kmart, you know places like that, and, as you can imagine, her and my mom both being incredibly addicted to pills, this was probably not the best occupation for my aunt. So she would work in these pharmacies and, like she would steal pills. Of course, and it was easier right back in the 90s when she worked in these places and in the 80s when she also worked there. It's definitely not as easy to do that today, but she would steal pills. And then one time she somehow got a hold of a prescription pad from a doctor. And you know this was back in the day when, like, doctors had their own like little. And you know this was back in the day when, like doctors had their own, like little pads of you know, like you tear it off and it's a prescription and you hand it out. You know you didn't, they didn't put it in the computer and you go to a pharmacy and pick it up. Right, you had to have this piece of paper from the doctor. You took that to the pharmacy and, like you know, it's just kind of understood like yeah, the doctor prescribed this, so cool, you can have it. And so she got this pad of papers from this doctor and so I mean it's like a blank check, right, she can write all the prescriptions that she wants.

Speaker 1: 21:07

And her and my mom went crazy with this thing. I mean, they were getting pills left and right, all the pills you could want, no questions asked. But eventually questions were asked because I guess she kept going to the same pharmacy. She wasn't mixing it up enough and like trying to get opioids right. So someone called bullshit at some point and I actually remember being there when this happened my mom, my aunt and I were all in whatever store let's call it Kmart and she was writing this prescription. She took it up to the pharmacy and she tried to get it filled and they had caught on to her by this point and it was like taking way too long, and so her and my mom both knew that something was wrong. You know, they just got this feeling right. You got this sixth sense for the cops when you're doing these sorts of things. And so they both knew something was going on, but they weren't smart enough to like just fucking leave it alone. Like my aunt went up still trying to get this prescription filled even though it was taking so long, and she knew something was going on and, of course, like the cops were waiting for her and as soon as she went back up to the window to get her pills, they arrested her. And so, like there's the end of her pharmacy career, those years of training and like good reputation and getting paid good money to do this job, like all gone. Yeah, luckily my mom didn't get arrested this time, but yeah, my aunt was gone for a while and she had a few kids and she was actually raising one of her grandkids because his father had died when she was very young. And like cool, now who's like taking care of these kids now that you're in jail?

Speaker 1: 22:42

For a while, my aunt also had this peculiarity where she would only date Hispanic guys. I don't know where that came from. Like her ex-husband was white, but then after that she wouldn't date anyone white, only Hispanic guys, until she found this boyfriend named Bobby, who was white, and we're gonna talk a lot about him, probably in the next episode or two. One other quirk about her, I guess well too, like she had a whole bunch of Barbie dolls from when she was younger they were probably super valuable and like she got rid of them at some point, of course, because drugs and money, and she was super obsessed with Elvis. She had so much Elvis memorabilia wherever she went, like she took it with her, just like all these dolls and records and pictures and just all this Elvis stuff. So much of it it was crazy, yeah. So that's a little bit about my aunt Gail. You know she'll feature sometimes in the story, but now you have some background on her.

Speaker 1: 23:37

But ending the episode, like I said, she lived down the street from us in this neighborhood and we got kicked out of our place and we went to live with her for a while and that'll be a recurring pattern pretty much throughout the rest of my childhood. But I think that's probably good for this episode. I got a new mic for this one and I'm recording it with video as well. If you're watching it in video, obviously you can tell that I appreciate you watching the video, and if you're just here for the audio podcast, then I appreciate you, as I always do.

Speaker 1: 24:06

I don't think I really have like an ending message or thoughts about this episode. You know this one was pretty straightforward, just kind of like the next chapter after my mom got out of jail, and I kind of feel like I didn't talk about that specifically enough. But I don't really know what to say about that. You know, that's just what happened, like the system didn't really care that I was going back to live with her. I don't know, I'll talk about that some other time. I think it's been enough for this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in, as always, and I really hope to see you back next week.