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Everyone's pissed off at me this week. Just the usuals, mum, my sister, the school board, ha! Ya know? I don't see why they're
mad at me. I'm just trying to help out, make things better. They're just all hopped up on possessions and control, that's
not my, fault you know?? So, here's the dillio, my drift yo, can ya catch it? I'm old school at the skate park, not like
ChrisP and Merlin and those guys, the old old schoolers. They don't skate anymore and I do so I'm top dog to those little
guys, little piglets! I can bomb anything I want there and not just phat air and wicked railslide combos but I can tag my
art anything, full rights, ya know what I'm saying? They put up a climbing wall right beside the skate park and they painted
it some boring color. I had to make it look better, blend in with the park, ya know? I drew a F.U.G.A. tag on it. F.U.G.A,
you know, like Fulford. Underground. Guerilla. Army? Phil and Dill started it up years ago when they lived up the hill.
They used to play war games in the woods with the rest of the F.U.G.A. squad. Phil and Dill up on the hill. Now it's just
me and Flasper keeping the spirit alive. Anyways I got caught or sawn. One of the middle school teachers remembered me and
called my mum. I had to wash all the paint off. Mum helped me. It was so lame. Some one threatened to call the cops but
I guess since they see I'm a F.U.G.A. kid, no one wants Flasper comin' after their ass, he grew up to be a pretty big guy.
I'm pretty quick, now that I'm almost off those drugs-meds they had me on. Vitamins. Yeah, man. The other they, like Dr.
Benter and his books and associates and shit. They (the newschool they) put me on the vitamins. Now I'm quick again.
Feuuuum, like that!!
Agile too, I can climb through a window real easy again. That's why my sister Ellis and her husband Spence are mad at
me. . . I think. She'd called me and asked if I would walk her dog, Cujo and when I got there she'd put him inside and
locked the door. She said she was going to leave him outside but I knew he really wanted a walk 'cause when I said "wanna
go for a walk" through the window to him he got really waggy and happy. So I snuck in, I wouldn't just sneak into anyone's'
house but I thought it would be okay. She's my own sister, ya know? Spence was kind of choked when I got home after dark.
I only took Cujo to town for the day. Ellis came home and told me she just meant a walk around their neighborhood. Whoops!
Well what can you do when a deed is done?
He could think about the consequences of his actions and how people are going to react to the strange things he does.
. . That was a recent week in the life of Sammy. My brother can frustrate the hell out of me sometimes, a lot of the time.
He has a heart of gold though, and that is worth a hell of a lot, it makes him absolutely impossible to hate. We're three
years and two months apart and for our whole lives that two months has seemed like a couple more years. I participated in
a lot of guidance that a parent would and some that only a sister can. We have parents that are above average ages so there
were and are a lot of things that they just couldn't and can't relate to. Sammy's always been a different boy; forever the
attention seeker that has a hard time paying attention. Making it through a whole board game with him has never been an easy
task. His oddities increased during the summer of his fifteenth year, coming of age, drugs, hormones, enlightenment, sex-all
the normal teenage things hit him tike a truckload. He got thrown through such a loop and displayed such grand (and creative!!)
delusions that it landed him into a children's mental institution. I'll just make it easy and call it the bin, I don't give
a shit about political correctness, by the way.
I'm writing this for a reason, or that's what I set out to do when I started. I wanted to determine the cause for my
brothers' strangosity, what ever the shrinks couldn't diagnose, and come up with some sort of answer, solution, an idea for
a way to help him. I haven't done anything but bring back more memories that could use forgetting, write page after page
of detail on his mental state at different times, getting nowhere nearer than I was two years ago. How can I write about
him with out saying everything? How can I do the guy justice with out telling the whole story? Where the fuck do I start?
Birth? Do I say he was born too late in my mothers' life? Was that even a reason, can I blame her for waiting thirty years
until she found the right man? Of course not, can it be all boiled down to a sort of fluky chemical imbalance that results
in delusions and poor decision making?
Let's begin where the shit really began to hit the fan. It was in this summer of his fifteenth year, almost two years
before he was caught writing F.U.G.A. on the climbing wall. I had been away from home for a year, not there to look out for
him. It was his post grade ten summer and he was getting into the Saltspring Island party scene, it's the average age to
get in to drugs in that place in 2002, though a lot of kids start younger. Being a transient Island, a Mecca for hippies and
other fun lovin' tourists, it's a centre for drug use. It's not like Nanaimo, with organized drug crime and the H.A and shit,
there's just always a flow and that flow centers around Centennial park in Ganges or as we say on island: the park in town.
To say the least, a shit load of drugs comes through the park, especially in the summer. Pot was a constant, it was fucking
free, mushrooms were always attainable, boots for alcohol or smokes were ready and willing for a beer, two smokes or the change,
acid came in floods, ecstasy also in floods. The harder drugs weren't open like that, but they as well were not too hard to
find. Sometimes some weird drug would come along and everyone would do it stupidly. It was all pretty ridiculously excessive,
especially back in the day. Another thing about Saltspring being a small, slightly isolated town, is that age means very
little. In cities, they have clubs and activities for teens where one would meet other kids from other schools. But on the
island if you wanted to make more friends than were in the four hundred kid school you had to make friends with adults cause
there just werent any more kids. Theres barely anyone local between the ages eighteen and twenty there cause everyone leaves
after high school. It's an easy place to grow up too fast. I'd walked through this environment, never waded much past my
ankles as far as drugs were concerned. I deemed it safe for myself and my good sense but I had not proofed it for my little
brother.
About mid July, I'd heard word from my friends-- who had accepted Sammy as their friend-- that he was getting his tongue
in the old jar of LSD and he'd gone way off. They said he'd run up and down streets with some people and their dog screaming
at the top of his lungs that they were "mutha fuckin' pack-wolves" Now this is all fair and good for a teenager
of his age to try drugs and act silly, why not, you're only young once. . . But I knew my brain and that it couldn't take
much of the stretching and warping that drugs do. Sammy's brain was more tender to begin with, if I couldn't take excessive
usage with out losing it, I knew that Sammy could become a candidate for a weird panhandling tripper or something. But I
ignored that and dismissed it as regular coming of age experimentation. I wasn't on island. I didn't see the process of
him losing it from day to day. Most of all, I didn't admit the possibility that something could be wrong with him because
it was me who introduced him to my old buddies. I was the one who brought him to the park for the first time. If I admitted
it to myself then it would be possible to blame the fact that it was a problem on myself.
Let's begin where the shit really began to hit the fan. It was in this summer of his fifteenth year, almost two years
before he was caught writing F.U.G.A. on the climbing wall. I had been away from home for a year, not there to look out for
him. It was his post grade ten summer and he was getting into the Saltspring Island party scene, it's the average age to
get in to drugs in that place in 2002, though a lot of kids start younger. Being a transient Island, a Mecca for hippies and
other fun lovin' tourists, it's a centre for drug use. It's not like Nanaimo, with organized drug crime and the H.A and shit,
there's just always a flow and that flow centers around Centennial park in Ganges or as we say on island: the park in town.
To say the least, a shit load of drugs comes through the park, especially in the summer. Pot was a constant, it was fucking
free, mushrooms were always attainable, boots for alcohol or smokes were ready and willing for a beer, two smokes or the change,
acid came in floods, ecstasy also in floods. The harder drugs weren't open like that, but they as well were not too hard to
find. Sometimes some weird drug would come along and everyone would do it stupidly. It was all pretty ridiculously excessive,
especially back in the day. Another thing about Saltspring being a small, slightly isolated town, is that age means very
little. In cities, they have clubs and activities for teens where one would meet other kids from other schools. But on the
island if you wanted to make more friends than were in the four hundred kid school you had to make friends with adults cause
there just weren't any more kids. There's barely anyone local between the ages eighteen and twenty there cause everyone leaves
after high school. It's an easy place to grow up too fast. I'd walked through this environment, never waded much past my
ankles as far as drugs were concerned. I deemed it safe for myself and my good sense but I had not proofed it for my little
brother.
About mid July, I'd heard word from my friends-- who had accepted Sammy as their friend-- that he was getting his tongue
in the old jar of LSD and he'd gone way off. They said he'd run up and down streets with some people and their dog screaming
at the top of his lungs that they were "mutha fuckin' pack-wolves" Now this is all fair and good for a teenager
of his age to try drugs and act silly, why not, you're only young once. . . But I knew my brain and that it couldn't take
much of the stretching and warping that drugs do. Sammy's brain was more tender to begin with, if I couldn't take excessive
usage with out losing it, I knew that Sammy could become a candidate for a weird panhandling tripper or something. But I
ignored that and dismissed it as regular coming of age experimentation. I wasn't on island. I didn't see the process of
him losing it from day to day. Most of all, I didn't admit the possibility that something could be wrong with him because
it was me who introduced him to my old buddies. I was the one who brought him to the park for the first time. If I admitted
it to myself then it would be possible to blame the fact that it was a problem on myself.
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