My foster families cousin that I was practicing karate with was the manager of a pizza restaurant and he offered me a job there. I began working after school and weekends making pizzas. The pizza restaurant was twenty miles from the house. The only way that I had to get there was on my bicycle. They all thought that I was a bit crazy but I rode my bike to work in all types of weather. My shift would finish at midnight so I would put my bike in a big taxi and go home. One local taxi company was running the big London taxis and my bike easily fit in the back. I did this for about a year until I turned sixteen when I got my drivers license and a car. I also received my GED from school. It was supposed to be the equivalent of a high school diploma. The school that I was going to was allowed to give pupils more curriculum points towards your GED. This was completely different then a high school diploma however. They basically gave you more points for easier subjects. I always felt as though I could have achieved much more if I would just have had a stable life for longer. I was a very intelligent kid and would probably have finished at the top of my class if I would have had the opportunity. My mind was focused on survival for years however rather then school work. My intelligence and intuition is probably what kept me alive in the boys home besides learning to fight well. I suddenly had more time since I was out of school and I had a car to get around in so I took a second job at the Sears warehouse during the day. I still thought about my high school diploma. I had heard that several companies would not hire you without a diploma and they did not accept a GED. It was also not possible to advance to a higher level position at Sears without a diploma. This bothered me as I felt as though I could do better so I got registered in the local high school. It was somewhat daunting when I realised just how far ahead of me that the rest of the kids were with their studies. I persevered however and was still working at the pizza restaurant at night. This was the first time that I had met other kids who had stable lives. I could not help resenting them a little bit. I had no idea how to act around them. My life had been so different to theirs. They had lived such privileged and sheltered lives. The class distinction was massive as well. Some of the kids had parents who owned casinos or had very well paid jobs in the casino industry. I could not imagine how it was to have your own parents at home and nothing to worry about besides getting yourself up for school. Most of them had never worked but had fancy new cars and clothes. I began gravitating towards the rich kids that did drugs. We had the drugs in common but nothing else. They would tell me about their ski trips and vacations. I was sort of fascinated and jealous at the same time of this. These kids eventually shunned me when they realised that I was not like them and could not afford to go on ski trips with them like the others. I began making friends that were criminals. They accepted me because I was not afraid of anything including committing crimes. We began partying together and I would supply all of the booze to the rich kids parties. I found a shop that would sell me alcohol and was buying crates of it and then taking it to the rich kids parties. I would then sell it to the rich kids at a premium rate price. Their was a hidden rage building inside of me because I felt hard done by. I went driving out in the desert one day while drinking heavily. I was very angry and very drunk. I took my car as fast as it would go along a ridge and did not make it around a turn. The car flipped over the side of the ridge and rolled several times before getting to the bottom. I crawled out of it without a scratch but the car was totalled. I got a lift home by some nearby motorcycle riders and I was back on my bike again. I began riding my bike to school and then to work afterwards. The manager at the pizza restaurant had promoted me to working the cash register. I was the only person around my age that was allowed on the cash register. We had other kids around my age working there but none of them could add and subtract without using a calculator. I had learned to add and subtract very well from dealing drugs and selling booze. I left the pizza restaurant the following summer and took a full time job at a metal fabrication plant. The plant was out in the middle of the desert and I would ride my bicycle there. It was only seven miles away from home so not nearly as long of a ride. I would usually get some cans of beer from a little shop after work and drink them about halfway home. I enjoyed the peacefulness of the desert. The school semester began again and I left the job. The man at the foster home allowed me to take an old truck of his back and forth to school. I was told that I must only go back and forth to school and nowhere else. The man began a job as a night shift janitor and would take me with him. We would pick up a van with the janitorial supplies and go from company to company cleaning. It was very hard work and I was not making much money. I still continued to see the other kids at school getting more and more with minimal or no effort. I was always very tired from working without much sleep. I was now angry at myself for wrecking my car as well. I was beginning to feel like I had lost my freedom because I could only go back and forth to school and then to work with George. I had made a friend at school who was a criminal. I knew that he was bad news but we got along pretty well. I asked my foster parents if I could start taking him home after school and they agreed. This went on for sometime and it began taking me longer and longer to come home because we started drinking and getting stoned after school. This kid did not have much money and lived in a trailer with his mother out in the desert. We spoke about the rich kids at school sometimes. It was hard to miss them with their sporting new clothes and tanned faces from the ski slopes. This was particularly annoying to me because I had been skiing as a very young boy before my mother died and I knew that I would probably be good at it but could simply not afford it. I knew how the other half lived because that was the life that I had before my mothers death. This always gave me something to work towards but was also very annoying because I was miles away from that type of life. I also knew that the tools were not available to me in order to achieve that type of life again. I would try very hard but always knew that the odds were stacked against me for achieving that type of lifestyle. My friend and I were driving home from school one day and we began talking about skiing and he said that we should just go. I said that I was only allowed to drive straight home after dropping him off and that we could not afford it anyway. I took him home from school on the following Friday and we had both heard all about the rich kids plans for their weekend ski trip. We had been talking about getting some beer that was a much higher proof to what we had been drinking. We bought some of it and had gone through an entire case before long. He said that we should just go up to the ski slopes and steal a pair of skis and then we could attach a rope to the back of the truck and ski along the snowy roads behind it. We found a long rope and went up to the ski slopes and stole a pair of rental skis and boots and took turns skiing behind the truck. We eventually got tired of that so we decided to rob a house. The house that we picked was off the road and nobody was around. It was a very nice house next to Lake Tahoe. We pried a window open and started to look around. There was nothing inside to steal. It must have been someones holiday home and their were no personal belongings. I was pretty drunk and started stacking some small furniture items by the window to take with us instead of just leaving. We did not realise that we had tripped a silent alarm when we opened the window. The police were out front next to where I had parked the truck. I knew that it was all over at that point. We both jumped out of the window but the snow was over the top of our head. My friend was lucky and landed on a frozen patch so was able to stay on top of the snow and get away. They caught me near the house and caught up to my friend later. I was taken to juvenile hall and ended up spending around seven months there. The man at the foster home got his truck back from the police after a few days. I got used to the routine at juvenile hall after awhile. I did a great deal of thinking and began to accelerate at activities including running and school work. I would set the pace when they let us out to run around the outdoor track. The teacher in the small school commented that I was gifted in science. I thought about how far behind that I had fallen in school since social services took me from the apartment where my father was keeping me years before. The thought occurred to me at that point that my life would never be what it would have been if I would have continued to have a sheltered life. My mind was damaged from all the drugs and abuse that I had suffered as well. I realised that even if I could somehow find a way to have a sheltered life again and concentrate on my studies that I would never be exceptional. I had lost to much so I decided to face the facts. The facts were that I was not going to have a stable or sheltered living arrangement for a very long time. I was probably not even going to have the foster home to go back to when I got out of juvenile hall. I realised at that point that I was going to have to cheat a little if I was going to be successful in life and get the money, status and stable living arrangement that I desperately wanted. I did not like being behind bars so I decided to focus on ways to achieve success by committing borderline crimes. Somebody once told me that people only believe what they think that they have seen. I had studied how the other half lived, dressed and acted so what if I could make people believe that I was one of them. How far could I take it if I just went through the motions and acted entitled. I would aim for the position in life that I would have had if I had not been taken into care. If I came across an obstruction in getting there then I would figure a way around it. This thought gave me a feeling of exhilaration. I felt as though I had nothing to lose as the alternative lifestyle was not acceptable to me. They let me out of juvenile hall and I temporarily went back to the foster home. It was not the same though and the man did not speak to me anymore. Things did not work out and I went to stay with a friend from school. The boys parents agreed to look after me and social services agreed. I received my high school diploma a few weeks later at sixteen years old. I only received my diploma because my previous school had given me so much extra credit for easy subjects. I was miles behind in most relevant subjects. The other kids who had a stable living environment and kept a normal curriculum were like college professors compared to me. I knew that I had no hope of going to college because my level of education was equivalent to that of a seventh grader at best. My friends dad raced mini stock cars and would take us around the races with him which I really enjoyed. There were girls, booze and marijuana. We would all camp out by a lake or river usually along with the other drivers, crew etc. My friend and I ran into someone that could sell us kilos of Marijuana. We started making a little bit of money selling small bags. This went okay until my friends dad saw us breaking up the pot into smaller quantities one day. It was made clear to us by them afterwards that we had better get rid of it or we would both be out on our ear. We both got a job washing dishes and clearing tables at a popular truck stop. I started getting a bad rash down my arm from the detergent and it got infected. My bad eczema and washing dishes for hours on end did not mix. This was the first job that I had which I could not do for a reason that was out of my control. I was devastated because I took so much pride in being such a hard worker. The day had come where I had to strike out on my own once again. I took all of the money that we had saved from selling the weed, a ring from my friends sister and a silver engraved mug that I had. The mug had been given to me by my father and he said that his family had it for years. I got on a bus heading to San Diego California. I was sixteen years old. The idea occurred to me about going to San Diego out of the blue simply because I could not think of a better place to go. I got to San Diego and went into a pawn shop with the ring and the silver mug. The next thing was finding a place to stay. I managed to rent a real dive of a hotel in downtown San Diego for a couple of weeks but it took all of my money and I was starving. I had a few packages of dried noodles but that did not last long. The following day, I went around to the local restaurants looking for work. I gave them my address at the hotel. My food had run out so I found some restaurants that were out of the area and did a few dine and dashes. Things were beginning to get desperate and I did not know what I was going to do when my rent ran out. I was really hungry and only had about three or four days of rent left.

Next Chapter: Chapter four