Читать книгу A Rock And A Hard Place - Shane Townsend - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

You see, I am predisposed to addiction, both genetically and environmentally. This is why the first adrenaline rush that I experienced while robbing a bank made it impossible for me not to continue down that path, especially when things got rough. I have always turned to drugs and alcohol to cover my pain and anger, but since I had ceased doing that, this replacement was totally acceptable to and welcomed by me.

I am of a mixed race, black and white, my mother being of the Caucasian persuasion and my father being one of the many lost black souls that populate this country. My mother only messes with black men, and somewhere along the way, some black man turned her out on coke and urged her into the occasional prostitution endeavor. The coke and prostitution caused her to abandon me more than once, and I ended up in foster homes until she could convince the courts that she had changed and was competent to once again take charge of her child. I wish she would have just left me where I was. I would have been better off.

She continued to do coke occasionally after the last time she was granted custody of me, and she was a daily and frequent partaker of marijuana throughout my childhood all the way up until I left home, with its rampant and violent abuse at the hands of my stepfather. I was thirteen years old then. I decided that I would rather face the streets than continue to suffer the abuse that I had been subjected to. I don’t know about the coke these days, but I do know that she is still a pothead.

My father was a frequent visitor and guest of our state’s penal institutions. Most of my earliest memories regarding him pertain to visiting him in various prisons throughout the state with my mother. Once they were divorced when I was about four years old, I almost never saw him. If I was lucky, I would see him between incarcerations. I have never discussed with him his addiction issues, but I have heard things over the years. Add that to the fact that my mother was a cokehead, and I can only assume that my father had the same problem. His frequent trips to prison support that assumption. He just cannot stay his ass out of prison, so he must have the affliction to this day.

My predisposition, coupled with the anger I have for my mother for allowing her own seed to be so severely abused and for abandoning me and the anger that I felt toward my father for abandoning me to the abuse of my stepfather and not being the protector, guide, and mentor that I needed, was corrosive mentally and emotionally, and I became the type of person to do what needed to be done without thought to the consequence or how it affected other people. I was psychologically crippled for most of my life, so rather than seek positive solutions to my problems, I did what came naturally to me: I went out and got that paper. I had no compunctions about running up in them people’s financial institutions.