(Excerpt From Fuck My Life III)
...1989
So what I was 13 years old, I had already deemed myself as being "grown".
If you had a crackhead mother, an alcoholic grandmother, a child molesting
grandfather and a dope fiend father that you never knew, you would grow up fast
too. It had been almost a year since I started taking over my role as "big sis".
At first our mother used to stay the night with us, even if she didn't get in until
wee hours of the morning. Slowly we started seeing her less. She would come
once a week, bringing a bag of groceries with not nearly enough food for us to
eat make last til the bnext week, but we was happy as hell to have food. Before
you know it, she just didn't come at all. The house was section 8 and I never
really knew how the rent worked but I recalled that she said it was free as long
as the gas and electric was on.
We all went to school everyday, at first, but when we couldn't go on trips or never
had money for snacks, some kids started asking questions. When I stopped
going to school altogether, I pretended that our mother was sick and then
started saying I was staying at home to take care of her. Naturally, being as
though I was the oldest of us four, I had to quit school to look out for my little
brothers. I wasn't sure if I could actually call what I was doing, "looking out", but
we managed to survive.
Most days we would take turns going on the corner begging for change until we
had enough money to get dinner, the usual, penny cookies. With twenty five
cents each we could get fifteen cookies a piece. I never let the boys miss school
because I knew they could get free breakfast and lunch but on the weekends,
when school was closed, it was tough to come up with three meals a day. We
learned how to make one pack of Ramen noodles stretch to feed four hungry
stomachs. Sometimes, if we were lucky enough we would stretch it with a boiled
egg and one hot dog. We learned that syrup sandwiches could last a few days if
we used one slice of bread each and drank a large cup of water. We were okay
surviving in that manner until some nosey fucking neighbors discovered we had
illegal gas and electric and called the police.
The night the police came, we hid under the bed and pretended no one was home.