People only really noticed me when something got broken.
Sometimes the thing I broke was everybody’s patience.
I was twelve the first time I got arrested.
And it started because I didn’t want to go to school.
That’s it.
No drugs. No fight. No spectacular crime worthy of an episode of Cops. I simply refused to go to school.
Mom had apparently reached the end of whatever patience she had left, because she called the sheriff’s department.
A deputy showed up.
He wasn’t there to arrest me. He wasn’t even particularly angry, at least not when he arrived. As far as he was concerned, his job was simple. Get the stubborn kid into school.
All I had to do was get in the car.
That probably would have been the end of it.
But I was twelve, pissed off, and absolutely convinced that nobody was going to make me do something I didn’t want to do.
Shutting up wasn’t exactly one of my talents, either.
So I argued.
Then I argued some more.
I don’t remember exactly what I said anymore. I remember that I kept going, and I remember making him mad.
What was I trying to prove?
Hell if I know.
Maybe that nobody could tell me what to do. Maybe that I wasn’t scared. Maybe that I mattered.
Whatever it was, I managed to turn a ride to school into something considerably more complicated.
Which, looking back, was becoming something of a talent.
The deputy finally had enough.
He told me to turn around.
The next thing I remember is hitting the wall.
Hard.
He slammed me into it hard enough that it fucking hurt. There was nothing particularly gentle about it.
Then I felt cold steel close around my wrists.
I was twelve years old.
He was probably three times my size.
Not exactly an evenly matched contest.
A few seconds earlier, I’d been determined to prove that nobody could make me do anything.
Now my hands were behind my back, and somebody else was deciding where I was going.
I had wanted a confrontation.
I had one.
And suddenly I wasn’t nearly as tough as I’d been a few seconds earlier.
That’s the funny thing about being twelve. You can spend an entire morning believing you’re the toughest son of a bitch in the county, right up until somebody considerably larger than you decides the discussion is over.
I hadn’t thought much beyond the argument.
Hadn’t considered what would happen if the deputy didn’t back down.
Hadn’t considered that the situation might get completely out of my control.
I was good at starting things.
Finishing them was another matter entirely.
What I remember most afterward is the cell.
Not what the walls looked like.
Not what the place smelled like.
Fear.
I remember being afraid.
Whatever attitude had gotten me there didn’t help much once that door closed.
I was twelve.
And I was in a cell.
There wasn’t anybody to impress. No classmates laughing at my smart remarks. No teacher getting irritated. Nobody to argue with just for the satisfaction of watching their face change.
Just me.
And the realization that I had managed to turn something as ordinary as going to school into getting arrested.
You would think that would have taught me something.
It did.
Just not the lesson everybody probably hoped I would learn.
Looking back, I can see something I couldn’t have explained then.
I’d refused to go to school, and suddenly everything stopped.
Mom called the sheriff. A deputy came to the house. An argument turned into handcuffs, and I ended up sitting in a cell.
For a little while, everything had revolved around me.
I’m not suggesting I enjoyed being arrested. I didn’t. It scared the hell out of me.
But the attention leading up to it?
That was different.
I’d made the world respond.
At twelve, I didn’t understand why that mattered so much.
I just knew that being ignored felt worse than getting yelled at sometimes.
And that’s a pretty dangerous thing for a kid to start believing.
Of course, the sheriff’s department wasn’t particularly interested in my developing psychological theories about attention. They were more interested in consequences.
Community service was one of them.
I spent hours scraping paint off the outside of a 4-H building.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of scraping old paint off a building, I can’t say you’re missing much.
There’s no audience.
No reputation to build.
Nobody standing around thinking you look tough.
Just old paint, a scraper, and enough time to reconsider some of your recent decisions.
The problem was, I wasn’t reconsidering the right things.
I understood that getting arrested sucked. I understood that sitting in a cell scared me. I understood that scraping paint was boring as hell.
What I didn’t understand was why I kept pushing things until they became disasters.
There wasn’t anything exciting about that building. Nothing dramatic. Nothing to fight against.
Just work that needed done.
And time.
Lots of time.
The kind of time that leaves you alone with your thoughts whether you want to be or not.
I wish I could tell you I spent those hours discovering the importance of responsibility and making some grand commitment to becoming a better person.
I didn’t.
I was twelve.
I probably spent more time thinking about how much I hated scraping paint than contemplating the direction of my life.
But there was something about the whole experience I understand now.
Trouble got people looking at me.
The consequences left me alone.
I hadn’t figured out the difference between being noticed and being understood.
And I sure as hell hadn’t figured out how to ask for the second one.
Once the community service was finished, life went on. School was still school, adults still expected me to behave, and I was still the same kid who couldn’t seem to leave well enough alone.
School was a strange place for me.
I wasn’t stupid. I could get good grades. I could play sports. I could make people laugh.
I knew how to be the funny kid, the smart kid, the athlete.
Those were roles I understood.
But none of them seemed to answer whatever was going on inside me.
School felt fake most days.
Not fake academically.
Fake emotionally.
Everybody pretending life was normal while kids sat in classrooms exhausted, angry, neglected, abused, terrified, lonely, or completely checked out.
Teachers talked about algebra while somebody’s home life might have been burning down three streets over.
And I’m not saying teachers didn’t care. Some probably cared more than I ever realized. They had their own problems, their own responsibilities, and classrooms full of kids they were expected to somehow keep moving in the same direction.
But from where I sat, it seemed like everybody was more interested in whether we completed our assignments than what was happening inside our heads.
Maybe that wasn’t fair.
It was how I experienced it.
Everything felt gray sometimes.
Like living inside static.
I was surrounded by people almost every day, but loneliness doesn’t really care how many people are standing around you.
You can be in a classroom full of thirty kids and still feel like nobody knows you’re there.
Or worse, that they know you’re there but don’t particularly care.
So I started crossing lines.
Nothing huge at first.
Smart remarks. Skipping assignments. Testing boundaries. Pushing teachers just enough to get reactions.
I got good at reading adults.
Some hated disrespect.
Some hated sarcasm.
Some hated eye contact.
Some hated silence.
And some seemed personally offended by the very existence of a kid who wouldn’t immediately fall into line.
I liked finding the cracks.
Say the right thing, and you could watch a perfectly composed adult come completely unglued.
There was something satisfying about that.
The teacher stops talking. Somebody laughs. Chairs shift. Everyone turns to see what happens next.
For a few seconds, you’re not background noise anymore.
You’re the center of the room.
I don’t think I consciously understood any of this back then. I wasn’t sitting around developing theories about childhood emotional needs.
I was a kid who liked getting reactions.
But looking back, I think some part of me had started making a choice I didn’t even realize I was making.
I’d rather be the bad kid than the invisible one.
That doesn’t excuse the way I behaved. Teachers shouldn’t have had to spend their days dealing with my bullshit just because I didn’t know what to do with my feelings.
But understanding something and excusing it aren’t the same thing.
I can recognize now that I was a pain in the ass and still wonder why being noticed had become so important to me.
Because when I was quiet, life kept moving.
When I created enough chaos, everything stopped.
People looked.
People reacted.
People said my name.
And once something works, you tend to use it again.
At first, most of the trouble I caused was just that. Trouble. Arguments, smart remarks, pushing boundaries, seeing how far I could go before somebody pushed back.
But anger has a way of growing beyond the places where you first learn to use it.
And a year or two later, I found out just how dangerous that could become.
His name was Jimmy.
I knew him.
And at some point, I found out he’d slapped my girlfriend.
Not shoved her.
Not yelled at her.
Slapped her.
Something inside me snapped almost immediately.
I didn’t think about consequences. Didn’t think about police. Didn’t think about what might happen afterward.
I wanted to find him.
And I wanted to hurt him.
Simple as that.
I wish I could clean up what happened next.
I could tell you I was defending her. Standing up for somebody who’d been hurt. Doing what any decent boyfriend would do.
It would make me sound considerably better.
It just wouldn’t be the truth.
I wasn’t defending myself.
Jimmy wasn’t coming after me.
There wasn’t some unavoidable confrontation where I had no choice but to fight.
I went looking for him.
That’s different.
By then, fighting had become another language I understood.
There was something straightforward about it.
Somebody hit.
Somebody got hit.
Somebody won.
Somebody lost.
No complicated feelings to explain. No sitting around trying to figure out why you were angry or hurt or scared.
Just action.
At least until it wasn’t.
I found Jimmy.
There wasn’t some long cinematic fight.
No circling each other.
No dramatic exchange of punches.
I hit him.
Once.
One punch.
His jaw broke.
I remember a sharp crack, nothing like the exaggerated sounds you hear in movies.
Then he fell backward.
His head hit the concrete.
Hard.
Everybody imagines the hit.
Nobody imagines the second afterward.
That second when the adrenaline disappears and your brain finally catches up with what your body just did.
Jimmy was on the ground.
And he wasn’t getting up.
Suddenly nobody looked tough anymore.
Not him.
Not me.
Nobody.
A moment earlier, I’d wanted to hurt him.
Now I thought I might have killed him.
And let me tell you, those are two very different feelings.
All that anger I’d been carrying around didn’t seem particularly important anymore.
Neither did whatever satisfaction I thought I’d get from hitting him.
There was just this kid lying on the concrete.
Because of me.
What if he didn’t wake up?
What if that was it?
What if one stupid decision had just ended somebody else’s life?
And what if I had to live with that for the rest of mine?
I’d wanted the confrontation.
I’d gone looking for it.
And now I wanted nothing more than to take back the last few seconds.
But that’s the thing about violence.
You don’t get to rewind it.
You don’t get to decide afterward that maybe you didn’t mean to hit somebody quite that hard.
You don’t get to negotiate with concrete.
The damage is already done.
Jimmy eventually got up.
But his jaw was broken.
And there were consequences.
Real ones.
Of course, I wasn’t particularly interested in sticking around to find out what those consequences were going to be.
I ran.
I was at the fairgrounds, and when the police started looking for me, I hid.
Probably not the most brilliant decision I’d ever made, but considering I’d just broken somebody’s jaw and thought for a moment that I’d killed him, my decision-making skills weren’t exactly operating at their finest.
I managed to sneak out through a back lot without being caught.
Then I called Mom.
She came and picked me up.
For a little while, I was home.
But running from the police doesn’t make them forget you’re there.
Eventually, they showed up at the house looking for me.
And this time, I didn’t argue.
Didn’t run my mouth.
Didn’t try to prove how tough I was.
I went quietly.
I’d already done enough.
There wasn’t much point in fighting anymore.
I knew what I’d done, and I knew there were going to be consequences.
So I accepted my fate.
It’s strange looking back at those two arrests.
The first time, I’d fought like hell over something as ordinary as going to school.
The second time, after seriously hurting another kid, I didn’t put up a fight at all.
Maybe I’d learned that arguing with the police wasn’t going to change anything.
Maybe I was still scared from seeing Jimmy lying on the concrete.
Probably some combination of the two.
Whatever the reason, I went with them.
And once again, I ended up in a holding cell.
Cells have a way of stripping the performance out of you.
There isn’t much of an audience in there.
Nobody cares about your reputation.
Nobody cares whether people at school think you’re tough.
Nobody cares how hard you can hit.
You’re just sitting there with yourself.
And sitting with myself had never been one of my strengths.
This time, I had something considerably worse to think about than refusing to go to school.
Jimmy.
That second afterward.
The way everything changed when he didn’t immediately get up.
I’d almost done something I couldn’t take back.
Not because I had to.
Not because I was protecting myself.
Because I was angry.
Because I went looking for him.
I wish I could tell you that was the moment everything changed.
That I sat there staring at those walls, experienced some profound revelation, and decided never to fight again.
Maybe I even promised myself something like that.
I don’t remember.
What I know is that I didn’t walk out of there transformed.
There wasn’t some magical moment where I suddenly developed good judgment and spent the rest of my adolescence making responsible decisions.
Obviously.
I was still a kid.
Still angry.
Still impulsive.
Still trying to figure out where I belonged.
But I had seen something.
For just a second.
A pattern.
I only seemed to matter when everything around me was falling apart.
At least, that’s how it felt.
When I was quiet, people forgot me.
When I exploded, suddenly everybody wanted to know what was going on.
Adults asked questions. People talked. Everybody had an opinion about what I’d done and what ought to happen to me.
And I can’t really blame them.
I’d hurt somebody.
They had every reason to be concerned about my behavior.
But looking back, I wonder how much of what I was doing had become tangled up in that desperate need to be noticed.
I don’t believe every bad decision I made was some secret cry for attention. Sometimes I was just angry. Sometimes I was selfish. Sometimes I did stupid things because I was a kid who hadn’t learned to think beyond the next thirty seconds.
But sometimes?
I think making something happen felt better than having nothing happen at all.
And the attention I got afterward, even when it came with handcuffs, wasn’t the same thing as the care I actually needed.
I didn’t understand that distinction then.
I was only beginning to recognize that something wasn’t right.
It scared me.
But fear and change aren’t the same thing.
Life didn’t suddenly become easier after that. I still had to go to school, still had to deal with adults, and still had to figure out what to do with all the anger I carried around.
The problem was, I didn’t have much of a vocabulary for any of it.
Attention is a strange thing.
Everybody needs some version of it.
Kids especially.
We need somebody to see us.
Not just look at us.
See us.
But I hadn’t figured out how to ask for that.
Hell, I didn’t even know that’s what I wanted.
I knew how to make people laugh.
I knew how to play football.
I knew how to get good grades.
I knew how to piss people off.
I knew how to fight.
I knew how to push until somebody finally pushed back.
Those things got reactions.
And reactions were easier to understand than feelings.
The problem was that the stakes kept getting higher.
Refusing school had turned into a sheriff’s deputy.
An argument had turned into handcuffs.
Handcuffs had turned into a cell.
Later, anger turned into a punch.
A punch turned into a broken jaw.
And a broken jaw turned into a boy lying on concrete while I wondered whether I’d just killed him.
That should have been enough.
It should have scared me straight.
It didn’t.
It scared me.
There’s a difference.
Knowing something about yourself and knowing how to change it are two very different things.
Looking back, I don’t think twelve-year-old me woke up every morning planning to create destruction.
I wasn’t lying in bed thinking about how I could make everybody pay attention to me that day.
Kids don’t think that way.
At least I didn’t.
I just reacted.
Something felt wrong.
I pushed.
Someone pushed back.
I pushed harder.
Eventually, everything blew up.
And there I was.
Right in the middle of it.
Visible.
I’d learned early how to be recognized.
The smart kid.
The athlete.
The funny kid.
Dr. Death.
But being recognized and being seen weren’t the same thing.
Somewhere along the way, I discovered another way to make sure people couldn’t ignore me.
Cause enough trouble.
Make enough noise.
Break something.
Sometimes property.
Sometimes rules.
Sometimes another person.
Sometimes myself.
The world will eventually look.
The problem with learning that lesson young is that chaos doesn’t stay the same size.
It grows with you.
And I still had a long way to go.
More fights.
More consequences.
More stupid decisions.
More opportunities to prove I was tougher than whatever happened to be standing in front of me.
I didn’t understand why I kept doing it.
Not yet.
All I knew was that when everything was calm, I could disappear into the background.
When everything exploded, people knew exactly where I was.
So I learned to explode.